I am ahead of my time…by exactly one week. Last week I posted a comment on Public Diplomacy before reading any of the articles for this week ahead of time and this is what I said [cut down a little bit]:
I have done some traveling and you know what’s the best way to change someone’s image of the U.S.? For them to actually meet someone from the U.S., someone who isn’t in a television screen drinking coffee at their local cafe on a couch with five of their closest friends or a man behind a podium with a big white house on it making a public speech. 9 times out of 10 these are the images people had in their heads of Americans being just like stock sitcom people or completely agreeing with a man at a press conference espousing views of his America that don’t necessarily convey the views of the nation as a whole. …Once people got to know us as individual people, as sisters, nieces, cousins etc they knew that we were absolutely no different from them in the fundamentally human ways that matter…
This was the gist of what I said as well as the U.S. should have more individual level interaction with foreign publics and I personally volunteered to go around the world on the U.S.’s dime to do them this favor- you’re welcome. Then lo and behold this week the readings were about Public Diplomacy and the different ways most countries these days are performing Public Diplomacy especially using the internet and Web 2.0 diplomacy and interaction from the actual public in Public Diplomacy and not just top down diplomacy. I do believe that the Internet is the way that Public Diplomacy is headed: its widely accessible and its cheap, however, I don’t think we should ever forget the value of the micro level interactions in Public Diplomacy. In the article by Joseph Nye “Public Diplomacy and Soft Power,” Nye talks about the power in individual interaction through exchange programs, scholarships and conferences. While this takes more time, and is more expensive and may have what seems like a limited effect because of the seemingly minimal impact it has- I believe it has the most lasting and powerful impact. I will use my own life as an example. Before I lived in Switzerland I had a lot of presuppositions about certain European people- all from movies and television so completely wrong. For one thing I thought that all German people were scary evil people (thanks Schindler’s List), but now one of my best friends is a girl I met in Switzerland from Munich. I even came back to the states and studied German for a little while. From her perspective she had never had a black friend from any country. It was a new experience and an eye opener for both of us.
In class we also talked about Tony Blair’s support for the Bush administration and how people attributed this to his time spent abroad, I think this is an excellent example of how individual experiences last a lifetime and may even have a broader impact on the world someday. This is why I think an emphasis on human connections in Public Diplomacy cannot be swept aside even as we implement new web based programs and should always be a major part of the United States or any other country’s PD effort.
Kristin R
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tallk
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Tallk's Blog: A discussion of IC 
I agree with you a hundred percent! When I lived in Korea all the foreign students at my university lived in the same dorm so we were constantly all together. All the Americans came in with their perceptions of the Europeans, and vice versa. One of the Dutch boys was very opinionated towards the Americans, to the point that most of us didn’t like him, (apparently we were all “dumb George Bush loving rednecks”) and of course I had 3 of my 4 classes with him! As the semester progressed, he and I became really close, and he would say things about how I had completely challenged his perceptions of Americans. After he started realizing that we all weren’t what he thought, he became much friendlier and all the Americans began to rethink their newly developed opinion on the Dutch (that was all based on him!) He’s a great guy and I’m glad we had this experience to open each other’s perceptions.
I think one of the larger concerns of Nye and Glassman is not just transforming invidual impressions of people, but government to government impressions as well. It is easy for people once they meet an American abroad to separate their notions of what an ‘American’ is versus what the ‘American’ government does. It’s hard to go to another country and even in the most friendly of circumstances defend your country’s very unpopular foreign policy. Sharing each other’s cultures is one thing, but from my own personal experiences abroad, many of the people I met were judging the government, not the people. They were not as narrow-minded to lump all Americans together and had some very positive things to say about the country, in general. But, at a time when the US govt. was perpetuating some very divisive foreign policies, and acting unilaterally in doing so, it became harder to reconcile a common agreement on a well-intended American government. This is where I am a little confused about how Nye combines those 3 dimensions of foreign policy, maybe they are intended to be sequential-first by informing about our FP, then by shaping it, and last by reinforcing it through exchange and building interpersonal relationships. But, I think it’s hard to fully do the latter if the first two points are as unagreeable as they have been.
I absolutely agree that the sequential element of Nye’s concept of diplomacy is a central point in the discussion about cross-cultural and interpersonal relationships. Without positive messaging about US foreign policy and creating soft power internationally and between governments,
facilitating positive impressions at an individual level becomes more of a challenge. While most people can separate people from their government, Americans still do feel the need to defend themselves as individuals against the backdrop of negative foreign policy impressions.