Embassies used to be able to enlighten visiting dignitaries with all sorts of privileged information that would make them look like they had local knowhow that no else could offer. But not any more. Most of what an embassy can tell you before you visit is now available online, via global media and is updated far faster than any embassy overnight telegram could ever achieve.
In a chapter of a new book for IPPR, former innovation advisers to Hillary Clinton, Alec Ross and Ben Scott, explore the new challenges for diplomacy in the digital age. ‘We have an information abundance problem; not an information scarcity problem,’ they argue.
There is no question in Ross and Scott’s minds that diplomats must embrace digital technology, but their concern is not so much an aversion to digital, but that diplomats are not taking full advantage of the tools it provides: ‘diplomats are deployed around the world to better understand what is happening there.’
Indeed, the internet ethos, the ‘all with access are equal’ mentality, should not be something that diplomats merely accept, but something they bring into the very heart of their working life. This does not mean simply tweeting out pictures of their breakfast, but retooling the workforce ‘through extensive training and non-hierarchical advancement’.
In practice, this could mean trawling hashtags on Twitter to follow conversations, or bearing witness to civilian footage of events via YouTube, and remembering that, as in real life, those who shout loudest aren’t necessarily the only ones we should be listening to. Social media will not reach everyone, but, when used well, it can allow diplomats to gain access to communities that even the best local fixers would struggle to reach: ‘social media is not a glorified press list,’ say Ross and Scott, ‘it is a community.’
In places such as China where access to websites such as Facebook and YouTube are blocked by the ‘great firewall,’ it is the technically savvy whose voices can be heard. Anyone with a degree of technical knowhow can use a VPN, a virtual private network, which allows them to stay one step ahead of the clumsy arm of the law, accessing forbidden websites with relative ease. It is essential that diplomats understand this technology: it is their route to people traditionally cut off from the outside world. For Ross and Scott internet freedom is: ‘… a moral principle – a value proposition that we seek to promote around the world … it is about using our resources (financial, human, and knowledge) to promote access and adoption of the internet in places where people are disconnected’.
Ross and Scott are also keen to counter the problem of the digital diplomat becoming tied to their computer. ‘Public engagement via a highly talented diplomatic corps’ would mean, they argue, ‘more time spent outside the embassy. More time spent talking and less writing.’ The duo also encourage ‘relying on local observers to make meaning and insight out of local media sources,’ an essential way of understanding the bigger picture that the digitally delinquent diplomat shouldn’t struggle with. It is extracting meaning from a larger conversation that they should prioritise.
‘This is a process we expect to take a generation,’ conclude Ross and Scott. Though the authors will know just as well as the 12-year-old in China risking all to update their Facebook status that a diplomacy which truly understands the power and potential of digital can’t come quickly enough.
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Natalie Cox is communications intern at IPPR. Influencing Tomorrow by Douglas Alexander MP and Ian Kearns is published on 7 November 2013 and is available from Guardian Bookshop
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