Collaboration & Tower of Babel. Deep thinking.

With the Internet we are now connected to people living in all parts of the world. With language translators available on Google and other places we can now understand each others words.

Will this lead to future joint efforts to solve world problems? Is this possible?

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. I'm not a Biblical scholar, so today I did some searching and came up with a web site that provides a number of articles worth reading.

This is the text from Genesis 11:1-9

"Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, 'Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.' And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.' And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.' So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.' Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth." (Genesis 11:1-9)

I highlighted nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them because this is where I struggle in my thinking.

Everything I've been trying to do through the Tutor/Mentor Connection and Cabrini Connections is get people to learn from a common body of aggregated information and apply that understanding in efforts to make programs and services available that help poor kids grow up better prepared for lives out of poverty.

Yet while the Internet gives us access to each other and an unlimited range of ideas, it also creates a proliferation of places with their own gravitational pull, making it more and more difficult to build the critical mass of people involved in any single place.

Is this just a continuation, or 21st Century version, of The Tower of Babel Story?

I've much more learning and thinking to do on this topic. What are your thoughts? Have you tried to bring people together to solve a problem but you seem to meet with resistance in many different ways?