Electing the UNESCO Director General in the Information Age

There have been comments in the Egyptian press expressing outrage at the failure of the UNESCO Executive Board to choose Farouk Hosny as the next Executive Director of the Executive Board, attributing his loss not to the comparative merits of the candidates but rather to a global conspiracy, Northern efforts to dominate the South, etc.

This selection process, as those of the past, was done be secret ballots of diplomats following extensive diplomatic contacts among member nations. There was however a significant media coverage, a number of influential editorial and op-ed pieces, and fairly extensive discussion in Cyberspace. A decade ago, the audience for a newspaper story or editorial would have been largely limited to the subscribers of the newspaper; today, with the World Wide Web on the Internet, interested individuals were following the selection news from many countries, and with online translation services in several languages. Stories and editorials went worldwide to the subset of the global population interested in UNESCO. The result was that individuals and civil society organizations had unprecedented influence on the votes of democratic countries. A number of members of the Executive Board explicitly stated that their votes on the candidates were influenced by the impact of the choice on the prestige of the organization. Democratic governments must have realized that there would be repercussions were Farouk Hosny to have been elected following the flood of comment against his candidacy.

Of course, the Information Age also makes it much easier for interested individuals to dredge up past statements by candidates wherever they may live, and to find charges against them from whatever source. A concerned NGO with staff and volunteers experienced in data mining can find a lot in a short time.

I suggest that the expectation that clearly existed in Egypt and the Arab world that Farouk Hosny would win the election was based on assumptions that the diplomatic process would work as it had in the past. The failure of the Hosny camp to understand the new dynamic in the Information Age may well have doomed the Egyptian candidacy. That failure may also underlie some of the rhetoric used by the Egyptian press in reporting the election.

The bloggers from the region, who presumably are more aware of the realities of the Information Age seem to be taking the election in quite a different way than the press.

That rhetoric results in uninformed and intemperate comments in opposition. I won't quote them either, but you might check the last paragraphs of this: http://bit.ly/48l4Bh

From the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

"More than half of younger online voters are turning to social media for election information. Of potential voters who are looking for election information online, 61% of 18 to 24 year olds and 55% of 25 to 34 year olds seek answers on user-driven content sites such as blogs, YouTube and Wikipedia."