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Abstract
On December 10, 2011, the first tweet was sent out from the @Sweden Twitter account, a nation-branding project financed by the Swedish government through the Swedish Institute and VisitSweden. Trumpeted by the media both in Sweden and internationally as an exercise in “transparent” and “democratic” nation-branding via the use of Twitter, the @Sweden account is “given” to a new Swede every week, and, supposedly, these curators are given free rein to tweet what they like, when they like. The use of a popular communication channel by the Swedish government—in this case, Twitter—provides an illuminating example of the carefully planned and managed promotion and nation-branding of Sweden, presented under the guise of a “transparent” and “democratic” selection and editorial processes. The @Sweden project will be addressed in light of “liberation technology” (CitationDiamond, 2010) and “technology discourse” (CitationFisher, 2010) perspectives, within which a correlation between access to, and use of, technology and proactive change is postulated. These theoretical perspectives are particularly valuable when heeding CitationKaneva's (2011) call for a more critical, communications-based understanding of nation-branding.
Notes
11All figures obtained from: http://beantin.se/post/22662673173/twitter-users-accounts-sweden-2012-census
13Twitter itself has terms of service which stipulate that tweets violating the laws of a given country are subject to removal. As such, Volontaire “rules” regarding illegal tweets run parallel to Twitter's.
14This e-mail sent out to a future @Sweden curator was obtained from an anonymous source.