The internet has taken over in a 3 important spheres of our lives (taking into account that you have easy Internet access): in the infrastructure, in communications and in mass media.
From there, we can see two new phenomenon:
1 . Social movements like those in the Middle East and North Africa lately did not need to have a leader that would inspire people; ‘The network is the leader’. Indeed, the use of social media tools like Twitter were sufficient to spread the message that people wanted a change and to show exactly what was happening almost ‘on live’. The effect that those communication tools had on those particular events was not that the former made the latter happen (one could argue that they would happened anyways) but rather that it allowed the ‘revolution’ in all those places to happen faster. 
2. People from Paris, London, New York to the other side of the world in Hong Kong can now contribute in the aid given abroad with only their phones. Indeed, after the earthquake in Haiti the 11th of January and in Japan on the 11th of March, several iPhone applications were created for iPhone users to donate funds to help international organisation in their aid delivery (i.g. Croix Rouge: Aide au Japon iPhone application realeased on the 16th of March).
In his speech, Alec Ross explained how the Secretary of State ordered the establishment of a tool that people could use to act rapidly to the catastrophic news. What was put in place was a mobile text system for people in the US soil to donate funds to help in Haiti. He says that much more people participated to this action (more than 3 million), which permitted to raise US $35 billion in only two weeks.
The position conclusion on this would be that when knowing how to use and work with the new communication tools at one’s disposal, civilians can be a lot more powerful!
Having said all this, I have now another point to make, in which I will probably blog about later on, but I would like to say that these sort of events and talks happening across almost all universities in London are great for students and for the people interested in the topic of the event to see practitioners’ point of view, experience etc... However, in my opinion, it is even more important to those speakers, especially when they represent a foreign country, to attend events like that as guest speakers: they are still doing diplomacy and promoting their foreign policy.
This can be seen in Alex Ross’ speech: he always came back to Hillary Clinton’s speech on ‘Internet Freedom’, delivered in January 2011 when the questions asked were beyond his duty. He also exposed to the public his background and talked about a charity that he founded few years ago, but did not give any name. Of course not! He was there as the Senior Advisor for Innovation, a member of the US government, and therefore, had to stick to it!
> What a great example of public diplomacy and soft power!
To see the LSE event posting as well as listening to the MP3 podcast:
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2011/20110310t1830vHKT.aspx
To listen to Hillary Cliton’s speech on ‘Internet Freedom’:
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