The title of the NYT article is “Digital Diplomacy”, but it’s really about how Twitter, etc. is completely changing the way the US government gets its message out, and how right now simply increasing dialogue and engaging constituents-of either party-through technology is as vital as the specific message.
“A lot of the 21st-century dynamics are less about, Do you comport politically along traditional liberal-conservative ideological lines?” Ross says. “Today it is — at least in the spaces we engage in — Is it open or is it closed?”
Government and the private sector recognize the benefits of this nascent symbiosis:
“NGOs keep asking for a way to be able to understand, in a country like Kenya, who’s doing clean water, who’s doing education,” one Google employee said. Several engineers chirped back and forth about the virtues of user-generated feedback and the challenges of multilayer mapping technology, until Schmidt cut them off. “We have a big operation in Kenya,” Schmidt said. “We have the smartest guy in the country working for us. Why can’t we just do this?”
Fascinating article on the intersection of government and personal communications tech in 2010; the relationship is already even more sophisticated than I would’ve thought.
