All You Need is Zoom...

 

Image ©Jim Gray / Hulton Archive, Getty Images

    It seemed to herald a new era of post-war global cooperation, perhaps, even, a future with conflict minimized or eliminated completely. It was the summation of all the optimism and prosperity signalled as the world crawled out of years of austerity and the rebuilding that followed the end of World War Two.
    It represented a hitherto unprecedented level of technological and artistic collaboration, pointing the way to an electronic utopia in the decades to come. The world united by a communications network that would break down state and tribal barriers, rendering difference into diversity and conflict into community.
    Ten months in the making, the live-to-air global broadcast of 'Our World' on June 25th 1967, used four communications satellites to reach an audience of between 400 & 700 million in fourteen countries across the globe. Britains' contribution, of course was The Beatles' first performance of 'All You Need is Love'.
    However, lending the lie to the laudable ambitions of both participants and broadcasters alike was the pulling out of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc over the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War and the Western involvement therein. A sour foretaste of the decades to come.
    Today, the internet and platforms like Zoom allow anyone to perform similar global communication at the drop of a hat. But the freedoms that an open system [the internet] allow have also fostered division and conflict, helping to encourage hate-crime and promulgating false knowledge. It too [the internet] started out with an optimistic flourish barely thirty years ago, but has proved to be more battle-than-play-ground, more Altamont than Woodstock in many respects. It's tragic that we seem unable to use the gifts of communication afforded us to good ends much of the time.
    Where we take things from here very much depends on how the world looks after lockdown, but I suspect, sadly, that opportunistic pragmatism on behalf of the controllers and possessors of wealth will prevail, reinforcing and feeding off the ill-educated prejudices that seem never to go away. It will take a monumental and unprecedented level of global collaboration and cooperation to prevent that from happening. Deja vu, anyone?