Click Home

 

The Promise of Broadband: What’s in it for me?

By Frank Odasz, frank@lone-eagles.com

 

Online at http://lone-eagles.com/promise1.htm

 

Do you believe that most people are basically good and can be trusted? Y/N

 

This last question was asked of tens of thousands of people in 80 countries and an interesting finding was those countries where the majority answered “Yes” were doing far better economically than those countries that answered “No.”  This makes sense, if you can’t trust those around you due to corruption and dishonesty it certainly limits your ability to grow a successful business. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/

Given this reality, just what IS the promise of broadband. We’re hearing lots of promises about broadband these days and it is hard to know who you can believe. We hear broadband will automatically create new jobs and save existing jobs, but do you believe that without any training or personal support that this applies to you? We hear that broadband can allow you to live and work anywhere, and you likely get emails daily promising you easy riches, but the ratio of scams to real deals is 54:1.
How I got taken by a work at home scam http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/worklife/01/07/home.scams/index.html

Your Internet service provider advertises speeds “Up To” a certain number but the fine print says they don’t guarantee any minimum speed. The very term “broadband” can apply to slow inconsistent service, or to blazingly fast speeds, that likely you have never experienced.

 

What do you really know about the promise of broadband?

 

Here are a few “truths” that you can check out for yourself;

 

1. A lot of folks have figured out how to make the living they want living wherever they want on the Internet, from the Internet. Whether they use ebay, have a website or blog with adwords, or are leveraging social media to promote their products or services, it is a fact; the Internet has provided free tools and resources to allow anyone the opportunity to teach themselves how to create value and a sustainable business.
   
   So, who is already gathering and sharing these success stories and helping the rest of us learn to be successful?  Have you been trusting the news media and the government to keep you informed? 
   
    
2. The Internet has created a Boom in grassroots innovation. Now that anyone can learn anything, anytime, from anywhere, millions of people are teaching themselves by watching what others have done online - that works. Myspace, Skype, and Facebook are multibillion dollar success stories started by a couple creative individuals and were successful because they brought new online expression capabilities to tens of millions.

 

3. Good people are demonstrating how to make a big difference in the lives of others.
   Microloans via www.Kiva.org , and dozens of similar sites including citizen banking, philanthropy, and demonstrate how good people can make a big difference in the lives of others worldwide from the social safety of their home. Now that each of us CAN make a big difference in the lives of others, would you agree that because now we can, we must? Y/N?

 

4. The Changing Nature of Good Business Practices
   Business as usual has changed. The new transparency has made typical “business is business” competitive tactics a negative dynamic. Consumer trust and loyalty now need to be earned, and reputation can’t be bought via advertising as it was in the past. With the click of a button consumers can switch where they buy products and are demanding more from companies regarding support services, and corporate social responsibility.

 

5. The Internet as The People’s University; People helping People.
   Educators and individuals posting their original curriculum and collections of resource links, have made the Internet a powerful learning tool. Wikipedia is bigger than the Encyclopedia Britannica due to the volunteered knowledge of tens of thousands. People helping each other learn is a big part of why social media has become so essential for keeping current in our age of accelerating change.

 

6. Doing for Ourselves Together.
   Trust building “social enterprises” have become a sudden and powerful new dynamic for building global businesses based on loyalty and allowing people the tools to come together for meaningful mutual support. Sharing a vision with a method of encouraging everyone’s contributions has become a powerful new dynamic; for social change and for building a global business. With peer evaluations, the best of the best ideas and resources are bubbling to the top, for daily distribution on “what you didn’t know you needed to know.”

 

The Power of One – One person’s online resources, innovations, and teachings, now have the potential to reach and benefit literally billions. This is a promise of broadband. Encouraging and mentoring someone to gain new confidence, knowledge and tools to allow them to also make a impact is a positive aspect of broadband, counter to the many scams designed to deceive and cheat others.

 

The Power of Many – Collaborating and sharing can produce an exponential return on everyone’s efforts. New global virtual communities are emerging suggesting future virtual nations of purpose will become viable players on the world stage. Good people taking action.

“Crowd-sourcing” is a new term related to the opportunity to benefit from gathering all the best ideas, from which the best-of-the-best can be evaluated and routinely shared. Based on past successes, corporations and governments are now opening themselves to public input and requesting those with big ideas please speak up.

 

The Changing Nature of Work

In the rapidly growing knowledge economy, also called the relationship economy, physical labor is not as important as knowledge work. For individuals with physical disabilities, this means they may be more employable than laborers who are digitally disabled, and without the knowledge necessary to create value online and to become employable in a knowledge economy.

 

Mining Raw Human Potential as the New Gold Rush
Imagine a world where everyone works to encourage and support the self-actualization of others. Where instead of criticizing others and withholding information that might benefit others, what if we all believed that what we give to others really does come back to us, tenfold?  Imagine online systems that measure the social impacts of individuals and give social recognition to those who are benefiting the most people through innovative sharing, support, and encouragement.

 

Nations are indeed now competing on self-actualizing their greatest economic resource, the goodwill and talents and untapped innovative enthusiasm of their own people. There are core global citizenship values that are being demonstrated, rather identical to traditional indigenous values of stewardship of the Earth, Caring for others instead of only for oneself, and valuing meaningful purpose of one’s actions over crass materialism. 

 

Social Quantum Theory relates to what’s possible if everyone worldwide were educated on how to unlock their full potential and to live a life of meaningful purpose helping others less fortunate than themselves. As the tools become more powerful, and more and more people understand how to leverage them to broaden their potential impact on the lives of many, many others, the world will begin to change for the better. And it is already happening as good people are beginning to take action. “The future has arrived, it just hasn’t been evenly distributed.”