Very pleased to report that my latest article "The Socially Networked Future of International Diplomacy" has just been published by the Prince Arthur Herald in Montreal. Click here to read it.
Always appreciate feedback. Hope you enjoy! - R.O.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Friday, August 12, 2011
The Socially Networked Future of International Diplomacy
By: Robert D. Onley
In a world enveloped by unsolvable crises, national leaders of the Boomer Generation continue to practice politics and diplomacy using methods little changed over the centuries. Responding to their stasis, a new flock of 20-something student leaders – the “Facebook Generation” – are spearheading efforts that will forever reshape the dynamics of international diplomacy and global governance.
This stark contrast in methods was seen as one Middle Eastern government after another fell to popular uprisings this spring. Arab leaders who had viewed Facebook and Twitter as mere "websites" were blindsided by the organizing and unifying power of social networks.
But the inherent ability of these networks to mobilize people into action came as no surprise to the Facebook Generation, whose young leaders deployed the networks' tools as digital weapons and brought down the dictators.
While the Arab Spring will be remembered for the Internet’s effectiveness in instigating short-term ground-level political change, the long-term transformation of international diplomacy and the networked future of global governance was on display at the 2011 G8/G20 Youth Summit, held in Paris, France in early June.
At the Youth Summit, aspiring world leaders from the most economically powerful nations on earth met each other, exchanged ideas, and debated serious global problems in a professional, high-profile setting. Unlike the upbringings of their forebears, these young leaders are digitally connected, instantaneously communicating, and constantly updating each other on their personal, political and educational progress.
Critically, they have established permanent online networks of highly engaged, driven students who seek to bring change to the world, and who remain connected long after the Youth Summit is over. It is this transformative reality that is far more potent than the Arab Spring protests; a diplomatic sea change which will have deep ramifications for the future global order.
Renaissance
Paris, June 2011.
160 university students from all over the world gather at the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris for the 2011 G8/G20 Youth Summit. The event, organized by a French non-profit initiative aptly called 'Youth Diplomacy', was planned entirely by undergraduate and graduate students.
The 5th annual Youth Summit sought to cultivate global dialogue between youth leaders through intensive negotiations over international affairs. Among the keynote speakers opening the event were the newly appointed Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, as well as an address by Christophe de Margerie, the President and CEO of Total S.A., one of the world's largest oil companies. Adding a layer of geopolitical credibility, Youth Diplomacy secured formal sponsorship for the Youth Summit from the Office of the French President Nicholas Sarkozy.
Beyond simply mimicking their respective national government's policies, the organizers encouraged delegates to propose their own innovative solutions. By week’s end the delegates had collaboratively drafted a consensus “Final Communiqué” of realistic proposals, a 54-page document which was then presented to the French Presidency and the actual leaders of the G8.
A Universe of Change
While international youth leadership events are nothing new, unlike any other era, social networking websites allow today's brightest youth to continue their dialogue, share their knowledge, and interact together on a daily basis. All of this is happening now, well before any of them enter into positions of real political power.
Critically, these up-and-coming world leaders understand that the influence of street-level social unrest only goes so far. What is needed is the genuine decision-making authority that comes with political office. These aspiring statesmen and women recognize that combining the organizational capability of social networks with their global networks of fellow young leaders will altogether reshape the future of global power and diplomacy, by equipping leaders with extraordinary communication tools.
The result is that social networks will soon become, in and of themselves, an additional lever of diplomatic power to world leaders. Tomorrow’s leaders, who today are establishing genuine international relationships through simulated diplomatic environments, will be able to leverage relationships from their youth that they cultivated over the coming decades.
Think about that for a moment. What if Barack Obama and Muammar Gaddafi had met 25 years ago and had been Facebook friends ever since?
Knowledge as power
The likelihood of such a scenario may be slim, but the plausible by-products of a such a relationship are as follows.
Tomorrow's world leaders will know more about each other than ever before. Like no other time, regular users of Facebook are provided – free of charge – with a deluge of personal, social and educational information about anyone they have ever added as a friend on the network. In many cases, this information is available for everyone that they have effectively ever met. (If you have added someone on Facebook that you only met once, raise your hand.)
Whether it is the latest degree, achievement, or new employer, Facebook allows for the completely legal “monitoring” of friends’ professional developments. By using Facebook just as the typical user does, sharing periodic life updates, Facebook Friends can know effectively everything that you, and concurrently, they, are doing and have done.
Intelligence briefing notes, the product of exhaustive research and once an indispensable primer for international negotiations with rival diplomats, could wind up becoming redundant relics of the pre-social-networked era of diplomacy.
Accordingly, relationships will be nurtured outside of regular diplomatic circles. Delegates at the 2011 G8/G20 Youth Summit in Paris warmly greeted returnees from the previous year's Summit in Vancouver. Like old friends, they had kept abreast of each other’s latest news, published articles and global travels – all through Facebook and Twitter.
Many of today's young leaders, including almost all of those who aspire to political office, are members of the jet-setting, globe-trotting crowd. Some delegates in Paris had even met up in far-off locales during the year in between Youth Summits – yet another externality facilitated by cheap travel and immediate communication tools.
While other delegates had not physically seen each other in over a year, the steady communal, ongoing dialogue enabled by social networks helped create a comfort and familiarity that only deepened the genuineness of their now renewed personal interactions in Paris.
Mental, digital shift
Empowering all of this is the fact that Facebook is effectively hard-wired into the day-to-day existence of tomorrow’s future leaders. Teenagers and 20-somethings possess a fundamental grasp of how Facebook “participates” in their daily lives.
Facebook’s all-pervasiveness is manifest in the hyper-connected reality of perpetual communication with --and information from-- anyone they have ever known. The social networks’ infiltration into the lives of the 'Facebook Generation' is due primarily to that fact that the Generation has literally grown up with the unprecedented power of instantaneous digital interaction.
For today's crop of young leaders, Facebook launched at the beginning of their undergraduate studies, allowing the sharpest among them to utilize the Groups feature to great effect when organizing campus events, clubs and parties.
But it is the omnipresence and ease-of-use of these technologies that will also enhance international dialogue in the near future. Facebook and Twitter are apps on every smartphone, and this will increasingly be the case as smartphones inevitably become ‘normal phones’. Facebook’s recently released Messenger app for iPhone and Android allows any user, anywhere in the world, to immediately contact anyone they have in their social network. And unlike international text messaging, Messenger’s chat feature is completely free.
Beyond Facebook, Twitter’s unique ability to #hashtag ideas, Tweet @ other users and their followers (thus bringing the Tweet to the attention of the 'targeted' user) is an instant accountability mechanism that today’s Boomer leaders are late to recognize, but one that tomorrow's leaders innately grasp. As these websites evolve and expand, so too will their abilities.
Hacker's delight
There are undeniably serious concerns regarding the security and privacy of Facebook, the legitimacy of social news outlets like Twitter, and their overall vulnerability to hacking. Recent scandals and security breaches have emphasized this, most notably the abhorrent hacking by Rupert Murdoch's "News of the World" paper.
However, the social networks are no more vulnerable than any other website. In fact, neither has ever been publicly hacked or catastrophically exploited. Broadly, every website on the Internet is subject to potential attack. The ongoing efforts of the hacking group ‘Anonymous’ to knock out the websites of major transnational corporations emphasize this ruthless reality.
Except given that ‘Anonymous’ concurrently supports opposition movements around the globe by hacking “enemy” government websites, it seems unlikely that the world’s highest profile hacking group would target the very social networks that pump oppressed protestors with the lifeblood needed for their movements to survive.
Move Beyond Sharing, into Shaping
The challenge for Facebook and Twitter is to move beyond merely lumping people into an interconnected universe filled with massive Groups and Events. Simply providing pages with common interests does little to push regular users to do anything more than read articles, watch videos and look at photo albums.
But Facebook can and must create legitimate social change, simply because it has the capability to instigate genuine discussion on global issues. What is required is motivated thinking.
In order to evolve beyond merely 'sharing', users should have the ability to opt-in to a "Dialogue" channel, one where "Strangers" (not Friends) with similar interests all over the world can comment on identical articles, ideas and proposals which have been mutually shared by several different people.
Often incredibly insightful comments and ideas on shared articles are forever “lost” on the Walls of Facebook users, whose ideas will never escape the restrictive confines of their profile's individual security settings. These lost ideas represent a tragedy for the progression of collective global discourse, and are untapped resources in the pursuit of tangible, results-oriented dialogue.
OneMidEast.org is an excellent example of a platform for constructive cross-cultural debate, featuring opposing views on contentious issues, presented on equal footing. Google's recently launched "Ideas" think-do-tank (in Google parlance) is another effort at encouraging discussion on intractable, real world matters.
The great advantage Facebook has in developing a similar platform, of course, is that it can exploit its exponentially larger userbase. With so many deeply troubling global problems requiring immediate action (just read the news), Facebook's competitive advantage cannot be wasted by simply staying complacent as an outlet for sharing silly YouTube videos and gawking at friends’ party pictures. Future generations cry out that Facebook’s 750,000,000+ users do far better than this with their time.
Facebook has already invaded the entire Internet, allowing users to log-in on practically every website imaginable, letting users "Like" pages and comment publicly on news articles using their personal profile. Such an unrivalled, ever-present platform for constructive communication with strangers can be taken a full step further, through the establishment a permanent think-tank structure for global dialogue, one that is operated within and populated by the entire Facebook universe and all of its shared content.
Only then can the overwhelmingly inane, narcissistic nature of Facebook today, be overhauled into a substantial, altruistic vehicle for shaping solutions to the myriad issues plaguing the planet.
Start now
Indeed with great power comes great responsibility. Possessing the largest, most influential websites in the world, Mr. Zuckerberg and his friends at Twitter and Google are burdened with, and challenged to begin, establishing a positive, lasting legacy using the very behemoths they now control.
Tomorrow's future leaders are ready to join them in this effort, today. Indeed, as the G8/G20 Youth Summit showcases, they have begun this dialogue by establishing influential networks of student leaders who are already initiating change. These young minds have been raised in an era where technological limits simply do not exist.
One spark and one Tweet started a revolution that is still sweeping the Middle East. The capacity to achieve has never been greater. Let’s get to work.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert D. Onley represented Canada as the Minister of Defence at the 2011 G8/G20 Youth Summit. Robert is a UTSC graduate (Honours Bachelor of Arts, 2009) and a freelance writer in Toronto. He is the President of the Students' Law Society at the University of Windsor, Faculty of Law. Follow @RobertOnley on Twitter.
In a world enveloped by unsolvable crises, national leaders of the Boomer Generation continue to practice politics and diplomacy using methods little changed over the centuries. Responding to their stasis, a new flock of 20-something student leaders – the “Facebook Generation” – are spearheading efforts that will forever reshape the dynamics of international diplomacy and global governance.
This stark contrast in methods was seen as one Middle Eastern government after another fell to popular uprisings this spring. Arab leaders who had viewed Facebook and Twitter as mere "websites" were blindsided by the organizing and unifying power of social networks.
But the inherent ability of these networks to mobilize people into action came as no surprise to the Facebook Generation, whose young leaders deployed the networks' tools as digital weapons and brought down the dictators.
While the Arab Spring will be remembered for the Internet’s effectiveness in instigating short-term ground-level political change, the long-term transformation of international diplomacy and the networked future of global governance was on display at the 2011 G8/G20 Youth Summit, held in Paris, France in early June.
At the Youth Summit, aspiring world leaders from the most economically powerful nations on earth met each other, exchanged ideas, and debated serious global problems in a professional, high-profile setting. Unlike the upbringings of their forebears, these young leaders are digitally connected, instantaneously communicating, and constantly updating each other on their personal, political and educational progress.
Critically, they have established permanent online networks of highly engaged, driven students who seek to bring change to the world, and who remain connected long after the Youth Summit is over. It is this transformative reality that is far more potent than the Arab Spring protests; a diplomatic sea change which will have deep ramifications for the future global order.
 |
| Chambre de commerce et d'industrie de Paris |
Paris, June 2011.
160 university students from all over the world gather at the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris for the 2011 G8/G20 Youth Summit. The event, organized by a French non-profit initiative aptly called 'Youth Diplomacy', was planned entirely by undergraduate and graduate students.
The 5th annual Youth Summit sought to cultivate global dialogue between youth leaders through intensive negotiations over international affairs. Among the keynote speakers opening the event were the newly appointed Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, as well as an address by Christophe de Margerie, the President and CEO of Total S.A., one of the world's largest oil companies. Adding a layer of geopolitical credibility, Youth Diplomacy secured formal sponsorship for the Youth Summit from the Office of the French President Nicholas Sarkozy.
Beyond simply mimicking their respective national government's policies, the organizers encouraged delegates to propose their own innovative solutions. By week’s end the delegates had collaboratively drafted a consensus “Final Communiqué” of realistic proposals, a 54-page document which was then presented to the French Presidency and the actual leaders of the G8.
A Universe of Change
While international youth leadership events are nothing new, unlike any other era, social networking websites allow today's brightest youth to continue their dialogue, share their knowledge, and interact together on a daily basis. All of this is happening now, well before any of them enter into positions of real political power.
Critically, these up-and-coming world leaders understand that the influence of street-level social unrest only goes so far. What is needed is the genuine decision-making authority that comes with political office. These aspiring statesmen and women recognize that combining the organizational capability of social networks with their global networks of fellow young leaders will altogether reshape the future of global power and diplomacy, by equipping leaders with extraordinary communication tools.
The result is that social networks will soon become, in and of themselves, an additional lever of diplomatic power to world leaders. Tomorrow’s leaders, who today are establishing genuine international relationships through simulated diplomatic environments, will be able to leverage relationships from their youth that they cultivated over the coming decades.
Think about that for a moment. What if Barack Obama and Muammar Gaddafi had met 25 years ago and had been Facebook friends ever since?
The likelihood of such a scenario may be slim, but the plausible by-products of a such a relationship are as follows.
Tomorrow's world leaders will know more about each other than ever before. Like no other time, regular users of Facebook are provided – free of charge – with a deluge of personal, social and educational information about anyone they have ever added as a friend on the network. In many cases, this information is available for everyone that they have effectively ever met. (If you have added someone on Facebook that you only met once, raise your hand.)
Whether it is the latest degree, achievement, or new employer, Facebook allows for the completely legal “monitoring” of friends’ professional developments. By using Facebook just as the typical user does, sharing periodic life updates, Facebook Friends can know effectively everything that you, and concurrently, they, are doing and have done.
Intelligence briefing notes, the product of exhaustive research and once an indispensable primer for international negotiations with rival diplomats, could wind up becoming redundant relics of the pre-social-networked era of diplomacy.
Accordingly, relationships will be nurtured outside of regular diplomatic circles. Delegates at the 2011 G8/G20 Youth Summit in Paris warmly greeted returnees from the previous year's Summit in Vancouver. Like old friends, they had kept abreast of each other’s latest news, published articles and global travels – all through Facebook and Twitter.
Many of today's young leaders, including almost all of those who aspire to political office, are members of the jet-setting, globe-trotting crowd. Some delegates in Paris had even met up in far-off locales during the year in between Youth Summits – yet another externality facilitated by cheap travel and immediate communication tools.
While other delegates had not physically seen each other in over a year, the steady communal, ongoing dialogue enabled by social networks helped create a comfort and familiarity that only deepened the genuineness of their now renewed personal interactions in Paris.
Empowering all of this is the fact that Facebook is effectively hard-wired into the day-to-day existence of tomorrow’s future leaders. Teenagers and 20-somethings possess a fundamental grasp of how Facebook “participates” in their daily lives.
Facebook’s all-pervasiveness is manifest in the hyper-connected reality of perpetual communication with --and information from-- anyone they have ever known. The social networks’ infiltration into the lives of the 'Facebook Generation' is due primarily to that fact that the Generation has literally grown up with the unprecedented power of instantaneous digital interaction.
For today's crop of young leaders, Facebook launched at the beginning of their undergraduate studies, allowing the sharpest among them to utilize the Groups feature to great effect when organizing campus events, clubs and parties.
But it is the omnipresence and ease-of-use of these technologies that will also enhance international dialogue in the near future. Facebook and Twitter are apps on every smartphone, and this will increasingly be the case as smartphones inevitably become ‘normal phones’. Facebook’s recently released Messenger app for iPhone and Android allows any user, anywhere in the world, to immediately contact anyone they have in their social network. And unlike international text messaging, Messenger’s chat feature is completely free.
Beyond Facebook, Twitter’s unique ability to #hashtag ideas, Tweet @ other users and their followers (thus bringing the Tweet to the attention of the 'targeted' user) is an instant accountability mechanism that today’s Boomer leaders are late to recognize, but one that tomorrow's leaders innately grasp. As these websites evolve and expand, so too will their abilities.
 |
| Gala dinner at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris |
There are undeniably serious concerns regarding the security and privacy of Facebook, the legitimacy of social news outlets like Twitter, and their overall vulnerability to hacking. Recent scandals and security breaches have emphasized this, most notably the abhorrent hacking by Rupert Murdoch's "News of the World" paper.
However, the social networks are no more vulnerable than any other website. In fact, neither has ever been publicly hacked or catastrophically exploited. Broadly, every website on the Internet is subject to potential attack. The ongoing efforts of the hacking group ‘Anonymous’ to knock out the websites of major transnational corporations emphasize this ruthless reality.
Except given that ‘Anonymous’ concurrently supports opposition movements around the globe by hacking “enemy” government websites, it seems unlikely that the world’s highest profile hacking group would target the very social networks that pump oppressed protestors with the lifeblood needed for their movements to survive.
Move Beyond Sharing, into Shaping
The challenge for Facebook and Twitter is to move beyond merely lumping people into an interconnected universe filled with massive Groups and Events. Simply providing pages with common interests does little to push regular users to do anything more than read articles, watch videos and look at photo albums.
But Facebook can and must create legitimate social change, simply because it has the capability to instigate genuine discussion on global issues. What is required is motivated thinking.
In order to evolve beyond merely 'sharing', users should have the ability to opt-in to a "Dialogue" channel, one where "Strangers" (not Friends) with similar interests all over the world can comment on identical articles, ideas and proposals which have been mutually shared by several different people.
Often incredibly insightful comments and ideas on shared articles are forever “lost” on the Walls of Facebook users, whose ideas will never escape the restrictive confines of their profile's individual security settings. These lost ideas represent a tragedy for the progression of collective global discourse, and are untapped resources in the pursuit of tangible, results-oriented dialogue.
OneMidEast.org is an excellent example of a platform for constructive cross-cultural debate, featuring opposing views on contentious issues, presented on equal footing. Google's recently launched "Ideas" think-do-tank (in Google parlance) is another effort at encouraging discussion on intractable, real world matters.
The great advantage Facebook has in developing a similar platform, of course, is that it can exploit its exponentially larger userbase. With so many deeply troubling global problems requiring immediate action (just read the news), Facebook's competitive advantage cannot be wasted by simply staying complacent as an outlet for sharing silly YouTube videos and gawking at friends’ party pictures. Future generations cry out that Facebook’s 750,000,000+ users do far better than this with their time.
Facebook has already invaded the entire Internet, allowing users to log-in on practically every website imaginable, letting users "Like" pages and comment publicly on news articles using their personal profile. Such an unrivalled, ever-present platform for constructive communication with strangers can be taken a full step further, through the establishment a permanent think-tank structure for global dialogue, one that is operated within and populated by the entire Facebook universe and all of its shared content.
Only then can the overwhelmingly inane, narcissistic nature of Facebook today, be overhauled into a substantial, altruistic vehicle for shaping solutions to the myriad issues plaguing the planet.
Start now
Indeed with great power comes great responsibility. Possessing the largest, most influential websites in the world, Mr. Zuckerberg and his friends at Twitter and Google are burdened with, and challenged to begin, establishing a positive, lasting legacy using the very behemoths they now control.
Tomorrow's future leaders are ready to join them in this effort, today. Indeed, as the G8/G20 Youth Summit showcases, they have begun this dialogue by establishing influential networks of student leaders who are already initiating change. These young minds have been raised in an era where technological limits simply do not exist.
One spark and one Tweet started a revolution that is still sweeping the Middle East. The capacity to achieve has never been greater. Let’s get to work.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert D. Onley represented Canada as the Minister of Defence at the 2011 G8/G20 Youth Summit. Robert is a UTSC graduate (Honours Bachelor of Arts, 2009) and a freelance writer in Toronto. He is the President of the Students' Law Society at the University of Windsor, Faculty of Law. Follow @RobertOnley on Twitter.
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