The Global Conversation

Tag: Facebook

  • Okay, there’s no right or wrong. But is this working?

    The internet, and more particularly social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, has become a cyber playground for people to connect and share and converse from all corners of the globe.  Millions of human beings every day are uploading photos of their children’s accomplishments, sharing nuggets of inspiration and wisdom, trading recipes with their circles of friends, and reuniting with high school classmates from days gone by.

    However, there is a darker side to this vast cyber world.  As wonderful and informative and entertaining as the internet can be, there are people who have chosen to use this far-reaching resource to hurt and shame others in what has been labeled as “cyber bullying.”  This behavior is especially prevalent among young adolescents and teenagers, many of whom are moving through some of their most vulnerable and uncertain years in life.  The level of ridiculing and tormenting experienced by some of these teens has resulted in grave consequences – depression, loneliness, and even suicide.

    But what is even more alarming is when bullying stories surface about people like Charles Fowler.  What makes this story especially disturbing is that Mr. Fowler happens to be an assistant vice principal in a South Carolina school, who, while at a neighborhood Wal-Mart store, snapped a picture of a young 6-year-old girl, a kindergarten student, uploaded it to Facebook, and captioned the unsolicited photo with these words:  “Honey Boo-Boo in Wal-Mart.”

    Honey Boo-Boo is the star of a popular reality show on television which features a family who manages to encompass negative socioeconomic stereotypes, obesity, teen parenthood, large families, and child beauty pageants all in an exaggerated effort to “entertain” its viewers.  And Mr. Fowler’s attempts to draw some kind of crude connection between these two youngsters by posting this picture online has not only devastated and embarrassed this little girl and her family, it has also cost him his job.  He resigned after hundreds signed a petition for his termination and the school district placed him on administrative leave.

    This particular story caught my attention because not a day goes by that I don’t see repeated examples of people making fun of others on Facebook, publicly ridiculing and taunting someone else because their clothes are too tight, their teeth are crooked, their body is too big or too small, their words are different, the color of their skin is too dark or too light, or simply because some aspect of who they are falls short of someone else’s idea of worthiness or acceptability.

    Of course, there are those who think Mr. Fowler losing his job over this event is an overreaction, that his behavior does not deserve such a swift consequence.  What do you think?  Harassing and intimidating behavior or just good ‘ol fun?  Do we hold the people who place themselves in positions of leadership to a higher standard – teachers, principals, ministers, etc.?  Is that “higher standard” one we should all volunteer to be accountable for?  Why or why not?  What is missing in someone’s life such that they would actually engage in bullying a 6-year-old little girl for a laugh or two?  What is missing in a person’s life who thinks this kind of behavior is funny?   And while this may appear to be the act of one person, what responsibility do we all have for creating this situation?

    What will it take to get to the point when people stop subscribing to exploitive tabloid magazines and “liking” the “People of Wal-Mart” Facebook pages and sitting in front of our television sets binge-watching episodes of “Honey Boo-Boo” and “Duck Dynasty”?   Will society eventually grow weary of emotionally capitalizing on other people’s differences?

    Conversations with God says there is no such thing as right or wrong.  There is only what works and what doesn’t work, given what it is we are trying to do.

    So my question to you is this:  Is this working?  And what is it we are actually trying to do?

    (Lisa McCormack is a Feature Editor at The Global Conversation and lives in Orlando, Florida.  To connect with Lisa, please e-mail her at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.)

  • Clash of the humanitarian titans

    In August of this year, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his plan to improve humanity by expanding internet access into the developing world, touting it as “one of the most important things we will do in our lifetimes.”  He published his thoughts and visions in an online document where he asks the question:  “Is connectivity a human right?”

    Zuckerberg goes on to say, “I’m focused on this because I believe it is one of the greatest challenges of our generation. The unfair economic reality is that those already on Facebook have way more money than the rest of the world combined, so it may not actually be profitable for us to serve the next few billion people for a very long time, if ever. But we believe everyone deserves to be connected.  The internet not only connects us to our friends, families and communities, but it is also the foundation of the global knowledge economy.”

    However, Microsoft mogul Bill Gates has reacted publicly with some harsh criticisms about Mark Zuckerberg’s plan, calling the Facebook entrepreneur’s mission “a joke.”

    “As a priority? It’s a joke,” Gates told CNBC in an interview. “I certainly love the IT thing. But when we want to improve lives, you’ve got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.  Take this malaria vaccine, [this] weird thing that I’m thinking of. Hmm, which is more important, connectivity or malaria vaccine? If you think connectivity is the key thing, that’s great. I don’t.”

    Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and someone who has been labeled the richest man in the world, has devoted himself to humanitarian causes since stepping down from a full-time role at Microsoft in 2006, personally investing millions of dollars from his own personal fortune into efforts to eradicate illnesses such as polio, HIV, and malaria on a global scale.  His website www.gatesfoundation.org thoroughly outlines many of the other social issues Bill Gates and his wife Melinda are getting in front of, including extreme poverty and poor health in developing countries and the failures of America’s education system.

    At first glance, it is easy to mock Zuckerberg’s “get the world online” plan when contrasted against the sobering perspective offered to us by Bill Gates, who also blasted Google’s dream to bring the internet to the world’s unconnected population by floating hundreds of weather balloons equipped with solar-powered radios in an attempt create an aerial wireless network with up to 3G-like speeds. “When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you,” said Gates.  “When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that.”

    But setting aside for a moment the disapproving commentary by Bill Gates, is it quite possible that Mark Zuckerberg is onto something here, too?  He believes that “bringing everyone online will not only improve billions of lives, but we’ll also improve our own as we benefit from the ideas and productivity they contribute to the world.  Giving everyone the opportunity to connect is the foundation for enabling the knowledge economy. It is not the only thing we need to do, but it’s a fundamental and necessary step.”

    No stranger to philanthropy himself, Zuckerberg and his wife were the second-biggest charitable donors in the United States last year,  giving roughly half a billion dollars to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a charitable organization whose causes in 2012 ranged from programs to teach immigrants English, to groups providing food and shelter to the needy, to funds for victims of the California wildfires.  In addition, he donated $100 million to help schools in the U.S.

    Can the crises humanity is facing right now – hunger, poverty, homelessness, illness, lack of education – be alleviated by both of the innovative ideas of these two powerful men who are more than willing to put their money where it matters?

    Are we willing to risk an extraordinary opportunity for significant positive change to occur while we sit back and debate with each other who is right and who is wrong?  Isn’t the biggest obstacle we currently face — the one thing that stands in the way of real, positive, and beneficial change taking place — our inability to embrace each other’s perspectives as “another way,” not a “better way”?

    Can the internet be counted as a fundamental and basic necessity for everyone in our world?  Or is it a tool, a resource, a luxury that should be reserved for those who can afford it?  If the latter is true, are we simply playing into the continuing the cycle of “those who have” and “those who do not”?

    Do people who have no running or clean water, families with barely enough food to sustain their bodies, and those who struggle with life-threatening illnesses on a daily basis really even care about having internet access?  Is the information superhighway, as Gates contends, just not, “in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs” and instead we should be placing our intentions and financial wherewithal elsewhere?

    According to a senior United Nations official, “Helping developing countries build their citizens’ access to the Internet is akin to giving them a tool that boosts their chances of achieving sustainable economic growth.”

    Is it possible that maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, this or that, yours or mine?  Can you imagine a way these two humanitarian giants can work hand-in-hand, supported by a new framework of understanding, clarity, and wisdom which would give rise to the harmonious implementation of both of their powerful visions and creative ideas?

    Personally, the prospect of that level of collaboration and heartfelt cooperation is something I would definitely hit the “like” button for.

    (Lisa McCormack is the Managing Editor & Administrator of The Global Conversation. She is also a member of the Spiritual Helper team at www.ChangingChange.net, a website offering emotional and spiritual support. To connect with Lisa, please e-mail her at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.)

  • If everything is perfect, why bother?

    “If everything is perfect, happening in Divine order, why bother doing anything?”

    This question was recently posed to the audience of The Global Conversation’s Facebook page in an effort to find out what people think about what may be one of the most asked about — and perhaps most misunderstood — concepts in the new-thought community.

    If there is a larger spiritual design to all of this — that is, all of life — if our ultimate outcome is already guaranteed, why in the world do we need to worry about changing or creating anything during our time on earth?  Can’t we just sit back and enjoy the ride?   Let the chips fall where they may?

    Our Facebook question triggered some wonderful and diverse responses from people around the globe.

    Yoga Wahyudi says:  “because there’s no such thing as perfect.”

    Could that be true, that we actually are less than perfect?  That nothing is perfect?  Is much of the world striving and struggling and reaching for what they may never be able to attain?  Is it true that there is no higher purpose or all-encompassing perfection involved here?

    There are religions in our world today that support the idea that we are flawed from the moment we enter into the realm of physicality.  If we embrace that belief system, one that requires us to believe ourselves as separate from God, upon what then do we base our decision of whether or not to become active participants in the happenings in our world?   Is it merely an exercise of atonement for our perceived defects, earning or receiving credit for our “good” deeds?

    Tony Meade shared a quote from Albert Einstein:  “Nothing happens until something moves.”

    And Deanne Steinbeck offered this thought:  “Even divine order requires action, every action you make has a butterfly effect and it may be one of your actions that inspires someone else and so on. We are here to learn, grow and love and for us to action our best self…..divine order requires each of us to action love into the world.”

    So perhaps it is within our actions, our doingness, our creativity that we are experiencing the perfection of our choices?  Would we ever be able to know who we are, to declare who we are, or express who we are if we never engaged in demonstrations of who we are?

    The answers to these questions will depend largely upon what your belief and understanding is about why you are here, on this planet, to begin with.  Conversations with God shared this powerful message with us:

    “My divine purpose in dividing Me was to create sufficient parts of Me so that I could know Myself experientially. There is only one way for the Creator to know Itself experientially as the Creator, and that is to create. And so I gave to each of the countless parts of Me (to all of My spirit children) the same power to create which I have as the whole….My purpose in creating you, My spiritual offspring, was for Me to know Myself as God. I have no way to do that save through you. Thus it can be said (and has been, many times) that My purpose for you is that you should know yourself as Me.”

    And it is within this message that I believe we are offered an understanding that most clearly explains the dichotomy that exists between “everything being perfect” and the call for creation.  It comes to us not in the form of a commandment, but rather in the form of a gift from God, so that we may experience ourselves as the Divine and so that the Divine may know Herself experientially.

    So when we are at the choice point, and we find ourselves being given an opportunity to decide, the important questions to ask ourselves are:  Who am I? Where am I? Why am I where I am? And what do I intend to do about that?  When we purposefully transform our thoughts into actions, we become powerful creators and active participants in the evolution of life…not only for ourselves, but for everyone.

    – Rosa Parks experienced this when she chose to stand up to legally imposed racial segregation and faced her own arrest.

    – Hotel workers at theTaj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai, India, experienced this when they placed their own lives at risk in efforts to protect guests during the deadly terrorist attacks in 2008.

    – Nancy Lublin experiences this in her capacity as CEO at DoSomething.org, one of the country’s largest nonprofit organizations championing for young people and creating social change in the areas of bulling & violence, environment, homelessness, and human rights, just to name a few.

    – Cassandra Curley experienced this when she walked 50 miles in each of the 50 states in 50 weeks in conjunction with her 50th birthday, spreading the message to anyone who would listen that peace is our natural state and that conflict is generated by fear.

    So I pose the question again:  If everything is perfect, happening in Divine order, why bother doing anything? 

     (Lisa McCormack is the Managing Editor & Administrator of The Global Conversation.  She is also a member of the Spiritual Helper team at www.ChangingChange.net, a website offering emotional and spiritual support. To connect with Lisa, please e-mail her at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.)

  • A Billion Friends and Zero Connections

    On October 4th, 2012, an unprecedented event occurred across the world. This event was not a day of political change or economic change, but this was a day of a social change. Through the incredible progress of technology, October 4th marked the day that will continue to define lives and generations. For on this past Thursday, the social media network Facebook officially registered its billionth user. Stated from a BBC article published on October 5th, Facebook now has “over 1.13 trillion ‘likes,’ 219 billion photos, and 17 billion check-ins.” With users logging in from all over the globe, Facebook and social media has become one of the most popular forms of communication on the planet.  

    From observing this massive expansion of social media, it would seem as though our society is more connected to each other than ever before. Through Facebook and other social network sites, we have been given more opportunity to communicate and interact with others than any other generation has. We can post, print, and tag on each other’s wall instantaneously, and comment on their activities just as fast. And yet, for all of the connections that social media creates, we feel even more separated and disconnected than ever before. Why is that? 

    How is it even possible that a billion people, who have engaged in social networking to create meaningful connections with others, still feel so separated from each other? In essence, it begins with the most basic element: the message. In the simplest truth, the purpose of having conversations and being connected to others is to send and receive our messages. As these messages that we type, text, and tweet serve as our verbalized thoughts and desires, every word is being sent out for the world to lean and listen. So, what are the messages that we are sending out? Are they ones that continue to separate us, or are they ones that actually might bring us together?   

    If you ever felt the messages you posted online only created further division, further guilt, further fear, then know that you CAN change the message that you put out into the world. By simply being aware of messages that either bring people together or drives them apart is a step in a new direction. Social media doesn’t have to be used to boast accomplishments and events of one over another, but rather can be used to bring the two together. We have the ability to connect with the billions of other social media users, as long as we are willing to create those connections. You CAN choose, in every post, in every tweet, to bring a message of unity and understanding into everything you say and write. You CAN choose to promote love and unity, and let your words reflect it. Your message is a reflection of Who You Are, and your expression of Who You Are. It’s just your choice on the extent you want to express it. 

    As Facebook now has a billion users, social media is becoming more complex and interconnected than anything else we have ever known socially. As each of its billion users will choose the message they send out into the world, they will decide which path they will follow. But as we decide our own path, we can start to choose messages that create those deeper connections and higher conversations that will interact with billions of other users. So next time you go to update your status, remember the words you send will be literally sent into the world. Check your messages often. 

    (Lauren is a Feature Editor of The Global Conversation. She lives in Wood Dale, IL and can be reached at Lauren@TheGlobalConversation.com.)