One of the benefits of having Nicco Mele as my professor for the Media, Power, Politics in the Digital Age class is that he invites all his cool and well-connected friends to speak in our class.  His guests so far have included Sam Graham-Felsen the official blogger for Obama’s campaign; Jed Alpert co-founder and CEO of Mobile Communications, the award-winning mobile messaging platform;  David Holtzman, digital privacy guru; and now Alec Ross, Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.   Alec was also a technology policy advisor for the Obama Transition Team.

According to Alec, thanks to Clinton’s vision the State Department has become very innovative in the use of technology.  For example, it used technology to immediately assist individuals in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. The State Department began a text message program where people could request help by texting their needs to an established short code.  Success stories regarding this campaign are many, including a health clinic that used the service to request diesel fuel to keep their generator running.

Alec also mentioned the State Department’s first Apps4Africa Competition.  This application development competition brought together local technology entrepreneurs to build tools that serve the needs of local Non-Governmental Organizations and their communities.  The key word here is “local,” to its credit the State Department had the foresight to realize that the locals would be the best people to come up with innovative solutions to real problems in their community.  The competition’s winner was “iCow,” a voice-based mobile application that helps farmers track the estrus stages of their cows.   According to the State Department’s press release, “this application can enable farmers everywhere to better manage breeding periods as well as monitor cow nutrition leading up to the calving day.  This will help farmers get the most of their cows and their farms.”  How awesome is that?

I couldn’t miss the opportunity to ask Alec about his thoughts on the Obama Administration not being able to move the Network Neutrality agenda forward.  He said that he was very disappointed that after 18 months there hasn’t been much progress.  He alluded to the fact that there are millions of dollars being spent by AT&T and other corporations to block this policy issue from moving forward and that corporate lobbying seems to have paid off.  He didn’t seem very hopeful about Network Neutrality moving forward anytime soon.

The class readings this week included articles on Twitter’s impact on last year’s historic Iranian protests.  The media had previously promoted the idea that Twitter had played a key role in the organizing of the protests, they called it the Twitter revolution.  In our class there is a student that is an exiled Iranian reporter who shared with me and others that this wasn’t the case.  Twitter’s role was largely overemphasized by the West, a former aide to George Bush even suggesting awarding Twitter the Nobel peace prize.  It turns out that most of the tweeting was done by people outside of Iran.  A Time’s article “Iran Protests: Twitter, the Medium of the Movement,” confirms this idea: “Twitter didn’t start the protests in Iran, nor did it make them possible. But there’s no question that it has emboldened the protesters, reinforced their conviction that they are not alone and engaged populations outside Iran in an emotional, immediate way that was never possible before.”  There is no doubt that social media played a role in the protests, YouTube broadcasted around the world the killing of the young protester Neda Soltan and protesters did use SMS to communicate with each other.  Jared Keller of “The Atlantic” talks about the “Green Revolution,” the media’s name for the historic protests, the first major world event broadcast worldwide almost entirely via social media.