Everyone has seen the photo of the little Vietnamese girl running away from the napalm, the man in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square and the death of Neda during the Iranian protests.  UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave an inspiring talk at TED and explained why these images came to symbolize and publicize a movement for the rest of the world to see.  These moving photos evoke a strong emotional response and are testaments to the power of the image to inspire action and civic participation.

As I discussed in an earlier post, technology and social media are helping to give a voice to people whose stories might otherwise not be heard.  In his talk, Brown says:

But I think what’s new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world.  We now have the capacity to find common ground with people we will never meet but who we will meet through the internet and through all the modern means of communication, that we now have the capacity to organize and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an injustice that we want to deal with, and I believe that this makes this a unique age in human history, and it is the start of what I would call the creation of a truly global society.