In our generation, we spend hours a day scanning the different screens of the internet. Whether you’re looking for sports, something to do later that night, or the most recent episode of Tosh.0, the internet is an incredibly tool for many different reasons and just recently it has been being utilized for much more than a laugh or a quarterbacks stats from last game; it’s been being used to start revolutions.
For years, most, if not all, of the 3rd world countries have kept a lid on what goes on in these troubled regions. Many told stories of the horrors that came out of these different areas, but no one on the outside knew for certain or could relate in any real way. These days are over. With the internet, for the first time in the history of the planet, a random individual from the apartment building of a UCF sponsored development can watch, listen, and for once, truly feel what is going on in a different part of the world, for good and bad.
The riots in Egypt are a prime example of this. The internet was used as the tool I believe it was intended for: to pass along REAL knowledge and connect REAL people to do REAL good. Viral videos of police officers using excessive force, women being harassed by officials, and even of different protests gave this revolution much more of a “country next door” feel. We could see what was happening and pass judgement, good or bad, on the people and the government with real first hand accounts and evidence of the troubles of the volatile country.
Rewind roughly 70 years and what comes to mind for many is the devastation and horror of the Holocaust under Nazi control in Germany. Many joined the evildoers not fully aware of what their country, their government, was doing to so many innocent people. In the age we live in, this amount of naivety would not last long. Pictures, videos, emails, texts would have flooded out of the country within a day, if not an hour, of these horrors taking place. The world would have known sooner, much sooner.
The idea of the internet fully informing the global community is in no way going to stop evil from happening; it may not even slow it down. What it will do, however, is speed up the pace in which the world knows about the evil, speed up the pace in which the rest of the world can rally together and do what they can to help the weak and impoverished, and speed up the pace in which the rest of the world can inform themselves of these horrors in the hopes of a better tomorrow. The internet is not going anywhere anytime soon and Big Brother will always have an upper hand, in one way or another, over the people of it’s respected government but with the emergence of revolutionaries sitting behind a computer, uploading and downloading, there is a new threat to evil, wrongdoers. A threat that isn’t going away. It’s the new generation of free thinkers. It’s the people that have sat and watched Big Brother take all their stuff, and now they’re older and seemingly taller. This generation is that of Younger Brother finally overcoming it’s older sibling and is focused on making his own life better.