The year before I left Trinidad for university in the USA, I spent hours on end at the United States Information Service (now called the Public Affairs Section) library on Marli Street, boning up on Dreiser and Faulkner, Updike and Bellow, Welles and Cassavetes, filling in the gaps left by a British post-colonial education and attempting to add a veneer of sophistication to an experience of US popular culture cobbled together from a couple of local television channels and visits to the cinemas of Port of Spain, plus the odd visit to the country itself. In using the services of the USIS, I was engaging with one aspect of US public diplomacy, the means by which the US as a nation “seeks to promote [its] national interest. . . through understanding, informing and influencing foreign audiences.”

The countries of the English-speaking Caribbean are hardly the United States’ most challenging interlocutors, especially when compared with the Middle East, China, the former Soviet Union, Cuba or the country that lies just a few miles west of where I sit writing this (Venezuela, in case you’re wondering). But our relationship with the the US isn’t a simple one, as any Caribbean national who’s ever applied for a visa knows only too well.

That our gaze wanders so easily and longingly northward; that our countries are commonly considered transshipment points for drugs; that deportees from US prisons are contributing to the increase in our crime rates; that most of Trinidad and Tobago’s natural gas is purchased by the US; that Venezuela lies across the water just a few valleys west of where I sit writing this; that I can write this, then publish it instantly to the internet: all of this makes us important to the US in the way that small, unimportant places can be. “Important”, meaning, of course, “strategic”.

Because small and strategic is not an unproblematic combination, an event taking place on Tuesday 3 February, 2009 (tomorrow, in this part of the world) in Washington D.C. should be of interest to many of us in the Caribbean (not that anything in the programme is specific to us–but we’re used to that). The event is called Media as Global Diplomat, and it’s designed around the premise that

We are in a disruptive period in media, the result of an explosion in digital distribution, social networking, and user generated content. And with disruption comes opportunity. This summit, moderated by Ted Koppel and entitled Media as Global Diplomat, is a forum to ask key public and private sector leaders how the United States can best use media to reinvigorate its public diplomacy strategy and international influence in order to strengthen efforts to build a more peaceful world.

The event is also a response to the Obama administration’s promise to distinguish itself from its predecessor by taking a different approach to public diplomacy, one focused on listening instead lecturing.

How to participate? I won’t be physically present at the event, of course, but my Global Voices colleagues Ivan Sigal and Rebecca MacKinnon will, and I’ll be tuning in to the live webcast and chat which Ivan will be moderating and parsing for questions and comments to be passed on to Ted Koppel.

Rebecca will be liveblogging at http://rconversation.blogs.com/, which, given her fierce intelligence, outspokenness and sharp wit, not to mention her skepticism about the event’s actual goals, is bound be both informative and entertaining. “It’s unclear to me,” Rebecca says, “whether they really just want to explore how to use digital media to get the world to like the U.S. better – or whether they’re truly open to a paradigm shift: moving from broadcast “messaging” mode to conversation mode, in which the U.S. would be listening and learning as much as informing others.”

Rebecca also notes the dearth of new media vibe on the program “…my initial reaction is that the only panelists who might be considered “new media” people are Google’s Andrew McLaughlin and Mika Salmi of MTV’s Digital Networks. And they work for huge Internet and media companies. No citizen media or grassroots voices are speaking on the panels at all. Lots of “old media” and/or establishment foreign policy elites. Will there really be any new ideas coming from this crowd? Hard to know. Maybe you can help thorough your remote participation?”

Maybe you can. Let’s get some Caribbean spirit into that chat room. Visit this page for the event schedule, and the live chat will be taking place here. See you online tomorrow!