How Giving the Third World Internet Access Could End Hunger Worldwide

I have a theory about human behavior. Don’t ask me to cite psychological studies (although I have no doubt they exist) because this comes purely from my own observations of people:

People are more likely to help others when they see them as real people.

Photo by mishimoto on flickr.com

Simple, right? For example, do you remember those commercials that showed starving African children and asked you to donate to sponsor a child? These images are intended to invoke empathy. It’s much harder for you to ignore millions of starving children when you see even one example on TV.

If you listen to the news, you will hear about millions of people dying of hunger, AIDS, war, etc., but it’s easy for most of us to ignore them. Why is this? How sick are we? Human beings are dying!

This isn’t unusual human behavior. For thousands of years (possibly longer), we as humans have been perfectly comfortable fighting wars against each other and directly killing one another because we were told these “people” weren’t really “like” us in some way or another. We didn’t see them as human because we never had real human interaction with them.

This is true in a less active way today. While we may not directly go to war and kill people as often (that’s up for debate I suppose), we can turn a blind eye to human tragedy because, after all, we have our own problems here at home. We need to pay attention to the people we actually meet before we fix the world, right?

Where is This Going Exactly?

Okay, back to my point about hunger and the internet. The internet makes direct, one-to-one contact with people more possible than ever before. The more that communication technologies advance, the higher the chances are that we in the first world will interact face-to-face or computer-to-computer with people in the third or developing world.

Today, +Brian Kwong posted about meeting a gentleman who lived in Iraq through a Google hangout, +Dr.Bassam Mohamad Hameed. Bassam told Brian that he had read his posts and found them inspiring. Brian was understandably moved. He had inadvertently helped make life ever so slightly better for a man thousands of miles away whom he never would have met without the internet.

But how does this empathy translate into food?

The reasons that people go hungry across the world (and even here in the United States) vary widely, but overall, it’s a logistical problem. We actually produce plenty of food for the Earth’s current population, but we in the first world have never gotten passionate about the third world because we don’t know those people yet.

Psychologically, we can’t see them as our friends or family. We can push them to the back of our mind and tell ourselves that there’s nothing to be done. Our brains have categorized them as unknowable people with unsolvable problems.

Imagine a Face-to-Face Meeting Though.

What if you were able to establish a relationship with these people though? What if instead of distant, unknowns, we could meet them ourselves? What if we got to know one or two or twenty of them? What if we attended a Google+ hangout with people living in the third world every week?

I realize that this isn’t possible yet (and there are translation issues to work out), but the potential is there. If you are a person who is passionate about helping solve world hunger or end civil war in Africa, think about technology, and ask yourself…

What Could Face-to-Face Interactions do for Your Cause?

Originally shared by +Karl L. Hughes on Google+