COMMUNICATION

1. CONTACT

To contact any Government or Political Leader, this site plus it's excellent links is likely to lead you to them.

http://www.gksoft.com/govt/en/sources.html

2. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

The English Language is the largest. It contains more than three quarters of a million words and is constantly growing.

By the age of 4 a child knows some 4000 words which are more than enough to communicate.

An average person knows 10 -15000 words.

A highly educated person knows 30 - 40,000 words.

Only about .3% or 2000 words are needed for daily use. These are the basis of most of our communication.

The most common 500 words have 14,000 different meanings!

No wonder we are confused!!

3. COMMUNICATIONS AND COMMUNITY

The world gets smaller. I speak to fellow astrologers all over the world daily on the internet. It provides immediacy - I often get world news from a friend on the net before I see it on TV - and intimacy - people seem to be able to reveal their personal worlds more easily in this apparently distanced medium. We are a 'community', albeit one connected by phone lines and computer terminals - but this in turn can lead to personal contact in more direct form. The UK members of this list met for lunch recently, turning screen personas into reality. The internet breaks down barriers and much is quickly learnt. There is constant surprise from the wisdom of youth - extraordinary insight and information appears - and I have been on more than one occasion amazed to learn I was 'talking' with someone who was yet to reach 20. You cannot tell race, or colour, and often not even gender. My name is taken most often as feminine. Thus things are not always as they appear, and humour and culture differ around the world, but a little experience usually teaches us how to deal with these hazards. It also allows rapid response to laws and regulations that bother the 'community'. Last year a huge and rapid response was made to one of the credit card companies who were introducing regulations that were considered 'not in the public interest'. The public - that is you and I - have much more say and if there is a 'hot' issue, it reaches us rapidly and we in our turn can respond equally quickly. It is possible to be heard on a wider scale than ever before. It is harder to hate and make war, when you communicate with people daily on a friendly basis, when you are part of a world wide community. This is the good side, world community, world connections, world friends.

The negative side is simply being overwhelmed by quantity of information. A recent survey found that every middle manager has to deal with 178 messages every day. I download over 100 messages daily from my one internet list and I know of people who get literally thousands. Thus with our increasing ability to communicate through technology, we need to improve our personal ability to communicate concisely and clearly. To put quality into our communications not quantity. With this of course comes self-awareness. Being aware of our own limits and prejudices, facing up to our responsibilities in communicating with others. Taking responsibility for misunderstanding, not blaming others. If you communicate something and people don't understand you, then it is down to you, not them. I see the future as one of communication and community. World communications leads to a world of people genuinely in touch with each other. True community.

4. SEARCHING FOR OUR SOULS

One vision of the future is that of a widening gap. The rich get richer. Not just in monetary terms. Today there are around 60 million on the internet - the forecast is 500 million in 3 years. That will still leave 90% of the world behind. Half the world have yet to make their first phone call!! Technology's prodigious race to produce ever more extraordinary and exciting advances and products makes a small proportion of the world apparently richer. The poor remain poor, the uneducated remain ignorant. The internet is wonderful but you can't eat it!

But is technology actually enriching our lives or is it bringing with it poverty of belief, of humanity, of soul?? We are beginning to awake to the vast negatives we are creating. The have's want more, but when you have most things, what is there to do? They turn increasingly to counselling and therapy, to old and new world religions trying to find that missing something. Having finally satiated their outer world needs, or realising that the trappings they can buy give them no lasting satisfaction or peace, they finally face the inevitable struggle with their inner world and the needs of the soul. Maybe whilst the have's are struggling to find what they should have sought in the first place, the have not's will catch up a little with their material needs.

5. WHO ARE YOU?

If you think of the earth's population as a village of 100 people, it would look like this...

There would be:

57 Asians

21 Europeans

14 from the Western Hemisphere (Nth and Sth)

8 Africans

52 would be female

48 would be male

70 would be non-white

30 white

70 would be non-Christian

30 Christian.

89 would be heterosexual

11 homosexual.

59% of the entire earth's wealth would be in the hands of only 6 people and all 6 would be Americans

80 would live in substandard housing,

70 would be unable to read

50 would suffer from malnutrition

One would be near death and one would be near birth.

Only one would have a tertiary education

…… and only one would have a computer

Makes you think?!

United Nations Association of Australia statistical information. 11.11.2000

6. A Brief History of Communication and Travel in the 20th and 21st Centuries

1920 First radio broadcast

1930 Talking pictures

1937 First television broadcast

1942 First electronic computers

1950 First commerical computers

1951 First cross channel TV broadcast

1952 First commercial jet plane service

1958 Lasers Videotape

1961 First man in space

1962 First translantic TV broadcast

1964 First world wide TV broadcast

1969 Man on Moon, First flight of Concorde

1970 First hand held calculators

1977 Mars landing and Concorde translantic

1989 TV pictures from Jupiter

First commercial mobile phones in UK

1992 Laptop computers

1993 Internet launched text messaging

1995 First commercial digital cameras

1997 Hubble telescope pictures from space

show a 3D chessboard pattern!

Round world balloon flight fails again!

2001 Apply launches i-Pod

2002 Mars Odyssey in orbit round Mars

2004 Cassini-Huygens probe to Saturn - Facebook founded

2005 Flat screen TV's available in UK - You Tube starts

2006 New Horizon launched for 9 year travel to Pluto

First e-books appear - HDTV starts trials in UK

2008 i-Phone launched

2009 Mobile phone use passes 4 billion

2010 3D TV launched

Compare the launch of the first commercial mobile phone in 1989 in the UK with the comment in Section 4 above from 1997 'that half the world still have to make their first phone call' with the fact that by 2009 4 billion mobile phones were in use. In 20 years from nothing to 4 billion shows the speed of change!