British Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave a speech at the TED Global Conference addressing the need for greater global connectivity in solving the major problems affecting the world today. He began by calling attention to images that have affected millions of people across the globe and forced them to action. From pictures of Kim, a girl whose back was ruined by napalm in Vietnam, to the video of Neda, an Iranian woman who was killed while demonstrating, Prime Minister Brown explains how compassion compels people to act.
Prime Minister Brown explains, “We now have the capacity to find common ground with people we will never meet but who we will meet through the Internet and through all the modern means of communication, that we now have the capacity to organize and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an injustice that we want to deal with, and I believe that this makes this a unique age in human history, and it is the start of what I would call the creation of a truly global society.”
With the Internet and new technologies, we have the potential to act united as one world to combat challenges from human rights abuses to climate change and financial crises. It is with greater communication and combined efforts that we can prevent future genocides, famines and severe poverty. In ancient Greece, crowds would call out “Let’s march,” following one of Demosthenes’ speeches. Prime Minister Brown asks us now to march toward a global society.
--Jessica Milstead
Source: Ted.com (click here to view his speech)
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