CBS has an interview with Jared Cohen, the 27-year-old who works for the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff who was responsible for Twitter delaying its scheduled maintenance during the Iran protests.

According to the New York Times, Cohen:

“e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.

“The request, made to a Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, is yet another new-media milestone: the recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country.”

Cohen joined the State Department in 2006 after graduating from Stanford University and attending Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

Regarding his request of Twitter during the Iran protests, Cohen said, “We don’t tell the private sector what to do but what we can do is provide situational awareness. And after providing that situational awareness Twitter agreed to delay their scheduled maintenance.”

Cohen said that integrating technology as a tool has become a priority of the State Department since he arrived. And he also said that youth around the world are starting to understand its potential, including young people in Colombia who organized, via Facebook, a protest against the country’s guerilla group, FARC, and others in the Middle East who mobilized in the name of human rights, good governance and technology.

“Technology is really leveling the playing field. So in Mumbai the largest movement, anti-terror movement following the attacks in Mumbai, was organized by a 12-year-old using social media. And when I asked him, ‘Why did you use technology?’ he said,’ “Because no one would listen to a 12-year-old otherwise.’”

He has traveled widely for his job and one of his current focuses is Afghanistan, including bringing mobile banking to the country.

“The more a country is categorized as a developing nation, the more infrastructure challenges it has, the more censorship challenges it has, the more innovation it sparks on the part of the population. And so that’s the innovation I’m excited about.”

The full interview can be viewed here.

You can also follow Cohen on Twitter: @jaredcohen.

Cohen also has a piece in the Huffington Post today discussing the term “social media.” He doesn’t like that term because he thinks it’s outdated and doesn’t reflect that people use technology for more than just accruing Facebook fans.

“‘Social media’ is merely a way to describe new tools in an old and narrow paradigm where we measure success by how many people are reached. This lends itself nicely to competitive obsessions over who has more Facebook fans, whose blog gets the greatest number of hits, whose video goes the most viral, and who has the largest number of Twitter followers. And who are the people who focus on these things? It is those who like to use the technology as opposed to those who need it.

“I just returned from the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit in Mexico City, which is the world’s only event that brings together young leaders who emerged from virtually nowhere to achieve remarkable grassroots impact by using technology as a tool….

“[A] key theme of the Alliance of Youth Movements was the use of technology as a tool for staying one step ahead of the media, which was of particular importance for groups in places like Iran and Moldova where people using technology to organize needed media to report after they were in the streets, not before.

“The Moldova case study is of particular importance, not just because the tools enabled people to go to the streets in protest and challenge an election result, but also because they achieved the tangible impact of new elections and a new government. Moldova’s leading Twitter revolutionary told the tool’s founder that their success at overturning the election results in April had less to do with how many people visited websites, followed them on Twitter, or were fans of their Facebook page, and more to do with connecting people to resources in real time while the “social media” sites were blocked. She explained how in the midst of massive blockage, one guy with only 37 Twitter followers (as opposed to Ashton Kushner who has 4 million) used five characters (#pman), named after the main square where the demonstrations were to take place, to enable people on the street to mobilize in real time through SMS and to let the world know what was happening….

“In this networked century, where access to technology is increasing exponentially, almost everybody is reachable. But more importantly, almost everybody has the ability to connect. This new ability to connect is leveling the playing field and breaking down previous age, gender, socioeconomic, and circumstantial barriers to who can emerge as a leader, activist, or grassroots agent for change. The power of technology today will be determined not by web traffic and viewership, but by its ability to strengthen and more importantly facilitate connections in real time.

“Isn’t connection technologies–or ConnectTech–a term far better suited for the 21st century?”