The Foreign Service Journal, May 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2017 19 SPEAKING OUT Digital Diplomacy: Will State Ever Take the Plunge? BY AME L I A SHAW Amelia Shaw, the 2015 recipient of AFSA’s W. Averell Harriman Award for Constructive Dissent, joined the State Department Foreign Service in 2014. Prior to that, she was a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, a TV news producer with the United Nations, a digital media adviser for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and a specialist in social marketing for international aid organizations. She was also a Fulbright Scholar in Haiti in 2003. From 2014 to 2016 Ms. Shaw served as a consular officer in Tijuana, and is now in training to serve as a public diplomacy officer in Vientiane, beginning this summer. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not necessarily those of the Department of State or the U.S. government. W hen I came into the State Department in 2014, I was excited to add my skills to our country’s public diplo- macy (PD) effort. I brought with me 15 years of media experience, and imagined entering a cutting-edge operation, where highly skilled teams use technology and innovation to promote our national for- eign policy to publics abroad. But that’s not what I found. Instead, it feels more like being stuck in a time warp from the late 1990s. Here’s what I mean. I recently took six weeks of training in preparation for my first assignment as a PD officer, in Vientiane. During our 180 hours of class time, we talked about a lot of things—the history of the U.S. Information Agency, the legacy of Edward R. Murrow and the meaning of PD. But we spent just three hours on digital media—less than 2 per- cent of total training time. I was shocked. While our bureaucracy has been busy plugging away at state- craft, the rest of the world has under- gone a digital revolution. Has State even noticed? As of December 2016, there are about 3.4 billion people using the internet worldwide—47 percent of the global population—with just over half of them using Facebook. Due to the breakneck speed of mobile phone penetration into the developing world, the number of people online is expected to continue to rise steadily. Increasing numbers of users are younger than 30 and live in developing or tran- sitional economies in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Many of us Foreign Service types live and work in those places. But are we present there virtually? And are we mak- ing the most of the huge (not to mention relatively low-cost) opportunity that digi- tal media offer our diplomatic missions in our quest to win the hearts and minds of the foreign public? Many leading analysts would answer with an emphatic no. Jets Don’t Go on Highways “The U.S. government is appalling at giving diplomats the leeway to use technology as it is intended,” says Nicholas Cull, director of public diplomacy at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (part of the University of Southern California). Cull has advised the State Department for years on PD issues and lectures regularly at the Foreign Ser- vice Institute. “You can’t drive a jet on a highway. Digital platforms were designed to create relationships, not just push messages out,” Cull adds. “The average U.S. embassy Facebook page makes it look like the U.S. government doesn’t understand the busi- ness of public diplomacy.” Cull is referring to the practice among many U.S. missions of using Facebook as a signboard on which to cut and paste media content created in Washington or post drab “LOPSA” (lots of people standing around) photos. Either way, too often content is placed without con- sidering how it resonates locally. Your average Nepali, for instance, might not be interested in a post about the kinds of vegetables planted in the White House kitchen garden. There are, of course, missions that stand out for successfully using social media to create local buzz. Embassy Mos- cow’s 2015 tweet about the U.S. ambas- sador landing on the moon is a great example of dishy repartee with Russia’s dezinformatsiya or fake news apparatus. But these efforts tend to be the exception, not the norm. Compared to other Web and Facebook pages, U.S. mission digital platforms generally experience low traffic. Online users who do follow the U.S. pages rarely