Globalization and the information revolution are creating new community relationships that build upon, democratize, and magnify existing social frameworks.

The network allows ideas to compete and confers a competitive advantage on those most able to share, trade, and receive the most relevant information.

State Department officials may look gleefully at other foreign ministries and note that the United States is far ahead of its perceived counterparts in responding to globalization and the information revolution. These officials, however, do not recognize that competition is not coming from other states, but from other forms of organization altogether.

Power today is as much about promoting ideas and norms of behavior as it is about projecting military might.

By disaggregating the state foreign policy function into its component parts, it is possible to identify where greater integration into networks is feasible and desirable, and where the hierarchical structures of accountability can and should remain intact.

The very term "foreign policy" attempts to differentiate between "domestic" and "foreign" in ways that make less sense in a globalized network environment. Foreign policy is not foreign. It is global -- both domestic and foreign simultaneously.

The primary impediment to networked engagement is the culture of insularity and secrecy that pervades US foreign policy institutions.

Accountability should not be purchased at the cost of ignorance.

Understanding control as the ability to influence values and standards in a decentralized system, not as the need to maintain absolute authority over every component of the policy process, will pose a fundamental challenge to governments. The networked global environment of the information revolution, however, not only distributes control, but also punishes those who attempt to hoard information and rewards those who share it. In the Information Age, you have to give up control in order to get it back, but it returns in a different form. Old control was about hierarchy, monopoly, and aggregation. New control is about flexibility, decentralization, and networked specialization.

Open dialogue and the sharing of ideas should be goals in themselves. The United States must support and facilitate such dialogue, even when it is critical of the United States.

Conscious efforts must be made to shift government institutional culture from a focus on secrecy, information hoarding, and hierarchy to a system of openness, innovation, and information sharing.

Governments must change the way they do business to make their best voices heard in a networked world.

Network Diplomacy

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the US government rolled out an arsenal of heavy weaponry; all were arm's-length public diplomacy in a region that values people and faces, not facts and figures. While the United States focused on presentation of policy, the audience focused on policy, period.

Public diplomacy during the Cold War was about bipolar interests, information volume, control, and separate audiences. Public diplomacy was a product.

But the Cold War information strategy is not working today. The more globalization spreads, the more culture becomes the new frontier for defining identities and allegiances.

Today's communication interactivity has transformed public diplomacy into a process.

Fighting information battles over the airwaves cannot win hearts and minds; building communication bridges and forging a network can.

Yesterday, the communicator with the most information won. Today, the one with the most extensive and strongest network wins.

Disseminating information is spam, networking is strategic.

Rather than using research to find the right messages, Washington should attempt to learn how people are connected in order to develop new links. In the future, reliable databases will be more valuable than opinion polls.

In the global communication era, to effectively maneuver the political landscape requires networking as the new paradigm of strategic U.S. public diplomacy.

The Network Paradigm of Strategic Public Diplomacy

If you liked PostSecret, you may also like Barbara Kruger. Here's a description from a gallery of Barbara Kruger's work:

The juxtaposition of word and image in Barbara Kruger's highly recognizable work is derived from twelve years as a designer and photo editor for Conde Nast publications. Short, pithy caption-like copy is scattered over fragmented and enlarged photographs appropriated from various media. Usually declarative or accusatory in tone, these phrases posit an opposition between the pronouns "you" and "we," which satirically refer to "men" and "women." These humorous works suspend the viewer between the fascination of the image and the indictment of the text while reminding us that language and its use within culture to construct and maintina proverbs, jobs, jokes, myths, and history reinforce the interests and perspective of those who control it.

There's another gallery:

Barbara Kruger's on going project is to provoke questions about power and its effect on the human condition: to investigate the way power is constructed, used and abused. In her works, which have become the demonstrative visual icons of the 1980s and 1990s, power is interrogated and interpreted through the social, economic and political arrangements which motor the life impulses of love, hate, sex and death.

Kruger was also featured in the PBS documentary art:21.

It's our pleasure to disgust you is in the permanent collection at MOCA in Los Angeles.

In 2000, some of her art was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Here are some prints from the gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum:

We, Longer, Heard, Seen, And, No, Not, Be

A Slate article from July 2000 begins:

Barbara Kruger comes as close as anybody can to being the official artist of American consumerism.

An interview with Barbara Kruger:

By using familiar images and text from modern advertising, Kruger forcefully exposes the misleading and aggressive lies of pop media. Her works involve humor and irony, though they are often disturbing at the same time. Kruger gained her "fluency and comfort with pictures and words" from working as a graphic designer for magazines before she became an artist in the mid-'80s.

Barbara Kruger

When did Darwinian evolution begin?

Darwinian evolution did not go back to the beginning of life. In early times, the process called Horizontal Gene Transfer, the sharing of genes between unrelated species, was prevalent. It becomes more prevalent, the further back you go in time.

In this golden age of pre-Darwinian life, horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not exist.

But then, one evil day, a cell separated itself from the community and refused to share. The Darwinian interlude had begun.

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. Cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change, and we are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal.

The Darwinian Interlude, by Freeman Dyson

Here is a strange site. Sometimes funny sometimes sad. People send in their secrets on postcards they have made. Check it out.

PostSecret

There are over 8 billion web pages. Most of them suck.

Outfoxed uses your network of trusted friends and experts to help you find the good stuff and avoid the bad. (And a lot more, too.) For a quick overview, read Outfoxed in a nutshell.

* Become a beta-tester.
* What are people saying about Outfoxed?
* Compare with existing systems.
* The documentation section is growing fast.
* Outfoxed tastes del.icio.us

Outfoxed is open-source, open-standard, de-centralized, and free of charge.

Outfoxed | Personalize your internet.

MARSHALL McLUHAN waited for the reporter's lips, mine, in fact, to stop moving, leaned back in his seat in the rear garden of that year's (1967) restaurant of the century, Lutéce, looked up at a brilliant blue New York-in-May sky, lifted a forefinger and twirled it above his head in a loop that took in the 30-, 40-, 50-story buildings that rose all around and said, apropos of nothing anybody at the table had been talking about:

"Of course, a city like New York is obsolete. People will no longer concentrate in great urban centers for the purpose of work. New York will become a Disneyland, a pleasure dome ..."

At that stage of his mutation from unknown Canadian English teacher to communications swami and international celebrity, cryptic, Delphic, baffling, preposterous predictions were McLuhan's trump suit. Intellectuals argued over whether he was a genius or a dingbat. If the case of New York is any proof, however, the man was a pure genius.

Pleasure Principles, by Tom Wolfe

Is there perhaps a hint of irony in William Safire's On Language column for today's Times?

To retract, from the Latin for "to draw back," is directed to a specific statement more than a body of work. The most famous retraction this year was made by Newsweek magazine after it apologized for a portion of an article alleging that an internal military investigation had uncovered an instance of desecration of the Koran. The article was seized upon by an anti-American Pakistani to trigger demonstrations that cost 17 lives.

Meanwhile, only pages away, Frank Rich directly contradicts Safire's account:

In the most recent example, all the president's men slimed and intimidated Newsweek by accusing it of being an accessory to 17 deaths for its errant Koran story; led by Scott McClellan, they said it was unthinkable that any American guard could be disrespectful of Islam's holy book. These neo-Colsons easily drowned out Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, both of whom said that the riots that led to the 17 deaths were unrelated to Newsweek. Then came the pièce de résistance of Nixon mimicry: a Pentagon report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards was released two weeks after the Newsweek imbroglio, at 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, to assure it would miss the evening newscasts and be buried in the Memorial Day weekend's little-read papers.

It seems clear to me that one of these men is "in error." I wonder if there will be a correction? Or would it be a retraction? You be the justice. Er, I mean, judge.

If You're Simultaneously Right and Wrong, Is a Retraction Really Necessary?

In a curious twist, Wind River's latest advertising campaign evokes 20th-century agitprop style.

This week, Wind River introduces a revolutionary suite of products, services and partnerships to enable companies to develop device software faster, better, at lower cost and more reliably. The hero of the revolution is Device Software Optimization.

You might also be interested in a new graphic history of the Wobblies.

Wind River Propaganda?

Acidus gives Elonka a run for the money. Way to go Acidus!

How scary. And how refreshing.

Make, a new quarterly put out by O'Reilly Media, is a throwback to an earlier time, before personal computers, to the prehistory of geekiness - the age of how-to manuals for clever boys, from the 1920's to the 50's.

The technology has changed, but not the creative impulse. Make's first issue, out in February, explained how to take aerial photographs with a kite, a disposable camera and a rig of Popsicle sticks, rubber bands and Silly Putty. It also showed how to build a video-camera stabilizer - a Steadicam, basically - with $14 worth of steel pipes, bolts and washers; how to boost a laptop computer's Wi-Fi signal with foil from an Indian take-out restaurant; and how to read credit card magnetic stripes with a device made with mail-order parts and a glue gun.

Congratulations to Acidus on being the first MemeStreams user to make the New York Times op-ed page. And on a Sunday, no less! (14:59, 14:58, 14:57, ...)

A New Magazine's Rebellious Credo: Void the Warranty!