Interorganizational and International Networks For Digital Diplomacy Outreach: A Comparative Study of South Korea and China

This study introduced an analytical framework for assessing the inter-organizational network system and the web impacts of public diplomacy organizations’ sites through the cases of South Korea and China. This study compared interorganizational collaboration networks, the impact of the government agencies’ websites, and the sectoral and geographic distribution of information resources offered by the agencies on the web. Social network analysis was employed, and it indicated that the Chinese public diplomacy organizations constructed denser and more strongly connected networks than the Korean public diplomacy agencies. Furthermore, the results suggested that .com was the most popular generic top-level domain, followed by .org, .net, and .edu, for both Korean and Chinese organizations. The source sites that sent links to Korean organizations originated mostly from East Asian (Korea, Indonesia, and Japan) and European countries (Germany and Russia). Information about Chinese culture was spread more widely across diverse countries, including East Asian (China and Japan), North American (Canada), European (United Kingdom, France), and Oceanian (Australia) countries. For both Korea and China, domestic audiences played key roles as information hubs in each network, which illuminates a networked and cooperative form of digital diplomacy outreach in these countries. KCI Citation Count: 0