Let’s march

In Ancient Rome, when Cicero spoke to his audiences, people used to say, “Great speech.” But it is also said that when Demosthenes spoke to his audiences in Ancient Greece, people turned to each other and said, “Let’s march.”

Gordon Brown, ex-Prime Minister of Great Britain, defended in his TEDTalk that we, global citizens, should also be marching. Gordon’s talk of last year during TEDGlobal in Oxford in the UK is a current manifesto on civic mobilization and the power of information. The British politician presented examples of people and communities that were able to change the course of political history in their countries through Web 2.0 tools and mobile technology.

According to Gordon Brown, what’s new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world, and we can march together in great numbers in the non-linear direction towards the future we want and need as global citizens. This is makes this a unique age in human history, the creation of a truly global society.

With the internet we can organize ourselves internationally and take collective action together to deal with global problems, what means that we have in hand a real opportunity to fundamentally change the world.

Foreign relations are changing. They cannot be run exclusively by elites; they must now be guided by listening to the public opinions of peoples who are blogging, who are communicating and interacting with each other around the world through the internet and its several tools of connectivity and participation.

Civic mobilization through the Internet is capable of raising flags against illiteracy, denounce slavery, fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, amongst other forms of discrimination. There are no limits to the involvement, and the outcome of participation is always transformative.

André Blas