There is a great uprooting of the accumulated wisdom of the last several centuries because new forms of communication are well underway. It has been written about, mostly on the Internet, for years, but up to this point the speculation of so-called futurists has appeared like the mutterings of a mad man: all prophecy, but no proof. It was easy to dismiss dire warnings of drastic change. This is not the case anymore.
Within years, social networks like Facebook will provide more cohesive systems for personal inclusion in a collective effort than soon-to-be archaic notions like nationhood and religion. Already, 200 million unique users occupy the virtual space of Facebook. When nations like China and India, each with more than a billion people within their borders, adopt high technology in a massive way, that number will multiply. The aggregate of users’ collective actions on Facebook and similar sites will never be fully understood, but its consequences already ripple across the world.
As recently as a decade ago, it was easy, perhaps inevitable, for someone to become blinded to life outside of their particular situation. Inherent in every profession and way of life is a bias that in the past may have been nearly impossible to overcome. The travel agent thinks in terms of resort hotels, the doctor thinks in terms of the spread of disease, the lawyer thinks in terms of copyright laws. Each is ignorant to the others’ concerns and knowledge; the possibility of building a broader picture and taking action based upon it is precluded by professional separation and isolation. This is just as true of nations, religions, ideologies and any other distinction that divides humanity into competing factions.
Today these biases are shattered by the ubiquity of information. Unless the recession becomes so bad that Facebook goes bust (unlikely), it is very possible that many of us will take our friend lists, with hundreds of entrants, to the grave. Some of us will be doctors, some lawyers, some travel agents, some journalists. We will see, document and share our experiences around the world. Our habits are ingrained to the point that much of our idle time, far into the future, has already been spoken for by our generational obsession with social networking. As a result, we will have the broadest perspective of any humans ever to walk the earth.
Though it is a time to be hopeful, unbridled optimism in the face of the arbitrary and too often tragic course of history is dangerous. Often, speculation about the future promises too much; humans tend to not live up to their potential. Though almost every student at Binghamton University interacts with a broad cross-section of society via the Internet, I wonder how many truly seek to break barriers. Could we become sheep, led through digital manipulation or simply ignorance to perpetrate injustice on a scale as unprecedented as the medium itself? Will we have the will and vision to use technology and not allow it to use us?
Where we could be documenting and addressing squalor in our communities, corruption in our government, substance abuse among our people or many other concerns, I fear the instinct is to share bar photos, baby pictures and little else. While these things are certainly a worthy use of technology, we have no excuse not to ask more of ourselves. It’s not like it’s hard any more: a cheap digital camera and some know-how surfing the Web is all that’s needed to find and share vital information. The recent election demonstrated the enormous power of people who collaborate to share information in order to affect positive change in the world. If we’re smart about it, that’ll only be the beginning.