Yes, we all love the new social media. They provide instant information/gratification. And, what's often overlooked, they can be a useful research tool. Type, for example, "public diplomacy" when you're on Twitter, and you'll get the latest on what twitterers are saying about the subject.
But what's happening is not necessarily what's important. Much of what twitterers say is as significant as that Viagra ad aired on the corporate evening news. "Now" is not "wisdom." That's the great limitation of the new social media as an intellectual or even political tool.
All those titillated by Twitter should read Evgeny Morozov, who has written skeptically about the new media and is dismissed by a self-promoting State Department functionary in the following sweeping fashion:
The problem with his thinking ... is it neglects the inevitability that this technology is going to spread -- so he advocates a very dangerously cautious approach that says it's dangerous and we shouldn't play in that space. What the Evgeny Morozovs of the world don't understand is that whether anybody likes it or not, the private sector is pumping out innovation like crazy.
Yes, Mr. Jared Cohen -- the State Department functionary referred to above -- it's the inevitable end of history all over again, 21st century version! Keep the technologically private sector pumpin' (with a little help from the State Department) and all will be fine with the universe (just ask BP or try talking on your
Public diplomacy (PD) -- which the State Department defines as "engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences" -- is not rocket science. All too many academic theories about PD are incomprehensible, pompously-expressed "concepts" from persons -- among them rightfully esteemed tenured professors whose intelligence is all too often joined with a tactless inability to handle the last three feet of person-to-person contact -- who have never actually worked as diplomats in the field of "public diplomacy," which they pontificate about, often too assuredly, from their ivory towers on comfortable campuses so distant from what some call the "real world."
When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
Still, PD, dealing as it does with complex human relationships from an international perspective, is worth talking intelligently about, especially when approached by scholars/PD practitioners who value life and history above theory and abstraction. Goethe:
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle TheorieUnd gruen des Lebens goldner Baum.
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Thanks for a wonderful post.
While social media does have its limitations, what I have found professionally is that it can serve as a great listening tool. Conversations in social media can shape perceptions and such perceptions in turn may play out in the so called 'regular, mainstream media.' You are right about not sacrificing the "last 3 feet interactions," but at the same time, I believe social media can be an effective tool for a PD practitioner. It can be used to listen, for insights and also for communicating messages for targeted engagement. Of course for that to happen, any campaign should be clear at the outset of the objectives of a campaign. So within PD, it becomes a communication function that can be leveraged when required. It can complement communication efforts if planned well. After all the internet is here to stay!
Thanks,
Madhurjya Kotoky
Considering that you're a prof and I aint, I'm probably wrong about this but ah well.
Seems to me, most of the people talking together in twitter have already finished their discussing and have moved on toward actions. Discussions what forums are for. Question! Seems like you expected more out of this than was possible. I assumed that the significance would be small individually, but added to a growing list of tools for those with no power (and many times, with no brains) to have their voices heard, it would be rather significant in the long run. Was I wrong about this? When I say significant I guess I'm saying that we are.. testing.. things.. Refinement of populist tools! Plus the best ways to tell everyone you stubbed your toe. Doesn't matter if that's the way it was intended but that's the way we are gonna use it. My two uneducated cents! Btw, why does everyone try to examine the Internet as if it were anything but the madness, mundaneness, stupidity and brilliance everyone sees in their personal lives exposed? P.S.B.T.W. Science has a habit of increasing the effectiveness of effort it seems. Your hero Evgeny Morozov seems to think that our new ways of uhhh.. being what is effectively a human based super organism has no shot at stopping future dictatorships.. wow. If I'm wrong please correct me.
Morozov's skepticism is justified because social media use- in the Team Obama context- is creating a Cold War style public diplomacy nomenklatura, an elite culture of information brokers, the Donilons and Jared Cohens, operating in the tradition of Victor Louis, Georgi Arbatov and Vladimir Pozner, seeding and buzzing up user generated content (UGC) mining the data, social networks and predictive analytics from public diplomacy conversations on Twitter and elsewhere and sometimes even influencing outcomes. Realpolitik is a zero-sum game and social media plays by the soft power, politically correct rules. Sizzle not steak. Short half life.
Social media and its use as a subset of public diplomacy is a cheap date because it is not realpolitik. It is two dimensional, disconnected from the human centers of power. And the State Department praises PD because their high-tech friends on Silicon Valley's Sand Hill Road who fund the tools that make it happen are major campaign contributors thus promoting their own job security. If the private sector is pumping out innovation as fast as Jared Cohen says it is, perhaps the State Department can be completely privatized, or have its activities outsourced more than they are now.
than it it is to ask for permission