Events - Making the Global Local: Virtual Worlds, Migration and Linguistic Diaspora

Events: Details - Making the Global Local: Virtual Worlds, Migration and Linguistic Diaspora

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Event

Title:: Making the Global Local: Virtual Worlds, Migration and Linguistic Diaspora
When:: 09.10.07
Category:: General

Description

USC Center on Public Diplomacy Panel Supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Participate in Interdependence Day, Mexico City

On September 10, 2007, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School

for Communication convened a panel called “From the Global to the Local: Virtual Worlds, Migration, and Linguistic Diaspora” that stimulated brisk debate about the geopolitical usefulness of virtual worlds like There.com and Second Life. The panel, which was part of Interdependence Day V, took place at Tec de Monterrey in Mexico City and was simulcast to the USC Annenberg Public Diplomacy Island in Second Life, with panelists participating in real life from Mexico City and remotely via Second Life.

Joshua Fouts, Director of the Center on Public Diplomacy at the USC Annenberg School of Communications, chaired the panel and launched the discussion by noting that Second Life has 9 million registered users, only 20 percent of which are from the United States, making the platform a remarkable tool for inter-cultural dialogue. “It behooves us to pay attention to how technology is changing the way people are meeting each other,” Fouts said, adding that the panel was convened as a counterpoint to how the media covers virtual worlds. U.S. media, Fouts said, tend to either “trivialize or demonize” virtual worlds.

Mark Wallace, a journalist who covers virtual worlds and a panelist, noted that three dimensional online environments are “much more than a game or a fantasy place or a place where you can dress up as anything you want. They’re actually a fairly powerful medium for transmitting information.” Particularly for young people, he added, online communications are as important as offline ones.

Panelist Peter Marx, formerly Chief Technology Officer for Vivendi Games, creator of World of Warcraft, one of the most popular virtual worlds in the gaming sector, and now a consultant, showcased “Laguna Beach,” an MTV initiative in the virtual world There.com that allows fans of the network’s show “Laguna Beach” to interact in a digital version of the southern California city after which the show is named. “The great thing about virtual worlds is that because they’re such a leveler socially, people can interact regardless of their location in the world, regardless of their language,” Marx said.

As Prokofy Neva, a well known Second Life personality and commentator, commented in chat during the panel, “Basically, the question is whether the channels of communication in a 3-D world is really the most effective vehicle for formal public diplomacy,” adding that now, with people of multiple nationalities doing business andsocializing in Second Life, they are coming into contact with people from other countries.

“This is all churning now with unknowable results,” she wrote in chat.

Jose Murilo, Manager of Strategic Information for the Ministry of Culture in Brazil and also a panelist emphasized his government’s commitment to virtual worlds with video comments from Gilberto Gil, Minister of Culture. “There are languages, world visions,archives, cultural collections that migrated, that left their original places and were dispersed through the world. Re-connect ability is one of the most important elements of this new electronic world,” he said. “It’s a new planet.” But during the panel, political theorist Benjamin Barber, founder of Interdependence Day, made clear his position as a detractor of the geopolitical importance of virtual worlds.

“Ninety-nine percent of people [in Second Life] couldn’t care less about the things being talked about [at this panel],” he said. “The idea that this is currently available as a civic tool, a political tool, is just absurd and is a kind of salesmanship done by people who are primarily in it to make money.” Barber’s comments ignited debate among the audience in Mexico City, a group that included Princeton University Professor of Religion Cornel West and PBS personality Tavis Smiley. They also spawned lively dialogue amongst Second Life audience members as well as bloggers who covered the event.

“For some ideologues, SL and other virtual worlds are distracting from real-worldproblems like poverty and war and merely gratifying the affluent; for other ideologues virtuality is going to lift young people from Third-World poverty and harness the entertainment-driven masses to Do Good and change the world,” Neva wrote on his blog The Second Life Record. “The truth is probably not somewhere in between, but something completely different that we don't understand yet.”

Second Life blogger Rik Riel also took issue with Barber’s perspective. “There are people everyday using Second Life as a serious civic and political tool, from voter registration drives to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to cancer survivor's support groups to 9/11 memorials,” he wrote on his blog The Click Heard Round the World.” To poo-poo all this activity and talk about virtual sex paraphenalia is just insulting to the hundreds of people doing good work using the medium,” he wrote. The event was also covered by Second Life video journalist Draxtor Despres with a reportposted on YouTube.

“From the Global to the Local: Virtual Worlds, Migration, and Linguistic Diaspora” was made possible by support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which recently awarded the USC Center on Public Diplomacy a $550,000 grant to explore the role of philanthropy in virtual worlds. The Center’s Director and panel chair Joshua Fouts is co-principal investigator for the grant, together with Douglas Thomas, Associate Professor of Communications at the Annenberg School

View the Event

Read Text Transcript

More Photos

Some Video:
Gilberto Gil's Web Message
The Draxtor File: Interdependence Day in SL
Projectile Arts: Interdependence Day Video Archive

Statistics:
Event Metrics

Blogs:
Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative
The Click Heard Round the World
The Second Life Record
Dancing With Myself

Additional links:
Conference Schedule
About CivWorld
About Second Life
MacArthur Foundation
Press Release

Panelist Bios:

Joshua Fouts

Joshua S. Fouts is co-founder and former director of the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School, a cross-disciplinary research, and training center. He was also director of the "Public Diplomacy in Virtual Worlds" project, for which he was a 2007 recipient of a $550,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He has over 18 years of expertise in new technology innovation, international relations, journalism, and strategic non-profit management and development. He was previously co-founder and director of the USC Annenberg Online Journalism & Communication Center. Before joining USC, Fouts spent half a decade the U.S. Department of State and the Voice of America launching numerous new technology and public diplomacy projects. He is editor of the forthcoming, "Politics and Play" (Peter Lang). He is on the editorial boards of Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media (Sage), and Place Branding (Palgrave Macmillan). Mr. Fouts is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the Public Diplomacy Council at the George Washington University.

Peter Marx
Former Chief Technology Officer for Vivendi Universal Games

Peter Marx is the Managing Partner for Analog Protocol, Inc., a consultancy which specializes in developing online virtual worlds for MTV Networks and other media companies. As the former Chief Technology Officer for Vivendi-Universal Games and former Vice President of Emerging Technologies at Universal Studios & Vivendi-Universal, Mr. Marx has an extensive background in developing digital technologies and digital consumer entertainment products. Mr. Marx' projects have included many games, including John Madden Football (98, 99), NASCAR, Disney's Daily Blast, Johnny Mnemonic, NCAA College Hoops, and many others. Other notable projects he has contributed to include “I Am Your Child” with Tom Hanks, Quicktime (Apple Computer), and MTV's virtual worlds. He is an Adjunct Professor for the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC School of Cinematic Arts and teaches digital media and entertainment at the graduate level.

Mark Wallace
Virtual Worlds Journalist

Mark Wallace is CEO of Wello Horld, Inc., a Brooklyn startup bringing virtual-world interactions to the Web. An editor of the Second Life Herald, he also runs 3pointD.com, a leading source of news on virtual worlds and the broader metaverse. His freelance journalism has been published in the New York Times, the London Times, Harper's and Wired magazine. With Peter Ludlow, Wallace is co-author of, "The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid That Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse."

Virtual Panelists:

José Murilo Jr.
Manager of Strategic Information, Ministry of Culture, Brazil

Founder of the 'Ecologia Digital' movement and one of the first bloggers in Brazil, José Murilo Jr. has been working to promote the free and open use of the Internet as an open environment to share knowledge and culture. He has a bachelor's degree in psychology and has spent many years working with computers and the Internet. Since 2004 Mr. Murilo has been the Manager of Strategic Information at the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, working mainly on the implementation of the inspiring vision of Minister of Culture and world-renowned musician, Gilberto Gil. The goal is to bring the new digital activism into the government turning advanced web possibilities into public policy, especially through the integration of the Pontos de Cultura/Cultura Livre [Cultural HotSpots/Free Culture] movement.

Francois Bar
Associate Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication

François Bar is Associate Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He directs the Annenberg Research Network on International Communication . During the 2006-07 academic year, he is a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication. His research interests include comparative telecommunication policy, as well as economic, strategic and social dimensions of computer networking, new media and the Internet. His research has been published in books of collected studies, in policy reports, and in such journals as Information Technologies and International Development, Telecommunications Policy, The Information Society, Organization Science, Infrastructure Economics and Policy, Communications & Strategies , Réseaux, and the International Journal of Technology Management. He currently serves on the advisory boards of non-profit Compumentor , and start-ups Clickability and Polaris Wireless .

Gilson Schwartz

Academic Director, City of Knowledge, Universidade de São Paulo

An economist, academic and research fellow, Gilson Schwartz directs the City of Knowledge at the Universidade de São Paulo and teaches at the Universidade's School of Communication and Arts. Mr. Schwartz was Chief Economist at the SEADE Foundation, the Data and Statistics Agency for the State of São Paulo under the State Secretary of Planning. For almost ten years, he was a senior consultant to BankBoston on economic, political and international scenarios for clients worldwide. Mr. Schwartz has been a research fellow at Brazil's National Institute for Information Technology, Technology Research Institute of the State of São Paulo, Tokyo's Institute of Developing Economies and the University of California, San Diego. He graduated from the University of Sao Paulo in economics and social sciences and holds a Master's degree and PhD from the University of Campinas.

The panel explored how the interdependence of our world is highlighted ever more dramatically by the role the virtual worlds are providing for social good – especially opportunities to explore new forms democracy, public diplomacy, migration and intercultural dialogue.

(Simulcasted live on Annenberg Island, Second Life)

Panelists included:
Joshua Fouts, Former Director, USC's Center on Public Diplomacy,
Peter Marx, Former Chief Technology Officer for Vivendi Universal Games (USA),
Jose Murilo, Manager of Strategic Information, Ministry of Culture (Brazil),
Mark Wallace, Virtual Worlds Journalist (USA),
Gilson Schwartz, Academic Director, City of Knowledge, Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil),
Francois Bar, Associate Professor, USC Annenberg School for Communication (USA) and
Gilberto Gil, Minister, Department of Culture (Brazil).

View a special video message from Gilberto Gil.