Category Archives: Google Stuff

Below is a clip of the 21st Century Statecraft talk at Google with Eric Schmidt, and the State Department’s Alec Ross & Jared Cohen earlier this year (Mr. Cohen has since moved to Google as Director of Google Ideas).

Eric Schmidt (Chair and Google CEO) and Jared Cohen, by the way have co-authored a piece in the November/December 2010 of Foreign Affairs, Digital Disruption, Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power. where they write:

The advent and power of connection technologies — tools that connect people to vast amounts of information and to one another — will make the twenty-first century all about surprises. Governments will be caught off-guard when large numbers of their citizens, armed with virtually nothing but cell phones, take part in mini-rebellions that challenge their authority. For the media, reporting will increasingly become a collaborative enterprise between traditional news organizations and the quickly growing number of citizen journalists. And technology companies will find themselves outsmarted by their competition and surprised by consumers who have little loyalty and no patience.
[...]
Continuous innovation — and the increasing population of the interconnected estate — will pose new, difficult challenges for people and governments the world over. Even the best-informed and most active users of technology will find themselves caught in a blur of new devices and services. In an era when the power of the individual and the group grows daily, those governments that ride the technological wave will clearly be best positioned to assert their influence and bring others into their orbits. And those that do not will find themselves at odds with their citizens.

The article is available here (registration required).