iDiplomacy’s new media panel Monday included Adam Conner, Facebook’s DC associate manager for privacy and global public policy, Price Floyd, principal deputy assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs, James Fowler, author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, Josh Klein, hacker of social systems, computer networks, institutions and animal behavior and Peter Marx, vice president of production and technology for Mattel.

Here are some highlights from the panelists as well as the other attendees:

Price Floyd:

“I’m supposed to be ‘the voice’ for the Defense Department and one of the reasons I wanted to be on this panel was to reinforce the fact that that idea, if it ever actually existed, is dread. I do think in the past there were a limited number of spokespeople . . . for national security issues – the White House spokesman, [Department of Defense, Department of State], but because of technology, because of social media – cell phones, blackberries, all those things – there are now tens of thousands of spokespeople, messengers, communicators at the Defense Department alone.”

Adam Conner:

“One of the things that we [are] completely honest about at Facebook is that the explosion of social gaming took us by surprise…. The idea that 60 million people log in and tend virtual farms now [on Farmville] – that’s more farmers in a virtual world by a factor of millions more than there are in the United States of in real life….

It’s not just about the in-point. So maybe only X amount of users have a Facebook account. But if you arm them with information they can then spread to other people who might not have Facebook or text messages or things like that. A good example was in Iran, where when Facebook service was blocked, when Twitter was blocked, when cell phones were blocked, people were running up to rooftops and yelling from the rooftops information. And so the idea is that information doesn’t end at an in-point. It is yet another channel to get it out there.”

James Fowler:

 “I fell out of touch with these people I had a close relationship with in Peace Corps. I think that if the government had some way to keep Peace Corps volunteers in touch with the people that they form these relationships with you [could] keep that channel open. And I’m assuming for Fulbrights the same thing, right? Some of these Fulbright scholars have to go back to places that don’t have conductivity.

And so maybe that’s money well spent – is that yo,u just keep the lines open so it’s not just that you’re promoting a message about the policies the government wants but you’re promoting conductivity so that these people can express their own opinions and you can actually receive from them inputs that allow us to adjust our policies so it’s more in line with what people in other countries want. Because a lot of times it’s in our interest to promote their interest.”

Josh Klein:

“In response to, ‘What can you tailor?’, I don’t believe you can tailor the message anymore but you can tailor the opportunity. For example, my mom tends to be – she doesn’t want to interfere, it’s hard to draw her out and what not so I gave her my IM account so now she can get me anytime. My dad’s very verbose so I gave him my SMS so he can only send me 140 character chunks. This is giving your audience the opportunity to interact the way that you want them to and guide the discussion that way.”

Peter Marx:

“We [Mattel] are using social media in a whole variety of different ways to allow people to connect with each other. They’re kids, so there’s moderation issues – unless their parents have agreed to it, it has to be indirect sort of messaging. Boys don’t message directly anyway, they win a game and post a high score. Girls are willing to chat but again, because they’re children, there has to be moderation, their parents have to accept things like direct chat and all the rest of it in order for it to work online….

What you’re really doing is you’re giving tools to a community of people to basically interact and communicate with each other. You can think of children in a way as being – I hate to say it, but [a] slightly disadvantaged audience. They don’t have cell phones, they don’t have credit cards, they don’t have the ability to – kids today are very controlled within what activities that they can go do…. You don’t see a lot of kids running home from school at the age of seven like you might have not that many decades ago.

If you think of online as a place where we are giving kids the ability to choose more to do things, more what they want to do and also communicate with whom they want to communicate and using social media as a way of having them interact and engage more with their friends or activities or toys, and eventually there are family things too – it may seem a little bit distant from the of discussion of government, Darfur, and Iran and Afghanistan and all the rest of it but as a microcosm there’s actually not that much difference.”

Joseph Assi:
“There’s a game called Counter-Strike. If you know it it’s about fighting – there’s a terrorist group and counterterrorist group. And growing up in a refugee camp in Lebanon I used that game to learn about weapons, and what kind of bullets they used and how many bullets you can put in one weapon. And it was great for me because at the time we were out of weapons at the camp.

But what I want to talk about is – there’s a little kid in the camp, they play networking games… The only way of conversation is really killing what this other image represents, which is the other. And the terrorists – there’s an Arab version, which has Arabs with their scarves as the terrorists. And this little kid was five or six years old, was picking the terrorists to play. And I asked him, ‘Why are you picking that guy?’ And he said, ‘Well, he looks like the people I know.’”

Peter Marx:

 Counter-Strike was produced by a developer working out of Seattle. And you know, I think it’s a good example of cultural isolation perhaps.

Mary Lambert:
“It’s about World of Warcraft. I have actually purchased three copies of that game. I’ve never played it but I feel like in the interconnected graphs that James[Fowler] was showing us that I’m really connected to it because my son became very, very intrigued with the game. He got very good; he got to some very high level in the game.

And then the group he was a part of – and it was really important to him, he was about 12 or 13 at the time – the leader of the group suddenly began behaving in a very Machiavellian way, and he was going to leave the group, he was going to splinter the group, he was secretly planning to start another group. And my son was very upset . . . and we had a lot of discussions about it that normally I would have expected to have had with my son about friends that I knew, kids at his school. And these people were just virtual people to me. I didn’t know anything about them except their identities as he described them to me. Yet … I did have a very important parenting experience, saying, ‘This is someone you can’t trust.’”