BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. Brooke is off this week. I'm Bob Garfield. A few days ago, an email came in from a friend in Slovenia, forwarded from a friend of his in Germany, originating in how many pass-alongs, there's no telling, from a hospital in Indonesia. It was a photograph of a 2 year old boy separated from his parents in the tsunami. A week earlier, a Swedish child had been re-united with his father following another global email search -- one of several ways the internet figured into the tsunami aftermath more than in any previous natural disaster. Online billboards were established to exchange information about missing loved ones, millions of dollars were raised for relief efforts using online payment services, bloggers transmitted up-to-the-second news and video with unprecedented speed. According to Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0 at C-NET Networks and noted internet guru, it all marked the convergence of the digital revolution with a tragic twist of fortune.

ESTHER DYSON: I think the first thing was how lucky they were that there were all these foreign tourists there. You had the poor people living in the flatlands on the beach, and the rich people living in the hotels on the beach, and that created a huge tragedy, but also a uniquely favorable condition for the internet getting involved. It just caught the internet's eye. Unfortunately, there were no foreign tourists in Rwanda. There weren't as many foreign tourists in Bosnia.

BOB GARFIELD: What we saw in, in fundraising, in news reporting, in, in the application of search technology and so forth -- were these refinements over how the internet has been used in the past, or were there some sort of giant leaps forward?

ESTHER DYSON: I would say everything we saw was stuff that was already happening on a small scale. What's great about the internet is how well it scales up. Usually, when things scale up, the individual loses power, but this gives the powers that institutions used to have to broadcast, to find things, to do research, to get heard -- it gives those out to individuals across the entire internet, and when something huge like this happens, that just becomes much more apparent.

BOB GARFIELD: In Wednesday's New York Times, you expressed a lot of enthusiasm about the use of the net for what amounts to, I guess, a digital human lost and found.

ESTHER DYSON: It's actually better than a lost and found, because in a lost and found, you have to go to the right place and point to the item. What's so miraculous about this, is - it's a Google search -- from anywhere in the world, you can go directly to anywhere else in the world that the right information is posted.

BOB GARFIELD: Now let's for a moment talk about the money-raising aspect of all of this. It, it struck me as being similar to Howard Dean's fundraising efforts in his presidential campaign. Was the mechanism approximately the same?

ESTHER DYSON: The mechanism was very much the same in the sense that it was reaching out to people who wanted to get involved. The precise mechanisms were different, but it reached a huge audience -- friends would pass links along to their friends -- and in both cases, people were just astonished at how much money was ready to be sent out, once people's imaginations or hearts were tugged at.

BOB GARFIELD: Is it fair to say that this kind of disaster relief could never have flowed in from ordinary individuals so quickly absent the internet? I mean obviously, there's some logistics attached to collecting coin containers at the checkout lanes at Wal-Mart.

ESTHER DYSON: The real difference is not even in how fast you could collect the money, but how fast you could set up mechanisms to reach people. The day of the disaster, you could decide you wanted to collect money and pass it to your favorite charity. You could post missing people and, using Google and other search tools, people could find you. So, the speed at which things can happen, the responsiveness, is hugely different from what was available before, and people now --they're used to getting on the internet and doing things, instead of waiting passively for an institution to do it for them. So, in some sense, what this really indicates is the decentralization of charity, as well as everything else.

BOB GARFIELD: You were talking about the convergence of circumstances that brought the world's attention and action on this catastrophe while the world has mainly sat on its hands about genocide in, in Africa, and the AIDS epidemic which is destroying the very infrastructure of an entire continent. Do you believe that what we learned as empowered internet users in South Asia could affect the world's apparent indifference to places that are far away and, and not top of mind?

ESTHER DYSON: I think it's an incremental step. Number one, getting people to pay attention, for example, to poor people in Thailand. But second, getting them to realize that yes, they can be involved. It's not that remote. They can go on line and find out not just the best book on Amazon, but the -- they can find out about some village in Thailand -- that all it needs is 3 cell phones and an electrical generator, and it could change 200 villagers' lives.

BOB GARFIELD: Before I let you go, I just want to ask you what the internet could have done that it actually failed to do. In USA Today on Wednesday, Kevin Maney's column pointed out the failure of the net, or at least the lack of certain infrastructures that could have actually alerted the affected coastlines hours before the tsunami even hit.

ESTHER DYSON: Well, that's the real tragedy -- that there was no warning. And you didn't need the internet -- just radio would have done it fine. There were some seismologists who were beginning to get a sense of what was going on, but they couldn't reach anybody. And that wasn't a failure of the internet. That was a failure of governments, a failure of officials, and I think a lot of the problems you're seeing now are, again, failures of the local political and administrative infrastructure to get help where it's needed, to organize relief efforts. And my hope is that a lot of the relief efforts that come in are going to leave things behind -- not just physical things, but attitudes and just understandings of what communication can do and sort of an assumption that gee, we should be on line with the rest of the world.

BOB GARFIELD: Esther, thanks so very much.

ESTHER DYSON: Thank you very much.

BOB GARFIELD: Esther Dyson is editor of Release 1.0 at C-NET Networks.