On Monday I picked up the Metro newspaper and on the cover was the Dalai Lama, who is in town for the 2009 Vancouver Peace Summit. The Metro (and CBC) quoted the Dalai Lama as saying, “I think technology may have some benefit for a smart brain, but no capacity to produce compassion.” He then went on to say that compassion and awareness is what will lead us to peace. EBay founder Pierre Omidyar disagreed with the Dalai Lama (gutsy move!) and said that the Internet allows us to discover more about other people than we ever have before, helping us find commonality with other groups of people, and that this will help us move towards peace. This began an internal debate in my head about these two different opinions of technology and interestingly linked into our discussions this week in class about the positives and negatives of web 2.0.
Can web 2.0 help us build more compassion, understanding and commonality? I think that Omidyar is partially right, technology can get us part of the way. Some web 2.0 tools, such as RSS, can definitely be used to gather information, which helps us be more aware and understanding. Getting RSS feeds from world news organizations to a RSS reader saves a lot of time and allows a person to read more, but does it really help a person understand. As much as being informed is a good thing, how much knowledge can we gain from reading information gathered by RSS feeds? We are still removed from what events we are now more knowledgeable about. We are still receiving our information from secondary sources. Maybe this void is part of what the Dalai Lama sees as problematic. We think we know what is going on because we feel more connected but are we really?
An example of this from my own life is from my Facebook account. I like Facebook because it is an easy way to stay connected with my friends who live overseas or some what far away and I do not get to see very often. I like reading their statuses, checking their pages, looking at their pictures and sometimes sending them messages. It makes me feel more connected to them than I did in the past when everything was via email. I feel more like I know what is going on in their world. But I have come to the conclusion that I don’t think this makes me more connected to them on any more than a superficial level. There have been a few times when friends, who I though I had a handle on what was going on in their life, totally surprised me with information about them I had no idea about. I had used Facebook to keep track of them and Facebook had forgot to tell me that they had moved to a new job, broke up with a long term partner, had a grandparent pass away. This has made me realize that though web 2.0 is great in some ways, it fails in others.
So yes, my RSS feeds, Twitter account, Facebook interest groups and subscription podcasts make sure I know what is going on in the world and I appreciate that, but they leave me feeling like I have only skimmed the surface. Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that I have no conclusion. I think that technology and web 2.0 can only take us so far towards the ideas of compassion, understanding and commonality before we have to start interacting with one another in a more direct way because no matter how connected web 2.0 allows us to be, in the end we are interacting with each other while staring at a computer, not another person.