Internet Nominated For 2010 Nobel Peace Prize

An anonymous reader writes "It's official. The Internet, which has virtually revolutionized world communication, has been nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. 'Organizers said signatories to its petition backing the nomination include 2003 peace laureate and exiled Iranian activist Shirin Ebadi — which would make it a legitimate entry.' The nomination was proposed by the Italian edition of Wired magazine for promoting 'dialogue, debate and consensus through communication' as well as democracy."

Comments

Obligatory

[NYMeatball]

"At least the Internet's been in office longer than Obama"

Decline of the Prize

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, or is the Peace Price rapidly declining into nothing more than an alternate venue for Time magazine's "man/woman/person/object of the year"?

Re:Decline of the Prize

[retchdog]

If Kissinger (1973) didn't kill its credibility, then Arafat; Peres; Rabin (1994) did.

Re:Decline of the Prize

[Kral_Blbec]

And if that didn't so it, then last year sure did.

Re:Decline of the Prize

[jfengel]

The Peace Prize has done some excellent service, bringing to the world stage people who were going unnoticed. Nobody had ever heard of Aung San Suu Kyi or Carlos Belo, and the attention really does do some good there. They gain international support for ongoing work. Sometimes it has gone to people who have genuinely done good work and deserve to be rewarded in retrospect, as it is in the science prizes.

On the other hand, some years have been completely out of line, such as Kissinger or Obama. (I'm a big fan of Obama, but the peace prize was completely unnecessary: he needed neither encouragement nor money to do his work. There were other people who could use the attention and money to better effect, and he had no accomplishments of note.)

In other words: a mixed bag. I suppose that the worst failures do little harm, and the successes do some good, so it's worth it. Even if it means putting up with the occasional simultaneous international facepalm.

Fail

[girlintraining]

The Internet, which has virtually revolutionized world communication, has been nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.

Yeah, okay... How come the telegraph isn't being nominated? It was the first time people on different continents started talking to each other in real-time. Or radio for that matter. The internet is not the greatest thing in the past hundred years of mass communications; The gutenburg press did more to free the masses from tyranny. If anything, the internet may make the problem worse: one of the side-effects of digitalization is that everything can be tracked, monitored, and recorded in perpetuity. The government doesn't concern itself with how to spy on its citizens... it's busy trying to figure out what to do with all this data. And we want to nominate this for a Nobel Prize?

Forget that... I want "None of the Above" to win the award.

Re:Fail

[gmuslera]

Telegraph, mail, phone, are basically 1vs1 communications, usually between people that know each other. Newspaper, Television, movies, are 1 or few to many, and sometimes the source of that communication is controlled by very few or follow the policy of government or some groups. But internet is communication everyone with everyone, usually unfiltered.

Pre-internet you could anonimize all the people of a region, country or culture, put them under an unified view, and see them as the enemy, rival, or whatever your government say. Now you deal directly against with individuals, against people with what you could communicate. Maybe won't stop future wars (i.e. didnt stopped US intervention in iraq) but could make that kind of things harder. If you take governments out of the equation, could be seen as a positive push to world peace.

Ok, until the trigger for WWIII is the discussion on who should get that cash.

Tim Berners-Lee

[wigaloo]

I have always thought that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World-Wide-Web, is deserving of a Peace Prize. Communication is the foundation of peace, and it is hard do identify another individual who has done so much for world-wide communications in recent history.

Awarding the Peace Prize to a thing? Ugh. Don't get me started. Awarding the Prize to organizations is silly enough already.

Re:Soo....

[penguinoid]

My guess, if the internet wins the Nobel Peace Prize, the money will go toward internet infrastructure in poor countries with a violence problem.

If we can nominate the Internet ...

[Anarchduke]

Then I want to nominate the Pacific Ocean for a Peace Prize. Without the Pacific Ocean separating The Americas from Asia and Australia, I am certain we would have had more wars.