Culture from Coast to Coast

One of the most popular posts on "Dispatches from the Imagination Age," is an interview Eureka conducted with Dr. Clifford Pickover (SL Cliff Nakamura). Indeed, it was at Cliff's suggestion that Eureka explore Second Life as a new outlet for her journalistic investigations. Yes, dear readers, were it not for Cliff Pickover, there might be no Dispatches from the Imagination Age.

Cliff will be appearing this Wednesday, April 23 on the wildly popular "Coast to Coast" radio show discussing his new book, "Archimedes to Hawking." Eureka and I will be enroute to Washington, DC, where we will be speaking at the Federal Consortium on Virtual Worlds at the National Defense University. We hope our plane lands in time to catch some of the show.

In a recent email exchange, Cliff and I discussed our mutual interest in understanding (in my case evangelizing) how the Internet -- especially virtual worlds -- can serve as a tool for facilitating better intercultural understanding. I've often used the word "public diplomacy" to describe this, but it goes much beyond that. Cliff replied:

I've always tended to disagree with people who suggest that electronic technologies (e.g. even email) can tend to isolate us from "real friends" and "real" human contact. On the contrary, the technologies unite the planet. Communities formed by ideas become more important than those formed by geographical proximity. I have more "true friends" electronically than in the flesh, and through email we can reach out and touch the lives of others in profound ways. And sometimes, you get to meet your electronic friends, and the meeting is all the more intense because of the shared ideas prior to the real-world meeting.

Cliff has written about this extensively, including in his recent book, "Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves."

The Internet breaks the barriers of time and distance, and permits unprecedented growth and opportunity. In the next few years, communities formed by ideas will be as strong as those formed by geography. The Internet will dissolve away nations as we know them today. Humanity becomes a single hive mind, with a group intelligence, as geography becomes putty in the hands of the Internet sculptor.

Chaos theory teaches us that even our smallest actions have amplified effects. Now more than ever before this is apparent. Whenever I am lonely at night, I look at a large map depicting over 100,000 Internet routers spread throughout the world. I imagine sending out a spark, an idea, and a colleague from another country echoing that idea to his colleges, over and over again, until the electronic chatter resembles the chanting of monks. I agree with author Jane Roberts who once wrote, "You are so part of the world that your slightest action contributes to its reality. Your breath changes the atmosphere. Your encounters with others alter the fabrics of their lives, and the lives of those who come in contact with them."

Dr. Pickover's philosophy aptly, is "not only to expand the mind, but to shatter it." I hope we can get to Washington in time to get at least half of our minds blown.