Evan H. Potter, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, University of Ottawa

Executive summary

This chapter highlights the innovative potential of Web 2.0, and the experiences of governments actively using new online social networking applications, in order to examine the prospects, benefits and risks of Web 2.0-enabled public diplomacy. It concludes that the future of public diplomacy lies in collaboration, whereby governments and ‘global citizens’ build relationships and use them to develop cross-national initiatives to address policy challenges. A growing proportion of such collaborative activity will be online in virtual worlds. The discussion will be speculative, asking: Does it still makes sense to consider online and offline worlds as separate? What are the benefits and risks of using online tools for advocacy and policy development? How will traditional diplomatic skills, premised on understanding of local cultures and networks, adapt to virtual worlds?

Collaboration is increasingly the hallmark of a networked world.¹ The rise of virtual worlds (terms in bold are explained under ‘Glossary’ towards the end of this chapter) and an online culture of open sharing offer policy-makers new opportunities to move from one-way messaging (the speeches, statements and press releases of ministers and ministries) towards dialogue and cross-national engagement.²

A second generation of internet-based software, sometimes known as ‘Web 2.0’, has the potential to change fundamentally how foreign ministries manage knowledge and communicate with more connected, yet more diverse and fragmented, domestic and global publics. Web 2.0 applications – online collaborative working (‘wikis’), web logs (‘blogs’), and social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Second Life – can reinforce existing relationships and build new ones by educating and mobilising citizens, and encouraging the co-creation of policy.

Web 2.0 will redefine how foreign ministries communicate and collaborate with publics (and their own employees) more than any previous technologies. Why? Because Web 2.0 enables interaction.

The credibility of the web

The recent wholesale reversal of the previous decade’s mistrust of the web is a profound change. In the 1990s, the questionable reliability of some of the web’s self-generated content was a barrier to using it as a platform. Today, 80 per cent of Americans believe the internet is the most important source of information (up from 66 per cent in 2006). Fifty-eight per cent of Canadians think information on the web is just as reliable as that obtained from traditional media.³ These levels of trust are mirrored in surveys of internet use in other countries as well.⁴ Meanwhile, the credibility of branded media online has actually benefited from the proliferation of commentary and fact on the web, pushing people to seek authoritative online sources, such as the New York Times and CNN.⁵

The rise of online social networking

The exponential growth in online social networking (in 2007 cited by Americans as the most important use of the web after electronic mail), with a demographic skewed to those between the ages of 19 and 31, is marked. According to the 2008 Digital Future Report, membership of online communities in the United States more than doubled in only three years, and visits to blogs by young people under 18 years old quadrupled to 27 per cent between 2003 and 2007.⁶ It is predicted that eight out of ten active internet users and Fortune 500 companies will have a ‘second life’ in a virtual world by the end of 2011.⁷

Data from the 2008 Digital Future Report reveal some significant trends, particularly with respect to the high correlation between membership of online communities and participation in social causes. A clear majority (71 per cent) of members of online communities consider these communities to be very important or extremely important to them, with over half logging into their communities at least once a day. Fifty-six per cent claim to have met online counterparts in person. Three-quarters use the web to participate in offline communities related to social causes; almost 90 per cent of online community members are participating in social causes that are new to them since their online involvement began. Most strikingly, a large and growing proportion – 55 per cent – say they feel as strongly about their online communities as they do about their real-world communities. These findings have led Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California, to conclude that ‘The emergence of online communities is demonstrating that opportunities to be involved in common projects and idea sharing about any subject we choose and with people anywhere on Earth is possible and practical.’⁸

Social networking is therefore growing in scale; it is also growing in complexity. International communication, which since the dawn of the motion picture has been premised on a one-to-many broadcasting model, is now moving ineluctably towards a web-enabled many-to-many format. The much-publicised Facebook is now the world’s largest social networking site, with a reported 67 million individuals registered as active users. At its current growth rate, the total number of users could exceed 460 million by 2013.⁹

Advances in information and communication technologies have spurred a further evolution, creating three-dimensional virtual worlds in which individuals interact with one another through their virtual representatives (‘avatars’). The popular Second Life (with 13.5 million ‘residents’ in May 2008) is a virtual world containing digitally mediated ‘third spaces’ similar to real-life pubs, community centres and clubs where people can socialise, create and trade.¹⁰ Anecdotal evidence suggests that social networking sites may allow individuals (for example, women in closed societies) to use the anonymity of the web to communicate ideas and perspectives across traditional boundaries.

What these developments portend is a growing global membership of online communities (especially as the costs in time and effort of joining decline), and a gradual increase in the extent to which people integrate their online activity into the rest of their lives, with online activity providing a direct stimulus for real-world decision-making and action.

Implications for public diplomacy

How can diplomats make best use of the advantages of scale offered by the ever-expanding array of online social networks? How can they work with existing online communities of interest and develop new ones to research, develop, advocate, deliver and review policy?

Effective diplomacy demands an ability to access, analyse and contextualise information; to build and maintain a wide range of relationships; to communicate, convene and negotiate across cultures, borders and institutions; and to review and understand the impact of policy and events.

At first sight, the web promises to be a ‘force multiplier’ across all these activities. But for the purpose of this chapter, I want to look in particular at the extent to which online social networks may transform diplomats’ ability to advocate policy and to access, engage with and mobilise new and wider constituencies in the making and implementation of policy. The evidence to date is piecemeal, and there are important caveats. However, some indications of trends are emerging.

Online public diplomacy: new terrain for advocacy and policy development

According to John Seely Brown, of Xerox PARC, new web-based applications have created a ‘powerful surge of “tinkering” and sharing among ordinary people as an enjoyable social activity’.¹¹ This is the profound difference between the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 environments. In the former, 125 ‘professionals’ dominated the creation of online content. In the latter, ‘amateurs’ are the dominant creators, and they create because they enjoy it, not because they have to.

This shift offers new opportunities for online public diplomacy in terms of advocacy and, especially, policy development – through online collaboration among policy-makers within governments, and also between governments and citizens across the globe, to address cross-national policy challenges such as resource competition, sustainable development and interethnic conflict. Online advocacy and policy development provide governments with clear benefits, but also carry risks.

Informing online debate

Growing online global activism puts foreign ministries under pressure to take a decision on whether and how to engage with it. A basic tenet of strategic communication is that absence from a debate opens one to the risk of having one’s policies reinterpreted or misinterpreted, by allies and competitors alike. The same holds true for governments. For example, in 2007 the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) built an online meeting space in Second Life to protest at the Canadian harp seal hunt. The Canadian government did not directly counter the IFAW’s advocacy campaign in this virtual world domain, leaving itself at a potential disadvantage in the arena of public opinion.

To be sure, a virtual world campaign in which site traffic is relatively low (as measured in the participation of hundreds of individuals) will not have damaging consequences for governments. However, once such virtual world campaigns by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) attract thousands of visitors, and begin to spill over into mass media coverage and real-world activism, then governments will be forced to mount sophisticated counteradvocacy campaigns in the same virtual worlds.

Correcting misunderstandings

In 2006 the US Department of State launched a ‘Digital Outreach’ team aimed at countering ideological support for terrorism. The team mitigated the risk of being regarded as irrelevant by adopting a ‘culturally sensitive approach’ and using native speakers in the languages of its target audience. They participated in online discussions on mainstream websites that carried the heaviest traffic on US policy, such as BBC Arabic, Al-Jazeera Talk and Elaph On-Line News.

Widening the debate, to obtain new thinking

Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT) was the first foreign ministry to experiment with an online interactive platform to engage citizens directly in the foreign policy-making process. Its 2003 interactive discussion, ‘A Foreign Policy Dialogue’, featured a significant online component, using the web to enable citizens to respond publicly to the government’s foreign policy discussion paper and to debate with one another in moderated online fora. The experiment’s success spurred DFAIT to create a permanent ‘e-discussion’ website to ensure that public comment on Canada’s foreign policy priorities was a matter of routine rather than ad hoc initiatives. The time-bound nature of the discussions, and the feedback given on contributions, make it less likely that participants will fear that their input is sought for reasons of presentation rather than substance.

Joining with activists to enhance campaigns

The emerging potential of global virtual platforms to generate and mobilise policy and policy activism was recently demonstrated in the context of the World Climate Change Conference in Bali. The vision is one of global ‘smart crowds’ – that is, individuals and/or organisations from different countries with different experiences and sources of expertise – generating online policy thinking and advocacy aimed at influencing real-world decision-making. Tightly defining the area of collaboration can lessen the risk that governments and NGOs will both be criticised for compromising their independence by working with each other.

Collaborating with other experts to recommend policy solutions

Another potential form of ‘policy mobilisation’ is the development of wikis. To date, experimentation by foreign ministries has limited these to internal users. For example, inspired by the success of Wikipedia, the US Department of State has established an internal ‘Diplopedia’ as a resource from which information on the department, its services and its policies may be acquired. The State Department is also using blog software to strengthen specific internal user communities. Wikis, because they are constantly updated (unlike physical briefing papers), can offer officials and ministers a rapid and comprehensive institutional perspective. In addition, given the regular rotation of staff, this form of collective intelligence-gathering can address the perennial problem of ensuring ‘institutional memory’. Internal wikis are, of course, prey to the same pitfalls as publicly accessible ones, above all, inaccuracy. But the finding by the science magazine Nature in 2005 that there was no significant difference between the accuracy of Wikipedia and that of the Encyclopedia Britannica is instructive.

Experimenting with new approaches

Sweden has taken a different approach and has created a virtual embassy, the Second House of Sweden, in Second Life. But the practical benefits in policy terms – apart from burnishing a reputation for being technologically avantgarde – are difficult to discern. The early lessons suggest that countries should not replicate the old web’s static content in this type of virtual environment, and that virtual worlds are not easily used for policy development, being better suited to cultural engagement (such as talks, film festivals or live music recitals). In short, the Swedish experiment points to the use of Second Life as another communications platform – an extension of Sweden’s real-world public diplomacy in the form of information and cultural/educational programming – rather than as a platform by which to establish a collaborative project to help Sweden to develop particular policies.

Being an online diplomat

Given the blurring of online boundaries between users and producers, authority and amateurism, play and work, and the attendant concerns about privacy and security, foreign ministries will have to proceed cautiously and develop content for each online intervention that is appropriate for that specific application.

Diplomats will have to spend as much time gaining an understanding of the cultures, values and languages of social networking as they will in preparing for new assignments in foreign countries. On ministry blogs, officials will have to balance the need to engage in the local idiom with the requirement to stick to existing policy.

Since websites are ‘leaky containers’, through which personal data on political views, religious beliefs, sexual orientation and other life preferences are often readily available, any interaction between government officials and individuals online must be bound by strict guidelines. One of the most important differences between online and offline social networking is that the former is ‘eternal’. In other words, all interactions between public officials and their online interlocutors will be searchable, replicable and captured permanently.¹²

Foreign ministries are already struggling to keep pace with web innovation and the anticipated additional expenditures associated with the convergence of online and offline activity. But the spiralling costs associated with being present in myriad virtual spaces will force governments to be very selective about their online representation. As more textured and sophisticated Web 2.0 applications become widespread, and given the intense competition for smaller shares of the public’s attention, foreign ministry websites must look, feel and perform like the most advanced media sites in the world. More and more, countries will become the images that they project in the online world.

Future directions

Having barely absorbed the operational, capital and organisational pressures of two generations of web technology over the course of a single decade, foreign ministries need to look ahead to the next wave of innovation: Web 3.0, or what some have called ‘Web 2.0 on steroids’. This latest generation of software heralds easier, cheaper and more pervasive connectivity, leading, conceivably, to the seamless integration of online and offline living by adding the full sensory dimension.¹³ Though simulated, this third dimension holds out the possibility of authentic emotional engagement online. Telehaptic or simulated touch technology in a virtual setting may alter the very idea of a nation’s foreign representation and increase the capacity to engage in crossnational collaboration. Might we see, after all, foreign ministry personnel interacting routinely with counterparts and the public via virtual embassies?

Setting debate about the likelihood of this vision to one side, my central proposition is that diplomats must be active participants in the growing global online conversation. The web is unprecedented in its power to circulate information and ideas, generate debate and influence opinion. The values of online interaction (free, non-hierarchical sharing) will challenge aspects of diplomatic practice (for example, the distinction between private and public negotiation). But online technologies do not undermine classic diplomacy; rather, they are essential instruments in the virtual age.

Glossary

avatar: a computer-simulated representation of the ‘self ’ that may be in the form of a three-dimensional model (as in the case of virtual environments) or a two-dimensional icon.

blog: short for ‘web log’, a blog is a web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual.

social networking site: a web-based site designed to enable users to connect and bond with each other. Such sites create communities of interest through instant messaging, chat rooms, e-mail, blogs, file-sharing, videos and so on. Some of the more popular social networking sites are Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, orkut, Bebo and Xanga.

telehaptics: computer-generated tactile (touch) sensations (haptics) transmitted over a network, allowing ‘physical’ contact between a local user and remote location. Telehaptics are being incorporated in the creation of virtual worlds.

virtual world: an artificial environment created by computer hardware and software and presented to the user in such a way that it appears and feels like a real, physical environment. Virtual reality is sometimes referred to more generally as any virtual world represented in a computer, even if it is only a text-based or graphical representation (for example using an avatar in a virtual-world social networking site such as Second Life or in an online game).

Web 2.0: the term given to a second generation of the World Wide Web that allows users to collaborate and share information online. Blogs and wikis are components of Web 2.0.

Web 3.0: there is, as yet, no single, accepted definition of Web 3.0. However, if Web 1.0 refers to a ‘read-only’ web, with content being produced in large part by the organisations supporting any given site, and Web 2.0 is an extension into the ‘read–write’ web that engages users in an active role, then Web 3.0 represents the further evolutionary movement of the web into the development of a consolidated global database, three-dimensional collaborative spaces and artificial intelligence. Web 3.0 will lead to a much more porous border between the real and online worlds as a result of ubiquitous connectivity (mobile devices), open-source software platforms, 131 roaming portable identity and intelligent applications through machines that can reason.

wiki: a collaborative website comprising the perpetual collective work of many authors. A wiki allows anyone to edit, delete or modify content that has been placed on the website. In contrast, a blog, typically authored by one person, does not allow visitors to change the original posted material, only to add content to the original material.

World Wide Web (the web): a system of internet servers that support specially formatted documents. The documents are formatted in a markup language that supports links to other documents, as well as graphics, audio and video files. Not all internet servers are part of the World Wide Web.

YouTube: a popular free video-sharing website that lets registered users upload and share video clips online at the YouTube.com website.

Notes

1. The assumption is that collaboration produces a result that is qualitatively different from that which would be produced by individuals working alone. It is an unpredictable process in which partners relinquish some level of control, something that would concern risk-averse bureaucracies. On collaboration as the ‘third layer’ of public diplomacy, see Geoffrey Cowan and Amelia Arsenault, ‘Moving from monologue to dialogue to collaboration: the three layers of public diplomacy’, in Geoffrey Cowan and Nicholas J. Cull, eds, Public diplomacy in a changing world, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 616, March 2008, pp. 10–30.

2. The culture of open sharing refers to a wide variety of educational resources, including open repositories for scholarly work, peer-to-peer platforms for collaborative learning, and open-source communities formed to share computer source code.

3. Phoenix Strategic Perspectives Inc., ‘New technologies and Government of Canada communications: Phase II – quantitative research and online surveys’, April 2008, p. iii. This report, which was prepared for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, is available at http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/200/301/pwgsc-tpsgc/por-ef/agriculture_agri-food/2008/130-07/index.html (accessed May 2008).

4. The perception that levels of trust in the internet have increased markedly is corroborated by the Oxford Internet Institute’s 2007 survey of the UK, which states that ‘trust in the Internet has remained stable and rather high from 2003 through 2007’. See William H. Dutton and Ellen J. Helsper, The internet in Britain 2007 (Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute, 2007), p. 28.

5. Center for the Digital Future, ‘How much of the information on news pages posted by established media (New York Times, CNN etc.) are generally reliable and accurate?’ Web Insight, 4 Feb. 2008.

6. Presentation by Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Center for the Digital Future, on the 2008 Digital Future Report, given at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, 7 March 2008. See highlights from the 2008 Digital
Future Report at http://www.digitalcenter.org/pdf/2008-Digital-Future-Report-Final-Release.pdf (accessed March 2008).

7. Gartner, Inc., online press release, ‘Gartner says 80 per cent of active internet users will have a “second life” in the virtual world by the end of 2011’, 24 April 2007.

8. This does not mean that users self-consciously participate in online social networking sites to seek out new friends from far and wide. Research on a sample of Facebook members has concluded that their primary motivation is to search for people with
whom they have a pre-existing real-world connection rather than to browse for complete strangers.

9. However, Facebook has yet to capture substantial portions of the non-English-speaking world such as China and Russia. In March 2008 the number of Facebook users in China and Russia were 146,780 and 63,160 respectively.

10. A cautionary note on the use of statistics to gauge participation in virtual worlds is in order. Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, does not distinguish between residents who have registered a unique avatar and used it once and residents who are frequent users of this virtual world.

11. As quoted in David Bollier, ‘The rise of collective intelligence: decentralised co-creation of value as a new paradigm of commerce and culture’, Report of the Sixteenth Annual Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology, 2007, p. 30.

12. See Danah Boyd, ‘Social network sites: public, private, or what?’ The Knowledge Tree, 13 May 2007, http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2007/?page_id=28 (accessed 11 March 2008).

13. The Distributed and Collaborative Virtual Environments Research Laboratory (DISCOVER) at the University of Ottawa, Canada, estimates that a fully immersive virtual environment (with the simultaneous simulation of all senses) may be achieved by 2018. See demonstrations of this virtual technology at http://www.discover.uottawa.ca/. The following video clips on this site illuminate the potential of this technology: ‘Virtualised environments’ (narration in French); ‘Hapto virtual environments research’ (narration in French); and ‘Virtual reality prototypes for human interaction, training and e-commerce’.