Group Three.

Soft power, public diplomacy, memes- these were all terms I had heard before I began my first semester here (OK I'm lying, I had never ever heard of a meme before this class) but that I wasn't quite sure what they meant. The funny thing is, I was engaging in a form of soft power for years and although I was aware of what I was doing, nobody, even my boss had ever bothered to talk to me about what the implications of facilitating study abroad programs might be on a wider scale.

I guess I should go back a little bit. I was the Special Programs Coordinator at OU for about 2.5  years, and the assistant to the director before that. My job was pretty much to plan the study abroad programs of the students who came with various groups. Some students stayed for as little as 3 weeks, some stayed for 4 months. It was my job to figure out where they would live, what they would do in their free time, and coordinated their schedules. My main job, however, was the be the point person for these students while they were in Ohio. They couldn't find friends? I was expected to have dinner with them in the dining halls. Roommates who have sex while you're still in the room? No problem, I'll change that dorm for you! Needless to say, it was an exhausting, 7 day a week kind of job. The perk? Meeting all kinds of interesting people. The downside? Always having to be a polite, idealized version of an "American." My boss was always directing the trips to "typical American experiences" so that the students could go home and tell their friends, classmates, and paysanos how much fun AMERICA was. So, to Amish country we went. And to Cedar Point. Shopping malls. New York City. Niagara Falls. Washington DC (Japanese kids DO NOT like museums, btw). I took a group of Koreans camping in DC during the worst snow storm DC has ever seen. Why? They wanted to.

What does all of this have to do with soft power? Those students had the times of their lives. For the first time, someone was always there to help them with their problems- to find amusing things for them to do, to take them fun places and let them have adventure after adventure- and it wasn't their mother. They also liked that they could call me by my first name, and would usually scream "HI EMIRY" in unison every time they saw me. Those students went home and told their friends how awesome roller coasters are and how beautiful the statue of liberty is (even though few of them actually went out there- the lines were horrendous so they just zoomed in really close in the pics). We were discussing in class about how the results of soft power can be measured? For me, the test of my success was in the numbers. They kept coming, in greater and greater numbers. The universities arranged (at our request) to advertise for information sessions, and then let the students who had already come explain what it was like to perspective students. Although the attractions of cities and Amish people were tantalizing, when the new students came and I asked what brought them, they all emphasized that they too wanted to make American friends- they had heard how kind and fun the OU students were and wanted to meet some for themselves.

So, while I may not have had the terminology down, I feel confident that I've got the basics of the concept down. Here's a tip for those of you aspiring coordinators: De-bunk the beds. Save yourself some trips to the ER.

On November 18th, police on the UC Davis campus pepper sprayed students staging a peaceful Occupy Wall Street protest. Images of one police officer walking casually, pepper spray in hand, down a line of students writhing on the ground spread like wildfire, and it wasn't long before a meme appeared—"Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop." Shown, as might be expected, casually pepper spraying famous scenes such as Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and John Trumbull's 1819 painting Declaration of Independence (pictured above), the "cop" meme became an instant sensation on social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit and Twitter.

While it's natural to make light of such a terrible situation—and the meme undoubtedly helped spread knowledge of the event itself—it's unfortunately difficult to see much positive impact in its diffusion. It isn't much of a stretch to draw parallels between the brutality of police efforts to break up Occupy protests and the Kent State massacre in 1970, when four unarmed students protesting the invasion of Cambodia were shot by National Guardsmen. (One Occupy Seattle protester, for instance, was beaten and pepper sprayed by police and subsequently suffered a miscarriage.) Of course, UC Davis students and faculty immediately called for the resignation of the university chancellor who ordered breakup of the protest. However, the chancellor has yet to resign, the officers involved have only been suspended, and no discernible national movement has arisen in protest. It seems that the events at UC Davis are doomed to be forgotten in the rush of our 24/7 news cycle. After the Kent State massacre, in contrast, a nationwide strike of four million students closed hundreds of universities and strengthened public opposition to the war.

So, why no university closures? Why no public movement in solidarity with UC Davis and other Occupy protesters brutalized by police? Putting political divisions aside, I believe the spread of the "Pepper Spray Cop" meme is a symptom of the perverse desensitization that a sensationalized media system has cultivated in our society. To see such shocking events on television was a relatively new phenomenon in 1970, and it mobilized massive national protest after Kent State. To modern eyes, it's just another sensational headline, just another viral video, just another drop in the 24/7 media flood. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the spread of the "Pepper Spray Cop" meme even discouraged protest—not only does it make a mockery of the situation; it also grants a sort of catharsis through humor that might have been sought via protest in another era.

Source: Know Your Meme

In Nye’s article on soft power, he mentions how the U.S. was once infamous for their credible and long lasting relationships, but overtime these relationships have gradually declined. The media has paid a lot of attention to the shift within the world’s relationships and the rise of new global powers. In particular, their depiction of the “rebirth of the sleeping tigers” or the emergence of China and Asia as newly integrated powerful international players. A lot of this has been the result of China’s soft power being used to persuade and attract the world to see the new economic powerhouse in a positive light and garner credibility. One example of China’s use of soft power was illustrated in Obama’s recent visit to the Pacific to discuss the U.S.’s new influx of troops with Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard. It sent an unsettling message to the Chinese. So in turn, they fought against the newly established relationship using soft power to try and reestablish their Pacific partner. Chinese Innovation Minister Kim Carr pushed soft power by establishing $9 million of funding for Australia-China research collaborations. The fund, announced in August, is a joint venture between Senator Carr's Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, to support joint virtual research centers. This is where Nye states that good public diplomacy goes beyond propaganda initiatives, and creating exchange and collaborative programs over a particular field such as science, can help to establish long term relationships, in this case China with Australia. I think that it will be interesting to see how the world will view China in the next decade. They have made huge attempts to regain a credible reputation in the world by creating these new types of relationships and making a new “harmonious society”. Whether these efforts will outweigh what the world previously knew of the human rights abuses and harsh history within the country, will be interesting to see unfold.

Meng writes in his article "From Steamed Bun to Grass Mud Horse, that, "Not unlike Marx and his contemporaries, who used the 'underground languages' of parody and irony to evade censorship in the 19th-century Germany, e gao is a stylistic means of 'smuggling ideas past a censor' for Chinese internet users."  Meng discusses how social commentary in the form of irony, sarcasm for entertainment is absolutely nothing new in the literary or media scene.  He sees them has powerful tools to be able to get at the heart of what is happening in China with regard to the censorship of media and the internet. Pieces such as e gao and other social commentaries in our past (A Modest Proposal by Johnathan Swift as stuck strongly in my mind since high school) are effective because these works take dense, tightly packed information with complicated, sensitive contexts and make them refreshingly easy to understand and digest.  It allows people to lightly pull all the pieces together in a fun and entertaining way.  It also has the added benefit of allowing the author to conceal what they may really mean to authorities who do not 'understand the code'.  

As Meng discusses, trying to fight e gao only feeds the flames.  The moment the Chinese government clamps down on one, many more pop up to take its place.  The moment one word or phrase is banned others come into its place. Does this widely available technology and media mean a change is in the future for China?  Perhaps not, as Meng also discusses the elaborat 'dispersed responsibility' to be sure that content on the web fosters society and community, as the government puts it.  This responsibility to counter questionable content is laid on the sholderes of web companies and domain name holders who then basically do the work of the government to control and censor information.  Fear and uncertainty also lays the responsibility on individuals themselves who may censor themselves more than necessary because the government is intentionally vague on what is objectionable material.

However, communication, an act human's are particularly good at, will find a way to happen, as Meng states e gao, "represent innovative strategies for articulating social critque and fostering societal dialogue" in a country that is rapidly trying to counter the 'decentralizing' effect of the internet.  The communities within China are utilizing technology and social media to push boundaries and forge new ways to communicate.  Will China continue to run around putting out fires one by one?