White House 2.0: Spreading its Message

Terming it '21st century statecraft,' the Obama administration is attempting to wed social technologies with public diplomacy, but true interaction may be still out of reach, Peter A Buxbaum writes for ISN Security Watch.

Senator Barack Obama’s campaign for the US presidency was notable for its use of social media for organizing and fundraising. Supporters were able to keep track of the candidate through websites like Myspace and YouTube and were prompted to make cash contributions through mobile phone text messages.

The use of these external pageWeb 2.0 technologies - rich internet applications that encourage user collaboration, interaction and contribution - are being carried over to the Obama administration, in a number of areas. They are being used to elicit citizen responses in the administration's efforts to make the government more open and responsive and as part of White House and State Department public diplomacy programs.

The monumental case in point for the use of Web 2.0 as part of public diplomacy was in connection with Obama's external pagegroundbreaking speech to the Muslim world in Cairo on 4 June.

“The President’s words were almost instantly translated into fourteen languages, posted on websites and blogs around the world, transmitted by text message to mobile phones in more than 170 countries, and discussed on social networks that span the globe,” said Judith McHale the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, at a recent gathering sponsored by the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based nonpartisan research institution. “State Department officers texted, blogged and chatted about the speech in dozens of languages.”

Even before the Cairo speech, the White House released an online video, known as the “external pageNoruz message,” of Obama speaking directly to Persian speakers. In an example of another marriage of social technologies and public diplomacy, the State Department organized a text-message campaign to raise $110 million from US private citizens to help internally displaced persons in Pakistan's Swat region.

These 21st-century technologies are not being deployed for their own sake, but to advance a State Department initiative called “21st-century statecraft.”

“The goal is to move beyond just government-to-government relationships and enhance government-to-people and people-to-people relationships around the world,” Alec Ross, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, told ISN Security Watch.

The use of technology in connection with Cairo and Noruz are examples of government-to-people advances. The Swat text message program - through which five dollars were donated for aid to the region each time users sent a specific text message - advances relations between the American and Pakistani peoples, Ross said.

From messaging to listening and recruiting

For McHale, the new push for public diplomacy marks a shift from messaging to listening.

“We have to learn how people listen to us, how our words and deeds are actually heard and seen,” she said. “The more languages and venues we communicate in, the more respect we show for our audience, the more effective we will be.

“Advances in technology,” she added, “allow us to move from an old model in which our government speaks as one-to-many, to a powerful new model of engaging interactively and collaboratively as many-to-many.”

While the Obama administration is pushing Web 2.0 technologies for its transparency and diplomacy efforts, they are not new to the US government. These interactive and collaborative internet technologies - represented by such websites as external pageYouTube, external pageWikipedia and external pageFacebook - which have made their mark on popular culture around the world have already penetrated the US military technology constellation, where the recruitment of engagement of young people are mission critical.

The US Defense Department's Military Health System recently began to use social networking tools, such as external pageTwitter, external pageMySpace and YouTube, to better engage beneficiaries ages 18 to 24 who make up a large portion of active-duty service members. The service's static website attracted only eight percent of that demographic over the last two years, officials reported.

The armed services have also used Web 2.0 in their recruiting efforts. The US Marine Corps is using websites like MySpace and Facebook to establish virtual recruiting stations and have posted external pagerecruiting videos on YouTube.

The US Defense Intelligence Agency began to develop a external pagewiki- a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change content - in 2004. The idea was to do for the intelligence community what Wikipedia does for the general public: provide an encyclopedia which allows the distributed expertise of the intelligence community analysts and specialists reflected in its pages. That wiki, known as Intellipedia, is now maintained by the Director of National Intelligence on behalf of the entire US intelligence community.

Engagement hurdles

The Obama administration's efforts to engage a domestic audience through social media currently appears timid compared to the robust efforts of the Obama presidential campaign, says Peter Swire, a professor of law at Ohio State University and a former technology advisor to the Obama campaign.

“They have a lot of polls on government websites asking for up-or-down votes on issues,” he said. “There is not a lot of true interaction.”

There are several hurdles the government will have to jump before it can engage the public through technology to the extent it has promised. One is an immature legal framework for managing government adoption of web technologies, Swire explained. Others include problems of scale - the large volume of communication handled by a small number of staff; clearance - the issue of getting a response approved by all the relevant agencies; and limits on how the government can delegate outsiders to act on its behalf.

For the State's Alec Ross, the biggest obstacle to public diplomacy efforts is the digital divide - the sparse adoption of broadband internet connections in many parts of the developing world.

“Whenever you push a message through new media you are excluding an important segment of society,” he said. “But the government can’t wait for ubiquitous access to broadband to take advantage of web technologies.”

One way to bridge the digital divide is to provide rich media adaptable to smart phones, according to Ross. “People will far likely be accessing the network through a smart phone than a laptop in the developing world,” he said. 

Ross also believes that US public diplomacy efforts could drive demand for internet access around the world. “Obama putting an online video out there targeted to Persian speakers will make them want to go online,” he said. Other such activities “could play a big role in catalyzing demand to connect to the network.”

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