What is One World Family?
It’s a new social network, introduced by Art of Living, but open to all. Our aim is to provide an online space for everyone who would like to do good and feel good – our motto. As Gurudev put it, “A community for those who want to enrich and expand, to Connect and Contribute, for a broader vision. We say, “I am there for those who are looking for me, Available to learn from those who are ready to share, Available for friendship, Available to share my skills and talents.” Want to know more about social networking and how it can be a force for change in the world? Read on…
A brief history of social networking…
Are we more basically individuals or more basically members of groups?
If you take a look at studies on ape behavior, it seems that monkeys’ behavior is more or less defined by their role in the society or group – whether a male is alpha or beta sets the rules for that monkey’s behavior. They don’t seem to be as individual as we are. Even though experts even claim monkeys exhibit basic ethical behavior – these right and wrong things mainly depend on his or her ‘station’. They exhibit some elementary form of embarrassment when they do something that’s naughty (hiding behind trees for example when they’re doing some, as we say, ‘monkey business’.)
Why do people love social networking?
Fast forward now a few billion years to facebook and the social media revolution. Networking on the internet. What makes for a great social media site like Wikipedia, facebook or youtube? Each of these sites has found a simple social interaction that is important for people and which net technology makes easier, bigger, better. What are these social needs or social interactions? The wish to update many friends at once – facebook.com. The desire to catch up with old friends – www.friendsreunited.com. You just have to show your friends and family this crazy funny clip you saw on tv last night – so we have youtube.com. You want to help someone do their homework? – Wikipedia.org is for you ;)
Next generation – specialization.
As often happens in the business world too, our first generation of social media sites were very general. The second generation of social media narrowed the fields of interest. Youtube becomes for a.tv – sharing of videos, but videos from conferences, public speaking, academia. Friends reunited becomes geni.com – for those who want to know who their great, great, great grandpa was. Yammer develops social networking within companies or connecting companies and specific groups and so facebook (and earlier business related networks like linked in) become enterprise ‘freemium’ services, meaning they’re free at the start (as social media usually are) but charged for premium services (as business usually do.)
We built this city on – human values…
Look at how much human values are involved in social media. The desire to share, to share your enthusiasm – youtube. The vision of Wikipedia.org’s founder, “Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.” Knowledge and generosity. That’s before we even reach the explicitly humanitarian social media sites like caringbridge.com. The social need it caters for is like facebook – the wish to share and update with your family and friends. But for people suffering from serious illness. They have a unique experience – they’ve had enough telling people who ask ‘How are you?’ ‘Still got cancer…’ So they can update nearest and dearest through the site. And get the chance to meet others with similar challenges, share medical tips, connections to good doctors.
www.causes.com facilitates the need to – get out there and help, set up an NGO, solve the world’s problems. Justgiving.co.uk helps you with the human need to… just give. It’s a fundraising site.
The www.one-world-family.org team believes this is the direction the online world is going – more and more human values are becoming the strongest force for social interaction in the web. If enough individual people from countries in conflict can just connect online, how long can their countries remain at war? Peace from the ground up.
