In the contemporary digital space, information and communication technologies gained increasing important role for international relations. The specific setting of online platforms is becoming alternately as a stage or as a engine for international conflicts and disputes while networks of interconnected devices and users, boosted by technologies, are turning in an additional center of power which state authorities have to deal with. The online platforms, as infrastructures and mediators allows the immediate distribution of content to potentially boundless audiences, contributing to alter the focus on international conflicts as it shifts from infrastructure issues to content battles. In this scenario, an increasing number of crises, frictions, medium- and long-term conflicts are increasingly using soft power models and tools, thinning the deployment of hard power. International public opinion becomes the first target of these forms of confrontation, as rigid diplomatic protocols are shifting to new forms of public diplomacy and digital diplomacy introducing new forms and languages. Global publics, in this condition, have become increasingly more important, also if they are still relatively unaware of the intricacy of the system of international relations and of the specific features of conflicts currently underway.
This research points to analyze the main issues affecting the development of international relations in the platform society, with the aim to identify and systematize contemporary trends, starting from the theoretical systems of sociology of international relations and sociology of communication and enacting an extensive empirical study on the so-called ¿strategic narratives¿ generated by States through a vast and heterogenous amount of texts, images and videos deposited on social media to bolster own public diplomacy during the period 2019-2021.
This research has a dual aspect of innovativeness. On the one hand, it addresses a pioneering analysis on the influence of platform on the vocabularies of international conflicts and crisis: in this case, it is relevant to analyze how languages are changing, assuming that a phenomenon that international literature is identifying with regard to public diplomacy is taking place. Intentional popularization (when not trivialization) is extending political matters to global audience previously unaware of traditional political diatribes, but who participate in them due to a rediscovered accessibility.
Using images of popular culture, meme, gifs, the contentious communication in the frame - shared by online communities - of irony and sarcasm, makes the interpretations provided by the party in question directly and instantly available and able to travel beyond contingent interpersonal or institutional interactions (Duncombe, 2017). Thus, while in the context of conflict digital media were often hailed as a source of breaking the informational monopoly of journalistic storytelling, especially thanks to grassroots representations, the digital occupation of narratives by the actors concerned marks another reflexive overlap between disintermediation, remediation, and technological mediation as a commodity and a representational influence (Baum, Potter, 2019).
The second point of innovation involves the use of systematic comparison of actors and communicative actions: in this way, it is possible to trace and identify the subtext that identifies the consonance between communicative practices and (even unconscious) impositions of the platforms. Discrepancies and uniformity of representations, detected through a multi-survey method, allow to isolate and hypothesize the weight of the platforms on the communication strategies of the actors involved in security and conflict issue (Carr, 2017; Singer, Brooking, 2018).
It is this analytical approach that allows to move forward on research on this field, examining the cognitive link in which the actors (political, digital, public) in question are involved. In fact, the analysis of the forms (and dissemination strategies) of public discourse, which take place and is structured starting from the constraints imposed by the digital tools, increase the significance of the role played by the platforms in the ability to shape the public values and the debate around them.
The research proposes to undertake a number of steps capable of integrating analytical knowledge and to realize a potential advancement in the research skills on the examined field:
- identification of languages and platform-based practices that lead to a redefinition of communication strategies; pointing out, for example, the link between contentious communication, popularization of languages and commercialization of host platforms;
- disciplinary integration between political phenomena and communicative aspects, through reflection on the bi-directionality of links affecting current international issues and the way they are expressed in public;
- classification of the forms of communication of polarizing and polarized actors, through the analysis of contents and how they are included in the logic of hypermediation or transparency induced by digital technologies;
- weight of technical constraints on common representational forms: platform audiences, selected through algorithms of which there is no complete domain, go from being networked individuals to calculated publics, an aggregate whose boundaries are established and known only to platform operators. This is supposed to have a strong influence on the forms of representation and narrative strategies undertaken.
The routine use of digital platforms directs the reflection towards the analytical identification of new repertoires of the political-identity claim. The (apparently) commercial expressiveness amplifies the tendency of public forms of expression to become advertising.
The use of an integrated approach makes it possible to identify the multiple digital forms; simultaneously, stylistic issues become the reinforcement and amplification of global political demands.
The research will therefore make it possible to identify and classify cultural and communicative codes of belonging to digital networks, evaluating both the universalization of languages, dictated by platform characteristics (affordances, defaults, algorithms), and the particularization of the claims in the digital world.