The assumption here is that peace between nations can somehow be resolved by just communication among private citizens and individual friendships; that conflicts are just misunderstandings or that we are too prejudiced or don't have enough sympathy. I can see how that is sometimes the case, but I don't see how that is always or even commonly the case. In many conflicts, there are very real underlying issues that need to be resolved and unless those fundamental imbalances are addressed, then there will not be peace.
For example, it looks like China is on a possible collision course with India and Southeast Asian nations over water rights. China's north is heavily populated, rapidly growing, and severely short of water. Tibet on the other hand is very rich in water resources that are upstream of major rivers in India, Laos, Vietnam, etc. As we speak there are gigantic projects diverting water from China's south to the north. It's likely not to be enough, and if China moves on to divert and dam rivers that cross international borders, there will likely be war.
This is just one example, but my guess would be that a resource-driven conflict that incites national pride on both sides will break those friendships rather than the other way around. If the fundamental reasons driving a conflict are not resolved, it's hard to see why friendships will be able to prevent war.
I agree. In fact the China has already initiated the process of building a dam over one of the major rivers to flow into India (Tsangpo-Brahmaputra), and India has asked China to put a hold to this.
It is also to be noted that among the few Chinese people I have met, most seem to have a liking towards Indians and vice-versa. Also, you would not believe the extent to which Indians and Pakistanis would go to demonstrate their love for each other. A few years ago (2005, I think), when there was a bilateral cricket tournament between Pakistan and India in India (and the next year in Pakistan), Indians would literally drag Pakistanis to their homes as guests. This was repeated by the Pakistanis the next year.
Looking at the news reports and the way the Indian and Pakistani governments accuse each other, you would never guess such stuff could happen.
Well the Pakistanis certainly weren't complaining. They were expecting to be greeted by armed policemen scrutinizing their every move (or atleast that's how one of them put it in an interview to a newspaper).
The real assumption here is that facilitating communications will help drive up traffic and thus ad revenue. A commendable initiative by Facebook if you are one of their investors.
Well, as has been demonstrated time and again, there is not always a conflict between "private" / "market" interests and "public" / "community" interests, nor need there be. (Arguably, there's almost never a clash unless the market interests are coupled to political ones, but let's not get into that...)
I'm not saying so much that there is conflict, but I very much doubt that the Facebook people truly believe that this will have any real effect on world peace or that their motives are anything other than money.
Being Greek, what I despise is being framed as one half of the world's 'mortal enemy pairs' that facebook is helping fix. For one thing, we haven't fought a direct war with Turkey for nearly 90 years. Having cultural animosity between two nations is one thing, being paraded as an example of 'warring tribes' on a worldwide forum is quite another. I fear this initiative crystalises stereotypes rather than helping break them down.
The funny thing about this is that Facebook leads to the exact opposite of peace among groups of people. There's massive amounts of social anxiety associated with your virtual prominence amongst your friends, even if you see them in-person on a regular basis.
Since I've quit using Facebook, etc I have noticed a massive improvement in the quality of my interactions with friends. They actually bother asking how I'm doing / what I'm up to, and I'm genuinely curious about their recent experiences.
I'm actually convinced that this global obsession with social networks could lead to more wars than peace -- the current generation of Internet trolls seem like a mere precursor of what's to come. People really take this virtual shit seriously -- doesn't that seem just the slightest bit scary, when coupled with natural youthful aggression?
I get the opposite reaction. I talk to people I'd never talk to otherwise. It doesn't hurt that I unfriend people I don't like talking to that much.
The problem is that Facebook is a constant communication. When you interact with people after talking to them on Facebook, there's less to talk about, because it's already been said. If you consider Facebook to be a part of interaction, as I do, the net conversation swells; if not, it shrinks.
> I'm actually convinced that this global obsession with social networks could lead to more wars than peace -- the current generation of Internet trolls seem like a mere precursor of what's to come. People really take this virtual shit seriously -- doesn't that seem just the slightest bit scary, when coupled with natural youthful aggression?
Yes and no. The good thing about the Internet is that to take it seriously, you have to make the choice yourself. It's not like a war, in which nationalism can sweep a lot of good people into doing bad things. Rather, it's a bunch of smaller, decentralized, isolated incidents, and I like that. The more isolationist (not isolated) the world is, the healthier it is. If a thousand nutjobs kill a thousand people over Internet bullshit, that's a lot healthier than that thousand nutjobs congregating over political/religious/economic bullshit and attempting to kill a lot more. There'll be more incidents, in other words, but each one will be vastly less harmful.
I disagree. Seeing people use something that you use but who live in a completely different place and have very different lives is a really enlightening thing.
As amohr posted, this is actually a Stanford initiative, not something that Facebook started. Regardless, I think it's a great idea, but we should be giving credit where it's due.
In other facebook news everyone in my freshman level class spends the whole lecture on facebook on their computer and is very surprising to me that the teacher doesnt ban computers from the classroom. ( When I started 2 years ago no one even pulled out computers during lectures unless they were at the back of the room. )
Maybe facebook is planning world peace through extended computer use.
If the content of the lecture isn't compelling enough to win out over Farmville for an hour and the content of the test isn't dependent on the content of the lecture, I pray professors don't attempt to artificially monopolize my attention.
Additionally, the idea of a weekly (worse, daily) lecture as an effective means of information transfer for everyone in attendance is pretty silly.
Lastly, my college classes _expected_ that people would tune out a bit, especially as freshmen, since we didn't have the mental strength to last through a 3 hour discussion of a text. 'Attendance' was a fairly fluid concept. It worked well.
Okay sure a few people did crosswords but I'm talking like 50 percent of the students having their computers out on facebook and playing dumb facebook games. It is distracting to me who ends up sitting in the middle of the class cause my other class is across campus and ends late and having a bunch of flashing computers in front of me.
Makes me glad I'm in engineering where people need to focus, it doesn't help that this freshman level class enforces attendance either cause these people probably wouldn't even be showing up.
Isn't it also possible that facebook could be used for the promotion of hate? An obvious and outstanding recent example was the recent quiz about whether the U.S. president should be killed. If you read about the balkans, (and more recently iraq) what is shocking is how quickly cultures with cross-ethnic/religous connections - even those as strong as intermarriage can quickly become polarized into bitter enemies. Which makes me wonder what these graphs of israel/palestine friendships will look like when tensions again escalate between these two groups. What did the india/pakistan graph look like after the Mumbai bombings?
Looking at it from a broader perspective, Facebook is the promotion of communication manifest. It strives very hard, in fact, to be a neutral medium, in which no one type of conversation is favored over another, so conversation ranges from flirting to intense debate.
The question is, does prolonged communication lead to more peace or more hate? My bet: In the short term, more hate, because there'll be a lot of people getting in fights over issues they didn't know existed. (I lost a lot of Palin-supporting friends last year.) In the long run, however, more open communication leads to us understanding each other better, and only good can come of that.
Yeah I agree - without any evidence I would expect it to be neutral. But I think that there is a pretty well documented tendency for people to be much more aggressive and extreme on online forums than there are in real life. (Similar to road rage) Back in the day I remember reading littlegreenfootballs and being shocked at some of the hateful rhetoric which was in the comments (of course left leaning sites have this too)
That's what I mean by short-term rage. As much as you think people accept you for who you are and what you think, when you express yourself online you realize that most people are awful and immature in a handful of ways. But past that point you develop some self-consciousness and, more often than not, come out of the social parts of the Internet a lot smarter, wittier, and more savvy than you used to be. I can't wait to see that happen on a mass scale.
And he was right. Facebook's policy of uniquely targeted ads is unlike anything else on the market, and it will be the future of advertising. It's killer.
Advertising doesn't just change every hundred years, but if you don't think Facebook is one of the two Great Advertisers of the decade, along with Google, then you weren't paying attention.
Define equality. There're a lot of versions of the word that I don't support. Peace, now, there's an idea I can get behind, impossible as it might seem.
Equal in rights and opportunity, ok? I'm not proposing the kind of enforced universal mediocrity that I know you hacker news ubermensch are paranoid of.
Of course everyone wants peace. The oppressed want a peace that is an end to injustice. The oppressor wants a peace where the oppressed will just shut up and take it.
I wasn't talking about that. I also didn't know there was a Hacker News ubermensch.
"Equal in rights and opportunity" still doesn't mean much. How can Facebook enforce equal opportunities? And everybody on Facebook is equal. So you're still dealing with a nebulous term.
Well, they aren't campaigning for peace ON Facebook, so I don't see why you think this is about equality in facebook itself. I don't see why equal in rights and opportunity is nebulous either. If you look at one of the contrasts on peace.facebook.com, Israel and Palestine, it's pretty obvious that the two populations are not equal in rights or opportunities and that this is the reason for the current strife in that region.
I've never been convinced that opages like this really have much effect.
Also it's worth pointing out that the graphs are immaterial; the people with real animosity wont be making those connections - and Facebook don't seem to be doing anything to encourage them......
radiolab (part of nyc's public radio) had a great news piece about this very topic. Back during the cold war like 1 in 3 people thought war was inevitable. It says a lot about our culture that 1 in 10 think that we can achieve PEACE. 66% peace lovers to 10% is pretty sad.
Wanting peace and thinking we will get peace are 2 different things aren't they? I want peace, but I'm not so naive to think that humans will change their nature and we'll get it, so do I show up as a peace lover or not?
According to the question ask "do you think war is inevitable?" you'd be included in 9 of 10 think war is inevitable. What we want was not part of the question (and I don't think it is on peace.facebook.com either. Their question is "is world peace possible?", based on your response above your answer to facebook would be "no").
For example, it looks like China is on a possible collision course with India and Southeast Asian nations over water rights. China's north is heavily populated, rapidly growing, and severely short of water. Tibet on the other hand is very rich in water resources that are upstream of major rivers in India, Laos, Vietnam, etc. As we speak there are gigantic projects diverting water from China's south to the north. It's likely not to be enough, and if China moves on to divert and dam rivers that cross international borders, there will likely be war.
This is just one example, but my guess would be that a resource-driven conflict that incites national pride on both sides will break those friendships rather than the other way around. If the fundamental reasons driving a conflict are not resolved, it's hard to see why friendships will be able to prevent war.