The Utopian World Championship

Enmar & The Hawk .: Portal to the Future: The Internet and the Development of a Global Utopia

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Summary

A vision of a future society, of a unified, global unit, has been the goal and the dream of all cultures. It forms the comparison between all political concepts, for it is the vision of the form of the good writ large. It also exposes the heart of the problem we face when we try to dream our future – for our dreams are very different.

The future will not look like any of those monocultural dreams. It is going to be the result of an integration process between cultures and new ideas that will emerge with time. It is very hard for us to foresee the future because we are blinded by our present realities, by the restrictions of our moral structures, by our ties to our past through history and through languages. We can neither see through the eyes nor feel through the hearts of the future people - they will have different values and perspectives on things. It is enough to look at the radical changes of the twentieth century to see how much the global perspective has been altered.

The fact that we can not see the future does not release us from our responsibility to it, nor our stewardship over it. The way we conduct ourselves today determines the paths people will be able to choose from in the future. We may not be able to bridge the cultural and religious gaps among us, but we can take the first step in the right direction by acknowledging differing religious and cultural backgrounds not as 'others', but as being like ourselves.

The Internet presents us, for the first time in history, an opportunity to cross paths with people very different from us. In a way unforeseen in fiction or in history, we have the ability to see diversity and commonality in basic human drives and beliefs, to care about conflicts that take place thousands of kilometers away, and above all, to make genuine friends outside our limited offline community, with those people who are not so similar to us as those with whom we share our living space.

The Internet can help us make the first step on the journey to a global consciousness, but it will not come into existence unless we harness it expressly for the purpose of building diversity, understanding, and change through its digital means. The portals of the Internet are the first doors through which the global consciousness of utopia will pass. Without that passage, without that understanding in the spirit of our responsibility to the future, change on a global scale is impossible.

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The world today is more globally connected than we ever knew in history. Mobility is on the rise - people travel to international conventions, and on business. Immigration is sky rocketing. We have a chance to come to know people from other cultures, but this is, mostly, an illusion. Tourists are rarely exposed to authentic culture, just a re-packaged and marketed vision. Businessmen and scientists are a tiny fraction of the population, and immigrants usually concede the superiority of their culture in favor of a new dream. They do not represent the patriots, the hard core of every nation. There is little real contact between cultures.

The Internet can change that drastically. It presents us, for the first time in history, with an opportunity to cross paths with people very different from us and from those who share out living space. We come together because of some shared interest, or in search of the same kind of information, and so the basis of our contact is positive, not a conflict. This allows us a space in which to learn to know each other in the neutral environment of an online community.

Online communities can become important to their members, and so they invest the time and effort into getting to know each other. Understanding the others, finding common things to balance the differences, is vital to the community’s continuation. This doesn’t always happen, as there are always people looking for a fight, but unless the community collapses, the process continues with each new member to join. People learn to know each other first as individuals, and with time, as members of a different culture. They think about all the people they’ve met online from a certain country and they draw lines of similarities based on their cultures. This is true even within a given culture that is a compound of several countries, but clearer when cultural borderlines are crossed.

This human, personal touch, sheds a different light on myths and stereotypes – some of them will be deleted, some reduced, some surprisingly true. It also changes the way we view conflicts and catastrophes that take place thousands of kilometers away from us. News finally takes on a human face when someone we care about might be involved, hurt or killed. It isn’t just ‘some savages over there’ butchering each other. There are nations or tribes with long, tragic histories that perhaps need outside help to break the cycle of violence.

Just as we see clearly what divides us, we also see what we have in common. And this can tell us a lot-- not just about cultures, but about our very humanity. The Internet is a place where the culture we live in comes into contact with ideas and concepts that it has not yet come to consider. The freedom to behave differently, to play with identities, to explore things and discover, is all readily available online. And people of all cultures react to that. They play with their identities, telling us how much a burden it is to wear the same face all the time. They look for a community to call their own, speaking to their intrinsic needs to belong. Their willingness to help strangers that will not be able to reward them simply because of common humanity, their connection with people of different status in a way that would be problematic beyond the computer – the Internet offers us a glimpse at the social chains that hold us. By watching what people do when they’re free, we can try and tell what common behaviors offline are intrinsic human behaviors, and which are socially imposed against our nature.

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