The Pentagon, not surprisingly, is not happy about the release of the video. Critics of WikiLeaks say that the more widely viewed 17 minute edited video is misleading in that it does not “make clear that the attacks took place amid clashes in the neighborhood and that one of the men was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade,” according to this New York Times article.

The Times article also delves into how WikiLeaks is able to operate because of the digital age.

By releasing such a graphic video, which a media organization had tried in vain to get through traditional channels, WikiLeaks has inserted itself in the national discussion about the role of journalism in the digital age. Where judges and plaintiffs could once stop or delay publication with a court order, WikiLeaks exists in a digital sphere in which information becomes instantly available.

“The most significant thing about the release of the Baghdad video is that several million more people are on the same page,” with knowledge of WikiLeaks, said Lisa Lynch, an assistant professor of journalism at Concordia University in Montreal, who recently published a paper about the site. “It is amazing that outside of the conventional channels of information something like this can happen.”

Nancy Scola of Personal Democracy Forum cautions against viewing the footage as news and a threat to journalism in this post:

But one thing to keep in mind here is that Wikileaks’ tragic footage is a document; it’s not news.

News requires some amount of perspective, context. The problem with seeing this admittedly horrific episode in the Iraq war ripped from its moorings is that the average American news consumer, at least, has been very little prepared to make sense of what it all means, even after seven years of war in Iraq. Is what we’re watching an aberration? Is this a normal Tuesday in Baghdad? The function of a journalistic class is to help citizens make sense of the world, a world that grows ever more confounding every day, especially as we see more of it, in real-time and often in living color. (Not for nothing is the site called Wikileaks, as in collaboration.) As the web made it easier and easier for everyone to collect and distribute bits of information, the American news world has floundered. . . .

The alternative for journalists not afraid of the future is to look at Wikileaks not as a competitor or their replacement, but as an amazing resource of historic possibility. Wikileaks’ video footage that seems to sum up all that is confusing and horrifying about modern war isn’t a threat to journalists. It should be looked upon as manna from heaven.

Scola also includes an interesting addendum as to where the video is most widely viewed:

[A]s this useful infographic from its YouTube page shows, it’s popular in a wide range of countries and regions, including all of Latin and South America, Europe, Russia, India, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and a smattering of African countries including Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Nigeria

Not all those countries are close allies of the United States, and the video probably won’t endear the U.S. military to people who think that the Iraq War was wrong. But despite the Pentagon’s opposition to the video’s release, it was unveiled at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., less than one mile from the White House.

Today, we are a world away from the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially when it comes to communication.  This is largely a result of the widespread adoption of cellular technology, the proliferation of broadcast, and the advent of the Internet.  Initiatives that once served U.S. interests abroad may now hinder them.  For example, language in the Smith-Mundt Act ties the hands of U.S. strategic communicators to counter online jihadists.  Some on-air contributors to Radio Farda and Radio Liberty are prone to curious assertions that many Americans may be surprised to hear from taxpayer-funded “pro-American” radio…

There is no one right answer to winning the war of ideas, and any solution requires bipartisan consensus.  A solid first step is establishing the Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy Caucus in the House of Representatives, which I have done with Congressman Adam Smith (D-WA).  Our goal is to bring together a bipartisan group of Representatives with an interest in waging and winning the war of ideas.  As the 9/11 Commission Report reminds us, “If the United States does not act aggressively to define itself in the Islamic world, the extremists will gladly do the job for us.”  America can’t afford for that to happen.

Thornberry also introduced HR 489 on Jan. 13, 2009, to “improve the conduct of strategic communication by the Federal Government.” It was referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and has two co-sponsors  but hasn’t seen any action yet.

How it works: Facebook users install a program called Causes. Facebook friends band together to solicit donations, promote advocacy and spread awareness for a cause.

The Internet is unparalleled in its power to quickly rally — and pressure — far-flung friends to participate, Green said. For example, with Causes’ popular birthday wish feature, users can ask their friends to donate money to a cause in lieu of presents. The birthday feature raises $20,000 a day for various causes.

Petitions are also effective. One petition to get insurance companies to cover genetic testing for breast cancer garnered nearly 3.5 million signatures. Causes does not take a cut of donations, but users can tip the service.

Causes also makes money from causes that are sponsored by nonprofits and others trying to reach more people, banner advertising and premium services that help nonprofits get more out of using the service.

The results: No gusher of funds for nonprofits yet, but Green has made significant progress in his quest to invent a new model for philanthropy. Causes has recruited 100 million Facebook users who have created 400,000 causes since May 2007.The median donation is $25. In all, Causes has raised $21 million for charity.

This week, in lieu of the congressmen and capitalists who typically make up delegations to Russia, Washington sent a detachment of Silicon Valley dreamboats: the 33-year-old creator of Twitter; the “chief lizard wrangler” of Mozilla; the chief executive of eBay; and — for good measure — the actor Ashton Kutcher, who has edged out Britney Spears to become the world’s most popular Tweeter.

The approach is an unorthodox one, punctuated by such strange moments as Mr. Kutcher’s tweeted discovery of a Siberian man whose arm bore a large tattoo of his face. But it indicates how seriously Washington takes online networking as a social force.

Among the delegation’s goals was to persuade Russia’s thriving online social networks to take up social causes like fighting corruption or human trafficking, said Jared Cohen, who serves on Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s policy planning staff.

But it also references an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal by Evgeny Morozov, who isn’t so sure that social media is going to succeed where more conventional means of diplomacy have not :

While sanctions and negotiations—the well-tested ways of wielding American power—do not get us very far with China and Iran, social media as a tool of foreign policy has the unique advantage of being untested. It never failed—so it must be working.

An attempt to log on to Facebook in Iran. The screen reads in part, ‘access to this site is not possible.’

It’s easy to see why a world in which young Iranians embrace the latest technology funded by venture capitalists from Silicon Valley, while American diplomats sit back, sip tea and shovel the winter snow on a break from work, sounds so appealing. But is such a world achievable? Will Twitter and Facebook come to the rescue and fill in the void left by more conventional tools of diplomacy? Will the oppressed masses in authoritarian states join the barricades once they get unfettered access to Wikipedia and Twitter?

This seems quite unlikely. In fact, our debate about the Internet’s role in democratization—increasingly dominated by techno-utopianism—is in dire need of moderation, for there are at least as many reasons to be skeptical. Ironically, the role that the Internet played in the recent events in Iran shows us why: Revolutionary change that can topple strong authoritarian regimes requires a high degree of centralization among their opponents. The Internet does not always help here. One can have “organizing without organizations”—the phrase is in the subtitle of “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky’s best-selling 2008 book about the power of social media—but one can’t have revolutions without revolutionaries.

Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate. This is what may explain the impotence of recent protests in Iran: Thanks to the sociability and high degree of decentralization afforded by the Internet, Iran’s Green Movement has been split into so many competing debate chambers—some of them composed primarily of net-savvy Iranians in the diaspora—that it couldn’t collect itself on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. The Green Movement may have simply drowned in its own tweets.

Rita J. King, whose work studying how people learn about Islam in the virtual world of Second Life we have featured in a previous post, has a different take; she agrees with Morozov that “Twitter and Facebook can potentially present more harm than good when it comes to creating and executing a real revolution, but so could drawing your pistol slower back in the wild wild West.”

King adds:

While Morozov focuses on what he perceives to be an illusion of “techno-utopianism,” I would argue that the illusion runs even deeper, because even successful revolutions eventually morph into the hard reality of “now what?”

And “now what” will not be solved on Twitter or Facebook, but rather within complex platforms that foster design and simulation of better systems that benefit more human beings, which is what the #RusTechDel is attempting. The sum total of the Internet is not just social media, but also the facilitation of more thoughtful, sophisticated design of systems that will undermine human suffering and give us a greater understanding of the common bonds that make us human and ultimately give our lives meaning.

I absolutely support the ongoing development of meaningful social media and its ability to make us more complete, connected human beings. It is revolutionary in itself that Evgeny Morozov and the Wall Street Journal can get so many people thinking, talking, blogging, and musing about revolution on a Saturday morning!

Ushahidi is an open source project which allows users to crowdsource crisis information to be sent via mobile. They have created a Crisis Map of Haiti in collaboration with International Network of Crisis Mappers. The map represents a comprehensive and up-to-date crisis overview for to the humanitarian community.

Google collaborated with satellite imagery company GeoEye to make images of the destruction available in Google Earth and Google Maps. The goal is to create a helpful tool for aid organizations.

Crisis Commons is a volunteer network of professionals that create technological tools and resources for mitigating disasters and crisis around the world. They have has set up Crisis Camps, all-day events in which people help build a variety of online tools to help disaster response in Haiti. Crisis Commons has also created a Haiti OpenStreetMap with the most complete digital map of Haiti’s roads, hospitals, triage centers and refugee camps currently available – the kind of street maps that save lives.

Skype and Google are offering free calls from Haiti. Google Voice is directly offering free calls from its website and Skype is sending vouchers for an hour’s worth of calls to the US to every Skype user already registered in Haiti.

Within a few hours of the crisis, a Google Group called Haitian Earthquake Registry was set up as an online person finder database to help Haitians in and out of the country locate missing relatives, which currently contains more than 54,000 records. Leveraging the kind of technology that we use for online dating, this platform re-unites families.

We Have We Need is a project created in partnership with the U.S. State Department to create a Craigslist-style site where nonprofits working in Haiti can post needs and requests and find donors.

The young woman seated next to us at the sushi bar exuded a vaguely exotic air; her looks and style, we thought, made it likely that she was not American born.

But then she spoke in perfect American English, even ending her declarative sentences in that rising questioning lilt characteristic of many young Californians.

As it turns out, however, she wasn’t from these parts after all; she was born in Iran and spoke only Farsi until her arrival here two years ago. What classes, we wondered, had she attended to learn the language so well?

“I didn’t,” she said. “I used RosettaStone.”

Those yellow boxes sold at shopping-mall and airport kiosks may be the most recognizable example of PC-based language learning, but it certainly isn’t the only one.

With the growth of broadband connectivity and social networks, companies have introduced a wide range of Internet-based language learning products, both free and fee-based, that allow students to interact in real time with instructors in other countries, gain access to their lesson plans wherever they are in the world, and communicate with like-minded virtual pen pals who are also trying to remember if bambino means baby.

In addition to Rosetta Stone, there are a number of other language programs, including TellMeMore, Livemocha and Babbel. There are also some free sites provided by the  British Broadcasting Service (bbc.com/languages), theGerman television network, Deutsche Welle (bit.ly/ts6×7) and japanese-online.com, or learn-korean.net. And of course there are also apps providing useful phrases.

Military.com:

[T]he fact that military.com can claim “the largest online military community” with over 10 million active and retired military members is worth mentioning.  Founded in 1999 and sold to Monster Inc. in 2004 for $40 million, this monstrous site is the pinnacle in efficient social networks…. It’s one-stop-web-shopping for those in the military, where one can join a forum conversation, supplement their career with training or advice, locate a buddy, buy military gear, stay informed and enjoy oneself by just logging in.

Govloop:

With 24,000 members and a very vocal community of supporters constantly tweeting and blogging about the site, Govloop, while not the largest government social network, seems to be the most beloved government social network…. [O]ne needs to spend only seconds perusing profiles to taste the real sense of community on the site, and its sheer size and popularity make it a fed networking mainstay mainly among the Gov 2.0 crowd, communications professionals, and IT folks.

ExchangesConnect:

Launched in 2008 and now boasting over 23,000 members, the State Department’s social network aims to actualize “global diplomacy.” Given the site’s vibrant design and the motto “connect, communicate, collaborate,” it seems they’re off to a good start…. The quality of discussion on the site is very intriguing, quite possibly due to the scope of the network — they even have a book club…. It hasn’t quite reached its lofty goal, but they are well on their way to something the folks at Idealist.org would love.

GovCentral:

This one looks like a college admissions page — the staunch white and blue is more Facebook style than MySpace. The website is owned and run by Monster.com, hence the massive job board and intense career focus…. Quizzes, salary calculators, and free white paper downloads and magazine subscriptions are nice features for job seekers and those looking to kill time, but they are easily picked out as created by those who have never actually worked in government, and designed mostly for those who want to do so…. The cons are that it seems a bit more Blackberry than iPhone, a bit too scripted, tidy, and well, corporate.

Our Border:

Although the name seems to conjure up images of minute men patrolling the Mexican border in SUVs loaded with gun racks, this government social network is actually run by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency…. [T]he homepage does boast an intriguing photo slide show, a timeline of upcoming events (relevant and interesting, unlike TFCN’s) including festivals, TV specials and conferences, and links to the surprisingly charming TSA blog and the less graceful Homeland Security blog.

The Federal Contractor Network:

It’s hard to say too much about this network, considering the peeving reality that every link leads you to a “sign in or sign up” page. Judging by “the Lobby,” the site’s cutely named homepage, it could very well be a useful network to join…if you’re a government contractor….To date, the social network hosts over 14,000 government contractors that must be confirmed as legit before joining. But for a social network of this size, the boards and blogs are mysteriously quiet, even with the twitter feeds streaming into the site.

An initial article on Dec. 17 describes how the then-15-year-olds found her and how Mia later found them:

It was Sept. 6, 1989. They discovered the newborn wrapped in towels at the front door of a townhouse in their Fairfax County complex and took the infant to Emily’s, where her stepfather called police.

The whole thing was over pretty quickly. The authorities took the baby girl, who was later adopted. Chris and Emily, both 15, went on with their lives, although Emily often cried when she told people the story, and the two called each other every Sept. 6.

Twenty years passed.

Then, on Dec. 2, a college student named Mia Fleming sent them both a message via Facebook: Might they be the same Chris and Emily who had once found a baby left at a stranger’s door?

If so, she just wanted to say thanks.

After all these years, the little girl they had found had found them.

The story of Mia, Chris and Emily, recounted by the three over the past few days, is a nativity narrative for modern times. There were no heavenly hosts that warm afternoon in 1989, just the distant ambulance sirens after the call to 911. But the event seemed blessed all the same.

Mia was adopted by a British couple in Virginia, and she was lucky that both Chris and Emily are also on Facebook. Her relative ease in finding the two friends, who have kept in touch,  stands in contrast to some of the difficulties faced by Chinese adoptees living in the United States trying to find their birth parents, as described by the LA Times today:

Many who try to investigate are frustrated by their inability to speak Chinese and unfamiliarity with the culture, incomplete or erroneous orphanage records and bureaucratic obstacles. In 2007, a delegation of American adoptive parents visiting an orphanage in Hunan province were allowed in only under the condition that they promise in writing not to ask questions.

Unlike the trend toward open adoptions in the United States, in which adoptive and biological families are known to each other, adoptions in China are closed. And unlike many other countries that send babies abroad for adoption, China deems it illegal to abandon a child. The result is that in China unwanted babies — in most cases given up because of a one-child policy limiting family size — are usually abandoned anonymously.

In some cases, babies fell into the hands of child traffickers who transported them hundreds of miles away from their place of birth; family planning officials involved in those incidents tried to cover their tracks with false documents that made it appear the babies had been abandoned.

“The link with the birth parents for almost all the children adopted by U.S. families is forever lost,” said Changfu Chang, an associate professor at Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., who has made a number of documentaries about China adoptions, including one featuring Chinese parents speaking tearfully about the babies they relinquished.

Obviously, there are additional difficulties, like language barriers, that these Chinese-born individuals face in trying to reconnect with their biological families — some of whom might not be as receptive to reconnecting as Chris and Emily were. But the incident with Mia shows how social networking sites can facilitate remarkable reconnections — a potential that has not been fully tapped in areas where internet access is not widespread.

• Create a National Communications Strategy articulated by the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. The Administration has been tasked by Congress with producing such a strategy by December 31, 2009. If public diplomacy is to become an effective outreach tool for the U.S. government, it will be as part of a tool kit, a coordinated government-wide approach, and a deliberate effort to harmonize messaging. Such a strategy is critical for Public Diplomacy 2.0 to reach its potential and be more than decentralized, trial-and-error efforts by individual government departments.
• Formulate government-wide guidelines to ensure that the new media is on message, as well as standards for official use of social media, ensuring that government Web pages can be identified and differentiated from impersonators without destroying the appeal of the particular media to its audience. Proper analysis of the way government agencies use social media will be needed to make Internet presence more than simply a nifty way of issuing press releases. “Web 2.0″ is not a cohesive whole, but a collection of different, complementary tools that must be evaluated individually as well as in concert.
• Establish a new non-governmental or semi-governmental research organization (a Corporation for Foreign Opinion Analysis) that can track the effectiveness and persuasiveness among foreign audiences of U.S. public diplomacy and strategic communications. A Corporation for Foreign Opinion Analysis would analyze the effectiveness of the new media in reaching targeted audience segments around the world, which vary widely according to the availability of technology, the control by autocratic governments of information flows, and local cultures.