Updated October 2006
LGVN OPINION

Culture, Fads and Fashions - an ongoing page of Looking-Glass based opinions.

Speak E-asy

Before the Internet, public communication across the world was incredibly limited in comparison to what is now achievable via a personal computer. The web's greatest asset is the ability to leap back and forth across international boundaries indefinitely, sharing awareness by crossing continents in a way that bypasses most country's political aspirations, fuelled by their spin-doctors and propaganda.
Although still far to go, there is an ever-growing potential for the Internet to seriously become the ultimate medium in achieving global peace; to strip away the façade and prejudice that we have previously grown up with and step outside our own cultural back yard, simply at the press of our browser's connect button. We can now meet and greet in global friendship - a boundless voice of compassion across the internet that can touch the hearts of millions, regardless of creed or colour; ordinary people from all cultures now have the ability to share concerns from their own hearts. Blogs, forums and other forms of interactive tools for the web community are helping to lay a foundation for public expression to evolve; an ideal gateway through which you can offer a welcoming hand to cultures so different from your own. Email, messaging and chat - when used sensibly can show how the moral fibre of life touches our inner emotions in much the same way - whatever part of the world we live. Around the world those good tidings can be absorbed with more personal effect than any TV or newspaper alone can express and perhaps an on-line tapestry of humanity's hopes can be better woven into something truly tangible. It's made possible by the web's facility of direct interaction between one ordinary human and the next - and for others to share.
Of course there are crooks who infiltrate and exploit the web medium for unsavoury reasons. There are even self-righteous or over-zealous fantasists taking every opportunity the internet can provide to rant and rage at the world about them. But these bad apples and odd-balls pale into insignificance against the millions who would rather persevere with on-line interaction and to see the internet spread a peaceful and effective karma.
There is however a growing thread of misinformation that threatens to suffocate the web; an overload of heresay and distorted truths which have been given platforms for easy uploading ... Forums are a prime target for this but of course so has Wikipedia become a victim of its own success as an interactive method in which anyone can upload apparent facts on any subject you can think of. And as the creator of Wikipedia has said himself it is "broken beyond repair," by a combination of busybody crackpots, commerce with vested interests and psudo-intellectuals. Even shrewd, perhaps less environmentally or less animal friendly companies can even create propaganda about themselves under disguise as a anonymous information uploader. Links to and from the millions of sites with half-cocked information, often borrowed from other equally unreliable sites, has created a web of uncertain truths and distrust; a shame when amongst this, the truth is out there somewhere. Whose information we trust wholly and whose we take with a pinch of salt is in entirelly is what we as a website visitor have to determine ourselves. It's a problem; Once we had just a few newspapers and the man-in-the pub to provide us a story or opinion which we could take or leave, but now a few billion web-pages are just a click away to bombard us with any combination of truths or lies, neatly laid out on our screens like a glossy magazine - and the easier it is for anyone to publish anything they like in what looks like a professional layout, the more diluted our resouces of correct information are becoming. But hopefully common-sense can prevail to see through the nonsense or sinuous justifications of man-in-the-pub sites or even sites made by big companies and organisations made to look like independent resource sites.
But there is no doubt that overall the web has created an entirely new way to mediate a positive thought and potentially heal a bad situation on many levels. Used wisely, and as a tool to promote good causes, it can allow any person in the street to make a genuine difference.
Much of the world now has the ability to heal through this global maze of cyber-consciousness, and with this simple thought in action the Internet can show us that we are not all as different to each other as we might have once imagined.
It's time to realise that we all feel the same passion, joy and sorrow.

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