The little green laptop that could

What would I do without my laptop? It's even on the kitchen table with me at lunch. I use it dozens and dozens of times a day: Google, Wikipedia, my four e-mail accounts, my calendar, my various networks of friends and work contacts ...

Being connected is like having running water and working lights. Living without it now wouldn't just be an inconvenience, I'd be seriously disadvantaged. I would get much less freelance work, I'd be in touch with far fewer people, and I sure as heck wouldn't feel like I could connect with anyone, anywhere, on any topic.

So when I read about One Laptop Per Child and its Give One, Get One program -- through Dec. 31, if you donate one of their highly simplified, wirelessly connected XO laptops to a child in a developing country, you receive one for a child in your life -- I wanted to stand up and cheer. (A lot of HumanKind makes me feel like that.)

That's the kind of idea that gets to the heart of peace and connection. It's intending to do no less than give the least connected people in the world -- impoverished children -- the ability to directly access the global connections we've all been making, to participate in this newly wired world. Think of all the possibilities here, not just for education and prosperity (though we're all for that at HumanKind), but also for the exchange of ideas, the creation of relationships, and the deepening and strengthening of connections.

I'm part of the generation that's the first to take the Internet for granted. I assume I can shop, conduct business, and socialize online any time I want, and that international borders barely exist in a connected world. But that's only true to a very limited extent; poverty and extreme politics silence global connectedness in much of the world. MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte has said he'll devote the rest of his life to putting an Internet-enabled laptop in the hands of every child, bringing about a world that's truly connected.

Negroponte is the guy in the funny sweater combo in this video, which at 18 minutes is lengthy, but so worth it.

Since this is the holiday season, I'll just add that at $200, the XO is a great contender for a white envelope family gift. In fact, if you're buying gifts this season, we've come across tons of wonderful ways to give this season while actually contributing something good to the world. And even though we know we can all appreciate each other without buying each other anything at all, we can't resist adding one more gift idea, especially when it's in a video narrated by the lovely Maggie Gyllenhaal:

Comments

[Mackenzie]

Yay.