Twitter as a foreign policy tool? Using Facebook to fight human trafficking? “Technology got Obama elected, now can it save the world?” is the tag line on a great article about a changing State Department via The American Prospect. Posting an excerpt without comment:
[...] in her agenda-setting July 15 speech to the Council of Foreign Relations, Clinton reiterated, “We are working at the State Department to ensure that our government is using the most innovative technologies not only to speak and listen across borders, not only to keep technologies up and going, but to widen opportunities, especially for those who are too often left on the margins.”The State Department calls this new technology-driven approach “21st-century statecraft.” Step off the elevator onto the State Department’s seventh floor, turn left, and you enter Clinton’s refined dark-wood-and-chandelier bedecked suite. Turn right, and you enter the nondescript office of a band of advisers, which includes Cohen, that serves as Clinton’s own think tank. The space is home to Alec Ross, Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation, who is helping to spearhead the 21st-century statecraft program. Now 37, Ross made a name for himself riding herd over hundreds of technologists who advised the Obama campaign. When I suggest to Ross that his custom-made job is perhaps an acknowledgement that candidate Clinton underestimated the transformative power of technology, he issues a look common to State staffers. Halfway between grin and smirk, the message is clear: Next question, please. But he will say that he didn’t come into the State Department “like Yosemite Sam with my six-shooter firing. I spent my early time here learning.”
When Ross arrived, he found Cohen already there. A holdover from Condoleezza Rice’s tenure, Cohen serves on the policy planning team charged, in the words of Truman administration Secretary of State Dean Acheson, with “look[ing] ahead, not into the distant future, but … far enough ahead to see the emerging form of things to come.” Cohen quickly saw the emerging form of Twitter’s role in Iran, but then again, he’s been on the lookout for some time. His office couch is lined with copies of Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, a hostage-crisis memento from his days as a Rhodes Scholar spent hanging around with Tehran’s youth. In his 2007 memoir Children of Jihad, Cohen writes, “The Internet is their democratic society. … They have become digital revolutionaries, creating, participating in, and popularizing chat rooms, blogs, and forums for discussion about everything from sports to politics.” Cohen just so happens to sit in one of the few places in the world where he can come up with an idea — let’s create a virtual student foreign service! — and have the United States government out promoting it days later.
Ask officials for details on Cohen’s outreach to Twitter — Did he call them? E-mail? Maybe direct-message them on Twitter? — and there’s that look again. (Though this time with an undercurrent of “I’m about as likely to go into details as I am to hand over my debit card and PIN.”) In a way, it makes sense. One instance of outreach from the U.S. government to Twitter HQ is symbolic. The bigger picture is that together with an informal but growing band of like-minded staffers, Cohen and Ross are shaping a rebooted technology-assisted diplomacy that is laying the groundwork for human-to-human engagement.
Read the rest at TAP.
