The Layalina Review
VOL. V NO. 7, March 13-March 26, 2009 "We are just expanding our technical ability to do that while at the same time using state-of-the-art information technology to have a dialogue with people," says VOA Director Dan Austin. In 2008, VOA awarded a contract to Alelo Inc. to develop an interactive web-based learning portal to teach English as a second language. The portal is extremely popular with college-age students in China and Iran, reports America.gov. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is also embracing new media, using the web to promote the agency and her role as the nation's top envoy, according to Associated Press (AP). In less than three months, Clinton's State Department has embarked on a digital diplomacy drive aimed at spreading the word about American foreign policy and restoring Washington's image. AP explains that this is part of a broader outreach strategy spearheaded by President Barack Obama. However Clinton has also built on e-diplomacy innovations developed during George W. Bush's presidency. "New media is critical in this new era of diplomacy, where smart power and expanded dialogues are essential to achieving our foreign policy goals," said Cheryl Mills, Clinton's longtime confidante and chief of staff. According to internal State Department's statistics, there has been a surge in interest in such technology. "The United States government is behind nearly everybody, except in certain discrete areas, in terms of technology," Clinton told department employees at a town hall meeting in February. "We are, in my view, wasting time, wasting money, wasting opportunities, because we are not prepared to communicate effectively with what is out there in the business world and the private world." On her first two foreign trips, to Asia and then the Middle East and Europe, local bloggers were "embedded" with the traveling press corps, broadening the audience for Clinton's official meetings and public appearances, which often produced more personal than policy questions. Clinton's staff says it plans to venture further into the realm of social networking, an animated online world called Second Life, and cell phone technology. The department hopes to follow through on a Bush administration organized project that brought together Facebook, Google, Howcast, YouTube, AT&T, MTV, Columbia Law School, Access360Media and Gen-Next for an Alliance of Youth Movements summit. It also wants to expand on X-Life, a mobile phone game launched in February that is aimed at helping youth in the Middle East learn English and teaching them about American history, culture and values, comments AP. However, Susan Hansell, reporting for The New York Times, explains that the government may be caught in a catch 22. Federal agencies must go through Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) every time they create a new computer system, which has been an issue in adapting social networks, blogs, wikis and other web tools to their traditional operating methods in order to connect to customers and partners. "We have a Facebook page," said one official of the Department of Homeland Security. "But we don't allow people to look at Facebook in the office. So we have to go home to use it. I find this bizarre." Referring to the US Constitution’s first amendment, one person asked at a privacy conference, if the government has the right to remove offensive comments on a blog or social network page. Another issue is that there are at least as many pages created on Facebook that are about the agencies that are not officially sanctioned. "For every Facebook page that represents itself as an official State Department page, there is another unofficial page," one participant said. The government already maintains a list of all federal blogs, and some wondered if it should do the same for social networking pages.
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Related Stories New Media Redefines Public Diplomacy Recent Issues Vol. V No.6: 02/27-03/12, 2009 Vol. V No.5: 02/13-02/26, 2009 Vol. V No.4: 01/02-01/15, 2009
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