Not content merely to block dissonant views, the government increasingly employs agents to peddle its views online, in the guise of impartial bloggers and chat-room denizens. And increasingly, it is backing state-friendly clones of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, all Western sites that have been blocked here for roughly a year.

The government’s strategy, according to Mr. Bandurski and others, is not just to block unflattering messages, but to overwhelm them with its own positive spin and rebuttals.

The government makes no apologies for what it calls “guiding public opinion.” Regulation is crucial, it says, to keep China from sliding into chaos and to preserve the party’s monopoly on power. . . .

In recent years, local and provincial officials have hired armies of low-paid commentators to monitor blogs and chat rooms for sensitive issues, then spin online comment in the government’s favor.

Mr. Xiao of Berkeley cites one example: Jiaozuo, a city southwest of Beijing, deployed 35 Internet commentators and 120 police officers to defuse online attacks on the local police after a traffic dispute. By flooding chat rooms with pro-police comments, the team turned the tone of online comment from negative to positive in just 20 minutes.

According to one official newspaper editor who refused to be named, propaganda authorities now calculate that confronted with a public controversy, local officials have a window of about two hours to block information and flood the Web with their own line before the reaction of citizens is beyond control.

Google and other major American Internet companies like Yahoo and eBay failed to gain significant traction in the Chinese market. And Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by the government.

Instead, the hottest companies in the world’s biggest Internet market have names like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba — fast-growing local firms that are making huge profits. Post-Google, China’s Internet market could increasingly resemble a lucrative, walled-off bazaar, experts say. Those homegrown successes, however, could have trouble becoming global brands.

“If the Chinese government continues to favor domestic companies, those companies that reach critical mass could become phenomenally profitable,” said Gary Rieschel, founder of Qiming Ventures, an American venture capital firm with investments in China. “But it may be hard for those companies to become world class without outside competition.” . . .

The story behind the success of these companies is a simple one, some analysts say. The young people who dominate Web use in China are not just searching for information; they’re searching for a lifestyle. They are passionate about downloading music, playing online games and engaging in social networking.

“Sixty percent of the Internet users here are under the age of 30,” said Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley. “In the U.S., it’s the other way around. And in the U.S. it’s about information. But in China, the No. 1 priority is entertainment.” . . .
One question, though, is whether Google’s departure will prevent Chinese companies from developing alongside the world’s technology powerhouses.

“When the Chinese companies go outside of China, they will find that they fail to understand their competitors as well as they did when they were competing in China,” said Mr. Rieschel, founder of Qiming Ventures.

Of course, Chinese companies may just be happy staying home. With 400 million Internet users and growing, their own market is a substantial prize.

Some of the issues discussed included:

– Who do you invite? Is the conference aimed at the younger generation? What do we want people to walk away with? Should we bring other interested parties that are not U.S.-centric into this conversation?

– Identify CEOs of companies that are already doing a form of diplomacy who just don’t realize it. (Keith Reinhard’s Business for Diplomatic Action would be a logical group to collaborate with.)

– Invite some of the established community that has been working on public diplomacy initiatives, such as Harriet Fulbright, wife of the late Sen. J. William Fulbright.

– Seek out entrepreneurs. If you’re able to back it up with $, that would help generate interest too. (The Ansari X Prize held a contest with a $10 million prize to build a private spaceship, which led to the investment of $100 million.)

– Bring in people in the community of interest ahead of time to help generate new ideas before the conference even starts.

– Celebrities will be part of the conference to help attract interest and press. That may include a benefit concert.

– We should take advantage of non-commercial films by students and people living in other countries. Invite representatives from Sundance and other student film festivals.

– Create an iDiplomacy game before the conference to use it as a mechanism to get ideas and feedback. We can also use films – high budget and guerrilla, comics, exchange programs, video contests, festivals, books, music and online social networks to further interest. The content can’t just be “peas and carrots” – it has to be something people want to watch – perhaps a film or game highlighting bad foreign faux pas.

– Who should pay for the conference? The private sector should be involved, but what about money from foreign companies/countries?

– Consider allowing companies to sponsor just one aspect of the conference. For example, an organization with particular interest in the Middle East or children could sponsor a segment of the conference that addresses those issues specifically.

– The conference should have a focus and consensus around a positive objective. (For example, the most competitive university in Guatemala has the goal of bringing free market economics to the country.)

– One of the goals should be developing the elements of a national strategy for public diplomacy that incorporates the private sector.

– Discussing intellectual property and other economic issues can draw in public sector participation.

– Deconfliction – we need to make sure we’re not duplicating things that have already been done.

– Have an interagency panel at the conference to look at public diplomacy initiatives and funding, a private sector panel and a congressional panel to address some of the questions of the first two panels.

– Empowering women should be a big part of the agenda. Queen Noor of Jordan has done a variety of things to empower women and NGOs have also done work in places where the government is not.

– After the conference who will own the ideas? What kind of action can people take a week after the conference to stay involved? We need to avoid, “We’re the government, you’re the private sector – we need your help,” statements without explaining where to go and who to call. Consider “adopt a project” where an organization can take responsibility for an initiative.

– Drive traffic to iDiplomacy.org and use it as a base to build on the dialogue before and after the conference.

Group 1 presented an extensive list of suggestions:
1.) A series of video shorts called “My America is” or have a touring film festival about “my America is”. This can include particular ethnic groups and immigrants talking about their experiences.
2.) Encourage local community voting to select local development projects, whether it’s a public art center or sports center. This will give local development projects more of a feeling of local buy-in, rather than Americans coming in to push something on the local community.
3.) Foster a crowd sourced wiki of Muslim media. Relatedly, have a university-based media hub to gather media being produced by various entities and help that media become more well-known.
4.) Engage U.S. publishers. For some of these public diplomacy projects, alongside individual private-sector efforts, there needs to be some type of large-scale coordination.
5.) National Endowment for the Arts freedom fund to foster the publication, translation, and multi-platforming of media (like making audio books out of print books).
6.) Add a sentence to US passports: “Remember that when you are overseas you are an ambassador of America.”
7.) Facilitate more fruitful communication by celebrities with foreign audiences, to prevent unintended consequences.
8.) Provide free luggage carts at U.S. airports.
9.) A sister cities project for public libraries.
10.) A travel TV show that would focus on preparing Americans to be more culturally and politically astute when they are abroad.
11.) Improve the no fly list process. It’s having a negative impact on our ability as Americans to interact with foreigners.
12.) Build synergies through collaboration. If individuals are more aware of what others are doing in a particular region, there could be more idea-sharing.
13.) A giveaway or reduce the cost of pre-loaded eBooks (a kindle-type thing)
14.) Giveaway of pocket video cameras to kids in key areas to provide them a chance to show what the world looks like to them.
15.) Pen pals – e-mail has changed the importance of postal letters, but encourage some kind of one-to-one relationship with kids across cultures.

Group 2 presented one well-fleshed out idea:
Create a worldwide music contest that uses new media, bringing the drama of an American Idol or Project Runway to the rest of the world and bring in the ideas of voting, a community, and self-expression to a community of people not as well-connected to these ideas as we would like them to be.
– They assume the ubiquity of cell phones, so they propose allowing input from individuals via cell phone – it could be composing music, commenting or voting.
– The act of participating would lead to the implied message that participation, choice and voting is an expression of freedom.
– By using mobile phones people can be as public or private as they want in their participation.
–There could be national or regional as well as worldwide winners.
– Have a theme on which the participants could base their entries – such as “hope” or “peace”
– Take a song that already exists and have participants interpret the song the way they want to interpret it.
– Can create an online archive about the songs and winners.
– Let the winners come to the United States for a music internship.
– Get iTunes to highlight a song – which can allow musicians in developing countries to have access to the U.S. market. People could vote by downloading the song, thus paying the artist.
– Tap the potential of private sponsorship. Since sending texts costs money, companies could sponsor contest entries by allowing people 100 or 200 chances to participate in voting.

Group 3 had a wide range of suggestions:
– Get a clear understanding across the U.S. government of what is already happening in iDiplomacy and what our capabilities are.
– Leverage existing technologies that make transliteration possible in real time. That helps to get past the final three-foot language communication barrier when two people don’t speak the same language.
– Have a Muslim women’s series promoting moderate voices. This can happen in societies where their voices are among the mainstream as well as more radicalized environments.
– Build on existing brands, such as G.I. Joe or Transformers to get fathers to expose their sons to the action figures, etc., that they thought were cool growing up.
– Have a Peace Corps 2, where producers help local populations understand what resources are available to them.
– Aggregate government features, capabilities, content and assets, so they can be harnessed, channeled and made more available to local communities.
– Buy up media to protect it from censorship. (Saudis are buying moderate content for the purpose of keeping it from the public because they thought it was too racy.)
– Empower women in societies where their voices are not often heard to socialize and collaborate with each other online.
– Use the microloan approach to encourage women and business in emerging economies.
– Create a national ID program, where the ID will let you get government benefits.

Group 4 focused on motivating people to engage in person-to-person exchanges – and the idea of an “iDiplomat”: ordinary U.S. citizens and those in commercial enterprise participating in public diplomacy.

– They concluded there were three groups of people with different levels of potential for participating in public diplomacy. The first group included people already doing things in public diplomacy.
– The second group included those willing to support public diplomacy, who would be best helped by training and tools to participate (such as Web sites, video kiosks and other facilities).
– The third “unmotivated” group consists of people who don’t think they are capable of participating, don’t understand the needs or don’t care. They would focus on forming connections for these people using social networking or a “Rock the Vote” model.
– Involving youth is key – they are sophisticated in social networking and gaming as early as 5 and 6 years of age, and there’s an opportunity for them to be active listeners.
– One idea was to have an X-prize to revolutionize person-to-person exchanges.
– Have a public-private partnership. Government can fund it and provide gravitas.
– Use the Overseas Private Investment Corporation – allow companies to receive funding in at-risk areas where stability is paramount.
– Involve people with a profit motive. There’s a big shift in the non-profit world toward the “fourth sector” – the idea that you can do something that’s for-profit and improves the world. (An example is the Disney volunteerism project, where if you volunteer in your local community and tell Disney about it ahead of time they send you a free day pass. Disney in turn benefits because participants in the program will buy souvenirs, etc.)

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.’”

“Why is iDiplomacy so important? iDiplomacy is actually … more than public diplomacy. We have to look at the new media communications technologies as important for public diplomacy but also important for AID, programs in Africa – so you’re doing AIDS and other kinds of health programs via cell phone – you have marshalling communities such as the ‘No Mas Farc’ movement, and others where whole communities have come together against terrorism, against women; we see possibilities to use it in microfinancing, using cell phones to give loans to Africans and others. Those are not public diplomacy but ways that iDiplomacy can actually use new media to make a difference in the world today.”

The State Department’s challenge is immense; no private firm has to deal with selling its product or conveying its message to every country in the world, in multiple languages, and without much money.

New media presents a number of challenges, “not the least of which it goes against our bureaucratic upbringing. . . . Bureaucrats tend to follow rules and regulations you don’t make great iDiplomacy following sets of rules.”

MacInnes also warned against failing to consider the appropriate content when using a particular new media medium: 

“What we don’t want to do is the worst form of new media where you take a blog and put a press release on it, and you think you’ve blogged, which I’ve seen done. Where you do, ‘Oh, I want to do a viral video,’ and you do … five minutes with the secretary of State.’ It’s not going to go viral.”

One of the challenges includes knowing who their audience is. It’s useful to know the internet penetration in certain regions but they need more specificity than that. “I need to know what a college student in Cairo does when he goes on the internet. What sites does he visit? Who does he talk to? Does he IM? Because I want to get into those conversations. If I know the top five places that young people in Cairo go when they’re on the internet then I can be there, I can pre-position myself. If I don’t know that I just put stuff up on the internet and hope people come.”

The State Department is also working to repurpose material. For example, the agency has a worldwide speaker program where they send Americans abroad to speak to foreign languages. They took a pre-existing software package, Adobe Connect, which was intended to facilitate web conferencing, and developed an electronic version of the speaker program that can reach audiences with a variety of bandwidths. Viewers with high bandwidth can watch a video of the person, with an accompanying web chat. As the bandwidth decreases, it can move from a full-fledged video interactive to an audio interactive to a web chat, for different dialup speeds. 

The State Department also developed a cell phone game, X-Life, targeted at Middle Eastern youth and replete with avatars that lets them learn about the United States. MacInnes said that the game has been “fairly successful” but that they “bit off more than we can chew” and it is now available online because it is too big for a small phone. They will be producing a second version that will be quicker and more like a quiz show game.

MacInnes was asked about the mission objectives of using new media tools to communicate. His reply demonstrated that the primary objective was more nuanced than just getting other countries to “love us”:

“For the same reasons we support freedom of speech and democracy around the world. It does not always rebound to our benefit. As we saw from the Gallup polling, those who have the most access to media dislike us the most. Those who practice democracy, or at least practiced it once as in Gaza – it doesn’t rebound to [us] positively. But nevertheless those are principles that we believe in and support and in the overarching scheme believe that people that have free and open access to information, that are democratic, will be in our interest.”  

Rita J. King and Joshua S. Fouts, both senior fellows at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, spent a year studying what people – represented by their avatars – were already doing to learn about Islam in Second Life.  (In addition to their virtual world explorations they also traveled in the real world to four continents.) King and Fouts are also CEO and creative director as well as chief global strategist of Dancing Ink Productions, “a full-service creative company that develops business strategy, policy, immersive narrative and mixed-media, mixed-reality content including games, conferences and cultural intelligence for a new global culture and economy in the Imagination Age.”

King and Fouts chose Second Life because of its disproportionately international, non-U.S. membership. They detailed their findings earlier this year in a report, “Digital Diplomacy: Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds,” as well as a mini-documentary and a graphic book. 

Second Life provides an environment for interactions to occur between Muslims and non-Muslims that might not otherwise take place in the real world due to geography, language and a general reluctance to go up to a stranger and question them about his or her religion.

“Digital diplomacy” is potentially valuable for a variety of groups. As King and Fouts note in their report:

“Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds specifically endeavored to consider how the Internet can lead to a greater firsthand understanding of Islam for policymakers, diplomats, and people worldwide, and to explore how the Internet allows people to experience the culture of Islam in a manner conducive to substantive dialog between cultures…

We have no illusions that radical Islamists are going to reverse course because Second Life has appeared. However, as part of a broader public diplomacy strategy, engaging and interacting with people in virtual worlds who self-identify as Muslim can contribute to a well-developed and inclusive perspective on religion, society, and democratic coexistence, which serves to undermine conditions that can lead to radical views and violent actions. The interviews and communities we encountered illustrate the rich potential for transformation.

We discovered thriving communities of people sharing the experience of what it means to be Muslim all over the world in 2008. We learned about the depth of the spiritual commitment required for authentic practice of Islam and the challenges of dealing with the damage done by extremists while simultaneously trying to meaningfully participate in a changing global culture and economy.”  

One exchange in Second Life illustrated how the virtual world can facilitate conversations about sensitive topics.”  

Islamonline.net has a Second Life simulation of the annual hajj to Mecca, which allows for easy participation by non-Muslims because it explains the symbolic importance of the journey to pilgrims, along with the required clothing, accoutrements and animations (prayer).

The first time King and Fouts visited the hajj they met two, avatars, one from the United States who said he was of “Arabic root” and another from the North Caucasus region of Russia. They offered both avatars a friendship (which can be instantly accepted or declined), which was declined. But they struck up a conversation about “ijtihad” (the critical thought component of Islam), which led to the following interaction:

“Ingush, the avatar from North Caucasus, became upset when he mistakenly interpreted the question to be about ‘jihad.’ Dialogue with Westerners is ‘almost impossible,’ he said, because the subject of jihad always comes up so soon. When we suggested that he read back through the chat log, he did, and he apologized for jumping to the wrong conclusion. We apologized for underestimating the language barrier and offered both avatars friendship again. This time they accepted. The interaction was illustrative of the way sensitive conversations can take place in a virtual world, where the potential to mitigate tension is such that conflict can become a catalyst for social change instead of escalating unchecked toward violence.”

Among King’s and Fouts’ observations is that the flow of information no longer follows a one-way, hierarchical path. “In fact, it’s the reverse–information now flows non-hierarchically from the bottom up. Public diplomacy and strategic communications must learn to adapt to this new communication and creative flow paradigm. Key influencers evolve rapidly and organically on the Internet. Public diplomacy must be prepared to  engage these communities in a nimble, non-bureaucratic way.

While virtual worlds cannot replace physical immersion in a culture, virtual environments offer a cost-effective way to maintain relationships after people return to their home country.

King presented their findings at the O’Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit and Expo, winning the Gov 2.0 award. Below is a video of her presentation:

Among the theories Fowler and Christakis posit in Connected is that you can influence people up to three degrees – such as your friend’s friend’s friend – who you might not even have met. For example, one of their studies found that obesity is contagious – a multicentric epidemic.

I spoke with Fowler on the phone last week about technology, social media and public diplomacy. (The interview has been condensed and edited.)

Q: Obviously, ordinary people have long engaged in what could be called public diplomacy, or at least building goodwill – such as Peace Corps. But that’s more of a traditional, face-to-face model. Do you think technology is accelerating the process by which the public can participate?

A: Yes. Although I would say that there’s a caveat which is what we find in our real world social networks is that people are motivated to change their behavior not by random strangers but by people they have a close social connection to. The internet gives us greater access to a larger number of people but the reason why I think it’s going to be important for diplomacy is because it’s going to help us to stay in better contact with people we already have a real world social relationship with.

Q: So it’s not going to displace it.

A: No, in essence it has to build on it. It’s very important to realize that these online social networks are not a substitute for a real world social network.

Q: What are some of the potential downsides to technology and its effect on public diplomacy?

A: I think it depends on what kind of message you want to get across. The upside is that when you increase your contacts between people of different countries I think you increase mutual trust. But the message that comes from the people of a country might be at odds with the message that the government is trying to promote.

During times of great division, like recently when we were experiencing the Iraq War and we were divided over how to deal with that problem, you can imagine there being lots of messages coming from individuals in the United States to people of other countries that were contrary to the message that the government really wanted to send at that time.

If you’re in a position where you’re trying to control the message then I think what these online contacts do is they make your job very difficult. In general as a U.S. citizen I think it’s a really good thing to increase these contacts but I can understand that diplomats or officials in the government might be frustrated. They might think a little bit like it’s opening Pandora’s box while the conversations go on that may or may not be at odds with official policy.

Q: Have you done any research into or thinking about how the decision to commit a terrorist act can spread? Have you found that some tendencies are less easily transmitted than others? Where might terrorism fall in this?

A: I think on the extreme end of the spectrum a terrorist act is an act of political participation just like any other. And so you can imagine the smallest act being reading the newspaper about an election, and then maybe getting more involved and you vote; you get more involved and you join a political group and engage in some kind of peaceful activity; and at a more extreme level you get involved in a group that is not satisfied with the rules and tries to change them violently.

What we know about the peaceful forms of participation is that those do appear to strike from person to person to person. We talked about that in our book. It’s an open question whether or not these kinds of violent behavior spread from person to person but my guess is if we had the data we would find that they also spread, because certainly participation spreads and the ideas underlying the ideologies that people use to think about whether or not to commit a violent act spread from person to person.

Q: The Israeli Consulate in New York held a press conference on Twitter last December. Some people – including Rachel Maddow – criticized them for trying to respond to such weighty issues in 140 characters. Do you think there is the potential to do harm by using the wrong medium?

A: I think this is a question of taste. Just because you can only get 140 characters in a single tweet doesn’t mean that you only get one tweet in a conversation. You can have multiple tweets and if anything what the shortness of that space does is it forces you to make your ideas very clear and you get nuance by having an interactive conversation with somebody where you send a tweet and they send one back and you go back and forth.

People have worried about going from full page consideration of an issue in the newspaper to 800 word Op-Eds; or where we go from reading about something in the newspaper to hearing about it on the radio or on TV; and more recently the television spots get shorter and shorter and shorter with sound bites. This is not a new criticism.

I understand the concern about trying to communicate in that medium but I think it’s so promising to be able to be in a medium where you’re not just broadcasting but you’re also capable of hearing reactions to what you’ve said that to me it’s worth it to lose a little of the precision and increase interactivity.

Q: You mentioned in your book that people with more attractive avatars tended to perceive themselves differently and be treated better, regardless of how they look in real life. Do you see a potential real world application for that phenomenon in public diplomacy?

A: Yeah. Just imagine – we don’t know yet all the reasons why people feel separate from each other but one can imagine that appearance is a big factor. You have people from different cultures who look different in real life wanting to be where their appearance has no bearing on how they appear in reality. You can imagine being able to change people’s minds about their ability to get along with somebody in this online context. The virtual world, I think, has the possibility of making these lines of division a lot fuzzier than we used to be.

Q: In your book you mention the case of the epidemic in World of Warcraft, a popular online game. Can you see a future in which aid to Africa will not just come in the form of cheap antiretroviral drugs but as a computerized game or simulation showing how to most effectively stop the spread of a disease like AIDS? Or swine flu?
A: Absolutely. Recently what’s really taken off in Africa is personal cell phone banking where people don’t really have access to stable currencies but a lot of them have cell phones now and they have minutes and those minutes can be traded as a currency just the same way as we would trade dollars in the United States. This is a very concrete example of something that is virtual actually having an effect on the real world economy.

And so you can imagine that the information that we’re generating now from studying how social networks can affect us can eventually be targeted to real behavior change. Can we use text messages in Africa to slightly change certain crucial people’s behavior to get a really big change in the prevalence of HIV? – for example.

Q: There’s a Facebook group called “3 Degrees of Connection.” It’s got 58 members and you’re one of them. Did you set up this group?  How hear about it?

A: No – a person who likes the paper that Nicholas [Christakis] and I have been writing wrote to me and she said that she wanted to start the group. I don’t even remember what the group is about – I think it was written in response to the happiness paper –

Q: Yes

A: — and this idea is that if more people realize that their own happiness affected not just their friends and family but their friends’ friends and their friends’ friends’ friends then more people would take a greater responsibility for their own happiness and work harder to try to spread joy because they’re not just affecting the one person they’re targeting they’re affecting a group of hundreds of other people.

Q: Do you feel like you have more responsibility knowing the potential effect you have on others and the fact you’ve publicized this effect?

A: I’m a scientist so I’m very interested in how this affects our scientific view of the world. But I also think there’s a fundamental message here of how we have to change the way that we perceive ourselves. For too long we’ve had just two choices – one choice was to think of ourselves as alone individuals, Robinson Crusoe types on the island by ourselves.

And then there’s the other alternative which is actually the individual identity doesn’t matter at all – you’re just a member of a group and I can totally predict your behavior just by knowing if you’re rich, or if you’re black or if you’re an American.

There’s a third way for perceiving yourself – you do have individual choices, but these individual choices exist in a web of interconnection with other people where they’re exerting influence on you and you’re exerting influence on them. Ultimately, when we show people these maps, these networks of their lives where they’re able to see beyond their social horizons to their friends of friends and friends of friends of friends, many of who they don’t know and have never met, I think it completely changes their attitude about what kind of effect that they personally have on the world. If you tell someone they don’t influence anybody, they’re not going to take nearly as much responsibility for their actions than if you tell them they influence 1,000.

This is a way I personally have reacted: Since publishing the obesity study I’ve lost five pounds and I’ve kept it off because I know that if I make myself healthier I’m not just helping me, I’m helping my son and my son’s best friend and my son’s best friend’s mother. These positive changes I make for my own life can spread to so many people that I really have to take responsibility for my own actions in a way that I never before comprehended.

Q: You mention in your book that the average Facebook user has 110 friends and there are plenty of studies that cite that number or similar numbers. But in my experience my younger friends tend to have far more friends – often over 500, and noticed you have 297 – which means that they’re not exactly duplicating their offline social networks. How do you think that the younger generation’s tendency to be connected to more people online will change the way that they socialize?

A: One thing that’s very clear from our own research is that Facebook friends don’t influence us on average. And the reason why is because the average strength or connection to a Facebook friend is very low.

My guess is that what we’re going to find is that influence works the same way it always has on Facebook as it does in the real world. All these extra people that we’re connected to are going to be useful not for behavior change but for the spread of information. You have, for example, much greater ability to coordinate political actions with online social media like we saw in Iran recently with Twitter. People were not being influenced to protest by someone who randomly tweeted them but that piece of information did change their attitude about the likelihood that lots of other people would show up at the same time.

All these additional acquaintances are not going to have a direct effect on us but they’re going to give us greater access to information that’s important to us which [can] lead to coordinated political action.

Q: You conclude in your book that we need to pay more attention to addressing positional inequality instead of just inequalities arising from race, income, gender and geography. To what extent is lack of technology hurting people in countries where mainstream access to internet is still just a dream? Should we be focusing more resources on providing internet and cell phone access versus more traditional aid like ditches and roads?

A: My guess is that the people at the edges of the network – their real world social network – are still living in a state where a lot of the people they are close to are not very far away from them. People in rich countries are much more mobile than people in poor countries are. I’m not sure necessarily that technology is where I would start.

I think where I would start is with real world social networks where we try to make sure that people who are not able to visit their friends or be visited by their friends because of basic needs are given greater access to a healthy lifestyle. Just for example, if you break your leg and you don’t have health insurance and there’s no doctor and you have to stay in your home you’re not going to be able to stay connected to your friends and family unless they come to visit you. And if you’re in a poor country chances are very good that they’re out working and trying to make ends meet.

One way that I think we can really help people to stay connected, very simply, is to make sure people have access to basic health care, to clean water, to safe environments. Because then they’re going to be able to freely connect in these real world social networks and continue to stay connected to the network as a whole.

THE 99, for those who aren’t up on the latest in fictional superheroes, is a wildly popular comic in the Arab world conceived of by Dr. Naif al-Mutawa, who spent a decade as a clinical psychologist treating victims of war before founding the Kuwait-based Teshkeel Media Group.

Mutawa grew up in Kuwait but attended college in the United States. He conceived of the comic, which publishes THE 99, after he decided to “to take back Islam from its hostage takers.”

In a July 2, 2009 open letter to his sons written for the BBC News Web site Mutawa explains the origins of THE 99:

“Khalid, you were born in New York City, shortly after 9/11. I had already made a decision that I needed to find a way to take back Islam from its hostage takers, but I did not known how. The answer was staring me in the face. It was a simple, and as difficult, as the multiplication of 9 by 11: 99.

“I told the writers of the animation that only when Jewish kids think that THE 99 characters are Jewish, and Christian kids think they’re Christian, and Muslim kids think they’re Muslim, and Hindu kids think they’re Hindu, that I will consider my vision as having been fully executed.”

“So, at the age of 32, I uncapped my pen to create a concept that could be popular in the East and the West. I would go back to the very sources from which others took violent and hateful messages and offer messages of tolerance and peace in their place. I would give my heroes a Trojan horse in the form of THE 99. Islam was my Helen. I wanted her back.

“THE 99 references the 99 attributes of Allah – generosity, mercy, wisdom and dozens of others not used to describe Islam in the media when you were growing up. But if I am successful, by the time you read this, you will not believe that such an era could have ever existed….

Mutawa’s superheroes may have their origins in Islam but there is no reference to Allah. As noted in a 2008 Time Magazine article:

“While the 99 represent Allah’s myriad attributes — everything from wisdom to faithfulness — there is no overt mention of religion in the stories. ‘When you read through the books, there is no mention of Islam, Allah or the Koran,’ says Mutawa. ‘I used an Islamic archetype, but the actual stories don’t show any Islam, because they are based on values that we all share.’ Even Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, he says, ‘are based on religious archetypes. Like the prophets from the Bible, they are all orphans. Superman left his parents on the planet Krypton, and Batman sees his father and mother gunned down in front of him.’”

Mutawa’s creative team includes comic book industry veterans who have worked at Marvel and DC Comics. In a talk on Monday at the Dubai School of Government Mutawa spoke of his expansion plans.

“Elaborating on the development of broadcast animation, the launch of THE 99-themed lifestyle magazine in the Gulf region, and additional international publishing and merchandising partnerships, [Mutawa] also revealed that Batman and Superman will be teaming up with THE 99 in a new global series to be published by DC Comics.”

“Dr Al-Mutawa’s involvement in the field of human rights and tolerance dates back to his college years, where he interned at the United Nations Convention of Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. While at college in the US, Dr Al-Mutawa wrote widely read columns for both the Arab and American press focusing on social and political commentary.”

THE 99 is best known in the Middle East but its fan base is growing. Forbes Magazine named THE 99 one of the 20 trends sweeping the globe last year:

“Swash-Buckle With The 99

It’s 1258. The Mongols have just invaded Baghdad. They destroyed the library, but the Guardians of Wisdom manage to preserve 99 ‘stones of enlightenment,’ which are scattered to the winds. So begins The 99, a comic book in which each superhero possesses one of Islam’s godly attributes, like wisdom, farsightedness or healing power. The series has become a phenomenon in the Arab world; when Teshkeel Comics — exclusive Arabic-language distributor of Marvel Entertainment comics like Spider-Man and The Hulk — launched The 99 in Kuwait in 2006, regional sales of the Muslim comic book were second only to Superman. The 99 debuted in the U.S. in 2007.”

Mutawa’s superheroes aren’t just on paper and television. Earlier this year THE 99 Village theme park opened in Jahra, Kuwait, with plans for a theme park to be opened every year for the next six years.

You can view a short video about THE 99 here.