Did Twitter spur the recent Iranian protests, or is its role in the nascent revolution there little more than hype? How can new media technologies be used to bring people together from different cultures and maybe even foster peace?
These are questions raised at a conference sponsored today by George Washington University's Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication marking the 50th anniversary of the famous Kitchen Debate between then-Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev. The conference, which is being streamed live by the Huffington Post, looks at at how new media technologies can be used to improve the public diplomacy efforts of the United States and other countries in an increasingly globalized world.
Our coverage of the conference begins with a talk by visionary thinker Clay Shirky, author of "Here Comes Everybody: The power of organizing without organizations." Shirky will talk about how to establish connections between the U.S. and the rest of the world through new media networks. Your browser may not support display of this image. The conference also features creative ways in which the Web might be used to foster public diplomacy efforts, including the concept for a new cross-cultural multi-player online game that foregrounds collaboration and diplomacy, created especially for the conference by a Duke University team led by Timothy Lenoir, a leading scholar and leader in bio-informatics and game-making. The final panel of new media thinkers and practitioners - from business, government and the scholarly community-discuss how these ideas might form a new strategy for U.S. public diplomacy in the 21st century.
WATCH the conference below (click QuickTime logo to begin stream):
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