New Age Globalization
Can Cyber Social Networks Help Rebuild Real Community?
Can the models of MySpace and Facebook serve to bring global citizens from nations together. Proposes educators use new forms of pen pals to make individual connections.
A World in Crisis
We can name world crisis spots, communities and nations fractured in terrifying ways, places of death and hopelessness: Darfur, Kosovo, Sri Lanka. We can name such places but cannot imagine them. We may grieve for their people but few can connect with the individuals who live among such horror. What do most of us know of such places beyond headlines? We change the channel or check our MySpace account. It is easier to turn away from terror when the terror isn’t touching our immediate lives.
Images of the West
And how are we viewed? Often, while people in troubled places around the world may wear our cast-off clothes, they may view the West as either a romanticized haven or a corrupted empire. They might be able to name our president and almost certainly can name our pop stars. How are we known in less troubled places around the world? By our scandals, our brand names, our excesses?
How can such disparate places connect? Can nations come to help one another unless their citizens know each other as individuals?
Social Networks as Models for Solution
Perhaps some of our very sources of distraction, those entertainment mechanisms some might believe we lose ourselves within or use to “disconnect” could provide models for creating relationships with those we find unfamiliar. In this age of on-line “social network communities,” could we use technology and its models to expand our world view? If the greatest opportunity for wide-scale lasting social change tends to focus on the young, then perhaps teachers must use real social networks to better employ cyber social networks. What would happen if, beyond chatting on-line with friends you likely saw at school or work, you held substantive conversations with individuals on another continent? Placing computers and network interfaces in places where people are starving may seem unrealistic, but perhaps we must first use technology as a model and employ simpler means of communicating. If a single high school class in every school district in the US created pen-pal opportunities with a sister class in a developing nation, surely thousands of long-term friendships would emerge, friendships that could challenge the very base of a world view and meaningfully alter conditions. Multiply “snail-mail” relationships with those around the world with email access and multiply again for developed nations with Internet accessibility and the numbers of international friendships are staggering.
Take the model of the wildly successful Facebook . Now with more than 25 million users, adding 100,000 new members a day, it has become the 6th most trafficked site in the world. What would happen if schools used such technology to expand the their students’ horizons, allowed them to communicate with individuals of different cultures? Take such mechanisms and translate them to letters and care packages with other schools. And what minutely small percentage of the annual profits for a company like Facebook would be required to staff a developing school with teachers and computers?
International Friends
Let’s face it, making friends and exchanging perceptions alone won’t save the world. Or would it? Take a ten year old in the rural US, provide her the means to correspond with a child half a world away, perhaps another child helping on the family farm, let them talk and see how both their worlds expand. If a lasting friendship develops, just maybe both will begin to share their knowledge, their beliefs, and their dreams. What would you do to help a neighbor suffering tragedy down the street? Maybe it’s time to expand the neighborhood.
