Gordon Brown's Interconnected World
BY Nancy Scola | Monday, July 27 2009
At TED Global in Oxford last week, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a passionate (well, passionate for Gordon Brown, at least) argument in favor of the idea that social media is transforming the world. The web and digital technologies, said Brown, are creating a moment of interconnectedness unique in the world's history. Brown drew a line from Phan Thị Kim Phúc, the Vietnamese girl captured in the famous AP photograph of a South Vietnamese napalm attack, to Neda Soltan, the young Iranian woman whose death captured in a YouTube video caught the world's attention. For one thing, said Brown, "foreign policy can never be the same again." Brown also entertained the crowd with an amusing anecdote featuring Nelson Mandela and, naturally, Amy Winehouse. Give the video a watch. But, reports the Guardian U.K., Brown -- whose electoral strength in Britain is a bit weak at the moment, in part because of recent disclosures over MP spending -- found that his forward-looking pro-technology message of global unity wasn't universally embraced on the Internet. Or, for that matter, in the hall, where one man reportedly yelled "bollocks!" throughout his speech.