I spent some time this morning talking with my three year-old daughter about Martin Luther King Jr.  I did my best to put into simple terms why he was great man, and his contributions to making the world a better place.  I wanted her to experience his speeches directly, so we watched a couple of shows on the History Channel and some videos on YouTube.

Being able to see the footage of his inspiring speeches and the protests that took place during the civil rights movement reminded me of one of my engineering courses at Virginia.  In it, we discussed how the television coverage of these protests — which often showed police officers attacking defenseless, peaceful people with water cannons, batons, and dogs – influenced Americans across the country in much more profound ways than photographs and news reports had previously.  In many respects, television was the technical catalyst that propelled the horrible realities of racism into American living rooms everywhere, to the point where the issue could no longer be ignored.

Television had a similar impact on influencing popular opinion for other major issues of the day, including the Vietnam War.   This morning I wondered: what technology is having a similar impact on the world today?

Two major advances may have begun to influence social progress even more than television: mobile communications and the Internet.  The potential of these two technologies to drive public opinion was highlighted recently when the Burmese government, fighting to quell anti-government protests, cut public Internet access to prevent videos, photographs and information about their violent crackdown from getting out.  Perhaps they studied American history, and realized that preventing sweeping social change was almost impossible when faced with an informed public.  Mobile camera phones and blogs turn anyone into an amateur journalist, providing hard doses of reality that are impossible to dispute.

While most societal issues we face are complex and often unclear, the fact is that there is still a such thing as right and wrong.  When people capture the world around them on camera and share it publicly, whether it’s with their small group of friends or every Internet user, it impacts their opinion and motivates them to react.  Because opinion sharing online can now spread to hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of days without any input from mainstream media, change that once took months or years can now happen in days or weeks.

In 2000/2001, I talked with my friend Philippe Cousteau about his dream of using the Internet to reach a whole new generation of young people with his environmental message in ways that might rival the reach his grandfather had in film.  At that time, we talked about doing things film couldn’t, like asking people to not just watch but participate by telling their stories.  Now, sites like change.org and Razoo (a Viget client) are building entire communities around people working to make change in society.  And, since many online users communicate primarily in semi-public social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, ideas are even more likely to spread. 

Television made it easy to consume information that made you stand up and say “something should be done to change that.”  Current technologies make it easy to find a broad range of information and then share it widely with those you can directly influence.  When the next round of advances help us actually do something about it (sites like Kiva are on the right track) — that will be when technology really drives social progress.