 And now, I am delighted to introduce the moderator of our final panel, Gary Nell, the President and CEO of Sesame Workshops. Mr. Nell leads the non-profit educational organization and has been instrumental in focusing Sesame Street's global mission, including groundbreaking co-productions in South Africa, India, Northern Ireland and Egypt. He also helped found PBS Kids Sprout, a 24-hour domestic cable channel in the U.S. Mr. Nell. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much to the USIP and ITVS for bringing us all together today. It's been an incredible morning, and this is a tough act to follow, but usually start with the young kids and work up to grown-ups, and we got it flipped around today. So we're going to have to, like, turn the dial back. You know, I've been spending a lot of time in Northern Ireland, and the God's honest truth is I now have Jerry Adams from Sinn Féin wearing a Cookie Monster watch, so I feel like I should quit now while I'm ahead. We toured an integrated school. There aren't too many there, and, you know, there are a lot of immigrants in Northern Ireland now, along with the rest of the U.K., and a little girl came into the class, a new kid joined this classroom of four-year-olds, and another little girl ran up to her, very excited, and said, oh, welcome. What's your name? She says, Mona. She goes, well, what are you? And Mona says, I'm Muslim, and the little girl looks at her very oddly and says, were you a Catholic Muslim or a Protestant Muslim? And the reason why I tell this story is because that's what we're dealing with around Sesame Street, and those of us in early childhood, you know, as the tape said, that film clip that children are not born to hate. This is a learned capacity, and we know now from research at Queen's University in Belfast and others that children as young as three years of age are showing these kinds of discriminatory attitudes towards other races and ethnicities, religions, et cetera, and this only gets exacerbated, I think, by the media environment that they are growing into. The other just opener that I will tell you as a story is about my grandmother who grew up talking about the refrigerator as this amazing thing, the ice box, right, amazing. And I never thought about the refrigerator. It was an appliance. And when we think about our blackberries and iPods and iPads and PS2s and everything else at Nintendo DS, as we think of these things as these incredible things, and oh my God, look what this does and that does, well, our kids do not look at these things that way. They are appliances. They will never know the world before the internet. Never know the world before cell phones. Never know the world for high speed internet in many countries. Mobile phones on Nintendo DS is iPods and iPads. It's very hard for those of us as adults to get inside that head and begin to think about building a world for children and trying to hand down the lessons that we want to teach them, but in a different way in which children are learning now. This is why Sesame Street is actually, this afternoon, applying to the U.S. Department of Education to launch it in four cities in America, an actual intervention in pre-K programs using digital assets of 40 years of Sesame Street teaching cognitive basics, health outcomes, and social and emotional learning. This is how kids are learning. Kids use those assets to get children, some 50% of whom are failing in our public schools in America, let's figure out a way to use these assets. We've now grown to 140 countries around the world. We just celebrated our 40th birthday, and in at least 30 of those we have Indigenous co-productions, as you saw. So we're working in places like South Africa with an HIV positive muppet named Kemi, who can teach children there, some one in nine who are infected, that you can be friends with someone and play with them and not necessarily get sick. To deal with symptom, to try to destigmatize those children so that you open up a dialogue around HIV and AIDS to finally get South Africa's head around tackling that crippling disease. And now, thanks to USAID, we're going to take that into six other Sub-Saharan African countries shortly, with Kemi at the same time. We're in Egypt with girls' education, where 60% of the female population is illiterate. We have little Hocha, who is a young girl muppet who wants to become a lawyer or a doctor or work for Search for Common Ground or something. But she's got a great path towards success, which we want to give to young girls in Egypt. And working in social and emotional learning like Northern Ireland or Israelis and Palestinians or in Kosovo, these are tough places. And as John said in his video, we're not naive about this, but we do believe that by showing a picture of the other, you can present something in the privacy of one's own living room that you may not be able to talk about out in the cafe. And we think that by showing the other and realizing the similarities to me as a Catholic versus the Protestant kid down the street or a servant in Albania, it's much harder to hate someone when you know someone on the other side. So that's really the premise of what Sesame Street is trying to do. The enormous youth bulge that exists in the world. We heard this morning about all of the technologies that are changing the world every week. I mean, it's hard to believe that 15 years ago, we really did not have the web in any kind of a high-speed capacity in this country in Europe and other developed countries. You remember dial-up web where you get busy signals all the time? It wasn't until we really had this 24-7 web capacity that things like Facebook, things like Twitter, things like YouTube could actually take off. They would not exist in a dial-up world. And the rest of the world is, of course, catching up with us, mostly through mobile phone technologies, some 5 billion mobile phones now in the world. So Sub-Saharan African countries, South Asia, many parts of the world, Latin America, that we're living in poverty, you saw those explosive numbers of growth in mobile devices. These are teaching tools for the 21st century. Those of us in the education business need to be focused on those tools as the next generation of teachers in the world, which is where Sesame Street started 40 years ago and now where we will work in this century and we will work with colleagues like you all to try to build a better world by using these technologies, which is why we're here. We have an amazing panel of people this afternoon who I'm so privileged to have on stage with me, Jared Cohen, who is on the Secretary of State's policy planning staff, a good friend. He has been chair of the State Department's policy planning staff working group on 21st century state craft. Jared has applied new techniques and technologies in developing a new youth-focused vision for a public diplomacy that effectively counters extremism among youth and promotes peace building. Jared is perhaps best known for his work using U.S.-based social media companies to advance U.S. interests internationally, having taken a delegation of leading executives from new media outlets to Baghdad recently. I think you're probably personally responsible for getting Eric Schmidt over there to digitize the entire Iraqi State Museum recently, requesting Twitter in June 2009 to stay online during the Iranian election protests to enable activists to continue using it. He's also the author of Children of Jihad. I'd like to welcome to the stage Jared Cohen first. Shamil Idris is the Chief Executive Officer of Soleah and oversaw its recent merger with the United Nations Alliance of Civilians Initiative. Soleah uses new media technology to facilitate dialogue between students from diverse backgrounds across the globe. At a time when media plays an increasingly powerful role in shaping people's viewpoints on political issues, Soleah provides students in North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States with the opportunity skills and tools to shape and articulate their own viewpoints on some of the most pressing global issues facing this generation. He was also the Chief Operating Officer of Search for Common Ground, the International Conflict Resolution Organization, where he also managed their office in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Please welcome Shamil Idris. Burugu Gekunda is creating the partnership between media focus on Africa and Search for Common Ground. Burugu masterminded the creation of that wildly successful program on the Kenyan sports team called the TEAM. In Kenya's split by ethnic violence, we all read about or experienced following the 2007 election. Burugu used the storylines afforded by the struggles of small-time soccer to demonstrate effective techniques for responding to conflict non-violently. With high production values and focusing on the national pastime of football, someday the U.S. will also join in that. God willing. The TEAM provided a means to reach out to the young men that dispensed much of the violence. Please welcome Burugu Gekunda. David Kleeman is the President of the American Center for Children and Media. He is a leading light in the U.S. media industry's development of a media environment supportive of children's needs. An executive roundtable of TV and digital industry leaders, the Center that David founded and organized promotes the exchange among industry partners of the ideas, expertise, and best practices necessary to deliver high-quality entertaining and informational media content to children. He's been a consultant to Paris Jeunesse, to the Global Summit on World's Children. This is someone who's really dedicated his career to helping children through media. Please welcome to the stage David Kleeman. And finally, Sandra Buffington, who is a leading practitioner of social marketing and communications that fosters social change on a global scale, responsible during her tenure at USAID for an international communications portfolio that exceeded $100 million in budget, which I'm sure you have now as well, and that targeted global health and reproductive rights. Sandra now directs the Hollywood Health and Society programs at USC's Annenberg School for Communications, a partnership to provide the entertainment industry professionals with accurate, timely, and credible information for storylines, including public health issues. Please welcome Sandra to the stage. So to get it started, panel, we've heard a lot this morning about the revolution around change media. And I'd like to maybe go down the line here, maybe starting on the far side, Jared, with how has social media, how has the web, and so-called new media, do you view it as an opportunity for change or a threat to civilization? Big question. And a fair question for somebody on the policy side. One of the things that's important to note is as we look at the new virtual comments and how to actually think about it as it pertains to support for civil society or support for democracy, technology doesn't sort of change things. Technology doesn't, in and of itself, do anything. It's just a tool that can be utilized for good or for bad. People are still the primary agents of change. So the question is when you throw technology into the mix, how does that empower different subsets of society? How does that transform dynamics? And that, to me, is the really interesting question. And the debate that we have in government is exactly as Gary mentioned, which is you put this technology out there, can't bad people use it for hostile purposes, but also we see it being utilized by a large number of people for civic empowerment, as well as a variety of other things. I want to actually answer this question just by beginning with a very quick story from when I was living in Iran in 2004 and 2005 before I was in government, because it really shaped a lot of how I think about this, which is I was in a marketplace in the southern Iranian city of Shiraz, and I saw a lot of young people perched against the walls of a busy intersection of about six different alleyways, and they were all fiddling around on their cell phones and I asked them, what are you doing? And they said, I'm using Bluetooth. And I had always thought of Bluetooth as that kind of creepy device where you walk around talking to yourself with the earpiece and I had never realized that it allows you to call and text complete strangers as long as they're within 200 yards. So I asked them, what are you doing? And some of them were organizing underground book clubs. Some of them were organizing for political purposes. One of them was recruiting a new basis for his band. I think a couple of them were picking up girls. I mean, they were doing sort of a variety of things. And I asked them, I said, aren't you worried that you're going to get caught doing this? You're all out here in the open organizing to do things that you're not supposed to do. And they looked at me and they said, nobody over 30 knows what Bluetooth is. Now, that's very interesting because it sums up a generation gap in a country of 70 million people where 67% is under the age of 30. But there's two important things that I took away from this. Most of what they told me they were doing was very frivolous and you're wondering, so kids are organizing to have a good time at night, why is that relevant to anything? Well, the same young people that were using Bluetooth to organize to do fun things that they weren't supposed to do were learning how to organize to come together behind the grip of the police state and they used those same tactics to organize politically in June of 2009. But the more interesting thing, which is relevant to the question that Gary asked, is when I went back to the U.S. and started talking to companies like IBM and others that have actually been at the forefront of Bluetooth technology and told them these stories, they didn't realize that Bluetooth could be utilized for this. And so it summed up a very it summed up a very important innovation gap that also exists, which is, you know, none of us in this room or in Silicon Valley, regardless of how smart an engineer somebody is, can possibly imagine how the tools that they innovate for profit or for mission or for anything else will be innovatively used when you throw it in an environment where people rely on those tools as a way to connect to civil liberties that they wouldn't otherwise have. And it's just something that you can't possibly do without, you know, more than a handful of people here have ever read the instructions manual to their cell phones. And to be honest, why would you? You live in societies that are free and open where you have your civil liberties, whereas if you're in a place like Iran or a place, you know, some place where there's censorship or restrictions, if you don't read the instructions manual five times over and figure out how to use every element of this technology, then, you know, you're losing out an opportunity. So why does that matter, right? So you're empowering citizens. You know, the debate that we have in government is, you know, how much do we embrace this new phenomenon given the risks? And, you know, I'll just, there's a lot more that I can say about this, but I just want to sort of give you a sense of how we frame the debate. Which is, it's inevitable. I'm not a tech utopian by any stretch of the imagination, but I am a techno pragmatist in the sense that whether we like it or not, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, you name it, they're putting it out on the public domain. And as a policy person, we have two choices. Fear that we can't control it, and don't try to influence it, and don't have more space for hostile actors to use it for nefarious purposes, or recognize that the 21st century has a terrible time to be a control freak, and there's, you may as well try to influence it. If you can't control it, and the time to influence it would be before, you know, cell phone penetration is 100%, or internet penetration is 100%. So you can do things like what Gary's talking about, of bringing access under the auspices of education, and cross-cultural programs, and so forth. There's a lot more that I can say, but I assume we'll get to it later. But it's a, I think really fundamentally, I would agree with one of the primary things Jared's point was it really was, which is that I think that new media technology, social media, all this, it's no more, I think it's value agnostic. I mean it's no more morally good or bad than the invention of the telephone, and it can be used for good or bad purposes. I think there are two things that it enables, and I think there's also be, there's also, you know, some of us get seduced by new media a little bit and need to be more realistic about what it provides and what it really doesn't provide. On the hand of what it provides, a lot of people have talked today about the importance of narrative and the importance of getting voice to a diversity of narratives, and that exposure of oneself to those diversity of narratives really helps you live in a more pluralistic, interdependent society and world. And whether we like being in that world or not, because it's a scary place to be, it's the reality of what we're in. And so clearly new media technologies and social media technologies allow you to link up to and be exposed to narratives and perspectives that you used to only be able to get through books or if you had the money to travel. And so that's an enabling thing. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to happen because a cool platform is put up. The second thing that, you know, I think it allows is it's really allowed for this shift from content to conversation, which so much of the media industry is now struggling with or embracing, but no matter what is moving towards. And the kind of media that was simply getting your message out of one-to-many approach to media really is shifting increasingly to a many-to-many interactive form of communication and conversation. Whether that's going to be a constructive kind of engagement or not, again, new media tools don't make that constructive. They simply enable it to happen. I can pick up the telephone and yell racial epithets at somebody, or I can pick up the telephone and try and have a constructive conversation with them. What we deal with at Solia a lot is how to marry the latest in these new media technologies that are enabling this exposure to diverse narratives and this shift to conversation, not simply one-way messaging, with tried-and-true practices and processes for cross-cultural engagement and conflict resolution. And how to marry the process with the scalability of the technology is not something that I have seen done extraordinarily well. It's still in very much the experimental phases and I think it's really critically important. So for me, Jared talks about getting in before cellphone penetration has reached, you know, 100% whatever it is. For us, the approach is very much, how do we pilot and then enable young adults who are using this technology much more so than I am or particularly people over the age of 35 are to be the leaders in using the technologies for those ends. And I think for Americans here, this, I don't know how many people saw Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, but to me one of the most profound things in that whole film was uttered by the heavy metal rocker with the make-up and the G-string and all that. When he was asked, you know, the kids who shot up the school in Columbine were fans of your music. You got criticized a lot for it if you could talk to them right before the morning of that attack. What would you say to them? And Manson immediately shot back. I wouldn't say anything. I'd listen to them. That's what nobody did. And one of the things that we found in our work in predominantly Muslim societies is that it's not a narrative, but particularly if you're in societies where you feel like your society's narrative is either not being heard or is being distorted purposefully or distorted out of ignorance, but nevertheless distorted to the outside world. Simply the feeling of being heard out is extraordinarily effective in a productive way of opening someone's engagement with the rest of the world. And we supported some research at the SACS Neuroscience Lab at MIT which you can find on our website and it's great to have neuroscientists at MIT telling you, yes, interaction around media is really what opens up people's minds, not simply broadcasting media to them, but the interaction that it enables and the experience of being heard particularly from societies where they feel oppressed or marginalized has an incredibly ameliorative effect on their sense of alienation and frankly the proclivity towards violence. I think for me obviously coming from a background of too much penetration of telecommunications and that sort of communication I suppose that we are talking about here new media presents opportunities opportunities to reach out to a lot more people. I mean you're talking about where we don't have so many fixed lines mobile phones obviously have got a lot more there are a lot more people who got mobile phones therefore they know there is an opportunity there but I think the point to be made is that people will make use of what that which they consider to be a lot closer to them and that which can resonate more with what it is that they believe in what it is that they stand for and that sort of thing and in instances where people think they would like to be able to know where the next watering point for their animals will be then they want to be able to find to use a gadget that is closest to them and if the mobile phone is that gadget then that's what they will use I think it's about you know it's about the possibilities possibilities that the new media does present I'm going to as others have before me take a little bit of issue with the framing of the question with the dichotomy of it I was watching Chris Matthews the other day and he was talking about over the past weekend President Obama giving a graduation speech talked about iPads, iPads, Xboxes and such as being distractions now at the risk of criticizing our president he did follow that by saying I don't know how to use any of them and it seems to me if you say I don't know how to use any of them it makes it less effective when you're critiquing their use we heard this morning about some of the research from the Kaiser Family Foundation and here I think the research is brilliant I think the framing of it that's been used is where the flaw lies because we keep talking about the amount of media consumption that young people are engaging in the fact is much less than you might think of what they're doing is purely consumption communication and I think what this is changing is the context in which young people are growing up when I was young my circle of friends my circle of connections was limited to those I could reach physically at first it was the kids right next door as I was very young as I grew older it was the kids down the block across the street as I was given a little more freedom to roam today it may be the case that a manga fan who lives near me in Chicago is closer friends with another manga fan in Tokyo than with the kid next door in Chicago who plays the violin but the kid in Chicago who plays the violin may be playing duets online with someone who lives in Amsterdam or Tel Aviv or anywhere around the world kids are much better able to find colleagues and friends based on their interests and their abilities and their skills than they are primarily on just who's nearby and they're doing amazing things with it there are some ways that it can be misused there's the danger that people will only relate to people who are very much like them and will not get out and see that broad perspective I'm encouraged by some research that your colleague now Gary Patty Miller did when she was at Children Now that found that most American children say that one of their best friends is of a different race, religion substantially different background of some sort but I have to share with you the most wonderful example of young people coming together through digital media to create peacemaking that I found while I was looking toward this panel and that's the Harry Potter alliance I don't know if you've heard of this but it's a group of young people who are fans of the Harry Potter books who have formed essentially a virtual NGO they're based all around the world and they've divided when you join you register for one of the houses they have competitions among the houses to do good so they just raised 40,000 books for a literacy organization and they're essential practices their underpinning has to do with equality across race sexual preference gender with solving some of the big problems of the world by applying their overall expertise to it I think what we adults need to bring to this they're doing a lot of this for themselves when I first got started in this business and it reveals a little about how old I am space bridges were the big thing satellite space bridges allowing young children in America to talk to children in Russia to talk to children in China and what we forgot was content they'd open up the satellite and you'd see the kids sort of looking at each other we can provide that structure that gives them a starting point to grow the pearl so that they can use the technologies they're used to and we can give them a starting point for conversation I'd like to reframe the question too we work primarily with Hollywood with entertainment programming we work with script writers and producers to get accurate social messages into TV storylines so you may not have noticed that when you're watching Grey's Anatomy or Lawn Order SVU or 90210 or Lincoln Heights that you're actually learning as you go because these are messages that are not preachy they're an integral part of compelling narratives and we use a trans media approach so it's not either or and I'm going to segue into there was a conference started at MIT called Beyond Broadcast I don't know if anybody here attended and for the first two years the new media community and after a while they approached me on the third year and they said we realized something's missing we went to our presenters and asked them if you could have your new media strategy or approach featured on prime time television would you care and they all said of course that would be the best thing we could have and so they realized that we're really talking about an integration of what's considered so for example we consulted on a storyline on 90210 program for teenagers on bipolar disorder it was a six week story arc we had our psychiatrist consulting working with the writers and producers once the storyline was accurate and was on air we did a PSA using the lead actor referring viewers to a website and a lot of kids went to this website we tracked the traffic to these websites huge spikes once they got there they could subscribe in discussion threads there they could generate their own content they were telling their own stories around bipolar disorder this went to viral media Perez Hilton the celebrity blogger picked it up he posted the same web link on his site and one of his bloggers said hey hey Perez you were watching 90210 last night so I don't see this either or that package is very powerful when we talk about trans media we define it as the use on the part of the viewer of multiple platforms to piece together health or social messaging they can't get the entire story from one site they have to go across all of these platforms David I'm still I have Vladimir Posner fuck in my brain now about the space bridge how many people remember Vladimir Posner okay few hands went up I have some specific questions Jared the State Department you obviously sit in a very powerful position in terms of defining a message that the United States wants to give out to the world and I'd love to hear a little bit about not just the technology piece and the savvy nature of the receiver and the person who is interacting with you but how does the State Department go about determining the message in this complex environment I think it is important to broaden it beyond just the message and it's hard to talk about the message without talking about the tools themselves we talk about and we call them connection technologies because what we're talking about is cell phones and internet cell phones that are 3G capable they connect individuals to information, i.e. new media to each other and entities, i.e. social media and then a whole new universe of activity that we're coming to grips with which is actual resources be they financial as is the case with mobile banking be they health as is the case with telemedicine be they justice as is the case with telejustice or distance learning as is the case with education and so we're looking at the whole universe of it and in some cases the message is less important than who the messenger is or what the tool of dissemination is you can come up with the greatest message in the entire world with all the right stakeholders involved but if you want to reach young people and you're not using the right technologies you may not even get it there and you've then wasted millions and millions of dollars but in terms of how we actually look at this larger universe I think one of the biggest issues that we often see made is for people to assume that the digital space is something separate from the traditional realms that we already execute our policy and so we look for different sorts of solutions so take civil society the way that we've thought about civil society traditionally is NGOs with offices with hired staff that apply for grants and give them out to local organizations, individuals or entities what we've seen over the last several years whether it was the anti-far protest in Colombia the social upheaval in Iran the twitter revolution in Moldova there's so many different examples of this is that a new generation of activists that are sort of your unlikely or your non-traditional leader are taking the traditional advocacy that we've seen for decades beyond the traditional realms and into cyberspace and so when Secretary Clinton decided to give her big internet freedom speech on January 21st in the museum part of her rationale for giving this whole new generation of leaders are advocating in an expanded civil society from what we've traditionally looked at then the policies that have governed how we engage, empower, support them in the traditional realms should also guide how we support, engage and empower them in these new realms and so part of the logic behind her internet freedom speech was looking at this universe of stakeholders that are advocating for human rights, democracy whatever it might be on the blogs, on the social networks, on their cell phones and looking at how we treat them as we would treat ordinary elements of civil society so the point that I often make is take a blogger people don't get arrested for blogging they get arrested for dissent the blog is just what their office looks like people don't get arrested for using social networks they get arrested because of the things that they do on social networks and the larger way that we're thinking about this is civil society now is expanded and includes those that have URLs and offices instead of websites those that have followers and members instead of paid staff and those that use open source platforms instead of applying for grants or having robust budgets so what that means from a policy standpoint is it completely changes the nature of who we engage it completely changes the nature and the definitions of how we support it also completely changes the nature of what stakeholders we bring into the mix part of the reason that I routinely bring executives from Silicon Valley to places like Iraq and Mexico and Russia and a variety of other places is because we the U.S. government we know the stakeholders and have relationships with the stakeholders who understand the local context but to me state craft is just a fancy way of troubleshooting the world's challenges and if you're troubleshooting anything you want to connect the experts on the most innovative tools with the experts that understand the local context so our policy is such that we play facilitator sometimes the State Department is most effective acting as a convener a connector and a conceptual partner where we bring together experts who understand 21st century tools with experts that understand the local context and issue in country A, B, C, D or all of them and facilitate a conversation that wouldn't otherwise take place and that to me is sort of the essence of what we call 21st century state craft we by no means have it all figured out by any stretch of the imagination but we sort of broken down this culture of risk aversion and we're willing to try new things and bring in new stakeholders whether people think it makes sense intuitively or not It's really interesting I think a lot about this issue like with Harry Potter and Avatar and the fact that these have such massive mass appeal all around the world and I remember being in Cambodia once and and the streets were cleared in Phnom Penh at 9 o'clock at night because MacGyver was coming on television and there is something about Hollywood there is something about U.S. entertainment that has a universal appeal somehow when we used to export Duke Ellington to Kabul to give a concert in the football stadium there I'd love to hear the panel a little bit talk about what Jared just mentioned is there a big role in public diplomacy for technologists in this country to transfer some of their know-how to developing generators of use in these different countries in social and new media Yes, there is What's really important is that we move away from a campaign model to a sustained and systematic form of outreach to the creative community and we need to do that in the major media markets that serve developing countries as well as in the U.S. and we're doing this now in Hollywood we don't do campaigns when you do a campaign you pay for it you're either producing or co-producing you have control of the product you have control of the end product you may not have control of the outcome but you know what your end product will look like that's very costly when you're producing you're paying in Hollywood we don't pay for anything we're simply a resource we're a community so we first of all have to learn what their needs are what they will tell us the writers will say we have a partnership with the Writers Guild of America West they say my job is to tell a compelling story and we say okay we'll help you make your stories more compelling by making them more realistic and we will provide you a free resource of experts on any health topic you need the climate change and the environment it could be finance and economic development we can pair up experts any kind of expert with the writers the key is that we're there 24 hours a day 7 days a week we help them meet their deadlines we give them story ideas not storylines they're the master storytellers and this is really important every single issue group in the world wants to get their issue portrayed in Hollywood so don't pitch your storyline this is a case studies real stories of real people this gives them ideas they spin them and going to the power of narrative this was mentioned on the panel we know that there is a measurement which is called a measurement of transportation the degree to which the viewer is engrossed or transported by a storyline there are huge knowledge gains and changes when a viewer has been transported into a storyline which means they forget where they are they lose track of time they come to see these characters as beloved friends or family this is much more powerful than preaching it people or telling them what the story is it allows them to become fully immersed and discover the message themselves I'll stop there Gary maybe I'm just being obstinate today but I again want to turn the question around but I think we're talking about it as though it's a one-way flow from the US out to the rest of the world I think one of the biggest gaps that we have is we don't bring enough from the rest of the world back to the US I serve as chair of the advisory board for the International Children's TV Festival so I have a chance to see programming from around the world and there are some amazing models for low cost production high quality production that allow cultures to exchange with each other not all the culture out of programs but by sharing work done within a particular country the exchange model where excuse me each country produces one program and shares the rights with all the others that participate so that you get not only low cost programming but you get examples of how media would be produced from 10 or 15 different countries I think there are some encouraging signs here in the US that we are starting to look beyond our own borders for children's content in particular that exposes young people to other cultures the new president of the Disney Channel comes from Latin America she's from the Brazilian office so she's going to be looking worldwide Nickelodeon is starting to bring programs from its global channels back to the US now we have here in the audience today MHZ networks that is bringing programming from around the world and putting it out on digital channels and has launched a children's service now so I think let's look at this in a narrow either way but as a circle I'm not sure about policy especially the American policy but I know about one thing that there is need for engagement there's need for engagement between people and among people in the 2008 the period, we call it the darkest period in our country 2007 elections then we descended into a period when we hacked one another and people used mobile phones to create fear among one another messages started circulating the fact that the army was getting out on the streets to spread terror messages were sent around saying stuff like the police commission has resigned and a lot of the information that was coming across was not necessarily the truth but it was used to cause whatever to spread whatever fear people wanted to spread and that sort of thing I think if only the technology if only the possible media was used to harness the good and to communicate and to put across facts away from people's perceptions I think there would have been a major difference at that time say the Americans had a policy towards encouraging the use of new media differently perhaps it would have indeed the Americans did come across very strongly at the time when we were at that moment they did not specifically target the use of media at that time but indeed there were other areas that they did look at but I dare say that there is a need I think for engagement on what is it that how is it that we can allow people to communicate between themselves because ultimately it's about that which the people think works for them if the people don't take ownership of it it doesn't matter what the Americans think if the Kenyans don't think it works for them I mean Americans can shout all they want or indeed anybody else for that matter one of the things that we struggle with all the time is the word clutter and we just view there have been other I think synonyms used to use for that today the world is just filled with too much on the hard drive and it's very hard in this media environment I'd love to hear from the panel prognosis on television and feature films in terms of hitting mass audiences is this a technology that will be with us for a long time in this long form storytelling hitting mass audiences or are we going to see really that business model disappear and be divided up into a million little pieces I thought it was going to sound good Well television is definitely here to stay now the nature of programming is changing for sure yeah Hollywood is probably one of the most powerful form of storytelling in the world and that is not going away and of course it's less expensive to do reality programming and we see a huge increase in unscripted programming but I want to tie this to the changing nature of programming in general there used to be a very clear line between children's programming and adult programming there were certain hours that we saw children's shows now maybe this is talked about earlier today I actually I'm sorry I wasn't here that's not true anymore there's a real blurring you know kids can watch TV on the internet they can watch on a handheld device there's really no hour anymore for children's programming so there's a real blurring that's one line again and the reality and scripted show are also blending these shows that look like you know they're non-actors start out that way and they're unscripted in the beginning but you know over the course of the series they become actors with scripts so there's not even a clear line there I think we'll continue to see these types of changes but one thing we know is that you know television programming in Hollywood is broadcast all over the world I was I spent a lot of time in the Middle East over the last 12 months everywhere I went I was working with young people with the Y-peer network the youth peer education network that was started by UNFPA these kids watch more American television than I do they watch all of the reruns and I would ask them why do you watch the medical shows and why do you watch the crime shows and they said because this is the only way we can see how justice is delivered and how medicine or health care is delivered we don't have access to that in our own countries through our own programs right now I think the one area where television will remain closest to now if I really knew the answers to this I'd be a very wealthy man the one area where television will probably remain much more consistent with what it's been in the past than anywhere else is preschool there's no better medium for conveying information to very young children than story based broadcast television whether it's in a magazine format a fiction format but conveying stories to young people and I strongly believe that we need to let even very young children see other real children see a diversity of real children that we can't always rely on animation that we really you have to start peace building at the very youngest of ages as someone was talking about today and I've seen some stellar examples just in the last few months a program from the Netherlands a series about a little girl who lives in a very diverse apartment block with someone who comes from a very different background from her sometimes that background is national sometimes it's ethnic, sometimes it's religious one time she even visits a friend who's lost a leg so she learns about disability example from Colombia where they're introducing kids to all the different parts of the country and to how people grow up in very different ways in what's been a very fractured country through an exchange program a kid goes to visit someone who lives under circumstances and then the kid who he's visited goes out and visits someone else and sort of a domino effect throughout so I think preschool is probably the area where we'll see it stay the most the same, Camille? I was going to take your question and turn it for my own purposes just to be completely transparent I mean I'm not... I'm not good at the predictive stuff at all particularly in this space because I've talked to a lot of people who've been in these industries longer than I have and they don't seem to know and so I have no clue but one thing that you pick up on in doing this work is trends or where things seem to be going and we're engaged more right now in the news media realm than in the dramatic form realm and one of the things that we but by way of just very brief discussion one of the things that we do through 80 universities in 25 countries is facilitate a process by which through a web-based video conferencing technology students from multiple different countries are having facilitated dialogue for two hours a week but a highlight for the students every semester is whether they're from Indonesia or Egypt or Kansas or the UK or Netherlands whatever is the media production module and they love this and we basically provide we get raw footage from Al Jazeera and the Associated Press and we provide them with basic training and how you cut up a short news clip then they all go off on their own and that's something in Gaza or whatever it is that Al Jazeera and Associated Press have provided for that semester and then they exchange those pieces with one another and that starts a very profound conversation about why did you introduce it with this music and not that music how can we focus on the suicide bombing and not the grieving widow and that led to a relationship now with some of these outlets we just formed a partnership with Al Jazeera where they're going to be providing digital media training for some of these young adults what they're interested in is what is the content that would filter to the top of a particularly diverse community of young adults from around the world be they Texas evangelicals or secular human rights activists in France or religious political activists in Jordan or whatever it might be who are within this network of young adults that we've been working with for the last seven years and if each of those students was equipped with the respect button on their web browser they think wow that news piece or that commentary or that video really reflects something I didn't really understand before finally that perspective in my community is being given voice it always gets ignored for more extreme voices they can click respect and the stuff Al Jazeera is interested in we're starting to have this conversation with BBC and others is the stuff that filters to the top almost like that's a virtual editorial board of young adults again we're experimenting with the reason I'm getting into all of that the shift in the news media that we're seeing not so much in Hollywood but in the news media is this shift from just providing information and the importance of giving facts and even the importance of giving a diversity of perspectives to sitting in the middle and helping to facilitate a conversation this is why the Al Jazeera folks were really interested by they were as excited as we were about this partnership and we're hearing this from other news outlets as well that they're increasingly interested not so much whether the medium is going to go away but it's going to become much less becoming much less of a medium is about getting something out and is about facilitating a conversation hopefully an informed conversation and hopefully one that's facilitated in such a way that you don't have people leaving more polarized than they were when they came in let me share some experience here we've done the show that you just showed you just showed up here the team, we put it on TV we have our radio adaptation of the same and then we take the programs out to the villages and screen them and we then have people engage in facilitated dialogue thereafter we did ask our researchers, we have a team of researchers from the University of Peace to find out between the three of them between TV, radio and the mobile screenings and the dialogue that follows what is it that gets people to respond more to the content that we are putting across and the results were interesting for us we are now convinced that it is the combination of the three of them that is actually the reason for the success of the series and if we removed one of them it would not be the same anymore so much so that we are unable to tell whether people acted on the basis of what they saw on TV or what they had on radio or whether it was on the basis of the facilitated dialogue that followed what we are convinced however is that when people see it in their living rooms as audience members they are very passive they will not act on that information but when they watch it in a group and they then have some discussion or dialogue that follows thereafter there is some element of you know, urging one another there is some encouragement for one another to take some action after that and what we have seen is that when they saw it the first time then they watched the screenings during the when we went out for the mobile screenings the first time, the second time, the third time the fourth time they started saying now we have seen it so what do we do after this and it was after that then we started seeing groups starting to emerge and actions start happening and those people that initially were looking at individuals as you know as the other they have heard a lot about the other this morning people started looking at members of the other ethnic groups as sometimes even as non-humans now they started engaging and starting to want to talk again and it's only then that we started realizing that perhaps it is the fact that they saw it on TV the TV therefore validated what they then got to see on the ground and when they heard it on radio it confirmed what they had watched on TV because it was all happening just about the same time and therefore it's I'm not sure that you know you can for us in what we are doing we think it has to be a combination of the three probably even more because even we take it out to schools and we get kids or you know students in high schools to watch the drama and again have teacher moderated dialogue thereafter and they localize the issues that they see on screen they then bring them to their school context where it is about an example say for instance something to do with corruption they bring it to the level as to what it is that they can relate to it's the fact that they are able to see all these things that I think plays what's our best for them I have one more question and I'd like to open it up to the floor Jared this is a room pretend this is a room full of college students and you've been invited to give career advice to people who want to build peace and what are you going to tell them? That's an easy question because I do speak a lot at universities and so forth and one of the points that I often make and I think it actually is the most important is anybody who's interested in building peace presumably is paying attention to something around the world but I think a lot of students are kind of grappling with the question of how do I find my niche how do I build an area of expertise am I going to do it on the Arab-Israeli conflict there's people that are decades older than me that have been doing this for so much longer than me what can I really do that's different which is the question that they often ask and the point that I make is as somebody who works in the government I know how little expertise exists on technology and on tools of the 21st century not because people can't figure it out but because the largest demographic that populates U.S. government offices are individuals that were born into a society that didn't have high prevalence of these technologies and so the advice that I would give and under the age of 30 every single person at a university or a high school or wherever else has an innate expertise that they probably don't even realize which is the benefit of being the first generation socialized with high prevalence of satellite TV mobile phones, internet and so I think that comes with two things one, it should help kind of shape how they think about things because these technologies are relevant to every issue in every country and every discipline and they have a responsibility there's a huge gap that exists between those that understand the issues and challenges that we face both new and old and those that understand and have an innate expertise on the tools that need to be leveraged to address those challenges and so we actually need young people to be one proactive in terms of applying their expertise on those tools to those challenges and then two advice to people over the age of 30 is look for opportunities to engage and empower young people to do what they're very good at which is the stuff that they probably don't even realize is significant and prescriptive to the major challenges that we face I think Jen is right about where young people have a comparative advantage over everyone older than them which is the means almost by second nature as you were saying these are appliances I think one thing young people don't really have because none of our cultures really support this in them is an understanding of how you make sustainable social change and the way you make sustainable social change in my view is not about immediately going outward to the change you want to see in the world but first grounding in yourself what you stand for what you're willing to do and not do and to take an approach to social change that shifts you from this is an issue I care about I'm going to find out everyone who agrees with me on that issue and then I'm going to go to war literally or figuratively with the other side whatever to shift from that to I'm going to take an issue I really care about and I'm going to engage everyone else who really cares about that issue I'm going to find a way and then I'm going to try to find a creative way to get a sustainable solution together that is not inherent in any of our cultures that we engage with it's certainly not inherent here and I think when I talk to young people about social change I talk oftentimes about getting grounded in that way first not least of which because oftentimes you will lose friends and enemies in this space people will remember the autobiography of Malcolm X whether you read the book or saw the movie if you saw the film when he's going into this Ivy League campus hall to give a talk and this young white co-ed says I love you know what you're doing can I help you when he says no when he walks right past her and she breaks down crying on the steps well in the book you know later in life he reflects on that interaction and he says I wish I had told her to go into her own community and have the same kind of immediate passport that she will but that's also the toughest kind of action to take because that's where people will call her a traitor that's where the tribes that you're dealing with in Kenya will wonder well why are you meeting with those people or what are you doing here and to prepare and equip young people to deal with that kind of world whatever the tools they are they're going to use to affect it is I think the primary and most important thing right Baruga what would you tell college students in Nairobi I think the best thing is that which is locally owned that people believe in I think we can one could sit and prescribe some formula but ultimately if the people don't believe in it again as I said before they will not they will not even pay attention to it I think the point is the best thing to do is develop content or media or formats or platforms that create the space for people to develop their own for people to be able to engage with the issues that they consider most dear to them and that they are able then to generate or come up with solutions that they themselves feel are the best in their context I think it's very easy to sit down and have some very lofty thoughts or what works and doesn't work and have some great theories about what it is that we need people to do and how they should apply the new technology or apply this, make use of media and whatever else you want them to do but if ultimately they do not believe in it if they don't think it serves their interests it's a wasted opportunity I think the thing to do really is to get out and seek what it is that people want first of all to do with themselves and provide the spaces and encourage them to really come up with the solutions that come and respond to their needs David I know you want to produce more preschool television to drive Sesame Street out of business but other than that what would you tell college students to really want to build peace? I'm actually going to assume for the moment that I'm speaking to an engineering class because I want to take on a different part of this and that is to say build out sustainable and connected platforms so that the entire world is able to communicate not just certain parts of it we've reached a point with media right now where if you do not appear you become invisible, you cease to exist so we really need to ensure that all parts of the world are able to communicate with all other parts so that we can have this conversation not just among a privileged few Sandra what do you tell the kids at USC? I would ask the kids where is your heartbreak that's where to focus it's an inner and an outer process because you know for a human being to sustain that passion and commitment over time it has to be very meaningful for them it may not be something in their local community it may be something they've been exposed to overseas, elsewhere I don't think we can prescribe that but the key is to go deep inside and find that depth of feeling and go with it the other thing when I work with the white peers I always tell them don't get hung up on tactics stay with your vision believe in yourself if you stay with that vision and connect to your heart you'll start drawing all the information and strategies and tactics and technologies and things you need to reach that and it's true it may not happen in the way you think it will but believe in your vision stay with your vision don't let anything get in the way you can succeed I think that's the main thing kids are going to be informing us very soon they're going to be telling us how to reach our goals so in terms of strategies and tactics and technology we know what we know now it's all changing so fast it'll be very different in 10 years so I don't think we need to tell them about that for the deep part could be a light but deep part questions from the audience yes ma'am visitors from all over the world and many of them are in new technologies some are in media one of the concerns I have about the whole day but particularly about this afternoon's battle is the issue of clutter like you were just saying there's so much out there using the internet rapidly and they're really doing all the recruiting that way effectively through whatever programming they use as you know in Tehran they use the cell phone to the detriment of the people now lately in China as well but how all these wonderful programs do exist but how do you compete in this collateral market and how do you make sure that some of these things from the heart that really promote peace are actually visible to the millions of kids in villages or wherever that are bombarded with a lot Jared you want to talk a little bit about Iran because you had such a deep experience there what's happening in response absolutely and let me address the first part of your question it's more than terrorists drug cartels in Mexico use it it's very pervasive among violent groups be they terrorists or other types of groups but again beyond the pragmatic explanation that I gave earlier about how this stuff is inevitable so it's getting out there and so you don't want to give extra space or more space for hostile actors to use it for hostile purposes but there's also a historical analogy here we said the very same comments that you're making are the same comments that we made about the cassette tape in the 1970s we didn't support the cassette tape because we feared that in the midst of the Cold War it could be used by the Soviets to propagate a communist ideology and so we decided you know what we're not even touching this space neglecting the fact that this wasn't DARPA creating the internet this was a private sector company and a collection of private sector companies putting a new technology out on the public domain well we didn't influence the space until it was far too late and not only did the Soviets know what they were but had it not been for the cassette tape it's very unlikely that Ayatollah Khomeini from his villa in France would have been able to achieve the kind of notoriety that allowed him to come back to such fanfare in November or in February of 1979 and so the historical analogy there is we have certain lessons learned now the prescription let's take a place like Iran in the midst of the demonstrations in June and then since then we're almost coming up on the year anniversary we're doing themselves if they think we in the State Department don't understand that the grave risks that come with technology we talk openly about the opportunities the press loves sort of talking about the way Twitter and Facebook and all these things are being used but we're well aware of the darker side of all of this that being said it's out there people are using it, people are going to continue to use it for good and for bad so how do we think about this there's a couple ways that we're thinking about it recognizing that it's not about the tools it's about the people behind the tools and so after the demonstrations in June of 2009 everybody talked about Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and all these things but nobody talked about who the people were behind these different platforms and go back to what I said before we're sort of ushering technologies breaking down these traditional barriers of age, gender, socioeconomic status and circumstances that previously prevented any individual that comprised civil society from having a voice and making an impact and being a visible member of civil society I don't think there's any better place to kind of zero in to illustrate this example than the native video the most popular name to come out of the demonstrations in June of 2009 it wasn't the former prime minister and opposition leader, Musavi it wasn't any of the sort of more well known activists it was an ordinary female individual walking the streets who was murdered and had it captured on a video camera and then posted on the web now let me say just a few things about this because it's very important because of video capable cell phones some ordinary individual who was five steps away from Neda Sultan I don't know if they were male, female old, young, rich, poor politically motivated or just there at the right moment captured it on their cell phone and within several hours was able to get it out of Iran on the web it had been sort of reposted on YouTube with different names and that video found its way on the desks and computers of some of the world's most powerful and least accessible people on the planet presidents, prime ministers, heads of state now take cell phones out of the equation and imagine Neda Sultan gets murdered the same exact events unfold what do you think happens a whole bunch of traditional NGOs try to sort of rally behind her case do you think within a couple of hours that story is making it I doubt it it's not about the technology but technology allows things to happen differently changes dynamics going back to Iran what we're looking at is finding ways to put tools in the hands of people and give them the ability to utilize those tools based on the anecdote I told earlier it's not our place to tell Iranians or even try to figure out for Iranians how to use these tools to hold their government to account US foreign policy now to wherever people are faced with politically motivated censorship to engage and empower those stakeholders that are allowing them to circumvent it and so that's one thing that we're trying to do but the other thing that we're trying to do is people in places like Iran and elsewhere even if they're not successful in achieving their objectives are putting new innovations about civil society out on the public domain and so whether it's Iran or Colombia or Moldova or anywhere else the world is comprised of one internet and even where people fail innovations succeed and what failed in one country might succeed in another country there was another question back here all the way in the back sir Hi my name is Leonard Doyle I run an organization for censored journalist called Infremedia isn't the point that around the world there's intense repression in places where we give a lot of multilateral aid whether it comes from the World Bank organizations or bilateral aid and isn't the time that we use some of the leverage the enormous leverage we have as governments when we're spending public money in these countries to create a space for independent media not state media, not commercial media I mean it's one thing to mention how Nita appeared on the deaths of prime ministers but the prime ministers probably knew about actually their spy agencies just likely knew about the death camps in Bosnia we surely need to empower media that's totally independent of government and you can do that through a variety of methods perhaps through trade isn't censorship infringing free trade perhaps through human rights legislation What's the take down on Shamil? Well I don't know anybody who would argue against and Jared could speak better to the policy element of it but I don't know anyone who would argue against wanting more independent sources of information I mean I think I think of we're talking a lot now we're using an example of Iran and also because of what my organization is primarily dealing with right now is relations between American, European and predominantly Muslim societies a lot as soon as you embrace a technology that allows you to give voice to diversity as perspectives as soon as you say that that's a good thing which I think it is you have to be ready to hear things that are going to be really hard for you to hear and different governments different American administrations different attitudes towards that kind of thing but I think in the non-profit non-governmental sector to me it's critically important that we allow space for those narratives to come out if we're hearing from a lot of the young adults who we engage that what's going on in Gaza or the increase in drone attacks from the US administration are some of the primary lenses through which they're seeing the US engagement separate from the real inspiration and motivation and hope that they got from both President Obama's election and then his speech in Cairo and more recently the action on Israeli-Palestinian conflict we're hearing that you know you can try and squash that opinion you can try and ignore it both of those not only don't work but they're counterproductive or you can engage with it and also realize that in this country so here in terms of understanding the diversity of those perspectives and how differently people view things than we might think or how differently they may view us than we kind of hope or thought that they did so I don't think there's any independent sources of media is fine I think if you're talking about governments for me and I know you might have a different view but I think governments for me that the criticals place in this area of embracing these technologies is giving voice to a lot of perspectives and those perspectives that represent a significant constituency or a huge frustration that's out there that has to be given voice and then engage with constructively at the people to people level the policy level is a different world but I don't think you can escape that I don't think we can embrace these technologies and then be upset by the fact that some people are voicing their anger through them and it's unfortunate but others will be I separate out the voicing of frustration the voicing of what is a large scale shared perspective not just among extremists but among many people as part of the problem I think it's part of the solution especially if we can find a way to actually listen and engage with it constructively I'd like to close with a question on media literacy I think it came up today Marvin Kalb I think was talking about the need to educate or maybe it was Frank this morning educating kids and adults frankly where the content comes from so whether something is actually based on fact checking like a nightline setup piece or whether it's one person's view made in a closet somewhere what is the role of media literacy and which has been talked about endlessly in Washington and Hollywood and New York and all kinds of other places no one's really getting it done in my opinion is this a dog chasing its tail or is this are there actual ways of making this happen I think we've seen great examples of how it actually can be made to happen in Canada in the UK where it's become an integral part of the school curriculum I think the problem that we've faced here in the US is that we've treated media literacy as a protectionist part of the curriculum teach you how not to get screwed over by the corporations or that kind of approach as opposed to accepting that look at the statistics we saw this morning about the amount of time young people are spending with screens we teach young people to read critically in print why are we not teaching them to view critically no matter what the screen is that they're looking at and to think critically about everything there that they're seeing I'll throw in a couple of data points 52% of regular viewers of television report that they believe the health content on television and scripted shows is accurate 26% of regular viewers of TV report scripted television shows among their top three sources of health information so it's also on these data points nearly half just over half of regular viewers of television report learning something new about a disease or how to prevent it from scripted television shows and one third of those viewers take action on what they learn that means if the content is inaccurate they're taking action if it's accurate we're doing them a service so just in a way of a model when there is a significant TV health storyline that we've worked on we post web links to the TV shows website so if you go to the house website you will see links to CDC or other credible sources of information so that viewers can find credible information and not just rely on the TV shows well first I'd like y'all to stay up here and secondly I just would like us all to thank this incredibly talented group of professionals who are building piece every day thank you for being here