American Pop Culture and Public Diplomacy

This past week Dr. John Brown, former Foreign Service officer and blogger, came to class to discuss cultural and public diplomacy. Through his animated and engaging stories the disparity of cultural understanding between Americans and Russians became evident. Russians value culture and it is a huge part of their society, where it is also important to Americans, but not exactly in the same way. We don’t memorize poetry or songs the way the Russians do Brown explained. Russians value high culture where as most Americans ascribe to popular culture, which is not bad, just a different mindset. Thus when doing PD with nations who value high culture, a different approach needs to be taken. Throughout Brown’s talk the ways in which America was lacking in cultural diplomacy were clear.
The U.S. has a huge media presence, which accounts for some of the stereotypes of Americans around the world. Peter Van Ham discusses the idea of cultural and media diplomacy in his chapter entitled, Culture and Constructivism. Van Ham writes that Hollywood can exercise America’s social power easily through films and TV shows because they are easily available to watch and they appeal to a wide audience. This can have both positive and negative effects depending on the film or TV show. Van Ham discusses a survey taken in 2003 in which teenagers in twelve countries associated America with sexual amorality, materialism and violence…just to name a few things (Van Ham 54). That shows that many people have no idea about the positive aspects of American culture Van Ham concludes that characters like Tony Soprano may be as much to blame as the Iraq war (54). That is a very interesting statement that shows America’s image is just as connected to a fictional character as it is with our foreign policy.
The next season of Jersey Shore is going to be filmed in Italy, which may be a good or bad idea depending on your impression of the show. It will be interesting to see what happens as they start to film the next season and what impact it will have on the U.S. image for better or for worse, we shall see.