Duncan MacInnes from the State Department spoke about some of the challenges at the department and the way that they are incorporating new media to augment their programs.  

“Why is iDiplomacy so important? iDiplomacy is actually … more than public diplomacy. We have to look at the new media communications technologies as important for public diplomacy but also important for AID, programs in Africa – so you’re doing AIDS and other kinds of health programs via cell phone – you have marshalling communities such as the ‘No Mas Farc’ movement, and others where whole communities have come together against terrorism, against women; we see possibilities to use it in microfinancing, using cell phones to give loans to Africans and others. Those are not public diplomacy but ways that iDiplomacy can actually use new media to make a difference in the world today.”

The State Department’s challenge is immense; no private firm has to deal with selling its product or conveying its message to every country in the world, in multiple languages, and without much money.

New media presents a number of challenges, “not the least of which it goes against our bureaucratic upbringing. . . . Bureaucrats tend to follow rules and regulations you don’t make great iDiplomacy following sets of rules.”

MacInnes also warned against failing to consider the appropriate content when using a particular new media medium: 

“What we don’t want to do is the worst form of new media where you take a blog and put a press release on it, and you think you’ve blogged, which I’ve seen done. Where you do, ‘Oh, I want to do a viral video,’ and you do … five minutes with the secretary of State.’ It’s not going to go viral.”

One of the challenges includes knowing who their audience is. It’s useful to know the internet penetration in certain regions but they need more specificity than that. “I need to know what a college student in Cairo does when he goes on the internet. What sites does he visit? Who does he talk to? Does he IM? Because I want to get into those conversations. If I know the top five places that young people in Cairo go when they’re on the internet then I can be there, I can pre-position myself. If I don’t know that I just put stuff up on the internet and hope people come.”

The State Department is also working to repurpose material. For example, the agency has a worldwide speaker program where they send Americans abroad to speak to foreign languages. They took a pre-existing software package, Adobe Connect, which was intended to facilitate web conferencing, and developed an electronic version of the speaker program that can reach audiences with a variety of bandwidths. Viewers with high bandwidth can watch a video of the person, with an accompanying web chat. As the bandwidth decreases, it can move from a full-fledged video interactive to an audio interactive to a web chat, for different dialup speeds. 

The State Department also developed a cell phone game, X-Life, targeted at Middle Eastern youth and replete with avatars that lets them learn about the United States. MacInnes said that the game has been “fairly successful” but that they “bit off more than we can chew” and it is now available online because it is too big for a small phone. They will be producing a second version that will be quicker and more like a quiz show game.

MacInnes was asked about the mission objectives of using new media tools to communicate. His reply demonstrated that the primary objective was more nuanced than just getting other countries to “love us”:

“For the same reasons we support freedom of speech and democracy around the world. It does not always rebound to our benefit. As we saw from the Gallup polling, those who have the most access to media dislike us the most. Those who practice democracy, or at least practiced it once as in Gaza – it doesn’t rebound to [us] positively. But nevertheless those are principles that we believe in and support and in the overarching scheme believe that people that have free and open access to information, that are democratic, will be in our interest.”