Friday, February 1, 2013

Can social networking technology bring peace?

Pakistani and Indian students
getting along
Can social networking tools such as Facebook advance the cause of peace? In order to find out, I recently interviewed two researchers from the Peace Innovation Lab at Stanford University. Margarita Quihuis is the Director of the Lab, as well as a social entrepreneur, mentor capitalist, and former head of a Silicon Valley technology incubator for women entrepreneurs. Mark Nelson is a co-founder of the Lab, and head of the EPIC Challenge, which promotes positive social interactions across conflict boundaries. The goal of the Peace Innovation Lab is to create grassroots contacts between people on opposite sides of conflicts in the hope that this may eventually tip the balance of power from war to peace. In addition to discussing the work of the Lab, which includes significant support from Facebook itself, we also touched on the underlying causes of conflict, whether peace or war is the natural condition of Mankind, and whether fostering a global consciousness  can overcome the many divisions pushing the world toward armed conflict. To view the program in its entirety, click here. To see it broken down into three shorter segments, click here.

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