Sheikh Hasina, Prime Minister of the Peoples Republic of Bangladesh, is interested to create science and technology based Digital Bangladesh that depends on different factors. Diplomatic relation with foreign countries is another important issue which is normally possible to create through the diplomats in foreign ministries. Diplomats are the great generators of information, knowledge, and intelligence about the world and its workings, and foreign ministries represent the institutional repositories for that kind of material. Diplomacy is now adopting the new media and migrating toward the web. Diplomats are empowering themselves with new technology, mainly information and communication technology (ICT) and become digital diplomats.
We are now in the early stages of Web 3.0, which features a spectrum of new possibilities related to emotion, sensation, the simulation of real life experience, and the construction of parallel, virtual worlds. Research and development activity in these areas is ongoing and the application of virtuality will undoubtedly evolve further in the coming years. This is the time that diplomats and foreign ministries get fully with the program of web 3.0.
An increasingly large proportion of the world’s population looks to the web as its primary source of information and communication, including e-mail, video conferencing, social networking and telephony. As higher transmission speeds and greater bandwidth expand audio and visual streaming choices, communications media are converging on internet.
An increasingly large proportion of the world’s population looks to the web as its primary source of information and communication, including e-mail, video conferencing, social networking and telephony. As higher transmission speeds and greater bandwidth expand audio and visual streaming choices, communications media are converging on internet.
In the late nineties, Singapore and Hong Kong were way out in front in establishing web-based identities for their city-states. Since then many countries have joined the party. The Swedish and British Foreign Ministers blog, some US and UK diplomats are encouraged to do so as well. The Republic of the Maldives, Sweden, the Philippines, Estonia, Serbia, Colombia, Macedonia, and Albania has established virtual embassies in the web-based, 3D virtual universe. The US State Department has established an Office of eDiplomacy. Secretary Rice has her own Web page and the former Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes was the first official at that level to do the same. The UK is also now actively recruiting “digital diplomats”.
The benefits may be gained through digital diplomacies:
• Effectiveness: Foreign ministries must find ways to better connect and communicate with international society – NGOs, business, think tanks, universities and the media
• Efficiency: to pool e-diplomatic resources, foreign ministries can capture scale economies and benefit from the move from bricks to clicks
Public diplomats can use the new media to connect directly with populations; finding better, more creative ways to do this will be one of diplomacy’s new frontiers, in part for the reasons set out above, and in part because the internet can play a crucial role in helping diplomats overcome the increasingly severe constraints on personal contact.
• Efficiency: to pool e-diplomatic resources, foreign ministries can capture scale economies and benefit from the move from bricks to clicks
Public diplomats can use the new media to connect directly with populations; finding better, more creative ways to do this will be one of diplomacy’s new frontiers, in part for the reasons set out above, and in part because the internet can play a crucial role in helping diplomats overcome the increasingly severe constraints on personal contact.
Not all e-diplomats need to be young, but many will be born of a generation that has grown up with the new media. Just as the military needs rules of engagement, e-diplomats need tools of engagement. These e-diplomats with their new tools could become active in virtual worlds. It is time to ventilate fully the structure and content of diplomacy, to democratize the inputs into decision-making and to push accountability upward while devolving responsibility for decision-making downward.
We believe, considering all the factors and realizing the present digital structures of the universe, Sheiklh Hasina’s government will design the foreign ministry and the embassies abroad with proper tools and technologies that can be handed to the trained Digital Diplomats of Bangladesh who will connect us with the rest of the world digitally.
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