Throughout our history we have always had those people who stood apart, always looking past the surface to who we really were as a society and a people. Many then put their thoughts to paper, thoughts which have affected the way we think and the way we live.

These philosophers were and still are the microscope by which we judge ourselves and our actions. Whether they be the deceptively simple thoughts of the Zen Buddhist masters, the social philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre or the futurist theory’s of Alvin Toffler these words and thoughts provide us with the mirror to look inward.

It is Toffler though who comes the closest to being a modern day philosopher who understands the incredible changes our society is going through. His book Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century which he wrote with his wife in 1990 is probably the closest we come to what technology will bring to our world, our society.

However I don’t think that Toffler even understood the massive changes that the Internet was going to bring to our society. Even in the books of his I have read he only had an inkling of what was to come but he did understand the amount of power that information held and knew that whoever could control that information would be the unspoken ruler of society.

Besides being an observer the job of a philosopher is to be an early warning alarm of when something is going wrong with our society. It is because of their ability to stand outside and look in that they are able to see the larger ripples as they merge together to create a social tsunami.

Unfortunately I don’t see anyone today that is able to fulfill that role. Everyone involved with technology and the Internet is playing to their own fiddler unconcerned with the larger impacts of the smaller events they initiate.

If there was ever a time when we needed the wisdom of Descartes, Shaw, Therou or Fuller it is now and our near future. The Internet in all its mindless beauty and misused evil is becoming the bedrock on which our children’s future is being built. We need to see beyond the do no evil sloganization, beyond the corporate manipulations and the banal socialization of one’s and zero’s.

We desperately need our philosophers of the Internet Age to step forward with their mirrors and make us see where we are leading our children’s world and what we are giving up in the process.

There’s a job opening just waiting to be filled - I wonder who can fill it?

Conversation Tags: Internet, philosophy, philosophers, Descartes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alvin Toffler, Bernard Shaw, Henery Therou, Buckminster Fuller