Have you ever had an idea or a plan, and then soon after came to find that someone had already done it? I certainly have, and I'd guess that this is a pretty common experience. Perhaps it's through the noospherethat we're picking up on something already existent, or getting our pockets picked by others? Hard to say. Nevertheless, sometimes it can be a bummer (when you had that idea for ___ that was going to let you retire early), and sometimes it can be a blessing. Recently I experienced the latter.
In the comment section to a piece of mine 
called Joseph Campbell, Facebook, and the One and the Many, Bergen linked to this striking image of worldwide Facebook connections you see here on the right. In my response to him I said, "It's interesting to see what parts of the world are still largely offline. It might be a worthwhile project to see if we can't connect here at Beams with some of the folks who are online in places like China, Africa and that big dark spot on South America. See if we can't get some direct information about what's going on in those parts, start some kind of exchange".
Well what do ya know- someone's already done it!! And how. While listening to commentary regarding Social Media and the Tunisian Revolution, I came across the work of technologist Ethan Zuckerman and a 
TED talk of his (which I've embedded below). Zuckerman and others created a website in 2004 called Global Voices, "an international network of bloggers and citizen journalists". This site has been a real gift during the recent events in the Middle East, with bloggers and collections of Tweets from right inside all the countries involved. Through hearing these local voices directly, unfiltered by the Western media and the many myths, projections and vested interests often found there, I've gotten to hear many intelligent, passionate, savvy folks that I personally resonate with. Through a site like Global Voices, the 'global village' shrinks and tightens in a rapid and palpable way.
Zuckerman makes many important points in his TED talk. He points out that while we think the 'World Wide Web' has created this globally connected network of humanity, folks like Zuckerman who study these things have come to realize that most people still remain in "segregated conversations", employing "filter bubbles" that create an "imaginary cosmopolitanism". Zuckerman invites us to become "xenophiles" in our actions, creating a wider world-network of social connection through who (and what media) we interact with. To put this in integral terms, you might say that Zuckerman calls for the action driven cultivation of a truly global-centric worldview within our collective (lower-left quadrant) shared culture and values. I would add that this shared globalized worldview, truly embodied and developed into, could put considerable pressure on the modern world-system to also evolve in step with this global opinion and solidarity. I for one feel deeply compelled to connect to a wider world in this way, and will be putting much future energy in that direction here at Beams. Please let me know if you have any connections or links that further that project.
Before going into Zuckerman's TED talk, here's a passage from Sri Aurobindo's 1915 political text The Ideal of Human Unity that's worth mulling over in this context:
"The whole process of Nature depends on a balancing of and a constant tendency to harmony between two poles of life, the individual whom the whole or aggregate nourishes and the whole or aggregate which the individual helps to constitute...The perfect society will be that which most entirely favours the perfection of the individual; the perfection of the individual will be incomplete if it does not help towards the perfect state of the social aggregate to which [s]he belongs and eventually to that of the largest possible human aggregate, the whole of a united humanity".
