Technology and progress

I was having a discussion the other night about the role technology is playing in changing the way people comsume media/entertainment. Clearly, people are getting more active (and less passive) in terms of this - role-playing video games vs. watching television; guiding your way through the internet vs. watching TV news - and technological progress is fuelling our ability to do this. In addition, our ability to communicate very easily with people around the world makes the notion of "it's a small world after all" actually seem like it might really be true. And, if I may be glowingly optimistic for a minute, this might make world peace a little easier to come by in the future. To young people today, those living on the other side of the world are less of an "other" and more like a neighbour. And presumably, it's harder to want to bomb (or, for that matter, pollute or cause hardship to) your neighbour than it is to do it to some group of people you've never had any contact with. The not-in-my-backyard idea could become pretty powerful when people start thinking of the whole world as their backyard. And lowering barriers to communication and the flow of information, primarily through technology, is going to be the horse than pulls that cart.