This video of the concert given by the first-ever online collaborative orchestra got me thinking… about the implications that projects like this could have for world peace.

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra was assembled by encouraging musicians from all over the world to audition by posting a video on YouTube.

Ninety winners from 30 countries were invited to play at Carnegie Hall.

It is worth listening to the speech Michael Tilson Thomas, the Orchestra director, gave before the concert. I love this part: “thanks to the internet and the amount of music that can be found online, we don’t need to define classical music any more, we can experience it”.

Does the same apply to cross-cultural relations?

These days, thanks to social networking, we can establish friendships on the opposite side of the world, in countries we knew nothing about. Through these contacts, we begin to learn about different realities and ways of thinking. A person from another culture is no longer a bit of statistics in a newspaper. Experiencing is so much better than sticking labels!

There are lessons for cross-cultural communicationsto be learned from the YouTube Symphony Orchestra project. I hope someone will come up with a study on this.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 10:07 am and is filed under Communications Strategy, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.