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Public diplomacy and information technology: America’s semi-secret weapons - Page 2

© Alan Kotok

Also, the United States needs to take proactive measures to build long-term understanding for American society, culture, and ideas. For many years, official exchange programs that bring foreign leaders to the United States and send American opinion leaders overseas, helped build a more sophisticated knowledge base about this country and its people.

IT can provide effective tools for public diplomacy

Fortunately, in the right hands, new information technologies can provide our public affairs professionals with effective new tools to tell America's story. Our public affairs officers overseas and in the U.S. need to use these tools at least as well as our adversaries. With advanced knowledge management technologies, such as XML, our overseas embassies can find specific information needed, assemble it into messages, and provide media worldwide with these messages much faster and in more tailored form than before. As public affairs professionals can tell you, speed, accuracy, and completeness are vital in making your case.

Also, the collaborative development tools used routinely in the technology industry, such as e-mail discussion lists, message boards, and online conferencing, can support the work of traditional visitor exchanges. Teams consisting of people working remotely have developed software standards and applications, often without personally meeting each other. These collaboration tools, again in the right hands, can extend the visitor experiences and develop long-term relationships among professional colleagues.

About 20 years ago, a group of ex-USIA officers formed the USIA Alumni Association, but recently the organization took on the task of making policy makers more aware of public diplomacy's promise and to encourage more focus and better use of resources in our current efforts. Public diplomacy helped win the Cold War, and it can help overcome the philosophy of hate being spread overseas today.

Living on the Internet: How to Make Money, Live Right, and Fight For the 21st Century The Internet is a great place to make money. The Internet is changing our lives as nothing has before and Internet issues will define the political landscape for decades to come. No book before has combined these perspectives, and none has used the Internet's own hyperlink technology to help you gain your own perspective. But until now no writer like Dana Blankenhorn has tackled the subject.

Full disclosure:

The author worked for USIA from 1969 through 1984 in various assignments, both overseas and in the United States, including a tour as chief of technology planning from 1982-84, and now takes part in the USIA Alumni Association.

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