Diplomacy meets the information revolution

Kavitha Rajagopalan is the author of "Muslims of Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West."

How does democracy change in an age of boundless information?

In the weeks following Cablegate, in which hundreds of thousands of state secrets became a part of the public record, some have called WikiLeaks a bastion of democracy and others say it's a terrorist organization. Of course, many groups in history have been seen as liberators to some and terrorists to others. But WikiLeaks is interested in freeing information, not just people or groups or nations. The implications - for citizenship and diplomacy, but also for informed civic and public engagement - are monumental.

WikiLeaks has emerged in an age of porous borders, when we as a society are struggling to define how to "do" democracy. Citizens of one country can now have simultaneous conversations with those from dozens of others. People form global communities around political issues almost effortlessly. Thousands of people bypass their governments to take political action - whether they are pro-democracy activists in Iran or anti-corporate anarchists at World Trade Organization summits or Islamist militants.

The conversations playing out in the State Department cables were often mundane, sometimes revealing. But it's clear that these conversations were limited to official diplomats speaking as offical government representatives. What about the thousands of international conversations and actions being undertaken by private citizens on any number of foreign policy matters? Aren't these a kind of diplomacy, too?

War is much easier to understand than diplomacy, but in the modern era, the two share the same language: alliances and enmities, secrets and subterfuges, all in an effort for national governments to maintain control.

At a time when we are so willing to volunteer personal data on social websites, but still unwilling to relinquish control over how that data is used, WikiLeaks raises interesting questions about what the government should keep secret..

At its heart, the debate about privacy and information is about access and control - not just who has control over what information, but, fundamentally, what constitutes information. Even before WikiLeaks came on to the scene, today's citizen has had access to enormous amounts of facts, figures, statistics, commentary and more. But how much of it is really "information" - organized and analyzed in a way that gives the reader context and insight - and how much is merely unsorted, unfiltered data?

The State Department cables were made available essentially as a searchable database. The onus for sorting and filtering these thousands of documents into a meaningful picture of U.S. foreign policy in practice was on the individual reader.

While a few major media outlets have the time and resources to spend hundreds of hours sorting through those cables, the majority of private citizens don't. They may read a few cables, jumping to regions or time periods interesting to them. Most likely, they turn to a media outlet to organize and analyze that information for them. But major national newspapers and broadcasts dedicated to objective presentation of international news are struggling with budget cuts, smaller staffs and declining audiences.

That means that the very resources dedicated to organizing information about war and foreign policy are becoming less available to private citizens - just as the data appears to be endless. Our democracy depends on our citizens sorting out the difference between the two.