Framing Draper/McBride

The Draper/McBride affair is a mess of contradictory frames.

We have a right wing blogger, Paul Staines, whose entire site is predicated on innuendo, gossip and rumour, claiming to be a beacon of truth, and being framed as such by Conservative bloggers such as Tim Mongomerie.

We have Draper and McBride’s misguided and desperate attempt to emulate the Staines approach, framing new media through the lens of 1990s style sleaze-spin, and entirely missing the point about the internet, political parties, and citizen engagement.

Then there is the Brown and Blair “war years” frame-that-will-not-die.

And we have the mainstream media frame: “I told you so - this is what happens when you descend into the blogosphere.”

The Foreign Office’s Digital Diplomacy Initiative

Last week, the UK Foreign Office held a Digital Diplomacy event. Chaired by the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones and promoted by Weber Shandwick, the event was designed as a showcase for the recent intensification of social media initiatives at the FCO. These come under the heading of “Bringing Foreign Policy Home.”

Cellan-Jones has a typically funny post about the event.

While it’s easy to be sceptical, it’s interesting to note that the FCO has not dumped its earlier internet enthusiasm overboard, as many predicted would happen when David Miliband and members of his team started blogging a couple of years ago.

The FCO bloggers are one of the several examples I discuss in my latest paper: Chadwick, A. (2009) “Web 2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy in an Era of Informational Exuberance”I/S: Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 5 (1), pp. 9-41. Download pdf.