Criticality of Internet in bettering life on Earth

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Sat, 01/01/2005 - 13:12.

Over the past year everyone in the interconnected world started waking up to the value of Information Technology for individuals to transform every day life on Earth, for good and bad - a point largely demonstrated by the role the Internet and blogs/wikis now play in social organizations. 2004 saw a new dawning of enlightenment. And, overnight, a tsunami taught us that individual IT empowerment is transforming life on Earth for all, evolving us from isolated people and communities to an interwoven fabric of interconnected humanity sharing one planet with personal familiarity with the quality of life of all others.

The Internet is how awareness of this disaster's impacts and recovery requirements is being shared world-wide, and that is allowing for dramatically better response and life-saving. IT empowers all people to be informed, respond to important issues, and direct the larger response of social organizations and government leaders - the open sharing of first-hand experiences, resources and opinions happening now is unlike any social action in history, and is the model by which we the people of Earth may determine how our leaders must serve humanity forever here after.

This positioned humanity at the start of 2005 at an epicenter for a wave for good, despite the waves of hardships that calamatized the world throughout 2004, climaxing December 26th. The Internet allows individuals to help make a difference in SE Asia today, at http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/Â .

Perhaps, as the people of that region recover from their tragedy, we may maintain a state of heightened social consciousness and use the Internet to share familiarity with other suffering the world over, and ways individuals can help those less fortunate - thus 2005 may be the most positive, transformational time in human history, and we can all say we were there in the beginning.

Dan Gillmor on WWW Tsunami relief

In the past week there's been lots of great coverage of the blogging world... among the noteworthy material:

  • My colleague (until tomorrow) Mike Bazeley discusses how blogs and other online forums have become a "global commons" in the wake of the tsunamis. See also this BBC story.