This is my 1000th post on feelingelephants and every day at my internship with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society I find one more reason to believe the internet helps us make connections which are unique to our time. There’s a big academic debate between web pessimists and web optimists about whether the internet is democratizing or not, freeing or not, transformative or not.
I’ll say wholeheartedly that I am an optimist, and here are two samples of why.
The first is a collection of mp3 files sent to Speak2Tweet, a Twitter account hooked up to a phone number that you can call from places in the world where the internet is being censored and get your message out. I haven’t listened to all of their messages, but those I have listened to have all been in Arabic. Here’s one from a a Libyan man calling from an Italian phone number:
[mp3j track="http://www.gstatic.com/speechtotweet/ZUIvOUJRNTliVmwwY2NKck9jbXNGZz09.mp3"]
That in one week I can listen to gospel music recorded a decade before my grandmother was born and a man whose country is at war on the other side of the world makes me one of the most privileged people in history.
I see no need to be anything but optimistic for the future.
Inspirational Quote:
“The art of love . . . is largely the art of persistence.”–Albert Ellis
