OUTPOST

During the Cold War, public diplomacy (PD) was the underlying concept behind organisations like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and Radio Liberty. The mission was to ‘tell America’s story to the world’-essentially to influence the populations of communist-governed countries and enlighten them as to the American way of life.

Propaganda by any other name would smell as sweet? Well, maybe…but lets not forget that one of the high priests of Journalistic ethical practice, Edward R. Murrow, was one of the first directors of the cold war era PD powerhouse, the United States Information Agency. Tuft’s university even named their school of Public Diplomacy after Murrow.

So what does that say about PD? Well, basically, it says that the best kind of PD is honest PD. As Murrow himself put it when he modified the maxim of PD, “We have to tell America’s story to the world, warts and all”.

But the public spaces that were targeted in the Cold War were more or less limited to radio, press and funding various traveling exhibitions, activist groups etc. With the explosion in online media, these spaces have multiplied and diversified to a point where quantifying or targeting them becomes an impossibility. So whither the earnest art of Public Diplomacy?

For the US, engaging with online publics has become a priority. See the speech below by former Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy James Glassman.

Its all very friendly, fuzzy bumph at the moment: teaming up with trendy, down with the kids companies like Google and Facebook to facilitate discussions about peace, democracy, fighting violence and oppression, as well as the best techniques for nursing abandoned kittens back to health (I may have made that last one up).

Of course, a rhetoric which relies on positive, inoffensive ideals, backed up with a liberal dose of new-media buzzwords is not the sole preserve of the United States government. You can expect to see the same tactic deployed by any company or institution attempting to come to grips with the fast and loose world of new media:

The thing about (insert activity here) in the information age, is that it allows us to be more reactive and participatory through the use of clouds, crowdsourcing and real-time network construction. This means we can sustain meaningful relationships with our publics. Soon we’ll be able to see real-time results and return on our net-capital investment. Of course, netiquette is key…

But that’s not to say that governments aren’t eager to participate and take advantage of these new public spaces-and its not always in a way that lives up to the web-utopianism we all know and love: see Evgeny Morozov’s dissection of how oppressive governments use social media and web 2.0 to monitor and suppress progressive movements. His heavyweight discussion on the limitations of social media for social change with Internetland demi-god Clay Shirky over on Prospect magazines site is also useful.