THE NO-ESCAPE EXCITEMENT OF OUR GLOBAL VILLAGE

Not even today's Luddites, still bah-humbuging technology, can argue no longer. The Internet -- fed by and feeding on a gazillion digital devices -- has changed our world! our brains! our humanity! This is one of the very few revolutions in the history of mankind that really warrants the title.

But in so saying, we are merely saying the obvious. Vastly more important is how do we evaluate this revolution? A question which will be answered and re-answered many times in the coming years. But there's already one answer staring us in our face. It is the two faces of the Internet. One that's smiling, the other that's frowning.

The smiley face takes enormous and justified satisfaction in seeing how the worldwide net has, well, netted us all together. As of 2011, there are only remote jungles and mountainsides left where the net has not yet reached. Peoples of every region, race, gender, age, religion and political persuasion can now instantly reach people they would never have otherwise known, people who have so much to offer them, people from their blessed past, people who can and are impacting their amazing future.

The Global Village has arrived and burst into digital life in ways the old futurists could never have fully imagined.
If there is some one word for this extraordinary human phenomenon it's probably: Connectivity.

How then can there be any frowning face to this wonder...?

Perhaps the face I see frowning is really just puzzled. It's the puzzle to the implications of Connectivity itself. Surely it's historically the very first time such immediate contact, such powerful interaction, has been granted the human race. It speeds news, knowledge, cures, even revolutions. And by that very speed, our species finds itself hurtling into bold new frontiers together. And yet, there's still a reason for that frown.

Possibly it expresses an eternal question: How much do we lose by what we gain...? In this case, the loss of those old dis-connects of time and space that once stood between them and us. Between the deluge of distant news and disasters, and our own little living rooms. Between all that's out there and what our brains and hearts back here can hold at one time.

There was a time when the murder and child abuse in the other town...the tsunami and earthquake in the other nation ...the relentless horrors somewhere else didn't reach us quite as quickly back here. Quite as horrifically. If nothing else, in such days we may have had the small luxury of sleeping better at night. A luxury perhaps earned at the cost of news we didn't really need.