Village of 100 Video

Rating ***** (1 out of 5)

Initial Thoughts
Didn't I see this video as an e-mail forward at some point? The Village of 100 video is a diversity film that pulls together what the world would look like if there were only 100 people on earth. How many of those would have a computer? How many would reside in the United States? Which ethnic groups would have the most people of that 100? Basically, it tries to make diversity a little more accessible by making the numbers smaller.

The Pros
It's short. It could potentially be facilitated in a way to spark discussion about the world and world issues. It could potentially work as a meeting opener that doesn't really do anything other than "set the tone" for the meeting.

The Cons
The video even acknowledges that it came from an e-mail that was forwarded around for a while. I'm not a big fan of spam forwards and mentioning the source material makes this seem like spam, too. I deleted it when it first appeared in my in-box with a FWD in the subject line, so why should I sit through a movie version?

The video intends to make the reality of human conditions more startling by compressing the figures into accessible terms, but the reality is, the numbers pull a lot more punch when they're bigger- not smaller. Telling me that 1 person out of 100 would have HIV makes me feel like we're doing pretty well when the reality is, there's over 42 million people in the world who test positive for HIV. 42 million seems a lot more important than 1.

The production was satisfactory, except the audio... the actor's voices sounded like they were being recorded in an abandoned elevator shaft or a garage.

I'm not even sure how this video makes an impact on everyday business practices. It's good to know what the world is like- especially since we're living in a global village of sorts- but how does that really effect how I interact with the people I work with every day?

Who Would Want It
Someone who has a really strong diversity program- but wants to supplement it with a fun video that isn't really imperative to the rest of training.

The Bottom Line
I don't like it. That doesn't mean that it's worthless, but I think that training time is so important to most businesses that they should skip this video and buy something with a little more substance and credibility than a program that was adapted from a spam e-mail.

Check it out here: Village of 100 video