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| Edited By: Shaili Chopra |Source: DNA webdesk |Updated: May 16, 2015, 06:56 PM IST
Narendra Modi’s selfie with the Chinese premier has been retweeted more than five thousand times, shared over 9,300 times on Facebook with over 600,000 likes, putting China’s social quotient (and protection) to test. On Weibo, Modi’s follower count has jumped to 1,30,000 from about 80,000 and he has got over 50,000 reposts. The Great Firewall of China, which has banned popular social media and search engines from the West probably experienced tremors thanks to Modi’s passionate posts, engaging not just Indians but even the youth in China. Premier Li Keqiang, otherwise conservative and shy of the selfie syndrome may count his picture with Modi as the first selfie of his life, after Chinese president Xi Jinping's first selfie a month ago had created a lot of buzz as well.
Narendra Modi’s arrival on Weibo is a significant move in digital diplomacy, helping him reach out to China’s billions. His social media reach, thanks to the selfie alone one would guess, runs over 10 million people. Modi beat Tim Cook to Weibo and Obama appears to have no plan of being so social. But what Modi is doing effectively, is putting out his China trip on Twitter for the rest of the world to follow. The India-China relationship is closely watched for geo-political reasons. But just observing the social trends around this diplomatic visit tells us a few things. One, social media diplomacy is useful and impactful. Two, people are being forced to log on to China's social spaces because they have no choice and that’s the only way to engage with the world’s largest population. Three, the final chapter on how to use digital for diplomacy is far from written. It remains a big grey patch open to interpretation.
And therefore a whole piece around twiplomacy or weibomacy raises some interesting questions. It’s clearly an important tool to connect with the millennials who want to see political leaders in the space where they spend most of their time – that’s online. But given how swiftly social media is influencing opinions, campaigns, causes just how is the world dealing with a vertical split in apps for being social? It’s China and the non-China world.
1. At some point, the world was divided as the Allies and the Axis powers, First World versus Third World etc. Today, the world seems to be divided as China-apps and the non-China apps. The Chinese people are not able to engage the non-China world en masse, which restricts ideas, ideologies, knowledge and thought-exchange. Randy Kluver of Texas A&M University, who also spends time in China, shares how the country’s development of alternative social media apps embodies a different set of values. “For example, Chinese social media lacks the ability to organise events or groups, one of the things that makes Facebook popular. By developing a “platform substitution policy,” China strips the ability to organise political or even social movements out of the use of social media, he says.
2. What can this App-Gap mean for digital democracy? Are we creating a bipolar world? By undermining the ability of its citizens to interact with the rest of the world, China is controlling what’s inherently meant to be a free virtual world. “By creating a set of platforms that are not compatible with the apps that the rest of the world is using, it limits the ability of anybody, politician or otherwise, to reach across national and cultural boundaries, thus leading to the bipolar world. The promise of digital diplomacy is the ability to “democratise diplomacy,” but by minimising the contact between nations, that is undermined.
3. Is this essentially a digital cold war where China believes in building, preserving and cocooning its users and perhaps information? After all ‘control economy’ is its inherent style of functioning whether it is their currency or communication. Now that wall, has simply transformed into a firewall.
4. Could China’s communication-control eventually pay off given how hard other governments are fighting to rheostat the conversations and criticism against the state? “Of course, the other side of this is that most of the other popular social media apps are developed in, or owned by, companies in the US. Thus, the Chinese perspective is that by developing alternative apps, you minimise your exposure to US hegemony, expressed through technical, and cultural values.” Some in China believe, that their nation is trying to set norms for its population that minimise conflict before it opens up to the rest of the world. Would that notion question the intelligence of China’s own citizens?
Modi’s swag in the People’s Republic has only multiplied his popularity - from logging on to Weibo, connecting with a selfie and addressing the youth who are mostly socially-savvy. His internet quotient now is second only to Obama’s. But this visit of the Indian prime minister has open up a dormant discussion on what such parallel universes in social media can mean for the world at large and digital diplomacy in particular.
