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“Peace on Earth; goodwill toward men.”
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Expressed by angels 2000 years ago to working-stiff shepherds who were otherwise minding their own business, that sentiment seems quaint in our age because of its utter elusiveness. (Okay, maybe also for its political incorrectness; substitute “people” for the last word in the quote if that works better for you.)
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The desire for peace, built upon mutual goodwill, is nearly universal. But peace can be shattered when the people of one land fail to understand the people of another land. Or when each group’s self-interest seems more compelling than mutual or collective interests.
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Either way, the culprit is a failure to communicate. We cannot even imagine peace if we don’t talk to each other.
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I remember some dozen or so years ago, at Disney's Epcot Center riding in the giant white golf ball Spaceship Earth with my oldest son when he was about seven years old. The most prominent landmark dominating the view from the entrance of the 
park, Spaceship Earth takes you on a ride from the beginning of human history to a glimpse of a wondrous vision of the future, all told through the evolution of communication. From the dawn of primitive cave writings, the first use of papyrus, the invention of the alphabet. to the printing press and finally computers, we can see that the greatest developments in human history related to improvements in how we communicated with each other. And I remember the sudden, proud realization that I was onto something big with my budding career in public relations. Up until that day, a latent inferiority complex had dogged me, a feeling that engineers and manufacturing types were more important to the world than wordsmiths because they designed and built things. Real things. All I crafted were words. But here in Spaceship Earth I felt a rush of pride: developments in communication could be seen as the most important hallmarks in the evolution of civilization - even more so than history's greatest inventions.
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And this was back before the popularization of the Internet. I suppose the realization of the awesome power of communications isn’t as stunning today as it was back in the early ‘90s.
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But even then we had seen how communication could spread freedom. In this new Information Age, totalitarian states could not keep out all knowledge of free societies, leading to popular uprising. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Iron Curtain was evaporating. Today, citizen journalists help shine the light of freedom even in countries where there is no free press.
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Will communications help bridge the horrific gaps in understanding between Western civilizations and Islamic theocracies that breed a continuous cycle of terrorism and reprisal? Or put better, will communications between people living in the Western world and people living in Muslim countries reduce tensions and strife? Can communication spread understanding, respect, even trust where today there is so much misunderstanding, hatred and fear?
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The Internet and the empowerment of the individual is transforming our world. TIME magazine has anointed “YOU. Yes, you.” the individual communicator, as its Person of the Year: "In 2006, the World Wide Web 
became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter."
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Corporations that best understand this new dynamic and work constructively to engage in the consumer dialog shaping their brands (rather than shouting at the market in a suddenly futile monologue) will be richly rewarded by the market.
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One can only hope that nations, or perhaps more likely, the people of those nations, will likewise embrace the transforming power of engagement in a dialog that can bring us all closer together, even when their leaders do not, so that communications can fulfill its greatest promise: to deliver not just prosperity but peace.
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- Jon Harmon
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