by
Sam Roggeveen
19 February 2008
Two very different blog posts about one idea. The first is from Global Dashboard, and features American writer Clay Shirky on the social effects of internet technology:
What is happening in our generation is that we have a set of tools for aggregating things that people care about, in ways that increase both the scope and the longevity [of their efforts], in ways that were unpredictable even a decade ago. The coordinating tools we now have — and I’m not talking about anything fancy, I’m talking about mailing lists, usenet, weblogs and wikis — those tools turn love into a renewable building material.
And then there's Dilbert creator Scott Adams, who has his own frequently hilarious and often wise blog:
What I’d like to see is a pen pal web site designed to end war. The idea would be to connect citizens in different countries at such a high rate it would be politically impossible for the two countries to start a war. You might support your government in a war against a country full of people you don’t know. But would you support a war that has a good chance of killing your e-mail friend Phlubanakawahaha and his entire family? There is some theoretical level of citizen-to-citizen contact that makes war between two countries virtually impossible.