Mass Collaboration Will Change the World

One of the benefits to being a member of the YouTube community, is that you’re able to subscribe to other users. If there is a particular user that publishes videos that you’ve liked in the past, say maybe The RSA (you may have seen one of their videos — they’re the ones who write on a whiteboard depicting the ideas from the presenter’s presentation), then when you login to YouTube, if this user has published any new videos, you’ll see it right on your homepage. Additionally, you can also get notifications of new videos via email, but who likes a cluttered inbox, right?

I recently logged into YouTube to find that one of users I’ve subscribed to, TEDtalksDirector [the same user that has uploaded such popular videos as: Sir Ken Robinson – Do Schools Kill Creativity?] had uploaded a new video called: Eric Whitacre: A virtual choir of 2,000 voices strong. I like music, but I like collaboration even more, and most importantly, I was intrigued by the idea of a ‘virtual choir.’ I clicked on the video and watched the presentation by Eric Whitacre. Wow! Wow! Wow! I’ve embedded the video into this post to the right of this paragraph and strongly suggest spending the 15 minutes to watch it [Be sure to watch it in full screen mode, too!].

What struck me most about watching Eric’s presentation is the element of collaboration. In the first video [embedded in the next paragraph], Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir – ‘Lux Aurumque’, there were 185 voices in over 12 countries. In the second video [embedded at the end of this post], (which debuted quite recently, April 6th of this year to be exact), Eric Whitacre – Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir 2.0, ‘Sleep’, there were 2052 voices in over 58 countries. Can you imagine singing with over 2000 people in person much less, virtually and across the world? This project reminds me a bit of Starbucks’ Love Project, where they had people in over 156 countries join together and sing at the exact same time. Projects like these get me really excited!

Projects like these give me hope for the future of the world. It is absolutely moving that there are causes that motivate people to gather together across obscure places. The first (Lux Aurumque) of Eric’s videos was moving, but the second, was even more moving! More than two-thousand people decided that this was something that they wanted to be part of. This project was something that they wanted to contribute a piece of their creativity and flare to. This project was something that they thought was inspiring. And can you really disagree with that?

This bit of collaboration demonstrated by the people who spent hours perfecting a video to send to Eric Whitacre makes me think of the possibilities… What if we could get 10,000 people singing together? What if we could get 100,000 people singing together? What if we could get a whole country to sing together? I wonder what kind of positive emotion and inspiration we could invoke from the people of a nation, if they were all singing a song (like the ones in these videos) at the same time. I wonder what that could do for “world peace.”