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.
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James Fowler, UC San Diego professor and author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, had a formative experience learning how social networks work when he went to Ecuador for the Peace Corps and helped a small town build a water system. He became frustrated after he was unable to duplicate those efforts in 29 other villages but he realized over his two years of living there that building infrastructure was not the most valuable aspect of his stint. “The real value of the Peace Corps is the connections I made with the people while I was there.”

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We’re at Gallup headquarters in downtown Washington DC with an hour to go before the start.

It’s going to begin with a welcome from Ben Riley, Principal Deputy, Rapid Fielding, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and chairman of iDiplomacy. Jerome Gary, the moderator of iDiplomacy and chairman of Visionaire Media, is going to be discussing the semantics of public diplomacy.

Warren Wright from Gallup will be discussing perceptions of the United States around the world and Matt Armstrong, blogger of mountainrunner.us, will be presenting the history of public diplomacy. Although there’s good representation from government, not everyone attending has a public diplomacy background — there are screenwriters, (video) gamers, and people from the tech industry in attendance too. 

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James Fowler, professor at UC San Diego and co-author along with Nicholas A. Christakis of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, will be one of the presenters at iDiplomacy.

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.)

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James Fowler, co-author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, will be one of the presenters at the iDiplomacy symposium. Fowler, a political science professor at UC San Diego, along with co-author Nicholas Christakis, was named “most original thinker of the year” in 2008 on the McLaughlin Group. Their research on social networks was featured in Time’s Year in Medicine in 2007 and 2008 and in Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Ideas. He also was named one of the Nifty Fifty “most inspiring” scientists by the San Diego Science Festival.

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