Extension’s charge has long been to extend research, information, and innovative strategies and programs from Land Grant University and research centers. Extension is working in an era of digital communication where social media is evidencing extraordinary growth. Most adults in the United States now report accessing information from social media platforms. As such the use of social media and technology in Extension is rapidly becoming a necessity. As Extension has served as a trusted source of information for over a century, it is currently facing a time of transition to explore how to effectively use technology to reach audiences. This chapter explores current trends in digital communication and highlights the ways that Extension can create and deliver information using social media. We propose intentionality in strategies and factors to consider when engaging via social media. Finally, we pose questions regarding Extension’s continued relevance and possibly changing role in considering the rapidly shifting information landscape.

Actions in cyberspace by governments, businesses, NGOs and other players have become part of international relations and international security. Those actions reflect countries’ national interests and affect their bilateral and multilateral diplomatic relationships. This has led to the rise of cyber diplomacy, the activity of deploying international cooperation in cyberspace and using actions in cyberspace to achieve foreign-policy goals. The main focus of cyber diplomacy in its early stages is trying to forge a way to regulate state behavior and prevent and regulate conflict in cyberspace. Some governments have extended their cyber diplomacy portfolios to include the foreign-policy implications of new technologies. Both traditional tools from the diplomacy toolbox and new technologies are needed to build and maintain international cooperation in cyberspace. Cyber diplomacy is not the activity of using digital tools to accomplish traditional foreign-policy objectives–that is the definition of digital diplomacy.

This chapter takes at its starting point a theoretical perspective that links language, signs, and sign-making firmly to the material world, and the inequalities that shape this world. The visibility, and invisibly, of linguistic diversity online is a function of these larger socioeconomic processes, and the digital social inequalities they give rise to. The internet and associated networking applications might be “new” technologies, but they reflect and reproduce historical continuities of structural inequality, reinforcing the imbalances, silences, and marginalizations that define the global world system.