Diplomacy in the Digital Age
- By Brian Hocking and Jan Melissen
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E-mail China.org.cn, October 26, 2015
Government and the 'wired society'
There is a range of profound changes at work in the 'wired' society and it is important to note that underpinning developments predate the digital age. Amongst these is the decline in deference and trust in social and political institutions that have weakened the hierarchical linkages between people and institutions. The empowerment of people through access to information and the ability to express views through new channels has reinforced the trend whereby government mimics business in viewing citizens as consumers. Conversely, commercial enterprises have had to come to terms with an environment in which older assumptions on which public relations and marketing strategies were based no longer accord with demands from society. The development of the Internet through Web 2.0 has both accelerated and is a reflection of these developments. The opening up of the Internet with the ability of individuals to add content represents a shift in power from the few to the many over the key modality of 21st century communication.
These social mutations are 'rewiring us', they are producing a world in which role definitions are more fluid. But if digital technology offers the prospect of empowerment, it also poses risks in the form of challenges to privacy. The 'Internet of things', that is the transfer of data and the execution of operations not requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction, and the ability of smartphones to track individual movements and preferences, open up the prospect of an Orwellian world. Reconciling the growing addiction to connectivity and concerns with its consequent erosion of the sphere of the private is one of the major dilemmas of the 'networked society'.
Despite these concerns, the digital age impacts on government in terms of more effective top-down delivery of services. This was the key objective of the early phase of 'e-government', taken to a higher level by Estonia in offering the opportunity to anyone in the world to become an Estonian electronic citizen. National governments and international organisations seek to incorporate digital tools into the toolkit of policy making. In the words of a statement following a meeting of the OECD Network on E-Government in 2014 which adopted a 'policy toolkit' to assist governments develop digital strategies, “the goal is to strengthen public sector strategic agility and improve public policy performance, leveraging the power of innovation to build and maintain trust in government services”. However, an OECD policy paper makes the critical observation that few governments are trying to leverage social media to involve people in public policy processes or in improving public service delivery. Government institutions, as opposed to the spin doctors of political campaigns, seem somewhat uncertain about the objectives and gains to be made by utilising social media.
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