Over four days, the recent TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, England “explored and made visible the Substance of Things Not Seen.”
At the end of the first day, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown discussed how images — from Kim Phúc during the Vietnam War to Neda Agha-Soltan during the recent Iranian protests — unlock our collective conscience to events happening around the world, forcing society into action, and how the modern digital world is making it happen all the more quickly than just a few years ago. He gives great examples of world-changing movements, and how long it took them to build.
Go back 200 years when the slave trade was under pressure from William Wilberforce and all the protesters. They protested across Britain. They won public opinion over a long period of time. But it took 24 years for the campaign to be successful. What could they have done with the pictures they could have shown if they were able to use the modern means of communication to win people’s hearts and minds?
Or if you take Eglantyne Jebb, the woman who created Save the Children 90 years ago. She was so appalled by what was happening in Austria as a result of the First World War and what was happening to children who were part of the defeated families of Austria, that in Britain she wanted to take action, but she had to go house to house, leaflet to leaflet, to get people to attend a rally in the Royal Albert Hall that eventually gave birth to Save the Children, an international organization that is now fully recognized as one of the great institutions in our land and in the world. But what more could she have done if she’d had the modern means of communications available to her to create a sense that the injustice that people saw had to be acted upon immediately?
Now, Brown says, we’re at the looking at “the creation of a truly global society,” where information can be shared across the globe instantly. He stressed that organizations and countries around the world need to unite, to work together in order to relieve the world of our greatest challenges.
Nelson Mandela… summarized the challenge for us all. He said in his lifetime he had climbed a great mountain, the mountain of challenging and then defeating racial oppression and defeating apartheid. He said that there was a greater challenge ahead, the challenge of poverty, of climate change, global challenges that needed global solutions and needed the creation of a truly global society.
While there was a degree of political grandstanding in his speech (which caused some lively discussions on the TED site), I couldn’t help but feel Brown believes what he says, that this connected world – the “YouTube generation” – has the power to solve great problems – from hunger and disease, to politics and personal freedoms.
Take a look at Prime Minister Brown’s speech. What do you think about Brown’s speech? How can your organization use the tools Brown highlights – from photos to texting to blogs – to advance your cause, and to help improve the world?
