Keynote Speech by Professor Victor Lawrence on the 150th Birthday celebration of Mohandas Gandhi in New York City on October 1st 2019 during the 74th Session of the United Nations.
“ICT is having a profound impact on the way we live, work, learn and entertain our selves. It is helping all parts of our communities and improving all sectors of the world economy. It is changing the world.”
– Professor Victor Lawrence
INFORMATION & COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES CAN CONTRIBUTE TO
NON-VIOLENCE AND PEACE
Power Point Presentation > PDF
Thank you Madame Bircan Unver
Your Excellencies
Ambassadors
Distinguished delegates and guests
It is an honor to be here today to speak on the eve of the 150th Birthday of Mahatma Gandhi during this 74th Session of the United Nations General Assembly meetings in New York.
Gandhi’s philosophy and vision has had and continues to have a major impact on our lives.
My talk today is about how Information and Communications Technology (ICT) can contribute to realize Gandhi’s philosophy of using Non-violence and peaceful demonstration to solve social injustice and attain a more peaceful world.
ICT is having a profound impact on the way we live, work, learn and entertain our selves. It is helping all parts of our communities and improving all sectors of the world economy. It is changing the world.
For almost 1600 years from the year 230 AD to 1880 AD, the only communication breakthrough was the inventions of paper, graphite pencil and erasers. The 160 years leading to 1990 were very different. Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876 created a means of real-time communication; Guglielmo Marconi, proved the feasibility of radio communication in 1895 and transatlantic radio and cables made communications global. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, telephone calls were infrequent, and the long distance call was an extraordinary event in which families gathered about to speak to relatives.
Then came the 50’s and 60’s with the advent of global voice communication and television replaced radio as a means of entertainment and information medium and computers made appearance in the business world as a means of accessing and manipulating information.
In the 70’s we started to see breakthroughs in VLSI which made telephony more affordable and more easily manageable by network operators. In the 80’s Unix software and the PC made computing much more affordable and more common in businesses.
The 90’s which brought us distributed computing and the World Wide Web (WWW) is referred to as the Information Age Some refer to the first half of this century as the knowledge age expecting that we will find ways to make the best use of information. Some look further into the future, the second half of this century and see an age of wisdom which suggests accumulated knowledge perhaps (Artificial Intelligence).
Information and Communications Technology is making our world smaller, more open and more visible. It is making our future different from our past and giving us opportunities, we have never had before. It has given rise to social media networks which, if used well, can be very helpful. Examples are;
In this age of accelerating technology, the Internet, social media networks and 24-hour news, we have the opportunity to make our future different from our past.
Additional back-up slides
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From left to right: Professor Victor Lawrence, NaYOUNG Yang, Justin Trugman
and Bircan Unver follow by Prof. Lawrence’s keynote presentation at the “In a Gentle Way, You Can Shake the World” titled event at the Salvation Army Intl. Commission on Social Justice in NYC on October 1, 2019.
Event Photo Album – I:
GANDHI-150 “IN A GENTLE WAY, YOU CAN SHAKE THE WORLD“
Event Photo Album – II: MAHATMA GANDHI ~ THE MAN OF MILLENNIUM
– Photos by Demet DEMIRKAYA, Representative of The Light Millennium to the United Nations Department of Global Communications
• Run-Down
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