Public diplomacy 2.0: A case study of the US digital outreach team

Middle East Journal

Volumn 66, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 453-472

  Khatib, Lina ^a   Dutton, William ^b   Thelwall, Michael ^c  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

^c UNIVERSITY OF WOLVERHAMPTON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS; FOREIGN POLICY; GOVERNMENT; INTERNET;

MIDDLE EAST; UNITED STATES;

EID: 84868589538     PISSN: 00263141     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3751/66.3.14     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. "Digital Outreach Team," US Department of State, Bureau of International Information Programs, January 2009, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/116709.pdf.
2. "Web 2.0" in this context is used to refer to the concept of the internet as a site of sharing usergenerated content, such as social-networking sites, blogs, wikis, or forums. This term was coined to contrast with the passive consumption of content (the so-called "Web 1.0").
3. Jesse Lichtenstein, "Digital Diplomacy," New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 18, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/magazine/18web2-0-t.html.
4. Opinion Space, US Department of State website, http://www.state.gov/opinionspace/.
5. Hyunjin Seo, "How the Internet Changes Public Diplomacy: A Case Study of Online Community Run by U.S. Embassy in South Korea," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association, Chicago, IL, May 21, 2009, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p299789_index.html.
6. Jamie Frederic Metzl, "Popular Diplomacy," Daedalus, Vol. 128, No. 2 (1999), p. 178.
7. "Remarks by the President on a New Beginning," Speech Transcript, June 4, 2009, the White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-cairo-university-6-04-09.
8. Richard Grant, The Democratization of Diplomacy: Negotiating with the Internet, Oxford Internet Institute (OII) Research Report No. 5 (Oxford: OII, 2004), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1325241.
9. Yasmine Dabbous and Khaled Nasser, "A Waste of Public Diplomacy? The Performance of Al-Hurra TV among Lebanon's University Students," Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2009), pp. 100-114.
10. Mohammed El-Nawawy, "US Public Diplomacy in the Arab World: The News Credibility of Radio Sawa and Television Alhurra in Five Countries," Global Media and Communication, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2006), pp. 183-203.
11. Grant P, The Democratization of Diplomacy: Negotiating with the Internet.
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13. Dean Kruckeberg and Marina Vujnovic, "Public Relations, not Propaganda, for US Public Diplomacy in a Post-9/11 World: Challenges and Opportunities," Journal of Communication Management, Vol. 9, No. 4 (2005), pp. 296-304.
14. Karen P. Hughes, Testimony before the House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, Washington, DC, April 19, 2007, http://2001-2009.state.gov/r/us/2007/83269.htm.
15. James K. Glassman, Briefing on U.S. Public Diplomacy and the War of Ideas, Washington DC, October 28, 2008, http://2001-2009.state.gov/r/us/2008/111372.htm.
16. Interview by author Lina Khatib with US Digital Outreach Team, Washington, DC, July 21, 2010.
17. Glassman, Briefing on U.S. Public Diplomacy and the War of Ideas.
18. Evygeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: Public Affairs, 2012).
19. Mark Leonard, "Diplomacy by Other Means," Foreign Policy, No. 132 (Sep.-Oct. 2002), p. 54.
20. Evgeny Morozov, "The Future of 'Public Diplomacy 2.0,'" Net Effect, Foreign Policy, June 9, 2009, http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/06/09/the_future_of_public_diplomacy_20.
21. http://forum.egypt.com/arforum/-114814.html.
22. http://www.egyptsons.com/misr/showthread.php?141470&p=1424124&highlight=#post1424124;http://www.egyptsons.com/misr/threads/124271;ttp://www.egyptsons.com/misr/threads/124261;http://www.egyptsons.com/misr/threads/124267.
23. http://www.paldf.net/forum/showthread.php?t=431359.
24. http://www.nationalkuwait.com/vb/showthread.php?t=66338.
25. http://www.maghress.com/almassae/29566.
26. http://www.alsaha.com/users/Digitaloutreach/entries/259570/pages/1; http://www.alsaha.com/sahat/4/topics/262884; http://www.alsaha.com/sahat/4/topics/259749/pages/1; http://www.alsaha.com/sahat/4/topics/263946.
27. http://walidjawad.maktoobblog.com/date/2009/06/;
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29. http://forums.moheet.com/showthread.php?t=69858.
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31. http://www.qwled.com/vb/t110605.html.
32. http://www.montada.com/showthread.php?t=635778; http://www.montada.com/showthread.php?p=6503167#post6503167
33. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41v7vdBU5BU.
34. http://ikbis.com/statedepartment/shot/183165.
35. http://www.flickr.com/photos/statedepartment/3597465329/.
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39. http://www.aljazeeratalk.net/forum/showthread.php?t=219958; http://www.aljazeeratalk.net/forum/showthread.php?t=190561.
40. A Google Trends and Google Ad Planner analysis was conducted on all the sites on December 13, 2009. Results found that, while the number of visitors to each site varied, the DOT was targeting sites with frequent visitors. The most visited site in general in the sample is Maktoob, with 9,800,000 unique visitors at the time of analysis. There is a wide gap between this number and the number of visitors to the rest of the sites analyzed. For example, PALDF attracted 520,000 visitors, Al-Jazeera Talk attracted 330,000 visitors, Al-Saha 180,000 visitors, and Mahjoob 110,000 visitors.
41. Ahmed Hassan, Vahed Qazvinian, and Dragomir Radev, "What's with the Attitude? Identifying Sentences with Attitude in Online Discussions," Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010), pp. 1245-1255.
42. "Digital Outreach Team."
43. Byoungkwan Lee, Karen M. Lancendorfer, and Ki Jung Lee, "Agenda-setting and the Internet: The Intermedia Influence of internet Bulletin Boards on Newspaper Coverage of the 2000 General Election in South Korea," Asian Journal of Communication, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2005), pp. 57-71.
44. Marcus Messner and Marcia Watson Distaso, "The Source Cycle: How Traditional Media and Weblogs Use Each Other as Sources," Journalism Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3 (2008), p. 449.
45. Michael J. Breen, "A Cook, a Cardinal, His Priest, and the Press: Deviance as a Trigger for Intermedia Agenda Setting," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 2 (1997), pp. 348-356.
46. Erik C. Nisbet, et al, "Public Diplomacy, Television News, and Muslim Opinion," The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Vol. 9, No. 11 (2004), pp. 11-37
47. "Digital Outreach Team."
48. Interview by author Lina Khatib with US Digital Outreach Team.
49. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion - Our Social Skin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
50. Interview by author Lina Khatib with US Digital Outreach Team.
51. Interview by author Lina Khatib with US Digital Outreach Team.
52. Interview by author Lina Khatib with US Digital Outreach Team.
53. Blair Nonnecke and Jenny Preece, "Why Lurkers Lurk," Proceedings of the Sixth Americas Conference on Information Systems (Atlanta, GA: Association for Information Systems, 2001), pp. 1521-1530.
54. Morozov P, "The Future of 'Public Diplomacy 2.0.'"
55. "Digital Outreach Team."
56. Interview by author Lina Khatib with US Digital Outreach Team.
57. Interview by author Lina Khatib with US Digital Outreach Team.
58. Interview by author Lina Khatib with US Digital Outreach Team.
59. "Arabic Speakers Monitor Net Chats," Washington Times, March 8, 2007, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/mar/08/20070308-111426-4682r/.
60. Amelia Arsenault, "Public Diplomacy 2.0," in Philip Seib, ed., Toward a New Public Diplomacy: Redirecting U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 135-154.
61. Spencer Ackerman, "Future of Public Diplomacy Unsettled at State," Washington Independent, February 17, 2009, http://washingtonindependent.com/30404/future-of-public-iplomacy-unsettled-at-state.
62. http://gibrankahlilgibran.blogspot.com/
63. Interview by author Lina Khatib with US Digital Outreach Team.
64. Interview by author Lina Khatib with US Digital Outreach Team.
65. http://www.youtube.com/user/StateDepartment
66. http://www.facebook.com/DigitalOutreachTeam
67. Walter Pincus, "State Dept. Tries Blog Diplomacy," Washington Post, November 19, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-yn/content/article/2007/11/18/AR2007111801114.html.
68. Lisa Curtis and James Phillips, "Obama's Cairo Speech Stresses Common Interests but Fails to Identify the Common Enemy," Heritage Foundation, June 5, 2009, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2009/06/obamas-cairo-speech-stresses-common-interests-but-fails-to-identify-the-common-enemy.
69. Washington Times, "Arabic Speakers Monitor Net Chats."
70. Interview by author Lina Khatib with US Digital Outreach Team.
71. http://www.alsaha.com/users/Digitaloutreach/entries/259570/pages/1.
72. http://www.aljazeeratalk.net/forum/showthread.php?t=190561&page=3.
73. http://www.aljazeeratalk.net/forum/showthread.php?t=190561&page=5.
74. http://www.america.gov/ar/relations/middle_east_peace.html.
75. http://www.egyptsons.com/misr/showthread.php?141470&p=1424124.
76. The Arab Opinion Poll 2011 shows a significant increase in favorability towards the United States, compared with the 2010 poll, from 10% to 26%. The Arab Opinion Poll is produced each year by the Brookings Institution in conjunction with Zogby International.
77. http://sadat.umd.edu/.
78. Shibley Telhami, "2010 Arab Public Opinion Poll: Results of Arab Opinion Survey Conducted June 29-July 20, 2010," Brookings Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2010/0805_arab_opinion_poll_telhami.aspx.
79. It should be noted that this percentage in the 2011 poll was 52%, an improvement that could be credited to the US stance during the Arab Spring, though this still means the majority remain discouraged by US foreign policy towards the Middle East.
80. Bo Pang and Lillian Lee, "Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis," Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, Vol. 2, Nos. 1-2 (2008), pp. 1-135.
81. Joseph S. Nye Jr., "The Decline of America's Soft Power: Why Washington Should Worry," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 3 (May-June 2004), pp. 16-20;
82. Marwan M. Kraidy, Arab Media and US Policy: A Public Diplomacy Reset (Muscatine, IA: The Stanley Foundation, 2008), http://www.stanleyfoundation.org/publications/pab/PAB08Kraidy.pdf
83. Philip Seib, "Connecting Public Diplomacy and Policy," Layalina's Perspectives, Vol. 1, No. 5 (September 2009), http://www.layalina.tv/Publications/Perspectives/PhilipSeib.html
84. Lina Khatib, "Public Diplomacy in the Middle East:Dynamics of Success and Failure," in Scott Lucas and Ali Fisher, eds., The Trials of Engagement: The Future of US Public Diplomacy (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2011), pp. 133-147.
85. Cass Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).