Communications and interactions between States, individuals, NGOs, and corporations are constantly being reshaped due to new technologies, and this has shown to have a distinct affect on how diverse cultures are promoted and interact. This topic was the source of discussion at the AtlanTech Dinner on Cultures, Diplomacy, and New Technologies, a part of the Hub Forum 2011 in Paris on October 6th, 2011. Felix Marquardt, the visionary behind the Atlantic Dinners, hosted the evening providing context for the slate of futuristic thinkers and speakers.

Fission Strategy’s own Cheryl Contee spoke at the event, conveying that the human element was still the most important aspect of contemporary communications and networks. “The Internet is made up by people, for people, and about people,” she said. “Everything you see on the Internet is created by a person. Each mouse click, every status update, each tweet or photo, was created by a person.” This is an important consideration, as, “Those people are now more powerful than ever before in human history, and if you... want to be powerful or remain powerful, you will treat those people like people and not like anything else.”

Alec Ross, the Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, talked along similar lines saying people are the driving component in communications. “Technology is value neutral, it takes on the values and the intentions of its users,” he said. “It can fuel a city, or it can destroy a city.” This creates the potential to positively affect the political and economic well-being of these users. “What I believe is that the future is going to be made up increasingly of network effects that often times manifest themselves through individuals and ad hoc networks as opposed to in the traditional hierarchical way.”

This positive change has been demonstrated in a number of ways, and was the main topic of Cheryl’s speech. One example she discussed were ‘mom bloggers’. “Ninety per cent of moms are online in the United States, which is much higher than the national average. And it’s caught the full attention of marketers,” she said. “Since women buy 70% of everything in the United States... the rising influence of women connected to each other and how that’s changing buying patterns has really influenced the national marketplace.” By enabling people to have a stronger voice and helping them discover new sources of power through technology, their causes can have a greater impact much faster.

“We live in a world now that is generating more data than we have ever seen in one place before,” said Bit.ly’s Chief Scientist Hilary Mason. “What this data is actually bringing us is the ability to take conversations that would have happened and evaporated and to record them in a way where we can study them, so it is not so much engendering new conversation as it is taking the conversations that people already have and bringing them online.” Without people to have these conversations, the technology would have little influence.

Other speakers at the event included Blaise Agüera y Arcas, the Distinguished Engineer of Bing Mobile and Places; Director of Digital at The Onion and Jack & Jill Politics co-founder Baratune Thurston; CEO of Area/Code Kevin Slavin; art critic and archivist Hector Obalk; and Tunisian blogger and activist Bassem Bouguerra.