Big Think Interview with Alec Ross | Big Think

Big Think Interview with Alec Ross

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A conversation with the senior adviser for innovation in the Office of the Secretary of State.

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Alec Ross:

Alec Ross is one of America’s leading experts on innovation. He served for four years as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a role that earned him a Distinguished Honor Award from the State Department. He is currently a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and serves as an advisor to investors, corporations, and government leaders. Ross lives in Baltimore with his wife and their three young children. His book is The Industries of the Future.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How has American diplomacy changed throughout history?

Alec Ross: From the earliest stage of American diplomacy, dating back to the 18th century, it would take weeks for a single piece of correspondence to move from one continent to another. In the days of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson being our ambassadors to France, they would work and they would send correspondence back and by the time they got some feedback it was literally a month later. That pattern largely held until the introduction of the telegraph and telephony, which then shrunk dramatically the amount of time that it took to communicate and that then held until ten years ago when the Internet became a powerful tool that it is today.

So really, I think the major shifts in diplomacy dating back to the 18th century reflect the major shifts in communications technology. And so 50 years ago, I think that there was very little difference between how we conducted our diplomacy and how we did it in the 18th century. And more often than not, [it] was white guys with white shirts and red ties, sitting over mahogany tables, sipping cups of coffee, talking to somebody who looks just like that across the other side of the table. One thing that 21st century statecraft is doing now is changing that engagement from being exclusively government-to-government; [it is] also allowing us now to engage government-to-people, and people-to-people. And so changes in statecraft don’t often happen that often. And it’s only very, very recently that very unsubtle technology driven changes in diplomacy are taking place.

Question: How you are using social media in diplomacy?

Alec Ross:So, I should say first that the use of social media at the State Department and in the Federal Government is very, very new. You know, it is no surprise to anybody that social media was an important part of Barack Obama becoming president. And after he became president, part of what he brought with him was the value of technology as a way to connect people who are traditionally disconnected from Washington, from the policy-making arena. So what we are doing right now is introducing social media both broadly—meaning the White House and the State Department [is] using it as a big blunt instrument to engage with the people [and] the world around big events like the President going to Cairo or something like that. But what is actually every bit as compelling to me is what we are doing on a far more local basis; our embassy in Lusotur, for example, can use social media in Lusotur to engage the people there and create a smaller, more specialized community of engagement, and some conversations that are more organic [and] reflective of what the real local interests and concerns are.

So social media has these two contrasting possibilities; on the one hand, they can help us engage much larger numbers of people than we have traditionally. So our audience really is the six billion people on the planet. But on the other hand, it allows us to engage people much more locally and more organically than perhaps we’d ever done when our communications were driven exclusively out of embassy and company capitals [that were] only dealing with government officials.

Question: How was social media use to promote Obama’s speeches abroad?

Alec Ross: This is amazing. Let me talk about the most recent one in Ghana. One of the things that we did was our embassy in South Africa created a partnership with a mobile-based social networking company through which we solicited questions for the president and comments to get into the White House immediately in advance of the speech. Two hundred thousand questions and comments came in through this mobile-based social network, in advance of the Ghana speech, which is absolutely spectacular.

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