Virtual Diplomacy

All those who believe social networking technologies are superficial and undermine social communication move over, because Secretary of State Hillary Clinton believes that “virtual diplomacy” via Facebook and Twitter is the way to empower America’s “citizen activists.”

Clinton announced at New York University’s May 13 commencement that the U.S. State Department would be forming a Virtual Student Foreign Service Initiative (VSFSI). “Working from college and university campuses American students will partner with our embassies abroad to conduct digital diplomacy that reflects the realities of the networked world and you can learn more about this initiative on the State Department website,” she said.

Nearly two weeks after the initiative’s launch, however, the State Department website limits its information about the VSFSI to the length of about six Tweets or a Wiki stub and refers viewers to its Facebook page. The entry utilizes substantially similar phrases as those found in Clinton’s NYU speech.

Also the commencement speaker at Columbia University’s Barnard College, Clinton again pointed to internet tools as a “democratizing” influence worldwide and encouraged students to go on Facebook or Twitter, the Greenbelt Movement or Kiva. “Now in another time, the story of [Nasoon Ali’s] individual courage and her equally brave lawyer would not have been covered in the news even in her own country but now it is beamed worldwide by satellites, shared on blogs, posted on Twitter, celebrated in gatherings,” said Clinton. Ali, a Yemeni girl, was married to a thirty-year old man at the age of nine and successfully sued for annulment when she was ten years old. Clinton continued,

“Today women are finding their voices and those voices are being heard far beyond their own narrow circumstances and here’s what each of you can do. You can visit the website of a non-profit called Kiva, K-I-V-A, and send a microloan to an entrepreneur like Blanca, who wants to expand her small grocery store in Peru. You can send children’s books to a library in Namibia by purchasing items of an Amazon.com wish list. You can sit in your dorm room or soon your new apartment and use the web to plant trees across Africa through Wangari Maathai’s Greenbelt Movement and with these social-networking tools that you use every day to tell people you’ve gone to get a latte or you’re going to be running late, you can unite your friends through Facebook to fight human trafficking or child marriage, like the two recent college graduates in Colombia—the country—who organized 14 million people into the largest anti-terrorism demonstration in history, doing as much damage to the FARC terrorist network in a few weeks than had been done in years of military action. And you can organize through Twitter, like the undergraduates at Northwestern [University] who launched a global fast to bring attention to Iran’s imprisonment of an American journalist and we have two young women journalists right now imprisoned in North Korea and you can get busy on the internet and let the North Koreans know that we find that absolutely unacceptable. These new tools are available for everyone. They are democratizing diplomacy.”

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.