The Last Three Feet (ed. William Kiehl)

The Last Three Feet (Public Diplomacy Council, 2012), edited by William Kiehl, is a significant contribution to the ever expanding literature on public diplomacy. The book uses the case-sudy approach to understand how American 'public diplomacy actually works on the ground, the challenges public diplomacy officers and specialists face in conducting ther duties, and the tools they employ to achieve their goals'. This is achieved by allowing the public diplomacy field officers to speak for themselves and describe their work in a range of environments, including China, Bahrain, Brazil, Pakistan, Turkey and Iraq. The dominant theme of the book is engagement: each of the officers provides a candid assessment of their work and how well they were able to bridge Ed Murrow's famous 'Last Three Feet' using traditional and modern methods of communication. Hence most of the chapters describe how the officers have embraced the social media to create new dialogues with the people they are trying to reach, bringing them into the conversations that may be started at the embassy, and using these tools to reinforce the more traditional methods of engagement: In Brazil Facebook works alongside the Youth Ambassador Programme and the creation of new-style "American Centres" (@America) in Indonesia. In Bahrain, the social media have become a major source of intelligence for American diplomats, which means interpretation and verification of open-source information becomes a responsibility of the diplomat that is more important than ever before. In June 2011, Under Secretary McHale asked, 'How do we stand out and respond in ... a crowded and complex environment? Our answer is simple: By taking our public diplomacy into the market place of ideas.' As this book highlights, this answer is far from simple despite what McHale thinks, and engaging in the new, crowded 'market place of ideas' is fraught with potential problems.

Most valuable are the discussions of 'lessons learned' by each of the contributing authors; but equally these are the most disturbing parts of the book. Time and again I read of an "innovation" in pd practice and found myself howling aloud: 'Don't they already do that?' Maintaining websites and a presence in the social media has little strategic value useless unless you are able to first determine how they will further your ambitions and help you achieve your objectives; while understanding how these platforms work and how the audience uses them is absolutely crucial. Having a mere presence in the virtual public sphere is no longer sufficient; the dialogue and discussion will continue without you. Hence in Turkey, the US Embassy 'learned to approach the design of our programs with the audience's needs in mind - rather than merely our own.'

The public diplomacy officers at the American embassy in Pakistan discovered something that had apparently eluded their predecessors: 'an English-language newspaper with a circulation of a few thousand readers was not a significant part of the Pakistani media, and only when a story appeared in the Urdu media would it be noteworthy.' Thus more effort was devoted to monitoring, analysing and reporting on the Urdu-language media, with round-the-clock TV watching as an important supplementary activity (Pakistan has a high illiteracy rate so TV plays a big part in the lives of most Pakistanis). The Public Affairs Section in the Embassy writes a Pakistan Media Analysis which is despatched to Washington DC:

                    'At first, we were surprised by its popularity. Officers from the Pakistan desk in the State Department started to mention it. Then we heard that the Pakistan team at the National Security Staff in the White House read it every morning. Congressional staffers began to hear about it, and we put them on the distribution list. New officers arriving at the post mentioned its popularity in official Washington.'  

 

Wait a moment ... does this mean that DC did not receive any brief from its embassy in Pakistan   about the content of local media before? Had no-one dealing with Pakistan in the State Department or White House even asked for such an assessment? DON'T THEY DO THIS ALREADY? Surely monitoring the local media is not just Public Diplomacy 101, but has always been a crucial component of diplomatic activity? Didn't I "discover" this twenty years ago in my PhD research on American and British public diplomacy in the 1950s and early 1960s?

 

More frustrating revelations follow: 'The next generation of successful PDOs will make PD programs such a natural and integral part of an embassy's exercise of smart power that we will stop thinking about public diplomacy as a separate diplomatic function.' These debates are still going on in the Foreign Service?

 

'American and locally employed staff members at US embassies and consulates live and work in the local environment and should know best what the host nation is thinking. Why not let the field post drive the process rather than leave it to the massive bureacuracy in Washington that may have the financial resources but not the knowledge of how best to apply them. ... The cookie-cutter, one size fits all prescriptions from headquarters rarely hit the mark.'  This is good advice, and would certainly help to overcome the identified problem in Pakistan where 'the least amount of attention' was given to understanding 'what people are saying and thinking'.

 

The Last Three Feet is an important description and analysis of American public diplomacy by field officers, but I do feel a sense of disappointment and even anger that, in 2012 members of the American Foreign service are writing about having such 'Road to Damascus' moments. Half a century on from Ed Murrow's tenure as Director of the USIA, conquering the Last Three Feet may remain the most important, but perhaps most challenging work of the public diplomacy officer; but it seems that convincing your colleagues of the value of your work is still a priority.       

 

 

The 'Facebook Revolutions,' 2011

At the weekend I participated in a fascinating workshop organised at Leeds University about the Arab Spring and Asia. Colleagues representing Middle East Studies, Politics, Development Studies, Asian Studies and Sociology met to discuss the recent political events in the Arab world (the 'Arab Spring') and their ripple effects across Asia. I was asked to introduce a discussion on New Social Movements, Media and Technology, and we had a lively debate. I thought it appropriate to share some of our thoughts here.

I expressed my unease with the idea that these were the Facebook or Social Media revolutions. Would the unrest have occurred anyway? After all, the European revolutions of 1848 had spread across the continent within two weeks; and the events of 1989 occurred with the help of satellite television and the fax machine. Besides, there is something determinist about claiming that these were social media uprisings, and I am very uncomfortable with that idea. Social media are simply another tool that can expedite events; they facilitate speed, mobilisation and the demonstration effect; but the uprisings were started, fed and endured by people struggling for the human condition.

Nevertheless there are three key things to note about the events of 2011.

First, a new generation of the digitally-literate is comfortable with these technologies, but also with the consequences of these technologies: networks, flat hierarchies, the convergence of platforms, and the ease with which anyone can now be the source, producer and consumer of news, information and opinion. We can see the same thing happening in Burma with the use of camera phones to capture videos of human rights abuses that are then downloaded to The Voice of Burma in Scandanavia before publication and circulation on the web.

Second, we cannot discount the role of television, and especially Al-Jazeera which is considered a credible and authoritative source of news in and about the Middle East. The difference now is that Al-Jazeera was one of the first TV stations to depend on 'citizen journalism' and social media to inform its programming.

Third, the reaction of the old political guard in the Middle East was interesting. They demonstrated that governments are beginning to realise 'if you can't beat them, join them'; and while in both Tunisia and Egypt the government did try to use old-fashioned techniques to control communication (technologies and the sources, and using censorship) they quickly recognised the possible value in trying to control the narrative itself. So the credibility of the political opposition that was tweeting and blogging and Facebooking was routinely discredited and their legitimacy questioned. It reminded me of the so-called 50 cent party in China - groups of young netizens who are paid for posting pro-govermement opinions on the web, thus trying to spin and manage the flow of information.

There was a consensus among the participants that the social media were a tool only in the 2011 uprisings, and that new media were in some senses a distraction from the reality of what was actually happening. There was a claim that by focusing on, and overestimating the importance of the social media we remove agency from the debates (especially when we lose sight of the fact that these were not 'Facebook' revolutions, but Tunisian Revolutions and Egyptian Revolutions). The uprisings (there was some discomfort with the term revolutions since only regimes and not whole social orders had been replaced) would have happened anyway. We need to look at the antecedents of these events and understan the long-term context. Struggles against oppression, corruption, and poverty have a long history in this part of the world - they did not just suddenly erupt in 2011.  For this reason, the term Arab Spring is innaccurate (one participant said 'offensive') because it denies the historical specificities and processes, and suggests these uprisings appeared from nowhere. It also raises questions about news agendas and the way the Facebook Revolution and Arab Spring are simple and sexy tags for these otherwise complex events.