International, Public & Corporate Communication Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News Issue # 1 - 2015 FOREWORD This newsletter is aimed at providing Public Affairs practitioners with a short selection of recently posted stories, papers, etc. which may be useful to remain abreast of new trends or to stimulate a debate. Sources are linked and any copyright remains with the authors.
Idiots on Internet The Facebook post that got wider attention this quarter was triggered by a provocative statement: Intrernet dominated by idiots. Our first story in this issue tries to assess how much ‘idiots’ influenec the Social Media world. The second post in our hit parade was a TED talk devoted to speeches or presentations on technical matters, with golden tips to make it simple and stupid enough to be attractive. The transcript of that speech is a good reference to check next time you have the same problem. Maybe together with a story we have at page 15, advocating to ban Powerpoint from presentations.
In this issue:
About idiots and modern churnalism
p. 2
Talknerdytome
p. 4
In 140 Characters (#i140c)
p. 6
Did Facebook’s Big New Study Kill My Filter Bubble Thesis? p. 7 How to manipulate photos to tell an anti-Israel story p. 9 The world looks like it’s getting worse. Here’s why it’s not p. 11 The Use of Hashtags in Your Crisis Communications
p. 14
Let’s ban PowerPoint in lectures
p. 15
Going Viral
p. 17
The remaining stories also reflect the sequence of our quarterly Facebook ‘hit parade’ and subjects vary from Social Media to Propaganda. I found it encouraging that also a story on an optimistic view of the world today was met with interest by our community. The editor
Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 1-2015
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About idiots and modern churnalism By Franco Veltri
A quote by the most known Italian contemporary writer, Umberto Eco, captured significant attention on the web:
just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types." If ordinary people populate social media, it should be no surprise if a good lot of them fell in the above categories. Still, it may be worth looking at a more scientific assessment, to validate Eco’s skepticism.
A study by Teresa Correa , Amber Willard Hinsley, and Homero Gil de Zúñiga published a few years ago tried to assess “Who interacts on the Web?: The intersection of users’ personality and social “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to media use.” speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the Here is the abstract of their paper: community. Then they were quickly silenced, In the increasingly user-generated Web, users’ but now they have the same right to speak as a personality traits may be crucial factors leading Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the them to engage in this participatory media. The idiots.” literature suggests factors such as extraversion, emotional stability and openness to experience are Among the many comments I liked more what Dr related to uses of social applications on the Jim West wrote on his blog: Internet. “... the idiots have the right to speak but they should have no expectation that anyone with sense will listen to them much less take them seriously. The idiots have as much right to be heard as CNN and the Huffington Post and Fox News and NBC and ABC and CBS and the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. But like those outlets of infotainment, they have no right to be taken seriously when they speak about matters like theology or history or exegesis or archaeology. Indeed, the truth is, only idiots heed idiots. So let them. Those who wish to know better will seek to know better and those who are satisfied with rank ignorance, stupidity, and misinformation will never care for the truth any more than a person who watches the Naked Archaeologist really cares about the facts. Their ignorance is invincible. They should be left to it. To rot in the swampy stew of their own putrid mindlessness.”
Using a national sample of US adults, this study investigated the relationship between these three dimensions of the BigFive1 model and social media use (defined as use of social networking sites and instant messages). It also examined whether gender and age played a role in that dynamic. Results revealed that while extraversion and openness to experiences were positively related to social media use, emotional stability was a negative predictor, controlling for sociodemographics and life satisfaction. These findings differed by gender and age. While extraverted men and women were both likely to be more frequent users of social media tools, only the men with greater degrees of emotional instability were more regular The relationship between extraversion and social media use was particularly important among the young adult cohort. Conversely, being open to new experiences emerged as an important personality predictor of social media use for the more mature segment of the sample.
It was not the first time Eco refers to idiots. In his Foucault's Pendulum, he identified four categories of people: “There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and 1 lunatics... If you take a good look, The BigFive framework is a model of personality that everybody fits into one of these categories. contains five factors representing personality traits at a Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a broad level: extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experiences, agreeableness, and conscientiousness moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is (Ehrenberg et al., 2008; John & Srivastava, 1999).
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Trying to translate scientific language into approximate plain language, it appears that social media frequent users are not necessarily idiots (as per Eco’s definition) but are more likely to be extraverts who are open to new experiences but also people with greater degrees of emotional instability.
As a facebook user I am afraid to position myself in the above categories...
But I feel better if I look at the statistics about Facebook demography. It appears that a large majority comprises young people who are college graduate and earn quite a lot. Difficult to reconcile this with the profile of a village idiot.
While earlier studies hypothesized that the anonymity of the Internet attracted people who were less comfortable with themselves and who otherwise had trouble making connections with others, more recent studies maintain that this negative connotation applies more to group-like conversations between individuals who are largely unknown to each other, while extroverts prevail in All of this not to enter into a sociology debate, but just to confirm that Eco is wrong in chats among people who know each other.
generalizing. Yes, there are idiots contributing to Social Media, and they may represent a Gender presented another difference among personality traits of SM users. While extraverted larger share – compared to the overall men and women were both likely to be more population – when it comes to places where frequent users of social media tools, only the men they can remain anonymous. Indeed an with greater degrees of emotional instability were ordinary village idiot has no problem in more regular users. No significant relationship showing his face. existed between women and emotional stability. This may illustrate the differences in the ways men and women communicate – women place a greater emphasis on forging connections with others and building a sense of community.
As per Facebook, another study by Tracii Ryan and Sophia Xenos revealed that users tend to be more extraverted and narcissistic, but less conscientious and socially lonely, than nonusers. Furthermore, frequency of Facebook use and preferences for specific features were also shown to vary as a result of certain characteristics, such as neuroticism, loneliness, shyness and narcissism.
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Still, Eco’s strong statement was a good reminder of the need to watch for idiots while we browse internet pages. A clear example was an experiment made by Ahmad al-Mahmoud, an Iraqi who lives in London and runs a Twitter account called @IraqSurveys. The account usually collates serious news about what's happening in the country, and has nearly 14,000 followers. As reported in a story by the BBC, one day he "got bored", and he tweeted that Islamic State had withdrawn from a non Edited by ComIPI – www.comipi.it 3
existing place called Shichwa. He even shared Photoshopped pictures of news outlets which appeared to show the battle being discussed. People started adding to it, making maps like Sim City," he told BBC Trending. Some posted fake news about the fight, and one user even made a map of the battlefield.
Talk nerdy to me TED talk by Melissa Marshall This talk brilliantly identifies the main mistakes that can be made while giving a presentation on a technical matter. (Transcript) Five years ago, I experienced a bit of what it must have been like to be Alice in Wonderland.
Penn State asked me, a communications teacher, to teach a communications class for engineering students. And I was scared. (Laughter) Really scared. Scared of these students with their big brains and their big books and their big, unfamiliar words. But as these conversations unfolded, I experienced what Alice must have when she went down that rabbit hole and saw that door to a whole new world. That's just how I felt as I had In 48 hours of running the gag, prothose conversations with the students. I was government Iraqis and militia fans started amazed at the ideas that they had, and I wanted others to experience this wonderland as well. And tweeting the news that ISIS was escaping a I believe the key to opening that door is great pitched battle and that the Hashd were victorious and on the move. Realising that the communication. joke was getting out of hand, Mahmoud called We desperately need great communication from a halt to the prank after two days. If you want our scientists and engineers in order to change the to have fun search on Twitter for the hashtag world. Our scientists and engineers are the ones that are tackling our grandest challenges, #Shichwa. from energy to environment to health care, Of note, Shichwa is a kind of leather pouch used by Iraqis to churn milk into butter. Mr Mahmoud among others, and if we don't know about it and understand it, then the work isn't done, and I said the allusion to “churnalism” – the term for believe it's our responsibility as non-scientists to recycling inadequately checked news – was a have these interactions. But these great “happy coincidence”. conversations can't occur if our scientists and engineers don't invite us in to see their I was surprised not to find any echo of this faked wonderland. So scientists and engineers, please, battle in western reporting, until the fake was talk nerdy to us. revealed. It was probably only because all the related traffic was in Arabic. But the lesson is still I want to share a few keys on how you can do clear. Trolls, idiots and disinformation that to make sure that we can see that your professionals are always at work and we all need science is sexy and that your engineering is to find ways to double check before echoing what engaging. we read. First question to answer for us: so what? Tell us why your science is relevant to us. Don't just tell me that you study trabeculae, but tell me that you study trabeculae, which is the mesh-like structure of our bones because it's important to understanding and treating osteoporosis.
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And when you're describing your science, beware of jargon. Jargon is a barrier to our understanding of your ideas. Sure, you can say "spatial and temporal," but why not just say "space and time," which is so much more accessible to us? And making your ideas accessible is not the same as dumbing it down. Instead, as Einstein said, make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Instead, this example slide by Genevieve Brown is much more effective. It's showing that the special structure of trabeculae are so strong that they actually inspired the unique design of the Eiffel Tower. And the trick here is to use a single, readable sentence that the audience can key into if they get a bit lost, and then provide visuals which appeal to our other senses and create a deeper sense of understanding of what's being described. So I think these are just a few keys that can help the rest of us to open that door and see the wonderland that is science and engineering. And because the engineers that I've worked with have taught me to become really in touch with my inner nerd, I want to summarize with an equation. (Laughter)
You can clearly communicate your science without compromising the ideas. A few things to consider are having examples, stories and analogies. Those are ways to engage and excite us about your content. And when presenting your work, drop the bullet points. Have you ever wondered why they're called bullet points? (Laughter) What do bullets do? Bullets Take your science, subtract your bullet points and kill, and they will kill your presentation. your jargon, divide by relevance, meaning share A slide like this is not only boring, but it relies too what's relevant to the audience, and multiply it by the passion that you have for this incredible work much on the language area of our brain, and that you're doing, and that is going to equal causes us to become overwhelmed. incredible interactions that are full of understanding. And so, scientists and engineers, when you've solved this equation, by all means, talk nerdy to me. (Laughter) Thank you.
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In 140 Characters (#i140c): Jens Stoltenberg
@berlinpolicy In Norway, lunch is @ 11 a.m. By the time of Belgian lunchtime, I am hungry for a good meal & discussion. I rarely eat alone.
by HENNING HOFF and JOSH RAISHER NATO Secretary General gave a short interview via Twitter. Interesting experiment: key messages condensed in 140 characters, using digital jargon.
NATO’s Secretary General on expecting the unexpected and how to relax in snow-deprived Brussels.
@jensstoltenberg How would you increase public enthusiasm for NATO? @berlinpolicy I will visit every #NATO country. Everywhere I stress that NATO will defend all allies against any threat. @jensstoltenberg What’s the most constructive thing #NATO could do about #Ukraine? @berlinpolicy Support UKR politically&practically, incl w 5 trust funds. Call on Russia: respect UKR’s sovereignty & territorial integrity. @jensstoltenberg Is the Red Phone to the #Kremlin still working? @berlinpolicy #NATO has suspended practical coop w Russia, but we keep political & mil-to-mil channels open.
@jensstoltenberg How do you relax at the end of @jensstoltenberg What’s the most important skill the day? for your job? @berlinpolicy I love to go cross country skiing, but @berlinpolicy The ability to build consensus. not really that easy in Brussels. Instead biking in the woods. @jensstoltenberg Tell us about an unknown unknown you’re thinking about. @jensstoltenberg What’s the biggest challenge to @berlinpolicy I have learned to expect the #NATO that doesn’t start with “R”? unexpected. New security threats can arise @berlinpolicy Extremism to #NATO’s south. It has quickly. Readiness is key. inspired attacks in our streets. We must fight @jensstoltenberg What was your immediate priority when you started the job? @berlinpolicy Keeping #NATO strong. Must keep bond Europe – North America rock solid & work w partners to build stability. @jensstoltenberg What’s on your desk that might surprise us? @berlinpolicy A photo of Anna Lindh. From our teenage years through her tenure as Swedish foreign minister, she was a dear friend. I honor her memory.
terrorism & stand up for our open societies. Embedded Key points: Consensus is important Security threats can arise quickly NATO will defend all allies against any threat NATO supports UK , Russia to respect UKR’s sovereignty & territorial integrity we keep political & mil-to-mil channels open. We must fight terrorism & stand up for our open societies
@jensstoltenberg What’s the biggest obstacle for you at work? @berlinpolicy As many #NATO colleagues will agree, just getting to work can sometimes be an adventure – Brussels traffic is famous. @jensstoltenberg What do you do at lunchtime? Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 2-2015
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Did Facebook’s Big New Study Kill My Filter Bubble Thesis? Not really. Let’s dive into it and see why not. By
Eli Pariser
(NoE: Good news: the Facebook algorithm does influence the political flavor of what you see but at a relatively small scale. Using Facebook you see more news that’s popular among people who share your political beliefs. On average, you’re about 6% less likely to see content that the other political side favors. However, who you’re friends with matters a good deal more than the algorithm. In addition, only 7% of the content folks click on on Facebook is “hard news.” The 6% distortion is therefore applying more to soft news. It is to be seen if the situation will change with the eventual further convergence between Facebook and news media producers.)
A few years ago, I gave a talk about how algorithms and social media shape what we know. I focused on the dangers of the “filter bubble” — the personalized universe of information that makes it into our feed — and argued that news-filtering algorithms narrow what we know, surrounding us in information that tends to support what we already believe. Here’s the main slide:
published the results in Science, a top peerreview scientific journal. Eytan Bakshy and Solomon Messing, two of the co-authors, were gracious enough to reach out and brief me at some length. So how did the “filter bubble” theory hold up? Here’s the upshot: Yes, using Facebook means you’ll tend to see significantly more news that’s popular among people who share your political beliefs. And there is a real and scientifically significant “filter bubble effect” — the Facebook news feed algorithm in particular will tend to amplify news that your political compadres favor. This effect is smaller than you might think (and smaller than I’d have guessed.) On average, you’re about 6% less likely to see content that the other political side favors. Who you’re friends with matters a good deal more than the algorithm. But it’s also not insignificant. For self-described liberals on Facebook, for example, the algorithm plays a slightly larger role in what they see than their own choices about what to click on. There’s an 8% decrease in cross-cutting content from the algorithm vs. a 6% decrease from liberals’ own choices on what to click. For conservatives, the filter bubble effect is about 5%, and the click effect is about 17% — a pretty different picture. (I’ve pulled out some other interesting findings from the study here.)
In the talk, I called on Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Larry and Sergey at Google (some of whom were reportedly in the audience) to make sure that their algorithms prioritize countervailing views and news that’s important, not just the stuff that’s most popular or most self-validating. (I also wrote a book on the topic, if you’re into that sort of thing.) Today, Facebook’s data science team has put part of the “filter bubble” theory to the test and Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 2-2015
In the study, Bakshy, Messing, and Facebook data scientist Lada Adamic focused on the 10 million Facebook users who have labeled themselves politically. They used keywords to distinguish “hard news” content — about, say, politics or the economy — from “soft news” about the Kardashians. And they assigned each article a score based on the political beliefs of the people who shared it. If only self-described liberals shared an article, it was deemed highly liberal-aligned. (There are some caveats worth paying attention to on this methodology, which I highlighted below.)
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Then they looked at how often liberals saw conservative-aligned content and vice versa. Here’s the key chart:
There’s one other key piece to pull out. The Filter Bubble was really about two concerns: that algorithms would help folks surround themselves with media that supports what they already believe, and that algorithms will tend to downrank the kind of media that’s most necessary in a democracy — news and information about the most important social topics. While this study focused on the first problem, it also offers some insight into the second, and the data there is concerning. Only 7% of the content folks click on on Facebook is “hard news.” That’s a distressingly small piece of the puzzle. And it suggests that “soft” news may be winning the war for attention on social media — at least for now.
First (“Random”), this shows the total proportion of hard news links on Facebook if everyone saw a The conversation about the effects and ethics of random sample of everything. Liberals would see algorithms is incredibly important. After all, they 45% conservative content, and conservatives mediate more and more of what we do. They would see about 40% liberal content. guide an increasing proportion of our choices — where to eat, where to sleep, who to sleep with, Second (“Potential from network”), you see the and what to read. From Google to Yelp to average percentage of cross-cutting articles Facebook, they help shape what we know. posted by a person’s friends. Third (“Exposed”) is Each algorithm contains a point of view on the the percentage that they actually saw — this is world. Arguably, that’s what an algorithm is: a where the algorithm plays in. And fourth theory of how part of the world should work, (“Selected”) is the percentage that they actually expressed in math or code. So while it’d be great clicked on. to be able to understand them better from the outside, it’s important to see Facebook stepping One important thing to note: The slope of this into that conversation. The more we’re able to line goes down. At each stage, the amount of interrogate how these algorithms work and what cross-cutting content that one sees decreases. effects they have, the more we’re able to shape The steepest reduction comes from who one’s our own information destinies. friends are, which makes sense: If you have only liberal friends, you’re going to see a dramatic Some important caveats on the study: reduction in conservative news. But the algorithm and people’s choices about what to That ideological tagging mechanism doesn’t click matter a good deal, too. mean what it looks like it means. As the study’s authors would point out — but many In its press outreach, Facebook has emphasized people will miss — this isn’t a measure of that “individual choice” matters more than how partisan-biased the news article or algorithms do — that people’s friend groups and news source is. Rather, it’s a measure of actions to shield themselves from content they which articles tend to get shared the most don’t agree with are the main culprits in any by one ideological group or the other. If bubbling that’s going on. I think that’s an conservatives like unicorns and there’s overstatement. Certainly, who your friends are content that passes the “hard news” filter matters a lot in social media. But the fact that the about unicorns, that’ll show up as algorithm’s narrowing effect is nearly as strong conservative-aligned — even though the as our own avoidance of views we disagree with state of unicorn discourse in America is not suggests that it’s actually a pretty big deal. partisan.
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It’s hard to average something that’s constantly changing and different for everyone. This result is true on average during this period of time (July 7, 2014, to Jan. 7, 2015). That’s a period when Facebook video and Trending became much more prominent — and we can’t see what effect that had. (I think the authors would say that the finding’s pretty durable, but given Facebook’s constant reinvention, I’m somewhat more skeptical.) This only measures the 9% of Facebook users who report their political affiliation. It’s reasonable to assume that they’re a bit different — perhaps more partisan or more activist-y — from the average Facebook reader. It’s really hard to separate “individual choice” and the workings of the algorithm. Arguably all of the filtering effect here is a function of an individual choice: the choice to use Facebook. On the other hand, the algorithm responds to user behavior in lots of different ways. There’s a feedback loop here that may differ dramatically for different kinds of people. In my humble opinion, this is good science, but because it’s by Facebook scientists, it’s not reproducible. The researchers on the paper are smart men and women, and with the caveats above, the methodology is pretty sound. And they’re making a lot of the data set and algorithms available for review. But at the end of the day, Facebook gets to decide what studies get released, and it’s not possible for an independent researcher to reproduce these results without Facebook’s permission.
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How to manipulate photos to tell an anti-Israel story by Elder of Ziyonmurd (NoE: This is a classic case of use of images for
propaganda. The image was not manipulated, it only showed one side of the story. In this case there was another camera documenting the entire action. It is nevertheless a must for riotcontrol forces to bring their own documentation capability, unless they can bring independent media along. This story contains video links and should be read online. ) From Ma'an: Amateur photographer Ahmad Nazzal captured Israeli forces spraying 'skunk water' at a Palestinian child during the Kafr Qaddum weekly march in the occupied West Bank on Friday.
Five-year-old Muhammad Riyad appears standing in front of Israeli forces wearing a Palestinian Keffiyeh before the forces begin chasing him with skunk water, the boy eventually falling to the ground. The foul-smelling liquid has been used by the Israeli military as a form of non-lethal crowd control since at least 2008 and can leave individuals and homes smelling like feces and garbage for weeks.
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The poor kid is just standing there, minding his own business!
Where are the parents? Obviously letting their little boys go out and throw stones at soldiers. Don't expect Ma'an to issue a correction, but it might be fun to tell them just to see them remove the comments. UPDATE: I posted a comment:
Too bad the photographer didn't show what else the little boy and his friends were doing for quite a bit of time while the soldiers did nothing. The boy in blue in this first clip looks like he isn't out of diapers yet.
The full video of the event shows not only that the child was throwing rocks from close range, but the police did nothing. The video also shows that the skunk water was shot at adult rioters on the right, unseen here. Video at Palmedia YT page. Ma'an owes its readers a correction and apology. We'll see if it gets published along with the hate.
And also that the skunk water was not aimed at the kid, but at the older stone throwers (The kid can be seen running on the left side while the water is clearly aimed at adult stone throwers on the right, Another video shows where he tripped):
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The world looks like it’s getting worse. Here’s why it’s not.
Welcome to the war of perceptions, in which an ever-improving planet seems ever more at risk largely because of the noise.
By John Stackhouse
Many more people are hearing from many more (NoE: “All things are subject to interpretation. people as they compete for the same, or fewer, Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time resources. The result: a louder world, and more anxiety about the noise, but not necessarily is a function of power and not truth.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche deeper crises underneath. It is general perception that the world is getting worse. Death ships on the Mediterranean. Cyberattacks in America. Syria in turmoil. War in Yemen and Ukraine. Islamic State, Boko Haram, al Shabaab, natural disasters... This is what we perceive reading the news. Sometimes perception is reality, but not always. To challenge our perception we need to take distance from it, and look at facts from a wider perspective. By doing this, you would see that several major challenges have been managed and the world is now a better place if compared to 25 years ago. Maybe not for you. But certainly for many. In any case, it could have been worst. This article contains video links and should be read online.)
Members of the Southern Resistance Committees man a tank during clashes with Houthi fighters in Yemen’s southern city of Aden, April 23, 2015. REUTERS/Stringer
“It’s almost the principle of network mathematics that when you build a system of globalization like the one we’re building with computers and speed, you’re going to get volatility, and we see it in the financial markets, and we see it in the rise of groups like ISIS overnight and their ability to empower themselves through their own engagement with global technologies and communications,” said Steve Coll, author of several books on terrorism and dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. “You’re looking at a world that is more subject to sudden shocks.” Coll was among five previous winners of the Lionel Gelber Prize interviewed for a video project to mark the 25th anniversary of the award, which is named for the late Canadian diplomat who helped create the state of Israel. The award — granted, through the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto to the best English-language book on international affairs – was given this week to Serhii Plokhy, author of The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union. The others interviewed were Paul Collier of Oxford University; China scholar Jonathan Spence of Yale University; the American political scientist Walter Russell Mead; and human rights expert Adam Hochschild of the University of California at Berkley.
Each author was asked about the world today, and The world may feel like it’s about to explode. whether it is in better shape than in 1990, when Death ships on the Mediterranean. Cyberattacks the award was created, communism was on its in America. Syria in turmoil. War in Yemen and deathbed and the Internet in its cradle. Ukraine. Islamic State, Boko Haram, al Shabaab — all on the move. They noted the world has seen extraordinary declines in poverty and child mortality, epic rises If the world seems more volatile, it is. If it seems in global trade and investment, and the spread, more dangerous, not so much. albeit fitfully, of democracy and human rights. The threats of loose nuclear weapons from collapsing nations, debt crises in Latin America, Southeast Asia or Russia, a war between India and Pakistan, Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 2-2015
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the collapse of Africa and a litany of global pandemics have all been avoided. The Gelber winners each said they maintained optimism about the next 25 years, for different reasons. But equally, they remain concerned about the world’s ability to cope with emerging small forces, including terrorists and cyberattackers, and the potential that their asymmetrical pressures bring to bear. Despite the noise, five of the dominant themes of the past quarter century — terror, rising China, the struggle for human rights, poverty and American hegemony — have been reasonably well managed. Even terrorism, Coll contended, could have been a lot worse, as fears of massive, random civilian attacks in the West subside. How those forces play out in the next quarter century may be more challenging: CHINA
Spence said one of the great challenges of the coming decade is the rest of the world learning how to live with an expansionist China, and China learning to adjust to global responsibilities. POVERTY
The most positive story of the past quarter century, especially in Africa, is the reduction in poverty. Now the challenge is to translate economic growth into social progress and a stronger middle class. The collapse of commodities prices has thrown some of Africa’s recent hopes into question, but for those who assume oil and mineral prices will regain some of their strength, Africa is still the new frontier — and a very young one. The continent’s urban population is projected to triple by 2050.
Spence, one of the world’s pre-eminent sinologists, who has been visiting the country for 60 years, said he is still shocked by China’s ability to manage rapid change. “I certainly didn’t expect the kind of speed with which China would be integrated in a kind of global community. That startled me, and still startles me.”
“We are at the point of a big struggle over whether natural resources will become an opportunity that is harnessed or a mistake that is repeated,” Collier said. Will Africa’s new mineral and oil wealth finance despots and their cronies, as was the case in the commodities booms of the 20th century? Or will they produce competitive private-sector players, create high-value jobs and sustain well-functioning governments and public institutions?
He said the regime — more so recently under President Xi Jinping — has been able to manage disruptive forces across the country through a DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS sophisticated system of rewards and punishments, even within the Communist Party. The collapse of communism opened the floodgates to the spread of democratic principles China will be challenged to maintain that system and human rights. Those are under assault once as it reaches into other countries, and continents, again in Ukraine, Russia, across the Middle East to protect and expand its interests — both and North Africa, as well as in China. through the hard power of its military and the soft power of its diplomatic and economic interests. Still, Hochschild, who has written extensively Mining in Africa. Oil exploration in the Arctic. The about the long march of human rights, particularly promotion of Chinese language and media. Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 2-2015
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in Africa, does not see a reversal. Peaceful, democratic transitions of government in Nigeria, Sri Lanka and Indonesia are positive examples.
new field of warfare looking out over 20 or 40 years,” Coll said. He is most concerned about China and Russia, China because of its desire to use technology to match U.S. military supremacy and Russia because of its need to offset its declining traditional power. AMERICAN HEGEMONY
Digital and satellite technologies secure an inevitable, if halting, progress by giving citizens the tools to probe, understand, criticize and even select (through mobile voting) their governments. The Internet may yet prove to be more valuable than the U.S. Bill of Rights as an envoy for democracy. TERRORISM
Militant groups don’t need to seize power anymore; they can carry out their objectives by infiltrating societies everywhere through mass technology. As Coll noted, extremists such as Islamic State “manage their own media operations, their own branding strategies and recruitment strategies without really much need for the formal mechanisms of the state because of the way technology makes it possible to self-empower.”
For those who, in 1990, had doubts about the future of the last remaining superpower, the United States is as great a force as ever — in military affairs, diplomacy, education, media, energy and, most profoundly, digital technology. Although the outcomes of the Iraq and Afghan wars remain uncertain, the United States remains the global cop. It also endures as the preferred quarterback for humanitarian operations, from Haiti to the Ebola zone. And its corporations continue to expand despite attempts by the European Union and China, among others, to curtail them. Don’t assume these forces are benign, especially to governments and economies that follow a different model. “American power is inherently not a calming force in the world,” Mead noted. But if the world feels like it’s about to explode, the perceived victims are likely to continue to turn to the United States.
A greater concern, he said, is the use of cyberwarfare by states and their proxies. A major disruption, such as a utilities network, could lead to reprisals and bring down far larger networks. “Cyber is the most important new field of defense competition and probably the most important
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The Use of Hashtags in Your Crisis Communications
By Melissa Agnes
Doesn’t know which hashtags to monitor for all updates, information and help requests Has a high-risk chance of missing important updates and information that needs to be shared and retweeted In the case of the Boston Marathon Bombings: Officials had no way of tracking and keeping up-to-speed on different departments and agencies’ progress
Having a pre-determined hashtag strategy is something that needs to be organized before a crisis – and this goes for companies, organizations and schools, just as it applies to government officials and emergency responders. What your hashtag strategy needs to include Whether your crisis hashtag strategy includes a pre-determined hashtag or not, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you do in fact develop a hashtag strategy before a crisis strikes. This crisis hashtag strategy should include:
One of my favorite crisis bloggers, Kim Stephens, recently published an interesting summary of two reports by Project Hazards Emergency Response and Online Informal Communication (HEROIC), on their research around the use of Twitter by officials in the Boston Marathon Bombings. There are many aspects of these reports that are very interesting, but the thing that struck me the most was the inconsistency of hashtag use, across the board, during the week of events that followed the Marathon Bombings. (Read Kim’s entire summary and take-aways here.) The reports state that: While there were a series of events throughout the week, including the detonation of improvised explosive devices at the beginning of the week, the killing of a police officer at MIT, and the lockdowns of Boston and Watertown, there was no indication that a consistent hashtag emerged or trended among official organizations to organize their content into a traceable stream.
Defining the role a hashtag will and must play within your crisis communications Guidelines and policies for using the hashtag within your crisis communications Where internal and external stakeholders can go to learn more about the hashtag strategy, including what the hashtag actually is during any given crisis How you would like your audience to use the hashtag in a crisis
The importance of developing your hashtag strategy pre-crisis Hashtags provide a way of grouping relevant information for ease of following, finding and sharing on social networks. The easiest way to group all of your communications in a crisis on Twitter is by using a dedicated hashtag. This dedicated hashtag: Keeps communications organized: No one following the crisis will miss a tweet or any important news. This makes it easy for your stakeholders to follow and share important information regarding the crisis.
Time efficiency: The proper use of hashtags makes your organization’s life much simpler in a crisis. This is a big deal. Without consistency, your target Once your hashtag strategy has been determined, audience: Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 2-2015
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everyone is aware and the appropriate people can begin to use these strategies as soon as possible.
Let’s ban PowerPoint in lectures – it makes students more stupid and professors more boring
Makes monitoring easier: Others know what hashtag to use to make it easier for your team to by Bent Meier Sørensen monitor information, news and inquiries about the Professor in Philosophy and Business at Copenhagen Business School crisis from your stakeholders. Great for documenting post-crisis: Documenting a crisis once it has been resolved is an important end-step within your crisis management. Having all of your organization’s, and many stakeholders’, tweets grouped together makes the task of documenting that much easier. In conclusion
Twitter plays an essential role within your crisis management, and within that essential role are different strategies for efficient and effective crisis Any university teacher who does not harbour a communications. The use of crisis hashtags are painful recollection of a failed lecture is a liar. On one of the most important of those strategies. one such occasion, I felt early on that I had lost the students entirely: those who hadn’t sunk into Is your company or organization prepared with a comatose oblivion were listless and anxious. crisis hashtag strategy? Ungracefully, I threw myself even deeper into my PowerPoint presentation to save me from total ruin. Years later, I can still hear myself reading aloud the bullet points from the overhead and see myself turning around to the students to sell these points to them. Luckily, I have no recollection of what the students thought of it, but my most painful memory is the experience of boring myself. When that happens, it is time to change one’s ways. That’s why I’ve led a move to ban PowerPoint from lectures. There are a host of possible reasons for a lecture going wrong: a badly planned course, inadequate preparation, feeling uninspired on the day, disengaged students, a crowd that’s too big, a poorly designed auditorium. To this bulleted list of catastrophes comes PowerPoint. The physical face-to-face lecture is potentially a complex and open event where the students, the readings, the lecturer and a case-based or theoretical problem interact. A PowerPoint presentation locks the lecture into a course that disregards any input other than the lecturer’s own idea of the lecture conceived the day before. It cuts off the possibility of improvisation and
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deviation, and the chance to adapt to student input without veering off course. This is usually what makes such presentations so painfully boring: while it quickly becomes evident to the audience where the presenter is going, he or she has to walk through all the points, while the audience dreams that the next slide might be more interesting. Not fit for teachers Yet, to be interesting and relevant in a lecture, teachers need to ask questions and experiment, not provide solutions and results. Unfortunately, PowerPoint is designed to provide just that. Originally for Macintosh, the company that designed it was bought by Microsoft. After its launch the software was increasingly targeted at business professionals, especially consultants and busy salespeople.
On top of this comes the ambivalence of what’s in those bullet points. In my presentations, the text on slides are really just my private and often hastily written down thoughts. Unlike my other published and peer-reviewed work, no one has seen or criticised my PowerPoints. Yet the students perceive my bullet points as authoritative, and they would often quote them in their assignments instead of going through the toll of finding the meaningful points in the real texts from the course. Free from PowerPoint
But during the 1990s it was adopted more generally by corporations as it became part of the Microsoft Office package, which explains the executive summaries, one-liners, ubiquitous “deliverables” and action plans. Its way into academia was then helped by the increased pressure on faculties to deliver more teaching and the increased demand from a more diverse student population to be more concretely guided through the jungle of knowledge. As it turns out, PowerPoint has not empowered academia. The basic problem is that a lecturer isn’t intended to be selling bullet point knowledge to students, rather they should be making the students encounter problems. Such a learning process is slow and arduous, and cannot be summed up neatly. PowerPoint produces stupidity, which is why some, such as American statistician Edward Tufte have said it is “evil”. Of course, new presentation technologies like Prezi, SlideRocket or Impress add a lot of new features and 3D animation, yet I’d argue they only make things worse. A moot point doesn’t become relevant by moving in mysterious ways. The truth is that PowerPoints actually are hard to follow and if you miss one point you are often lost.
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While successfully banning Facebook and other use of social media in our masters programme in philosophy and business at Copenhagen Business School, we have also recently banned teachers using PowerPoint. Here we are in sync with the US armed forces, where BrigadierGeneral Herbert McMaster banned it because it was regarded as a poor tool for decision-making. We couldn’t agree more, although we do allow lecturers to use it to show images and videos as well as quotes from primary authors. Apart from that, the teachers write with chalk on the blackboard (or markers on the whiteboard). Contrary to what PowerPoint allows, the chalk and blackboard enable us to note down points from the students alongside and connected to the points that we ourselves develop. Most universities are actually defending Microsoft’s monopoly by stealth, by architecturally letting the projector and PowerPoint take precedence over other technologies such as the blackboard. Of course, lifting the uneasy burden of PowerPoint off the teacher’s shoulders places higher demands on planning. Yet, while at our masters programme we as teachers have a clear plan in terms of what should happen every minute of the lecture, the exact content should remain variable and openended. In order to support interaction, the Edited by ComIPI – www.comipi.it 16
students sit with visible nameplates, also introduced in the first lecture of the course last year. This way less active students can be called upon to expand on the concepts and connections growing on the blackboard, either from their seat or by coming to write on it.
Post, CBS News and others. Dozens of media outlets around the world and millions of people on social media have been commenting and reposting it.
In all my years of using PowerPoint the traditional way, students unvaryingly complained about not getting the slides in advance of the lecture. Today, the students don’t mention the lack of PowerPoints at all – they only call for a better order on my blackboard. They are right, but contrary to the rigid order of a PowerPoint presentation, the blackboard order can actually be improved in real time. The irony of ironies is that my unintentional commentary on technology spread like wildfire Without the temptation of PowerPoint, lecturers through technology. have nothing but the students to fall back on. That seems like a much more promising turn of events. In January, I set out from Redondo Beach, California on rainy whale watch. There has been a lot of humpback activity off the coast and I had been dying to photograph them. For a full set of whale pictures, check out “Whale of a Tale”.
Going Viral Tagging a local news station on an Instagram post got my photo seen by millions of eyeballs
In my initial edit of the two hundred pictures taken that day, I ignored the shots with boats in them. Those weren’t what I was after. But, two weeks ago I took a second pass through the shots and began to examine the ones with boats, kayaks, and paddle boards.
By Eric Smith
The last weeks have been a blur. One night I had to just shut the phone off. The Today Show was calling at 4am. Interviews with the Huffington Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 2-2015
There was a small armada of craft out there, because the whale activity was extraordinary. I thought some of the boats might help give a sense of scale to the whales.
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The picture is titled A Sign of the Times.
I remembered a series where a small sailboat cruised dangerously close to the spot where a female humpback and her calf were just beneath the surface. A number of people in the flotilla around this spot were calling out to the captain of the sailboat to move back. He didn’t listen and the amazing animal surfaced so close to the boat that there was a near collision. I was shooting fast and furious to catch the the dorsal fin coming out of the water, I never even noticed the guy on the boat.
About the guy. He remains anonymous. I hope forever. The commentary is about us; about our society as a whole. He represents many of us who use smartphones. The message is simple: It is amazing to have the world at your finger tips, but lets not miss the extraordinary world right in front of us.
Cut to early February. I posted one of the photos on Storehouse and Instagram. I tagged it with our local news program in LA to see if they would air it as I had seen a couple whale pictures in the last few weeks. Sure enough, within minutes, a producer was asking permission to put it on air. An hour after that ABC News in New York was on the line asking to do a segment on Good Morning America and suddenly I was off to the races.
When I reviewed the pictures two weeks ago I was astounded by the juxtaposition of the young All photos except for TV screenshots are copyright Eric man immersed in his phone while this creature is J. Smith 2015. feet away. Over the course of six shots showing the whale emerging and vanishing, he never looked up, even while the three other people on his boat were all excitedly looking right at it. Quarterly Digest of Public Affairs News – 2-2015
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ComIPI is a no-profit study center aimed at developing and implementing advanced techniques to communicate with the public while respecting ethical principles. ComIPI uses its communications talent, skills and expertise also to help organizations to educate and to inform their target audiences; to develop communication strategies; to train their staff in communication skills; to monitor and analyze results of communication efforts; and, to assess media perceptions on matters of interest. Communications activities are also assessed taking into specific consideration inter-cultural aspects. Edited by Franco Veltri info@comipi.it www.comipi.it our Blog: http://comipi.wordpress.com/
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