Thanks to the generous support of the Walter Roberts Endowment, the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication (IPDGC) is offering a grant of up to $5,000 to a promising student for a project in public diplomacy.
Public Diplomacy can be defined as the effort of state and non-state actors to educate, influence, and interact with foreign publics to support the actor’s goals. The purpose of the grant is to work with an institution and help it bring to fruition a project of importance to the organization. All projects must be coordinated with a faculty mentor who will provide guidance until its completion. Sample projects include working with the US Department of State, a foreign embassy, a cultural center, or an NGO on:
· an arts exchange program/event in theater, music, film, or other art forms that culminate in performance or exhibit.
· a public diplomacy campaign in support of a specific issue the organization believes is important.
· a video for use in either traditional or social media that builds public support for a particular public diplomacy program.
· an analysis of the organization’s current use of social media, with recommendations for improvement.
· an analysis of the effectiveness of an exchange or cultural program, with recommendations for improvement.
Eligibility
Applicants must be enrolled as full-time juniors, seniors, or graduate students at the George Washington University. Applications must include the following:
a. A cover letter describing the project
b. A letter of support from a GW faculty mentor
c. A signed endorsement from the cooperating institution.
d. A detailed budget describing how funds will be used (a. travel c. materials, d. pay for services, etc)
e. An unofficial transcript obtained from Colonial Central
Completed applications should be emailed to ipdgc@gwu.edu by April 15, 2019.
Description of the award
Student awardees will receive a $3,500 grant and up to $1,500 in expenses. $2000 will be paid upon notice of the award; the remaining $1500, along with up to $1500 in reimbursed expenses, will be paid upon receipt of the final report.
Faculty will receive $500 per student supervised upon notice of the award.
Deadline
Applicants will be accepted in the spring semester of each academic year for an award to be completed by December 31. This year, the deadline is April 15, 2019.
Follow Up
Grantees must submit (a) a 600-word blog post to IPDGC’s “Smart Power” blog, and (b) a report, in either written or video form. to their faculty mentor upon completion of the project. The faculty member will agree to forward the report to the board of the Walter Roberts Endowment.
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Walter Roberts Student Prize
APPLICATIONS CLOSED for Spring 2019
Each year, thanks to the generous support of the Walter Roberts Endowment, a second-year student in the Global Communication M.A. program receives a prize of $1000 based on academic excellence in Public Diplomacy studies while at George Washington University and professional aspirations for a career in public diplomacy.
Eligibility
Applicants must be enrolled as full-time second-year students in the Global Communication M.A. program at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Applications must include the following:
c. An essay (500 words) describing your interest and experience in public diplomacy, and career goals;
d. A blog post (600-800 word) on a PD-related topic of your choice, which will be featured on IPDGC’s Smart Power blog. (https://blogs.gwu.edu/ipdgcsmartpower/)
Completed applications should be emailed to ipdgc@gwu.edu by March 15, 2019.EXTENDED TO MARCH 22 (11:59pm).
Description of the award
A prize of $1000 will be awarded to a 2nd year graduate student based on academic excellence and aspirations for a career in public diplomacy. (A second prize of $500 is occasionally awarded to another deserving student.)
Deadline
The deadline for applications is March 15, 2019. EXTENDED TO MARCH 22 (11:59pm).
Following a Walter Roberts Endowment committee review, notifications will be sent by email and posted to social media by early April.
Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1990, Harvard Professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr., stated that “the richest country in the world could afford both better education at home and the international influence that comes from an effective aid and information program abroad. What is needed is increased investment in soft power, the complex machinery of interdependence.” He added in 2003 that neither hard power (coercion and payment) nor soft power (attraction) can produce effective foreign policy — what is needed in the modern world is a strategy the combines the tools of both into smart power.
This blog is an attempt to highlight the most thought-provoking articles, commentary, and graphics related to smart power – the world of public diplomacy and global communication. We welcome your suggestions of links and your own contributions and comments. There are many sites on the world wide web that look at public diplomacy, public affairs, and foreign policy. Our vision is that this site serves as a gathering place that helps inform and educate you about the opportunities and issues every modern nation faces, and how smart power can help them pursue their goals and overcome their challenges.
As Nye wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine in July 2009, “Despite its numerous errors, the United States’ Cold War strategy involved a smart combination of hard and soft power. When the Berlin Wall finally collapsed, it was destroyed not by an artillery barrage, but by hammers and bulldozers wielded by those who had themselves lost faith in communism. In today’s information age, success is the result not merely of whose army wins, but also of whose story wins.”
We hope this blog will help you follow that amazing story.
This is the fifth in a series of posts on life, culture, and politics in the U.S. and E.U. by Robert Entman, who spent 2012 as a Humboldt Research Prize Scholar at Freie Universität in Berlin. Read more posts here.
During our year in three different European countries, my wife or I had occasion to obtain medical care in each. Of course I didn’t do a systematic study but I saw no evidence that the taxpayer-funded and government-administrated European health care systems resembles the nightmare of many Americans’ imagination. From everything I saw, Europeans don’t experience nasty old clinics with long lines of miserable patients endlessly hassled by bureaucrats so they can get access to nameless overworked and under-trained doctors using outdated technology and drugs. Instead the experience of visiting a doctor is much like it is in America, only better and cheaper.
In our experience with routine medical care in Germany, France and Spain, care was competent, wait times and lines were shorter than in the US, and doctors paid close personal attention. For instance, on every visit, doctors left their desks and personally called out the name of the next patient and escorted him or her into the exam room. That’s never happened to us in the US, where clerks or nurses usher you around until the doctor comes into the exam room. It’s not a crucial difference, but it does illustrate the distance between stereotypes and reality.
Here’s one case study: I had a chronic problem that the doctors I’d seen in DC and North Carolina hadn’t been able to help much, so I thought I’d seek a Euro-perspective. Berlin’s Charité Hospital is one of the leading medical research and teaching centers in Germany. By searching on the internet, I found the name of a doctor who specialized in my malady and had given papers at conferences in the US and participated in international research grants—he was obviously plugged into the latest developments in the field. Like so much else, medicine, at least in affluent countries, is globalized.
It happened that this particular G-I specialist was also Chief of the Internal Medicine division. I contacted his office for an appointment and got one within a couple weeks, without needing any referral. Try getting an appointment with the head of Internal Medicine at a major American teaching hospital and see if you get seen, without a referral, within two weeks.
Subsequently, I had two long office visits with him and three multi-hour tests. These yielded useful information that helped control my symptoms a little better. Here’s the key point: At my final visit, I had to ask my doctor’s secretary to please send me a bill. There was no upfront demand for my insurance papers or co-pay as is inevitable in the US. During my total of five visits, nobody had asked me to pay anything, or even raised the issue of billing.
The day after my fifth visit, I was leaving Berlin for Paris. The secretary was saying goodbye and even after telling her I was moving to Paris I had to remind her that I needed to pay. She said they’d figure it out and send a bill to my Paris address.
The total cost of the two doctor visits—with the chief of internal medicine at one of Germany’s leading medical institutions, no less—and three lengthy test procedures was 104 Euros, or about $130. In the US the cost would easily be 10 or 15 times greater.
Finally, the doctor at Charité wrote me a prescription for a particularly expensive drug that I take every day (a PPI if you must know). In the US, I had to make a special appeal to my insurance company to cover this drug and still had to pay a $40/month co-pay. For 90 pills (three months worth) I pay $120, and the insurance company paid about $1000, or $9.33 per pill. In Berlin, the total cost of 98 pills (three months plus one week’s worth)—with no payment by an insurance company—was $135, or $1.38 per pill. In other words this same drug cost nearly seven times more in the US than in Germany.
The cost differential arises because the US is the only affluent country that allows drug companies to charge individual patients whatever they can get away. This functionally results in American consumers and taxpayers subsidizing drug company profits (and, to be sure, drug research) for the entire world. Recognizing the serious market failures in the pharmaceutical industry, most every country regulates drug prices. US policy is one of my pet peeves, and one of many reasons Americans pay so much more for medical care.
Most importantly, US spending doesn’t yield better medical care or—and this is the bottom line—longer life. Below are life expectancies in some of the top countries in lifespan that are most comparable to US in affluence. The US ranks about 33rd among all countries, according to the World Health Organization (2011), tied with Denmark, Chile, Bahrain and Costa Rica at 79 years and just ahead of Cuba, Czech Republic, Colombia and Barbados at 78:
World Bank, 2012
RANK
COUNTRY
(YEARS)
GDP per capita (equivalent purchasing power)*
1
Japan
83
$35,178
1
Switzerland
83
$53,367
4
Hong Kong
82
$51,946
4
Australia
82
$44,598
4
Italy
82
$33,111
4
Canada
82
$42,533
14
France
82
$36,104
15
Spain
82
$32,682
33
USA
79
$49,965
The US spends hugely more as a percentage of GDP on health care:
Beyond paying way more for prescriptions:
These aggregate data don’t deny that in certain respects Americans might be getting their money’s worth. For instance it’s often assumed that US spending enables more advanced medical treatments and higher survival rates for diseases like cancer. However, it turns out to be extremely difficult to compare survival rates while controlling for the many differences among countries’ populations, including their getting cancer in the first place (US ranks seventh in cancer incidence).
There isn’t much empirical basis for assuming that Americans benefit in any way from their higher spending. But there is quite a bit of evidence that the excess spending is the cost of having a political system so uniquely and thoroughly dominated by wealthy organized interests, such as the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, whose lobbies heavily influence public policy agendas, options and decisions. The Rube Goldberg-like Affordable Care Act, though a step in the right (European) direction, reflects above all the less democratic nature of the US political process when compared to the governments of Western Europe.
Americans pay for their inferior democracy thrice over: their health care system costs more yet delivers inferior care and shorter lifespans. The health of democracy reflects and shapes the physical and fiscal health of its citizens.
In the last few days much talk on has centered around Apple’s recent rejection of of an app called Endgame: Syria. The event has many lamenting Apple’s policies regarding violence in games, which insists that enemies in in software “cannot solely target a specific race, culture, a real government or corporation, or any other real entity.” But the game itself deserves some attention for how it uses mechanics to inform the user about a complicated issue: the real-world Syrian civil war.
Endgame: Syria rests somewhat uncomfortably in the mainstream conception of a “game”. The app places the player in the midst of the modern Syrian conflict, asking him or her make decisions for the rebels and guide them in their struggle to gain public support and inflict military damage upon the regime. Though it presents a complicated issue with a somewhat simple perspective, Endgame ia an interesting case study on how games address serious issues.
Endgame doesn’t seek to be a simulator – to comprehensively embody the complex interplay between politics, society, and war in Syria – but it does impart a basic understanding of the sort of challenges faced by the Syrian opposition. The player makes decisions during two “phases” of interaction: the Political stage, where the player strives to earn support from world leaders and enact various sanctions against the regime, and the Military stage, where rebels face off against powerful government forces.
Through gameplay, Endgame emphasizes the relationship between the military and political achievements of the Syrian rebels. Support from Qatar, or Saudi Arabia, or France in one phase directly translate into support during another, supplying the rebels with resources necessary to employ fighters. By placing the user in the position of making these important decisions, the game instructs the player on how vital these international supply lines are. Quite apart from being told that politics are important to the rebel cause, the player experiences the reality of resource scarcity firsthand.
As the game progresses, the regime steadily brings greater and more powerful forces to bear, including tanks, helicopters, and jets. The opposition must work with smaller forces, typically infantry. The player is presented with an attack from the regime and must choose which among his or her (mostly inadequate) forces will be selected to repel the opposing fighters. Using more powerful engines of destruction – captured tanks, often – results in a greater fighting chance but endangers the lives of civilians, which directly translates to a loss of foreign and domestic support. Placing the player in the shoes of an opposition leader making these decisions makes the combat realities of the Syrian rebels a little more understandable.
Endgame falls into a series of games which force the player to make difficult decisions and come to understand the perspective of real-life decision makers. Like Impact Game’s Peacemaker, which places the player in the role of either an Israeli or Palestinian leader in the peace process, Endgame revolves around making difficult choices where short-term decisions have long-term consequences regarding public approval and support. Sitting down in front of either of these games, the player can experience the challenges faced by a Syrian opposition commander, who has to balance waging a war with protecting civilians, or an Israeli politician, for whom ordering the evacuation of a settlement may amount to political suicide.
The experience is certainly an interesting way to encourage the average consumer, playing the game on an Android device or in a browser, to engage with the Syrian conflict that has claimed more than 60,000 lives to date.
Not everything about the game is perfect. Issue might be taken with Endgame: Syria’s somewhat simplified and smoothed take on a very messy war. The conflict is distilled down to monolithic representations of the regime and the rebels, leaving aside, for the most part, a wealth of sectarian and political subdivisions that exist on both sides. In having the player always responding to regime attacks, the rebels are presented as generally on the defensive, while real-life opposition forces have been on the offensive seizing land and making strategic gains across the country. Nowhere in the game is the player presented with the option of brutally executing captured regime soldiers, an act which has occurred after opposition victories and makes at least some of the rebels liable to be indicted for war crimes. For all its ambition to convey some of the challenges of a rebellion with legitimate grievances, the game runs into the classic problem of media surrounding conflict: how to tell a compelling story without wandering into the realm of propaganda?
Yet while the game may provide a simplified version of the regime and the rebels, it might be forgiven. Endgame: Syria provides a more serious take on war than most games on the market. Each of the player’s choices are connected with the inevitable death of civilians, driving home the reality that the war he or she is waging has real-world consequences for innocents. The game has multiple end states, including a peace deal that fully satisfies none of the parties, and a violent breakup of the nation into chaos. Most often, the player will simply lose, succumbing to Assad forces and leaving the dictator to rule over a broken country. Far from being a power fantasy in the vein of the world’s Call of Duty franchise, Endgame: Syria conveys an ambiguous, inglorious image of war… uncommon enough, in the games market today.
The game’s designer, Tomas Rawlings, is well aware of the challenges associated with engaging with a serious topic through a medium most often associated with frivolous entertainment. The trailer above was released alongside Endgame, as a sort of introductory primer for audiences unfamiliar with viewing games in a serious style. In the video, Rawlings pays homage to the work of Joe Sacco, whose exploration of the Palestinian conflict through a comic is an example of what Rawlings considers to be a “pioneer” of a addressing serious topics in non-traditional mediums. Sacco’s work addresses the themes of death, loss, and suffering in a medium that until recently was considered only appropriate for less serious fare. Rawlings, the creatorsa game focusing on rebellion and warfare, seeks to have Endgame exist within a similar space.
The work of comic artists Joe Sacco (left) and Art Spiegelman (right).
Today, comics appear to have made the leap into cultural acceptance in a way that games have yet to accomplish. Yet one can see that the two mediums have undergone similar journeys. One of the most famous serious comic series, Maus by Art Spiegelman, tells the story of the author’s father’s experience of the Halocaust. Although he eventually received the Pulitzer prize for his work, Spiegelman often worried that the story might be too complicated for comics to convey. Games, it seems, are beginning to experience a similar trial. “It is not the medium that is the issue,” says Rawlings, “but what you do with it.” Endgame: Syria is an honest look at a complicated issue, and is what we should hope to see in the medium of games.
As a company Google has a reputation for being clever, but their latest Android app Ingress seems like a particularly intelligent method of gathering data from their ever expanding user base.
Developed in Google’s Niantic Labs division, the game makes use of mobile phones’ geolocation abilities and augmented reality for a unique gameplay experience. Users join one of two secret factions that are battling over what to do with an energy source that is entering into our world. The creators of the game urge players to “move through the real world using your Android device… to discover and tap sources of this mysterious energy. Acquire objects to aid in your quest, deploy tech to capture territory, and ally with other players to advance the cause of the Enlightened or the Resistance.”
Why is this clever? Ingress, as does Niantic Lab’s earlier project Field Trip, encourages players to walk around outside, travel from point to point around within their city. This data is invaluable for a company seeking to find the best possible walking routes in a crowded cosmopolitan environment. In addition to its normal complex algorithms, Google is cajoling its users to provide it with real-world-data on how best to get from point A to B on foot. This can help Google to further improve the quality of its Google Maps application, both on smart phones and for its Google Glass project, whenever that arrives.
Tech Crunch’sDarrell Etherington points out that the game follows in the footsteps of start-developers like Massive Damage, whose games Please Stay Calm and Shadow Cities use location-based gameplay. But whereas those games are available to anyone with a smartphone, access to Ingress is limited to a closed-beta set of users… possibly to enhance the mystique surrounding the game.
The takeaway is that organizations like Google are using games to gather information in new and effective ways. By wrapping data collection in the trappings of an engaging interactive experience, Ingress is actually fueling a desire amongst its users to provide it with information (and giving the company positive coverage to boot.) NGOs and governments can find a lesson in this – by creating a games project that is worth engaging with, they can shape users’ behavior and thinking.
The webcomic XKCD pokes fun at the lengths some Ingress users will go to complete in-game challenges.
Last week IPDGC and the U.S. Institute of Peace co-hosted a great conference, “Groundtruth: New Media, Technology, and the Syria Crisis,” that focused on the use of online videos by activists, new and traditional media, and policymakers. The event was the latest in the “Blogs and Bullets” series of research papers and conferences that have produced two major reports, and kicked off a new research project conducted by my GW colleague Marc Lynch, American University’s Deen Freelon, and myself.
There was much to chew on in the comments and observations of the various panelists, but I want to flag a few interesting nuggets concerning the role of social media in Syria – which Marc referred to as perhaps “the most social mediated protest in history” – and the complex intersection between new and old media.
First, a recurring theme from both activists and journalists involved the evolution of both social media and the public sphere in Syria as the regime’s hegemony wanes in the face of an ongoing civil war. NPR’s Deb Amos, who has been reporting on the Middle East for decades and the current Syrian crisis since it’s beginning, talked about how she has seen social media develop rapidly over the last year from something a few activists used to meet and share information, to something that is a more sophisticated tool for organizing, waging an information war with the regime, fundraising, and engaging with regional and world media.
Sometimes the online discussions via Facebook or YouTube comment threads and the like can turn viciously sectarian. After all, the pubic sphere, especially online, is not always known for its decorum. But even this can be seen as part of the maturation process as Syria moves from dictatorship to, perhaps, a more open society. For example, Rafif Jouejati of the Free Syria Foundation, pointed out that her organization has decided against censoring sectarian comments in favor of responding to them and thus creating a dialogue “so we educate against hate speech.”
Social media may be creating or strengthening the public sphere on multiple levels: within Syria and across the region. ABC’s Lara Setrakian called the “Arab digital vanguard” the “connective tissue throughout Arab Society.”
“Pan Arabism died a long time ago,” she said, “but it’s been resurrected online.”
Activists in Syria use social media to rapidly propagate images.
There is, of course, a vast literature on the representative public sphere across several scholarly domains, highlighted by the work of Jurgen Habermas. Many have pointed out the complex role media play in fostering a functional and empowering socio-political conversation among the various layers in a society. On the one hand, media can create information baselines and be a conduit between elected officials and the public, among other functions. On the other, they can also misinform and misrepresent, be it because of their own latent biases (structural and ideological) and/or manipulation from sources, especially elites.
New media present these same challenges, as well as others. Fadl al Tarzi, from the Dubai News Group, whose organization has been monitoring social media across the Arab world, pointed out something that others have found in studying new media and politics in the U.S. and elsewhere: social media, more than traditional media, tends to include like-minded users. This is not often conducive to the (somewhat mythical) Enlightenment notion of an 18th Century Café/Salon style public sphere where ideas are contested on an equal plane with the best rising to prominence.
In Syria, one of the more interesting ways that new media are playing a role in shaping the information environment is in their use by traditional media, both within the region and across the globe. Several of the panelists, from activists to journalists, talked about how this has created an incentive for activists to create more credible media, rather than overt propaganda.
Rami Nakhla, of The Day After Project, discussed the way his organization has had to learn to adopt traditional Western news norms like balance to be taken seriously by mainstream media outlets interested in using their videos of regime violence, protests, etc.
The relationship between activists and traditional media can be a tricky one, though. The fact remains that it is still difficult to assess the credibility of many videos, many of which are of sketchy provenance and may not be depicting what they claim. Marc Lynch talked about the importance of being skeptical when a video claims thousands were at a protest, when in fact the tight focus of the camera may be obscuring that in fact only dozens were there. This is a phenomenon familiar to those who recall the exaggerated claims of thousands filling Baghdad’s Firdos Square when the Saddam statue fell on April 9, 2003, when in fact a couple of hundred were there.
Deb Amos raised another interesting challenge with traditional media coverage as the civil war continues and various rebel factions gain control of a growing segment of the country. In the early days of the conflict, outside media didn’t have much if any access to the fighting on the ground, making them more dependent on videos and other third-party sources of information. This is obviously not optimal for reporting and verification.
Without verification, social media can publish a distorted message. Only a few hundred people were present at the fall of Sadam Hussein’s statue, rather than the thousands initially believed.
Now, however, as reporters are able to access places like Aleppo, a new challenge has emerged: Journalists may be over-reporting what they can see with their own eyes at the expense of important developments in less accessible parts of the country. “We have the same level of violence in Homs, but no coverage anymore because now journalists are able to get into Aleppo for a day” before going back across the border to safety.
This is a story familiar to any media scholar. Contrary to the claims of most prominent press critics (especially in U.S. politics), most press biases are not partisan but structural, the result of the routines of reporting and patterned and often latent norms that lead to certain stories, sources, and even places being covered at the exclusion of others.
What we’re seeing in Syria, according to Amos and others, is perhaps more credible, in the sense that it’s verifiable by journalist eye-witness accounts, yet at the same time less comprehensive, because it’s increasingly governed by a myopia of access. Journalists always have to contend with these problems, and Syria is no exception. This makes it increasingly important for audiences to critically assess a variety of news and information sources.
Finally, there is another type of structural bias we might be seeing in Syria coverage due to the prevalence of online videos in the news. Many panelists echoed the observations of others over the months in pointing out that the videos we see from Syria (and, before that, from other hot spots during the Arab Spring) often substitute for other types of reporting as stories within themselves. Schadi Semnani, of the Syria Conflict Monitor, for instance, commented that “lots of mainstream media use videos as their primary source rather than interviews with people behind them.”
There are many challenges associated with this, some of which I’ve discussed already. But another is this: videos tell one type of narrative, one that is highly episodic and typically vivid, rather than thematic or complex. They aren’t necessarily less informative, but they contain a different type of information, and therefore might be expected to influence audiences differently than, say, print reporting (online or off).
[youtube=http://youtu.be/1luJ4hOyOco]
Research shows, for instance, that episodic narratives can have the effect of leading audiences to assume problems are caused by individuals rather than to look for more societal or structural causes, and, similarly, to look for solutions that are more punitive and focus on individuals. Put another way, an implication of this research is that episodic stories discourage support for diplomacy in favor of more bellicose responses.
There is also the question of what we learn from the videos and whether that helps us better understand the crisis they are depicting. Journalism’s principal job is, after all, to inform us in a way that helps us comprehend the world around us so that we can make sound judgments and assess our leaders’ policies. Videos tell us one kind of story. How journalists contextualize those videos will be a key variable in how people understand it.
If journalists rely overly on the videos to tell the story, one implication is that people might be more likely to simply understand the Syrian crisis through the prism of their own biases and predispositions. Research consistently shows that this is how most people process news they don’t know much about, and foreign affairs certainly fits that description for the vast majority of audiences around the world. But it also means that, within the region, sectarian predispositions might be a greater influence than the events and messages implicit and explicit in the videos and other social media coming out of Syria. This leads back to Fadl’s point about a collection of like-minded communities in the virtual public sphere self-selecting the media, and the messages, with which they already agree.
But it also places a greater value on traditional journalism, and the role of intrepid journalists to sift through an even greater array of information in making sense of complex crises like the one currently so tragically dividing Syria.
One of the most hotly debated topics surrounding the Arab Spring has been what role if any social media have played in the protests and, in a couple of cases, revolutions. Scholar Zaynep Tufekci (UNC) and The Engine Room’s Christopher Wilson have a new piece in Journal of Communication(gated) that looks specifically at the role of social media in Egypt’s Tarhir Square protests. The article appears in a special issue of the journal dedicated to the topic of social media and political change. They find evidence that Facebook in particular seemed to play a critical informational role, as well as mobilizing one. From the abstract:
We demonstrate that people learned about the protests primarily through interpersonal communication using Facebook, phone contact, or face-to-face conversation. Controlling for other factors, social media use greatly increased the odds that a respondent attended protests on the first day. Half of those surveyed produced and disseminated visuals from the demonstrations, mainly through Facebook.
The authors used a snowball sampling method – asking respondents to recommend others to participate in the survey – and ended up interviewing about 1,000 people who claimed to have participated in the Tahrir Square protests. The interviews were conducted about two weeks after Mubarak’s resignation. Tufekci and Wilson are upfront about the potential problems with their sample, to their credit.
There is much to chew on in the piece, but I’d like to flag a few things from the study:
Face-to-face interpersonal communication was by far the most common way people first learned about the protests: 48.4 percent cited this as opposed to 28.3 percent that said “interpersonally oriented media” such as Facebook.
That said, traditional media – in this case, satellite TV – was only cited by 4 percent of the respondents as the means by which they learned about the protests.
A major function of new technologies ranging from social media to mobile phones (and both in tandem) was documenting events and spreading them virally.
Women were heavier users of social media than men, and the differences were statistically significant.
Perhaps most interestingly, the authors make a case for thinking of a “new system of political communication” in the MENA region, one that isn’t just about “Facebook Revolutions” but instead sees a complex media ecology that has three, interrelated components:
Satellite TV/traditional media
Information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially social media platforms
Ever cheaper and widely available mobile phones
The piece is an interesting addition to the growing body of scholarly literature in this area and worth checking out in full, as is the special issue.
If you haven’t been visited Twitter or Facebook recently, you may have missed the news: The Kony 2012 campaign has set the Internet on fire. While in its early stages, it’s fascinating to see how much attention the movement has garnered and to speculate as to where its headed.
Kony 2012 has lit up Twitter and Facebook over the past few days
The movement is the latest and most public undertaking of Invisible Children, an NGO founded by Jason Russell and Laren Pool with the mission of ending the campaign of violence perpetrated by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa. Kony 2012 is a social media campaign engineered to draw attention to one man in particular: Joseph Kony, the LRA’s leader. Kony was indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2005 for war crimes, which include the brainwashing of thousands of children into child soldiers, rape, and mutilation.
This is the logic of the campaign. To bring Joseph Kony to trial at the ICC, he must first be captured by the Ugandan military. In order for them to catch a man who has been a guerrilla fighter for more than 20 years, they need military and technical support that was publically first provided by the United States in 2010. For Congress to authorize continued US involvement in Uganda during a time of economic crisis, they must be pressured by the American people… but for the people to pressure Congress they must first know who Joseph Kony is. Despite his notoriety with international justice bodies, the average American has no idea who the leader of the LRA is or what he has done over the past two decades.
Jason Russel is Co-Founder of Invisible Children and producer of the Kony 2012 Campaign Video
Kony 2012 seeks to mobilize public attention by gaining the attention of two groups: “culture makers” and “policy makers.” 20 celebrities, actors, talk-show hosts and athletes were targeted as social media amplifiers, who will theoretically campaign for public awareness of the issue. Pop star Rihanna has already mentioned the campaign on her twitter account. The second targeted group, the policy makers, are a group of 12 current and former officials ranging from Condaleezza Rice to Bill Clinton who will hopefully exercise their influence within Congress for the cause. The movement also calls for a poster/sticker/word of mouth campaign, scheduled to climax on April 20th, when involved activists are instructed to “Cover the Night” and launch a massive poster campaign designed to get the attention of everyone not already clued in by social media.
The goal of the campaign is to achieve “500,000 shares” within the span of its lifetime, and its producers are well on the way to achieving that goal. At the time of this writing, the video has already achieved more than 3 million views, with the vast majority of those occuring over the past two days. It’s an Internet firestorm, and its sudden surge of popularity has sent the Kony 2012 website reeling off and on.
While the movement is certainly gaining attention and notoriety, it also has its critics. Mark Kersten argues that the Kony 2012 campaign is awash with an “obfuscating, simplified and wildly erroneous narrative” that implicitly places legitimacy with the official Ugandan government. That sort of support is ill-placed, states Kersten, because the Ugandan government is similarly guilty of “collective torture” and “blurring of the perpetrator-victim binary”. From the the perspective of the Kony 2012 detractors, the campaign is a viral oversimplification of an extraordinarily complex conflict, and the simple idea of “making Kony known” is hardly the means to stop a war when both sides are guilty of harming civilians.
Said Laura Seay in one impatient tweet: “My basic premise is that the awareness of American college students is NOT a necessary condition for conflict resolution in Africa.”
Kersten believes the makers of Kony 2012 are biased towards the Ugandan government
Others are critical of Invisible Children’s methods – Samual Gebru, president of the Ethiopian Global Initiative, argues that it is the Ugandans on the ground who should be supported, not an NGO primarily involved with building schools and only minor direct influence on the conflict. Others challenge the idea that even killing Kony will be effective since the atrocities of the war are rooted in the structure of the conflict, rather than a single individual.
Time will tell whether this initial burst of attention – enthusiastic on one end and critical on the other – will translate into action at the congressional level. But in terms of simply focusing the world’s attention on an issue, the campaign should already be considered a success.
In his video, Invisible Children founder Jason Russell makes the argument that the way that social networks and activism have the power to change the way that national policy is created – transferring influence from a limited few with great resources to a like-minded and mobilized collective. If true, it has staggering implications for the way the world works in this new era. We’ll be watching the playing out of this viral activist campaign with great interest.
