Social media and social movements: There’s a whole world out there!

It’s 1am and there is a stranger asleep on my sofa, rucksack at his side, snoring gently.

Six hours earlier I’d been standing in Manchester bus station, scanning the crowd for a face I’d only seen in a few blurred photographs.

Until now, Ashley Drew and I hadn’t even spoken on the phone. All I knew from our brief and infrequent emails is that he’s 28 and from Melbourne, he likes animals and snooker, and the location of my sofa is rather appealing.

Ashley is a couchsurfer, one of over a million members worldwide. The idea is simple: rather than jostling for expensive hotel rooms with other tourists, the couchsurfing movement gives backpackers the opportunity to crash on sofas for free, with the added bonus of tasting real cultures and experiencing places other sightseers probably wouldn’t. As for the hosts, they receive the simple pleasure of helping somebody out.

Couchsurfing is just one example of the emerging social trends to sweep the globe in recent years.

Change-a-lujah people! Joining Rev Billy on his Shopocalypse Tour

Reverend Billy of the ´church of life after shopping´takes the evil from a cash register in Tesco, Liverpool

It’s a perfectly ordinary day in a Liverpool city centre branch of Tesco. Customers clutching lunchtime snacks queue patiently in silence. Bored-looking cashiers scan sandwiches and salads on autopilot, daydreaming of clocking off and enjoying the sunshine outside.

Suddenly, the store fills up with men and women wearing long green robes, making low humming noises as they weave in and out of the aisles. The humming grows louder, and the expressionless troupe begin to clap- softly at first, before raising the volume and tempo. One woman starts to sing in a beautiful and sorrowful voice: ‘Shopping in Tesco- it hurts the people, hurts the ’hood.’

Her associates join in the chorus and approach the tills, where the queue has become  significantly shorter as customers abandon their baskets and edge towards the exit. Two young cashiers exchange bemused glances and giggle nervously while their manager frantically calls security.

In bursts a Kurt Russell lookalike wearing a beige polyester suit and dog collar. His blonde hair is swept back into an enormous quiff and he’s carrying a megaphone. At first glance, he looks like any other Evangelical man of the cloth. But this is Reverend Billy, head of the Church of Life After Shopping, and he’s a man on a very different mission.