public diplomacy as cultural revolution

All aspects of human nature can be found in Second Life, as evidenced by this combat zone, which contains a warning that unarmed civilians will be shot upon entry. But who would enter unarmed when so many bullets, sniper suits and other accoutrements of war can be had for a few Linden? Below, a sign explains, "We fight for the freedom of fighting." Is the same true in the physical world?

(click photos to enlarge)

The Virtual Vibe Jazz Fest was hosted by United States Department of State International Information Programs Bureau and The University of Southern California Center for Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

On Thursday night we attended a play, Black Watch, at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. A booklet, "Black Watch: Theatre as Cultural Diplomacy," accompanied the show and explained, in a foreward by Joshua Fouts and Sharon Memis, Director of the British Council USA:

"Art has always been central to a nation's attempt to articulate its culture and define its preoccupations, values, characteristics, challenges and successes. Using approaches ranging from the conventional gift of art to the more complex arena of art-centered capacity-building, cultural diplomacy expands upon these efforts and strives to engage public abroad with the home country."

Black Watch was anointed with a stellar review in the New York Times, so I expected it to be good. But it went beyond good and evil, into the heart of what it means to be most human, to explore the quest for the meaning of life that too often leads individuals and cultures down the path of violence as a means to express devotion, passion and the tangled intrigue and terror of mortality.

Virtual worlds, Josh and I believe, provide a framework for the development of these characteristics based on creativity and expression of ideas that, until the dawn of the Conceptual Age, remained largely suppressed on a global scale due to the limitations of language and the boundaries imposed by geography, socioeconomics and seemingly incompatible cultural traditions.

Joshua Casteel, a Black Watch panelist of great passion, focus and ethical depth, revealed that he had served in Iraq as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib prior to earning approval as a conscientious objector. Staring through the scope of his rifle at three eight year old boys, he told me at dinner before the event, made him feel like a "worthless human being." But he isn't. The difficulty of his experiences serves as a reminder for the rest of us about the infinite complexity of being human.

People in America ask him what the war is like, he said, but they "don't really want to know."

Still in the thought-provoking aftermath of Black Watch, Josh Fouts (who hosted the panel after the play) took the form of his Second Life avatar Schmilsson Nilsson the next day to take part in a panel for Virtual Vibe Jazz Fest. The discussion took place between segments of live music. Bill May, who has led the charge at the U.S. State Department to explore the utility of Second Life as a public diplomacy outreach tool to build bridges between cultures, came up with the idea to employ the theme of jazz for the event.


"Jazz has a great history of demonstrating through its style and artists the importance of freedom of expression," Schmilsson Nilsson said a the event. "The values and individuality of Jazz as a musical style should not be underestimated. Take the picture behind us. 52 years ago, Dizzy Gillespie, pictured above...in an era when he was not allowed to drink out of the same water fountain or sit in the same part of the bus as white people in the U.S., accepted an invitation from the U.S. State Department to take Jazz to the world."

Charlie Fishman, who served as a producer along with Quincy Jones on that groundbreaking tour, also served on the panel, which engaged the global jazz community.

"We are all citizens of one world," Charlie Fishman said, adding that we all have two things in common. "A color and a beat. The color is red for blood and the beat is the beat of our hearts and all people have this and much more in common...Almost everyone who met Dizzy told him that the Voice of America and Jazz were their lifeline to hope that one day they too would be free. Dizzy along with Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Dave Brubeck were our nation's greatest cultural ambassadors during the Cold War."

A lifetime of hard dedicated work paid off. Charlie Fishman spoke of the way people would wait in line around the block after the fall of the Berlin Wall to meet Dizzy Gillespie and get his autograph.

The intensity of artistic expression always increases in times of war (whether active or cold, potential or kinetic) and the advent of the Conceptual Age has finally allowed the voice of the people an opportunity to be as unmistakable as a senseless bombing campaign. As a tool for public diplomacy, virtual worlds cannot be beaten at this time in our collective history. Finally, we can inhabit one another's ideas and even enhance them to take part in the evolution of a new global culture. Protest is giving way to meaningful, creative problem solving.