Nowadays, video games have become a dominating entertainment medium. The industry alone creates tens of billions dollars for other industries, every year. Like other pop culture staples, people have noticed the cultural influence of video games. By releasing online game featuring Hollywood characters, Taiwan's innovation and soft power are manifested.

Art is often the vehicle of choice in building bridges in cultural diplomacy. The “Ahh” moment is one of appreciation when our imagination has been captured. Cultural diplomacy can take the inherent power of art and transform it from an “Ahh” moment of appreciation found in one cultural setting to an “Aha!” moment of delight and wonder in other cultural settings.

In previous Culture Posts, I talked about the goal of developing an “in-awareness” approach to culture in public diplomacy. In the comments section, as well as other CPD posts, important observations have been raised about the challenges of cultural diplomacy. Developing a stronger “in-awareness” approach may be the key to designing and implementing rewarding cultural diplomacy initiatives.

In this post I discuss the idea of thinking about culture as a concrete noun as one way to develop awareness.

Culture as a Concrete Noun

The film, “The Flowers of War...is Mr. Zhang’s take on the Nanjing Massacre. At the moment, no other cultural product or artist better embodies the hunger by the Chinese state and its citizens to create culture that can attract foreigners, bolstering China’s “soft power”...

Learning another language will open the door to another culture and enhance your career opportunities in the increasingly global economy...The new language deepens your capacity to communicate and to understand the challenges of all cross-cultural relations.

On the first day of 2012, Chinese President Hu Jintao published an essay on culture in a...The language, lifted from Hu's speech at a party plenum on "promoting culture" in October last year, has been interpreted as largely hostile toward the "west" and its machinations to divide China.

Greek TV channels realised that buying the glitzy tales of forbidden love... from long-standing regional rival Turkey, was cheaper than filming their own..."Greeks feel closer to Turks than they did," he told Reuters. "Sometimes soft power is more important than political power."

China's President Hu Jintao recently warned that "international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China," and added that "the international culture of the West is strong while we are weak."