The U.S. State Department has jumped into the world of online communication with a vengeance. January 2012 has been designated 21st Century Statecraft month, and Administration officials have been busy tweeting, blogging, doing online Facebook chats, streaming video, and just about every other social media platform imaginable. As a public diplomacy tool, the Internet has become a heaven-sent gift for Foggy Bottom. Clearly, there is a very determined effort underway to upgrade the image of the State Department from a rather staid and slow-pokey bureaucracy to a hopping, hip, and …
January 2012 is the U.S. Department of State’s “21st Century Statecraft Month.” What the State Department has in mind in this case is what former Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy James Glassman dubbed “Public Diplomacy 2.0”: using digital media to maximize outreach to foreign publics. Thus it is not a new concept but dates back to the second Bush term. However, the State Department has run with the idea, and today, believe it or not, State has more than 193 media accounts, and 100 embassies have Facebook or Twitter accounts. “Throughout …
China has the dubious distinction of being one of the most controlled information environments in the world. Yet even China’s army of censors can at times have trouble staying on top of the vast sea of communication that flows through the Internet. The most recent challenge to government control is microblogging sites like Twitter, which produce a prodigious volume of output. Twitter itself is, of course, outlawed by the Chinese government, which created a number of internal Internet services, like the popular Weibo microblogging service. Ironically, that has now proven difficult …
Since the launch of Facebook in 2004, social media use has skyrocketed. Facebook has more than 750 million active users, and sites like Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr are quickly following Facebook and growing into cultural phenomenons. It is hard to imagine a day without sending a few tweets or writing on someone’s wall. Social media has become a crucial part of how we interact with our friends, community and even run our cities. Governments are starting to take serious notice and incorporate social media into their own day-to-day actions. With …
President Obama takes a break from the debt-limit talks to deliver a speech before the National Council of La Raza — a group that has served as an important bridge for Obama’s administration to the Hispanic community. Don’t expect Obama to deviate from the typical White House line when it comes to pitching Latinos that government knows best, says Israel Ortega, editor of Heritage Libertad. UPDATE: Read about the level of coordination between the White House and La Raza in today’s Daily Caller. On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Speaker John Boehner …
The recently rekindled Gang of Six presented its $3.7 trillion deficit-reduction plan to Senate colleagues yesterday. As the debt-limit deadline approaches, the six senators are hoping to gain support. “We told our colleagues this morning that we want to hear from them in the next 24 hours,” Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) said. “Are they with us or not?” After reading what Heritage’s David Addington had to say about the plan, hopefully the answer is “no.” (Pictured are Republican Sens. Mike Crapo, Tom Coburn and Saxby Chambliss.) At the White House, meanwhile, …
It took a Twitter town hall to learn how the President really thinks about defense. Not only does Obama want to gut defense as part of his debt deal (a proposal that simply won’t work)—on top of that, he wants to use the Pentagon budget as his personal ATM to fund more stimulus spending. According to Obama, the Pentagon budget is “so big that you can make relatively modest changes to defense that end up giving you a lot of headroom to fund things like basic research or student loans …
President Obama made history yesterday by becoming the first President to tweet live at a nationally televised event. But does one tweet – or even a complete Twitter townhall — mean the President is truly communicating openly and fairly with the American public? The Twitter Townhall hosted by Twitter and the White House yesterday was a botched attempt to suggest that President Obama is truly reaching out to everyday Americans on their level. Judging by the small selection of questions — one of which came from Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), …
President Obama offered few concrete proposals for promoting fiscal responsibility during his “Twitter town hall” on Wednesday. One that he did mention was his drive to freeze federal employee salaries, though he offered the measure as an example of an effort to “make these adjustments that are necessary during these difficult fiscal times…in a way that preserves collective bargaining rights.” “We froze federal pay for federal workers for two years,” Obama claimed. “Now that wasn’t real popular, as you might imagine, among federal workers,” the president added. But even federal …
The President isn’t the only one engaging Americans on Twitter. On June 28, the notice went out from the State Department’s spokesman that Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Judith McHale would field her first “Twitter Q & A” the following morning. Under McHale, State has launched a number of new ventures on the Internet. The power of the technology combined with low overhead has made Public Diplomacy 2.0 a highly inviting tool for U.S. diplomats. Social media is the latest tool in American public diplomacy, whether the goal is democracy …
