IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sek/iacpro/4607337.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century: Just Infotainment or a New Public Sphere?

Author

Listed:
  • Takeshi Suzuki

    (School of Information and Communication, Meiji University)

Abstract

We live in a world of the post-truth politics filled with alternative facts. To cope with the situation, public sectors need stronger ties and cooperation with private sectors. It is thus pressing that government agencies need to tackle how they can use both Soft Power, such as culture, political values, and foreign policies, and Hard Power, such as military power and economic power.After the U.S. Embassy Tokyo put the video of Ambassador Caroline Kennedy dancing from the TV program ?We Married as a Job? [a translation of the original title: Those who fight and run away, live to fight another day] on YouTube in December 2016, it went viral and has since been viewed more than 6.5 million times. Major media, including the New York Times and the Tokyo Broadcasting System, considered it as one of the most successful examples of public diplomacy. Public diplomacy is ?the process by which an international actor conducts foreign policy by engaging a foreign public? (USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism).It is the purpose of this essay to explore why public diplomacy is increasingly important in the 21st Century, compared with the 20th Century. Specifically, how did the relationship between legacy media and new media change? What kinds of news possess greater news value? What are directions for public diplomacy if we hope to use social media, such as YouTube or Facebook, for sending messages? This essay argues that the turning point was the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009. It will analyze so called the ?Obama boom? among the Japanese in 2009. For example, his CD speech book has sold more than half a million copies over the years. In conclusion, it is argued that public diplomacy should play a greater role since technology has rendered distance practically irrelevant, business is increasingly challenged to develop global strategies, and that a greater focus on transnational and intercultural communication is needed.

Suggested Citation

  • Takeshi Suzuki, 2017. "Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century: Just Infotainment or a New Public Sphere?," Proceedings of International Academic Conferences 4607337, International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences.
    • Handle: RePEc:sek:iacpro:4607337
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://iises.net/proceedings/31st-international-academic-conference-london/table-of-content/detail?cid=46&iid=053&rid=7337
    File Function: First version, 2017
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    public diplomacy; new media; transnational and intercultural communication;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A00 - General Economics and Teaching - - General - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sek:iacpro:4607337. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klara Cermakova (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://iises.net/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.