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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

LET’S NOT FORGET PUBLIC DIPLOMACY 1.0
DEC 8, 2008 - 5:46PM PDT
Posted by Mitchell Polman
All posts by this author

In the new movie "Slumdog Millionaire" there is a poignant scene that all public diplomacy experts should have etched in their minds. It's of a classroom full of boys in a Mumbai slum inhabited by Moslems passing around one copy of the "Three Musketeers" as part of their English lesson. Later we watch one of those boys evolve into a gangster. He could just as easily have joined Al Qaeda. The scene takes place in the early 1980's, but I suspect that in spite of India's growth that similar scenes can be found today. I say public diplomacy experts should keep this in mind because while much is said and written about how much the world is changing and the need for public diplomacy to change with it there is still much that has not changed. About 20% of the world's population is completely illiterate. That doesn't include functionally illiterate. Only about 22% of the world has access to the Internet. Of course, in order to go online one needs to have a computer and usually electricity. Furthermore, most websites are in English. Most people in the world do not own a television set. Most rural villages in poor nations usually have one that is shared. It is important that public diplomacy programs target their audiences appropriately. The State Department's use of the Internet, chat rooms, and Facebook is valuable in engaging extremists of all sorts that commonly use the Internet both to spread their views and to plan attacks upon others. However, we need to keep in mind that preventing people from becoming extremists in the first place is also important and "old technology" still needs to be an important part of that. Public Diplomacy 1.0 is still very relevant in today's world. Many years ago as a young backpacker in Peru, I had an experience that drove home to me for the first time what an important medium radio is. I was staying in a small home with no running water or electricity on an island in Lake Titicaca where people were still living in a way that hadn't changed much for centuries. I watched a woman milling grain off in the distance and then I heard the strangely out-of-place sound of Eric Clapton on a radio she had close by. In this remote area the radio was the perfect medium to reach people. It didn't require electricity, expensive equipment, literacy, or even time and attention. A woman going about her dull daily chores could listen to it and get her work done at the same time. Radio programs that educate can reach her in a way that TV programs, the Internet, and even books can not. Much of the world still lives like this. Indeed, television is still a new medium in many places and its uses are only now being explored in some countries. I worked with a young Indonesian television news anchorman just a couple of years ago who was interested in learning about TV…... FULL TEXT
 
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Ian on January 16, 2009 @ 1:49 pm:
Mitchell - you make a very strong argument here, one I am sure Voice of America proponents would salute, especially considering the recent cuts in Russian and Hindi language radio programming. Those seem strategically vital languages for public diplomacy outreach, and are in areas far too significant to be left simply to dialogue through web-based platforms.

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