Detente 2.0

Who is Google's Katie Stanton, the person named today to be White House Director of Citizen Engagement, a new job on Barack Obama's social media team? Here are some bits to add to the emerging picture on the blogosphere: she told attendees at last month's Alliance of Youth Movements Summit at Columbia University, co-sponsored by Google, the U.S. Department of State, Howcast, Facebook, and Access 360 Media that "the Internet is potent fuel for democracy, more than any war or troop surge or invasion." [The summit was organized to respond to the recent, sharp rise in the number of Facebook-organized political protests and mass demonstrations around the world.]

Watch this summit video, below, of Stanton and others discussing how new digital media platforms can be leveraged to affect social change. Stanton [in red] didn't say much, but called the attending youth activists—each of whom had used some form of social media to help bring about social and political reforms in their home countries— "the new United Nations."



For more on Stanton, see Nancy Scola's report on techPresident and Peter Kafka's piece on Mediamemo.

(Photograph, West Virginia Series 4, by James Pauls for istock.com)