Abstract
Dr. Ilan Manor is a leading scholar in the digitalization of public diplomacy and a senior lecturer at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. From the beginning of his academic career, Dr. Manor invested in researching the digitalized practices and strategies of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and conceptualized the expression “the digitalization of public diplomacy” to explore how digital technologies shape the norms, values, and working routines of diplomats and diplomatic institutions. Based on the hypothesis of transparency as the core of social media technology, Dr. Manor mentioned that diplomacy has also had to become more open, especially in public diplomacy. Traditional secret diplomatic negotiations are under universal scrutiny by netizens because they are digitalized. Thus, the public wants diplomats to be more open and transparent in their professional activities. However, digitalization also brought a series of communication problems, especially in the time of geopolitical uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war. In the academic dialogue, Dr. Manor has analyzed the conceptualization, practices, and challenges of the digitalization of public diplomacy in the framework of the current geopolitical context and global crisis and reviewed the long-term conceptual debate in public diplomacy scholarship on the value of soft power in the digital age. The last part of this dialogue focused on using visual supports in the international communication arena, criticizing the omnipresent use of memes and gifs of the Russian and Ukrainian governments during the war and questioning the public(s) in the digitalization of public diplomacy.
You are one of the leading scholars in the field of public diplomacy, especially in the digitalization of this practice of international communication. What inspired your research on the digitalization of public diplomacy, especially on the digital practices of embassies and governments?
I am the son of a diplomat. My father was a diplomat for 43 years. When I was looking for ideas for my Master’s thesis topic, I remember that he came home one day and was quite angry because he said that in addition to answering emails and all of the memos he needed to read, the foreign ministry now wanted him to be on social media. Why do diplomats need to be on social media? I found it a fascinating question. Indeed, that was the first time I had ever heard that foreign ministries were even thinking in that direction of using digital technologies. Moreover, because I was doing my Master’s program in the department of communication, it fit pretty well looking at the relationship between diplomacy and communication.
That is what got me interested initially in the ideas of digital technologies and diplomacy. Ultimately, I specialized in public diplomacy because that was the main focus of digitalization in the diplomatic arena at the time. Today, however, we find that foreign ministries, embassies, and diplomats use different digital technologies to achieve many different goals. For example, Ambassadors to the United Nations (UN) use WhatsApp groups to coordinate votes; foreign ministries use big data analysis to track disinformation; embassies use sentiment analysis to analyze comments they receive online. When I started my research in 2012 and 2013, in the public diplomacy field, it was all about engaging with the public. The idea was that digital technology would facilitate relationships between diplomats and audiences worldwide. If you spoke to diplomats, foreign ministries, and embassies in 2012 or 2013, you encountered what you might call “cyber optimism,” all kinds of ideas on the use Second Life, virtual worlds, and social media to facilitate relationships between a government’s representatives and foreign citizens. As we know, it did not end up that way. Since 2014, much of the use of digital technologies and social media has shifted focus from talking to people or interacting with foreign populations to managing the flow of information online and creating national narratives. Thus, relationships have taken the backseat to information management.
What got me interested at the beginning of my research was the fact that it was a new phenomenon and the atmosphere of cyber optimism enabling diplomats to do things they could not do. I remember speaking to an American diplomat who told me about their virtual embassy to Iran, which was a website that was supposed to replace the physical embassy because Iran and America have no diplomatic ties. Furthermore, he said, “it is impressive. We can use the Internet to communicate with Iranians and hear their opinions about the United States of America. We can also try to shape their opinions about America.” However, over time, cyber optimism gave way to cyber pessimism, so things changed over the years.
It has been a long journey, not only for your academic research but also for the conceptualization of the digitization of public diplomacy. For the most part, people think that public diplomacy in the digital age is a good thing. Because the use of digital platforms can allow people to join and exchange in horizontal communication interactions, we can use digital media to create a second life, or communication actors can even shape themselves into the image of “someone like the public” to serve their government better in achieving international communication missions. However, can you define public diplomacy and its digitalization? We have heard many neologisms: digital diplomacy, social media diplomacy, public diplomacy 2.0, and network diplomacy. What are the similarities among these terms, and what does the expression “digitalization of public diplomacy” mean?
Yes. We have many terms that tend to get conflated in academic discussions. I do not like the term “digital diplomacy” for three reasons. First, nowadays, people mostly mean using social media in the diplomatic arena when they say “digital diplomacy.” Nevertheless, as we know, digital diplomacy is an extensive topic. It means everything from how diplomats use digital media to how they send emails to how they deal with their internal management system to exchange memos. All of that is digital diplomacy. This term does not convince me because people now equate digital diplomacy with social media, which is only a part of the picture. Second, the term “digital diplomacy” suggests a kind of diplomatic practice: You have bilateral diplomacy, multilateral diplomacy, and digital diplomacy. However, the truth is that every department in a foreign ministry and embassy uses digital technologies now. That means it is not a type of diplomatic practice but a diplomatic tool. The third reason that I do not employ the term “digital diplomacy” is what you have just brought up. Indeed, over the years, there have been so many definitions that digital diplomacy means everything. Then it also means nothing. That is why I try to promote the term “digitalization.”
By “digitalization,” I am asking a larger question: how do digital technologies shape the norms, values, and working routines of diplomats and diplomatic institutions? This is a more apt term because it takes a broader view. It is not just social media. Furthermore, it also makes clear that this is a process, a long-term process. Digitalization does not happen overnight; if a foreign ministry suddenly launches a website, it does not mean they have suddenly become digital. What we have seen in most foreign ministries is that digitalization is a process. In some foreign ministries, for example, they started the process in 2008, like Sweden. The United States started this process in 2011. We see digitalization as a process in the sense of a foreign ministry or an embassy or diplomat adopting new technologies, and there is a trial-and-error phase where you try to use these technologies toward different ends. Then there is a professionalization stage where professionals learn how to maximize the technology. And then, ultimately, the technology becomes part and parcel of the diplomatic toolkit.
Furthermore, this process takes about a decade and a half. However, it also happens whenever a new technology is introduced. For example, when WhatApp became popular, we saw a process of digitalization. When Twitter became famous, we saw another process of digitalization. When Zoom became well-known, and diplomats had to use Zoom because of COVID-19, we saw another digitalization process.
Thus, for scholars, the question is, how do digital technologies impact the world of diplomats, and how do they impact the working routines of diplomats? At an elementary level, it could be from day-to-day work to special events, conferences, and summits. Then the question is where public diplomacy fits in here. The term I introduced in my book, the “digitalization of public diplomacy,” asked the same question but emphasized public diplomacy. Digitalization is when digital technologies impact diplomats and foreign ministries. We can narrow the prism by looking specifically at public diplomacy. The problem becomes that we do not know how to define public diplomacy. If we take five academics, put them in a room, and ask them to define public diplomacy, we end up with five different definitions. I tend to take a narrow view of public diplomacy. It is about one country’s government communicating directly with another country’s population. In this case, is Hollywood a public diplomacy actor? No. Is Facebook a public diplomacy actor? No, in my opinion. We can use other terms to define them, for instance, in communication studies. However, I see public diplomacy as when the government of one country tries to communicate with the population of another. I admit many people disagree with this definition, but this explication narrows the scope of what we study.
To conclude, the digitalization of public diplomacy is how digital technologies impact the norms, values, and routines of those diplomats dealing with public diplomacy. For instance, social media is based on transparency. The whole idea of social media is based on sharing as much information as possible so that those social media companies can sell our information to marketers. The transparency demanded by social media companies has also influenced diplomacy. Diplomacy has also had to become more open, especially in public diplomacy. Secret negotiations and deals are under universal scrutiny by netizens because these traditional diplomatic practices are now digitalized. People want diplomats to be more open and transparent in their professional activities.
During these years, especially during times of crisis (COVID-19 pandemic, global warming, Russia-Ukraine War, etc.), we have observed different movements of the digitalization of public diplomacy according to geopolitical transition. Especially now, we can see many problems regarding the digitalization of public diplomacy. We initially saw that digitalization would bring some good things to public diplomacy practices. For example, we have already mentioned engagement in online public diplomacy practices: Everyone can communicate directly with diplomats or embassies. Everyone can discuss, in a democratic way, a country’s foreign policies, and people can challenge a country’s international communication strategies online. We have also seen the negative side of public diplomacy, especially in the digital age. Two years ago, I remember you edited a book with “uncertainty” in the title. “Uncertainty” is basically a concept from International Relations scholarship, like the uncertainty of geopolitics. However, in this collective work, communication scholars suggested the presence of “uncertainty” in public diplomacy, especially when analyzing the challenges of using social media in international communication. Thus, how do we, from the digitalization of public diplomacy perspective, understand the term “uncertainty” in this challenging time?
This is a difficult question because it is very sophisticated. I will try to be more specific. I think that what we are witnessing worldwide in many regions is a rising sense or a rising tide of uncertainty. For example, we live in a world with superpowers, like the United States, but they cannot flex their super muscles. That means that the United States alone cannot reverse climate change or stop Russia from invading Ukraine. We live in a world where we are unsure what East and West are, the terminology we use. We are not sure what “liberal” means anymore. We are not even sure who is an ally and a foe. Some of these countries fall into both categories. One of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia has also been denounced as an enemy of the United States because of its human rights violations.
Thus, I think that the world does not make sense to many people. What you had, for instance, during the Cold War was not a better time to live, but the world was more straightforward. There was East and West; there was good and bad. You were either a socialist or communist supporter, and you probably belonged to the East, or you were either capitalist or liberal, and you belonged to the West. We do not have this clear ideological distinction today. We have shifts in alliances, and we have shifts in partnerships because of globalization. We have countries that only exist on paper or countries that do not have borders anymore. I think that uncertainty is felt on a very individual level. Moreover, a big part of what drives uncertainty is digitalization.
How does digitalization drive uncertainty? First, the decline of facts. We are no longer sure of what we encounter online. We are unsure if what we read is fact, fiction, or something in the middle. Second, we have witnessed the fragmentation of reality. Countries now do not simply frame the same event in different ways, but they disseminate different realities on social media. According to some official social media sites, there is a place called the Republic of the Crimea; it has a flag, a parliament, and issues passports. According to other websites and social media sites, it does not exist. There is no such place. According to some governments, Syria has been liberated from terrorists; according to other states, Syria has been reduced to rubble. Thus, it is not that diplomats frame the same event differently but that we have a fragmentation of reality. In this situation, you cannot know for sure what is real and what is not. This is essential for people, including diplomats and individuals, to make sense of the world. That is part of what diplomats do in public diplomacy. They help people make sense of the world and world events, and it is becoming harder and harder to do.
Finally, I think we all forgot the basic rule of physics: for every action in the universe, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What I mean here is that digitalization blurs national borders. It allows radical ideas or new ideas to transcend borders easily. Nowadays, many countries push back against digitalization, and we can call this a “digital paradox.” The more digital the world becomes, the easier it is for ideas to travel from one society to another, the more people will push back against digital by embracing conservative ideas and ideologies, by trying to return to the past. Conservative politicians tell us that women are not wearing headscarves anymore, or women are wearing short skirts in public because of digitalization and the radical ideas digital technologies spread. These three things contribute to uncertainty, and digitalization is a significant force in geopolitical uncertainty, but also individual uncertainty and the level of regular individuals worldwide.
This point makes me think about a paper you co-authored with Guy Golan and Philip Arceneaux regarding meditated public diplomacy, especially in the digital age. You mentioned that countries are trying to join a new frame competition related to global communication power building. This frame competition seems like a new form of propaganda (Golan et al., 2019). James Pamment (2015) emphasized this idea as the ontology of public diplomacy. The first ontology of public diplomacy was a mass media-driven communication model referring to propaganda.
For example, the real war and information warfare between Russia and Ukraine seem to damage the liberal or constructive imaginations or thinking about public diplomacy. It made us rethink the realist perspective of public diplomacy. That means digital propaganda: both of these countries diffuse fake news online and try to use social media to achieve psychological manipulation. The difference is that the current propaganda tactics have become increasingly digitalized and subtle. They are hard to detect and check vis-à-vis the propaganda in the 1960s. What do you think about this kind of phenomenon?
Furthermore, I will ask a sensible question. In this case, can we consider “soft power” a peaceful or liberalist rhetoric? More directly, does soft power exist in this geopolitical context?
This question is interesting because it hints at the two poles of the public diplomacy debate. On the one hand, we have soft power, the idea of engagement, building relationships, and carrots alongside sticks; on the other side of the axis, we have propaganda, which is manipulation, psychological warfare, walking a tightrope between truth and lies, and conspiracy theories. We have had this debate in public diplomacy since the end of the cold war, and everyone in our field has had to affiliate himself with one pole along this axis.
To answer this question, first, we must avoid the temptation of overstating social media’s role in our life. We indeed learn about the world through social media. We are influenced by what we see on social media. That means that social media shape our access to information. But we also learn about the world when we go to work, when we listen to the radio, when we listen to podcasts, when we talk to our family. Thus, we do not only learn about the world from social media. This debate about using social media for propaganda and using social media for psychological warfare is an important one. However, we must resist the temptation of thinking that social media is everything and that social media is the most important thing.
Second, if you try to chart the evolution of the digitalization of public diplomacy, it has not advanced linearly. It is not that diplomats began with simple technologies, like a website, and then moved toward more sophisticated technologies like social media and big data analysis. That is not how it happened. Crisis, conflict, and war have always impacted diplomats’ use of digital technologies. In 2014, we saw Russia use a lot of online disinformation and fake news sites when its army took over Crimea. It led a lot of foreign ministries to take an active role in stemming the flow of disinformation. Then we saw the Russian digital interventions in the Brexit referendum and the U.S. elections. This led foreign ministries to create departments that identify and neutralize fake social media accounts. So the offline world impacted how digitalized public diplomacy is practiced.
Moreover, since we are now in an age of geopolitical confrontation and competition, states are increasingly using social media to create narratives and frames and convince the public that their outlook on the world is right. The emphasis is not so much on relationship building and communicating with foreign populations but swaying the opinions of foreign populations. In this sense, we have perhaps moved closer to the world of propaganda. Of course, there are countries that use digital carefully: they don’t lie, fabricate information, or use innuendo. Such is the case with the European Union, for example. Other states like Russia, Iran, China, or even Saudi Arabia do use digital to spread false information. This is a real problem because countries use the same tool in two different ways. This creates a challenge, especially for countries that do not want to deceive the public.
Thus, digitalization is a problem but also a solution. For example, a study found that Finland is the most resilient country in the world to disinformation, meaning that citizens are not easily duped online. Scholars found that this resilience is tied to the Finnish education system, which is based on casting doubt on whatever the teacher says. That means that students criticize whatever the teacher says. That made them much more critical users of the internet and social media. When they see something surprising online, they verify it with two or three other sources.
Finally, you mentioned a fundamental question about soft power. I do not believe that soft power exists. I do not believe that it ever existed. Of course, soft power was a brilliant concept formulated by Joseph Nye. However, soft power was prevalent because it offered a conceptual framework and concrete example for differentiating power resources: there was soft power, which was relationships and carrots, and there was hard power, which was military power and economic sanctions. This framework made sense to diplomats, and it made sense to academics because when you have these binary distinctions, East and West, communist and capitalists, soft power and hard power, it is easier to understand the world system.
Nevertheless, it is problematic if soft power ever existed. At least, this idea is not applicable to the current world. We are in a moment of transition, and we see that military or political alliances, short-term or medium-term alliances, are much more important than soft power. Also, soft power could never really be quantified or measured. So it is almost like saying that the state has magical powers, and people cannot measure their ability to cast charms.
I agree with you about this soft power debate because geopolitical confrontation, along with new frame competition, has shown us a contest of economic and military power between states behind the mediatization of a range of information and narratives. In other words, when trying to promote something, states will mobilize their communication channels to frame it. Although everyone has the right to express and transmit information in the international communication arena, the strength of communication capability also seems to correspond to the competition of international order in the real world.
When we see the recent military conflict between Russia and Ukraine in digital settings, we find a new exciting phenomenon in social media narratives. That is the power of pictures and images. The images and videos of bombings have left audiences worldwide in tears and sympathy for Ukrainians. And they have also pushed the public diplomacy community to pay attention to the role of semiotics. I know you have recently edited a book for the Center of Public Diplomacy regarding this issue. Could you briefly outline the relationship between politics, the digitalization of public diplomacy, and semiotic trends and their direction in the future?
This is another way that society impacts diplomacy, especially the digital society vis-à-vis the digitalization of public diplomacy. Indeed, social media members realized that to drive engagement with their content, they could use images, gifs, or memes, which refer to a very effective way of getting attention. Moreover, diplomats took note of that, and they started incorporating images. Never before in history have so many diplomats authored so many images daily. They do so because they are active on social media; every foreign ministry active on social media is now a visual narrator. Visual narrators use images to tell a story, and images are now as crucial to the online communications of diplomats as the text they publish on Twitter. If we go to the Twitter account of the Israeli foreign ministry, the American foreign ministry, the Saudi foreign ministry, and the Russian foreign ministry, we will find that about 90% of all online communication across platforms includes images. As public diplomacy scholars, it means that we need to investigate these images.
Furthermore, when diplomats work with images, how do they select images? How do images provide substance to text? How do images make the meaning of the text clearer? How do images narrow down the interpretation of the text? I tried to touch on all these questions through the term “semiotics.” This term is significant. We have talked about digitalization and blurring boundaries. Digitalization has also blurred the boundary between national citizens and foreign populations. Moreover, many foreign ministries wield social media accounts to communicate both with their citizens and with foreign populations. An image in a tweet can hold one meaning to the local population and another to foreign populations. For instance, a U.K. diplomat can write a tweet and then attach a picture from the British parliament. Not everyone knows what the British parliament looks like, so this image would have one meaning for British citizens and another meaning for international audiences. Diplomats have become very sophisticated in preparing visual messages. They can use a single image to relay a very complex diplomatic message. They also bypass post length or tweet length restrictions by using images, as a meaningful and intuitive picture can even be better than an extended essay.
Also, if you analyze these images, they are rich with meaning. Many images published by diplomats have two or three layers of meaning. However, the question is, how do people get to these layers? Semiotics would be the answer because semiotic analysis enables scholars to examine the different layers of meaning attached to an image and identify the different meanings it could have to different audiences.
I try to link digitalization, public diplomacy, and semiotics in this context. Semiotics will be a promising tool for analyzing this phenomenon of visual diplomacy. Since you mentioned the war in Ukraine, using images is an excellent way for the Ukrainian government to convey its message; using images is a perfect way to elaborate on its message and attract the attention of social media users. Nevertheless, it also has a downside. For instance, using memes, especially by the Ukrainian government, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, and the Ministry of Defense, is a huge mistake. They are gaining much popularity online by using memes and gifs. But what they are actually doing is they are reducing a very complex crisis to a straightforward analogy: President Zelinsky is Captain America or Captain Ukraine while Putin is Thanos.
In this case, their memes have reduced a very complex international crisis to an elementary struggle between good and evil—social media followers who buy into this analogy will expect that Good will vanquish Evil. The bad will be defeated, ending in a grand celebration. However, as we know, it is more likely that the Ukrainian crisis will be resolved by a diplomatic agreement where both sides will give something up. The minute that agreement is reached, audiences online will think that Ukraine has failed because it was supposed to win the struggle of Good vs. Evil, or Captain Ukraine vs. Thanos. So memes and gifs actually drive disillusionment with global leadership and with diplomacy. The good were supposed to defeat the evil, but because of diplomats and their government’s online practices, no one is the clear winner.
Therefore, I think that using images also has a considerable downside, and countries should be cautious about how they use images because they reduce complex crises into very binary solutions that will not be achievable in the real world.
According to your comment, we need to reconsider propaganda practice. Indeed, the popularization of memes or images seems to bring social media communication into an era of diffusing minimal content: actors fabricate, use, and circulate imagery to reconceptualize or intentionally simplify some sophisticated cases, ideas, or policies in the public diplomacy arena. As you said earlier, when people cannot correctly interpret the meaning of the various layers hidden behind an image, people can only comprehend or even distort some of the transmitted content according to their interpretation, resulting in more significant cognitive uncertainty (Huang, 2021). It also makes me think about our public relations colleagues’ work on communication engagement.
For example, Kim Johnston and Maureen Taylor (2018) worked on conceptualizing engagement through a communication lens. There is a triangle of communication engagement at the individual level. That means the first level refers to the affective influence and emotional appeals, and the second level aims to convince people through discourses and narratives. At the third level, communication actors will push for behavioral change through long-term influence (Huang & Wang, 2020). I think semiotics is the most crucial thing for diplomats to deal with in exercising the global influence of their governments online; it can easily attract the target public’s attention and then, little by little, infiltrate the political content it wants to convey to civil society. This series of actions is all about the public, the reception of messages, and the public’s perceptions. Thus, I would love to ask about public diplomacy’s publics. As you mentioned, digitalization has already blurred domestic and international boundaries, so what about the publics of the digitalization of public diplomacy?
We need to go back to the definition of public diplomacy. Based on the definition, we would also think of publics. Nevertheless, I would say that foreign ministries and diplomats are more sophisticated than people give them credit for. Moreover, they use different media to interact with different publics. Facebook is used to converse with several publics, including national citizens, foreign populations, and Diasporas. The goal here is to communicate with average social media users.
Twitter, on the other hand, is an elite-to-elite platform. On Twitter, diplomats seek to interact with parliamentarians, opinion makers, journalists, editors, and other diplomats. Thus, there is a lot of diplomatic signaling on Twitter. Finally, diplomats use Instagram to communicate with younger demographics. In general, they are trying to communicate with 18- to 22-year-olds. In this case, the messages are different and more visual-based. Today, diplomats are trying to talk to interact with teenagers on Tik Tok.
Therefore, on the one hand, digitalization increased the range of the publics in public diplomacy. The digitalization of public diplomacy touches citizens, foreign populations, academics, diplomatic peers, and journalists. However, it also segmented the publics into different media. Diplomats can mobilize one medium to talk to journalists, another to talk to teenagers, and the third one to talk to Diasporas. China’s digitalization of public diplomacy, for instance, follows this form. Diplomats can use Weibo, Douyin, Tik Tok, Twitter, and Linkedin for communicating with very different publics.
On the other hand, we have segmented the publics into different categories. I also think that an essential category in public diplomacy is big technology companies. They are also part of the publics of public diplomacy. Even more importantly, algorithms have become a particular public in this social media age. Indeed, diplomats always try to hack social media algorithms and reach as many people as possible. And when they sit down and formulate a tweet, a post, or a statement on the web, they think about how they can reach as many people as possible and hack the algorithm.
Footnotes
Author biographies
book, The Digitalization of Public Diplomacy, and his 2021 co-edited volume, Public Diplomacy and the Politics of Uncertainty, were published by Palgrave Macmillan. Manor’s forthcoming co-edited volume, The Digital Diplomacy Handbook, will be published in 2023 by Oxford University Press. Manor has contributed articles to numerous journals, including International Affairs, International Studies Review, Policy and Internet, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, The Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, Global Policy, and Media, War and Conflict. His latest work on domestic digital diplomacy will appear in The International Journal of Communication.