Tag: Public Diplomacy

Social Media Musings, Southeast Asian Edition

Foreign policy: Still behind walls or more open to the people? photo: tbSMITH/flickr

As the highly contested treasure trove of the State Department WikiLeak just keeps giving and giving, an interesting and under reported cable came to light earlier this week. It had to do, quite unexpectedly, with the social media strategy of the US State Department and specifically, the US Embassy’s social media efforts in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Jakarta? You ask. Yes, interestingly enough the US mission in the growing Southeast Asian archipelago nation is the most active of all in this ‘new’ and rapidly evolving field of public diplomacy. With more than 300,000 ‘Likers’ on Facebook at present and an impressive presence on Twitter and Youtube, the US  mission in Jakarta was in a push to get a significantly bigger budget for its social media outreach in advance of President Obama’s November 2010 visit, the leaked cable reveals. Although the cable reveals nothing particularly controversial, it gives interesting insights into the growing importance of social media in America’s outreach efforts in highly connected developing countries, particularly in Asia. It also provides insights into the growing, albeit not openly publicized, funding involved in spreading the message about the US, its leadership and about its policies in the region by directly and interactively reaching out to a younger generation, active on Facebook and other social media channels. And the strategy seems to be working- in less than a year, the number of Likers on their Facebook page has grown six-fold, from 50,000 to 300,000 and the number of Twitter followers from 1,000 to more than 16,000, with regular interaction from fans of both services.

This development begs a lot of interesting questions about the future of public diplomacy:

  • Are other diplomatic missions, even just other US missions around the world, taking note of the Jakarta Embassy’s success?
  • Is there something unique and special about the Indonesian environment where social media-focused outreach efforts find particularly fertile ground beyond Obama’s personal connection to the country?
  • Is the ‘soft power’ message that they are getting out uniquely suited to the kind of informal, multisensory interactivity that services such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube represent and do these provide a highly fertile new ground for such ‘persuasive’ activities and the building of soft power across the world?
  • Is social media changing the landscape of public diplomacy drastically and for good and what might its long-term effects be?
  • Does this finally bring foreign relations closer to the people and their concerns or is it simply a veil behind which business-as-usual continues (the highly fortified US embassy in Jakarta, seen above, is a powerful reminder of this metaphorical paradox)?

For more information on this fascinating topic, check out our recent ISN Insights package on E-Diplomacy and look out for an article coming up in February on the specific impact that social media is having on foreign relations.

Japanese Manga Diplomacy

"My name's Doraemon. I'm Japan's Anime Ambassador". / Photo: gutninja, flickr

I didn’t take it seriously when in 2007 foreign minister Taro Aso launched the International Manga Award. The media ridiculed Aso for not being able to read Japanese properly, which some said was due to him preferring cartoons to books. And indeed Aso liked to portray himself as a manga otaku, a freak.

I thus saw nothing else in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ initiative to actively use pop culture in public diplomacy than the minister’s personal obsession.

Even though it had never interested me much, I knew that many young people were attracted to Japan because of its manga and anime culture. But creating the post of an Anime Ambassador and filling it with Doraemon, the popular comic cat, didn’t seem like serious foreign policy to me.

However, recently, a couple of impressions have changed my mind. First, there was the article in Le monde diplomatique‘s Atlas. In “Japan’s innocent faces” Namihei Odaira argues that the  government’s efforts in promoting anime and manga abroad have contributed to Japan being perceived favorably in the yearly BBC global attitudes survey.

He also mentions how the trucks of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces in Iraq were painted with the image of Captain Tsubasa, another popular anime figure. The trucks were never attacked, which is attributed to Captain Tsubasas positive influence.

Continue reading “Japanese Manga Diplomacy”

CCTV (In-)action

Screenshot of CCTV Arabic logo on website

As China gears up to cash in its credibility tokens, accumulated as a result of its unexpectedly efficient handling of the global financial crisis, it’s more eager than ever to educate the world about itself on its own terms. Through its vast and disciplined state-controlled media machine China is engaging in a massive public relations exercise, presumably to make existing businesses around the world run more smoothly, and to prepare for world domination. Well, not quite.

Like any rising star, China is looking to expand its network of media outlets and to contextualize these so that audiences outside its cultural and linguistic sphere get their daily dose of Chinese news in their local language. It has reportedly budgeted nearly $7 billion for global media expansion and upgrades.

The most recent addition to the Xinhua-People’s Daily-CCTV family is CCTV Arabic, a channel purported to reach nearly 300 million Arab speakers via satellite in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Undoubtedly it considers this to be a major addition to its current portfolio which, in addition to its monopoly over Chinese media, includes CCTV in English, Spanish and French (plans are in place for Russian and Portuguese channels too).

Continue reading “CCTV (In-)action”