The television child is growing up with the whole world as his/her environment. At the press of the remote button, he/she could be in Beirut or Baghdad or Haifa, horrified by the Israeli aerial bombings or the hezbollah Katyusha missile strike or a suicide bomb attack...or he/she could be learning the ABC alphabet on the PBS channel... or trying to fathom how atoms break down into protons/neutrons/electrons/quarks or how these particles are made up of subatomic vibrating loops of strings.
With today's WWW.web child, all information is at everyone's fingertips. Information, gigabits of information are just a mouse click away!We could all be instant "experts" in art, history, geography, science, economics, martial arts,literature, linguistics...an Einstein, Pascal, Darwin or Pasteur all rolled into one... as long as the google server is up and functioning.
(Or instant helpless morons when the server is down.)
As Neo in the Matrix excitedly quips, "I know Kung Fu!".
We could be connected to an art historian in Tokyo... Or a cradle-to-cradle scientist in Washington DC... Or a businessman investor in Shanghai... or a computer hacker in Moscow...or watching a political rally in the streets of Manila... Or visiting Queen Elizabeth II of England in London... or watching Pres. Bush give a neck massage to Chancellor Merkel. We could be exchanging pleasantries with a potential life partner or being hoodwinked by an FBI expert investigating child pornography.
Yeah, today we have the reality of womb-to-tomb surveillance!
Finally, this is the new world of allatonceness that McLuhan has been raving about. We are now living in the global village.
What is amazing is that there are now 6.5 billion humans currently populating our community. Yet, there are only about 150 persons directly involved in making crucial decisions for the rest of us. Some of these key people were chosen by accident... or by appointment... others by ballot... others by the voting machine... and still others by waving the barrel of a gun or the Koran.
What our leaders decide in the next 36 months can bring us to a new global turmoil or a lasting global peace. We need to counter the agendas of big oil oligopolies trying to arm-wrestle each other for precious oil reserves through national, political or religious machineries with confrontational weaponry and with no regard for consequences to the community. We are all in the same boat...bringing the other guy down could sink our only life preserver.
What is important:
The human species will need to survive this transition from oil to more regenerative sources of energy.
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