When I was a kid, we had the institution of pen pal. Kids writing postcards and letters to each other once or twice a month, or if they were really, really diligent, maybe once a week.
Now, in the last couple years things has changed, I spend my evenings chatting with friends from Hong-Kong, Argentina, France, South Africa, the United States, daily contact, sharing jokes, news, problems, giving grocery tips, having fun.
And not once or twice a month, but every day.
But with the fun comes the sometimes not so fun things. When I hear about the hurricanes in Florida, my first thought is the hope that my friend living there is alright. If I hear about shootings in Colombia, I hope that my friend living there is ok.
The world has shrunk a lot, and it means that events on the other half of the globe has an effect on my life, in my own living room.
This all just came to mind as I received the news that a girl, who was part of an online game I play, has died in Iraq. Maybe we never met or just exchanged a few words, but nevertheless she was part of a group, and it has shown me that nothing is far away anymore.
When people start to get hit by hurricanes, tsunami, famine, armed attacks, it’s not “some poor blokes” out there, but people you can have a few memories of even if only an occassional friendly “Hi”.
When the people start to shoot other people somewhere in a remote corner of africa, some people in Australia, Japan, Europe won’t just say “poor guys” but “hey, you hurt MY friend, you bastards!”.
I don’t know if it is a good thing, or a bad thing. Maybe it will help the world to get a bit more peaceful, or maybe not.
But I feel that the world got smaller in a sense, and a lot of good and bad things moved in with me, and I am glad that the good things are in majority.
The Internet is a great resource.It depends whether a lot of it remains a virtual world and whether your 'real world' and online world actually connect sometimes.In theory the net should be a force for democracy and enhance our understanding of one another though at times it just seems to underline our differences & intolerances as the natural tendency of forming cliques continues. It's still early days yet for the Internet and maybe the 'real world' has yet to feel its unifying (or fragmenting) impact. No doubt in time new social structures that supersede geographic borders may eventuate.
I agree about the cliques. One thing however is that we always have more than one cliques. I have “online” cliques with people from all around the world, and “offline” cliques in my on “real life” location.
I definitely don't think we will be prejudice free any time soon, but I think it's harder to say “every german/french/american/japanese,/whatever is a….” when you actually know some real people.
What I think is that the geographical differences will be less important, but other differences will be more important. Of course I can be mightily mistaken – but I actually experienced something like that in the early days, when Joe from the US and Ivan from the former Soviet Union discovered that the other is not a blood drinking communist/capitalist devil, but a guy who had fantasies about Samantha Fox and Madonna just like he had and listened to Queen or whatever.
Probably Ivan and Joe in this case were already open minded enough, but the possibility to communicate helped I guess.
As for me, my virtual and real world always connect, I try to drag the virtual into the physical – not always easy, airplane tickets are getting really expensive, but I do my best.
addon: No, I don't think the internet will really change people. It will just change things as we perceive them. Physical distance will become less important to a degree. I think :)