Billions With Zero Knowledge

I just watched a great presentation by Jonathan Harris at TED 2007, where he spoke about how the power of stories to unify the human experience.

While many people look for differences to define our uniqueness (Difference in gender, religion, race, class, wealth etc.) his project We Feel Fine scans the blog world to show how the world can be unified by our common feelings and the stories we tell.

This is an incredible demonstration of the power visualization and storytelling to change the world.

Here are the some of the feelings that he showed that his We Feel Fine project has indexed,

• I feel invisible to you.
• I feel so much of my dead father in me, I don’t think there is room for me.
• I feel I need to be in a small red neck town to appear beautiful.

  

Check out We Feel Fine and look at how the world is feeling.

Yesterday Canadian author Steven Pinker spoke about how violence is dropping throughout the world and referenced last year’s TED speakers Robert Wright’s Non-Zero Game theory and Pete Singer’s Expanding Circle theory as two contributing reasons for this trend.

He pointed out that the reciprocity that comes from the ever expanding shared human experiences is creating new standards for behaviour. These new standards for behaviour are changing our moral consideration through mass adoption of empathy.

These concepts are at the heart of what we are working on with our new project, and in fact it was Robert’s speech where he called for a new moral revolution that was one of the tipping point moments in my thinking of Project Ojibwe. It was shortly thereafter that Alex and I were talking about our ideas for how we could help usher in an age of shared human experiences that uplift and improve the world.

On Thu 8 Mar 2007.