Gather around all ye LOLcat lovers, YouTube watchers, rabid facebookers and diligent tweeters, for there is good news for you. Our beloved Internet is in the running for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
The Nobel committee’s decision last year to award the Peace Prize to the freshly elected President Obama was considered by many to be an unusual choice, but the committee could top itself this year. The list of potential winners contains 237 nominees, including human rights activists like Russian Svetlana Gannushkina and Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo, but also our very own Internet.
The effort to get the net nominated was spearheaded by the Italian edition of Wired magazine. The editors propose that apart from being a place for people to nurture their vanity and satisfy their need to look at kittens in costumes, the Internet is also a forum for peaceful dialogue and communication. Thus, they say, it plays a valuable role in building peace.
Read the rest of my post for Discover magazine here.
