6 billion others – just another type of social network?

Do social networks necessarily require interaction between its individual members? I came to the conclusion that this is not the case when getting lost on

http://www.6billionothers.org

This site was recommended to me by a friend. The aim of the project / the site is to bring the people of this world together and yet to show how different our concerns and ideas are with our different cultural backgrounds and living situations.
Yann Arthus-Bertrand while making “The earth seen from the sky” broke down with its helicopter somewhere in Mali. This way he got to talk to one of the villagers where he got stranded and learnt one simple thing: the man’s only aim is to feed his children. For Yann Arthus-Bertrand this meant to get confronted with one of the most elemental concerns. He was touched by this encounter and started wondering how he could learn form the men and women he saw from above. That way he came up with the project 6billionothers that started in 2003. On the site one can see 5,000 testimonials of people from 75 countries. As stated on the site “from a Brazilian fisherman to a Chinese shopkeeper, from a German performer to an Afghan farmer, all answered the same questions about their fears, dreams, ordeals, hopes such as What have you learnt from your parents? What do you want to pass on to your children? What difficult circumstances have you been through? What does love mean to you?” Around fourty of such questions are asked to find out what separates and what unites the population of our planet. When either watching the testimonials or the making of videos one can gain the feeling that the people one listens to and looks at sometimes feel more familiar than one’s own friends. These strangers you watch in the testimonials manage to offer the stactator an intimate view on their most important experiences in life, on their relationship to family and God, on their greates fears and hopes. I strongly believe that some of these issues we have never even talked about with our closed friends or family members. Therefore I would like to come back to my opening statement that a virtual social network does not need interaction between its members in order to be considered a social network. I offer you to visit the project’s website and watch some testimonials and see for yourself how close it makes you feel to the people you watch but have never seen before in your life and will most likely never meet in your life. Maybe you even feel like contributing your own testimonial and thereby even feel closer to the members of this social network – the network between all individuals on our planet. To me this is one of the most impressive insides of lifes in different countries I have never visited but yet get to know so well just by listening to a person talking about his or her concerns, fears, hopes, dreams, believes and others. A social network definitly worth while visiting!