Information revolution for the ages

While sipping my morning coffee, I’ve digested five online newspapers, read 30 e-mails, corresponded with six clients and researched nutritional supplements. Before breakfast I’ve dealt with suicide bombers, dwindling gasoline supplies, wombs for rent, stocks soaring, political scandals, porno-porno-porno, corporate bribery, conspiracy theories, polluters and a planet bereft of environmental solutions. By 7 a.m., my mind is stimulated and simultaneously exhausted.

Mired in our technology, we wonder why we have more headaches, feel as if we’ve never done quite enough and find it difficult to relax.

But we “soldier on,” participating and absorbing more of the expanding global library of information.

Do we need to know it all? What shift in values does our changing method of exchange portend?

Everyone seems to be on the phone or otherwise connected. Beach walkers, coffee shop sippers ? even movie-goers. Ring tones fill the air instead of bird song. Young kids chatter away, share photos, music files, and send each other text messages ? a more sophisticated method for passing notes in class.

The phones, a kind of electronic leash, are gifts from their parents to keep them tied to one another. In this spinning world where terror lurks in every corner, it’s no wonder parents want to know exactly what their children are doing.

It’s certainly a different world than a mere 10 years ago. And, notwithstanding old masters’ paintings and vestiges of period architecture, there has been an irrevocable shift to a new way of being. While I may reminisce about spending my youth freely roaming the hillsides and beaches, today’s urban youth have an altered experience. They are hooked up, tied together with an information exchange that is revolutionary in the history of our species.

Information connects and in essence acts as a sledgehammer to social and economic borders. E-mail exchanges with acquaintances in foreign countries are as easy as logging in to a chat room or joining a blog. Opinions of ordinary folks share the net waves with paid lobbyists, newscasters, and politicians. Our society races toward a kind of leveling ? and the concept of “global” at last begins to bear significance.

We have the ability to know what is happening on the other side of the planet. We have the option of publishing our own point of view. If the foundation of democracy is freedom of expression, to voice one’s personal truth, then this technological revolution may be the greatest tool for creating a truly global democracy.

Those nations which steadfastly hold censorship as a means of government control see their position daily undermined by a current of connections that cannot be thwarted. No landlines are needed.

Airwaves are the medium of transmission. We launch from remote islands and empty deserts as well as in the midst of crowded city streets. Gaps in signals are filled by satellite links.

The transformation is not simply in what we can know, and how we can access it, but in how we function with one another. No longer are tiny outposts of civilization unimportant. Voices from remote locations are now blended into the equation. The Inuit have a say in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The residents of Greenland both mark and are influenced by global warming created far from their formerly frozen shores.

Planetary policy is open for all to analyze, and the responsibility for our future falls increasingly into all of our hands. Silence can be interpreted as consent or agreement, and so we take to the Web and our phones to be heard. We vote daily with our voices. Not just once every two years at the polls.

We begin to see the wholeness of our tiny blue planet, and its inhabitants for what we really are ? one very large tribe with common needs, and in many cases, values. We love our families, we cherish our homes, we want our children to grow up healthy and with more opportunities than we have had for ourselves.

Inextricably connected in a truly global community, we now all share the responsibility for crafting our future.