20090827

Diplomacy gets high tech?

Alec Ross at the US State Department says that there has been very few shifts in the way diplomacy is made. Before the telegraph it took a month for letters to go back and forth over the Atlantic. Now recently the Internet is shaking things up again.

Diplomacy is going government to government, government to people and people to people thanks to technological advances. We have seen evidence of people to government when Bill Clinton went to North Korea the other week.

There was an article in The New York Times the other day that talked about new algorithms that can mine feelings out of for example the blogosphere like Google today is mining facts. It will therefore be possible for individuals to respond to large groups of people themselves. Politics and diplomacy will be able to respond faster than by polls. It is important to ask if the blogosphere is representative of the people in an area?

The question is how governments will react to the government to people in an other country situation? It might be something a government must accept as something they can't do anything about. This would in turn weaken governments substantially. Is this way party memberships are dwindling? People are seeking other positions of power. Knowledge centers?

As Alec Ross points out the era when diplomats sat chatting at a mahogany table over a cup of coffee is over.

Governments will be custodians of the state but lack ideology and power?

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