ABSTRACT
Typically under the remit of digital diplomacy initiatives, foreign ministries have begun integrating social media communications and monitoring, big data analytics, social network analysis and crowdsourcing into their larger toolkits. In these cases, foreign ministries are capitalizing on the social web, defined as the platforms of the ‘read-write’, interactive web (e.g. social networking sites, blogs, mobile applications) and the social phenomena associated with them (e.g. crowdsourcing, peer-production, citizen journalism, ‘viral’ information flows). On the one hand, the social web appears to find a natural home in foreign ministries. Networking, influencing and intelligence gathering and analysis comprise these organizations’ key functions. The social web provides new and improved means of executing these tasks. According to this perspective, digital diplomacy extends naturally from traditional diplomacy, a logical and uninterrupted continuation of the ‘business’ of diplomats and foreign offices, but with a digital angle. On the other hand, digital diplomacy might be framed as a new and revolutionary development in which top-down, state-centric processes of international relations are increasingly replaced by a more networked, civil society-driven model of diplomacy. More specifically, according to this perspective, rather than being simply a case of ‘business as usual’, digital diplomacy signals a recognition amongst diplomats and foreign ministries that the social web has redistributed informational resources, ensuring that civil society – and not government – is best placed to perform the functions of networking, influencing and intelligence gathering and analysis that have long been the preserve of state actors as per the state-to-state, intergovernmental model of international relations (Huijgh 2013).
