Public diplomacy and social media listening : examining the practices of Australia and Italy

Public diplomacy is understood as the public and interactive dimension of diplomacy. Listening has long been considered a core public diplomacy activity; however, the introduction of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have challenged and altered this activity. This thesis investigates how public diplomacy actors are (re)articulating their practices with the introduction of social media. It further considers how social media can be used more effectively to advance listening and engagement (with both foreign and domestic publics) in public diplomacy. To develop the theoretical foundations for this study, I connect public diplomacy scholarship with a new wave of literature that has argued that listening is a critical and previously neglected component of dialogic engagement. In the theoretical part of the thesis I develop the idea of a ‘spectrum of listening’, conceptualising listening as a set of diverse communicative choices and practices that are available to public diplomacy actors. Using this spectrum, this thesis endorses active listening and the embedded concept of dialogic engagement as a concrete yardstick by which to assess successful public diplomacy listening on social media. To explore ways in which social media can extend and enrich listening practices in public diplomacy, I focus my empirical research on Twitter. I argue that quantitative Twitter analytics represent an opportunity to conduct large-scale listening to foreign and domestic publics. However, I argue that such analytics, while useful, do not provide comprehensive insights about the quality of listening and engagement. In order to address this, I propose an innovative mixed method approach that combines ‘thick’ (focused and contextualised) and ‘thin’ (largescale) analysis. To develop and test this methodological approach, the study investigates two international events as exploratory case studies: the 2014 G20 summit in Australia and Expo 2015 in Italy. These cases exemplify the involvement of domestic and foreign publics in discussing and debating important global issues on social media, and the ways in which public diplomacy actors do and do not listen. In summary, I consider listening to be a representational force: a public and active response to publics who are increasingly demanding not only to participate, but also to be listened to. The findings demonstrate that thick and thin listening and, in particular, being seen to listen, are the condition sine qua non for conducting successful digitally mediated public diplomacy