Shakespeare Lives on Twitter: cultural diplomacy in the digital age

ABSTRACT

This article is based on multilingual research that analyses the British Council Shakespeare Lives programme. Based on a study of the global Twitter campaign to promote the programme, and a manual coding and analysis of 4,722 tweets in five languages, we investigate the key Twitter actors, topics and types of engagement generated by the campaign. We reflect on two topics that still largely remain absent in the field of cultural diplomacy: first, global audience reactions to a cultural diplomacy programme, and second, the potential of cultural relations organisations to generate intercultural dialogue, at the same time as measurable returns both on investment and influence. Our findings demonstrate that audiences like to engage with activities that invite their participation in ways that reflect their knowledge of Shakespeare, allowing them to compare his works with their own national/local literary figures and to share ideas about universal themes. While the Twitter campaign garnered significant positive attention from members of the public around the globe, the ambition to boost ‘Brand Britain’ did not appear to materialise. We conclude that dialogic forms of cultural diplomacy that stress the value of open cultural democracy, even if difficult to achieve in practice, are more likely to succeed.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural diplomacy
• digital media
• Shakespeare
• cultural relations
• cultural value

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This is not a count of people reached but a sum of the number of followers of all Twitter, Facebook and Instagram users who produced content with the Shakespeare Lives hashtag (Gillespie, Wilding, and Nieto McAvoy 2017, 13).

2. We divided the data collection and analysis into three phases.

3. Our second phase of data collection and analysis took place in September-October 2016 and our third and final phase of data collection and analysis took place in January 2017, following the conclusion of the Shakespeare Lives campaign.

4. Data from qualitative interviews with programme staff.

5. We also coded for any expressions of the values the British Council sought to promote through the Shakespeare Lives programme: diversity, innovative, welcoming, creative, mutuality. The findings were slim in this regard. We have left them out of this article, focusing instead on those findings for which we had more and better data in terms of consistency and relevance for digital diplomacy.

6. This varied by country: with more than half of the sample in (624 of n = 1,000), but only a quarter of tweets in the Arabic sample (277 of n = 1,000) belonging to this group.

7. The Russian sample includes a comparatively high number of bots, while in the Arabic sample the type of actor was unclear in greater proportion than in other languages.

8. n = 1,000 in each language analysed.

9. 24% in English, 65% in Russian, 76% in Spanish, 68% in Mandarin and Arabic. Russian-speaking users rarely use the hashtag associated with the Shakespeare Lives programme, #ShakespeareLives.

10. 6.4% in English, 7.5% in Spanish, 0.6% in Mandarin, 24.7% in Arabic and 22.1% in Russian.

11. 73% in English, 31% in Russian, 23% in Spanish, 30% in Mandarin and 26% in Arabic.

12. 20% of the examined tweets in the Arabic sample made direct reference to events that were part of the Shakespeare Lives programme. The vast majority of those tweets referred to the events in Alexandria and Stratford-Upon-Avon.

13. An exception to this interest in technology is the sample of tweets in Mandarin.

14. https://www.google.com/doodles/celebrating-william-shakespeare-and-st-georges-day-2016.

15. An interactive video platform where users could recreate a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream staged at The Old Vic Theatre or Romeo and Juliet’s famous balcony scene, set in India.

16. In Arabic, the doodle featured in 16% of tweets from members of the public. In the Russian sample, 15% of the tweets from the members of the public tweeting about the Shakespeare Lives campaign informed others about the doodle.

17. 17.5% of tweets from members of the public tweeting about the Shakespeare Lives campaign mentioned the emoji in the Spanish sample, and 4.5% in the English one.

18. 9.8% and 0.5% of the overall sample, respectively. In the Arabic sample, 10% of all tweets referred to Obama’s and Prince Charles’s visits.

19. Although not part of the Shakespeare Lives weekend, they fall into the first phase of our analysis for VKontakte and Weibo. They are included here as they are a clear example of the possibilities of driving social media engagement through localizing celebrities.

20. The investigation into the Weibo users’ engagement rests upon the numbers of shares, comments and likes.

21. The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, [BO]. The data are not publicly available due to [restrictions e.g. their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Billur Aslan Ozgul

Billur Aslan Ozgul is Lecturer in Political Communication at Brunel University London, UK. Her work on digital media and political participation has been published in the International Journal of Communication, Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, and the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Her first monograph, Leading protests in the digital age: Youth activism in Egypt and Syria, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019.

Eva Nieto McAvoy is a Research Associate at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture (Cardiff University), working on ‘Arts Culture and Public Service Broadcasting’ for the AHRC-funded Cultural Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC). She was previously a researcher at the Open University on the Cultural Value Model. Her work on the intersection of cultural relations and power has taken her to collaborative research on audiences of soft power and the digital turn, contributing to articles published in Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies and The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power.

Marie Gillespie is Professor of Sociology at the Open University. She is an anthropologist and ethnographer whose teaching and research interests revolve around media and migration, diaspora cultures, politics and social change. Recent research includes projects on forced migration, digital connectivity and civic engagement among Syrian and Iraqi refugees. Since 2015 she has done fieldwork in refugee camps on the island of Lesvos, Greece and at Za’atari and Azraq, in Jordan working with UN Women on research aimed at digital inclusion and education. She has worked on culture and diplomacy projects around active citizenship in Egypt and Ukraine. Marie has published extensively on migrant transnationalism, political communication and securitization.

Ben O’Loughlin is Professor of International Relations and Director of the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was Special Advisor to the UK Parliament Select Committee on Soft Power. His books Strategic Narrative (2013) and Forging the World (2017) examine how communication is used to contest world order.