Disclaimer: I work in Google's Policy Team, developing multistakeholder cooperations for internet governance & policy themes, hence I want to point out that all the opinions and ruminations on this blog are mine, not Google's.
In the second part of the book, Postman proposes 5 narratives as possible alternatives to the current ones:
"Spaceship Earth" (the notion of humans as stewards of the planet)
"The Fallen Angel" (a view of history and the advancement of knowledge as a series of errors and corrections)
"The American Experiment" (the story of America as a great experiment and as a center of continuous argument)
"The Laws of Diversity" (the view that difference contributes to increased vitality and excellence, and, ultimately, to a sense of unity)
"The Word Weavers/The World Makers" (the understanding that the world is created through language — through definitions, questions, and metaphors)
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basically i would suggest to frame our "human rights online" story as a complementary (sub)narrative of this kind. something like "one free and fair global (online) community" what do you think?
This is probably the most entertaining, enlightening and pragmatically useful analysis/explanation for how/why there are such fundamentally different moral mindsets.
I am off to read his 2007 Science article http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/
when you understand experience as the basis for learning, and when you realized that new social multimedia networks are replacing old text-book / frontal teaching knowledge container transfer methods; then Scott McCloud's TED talk about how human storytelling evolved to the high art of comic books, should be inspiring regarding how we can/should/must design knowledge ecologies that take advantage of the this amazing n-dimensional interactive canvas that is cyberspace.
I usually argue for qualitative analysis, because i believe that statistical data might be good in describing trends, but it does not determine the individual case (which is what is IMHO most relevant most of the time).
In this TED video Hans Rosling presents some amazing data very nicely animated and passionately commented:
Yochai Benkler is possibly the man with the most convincing argument for a knowledge work revolution based on the radical change regarding the control of the means of production.
If you have not heard of his thesis developed in wealth of networks you have to watch this TED video. If you know about his work watch this video to re-engage, he is really convincing:
