Soft power

I recently came across this speech on TED regarding the possibility of soft power. It is known historically that interaction between people usually helped in the informational and cultural exchange which contributed to the human civilization (collective). Ideas spread through merchants, soldiers and their interaction. Human beings often evaluated each other and did have time in order to contemplate and to decide what qualities they wanted to inherit from the newly found culture. In this age it seems that our technical advances and the media are the major players in the information dissemination and hence they seem to be the major carriers of soft power. Very clearly we can see that media is just about sensationalism, advertisement and their own agendas. Superficially common sense demands that the people who possesses control over the media decides the balance of this power. Yet, the very interesting thing, I felt is that the power that human beings and their interaction wields cannot be underrated. You can be completely hypnotized by the media to believe certain facts, yet all that veil can be broken by just few minutes of human interaction. One recent example was an altercation we had with someone on a tennis court for his refusal to leave the court even after his time was over. Our mind very clearly inclined to generalize his behavior to his country of origin and his race. Eventhough Our 'enlightened' minds disagree with our generalization, we cannot refute that our first thought was not very positive.

Malcolm X, in his auto biography mentions how the visit to Mecca and the interaction with human beings from all over the world caused a complete shift in his world view. I believe that this power of human interaction is the only hope left in this world in order to achieve its much needed peace because we can without any reluctance say that our technology and media has failed us.