Possibly, probably, there's a scholar Out There who might suggest that new technologies inevitably create or motivate new wars. In that light, the Internet might be seen as a mighty weapon. It's certainly getting some tests.
For Burma, it's turning up a big, "We don't really like you" for the ruling junta, but it's also eliciting an equally large, "So what are you going to do about it?"
Hmmm.
The Old Press, whatever the cost in lost newspaper sales, has never had so much fun: ever skeptical, ever pointing the finger, ever eager to capture attention with someone else's spilled blood, it knows no shortage either of targets or materials.
I once said here of Somalia, there are no slow news days.
With the proliferation of English language blogs and translated media, for English speakers and no doubt the same and other solutions for other language cultures, the world itself has no "slow days"--and the whole spinning thing is here on our desks every day.
What we're missing would seem to be new frameworks and solutions through which to filter old problems, and nowhere may that be especially so than in each of the conflict zones, some loosely tied together, others swimming around in their own murky pools of percieved or quite real injustice.
We're going to need a much better tool kit by way of language and other cultural technologies to re-frame differences in such a way as to make so many issues generated solveable and then free that much more energy for common cause.
That's my prayer for the day.
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