Greg Boone

Category: Blog

  • The Soft Power of Online Diplomacy

    Abstract

    The age of the state is not over. Though some have written about the power of web 2.0 to topple regimes and destroy state sovereignty, the picture is a little more complicated. The Republic of Korea in the last two decades has taken on a major cultural export campaign. Led by television dramas and pop music, the “Korean Wave,” as it’s called, has strengthened the ROK’s position as a regional power. More recently, the Republic of Korea started a comprehensive online public diplomacy campaign targeted specifically outside Korea’s ordinary sphere of influence with the goal of developing soft power abroad. Through an examination of tourism statistics, public opinion polls, and Google search trends, this paper ask the question: what if any soft power was generated by these online efforts? The results, though not immediately obvious, provide an early model for a state successfully taking on the new challenges posed by information and communication technologies to generate soft power online.

    Download this article as a PDF. This paper was prepared as part of a course taught by Shanthi Kalathil at Georgetown University.
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  • Hacking as Protest?

    I posted this question to my Google+ contacts earlier this morning, but decided it was worth blogging about too.

    The recent protests against San Francisco’s BART system is raising all kinds of eyebrows over a government authority’s silencing of mobile networks in the interest of public safety. The bushiest of those eyebrows: didn’t Mubarak do exactly the same thing when he was trying to silence pro-democratic riots in Egypt, and isn’t that guy in a cage on trial right now, and doesn’t this remind anyone of a certain book titled with the year Reagan was reelected? While comparing BART’s suppression of cell networks underground to Mubarak’s silencing of all Internet and telephonic communication in the entire country of Egypt is a stretch, it does follow that if citizens are content to allow a small government agency to shut off our communication systems in the name of possible threats to public safety, it would be hard for those citizens to complain about a bigger agency doing the same thing. It sets a dangerous precedent.

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  • Why I’m (still) Excited about Google+

    It wasn’t until the Facebook/Skype marriage that I remembered Google were tackling a new social service. Eventually I got into the system to give it a spin and I have to say I’m impressed. I’m not quite ready to ditch Facebook, or say that anybody should or will ditch Zuck & Co.’s popular if addled monster, but I am impressed. Apparently the fifth try is the charm.

    To be sure, Google+ is still lacking one major feature: people. The trial period means that not every Snodgrass@gmail.com can sign up for an account. But bear in mind that when Facebook launched it also lacked people, almost pretentiously so, and people still used it. In Facebook’s early days anybody without an email address ending .edu and any school where Facebook “wasn’t yet available,” were sure out of luck until Zuckerberg opened things up. What Google lacks in population (though if it keeps up these growth rates, it could well have solved that problem soon) it more than makes up for in user experience by providing G+ users with a natural, easy, and safe way to connect with each other.

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  • Wherein a Northfield Game Inspired A Lesson Plan

    People who came of age in the State of Minnesota sometime in the last decade likely have heard of Tricadecathlonomania, particularly those of us who know someone Northfield. For anyone who hasn’t heard of it,  Trica, as it’s commonly known, is a scavenger hunt of epic proportion. It is not the scavenger hunt where you find a big list of things and bring them back to whomever gave you the list, nay it is far greater than that. With a whopping 288 items on the 2010 list, Trica is perhaps the most ambitious type of scavenger hunt there is; and here’s the catch: the list, whatever of it you can manage, must be completed in 24 hours. Thus was born “Tricadecathlonomania: The Lesson Plan.”

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