We live in exciting times. It used to be a curse that. You weren't supposed to tell children "May you live in exciting times", apparently living in boring times is...well probably more condusive to one's health and welfare. But whether our parents and grandparents could have foreseen the moments and technologies of today that have created the exciting times that swarm our lives, they surely never would have guessed.
To offer you a crosscut section of the insanity of technology in my personal life.
My friends in Victoria are organizing themselves and doing an internet televised marathon. They are raising money for a charity called Child's Play by having call-in guests, auctioning items both live and silent, and issuing challenges to their viewership.
Since they started on Friday, they are now halfway through their marathon, and have already raised 180 Thousand dollars. 180 thousand dollars, a sketch comedy troupe in Victoria that are operating with a bunch of laptops, small cameras, a boom mic, and a lot of heart and volunteers.
Child's play as a charity is about trying to raise money to donate toys, video games, and movies to sick children in hospitals around the world. It partners with existing facilities and departments (Usually a hospitals own Child Quality of Life department) in order to facilitate donations of handheld video games, televisions, game consoles, lego blocks, puzzles, everything. All in the name of the idea that a hospital is a pretty scary place for a child, and games help alleviate suffering.
I've been following Desert Bus for two years now, and it never ceases to amaze me the sheer incredible generosity of the world at large for a good cause. Desert Bus is just one community driven arm of many branches in Child's Play that helps the charity kick off. There are also huge charity dinners, galas, donation drives, you name it and gamers like myself have jumped on it in a frenzy. At Pax, which I regularly attend, there is even a cookie brigade which sells cheap cookies for Child's Play donations.
Ten years ago, something like this would've been near impossible. Oh for sure there were the television marathons of the past, those 24 hour phone in and donate so on and so forths. But now there's a community, you're not alone on your couch watching the tv. There are websites and connections, twitter and emails, a chat room that runs too fast for most of us to read (and I read pretty damn fast). People from all over the world have come together and are part of this one. As us North American's go to sleep around 3 or 4 in the morning, Asian gamers and European gamers log in to pick up the slack.
The global community literally comes alive for events like this one (one of many), for a good cause.
The Child's Play Website Here
http://childsplaycharity.org/
Desert Bus for Hope, the Event Organized by Loading Ready Run in Victoria
http://desertbus.org/
On the flip side of technology, we are also witnessing a revolution on the ground. I've written an Occupy blogpost that hasn't been published yet, but it's an ongoing sense of wonderment, and frankly is somewhat terrifying.
Images iconic are diffused across the internet, spread between friends and acquaintances about what they are seeing on the ground. Innocent people (or not so innocent as your perspective may be) are being shot with tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray, flashbangs. All of this is captured, recorded, disseminated, distributed to the world entire. Data is being stored and uploaded, filed away and shown. Names are recorded, actions are witnessed, and half a world away some of us are seeing things in Oakland, New York, San Fransisco, Seattle, and Portland and commenting on them from London, or Edmonton, or Toronto.
We are sharing the collective outrage, we have opinions, and thoughts, and we are WITNESSING it unfold, these events are now a part o our global consciousness. They are unavoidable. Technology has made us both strangers and peers of everyone else.
