Internet

My professor asked if the Information Age is the panacea of society. Everyone in the class said no, everyone but me. Am I just being contrary for the fun of it or am do I just see the world from a different perspective from normal people?

I can still remember the way it felt to get off the airplane and use the restroom in a foreign country for the first time. The way that it felt to be surrounded by German germs. It somehow felt very different than the American bathroom germs from the other side of the world. I remember how I would feel about tragedies which occurred in foreign lands as opposed to in my own neighborhood, how I felt before I started living in and traveling to foreign countries. I had an us and them mentality about the world. When my next door neighbor lost her job I invited her and her family over for dinner every night for a month, until she was situated, but when I read about the millions of people starving around the world I felt bad but didn't feel that it was my problem to solve.

I believe that this us and them mentality is the social issue which permeates the world today. I believe that the Information Age is going to rectify this issue. That it is the panacea of today's society and will change the world as much or even more than the Industrial Revolution. Every day more and more people are loosing the illusions of us and them and seeing the world as just us. Right now the Muslim world is them, doesn't matter that there are a billion of them, and the vast majority are good people. Right now the victims of Hurricane Katrina are them. Right now the people who live in the inner cities 20 miles from our home towns, whose children go to school without enough money for heat, let alone a quality education, those people are them as well. The ease of access to information and communication via the Internet is giving us the opportunity to see these people in a new way, as a part of us. It gives us the opportunity to see a new perspective and that will change our society.

Pedophiles are in my opinion an excellent example of the positive way in which the Internet and the Information Age is changing our society. That evil scourge has been a part of our civilization always. It is a part of every civilization. The number of pedophiles and the number of victims of molestations has not been changed by the Internet. The ease of communication of the pedophiles has been increased just like the ease of my communication with my mother half way around the world has been improved but the actual crime has not increased. The only thing that has really changed is that we the average people are starting to take notice of the evil within our society. Instead of feeling that only other people's children are at risk of being molested we are seeing that our children are at risk as well. This of course has always been the case, our children have always been at risk but now we have a big spot light shinning on this evil corner of our society. Now we are going to stand together and do something about pedophiles.

I do believe that the increased access to communication and information is going to change the us and them aspect of our society and make the world we live in a very different much better place, eventually.