Some years ago, Jeff Stamps and I were invited to keynote the US Intelligence Community's Fourth Annual Conference on Collaboration. Honestly, at the time we were invited, I didn't even know there was such a thing as the "intelligence community" (Jeff probably did). And so when we were invited to dinner with the CIO of the CIA the night prior to the speech, I was hungry with questions.
As the conversation unfolded, it turned out that the CIO's young son, around nine years old, as I recall, was on AOL, the Facebook of its time, and participated in chat rooms with kids all around the world, including in Pakistan and the UAE (I think I've got this right - might have been Bahrain). I asked the father what he thought the implications were for future diplomacy. He hadn't thought about it yet, he said, but allowed as these early encounters might have an effect on his son's approach to the global problematique.
I just came across "Trust and cooperation cannot be surged," an excellent post by technology visionary Dan Bricklin that deeply connects the current social networking craze with solving our terrible dilemma. If you've been hanging around the tech world, particularly here in Boston, you know who Dan is. Even if you haven't, he's had an effect on your life - or that of your accountant or your kids or anyone who's ever opened a spreadsheet. Nearly 20 years ago, Dan invented the spreadsheet so next time you open one, take a little bow in his direction (and mine as he's a neighbor here in Newton, Mass).
So to the point: about a month ago, Dan wrote an excellent post about the deeper meaning of social networking tools like Twitter. Twitter and its cousins (like Jaiku and probably 10 more I haven't heard of) are like belonging to a text messaging club. When you join (and any time going forward), you set up a list of people who receive your twitters and vice-versa (and you can easily post to your blog). The general etiquette is that you send out little updates on your current activities - mine right now would say, duh, posting to my blog when I should be making pancakes. A little news, something personal, a snippet of Life with Jessica (which as you can see is puh-retty boring).
Earlier, when I was not making (Nova Scotia) pancakes, I was tripping along a series of links from Boston
Globe reporter Scott Kirsner's Innovation Economy blog and came upon this wise post from Dan where he connects the US Navy's "maritime policy" with Saint Exupery's Little Prince. The idea is that "these social systems, by allowing (and encouraging) repeated, simple, personal interactions, actually help build community and trust." He goes on to say that understanding the mechanisms by which this happens are important and here's where he gets quite creative.
First Dan pulls a great quote from a US Maritime strategy document from 2007: "Trust and cooperation cannot be surged," meaning, to my mind, that you can't just add more troops to a situation and expect they will build social capital. It builds something else (secure neighborhoods perhaps, cleaner streets) but not by itself social capital.
Then he goes on to explain how the Little Prince handles diplomacy:
The
Little Prince encounters a fox and asks the fox to play with him. The
fox replies that he can't play with the Little Prince because he isn't
tamed. He explains that "taming" means to "establish ties". If they
establish those ties, then they will need each other. They will each be
unique to the other. And, this great quote: "One only understands the
things that one tames." Taming takes time. It takes repeated simple
encounters. It takes simple "rites" that make certain times special.
The Little Prince "tames" the fox by visiting each day, first sitting
at a distance, and then moving closer. The closing thought: "You become
responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."
He wraps his post with this thought:
This
idea, that repeated simple encounters (in person or today
electronically) help develop trust and friendships, is an important
concept to grasp. The Navy gets it (they've been building cooperating
teams for hundreds of years). The CNO [Chief of Naval Operations in the US] emphasizes the importance of the
growth in understanding of others that occurs. We should look to this
idea, too, in our evaluation of social software. People may make fun of
blog or Twitter posts about what someone had for breakfast or how they
like a certain video game, but it is all part of how humans build a
cooperating society that works. It can't be rushed, and it can be
nurtured, even with simple text messages.
Excellent, Dan. I've added your blog to my reader...and maybe I'll start actually using my Twitter account.