Chris Paul (who doesn't toss alley-oops to Blake Griffin)

Joshua Midgett

SIS 628

Applied Public Diplomacy

Professor Hayden

       2. Christoper Paul situates PD within the context of a larger notion of “Strategic Communication.” What is the purpose of strategic communication, and is this concept totally compatible with other notions of PD? 

        According to Paul and his mosaic-like definition of Strategic Communication, it's intent is "to inform, influence, or persuade selected audiences in support of national objectives." Using only these words, and not the remainder of his entry, I would think that Strategic Communication is not totally, but about 95% compatible with Public Diplomacy as I know it. 

       What's unarguably similar is the first word of the IIP adjectives. Public Diplomacy is in the business of informing one party or another in order to support the harmonies of nations and their objectives. The other two get a little sticky. One of the ideas that does come up later in that paper that I agree with and I think helps solidify the compatibility of these two terms is the concept that there is no such thing as "value-free information". Therefore, if Public Diplomacy is in the business of informing, it can't help but also influence and persuade. 

       The only 5% variance I could potentially argue would be that all of this has to happen to support national objectives, rather than help create them. Strategic Communication seems to be a way of communication to a public that we've already decided about. We know they are the enemy, or our friends, or our frenemies, and so we're going to communicate with them and their cohorts accordingly. Meanwhile, Public Diplomacy is sort of an equal opportunity communicator in many ways, or perhaps it should be able to be. It's intent is to express the core principles, which indeed might be at the heart of our objectives, but is also meant to glisten as much information as it can. Strategic Communication feels like a monologue, PD a dialogue. Or another analogy: Were they games, StratCom would be RISK, and PD Pictionary. One is about winning something, and the other, though having similar constructs, is more about the exchanges happening.

         Yet, even with that argument, the venn diagram of Paul's seems fairly accurate. Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy share a lot, and therefore their definitions share many of the same words or themes. Both are correspondence methods with foreign publics with specific intent, and both operate primarily with the currency of information. While, were I pressed to speak in a public forum, I would delineate between the two, I would also not hold it against someone not to do so.