... you have to write a very quick blog post saying "I have arrived safely in Shanghai" because that's the best way to inform friends and family of that fact, because I can't access Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ (intriguingly, LinkedIn is no problem), and Gmail is loading so slowly that I'd expect the Israel-Palestinian peace process to move faster.

That is all.

Jesse Lichtenstein's New York Times Magazine profile of the State Department's Jared Cohen and Alec Ross does a fine job of discussing the pros and cons of government efforts to use Twitter, Facebook et al in order to promote U.S. interests.  FP's Evgeny Morozov is quoted liberally as the voice of skepticism. 

What I found particularly interesting was the way that this kind of advocacy has turned Cohen and Ross into Internet celebrities: 

On Twitter, Cohen, who is 28, and Ross, who is 38, are among the most followed of anyone working for the U.S. government, coming in third and fourth after Barack Obama and John McCain. This didn’t happen by chance. Their Twitter posts have become an integral part of a new State Department effort to bring diplomacy into the digital age, by using widely available technologies to reach out to citizens, companies and other nonstate actors. Ross and Cohen’s style of engagement — perhaps best described as a cross between social-networking culture and foreign-policy arcana — reflects the hybrid nature of this approach. Two of Cohen’s recent posts were, in order: “Guinea holds first free election since 1958” and “Yes, the season premier [sic] of Entourage is tonight, soooo excited!” This offhand mix of pop and politics has on occasion raised eyebrows and a few hackles (writing about a frappucino during a rare diplomatic mission to Syria; a trip with Ashton Kutcher to Russia in February), yet, together, Ross and Cohen have formed an unlikely and unprecedented team in the State Department. They are the public face of a cause with an important-sounding name: 21st-century statecraft....

One apparent paradox of 21st-century statecraft is that while new technologies have theoretically given a voice to the anonymous and formerly powerless (all you need is a camera phone to start a movement), they have also fashioned erstwhile faceless bureaucrats into public figures. Ross and Cohen have a kind of celebrity in their world — and celebrity in the Twitter age requires a surfeit of disclosure. Several senior members of the State Department with whom I spoke could not understand why anyone would want to read microdispatches from a trip to Twitter or, worse, from a State Department staff member’s child’s basketball game. But Secretary Clinton seemed neither troubled nor bewildered. “I think it’s to some extent pervasive now,” she told me in March. “It would be odd if the entire world were moving in that direction and the State Department were not.” Half of humanity is under 30, she reminded me. “Much of that world doesn’t really know as much as you might think about American values. One of the ways of breaking through is by having people who are doing the work of our government be human beings, be personalized, be relatable.”

I'm really not sure if network diplomacy will work, but these grafs highlight a looming problem even if it does work.  Web 2.0 users succeed when they generate idiosyncratic, personalized content.  Governments, on the other hand, are team operations, designed to harness different organizations into a common message.  Ross  and Cohen are clearly smart, talented people, but at some point they or someone like them in the government will commit an Octavia Nasr -- and what then?   

Question to readers:  is it possible for foreign policymakers to be good at Web 2.0 and good at traditional bureaucratese? 

In light of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's big Internet freedom speech this AM, I thought it would be a good idea to get a handle on how China is playing this whole Google controversy.   

Well, according to the New York Times, it appears that China is downplaying l'affaire Google as a minor matter about business regulation:

The Chinese government is taking a cautious approach to the dispute with Google, treating the conflict as a business dispute that requires commercial negotiations and not a political matter that could affect relations with the United States.

Officials were caught off guard by Google’s move, and they want to avoid the issue’s becoming a referendum among Chinese liberals and foreign companies on the Chinese government’s Internet censorship policies, say people who have spoken to officials here. There have been no public attacks on Google from senior officials or formal editorials in the newspaper People's Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece.

Well, that settles that, I guess.... zzzz.... wait, what's with this Financial Times article by Kathrin Hille I'm seeing?

China has signalled a change of approach to the Google crisis, with state media describing the company’s threat to pull out of the country as a political conspiracy by the US government.

Accusations in two newspapers that Washington was using Google as a foreign policy tool were echoed by Chinese government officials on Wednesday....

Global Times, a nationalist tabloid owned by People’s Daily, the Communist party mouthpiece, ran an editorial with the headline: “The world does not welcome the White House’s Google”.

“Whenever the US government demands it, Google can easily become a convenient tool for promoting the US government’s political will and values abroad. And actually the US government is willing to do so,” the piece said.

In an accompanying news story, the paper quoted Wu Xinbo, a political scientist at Fudan University, as saying “the Google incident is not just a commercial incident, it is a political incident”.

NOOO... cognitive complexity!! Run away!! Run away!!!

Actually, it's not that complex.  Indeed, this climactic clip from Chinatown (oh, the irony) addresses this question metaphorically, without the yucky incest factor. This is a public and a private sector dispute. Marc Ambinder's useful tock-tock on events from the U.S. side of things make this clear enough (also, check out this webcast featuring FP's own Evgeny Morozov, as well as this FAQ on the controversy).

The interesting question is what will happen over time. Usually, public-private disputes don't stay that way -- they go for "corner solutions." Either the private sector finds an accommodation with the host government (access to Japanese markets, for example), or the business controversy gets subsumed by high politics (Dubai Ports World).

Question to readers: which way do you think the Google-China feud will go?

Consider two recent postings on the state of Web 2.0 discourse.

The first, optimistic one comes from Tyler Cowen on the utility of the blogosphere: 

Chess players who train with computers are much stronger for it.  They test their intuitions and receive rapid feedback as to what works, simply by running their program.  People who learn economics through the blogosphere also receive feedback, especially if they sample dialogue across a number of blogs of differing perspectives.  The feedback comes from which arguments other people found convincing....

Not many outsiders understand what a powerful learning mechanism the blogosphere has set in place.

Now let's consider FP's own Evgeny Morozov's revulsion response to the twittering about balloon boy yesterday:

The amount of energy that had been exerted by the Twitterati to save the now infamous "balloon boy" would probably be enough to prevent at least a few dozen African genocides. They even started their own campaign with its own hashtag: #savetheballoonboy, which for a while was a trending topic on Twitter. That is, it was a trending topic before it turned out that the boy was hiding in his house and had not had any relationship with that balloon....

[T]his all-pervasive cynicism with which members of the slacktivist generation treat extremely serious social problems is very off-putting and disturbing. What was the reaction to the #ballonboy story after the boy's whereabouts were disclosed? Humor. Some of it the jokes were mildly funny; most of it them were in bad taste. For example, the most popular joke - which also became a trending topic on Twitter - was making fun of Anne Frank, of all people (implying that she had a much better hide-out space in the attic - all phrased to sound as it was coming from Kanye West).

Well, if a tasteless joke about one of the most dramatic symbols of the Holocaust becomes the most popular topic on Twitter, there is something fundamentally wrong with the taste and norms of that community.  

So, blogs are better than Twitter, yes?  Um, no. 

The blogosphere can be a powerful learning mechanism -- but that hardly guarantees that it will be.  In this way, the blogosphere -- and the Twitterverse, for that matter -- are simply alternative mediums, like television or radio.  The content, or the consumption of that content, can be either good or bad.  To use a famous constructivist turn of phrase, the blogosphere is what people make of it. 

Tyler Cowen's blogosphere?  I want to go to there.  But I'm not sure everyone else does.  And, just because a lot of people want to go to Morozov's dystopic depiction of the Twitterverse doesn't mean that everyone will. 

Blogs have been around for a decade now, and Twitter has been in operation for a few years.  Can we dispense with the broad-based characterizations of social systems that are way too variegated for such simple characterizations? 

Maureen Dowd has a column today entitled "Stung by the Perfect Sting."  We're going to run much of this column through a little MoDo translator, partially inspired by Josh Chafetz's still-relevant discussion of the Immutable Laws of Maureen Dowd, and helped by a few other bloggers. 

Here we go....

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

If you’re written about in a nasty way, it looms much larger for you than for anyone else. Gossip goes in one ear and out the other unless you’re the subject. Then, nobody’s skin is thick enough.

Translation:  "I read everything about me on the Interwebs.  Everything.  And despite my bravado act, it hurts me sometimes.  I'm brave for putting up with it, though.  Ah, the first graf and I've already checked off the Fourth Immutable Law of Dowd:  'The particulars of my consumer-driven, self-involved life are of universal interest and reveal universal truths.' 

Say, the militia crack was pretty funny, right?  Right?"

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”

Translation: "You know how, later on in this essay, I say that insulting individuals on the Internet is rude? That's only if you do it badly. If you insult broad swathes of people in a charming manner, that's just witty banter." 

Those are my people, I protested, but I knew what he meant. That’s why I was interested in the Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger.

Translation: "Hah!  Less than a third of the way through, and I've already checked off the First Immutable Law of Dowd: 'All political phenomena can be reduced to caricatures of the personalities involved.' Suck on that, Tom Friedman!!" 

It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google’s blogger.com, calling Cohen a “skank,” a “ho” and an “old hag” who “may have been hot 10 years ago.”

Cohen says she’s “a lover, not a fighter.” But the model had stood up for herself before. In 2007, at a New York club, she tried to stop a man named Samir Dervisevic who wanted to drink from the vodka bottle on her table. He hit her in the face with the bottle and gouged a hole “the size of a quarter,” as she put it, requiring plastic surgery.

Translation: "Did you like how I subtly compared the physical attacker to the blogger? That was pretty deft of me, right?" 

This time, she punched the virtual bully in the face, filing a defamation suit to force Google to give up the blogger’s e-mail. And she won.

“The words ‘skank,’ ‘skanky’ and ‘ho’ carry a negative implication of sexual promiscuity,” wrote Justice Joan Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, rejecting the Anonymous Blogger’s assertion that blogs are a modern soapbox designed for opinions, rants and invective.

The judge cited a Virginia court decision that the Internet’s “virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication” with the masses means “the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

Translation: "A judge is on my side!  I'm going to quote her at length!"

[Side note here:  will individuals also be able to sue those who write anonymously about them on bathroom walls soon?--DD]

The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.

Translation:  "I bet no one knew about this phenomenon before I discovered it today.  God, my insights into this -- some anonymous blogging is good, some bad -- are really stunning." 

Dowd conveniently ignores a few important facts. First, there are power disparities going on here. If, say, the New York Times published a story calling Cohen a "skank," I can see the need for a lawsuit. Same thing if the Huffington Post had done it. But who the hell read this post before the lawsuit commanded everyon'es attention? As Laura McKenna puts it:

This just feels like a lot of whining to me. If you're on the opinion page of the New York Times, you have to be able to take the heat. It's part of the game. If you're not up for it, then I've got a waitress job for you.

Second, in Dowd's closing grafs she manages to conflate and tar all anonymous commentary because some act rudely on the Internet. This is the functional equivalent of me saying that because George Will is occasionally shoddy with his fact-checking, the entire op-ed profession is worthless and slanderous. Attacking an entire medium because of what some individuals are doing seems logically incoherent to me -- and yet far too many media commentators do this when talking about the blogosphere. 

In my experience, anonymous or not, the quality of one's insights and shrewdness of one's observations are the things that tend to push a blogger up through the ranks. 

If only that were still true of New York Times columnists. 

UPDATE: For more on the legal intricacies of the motivating case, see this Dan Solove post. 

Events in Iran have led to a lot of talk about how this is a Twitter revolution, and that Twitter has been the go-to source on real-time developments in Iran.  Stepping onto FP's Evgeny Morozov's turf, however, I have to wonder we're exaggerating its effect juuuuust a wee bit here. 

Twitter is serving two different purposes in Iran right now.  Its first role is as a coordination device for Iranian supporters of Mousavi -- much like events in Moldova from a couple of months ago.  On this dimension, to be sure, it would seem that Twitter has facilitated coordination. 

Well, except for one thing -- the absence of Twitter does the same thing.  According to the press accounts I read, Mousavi wanted to cancel yesterday (Monday's) demonstration because the Iranian authorities had refused to grant permission and warned of bloodshed.  The thing is, since Twitter and other methods of quick communication were down, there was no way to communicate the cancellation messaage to supporters.  In other words, had Iranian authorities not interruped mobile services and the like when they had, Monday's demonstration might have fizzled out.  One wonders if the same dynamic will play out today. 

Twitter's second role is as a source of information for outside observers -- indeed, if Dan Nexon's post is correct, that seems to be the more important function.  It's not the only or even the primary source, however. Kevin Drum gets at this point: 

I followed the events of the weekend via three basic sources.  The first was cable news, and as everyone in the world has pointed out, it sucked.  Most TV news outlets have no foreign bureaus anymore; they didn't know what was going on; and they were too busy producing their usual weekend inanity to care.  Grade: F.

The second was Twitter, mostly as aggregated by various blogs.  This had the opposite problem: there was just too much of it; it was nearly impossible to know who to trust; and the overwhelming surge of intensely local and intensely personal views made it far too easy to get caught up in events and see things happening that just weren't there.  It was better than cable news, but not exactly the future of news gathering.  Grade: B-.

The third was the small number of traditional news outlets that do still have foreign bureaus and real expertise.  The New York Times.  The BBC.  Al Jazeera.  A few others.  The twitterers were a part of the story that they reported, but they also added real background, real reporting, and real context to everything.  Grade: B+.  Given the extremely difficult reporting circumstances, maybe more like an A-.

This matches my assessment as well. 

Which, again, is not to diss Twitter.  It's merely to suggest that life is a bit more complex than simple memes of "this new information technology is supplanting all prior forms of information technology!" 

UPDATE:  Over at The Monkey Cage, John Sides and Henry Farrell offer further ruminations on Twitter.