From my brain to yours

One of the key factors to making world peace a reality will be our newfound powers of communication and community building.  We are uniting like never before, and the implications will be profound.

For one, we are gaining new means of dialogue, and dialogue is an integral step in the peacebuilding process.  Just getting people to talk is often the first step in conflict resolution.

Dialogue can also rehumanize an enemy.  Often, warring parties will dehumanize their foes, painting them as evil, irrational death dealers, but dialogue can make these misconceptions evaporate, and it is that much harder to kill someone who we come to see as a fellow human being.

Our new communication tools are also letting us spread important information that our mainstream media rarely, if ever, discusses.  Issues like the Military Industrial Complex, the Distrubtion of Wealth, or how our world has been consistently improving for centuries are all empowering forms of knowledge.

And, thanks to our growing powers of community, we will become more and more able to do something about it.  Facebook has exploded in size in just a few years.  Fast forward a few more years, and we will have groups large enough to rival corporations and governments in terms of power and influence.

Combine the size and might of our ever expanding groups with the speed of Twitter and instant messaging, and boom… we have some truly revolutionary power in our hands.

Look at what today’s flash mobs can do for a glimpse into the power we are unleashing.  A few hundred people, united at the same time and place for the same reason can really shake things up.  Now imagine instead of just 100, we had 100,000 people acting in unison.

Global Flash Mobs… mobilizing to action, in real time, all with shared goals, could truly shift the power back into the hands of the people.  We will be able to harness this power to make our world everything we want it to be… egalitarian, progressive and peaceful.