Will All Our “Digitalies” Save the World??

It’s been a while since I’ve been on this blog.  But so much hate and terror is currently terrorizing the world that I think it’s important to be part of a thoughtful, healing conversation. 

In April 2012, commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah, Avi Benlolo—President/CEO, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center Canada—posted a blog entitled, “Could the Internet Have Stopped the Holocaust?” I googled the question today in the context of my own cynicism about worldwide deadly violence and oppression currently overwhelming online, print, and television/radio news and social media, and I ran across Benlolo’s reflection on the power of 21^st-century “digitalities” in the hands of humans. 

It’s a question I’ve asked my writing/rhetoric students often:  would the holocaust have been able to occur in our current 24-hour/day cable/online news cycles and in the context of instant cellphone images and social media? It’s a question I have myself as a digital communicator

To my mind, the obvious answer is—or should be—of course not!  If the world had just known what was really happening in Germany and Eastern Europe, they absolutely would’ve condemned it and worked to remove Hitler and the Nazis from power.  After all, Benlolo points out about our current digital age, “At no other time in history have ordinary people with minimal resources at their fingertips had the opportunity to shape the course of world events in such a dramatic way”—to create a critical mass of equally ordinary people, from literally around the planet, virtually instantaneously. 

BUT…Benlolo qualifies his celebration of people’s power and reach:  “Had the digital age existed and had enough individuals been encouraged by mass social activism, one hopes the outcome would have been different.”  And that’s the big IF of our age isn’t it?  IF enough individuals become aware and involved, then make sure others became aware and involved…one hopes those individuals would have a transformative, healing impact.  A better outcome remains only a possibility.

And here we are, July 2014. 

• Pro-Russian Ukrainian rebels shoot down a commercial airliner flying from Europe to the Pacific, filled with 298 souls looking for a beach-side vacation, to reunite with loved ones, to enjoy much needed rest and relaxation with the kids before a new school year begins;
• Israel invades Gaza under the guise of stopping terrorist activity by Hamas, with over 1,400 Palestinians killed—80% civilians including children—in what seems to be an ongoing Palestinian genocide on the part of a militant Israel, home to survivors, children, and grandchildren of Hitler’s Jewish genocide;
• 200 young school girls are abducted by Islamic extremists in Nigeria because the young girls had the audacity to seek education—while some have escaped, 3 months later, no one knows where the girls are;
• Islamic extremists burst through the Syrian border into Iraq seeking outright domination, now insisting that all Iraqi females undergo genital mutilation;
• young children flee deadly violence in their Central American home countries, making a perilous trek across Mexico alone to the U.S. southern border in the summer heat, to be greeted by hate-filled, threatening Americans demanding they be return to where they came from. 

And we have all the news, social media, and up-to-the-minute cellphone images showing all the ugliness taking place in living color.  While millions have undertaken what Benlolo envisions, the deadliness, brutality, and domination continue. 

One of Benlolo’s blog respondents argued that surely social media, iPhone images taken from within prisoner train cars, 24-hour cable news, etc. would’ve at the least kept Hitler’s police squads busy and distracted.  But the same respondent celebrates the idea that thanks to our global digital network and media, nothing like the Holocaust will ever be able to happen again.  That respondent must have missed Benlolo’s reference to the Rwandan genocide that killed millions (1990s), the Bosnian genocide that required international military intervention (1990s), and the death and displacement of millions of Western Sudanese in a bloody civil war (2000s).   

Benlolo applauds those using digital technologies to increase awareness, to influence world political and economic leaders, to build advocacy coalitions.  But he adds another call to action: he calls on us to care more and sooner.  Another respondent to Benlolo’s HuffPost blog agrees that certainly our digital connectedness could’ve significantly mitigated the deadliness of the Nazi Final Solution.  But she cautions that ongoing history makes it evident that the human race still has some serious evolving to do before we reach a point of truly caring more and caring sooner, before we “reach that critical mass needed to make a difference” (annwil).

We’re great at immediate, real-time, show-n-tell, like first-graders, eagerly posting for all our “friends” the stories, photos, commentary, “facts,” and interpretation of those facts coming our way in sound bites, heavily-edited news reports, and 140 characters.  And many of us care.  Yet many feel utterly powerless to make any real difference, or we are absolutely overwhelmed by so much hate, violence, destruction, & oppressive power over the many by the few that we shut down, shut off, tune out.  The ubiquity of digital information about our world works against our caring enough to act, against caring soon enough to prevent brutality and slaughter taking place just down the road or across the planet. 

Elie Wiesel believes love’s opposite isn’t hate but indifference…not caring enough, not caring until it’s more convenient or absolutely necessary, not caring at all because it’s none of our business or it doesn’t affect us.  Our digital technologies are evolving much more rapidly than we humans; and surely we’ll continue to increase our effectiveness at using them transformatively, sooner and w/ greater care for our fellow inhabitants of planet Earth.  But in the context of today’s world, I have to answer Benlolo’s question with an unsatisfactory “no.”  No, the Internet, wifi, the latest iPhone, the Twitterverse, would not have stopped the Holocaust…then or now.  What say you?  What can we do now to move our digital and human evolution forward?