Virtual worlds, real cultures

Diplomacy doesn’t belong just to the physical world anymore. The project Digital Diplomacy: Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds explores how foreign affairs policies can improve the engagement with Muslim communities all around the world, using complex opportunities provided through the use of immersive virtual spaces like Second Life.

In this video developed during the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C. in September 2009, Rita J. King and Joshua S. Fouts, both Senior Fellows of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, talk to WebCitizen about their project and its mission.

King and Fouts chose the virtual world of Second Life as platform for their research due to many reasons, among them the fact that it is the most widespread international virtual world platform. That is their idea: how could people learn about other cultures in a experimental, authentic virtual space, and how this information can add or improve the diplomatic work in the physical and real world?

The project objective was to verify how much they could learn about Islam in a space that has the potential to bring new insights and to crush prejudices and boundaries cemented in the real world.

Rita J. King is Chairwoman and Creative Director of Dancing Ink Productions, and Senior Fellow of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

Joshua S. Fouts is Global Strategist of Dancing Ink Productions, and Senior Fellow of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs is a non-profit and non-governmental and educational American institution that through its programs, publications and website, aims to be the main destination for ethic decisions in international discussions. Since its foundation in 1914, the council has been focusing in the importance of ethic values in international affairs, and aims to be a “voice for ethics” all over the world.

See the video of the project here.