by Craig Hayden

Here’s a quick thought, inspired by my struggle to find time to blog amidst getting my classes planned and my household moved. In basic undergraduate argumentation courses, students learn some very simple criteria for analyzing arguments (in debate, in dialogue, in court cases, etc.). They include such classics as “relevance,” “sufficiency,” and, for the purpose of this post – “recency.”

When we consider the rapid diffusion of information across informal and mediated networks used by terrorists, let alone communities of opinion that nations engaging in public diplomacy might want to “reach” – it begs the question about whether the U.S. (or another large, state entity) could turn on a dime to respond both quickly and with information that passes the recency test. Recency does not imply whether information provided is truly contemporary. Some information may be “timeless” per se – but other information becomes useless in the context of rapidly changing “facts on the ground.” A classic example from arg classes: last year’s stock data may be somewhat useless for arguments made about yesterday’s stock market performance.

The U.S. State Department operates a Rapid Response center, leveraging useful open source data to provide policy-makers with relatively up-to-date distillations of arguments in foreign media. But I’m not sure the domain of the Rapid Response Force extends to the crafting of messages in public diplomacy. Information Operations outside the purview of State operate in this time-frame – but what about the above-board capacity to react not only quickly, but with evidence that meets the burdens of the recency test (let alone relevance.). The State Department operates its Regional Media Hubs, and this obviously is an important step towards a capacity to communicate in real-time, as an interlocuter within global info flows. But do the constraints of message management obviate the expected outcome of any message the remotely resembles “talking points.” I noted in the previous post the insight from the 2007 RAND study, “Enlisting Madison Avenue” about how the message needs to managed better across the strategic to tactical levels. While it doesn’t exactly address the burdens of recency, it does suggest more intelligent message coordination.

But does the cost of message coordination come at the price of being perceived as too “strategic” in strategic communication, let alone the public diplomacy of daily media management? I guess these really are two questions – but I think they start to get at the problem of a commitment to a dialogue-centric public diplomacy policy that remains structured by political imperatives. Messages issuing forth from such a system run the risk of being both “out of touch/untimely” and “obviously manipulative and calculated.” I suppose this fuels the arguments for a more distinct separation between strategic communication and public diplomacy in general.