Experts have been saying that America is in decline since – even before – we became an independent nation. Kotkin acknowledges that someday these critics will be correct, but not today, and he paints an optimistic picture of our American future. America has a lot of advantages going into the next generation. It starts with demographics.
Americans still remember how to have kids; it is evidently no longer a universal skill
The U.S. is unique among developed country since we have a positive rate of natural increase. It is not very much above replacement level, but that is more than others, some of which are almost in free fall. America is also an anomaly in that in some of our suburbs wealthy, well-educated women sometimes have three or more kids. (I recall reading an article about the big families in affluent Loudon County next door to us.)
We also still get millions of immigrants. That means that the America is growing older slower than other developed countries and the American labor force will continue to grow through 2050, while others suffer greater or lesser proportional decline in their productive populations relative to their dependent ones. The interesting thing about his data was that it also shows that the world’s most populous country – China – will begin to suffer labor shortages (at least for skilled labor) very soon. The Chinese labor force will start to decline as early as 2015 (yes, five years from now) as a result of their perhaps necessary but draconian one-child policy. (Long term predictions are always tough, but by 2050 the U.S. labor force is projected to rise by 42%; China’s will drop by 10% and Japan’s labor force will decline by an astonishing 44%).
More old people, fewer young workers
This labor force decline will be accompanied by a big growth in the elderly dependent population, both in relative and absolute terms. The world has never experienced anything like this before and our lack of models will require adaptions we cannot fully anticipate. We are truly going where no human societies have gone before.
But America will suffer these declines later and less severely than most others. In addition, the U.S. has a very robust & adaptive economic system. National power is based on economic strength, innovation and demographic clout. Among the great nations of the last generation, only the U.S. will still have these elements in abundance in the next generation.
Managing genteel decline not the same as planning robust growth
This U.S. outlook contributes to disagreements with old allies. For example, the Europeans can also make demographic projections. They see that their populations will decline and their economies will grow much slower than ours. When your population will get smaller and your economy won’t grow much, you don’t worry very much about promising cuts in CO2. You need different policies if you are managing a genteel decline than when you are planning for robust growth.
The U.S. will change internally too. The growth of the last fifty years went mostly to the coasts. The next fifty years will see a return to the heartland. Kotkin doesn’t say that all the little prairie towns will be back, but space and affordable housing will draw people away from the coasts. He says that the whole idea of suburbs has become meaningless. There is more a blending of suburbs, cities and rural areas. Kotkin foresees what he calls an archipelago of villages. More people would be connected by new media in greener and less crowded communities. It sounds a lot like the Loudoun County communities mentioned in the article I linked above.
Today’s ethnic & racial categories will not mean much in 2050
Much has been said about the changing ethnic composition of the U.S. population and in 2050 the white native born population is projected to drop to around 50% of the labor force. But how significant will this be? Kotkin pointed out how foreign the large immigration of Irish seemed in the 19th Century. We just forget how different earlier waves of immigrants had been and how completely they have been integrated into our society. When my grandfather and his brother Felix came to the U.S., they spoke no English and probably had never seen an American before. There is probably no population on earth today that is so “foreign.”
The younger generation doesn’t really care very much about race, with vast majorities in favor of interracial marriage, so by 2050 today’s categories will be as meaningless as some of the national and religious distinctions made in our grandparents’ childhoods. In other words, by 2050 nobody will care.
Still some challenges and skills mismatched
The road to this bright happy future is not necessarily certain. We have a challenge of education, not so much college but technical. We might, in fact, be pushing too many kids into college when the more appropriate skills might be technical. Our community and technical colleges should be given a bigger role as providers of final or working degrees rather than way-stations to four-year colleges. Kotkin thinks it is just a problem of incentives. We reward careers in finance and law more than we do those who actually make useful things. If that changes, so will our career paths.
We have been able to import skilled labor, but that might be slowing. We have some competition now. Places like Canada & Australia are also pleasant and welcoming like the U.S. They are also “countries of aspiration” and they drawing in some of the skilled immigrants. There are also now more opportunities in many source countries, as people around the world reap the benefits of market liberalization reforms of past decades. Indian engineers, for example, now may have good opportunities at home.
The general pool of attractive potential immigrants is also shrinking, as birth rates drop even in those place that traditionally had very high rates of growth, such at Mexico and parts of Asia. A good example of what this pattern can look like comes from South Korea, which a couple decades ago sent millions of immigrants to the U.S. and now absorbs its own population growth, which is now much lower than that of the U.S.
We need more Engineers & plumbers and fewer leaf blowers & Lawyers
We Americans screw ourselves, however. Canada or Australia favor the skills their countries need. An immigrant with skills has a better chance of getting into those places. Our immigration policies give too little weight to the skills and education we can use in our economy. We are too “fair”. We don’t need to import any more unskilled labor or even worse – people who don’t plan to labor at all. We have the right to ask potential immigrants what they will contribute to our country. Besides the relatively small numbers of bona-fides refugees, we have no moral duty to admit anybody. As long as we will limit total numbers and we have a choice, we should choose the best and the brightest, not people we need to train before they can operate a leaf blower.
Unfortunately, unskilled labor can create its own demand. My personal complaint is against leaf blowing. That is usually a job that just need not be done at all and if unskilled labor wasn’t so cheap maybe we wouldn’t do it very often. You can learn to use a leaf blower in about thirty seconds. We don’t need more of those things. We are better off with people with useful skills. Some jobs – such as leaf blowing – are worth less than zero. I have discussed the value of doing nothing (with specific reference to leaf blowing) here & here.
Anyway, the AEI event gave me something to think about. I will have to buy the book and read the details. I have to say – once again – that we are really lucky to have these kinds of events offered free or cheaply to anybody with the inclination to listen.
I am listening to a great “Teaching Company” series on Western Literature. (BTW – you never have to pay full price for these things. They always go on sale.) Western literature traditions are a little out of style these days, which is a shame because the great literature really does speak to us across the centuries. A good education has to include some knowledge of the classics and nothing can become a classic until it has been well-known enough for a long enough time to influence thought and literature in a broad sense. In other words, no matter how great something written a couple of years ago may be, it cannot have the power of older literature. Maybe it is a future classic, but it is not a classic yet.
Literature extends influence beyond the grave
The guy giving the lectures explained that literature is a way of talking to the dead and getting an intergenerational perspective. I was thinking about that as I drove down to the farm last weekend. I was listening to “Infotopia,” by Cass Sunstein. He was talking about markets, in the broad sense to include markets for attitudes and ideas and how they aggregate the opinions and attitudes of many minds. Literature is like that. He mentioned that the great economist Fredrick Hayek had contended that traditions are a type of market too and you have to be careful changing established relationships, since they are essentially long-term distilled experience, a record of how people adjusted and adapted to problems over the years. Edmund Burke made a similar observation about morality. I did too. When I wrote my note Found in Translation I didn’t directly recall my literature professors or Hayek or Burke, but don’t doubt that is where the ideas originated. One of the benefits of a liberal education is that you learn all these things and if they sink in early enough and deep enough you come to think of them as your own. There not any really new ideas; just restatements of and new compilations.
Reformulations
The funny thing is that those w/o the “useless” liberal education often believe they thought them up for the first time. And they often get away with it. Many best-selling authors and highly paid speakers recycle old stuff. I suppose they sometimes do it consciously, other times not. You tend to get the classics in the watered down version. I remember reading the science fiction “Foundation Trilogy” by Isaac Asimov. I recognized it back then as a allegory of the fall of the Roman Empire. What I didn’t get at the time was how closely the second foundation tracked with Boethius on the consolation of philosophy. Asimov was an educated man, so I think he did it on purpose. Generations of Sci-Fi fans have essentially read Boethius.
BTW – I first came met Boethius way back in 1975. You can go through college w/o ever coming into contact with him at all, since he has largely “fallen out of the cannon.” I got to know him when studying Chaucer. Boethius was a much bigger deal in the Middle Ages than he has been more recently and if you study the philosophy surrounding Chaucer’s writings, you run into Boethius. I mostly forgot about him for the last … oh thirty years. I was reminded of the details of his death by the audio program. It was dreadful, but I guess it helped secure his position as a martyr. After he fell afoul of the Ostrogoth King Theodoric and was executed by having wet leather straps wrapped around his head. The straps contracted as they dried and crushed his brain. It must have been very unpleasant and it is an example of man’s inhumanity to man. What kind of guy even thinks of that? I mean really, was there a bunch of guys sitting around thinking of novel uses for wet leather straps and ones gets the eureka moment? Well, hey, we can use these leather straps to wrap this guy’s head.
Old literature and new persuasion
I am thinking of “new” media and the arts of public diplomacy persuasion in my last couple of posts, since I am doing the FSI course on that subject, but I think this fits right in. Consider the persistence of influence of great literature and how it is so useful to have a compete repertoire of literary images, motifs and metaphors. After all, not only are they time-tested but they also lurk in the subconscious of our culture waiting to be revealed. It is a good lesson in this ostensibly fast-changing world that some things move slowly but have profound influence and create sustainable structure and technologies of the mind.
And the delivery mechanism is very much new media. I get these lectures over the Internet and download them onto my I-pod. This I-pod is smaller than a matchbox, yet can probably hold a full college curriculum of courses and lectures, along with supplementary texts. Sweet. But how does that delivery method change how the classics are received and how about who receives them? An old guy like me is unlikely to get them from a college professor standing in front of him. The whole relationship to knowledge is changing. That is new media.
It seems an esoteric subject, but it still makes a useful study today. I went to see a talk by Edward Luttwak on the “Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire.” Luttwak is an interesting guy who has done lots of things. He not only writes books about the Byzantines, but he also write regular commentary about current events and even is part owner in a cattle ranch in Brazil. BTW – for reference I also attended a lecture on Byzantine history at Smithsonian and wrote a post re.
Luttwak started with the sources, of which there are many but they are complicated. If you study of the pre-Byzantine Roman Byzantines, you have a lot of history and archeology to study. Byzantium is harder in some respects and easier in others. While there is a wealth of numismatic evidence, archeology is not as helpful. So much was concentrated in Constantinople (Istanbul) and that has not been well studied. One reason is that the Turks didn’t much care about the Christian-Greek-Roman civilization they displaced and more modern archeologists were more interested in the ancient Greeks, but probably the most important reason is that the city has been continuously occupied. It is just hard to dig in such a crowded place. But what you don’t have in archeology, you make up for in manuals and diplomatic reports.
The uses of intelligence and guile
The Byzantines were very sophisticated in their study of diplomacy and what we would today call intelligence or anthropology. They did research observations, made reports and wrote field manuals a lot like we do today. They needed them. For much of their history, the Byzantines were beset by enemies all around. They didn’t like to use their army too often because it was relatively small, and expensively trained and equipped. It was better to use leverage, so they studied everybody around them, found their strengths, weaknesses and vanities. The reports still exist. Often the Byzantine sources are the best historical documents for neighboring people. The early history of the Turks, Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians, Hungarians and others comes mostly from Byzantine observations.
Divide and conquer
The Byzantine method was to get enemies to fight each other. Flatter, cajole, threaten or bribe as appropriate. Their longest enduing and most dangerous rivals were Muslims, but then as now the Muslim world was not united. The Byzantines noted that no connection between supposed religious fervor and willingness to take bribes. When their spies told them that there was talk of jihad, they would send around gift baskets to local Muslim rulers, which often served to dampen enthusiasm for the holy war, at least temporarily. Their politically incorrect assessment was that these guys were either at their throats or at their feet. True or not, that assessment worked for them.
Byzantine diplomats studied everybody and reported back and they interviewed anybody who came to Constantinople. Often the emperor would meet important foreigners himself. The system worked reasonably well, evidenced by the fact that the empire endured for centuries in a very rough neighborhood.
The Byzantines believed in being benevolent when they could, but they recognized that this came only through strength, never weakness. Always be combat ready but avoid combat if possible. If you can bribe or trick your way out of a mess, why not?
It reminds me of the saying l learned, “Any problem you can buy your way out of is not a problem; it is an expense.” Maybe the original thought came from our Byzantine ancestors.
Soft power
Success of this kind of strategy required an openness not usually associated with the Byzantines. Luttwak pointed out that they allows a mosque in Constantinople (for foreigners and visitors). They also freely translated their texts into other languages. Unlike the Muslims who insisted that the Koran remain in Arabic, the Byzantines were liberal with their sacred texts. The Byzantine monks Cyril and Methodius created a written language for the Slavs and many Slavic languages are still written in the script named for Cyril.
Rise comes before the fall
Luttwak thinks that the weakening of the empire came as a result of too much temporary strength (pride goeth before a fall). Life was good in 1025. That was the year when the Emperor Basil II left the empire in possession of lands from what is now Iraq into Southern Italy. Borders were secure and the Empire prospered. There followed a golden generation, when the Byzantines got flabby. They permitted large landholders to take over tracts formerly occupied by people who supplied the border troops and didn’t pay enough attention to security. When the threat did come, they were not united enough or clever enough. After the Turks wiped out much of the professional core of the Byzantine army and captured the Emperor at Manzikert in 1071, Anatolia opened to the Turkish conquest and colonization. The Empire never really regained its footing. The real death blow came in 1204, when the 4th Crusade sacked Constantinople. The Byzantines regained the city, but after that the “empire” was more of a local Greek state than an empire. By the time the Turks finally conquered the city in 1453, there was not much left but the city itself.
The held on long enough to keep learning alive
The Byzantines were in every way heirs to the Roman and classical civilization. It was they who kept the works of the classical authors and they would almost certainly have been lost if the Empire had fallen to the first Muslim attacks. As it was, the final fall of the Empire and the scholars who fled the declining Empire helped spark the Renaissance in Italy and Western Europe. We sometimes forget that the light of classical civilization was not really extinguished in the East until 1453. By that time, the West was ready to take back its heritage.
IIP is consulting with FSI to produce a course on new and social media. I am doing the keynote plus and intro. Below is what I plan to say. Here is a link to the PowerPoint presentation on social media:
You will learn to use new/social media more effectively in this course, but this is not a “how-to” training. The beauty of the new/social media is that it is fairly easy to learn how to use. The challenge is how to use it in the context of effective public diplomacy and the new/social media’s ease of use and very ubiquity complicate the challenge. We are tempted to just start driving down the road, but it is a good idea to look at the roadmap first to figure out where we want to be and how best to get there
For our next trick
We used to ask “what are the parts of the new media?” We identified Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and others and figured out how to use them. Some of us got very good at sending out tweets and finding friends on Facebook. It is very impressive to reach thousands of people with the push of a key, but what are you accomplishing? When we first got into the new media, just getting there was hard and it was accomplishment enough. But we have moved beyond that. If we used to ask about the parts of the new media, the question now is, “what is the new/social media part of?” You will not learn a “Twitter strategy.”
Public diplomacy professionals should no more have a Twitter strategy than a carpenter should have a “hammer strategy.” Like the carpenter, we want a toolbox filled with the best equipment available and we have a building strategy that uses the appropriate tool or combination of tools to get the job done.
The human equation
This is the place where I genuflect toward public diplomacy’s patron – Edward R Murrow – who said that our technologies can bridge thousands of miles, but that persuasion takes place in the last three feet, i.e. the human space. We are always talking to humans and must consider human behavior, preferences and limitations and there are many that affect us. They will differ in various cultures and in various times. We also have to understand that our own actions may fundamentally change the challenges we face.
It is a kind of public diplomacy game theory. The very fact that we are acting changes the environment where we do our things.
A learning organization
This is why we need you and this is why I need you to participate in the talks. There really are no experts in this field, or put differently the actual practitioners, i.e. YOU are the experts. Unfortunately, none of you, none of us, has the complete picture. But we all have some pieces.
How this course is designed to be a little different
We want to pick up some of those pieces. We want to help make State more of a learning organization. Individuals learn, but in order to become a learning organization we have to harvest and synthesis the knowledge of our individual members. Tomorrow Bill May and I will lead a discussion session. I am sure many of you have been in “open discussions” where you know they have a particular goal where you will reach the received wisdom. Less devious trainers sometimes even have the final conclusions written on the flip chart, to be revealed when the group reaches the correct gate at the city of knowledge.
We will try to guide the discussion but we REALLY do not have a goal in mind; more correctly our real goal is to facilitate the learning among all of us. AND we anticipate changing our approach and procedures on the basis of what we learn. If you take this course again, it will be different. And I will write up a synthesis of the results and post it on InfoCentral’s wiki platform. All of you will get the URL and all of you can continue to comment and contribute.
The picture at top, BTW, is Memorial Bridge over the Potomac.
Alex and I went to a lecture at the Smithsonian about the Byzantine Empire by Lars Brownworth. It was a good lecture and the guy had very good humor timing but he also made some excellent points.
One of the key points is how the Byzantines have been disrespected for centuries. Even the name “Byzantine” is pejorative. The Byzantines referred to themselves as Romans, which made sense since they were indeed the heirs to the Roman Empire in an unbroken line of history. Some of it is the responsibly of one man – Edward Gibbon, whose monumental book “the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” has set the concept of Rome for more than 200 years. But in many ways he was merely reflecting a general Western prejudice against the East.
It seems to make sense that we could call the end of the Roman Empire when the city of Rome fell, but this is not the case. By the time the actual city of Rome fell to Barbarians in 476 it had no longer really been the capital of the Empire for some times. The Western Empire was ruled from the more defensible Ravenna. The more important Eastern part of the Empire was ruled from Constantinople. By that time also the Roman Empire had occupied the Mediterranean world for more than 600 years. It had become a single cultural entity a lot like the U.S. in North America. California or Nebraska is not less American than Virginia or Massachusetts because.
Take that back in terms of our own history and we are back to 1409, almost a century before the European discovery of America. Henry V had not yet become king of England and – BTW – the Eastern Roman Empire was still in existence. That was a long time ago, so you can imagine that a citizen of the Roman Empire had no real concept of anything before Rome, or maybe had about the same feeling as we would about Henry IV (for most people i.e. none).
Anyway it was one cultural region and the Mediterranean united the region, not divided it. North Africa was as much part of this Roman world as Italy. We forget about that today because we think in terms of East and West and we think of the Muslims in the Middle East as natural and native. BTW, many mosques are pattered after Byzantine churches (especially Hagia Sophia, that you see in the picture) and the Muslim world owes a lot to the Eastern Roman Empire in general, as we do.
If you read other parts of my blog, you know I am a fan of the great empire of Rome. The Byzantines preserved and transmitted the ancient heritage to us. Byzantine texts and scholars helped spark the renaissance. We should pay more attention to their history.
I think it is great that Smithsonian sponsors these lectures and that hundreds of people come to listen to them.
I am on a panel about public diplomacy at the Second Public Diplomacy Symposium at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York on October 16. Since it is a panel DISCUSSION I don’t want to say too much initially in order to let the discussion develop in ways favored by the participants. The reflections on public diplomacy on the blog this week are some of the ways I am working through the issues. Sorry for all the overlap. I have to produce hours of thought to yield a few minutes of talk. It takes a lot of preparation to be spontaneous.
Below is what I plan to use as an introduction. The PowerPoint for the presentation is available at this link.
Social Media & Public Diplomacy
Above are workers constructing the new Institute of Peace building across from my office. They use a variety of tools for their work, choosing the most appropriate for the job at hand. The TASK is the important thing. The tools are just a way to get the job done. A carpenter does not have a specific “hammer strategy.” We should not have a specific Facebook or Twitter strategy. Our PD TOOLS should be used … as tools – part of a tool box or portfolio. Use the ones that work at the right place and time; don’t develop a strategy for them.
****
You are catching me at a time of indecision. I spent more than twenty-five years working in public diplomacy and have been a pioneer in State Department innovative use of the new media; at least they gave me a couple awards that said so. But I have doubts. Electronic distribution & the social/interactive media is not the game changer I hoped. On reflection, I think we leaned too much about technology and not enough on the social and anthropological aspects of the social media. Technology has made it easy to reach large numbers of people, but it doesn’t mean they are paying attention, turning our information into useful knowledge or doing something new or different based on what they get from us.
We have to do a lot of rethinking but it is hard to think when we are beguiled and distracted by the promise of technology. So let’s set aside all the latest techno-developments and think about the SOCIAL media from the human and audience perspective. Since this will be a DISCUSSION and I have only a few minutes to provoke your questions, let me give you the seven truths about public diplomacy and social media.
1. Social – less about technologies and more about social interactions with people.
2. Iterative – It is a continuous learning, iterative process, not a plan and not something that can be delegated or finished.
3. Engaged – You want to influence others AND you are willing to be influenced by others.
4. Community -based – Build a community & be part of a community. Figure out what you can contribute to the community. People make decisions in the contexts of their communities.
5. Simultaneously Inclusive & Exclusive – A community is both inclusive of its members and exclusive to others. You attract nobody if you appeal to everybody. You have to earn membership in any community worth being a member.
6. Personal – Editors and marketers have tried for years to homogenize for the mass market. Niche markets – and the new media is just a series of niche markets – requires personality. There is no such thing as a world product. Even the ubiquitous Coca-Cola varies by region and country. We engage a series of niche markets. This means that we have to work through our country-posts, with people immersed in local cultures, politics and sensibilities and has obvious implications for a Washington-based PD messaging strategy.
7. Fun – We underestimate the importance of fun & games. People have choices in the new media. They often engage because it is fun and if you bore them they will wander off.
So these are the things that I think shape our use of social media. Let’s talk.
Alex and I went to see a Darwin interpreter at the Smithsonian. It was very interesting, although not exactly what I expected. Richard Milner did Gilbert & Sullivan songs about Darwin in between his story telling and interpretation.
Alex was probably the youngest person in the room, by far. I might have been in close contention for second place. I bet the median age was around sixty. Mr. Milner told lots of jokes that I understood but depended on cultural nuances from before Alex’s time. Jimmy Durante, Bing Crosby & Jack Benny survived into my time but even I know them largely through reruns of old movies. This kind of thing worries me. I also have trouble adapting new jokes. There are humor generations and it is hard to bridge that generation gap. Our references are just different.
I was crowd watching as much as performer watching. An evolution audience is peculiar and the performer pandered a bit to their prejudices. I don’t think there is any doubt that evolution explains our world, i.e. it is true scientifically. I also believe that Darwin was the greatest thinker of the 19th Century and the only one whose ideas are still broadly useful today. But I don’t partake in the Darwin hagiography and the kind of snooty superiority on display in this otherwise very polite and reasonable crowd. Dare I say that they treat Darwin with almost religious reverence.
The Darwinism of the 19th Century, i.e. the original ideas, is wrong in many details. This doesn’t really subtract from Darwin’s genius. Almost all the science of genetics, much of statistical analysis and most of the archeological record of early hominids was unavailable to Darwin. You can look at this in two different ways. Accolades say that it shows Darwin’s prescience and genius that he could still get so much right even w/o all that science. I would also praise Darwin’s skill, but say that he was very lucky in his guesses and made some seriously unscientific extrapolations that turned out well. We don’t have to believe that man was some sort of superman. We can still admire him.
Speaking of supermen, this is another problem with overdoing Darwin. Darwinism is closely associated with scientific racism, Nazism, abusive eugenics and so called social Darwinism. Darwin didn’t take part in this and he didn’t foresee it. You could say that all these things are ignorant misinterpretations of Darwin, and you would be right.
But when you look at something in totality, you have to consider what will become of it when it faces the grit and error of the real world. Academics argue academic theories that are manifest nowhere in reality. Reality matters. The best example of how reality can turn a minor intellectual pathogen into a deadly disease is Marxism. In theory, Marxism is just kind of silly. In practice it is deadly. Darwinism was not like this, but it was abused in the service of politics.
Let me make one small note about evolution. The common conception of it is … wrong and that is one of the reasons why the theory got abused. If you look at the various charts and timelines, you think that evolution is moving toward a goal. In fact, evolution doesn’t imply progress in any way. Fitness means only that organisms have reproductive success. In modern terms, the “Octomom” is the most successful and fittest human woman of our age and perhaps the most successful of any age. She evidently has fourteen children with a good chance of surviving into adulthood. Some sleaze who fathers a dozen kids out of wedlock is fitter than the childless Noble prize winner – kind of depressing. The related wrong idea is that species evolve from each other with the idea of progress, so that a fish or a frog is lower on the evolutionary ladder than monkey or a man. In fact, the science of evolution doesn’t have anything to do with this kind of idea. The fish that successfully reproduces is more successful than a man who doesn’t.
Anyway, I take the pragmatic approach to knowledge. We can never find absolute truth. Science cannot give that to us, since science is in the process of becoming. It is always in revision. We can, however, achieve USEFUL knowledge and that is enough for most of us most of the time. Just never get too enthusiastic about any particular ideas, don’t attribute infallibility to any human and don’t hold that lack of infallibly against them.
Even a genius is wrong most of the time because to err is human. And that is why I don’t feel it is a contradiction to believe in both science and transcendence.
Above is sunset from my office window behind the construction of the Institute of Peace.
BTW – I found a good article on this subject after I wrote this. It is at this link.
I would like to bring together people for a conference including those who “do” public diplomacy using the new techniques and technologies such as augmented reality, social networking, text mining & mobile together along with those who develop and study those things in order to discuss practical applications.
We need to discuss which technologies can be best used to deliver public diplomacy messages and that we and the larger public affairs community can use. Integral to addressing these issues are our organizational and mission imperatives, which directly affect the extent of use and acceptance of new methods. Not every new technology is useful for our work and not every useful technology can be used by us.
Subject clusters, along with notional times
8:30 – 9:00
Registration & seating
9 – 9:30
Introduction – new technologies and the new public diplomacy. A discussion of what has worked so far and what is in the works for the next six months and beyond.
9:30-11:45 (with 15 minute break in middle)
The next big ideas – I envision a panel with an expert on each of these things giving a 15 minute explanation. Following is a discussion among the panelists with questions from the floor. We would ask what are the next big ideas and whether or not they are useful in public diplomacy.
· Augmented realty – what is it? What does it do? How might augmented reality augment public diplomacy?
· Gaming platforms/virtual realities – what are they? What is our public diplomacy experience in their use so far? What are some future applications? Will “holideck” functions come to dominate online collaboration?
· Social networking systems – what are they? What is our public diplomacy experience in their use so far? What are some future applications?
· “Old” new techniques (blogging, webpages, outreach) — what are they? What is our public diplomacy experience in their use so far? What are some future applications?
11:45-12:45
Content – how much do messages matter? Can a content neutral or content free social network long endure? Is such a network worth cultivating? How can it be used to further public diplomacy goals? Where will content come from in a post-MSM world (this one is for the journalist and journalism professors)? Can user-generated content replace professionally crafted material?
12:45- 1:30
Lunch
1:30-3:30
Putting it together – Panel session format as above
· Integration/technological models – can one model encompass all/most forms of new technologies? Can we understand the new technologies w/o an overall model or framework? How can we determine the appropriate mix to use in various situations?
· Integration/anthropological models – how do new techniques fit into and alter existing human networks & relationships, both inside and outside organizations?
· Integration/information management – can wikis function as information conduits and knowledge generators? How will dispersed decision making change power structures and priority setting? Can a series of tactical decisions become strategy?
3:30-5:00
Where do we go from here? What is the future of public diplomacy? Does public diplomacy need to be run by, or mostly run by, governments? Can public diplomacy function successfully as only one voice among many?
I went to see the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. It is not as good, IMO, as the old Bond movies because Bond has lost his edge, or more correctly, the rest of us have caught up. In one scene, Bond calls back to his HQ for a name check. After a couple seconds, the super spy commuter comes up with a picture of the miscreant. Very impressive, but you or I could come up with the same result on Google Images in around 0.9 seconds. Bond would have been better off just using his I-Phone himself. This is the new world of communications.
Web 2.0/PD 2.0
Initial use of the web for public diplomacy and strategic communications involved online versions of familiar delivery methods, such as magazines, radio and television. Despite vast differences among them, all these shared the paradigm of one-way communications, where a set message was delivered to a passive audience in a one speaker to many recipients model. It ignored the web’s special capacity for interaction. Web 2.0 refers to the way the web has changed the nature of communications, making it interactive, more fluid and less centrally organized. Last year, Internet passed newspapers as a source of news in the U.S. For young people Internet is beginning to rival television. [1] This new world can make many people in governments or powerful institutions uncomfortable, since it signals a diminution of their power over information and a dilution of their messages.
We tend to focus on the instant communication aspect of the Internet, but the sinews of its influence are its capacity to find, sort and distribute information. Powerful search engines give individuals the power enjoyed only by world leaders few decades ago and before that time by nobody at all. Governments have lost what monopolies they once enjoyed and are now sometimes not even the most prominent voices. Controlling information is no longer possible. On the other hand, there is a greater opportunity for engagement to harness the power of the nation and the wisdom of the crowds to produce better and more robust products. There is no option of ignoring the development. Internet users demand a degree of interactivity and accept a measure of ambiguity unpredicted a decade ago. These trends will accelerate as the first generation of digital natives (i.e. kids who don’t remember a world w/o Internet) has reached adulthood. This is the new world of communications. Whether we are ready or not, the future has already arrived.
Interactivity and interrelations
The two concepts to keep in mind are interactivity and interrelatedness. The first concept is more obvious but the second is more pervasive. Internet users ostensibly love the possibility of interactivity, but most don’t use it to an extent commensurate with their stated preferences. On any blog, there are dozens, hundreds or thousands of “lurkers” for every active participant. On the other hand, interrelatedness represents the fundamental power of the Internet and its search engines. It is the interrelatedness – the unexpected relationships – that makes the Internet such a wonderful and terrible place to do public affairs. Some say the web provides a venue for the best and the brightest to share ideas w/o the constraints of status or station; others contend it is a place where peculiar people congregate to accrete one dumb notion on top of another. Both points of view are correct. The medium of free and often anonymous exchange produces the best and the worst as it emphasizes people on the long tails of the normal distribution.
Mass customization
The ubiquity and interactive aspects of Web 2.0 offer public diplomacy the possibility of direct engagement with thousands of individuals on a global scale. We can bypass the state run media and the various despotic gatekeepers that have long hounded the quest for truth & knowledge. In the exchange, however, we get a world of constant change, requiring flexibility and creativity, where you have to earn attention again and again every day. The interactivity means just what the word says. When we are trying to influence others, we need to open the possibility of being influenced by them. In a free marketplace of ideas, this would be all to the good. It would produce a synergy greater than the sum of the parts. The caveat is that this marketplace of ideas is not as free and open as it would appear.
Our own presence in the mix is the first sign of a constrained freedom. Although our opponents disagree, our activities are generally benign and broadly truthful. The USG is constrained to tell the truth by its own rules as well as the continual monitoring by our own free media, interests groups and political leaders in opposition. For the most part, we are probably too timid in the defense of our positions. Not so our adversaries. Most of them are heavy handed and incompetent peddlers of web influence, but there are so many out there that some get it right sometimes and others get it right a lot. When it works for them, their campaign is based on plausible lies, ones that play to stereotypes and prejudice, and often based on caricatures and exaggerations of our own real and verifiable mistakes and missteps. In a world where significant numbers of people doubt that there was ever a moon landing and where in communities where majorities don’t think Arabs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks, conspiracy theories go a long way. And the U.S. is probably the single biggest victim of conspiracy theories. In a world often driven by dispersed impersonal forces, people look for someone to blame. The U.S. is always there for that purpose.
Countering conspiracy theories with facts and information is futile. Most conspiracy theories have a built in defense against such quaint ideas as truth or fact. They are, after all based on “hidden,” “denied,” “secret,” or “occult” information. True believers in conspiracies derive significant personal status and feelings of self worth from the idea that they know things overlooked by or kept from the masses of people. It is a true Gnosticism. As they see it, any counter arguments are merely examples of clever attempts to discredit them. We have to recognize that some people are incurable conspiracy theory believers. Others are susceptible to the contagion, but can be cured, but through relationships, not information alone. A trusted and credible source of the information is what makes the difference. Web 2.0 provides the opportunity to create such relationships.
In a New World Where Nobody is Well-Loved
We also need to recognize that the constant vetting and finding of flaws, even when done honestly, will create a permanent state of dissatisfaction among large numbers of people. This is what happens when campaigns go negative and it is just easier to go negative than to defend a positive position. The U.S., as the most ubiquitous presence in the history of the world, will naturally come under the most scrutiny, fair and foul, but it is a general trend that affects everybody. The good new in this is that it applies to our adversaries as well as to ourselves. Al Qaeda’s popularity has also plummeted in recent years among Muslims, for example. [2]
Insiders & Outsiders
Internet 2.0 will strengthen “tribes” as people can go online to find others with whom they identify even across great geographical distances. (Of course, the tribes I am not talking about are not kinship of linage, but kinship of ideas.) This may lead to greater trust within groups, as they become more uniform and homogeneous, but also lead to a general decline in tolerance overall, since most people will be out-groups to any particular in groups. Early hopes that Internet would weave the world together in a kind of cyber age of Aquarius have been dashed against the reality of self-selection and segregation. In a mass information market, differing viewpoints must be tolerated, not so in the case of core groups of believers autoerotically communicating among themselves on the Internet. Where websites and blogs are most developed, disagreements have become sharper and more venomous. However, the impersonal/personalization of web interactions allows people with very divergent views to coexist and performs mutually beneficial transactions that would be impossible in a face-to-face world. General “approval ratings” have already become more transactional and unstable, making it even more important to discount what people tell opinion pollsters and watch what they do and get an idea of their true beliefs by their revealed preferences.
Public diplomacy and the marketing mix
The analogy of public diplomacy with marketing is far from perfect, but it provides some useful insights. When marketing a product or service, you have to understand which communications techniques are appropriate. Those useful for selling Coca-Cola are often not valuable for selling passenger jets or legal services. The same goes for public diplomacy. Our business is more analogous to selling high end legal services than consumer products. This informs and constrains our choices.
Public diplomacy involves communicating complicated concepts to people who come from a variety of backgrounds and the U.S. operates in a truly global environment. It involves long term relationship and trust building. Messages are more problematic. Some of our world audiences will react in sometimes violently different ways to the same subject. Imagine the discussion of U.S. attitudes toward same sex marriage at venues in Amsterdam and Jeddah. Aspects of the discussion popular in one venue would be odious in the other. In this interconnected world, messages cannot be neatly targeted to a discrete audience. Even more challenging is that the more extreme members of each audience will seize on the aspects they find most objectionable rather than look for areas of compatibility. This has long been a problem, but web 2.0 exacerbates it, since one blogger in an audience of hundreds can characterize a discussion for thousands of his compatriots back home.
In other words, web 2.0 has as much or more capacity to puncture and disassemble public diplomacy messages as it does to deliver them. The shorter the attention spans media, the more likely this is to be the case. Twitter with its 140 character limit is a good example. We have used Twitter successfully to send short messages and a give a “heads up” about bigger things, but it doesn’t easily lend itself to any proactive public affairs task beyond notices and reporting the equivalent of scores or stock averages. One the other hand, 140 characters is plenty of space for a slogan or attack. BTW – the last two sentences of the paragraph above had 327 characters counting spaces. These two directly above are 140 characters – exactly the right size for a tweet. Good luck with deep explanations.
So what do we do?
We look beyond or through the technology to our purpose. You cannot answer the how question until you have address they why question. Communication and relationship building is our goal. Rather than be beguiled or intimidated by technology, we simply need to keep our focus on the goal and use whatever technological tools are most appropriate. But we do need to acknowledge that changing technologies have changed the game.
Common themes not unified messages
There is much talk in public affairs about having a unified message. The new technologies, with all the links and leaks they entail in the information net, mean we can no longer have one unified centrally crafted message. We can have themes and goals that are interpreted and alerted by the individuals on the ground and closest to the challenges. We will, however, need to tolerate significant local variations on the themes and welcome the ambiguity of message delivery.
Delivering variations on the themes is much more labor intensive than cranking out a single message because rather than one voice speaking to millions (on the model of the national television program) we will have many voices speaking to thousands or maybe even to hundreds and not only varying the theme to suit particular audiences, but also responding to them and quickly responsive to changes in the environment. It is important that the theme be consistent but the delivery is protean. It requires more of a robust process than a comprehensive plan.
Set the Proper Goals for Each Situation
There are many degrees of distinction between active opposition and enthusiastic support. Americans are particularly afflicted by the desire to be loved in the world, but all that is often required is compliance or even indifference. Although outright opposition constrains our policy options, America’s image in the world has no discernible impact on the sale of U.S. goods or the acceptance of U.S. cultural products. Much of the sound and fury of anti-American prejudice signifies nothing or not very much. The fragmentation of media on the web means that those who dislike us will always have an outlet for their vitriol and they will probably be among those yelping the loudest. The majority may not have a strong opinion on a particular issue. They may voice support for our opponents, but take no steps to provide anything practical.
Military action, which by its very nature is coercive, will almost never be popular and any exercise of power, which inevitably means choosing among priorities, will annoy somebody. Since you usually get less credit for the good things you do than blame for the bad, any use of power will probably create more perceived losers than winners. (The world’s superpower is always on the hot seat. President Clinton gets blamed for not sending troops to Rwanda; President Bush is excoriated for sending troops to Iraq.) Lack of practical support for extremism and neutrality or even indifference toward our policies among the mass of a country’s people may be sufficient to accomplish our purposes. Often neutralizing or discrediting opposition will be the most appropriate tact, and Internet is well suited to this task. We should consider this on a case-by-case basis, rather than compromise practical goals by pursuing the chimera of seeking full throated outright approval.
All of the above
Using technology to communicate will be an all of the above proposition, with a cocktail of technologies usually more appropriate than reliance on any one. We will never find the Holy Grail or silver bullet of communications technology and we will never again have anything comparable to the nationwide television network where everybody is watching at the same time. The ability to reach the whole nation was a historical anomaly. Throughout most of history and in the future, the communication environment was and will be fractured. It is only because we all grew up in that unusually homogeneous media environment that we think of it as normal in any way.
The right tools
We cannot prescribe the particular technological tools for any public affairs task until we have assessed the task and the environment. What we should be looking for is synergy among the tools. For example, a live speaker is very compelling but not particularly memorable, while an internet page has the built in memory (you can refer back to it) but is unlikely to be compelling. Twitter can announce the availability of some piece of information or some event, but it cannot explain the nuances. An event might be very informative, but nobody comes unless they can be told and reminded. Obviously a combination of technologies works best, changing them to adapt to circumstances. BTW – technology is not only high tech or electronic. A technology is merely a way of doing something. A personal meeting is a kind of technology. Sometime the thousands year old technology is the way to go. We seek the right MIX of technologies, not the right ONE technology. There is no silver bullet or Holy Grail of communications. It is easy to be beguiled by the new or the latest big thing, but technology is not communication and the medium is not the message. It is only the method.
Other information is based on personal interviews with those doing public diplomacy as well as extensive personal experience working with USG webpages and blogs.
As the introduction says, I am a career Foreign Service Officer who recently returned from a year in Iraq leading a provincial reconstruction team (PRT) embedded with the Marine Regimental Combat Team in Western Iraq.
PRTs are an old idea made new. My assignment was to help rebuild Western Iraq, a task much bigger than me. I had a team of seventeen (17) experts to help. I also had the cooperation of the Marines and other U.S. military stationed in Iraq and most importantly I could ride on the energy, talent and hard work of the Iraqi people in Anbar. I think we were successful. I feel a little like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise, however. I arrived in Anbar at the inflection point when the war-fighting stage was largely over and the rebuilding was beginning. The people of Anbar, with the help of the Marines and my team members, made great strides during that year and I was privileged and proud to work among them.
Let me tell you a little about how I would like to handle this talk. I propose to lay out general principles and then fill in some examples. This won’t take very long. After that, I would like to address your specific questions and concerns. A disclaimer. I am not an engineer. Leading a team called a provincial reconstruction team implies building and engineering. This is not the case. I cannot talk re specifications, materials or building methods.
What I can tell you is what I saw in Iraq with my own eyes. What I have seen may indeed make more sense to you when I describe it than it does to me. Your training gives you insights I don’t have. My eyes and your expertise may create synergy.
Our PRT was tasked with helping rebuild – or in many case just build – infrastructure in Iraq. Infrastructure is broader than roads and buildings. You know that. Infrastructure includes all those things that make a prosperous modern society possible.
Roads, Bridges etc.
We start with the obvious things like roads, bridges and railroads. W/o these things prosperity is not possible. Then we move to factories mines and office buildings. In Iraq, they had significant agricultural infrastructure in the form of irrigation and water projects. All these things are clearly classified as infrastructure and can be built almost anywhere. But there is more.
Institutions
One of the hardest tasks in any developing country is the infrastructure of institutions. We Americans often forget this because we have had a functioning country with rule of law, more or less predictable political system and functioning government bureaucracies for hundreds of years. Iraq was lacking all those things. W/o institutions, you can build all the physical infrastructure you want and still not create a modern prosperous society.
Societal Strength
Which comes first, a strong civil society or civil society institutions? I don’t think you can really determine cause and effect. They strengthen and support each other or pull each other down. A key ingredient is trust. Most of our transitions are based on trust, even those we think of as determined by law. A prosaic example is when you go into a restaurant. Your waiter trusts you pay for your meal and leave an appropriate tip. You trust him not to tack on unreasonable charges and supply decent service and food. Imagine if each transaction required you to check references and proactively defend your interests. Trust in Iraq had been sorely tested and ripped apart by Saddam Hussein, his capriciousness and his wars. The level of trust is still low and a society with a low level of trust is a weak society. You cannot build a strong society directly. It takes time.
Below – Iraq geography is like the moon with more gravity.
Environment
We often take environmental services for granted. It is like good health. You don’t miss it until it is gone. In the U.S. we suffered through the dust bowl years when we abused our environment beyond its capacity. There are other examples, but the dust bowl is appropriate because that is what Iraq suffers. Dust storms are part of the natural arid environment, but the fantastic dust storms I saw are the result of long term human degradation. We started to help rebuild this infrastructure.
Human Capital
The most important part of infrastructure is human capital. These are the technical skills, work habits, managerial capacity, entrepreneurial dexterity and even the good health of the people themselves.
Human capital is harder to build and more important than physical capital. My father was in the Army Air Corps during World War II. They bombed German cities to rubble. When I went to Germany as a student, he asked me if they had rebuilt. It seemed to me like a silly question, but it wasn’t. Many countries that were underdeveloped twenty years ago are still underdeveloped today. Germany was completely devastated in 1945, yet ten years later the western half at least was among the world’s most prosperous countries. People build and run things. That simple fact is often overlooked by those who think they can just buy or give prosperity.
Or think of the more pop example. In the old television show MacGyver, the lead character would go into a situation with almost no tools. He would make what he needed out of simple kitchen ingredients or thing he found lying around. This is the power of human intelligence in real (Germany) and fictional examples.
Iraq suffered mightily from the destruction of its human capital. Millions of its best and brightest citizens fled the country during the decades of Saddam’s tyranny. Many more never acquired the skills of a modern society because of the mismanagement and underinvestment in the education system and lack of opportunities. Iraq during the dictatorship went from being one of the most skilled and literate countries in the region to being one of the worst. Finally, the recent war and unstable conditions made refugees of millions, many have still not returned. This is the longest term and most difficult problem that must be addressed. Money can buy the beginning of a solution, but only time can bring it to fruition.
Let me give you some specific examples of each of the categories. I want this part to be conversational. Please feel free to ask questions as I talk.
