| Chapter 1: | Introduction—Surveying the Cyberterrain of Developing Country Head of State Web Sites |
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There is almost universal agreement that English is the primary language of the Web (Brunn & Cottle, 1997; Carmel, 1997), although some argue the Web’s dependence on English is reinforcing the so-called “digital divide” (Menke, 2000).
This book examines how heads of state of developing countries are representing themselves to an English-speaking audience on the World Wide Web, developing and testing a culturally sensitive model of effective public relations practice that incorporates aspects of persuasion and propaganda. This is a text-driven study that focuses on manifest content, and uses a mixed-methods approach to view government Web sites as dynamic sites of multilayered subtexts, each eliding and colliding to generate meaning. The mixed-methods encompass a quantitative content analysis of official English-language presidential or head of state Web sites in countries identified as “developing countries” by the World Bank and a narrative analysis of four selected “data rich” (Geertz, 1973) Web sites in the population: the Philippines, Latvia, Nigeria, and Russia. The focus is on how presidents of developing countries are using their sites and how that usage might relate to international public relations practice, propaganda, and persuasion.
Following World Bank criteria, 31 countries can be classified as “developing countries”4 with an official presidential (or similar5) Web site in English. These 31 countries are the population for this book. By definition alone, “developing countries” are not economically or politically symmetrical with developed countries. The same logic holds true for public relations research. Sriramesh and Vercic (2003) observed that the body of public relations research is confined to a small number of countries in continents including North America, Asia, and Europe. According to the authors, this concentration of research has created a sizable gap in the literature: