Mobile devices, such as cell phones, notebook computers and even hand-held games, may soon be the way most people get their news and information and become their primary way of accessing the Internet. We have to be there too. Some places may bypass conventional computers altogether (much like cellular technology bypassed land-lines), especially as more and more features are added to mobile devices. Cell phones now come bundled with still and/or video cameras, global positioning systems and sophisticated computing capabilities. Mobile devices fundamentally change people’s relationship to information because they are available any time and almost anywhere. Mobile devices allow individuals to report what they see on the spot, along with pictures and connections. User created content has essentially made individuals into media.
Above is the hall of the new visitors’ center at the Capitol. It took them years longer and a lot more money. The guard told me that they had to reinforce all the doors and walls to make them more resilient in case of terrorism. This extra precaution costs us billions, but you gotta have it.
Experts from private industry traded experience with veteran public diplomacy officers when International Information Programs (IIP) and the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) explored innovative and imaginative new ways to leverage mobile technologies for public diplomacy during a conference held at NFATC on February 19.
It quickly became clear that mobile media, despite all the highfalutin hoopla, is just another part of the new media environment. Several of the speakers emphasized the necessity of flexibility in the uncertain and protean world of the new media. The new media is more fluid, fragmented, decentralized and personalized than more traditional media. This creates challenges and opportunities for public diplomacy as well as for the traditional way we deliver messages at State Department.
Hearing the experts at the conference talk about exciting new communications technologies and even more coming soon, it also became clear that changes in new media environment are coming at an accelerating rate. We have already seen some of yesterday’s most promising stars become today’s dinosaurs. There is no reason to think this will be any different tomorrow, so it is silly and to try to pick winners among the new media. Besides, we don’t have to. We have an “all of the above” option. What we have to do is experiment, recognizing that many will fail, but we will learn from the experiments that fail and that even those that succeed will work in unexpected ways requiring flexible responses. The new media allows us to be flexible and being flexible means that we don’t choose “the best.” Instead we try all appropriate methods, choosing the mix of media tools we think will work best for particular tasks. We must use technology but not get beguiled by it, remembering that communication is the destination and the technology merely the vehicle we use to get there. The mix will usually involve the newest technology used in the latest ways, but it will just as often include simple proven techniques such as personal visits. Remember, we have the “all of the above” option. Those are some of the lessons I learned at the conference.
Through all the changes in technologies, Edward R. Murrow’s famous observation remains true, “The really crucial link in the international communication chain is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.” My colleagues and I at IIP understand that but we also know that we need to use all available and appropriate technologies to get within communication range.
I was happy to be able to attend this conference on mobile communications and proud that IIP is looking forward to the future, as demonstrated by its organizing this sort of meeting. State Department is indeed using a variety of media to carry out its public diplomacy. My colleagues at IIP are using twitter, Facebook, webchats, webcasts, podcasts, Youtube, digital video, blogs, online gaming and various mobile technologies to complement our more traditional Internet, speakers, outreach and publications. Colleagues in other parts of State Department are also making innovations that harness the talents of State’s professionals. It is an exciting time to work in public diplomacy.
I got a Facebook page mostly because of my job. Really. The only way to understand web 2.0 is to be part of it. That is why I started to blog a couple years ago. I spent a lot of time last week and much of last weekend figuring out Facebook. Facebook offers a lot of the advantages of a blog or webpage, but it also features a lot of things that are both intriguing and annoying.
Above is the George Meade Monument on Pennsylvania Ave in Washington. Meade commanded Union forces at Gettysburg. A surprising number of people think it was Grant. I guess one guy with a full beard and a Union uniform looks like another. Many of the officers on both sides of the Civil War knew each other because they formed the West Point social network.
You can keep contact with a lot of people with this social networking system. The big question is does Facebook broaden your contact network or merely dilute it? What we have here is the classic failure to communicate across the interface between human technology and our Pleistocene brains. It is like when a giant water pipe is connected to a narrow straw. Only so much can go through and that volume is determined by the smallest part of the system.
Technology can connect me with many thousands of people, but I still have to know them with my brain developed for life on an environment like the Serengeti Plains, where almost nobody ever encountered more than 150 different people in the course of a lifetime and interacted regularly with only a couple dozen at most. Even after the advent of civilization, people just didn’t get around much. Most people lived like Hobbits; they rarely traveled farther than what they could make in round trip between dawn and dusk. The social capacity of the human brain is the weak link.
I am in danger of collecting too many Facebook friends. I am quickly realizing that I don’t have the energy or inclination to keep up actively with hundreds of people that I could find, so most of my group will be passive. A thousand friends do not mean a thousand daily interactions. This ability to find new friends is the most annoying and intriguing aspect of Facebook.
Below are the stirrings of spring. In a couple of weeks, the spring season will be here. Washington is beautiful in the springtime.
The intriguing part is the connections. We always hear about people being connected and the interconnectivity among opinion leaders etc is the basis for public relations – the power of connections. If we don’t have the resources to influence or even reach mass audiences, we can reach the right social nodes, we can leverage the message. I believed this but never saw it. On Facebook you can see how this could work very graphically. Some people are connectors who bridge lots of diverse groups; others are members of only a few.
The guys with the most friends may not be the one with the most connections. Maybe he has a thousand friends, but they all live in the same town and have similar jobs. You might have a very large but essentially incestuous group. Of course, on Facebook you are not sure if the connecting guys are really influential or if they just are non-participating members of lots of groups. Membership is easy to attain – and fake – online. I wonder how much a person can be connected to more than about a dozen groups, considering again our Pleistocene brains. I also wonder about a guy who would spend enough time online working on those connections. He would almost certainly not be very much involved in the real world and probably wouldn’t know much either if he spends all his time connecting. The term “hollow man” leaps to mind. Of course he is likely to have a lot of corpulence over that hollow center.
Facebook can also teach us something about the network effect, which is when something’s value is increased by getting more users. Usually if more people share something, they each gets smaller part than if anyone had the whole thing to himself. In a network, they all gain. The pie gets bigger the more people step up to the table. Telephones are the classic example. One person with a phone had nobody to talk with. Two are not much better, but each additional entrant makes it more and more useful – eventually indispensable. Facebook encourages the network effect when you search for friends and almost requires it when you want to do something online (such as a quiz). Happily and probably not coincidentally this is also great advertising for Facebook.
The biggest problem with Facebook is its openness. And I don’t mean that some people tell way too much about themselves, although that is a problem too. The real problem is that all your friends can see each other. Most of us like to keep some of our social life in separate spheres. There was a Seinfeld episode where George Costanza feared that if his fiancé entered his social life, relationship George would kill independent George. He called it worlds colliding. It was funny, but it makes some sense. Some relationships are appropriate for some things and not others.
My general complaint against electronic communications is that they are beguiling. Facebook is like that. I spent several hours searching for friends and updating my page until I noticed that my legs were falling asleep and it was getting dark outside. The virtual world provides too much active contact, or at least pseudo social contact. We are all becoming like the Borg. I think it is important to be alone sometimes.
Or maybe individual thinking is going out of style, to be replaced by the hive consciousness. We can all become like ants, bees or termites, beholden to the central consciousness. Those bugs do it with pheromones; we prefer electronic pulses.
Facebook is a lot like beer. For most people, beer lubricates social interactions and they can enjoy it in moderation. But some people abuse it sometimes and it makes them sick. Others abuse it all the time and it makes them boozers and losers.
BTW – I am still accepting new friends, as long as none of us are too demanding or clinging. Don’t expect me to remember your birthday or the name of your dog and we will be okay. My primitive brain is just not up to the task and frankly I just don’t care enough.
Sometimes we don’t like the drivers of innovation, but we like the innovation. The science of probably and statistics was largely developed to serve gamblers. They were the ones who really cared about properly figuring the odds and they were the ones who provided real working laboratories where elegant theories could be tested in relation the vagaries of human nature. We can thank gamblers for our ability to assess risk and make better decisions about the complex interactions in our world. A good book on this subject is Against the Gods: the Remarkable Story of Risk.
If we needed gambling to stimulate us to understand our complex civilization, we can thank war for having civilization in the first place. The organizational structures our ancestors developed to provide protection and – truth be told – to dominate their neighbors were adapted to other tasks. Causality in human events is always complex, with causes creating effects that become causes in ways that make it impossible to separate. But throughout history you find a strong correlation between success at war and success in other endeavors of civilization. This implies that the skill sets are at least overlapping.
In our own times, we can point to a variety of technological advances produced as a result of conflicts. The Internet and the Interstate systems were begun to make our country more resilient in the face of massive attacks. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have forced innovations in emergency medicine, which are already saving lives in trauma centers around the world.
Even if more total lives are saved because of wartime innovations than were lost in the conflicts themselves, we should be able to produce similar advances absent the destruction, but we don’t seem able to do that. Maybe we humans need a threat to get off our asses, jettison some of the inertia of old comfortable habits and maybe sweep away the resistance of powerful individuals or interest groups benefiting from the old way of doing things.
The things that drive a lot of innovation in computer technologies are online games and pornography. These are the applications that demand more and more bandwidth and greater computing speeds. I don’t really need a very advanced computer for the simple word processing and accounting programs that I run and people like me really don’t push the innovators to imagine the better future. It is the gamers on the edge that do it.
My boys play “World of Warcraft” online. There are something like 12 million (and that number grows every day) players around the world forming an online community. Few of them stop to think about the significance of what they are doing. They have created a seamless communication network where participants dispersed throughout the world react in cooperation and in real time to actions conveyed by sophisticated moving images around the world at the speed of light. What can be done in the “World of Warcraft” today will be done in the worlds of medicine, manufacturing, finance and science. Today’s gamers (or their parents) are financing the innovation and, more importantly they are managing and testing them every day when they play their games. Some are already taking the skills and insights learned in virtual worlds and innovatively applying them to their real world jobs. The skills that helped them overcome the Lich King serve them well in the struggles with the competition.
BTW – I think one of the reasons we often do better than would be predicted by looking at our school systems is that much learning – and most innovation – is done outside classrooms and away from the formal teachers.
The games teach the pluses of planning, the dangers of lost control and the problems of managing staffs or teams. Take a look at this youtube video. You can google WTF and world of warcraft and south park if you want to see more.
Above is a World of Warcraft city.
Maybe the dweeb playing video games is preparing better for life the nerd doing the homework the teacher exactly as the teacher says.
People in pre-literate societies had phenomenal memories. Great epics like the Iliad & the Odyssey started off as oral stories. While details were dropped or enhanced over time, storytellers could repeat from memory tales that cover hundreds of pages of modern print.
Literacy is a foundation of civilization. One of the reasons is that it enhances and replaces physical human memory. It allows for accurate communication over distance and time and prevents the loss of knowledge and collective experience. It also means that individuals no longer need to remember details when they can consult an easily available written source. They no longer need to learn them at all when they can easily consult the collective memory. The analogy of memory to muscle is imperfect, but Hippocrates’ old dictum still applies, “That which is used develops; that which is not used wastes away.” Everything else being equal, a man with a notebook and pencil is still better off than the man who has to rely only on his great memory, but we pay an atrophy price for leaning on the memory crutch.
Computers and the Internet turbo-charge access to the collective memory. Much of the accumulated knowledge of humanity is available in seconds at the cost of a few key strokes. That is why I love the Internet. (I feel a tinge of regret that my treasured for reference sources have become mostly dusty decorations, and I still appreciate the cultural and tactile pleasure of actually a book, but I fear that the last “people of the book” generation has already been born.) Internet magnifies my memory, but it also changes it.
My memory used to be better and I don’t chalk up the entire decline to the effects of age. Internet & computers are partly responsible. That which is not used wastes away and if you know you don’t have to use it, you often don’t. I don’t have to exercise memory as I used to because I know l I really need to remember only parts. If I can remember part of a name and part of a story, that is good enough. Internet will do the rest. A good example is the quotation from Hippocrates above. I remembered that the quote existed. I thought it was from Hippocrates. Google found it.
My memory used to be imperfect but it was organized mostly in complete stories associated with names, places and often dates in ways that made sense. My computer assisted memory is unorganized and random. I rely on external organization power of software to put what I know in order. Search engines assemble it for me, and I have mixed feelings about that. Computer power enhances but devalues intellectual muscle in the same way power equipment enhances but devalues physical muscle. It is an equalizer.
Being a strong man used to be a determining advantage working on a farm or building a house. I can still remember a time when truck drivers had powerful forearms from wrestling the wheels of the big rigs or when you knew that a man was a farmer by shaking hands with him. Today just about anybody can aspire to these jobs. Lack of physical strength is no longer a barrier.
Will the same thing happen with intelligence? It is happening already. I am a beneficiary. I could handle the higher level math required for my MBA only because calculators and computers largely eliminated the need for actual calculation. My statistics professor was sad that all her years of training doing regression equations by hand had been made redundant by cheap calculators that could be wielded by anybody with a couple minutes instruction.
All things considered, the price is worth paying. You are reading something right now that could not exist ten years ago, and not only because of the obvious internet as a medium. I write something for my blog almost every day. Many of the entries are recounting of my experiences, but some are mini-essays. I can write, edit and post an entry in less than an hour. This is only possible because of technology. My digital camera provides the illustrations. Everything I do would have taken me a lot more time and probably required added help. Microsoft Word replaces someone who would read and correct my grammar and spelling. The digital camera replaces the photo developer. Easy upload takes the place of printers. The Internet delivers it and provides takes the place of researchers who would have to dig through card catalogues and dusty stacks to give me what Google does in seconds. Ain’t technology wonderful?
Most things are better remembered than they were lived. My memory probably was never as good as I remember it being anyway.
The good news is that cable television has resulted in a proliferation of good programs about science, history and politics. If a picture is worth a thousand words, lots of moving pictures must be worth millions of words, but the pictures may be out of context and if you count up the total number of actual words in an hour on History Channel, you could probably fill only a couple of pages. (Re pictures – I watched “the Real Abraham Lincoln.” It featured a reenactment of the young Abe. But the guy has a beard. Lincoln didn’t grow the beard until 1860.) TV spends a lot of time repeating scenes of collapsing buildings, burning fires or horsemen galloping, w/o explaining the significance. The shallowness of the medium is the bad news.
This extends beyond the series of gripping but unenlightening images. I also notice a general decline in rigor. Maybe it is a general phenomenon, but you notice it clearly on TV. Instead of trying to evaluate evidence and sources, the programs sort of throw it all out there with equal credibility. This would be okay with a written source or among scholars, but the television images don’t provide enough background or references for the viewers to evaluate veracity, even assuming most audience members had the background or inclination to do so.
It is bad enough when we have dueling “experts” but it gets worse when many programs seem to put oral histories on par with real ones. All histories are subject to interpretation and just because something is written down does not mean that it is true. But oral history must be even more carefully evaluated because it is literally subject to change w/o notice.
The strength of written sources is that they freeze impressions and the facts at the point of writing. Facts don’t improve with age. An earlier recollection is more factual than a later one and a primary account is better than a secondary one. An investigator can compare a written record against subsequent ones to detect enhancements or omissions. It makes it harder to change the story. It is also possible to nail down the assertion, so that you can check them against other evidence.
Oral histories do not suffer these constraints. When confronted with disconfirming evidence, an oral history can just change. The danger to the integrity of the story comes not only from deception, but also from innocent rationalization. People tend to want to fit their stories into current realities. They smooth the edges to make them conform to the present needs.
This story changing is most often a social process. Stories change in the telling and retelling and in a short time they come to reflect the aspirations, interests, prejudices & desires of the group more than reality. Oral history has great value because it tells you a lot about the people telling the story; it tells you less about the actual historical events on which is it ostensibly based. It has to be handled carefully.
Of course all history starts off as oral. It is the raw material. Beer starts off as barley and hops, but it requires some processing before you drink it. The same goes for oral history. If you take oral history from those who actually experienced an event, you can check facts. It is helpful to compare stories of individuals who have not communicated with each other much since the events in question. It gets harder when you get into the second or third generation of the story. At that point it has probably become myth. It may be based on the truth but it is not truth.
Myth is usually more interesting and plausible than actual historical events. Heroes are stronger and braver. Villains are scarier. Causes are more just. Events make more sense and often presage big developments of the future. They make better narratives precisely because they have been edited and enhanced by the people who have told and retold the stories.
The compelling nature of oral history and the resulting myths makes them especially dangerous on history television. They are almost always more interesting and more easily recreated in dramatic reenactments. It gets worse in our PC world. Many historical programs these days portray the confrontation between literate and pre-literate societies. The literate societies have historical records that can be critically evaluated and parsed. You get the warts and all portraits. Given the critical nature of this inquiry, we often end up with a mostly warts portrait. On the other side, we have the myths property altered in light of subsequent events.
Below are Alex and Chrissy at “America’s Stonehenge” in New Hampshire. We visited it when we lived nearby in Londonderry. It is worth seeing but not worth going to see. The History Channel featured it as a “mystery”. It is a mystery – a mystery why some clown would pile those rocks, but otherwise it is clearly not ancient. But a TV show with lots of cool angles and suppositions can make it seem so.
Modern historians are understandably frustrated. They want to write about pre-literate societies and they want to write about conditions of the common people in all past worlds. Unfortunately, pre-literate people don’t write at all and the common people didn’t write much until recently. I don’t know a precise number, but I doubt that more than 5% of all the ancient Roman texts still exist, so we start out with a small sample. None of the authors are representative of their societies, in that most people couldn’t write, so you already have an elite enterprise. There are no significant female historians from the Roman period and the Romans were unenthusiastic about letting their subject people write critical accounts of their rule. Beyond all that, most the writers were not interested in the doings of the common people, male or female, Roman or not. When the sturdy yeomen are featured, it is usually just a didactic example. Victor Davis Hanson wrote a good book on people working the land, who always made up the vast majority of the population, called “The Other Greeks,” but there just are not many good sources. You can learn a lot about physical conditions from archeology, but you still don’t have the narrative. The stones and bones don’t tell you much about the people’s motivations, imagination or aspiration. That is unsatisfying. Imagine if a future archeologist could reconstruct your television set but had no record of any of the programs. So historians extrapolate and move the historical narrative into the realm of conjecture, as with other forms of oral history telling us as much about the extrapolator than about the subject itself.
All the specialty cable channels (history, discovery, military, science etc) are spreading information wider than ever before. That is good … I guess.
Particular parts of the programming that I think is very good are some of the “current” history features. I have seen several good programs on Iraq. They tell the story and interview the people involved. My belief is that the U.S. public currently has a very biased view of the events in Iraq and the news media is unlikely to clear it up, since they have largely moved on. Fortunately, a lot of lessons learned type programs are being made now. These are essentially primary sources and when historians get around to addressing events in Iraq more dispassionately, I believe these will be the key sources.
The New Year season is a time for reflection. I have been thinking a lot about the new communication technologies and my job. I know this is boring to some/most of the people reading this, and I know that I am being repetitive, but I still don’t have this sorted out in my own mind.
Decisions are easy when values and priorities are clear. The hard part is figuring them out.
I got along well with Internet in its early incarnations. It fulfilled dreams of my youth. They were nerdy dreams, I admit. I dreamed of a comprehensive searchable data base that could answer all my questions if I posed them correctly. We got it. I wanted easy access to the accumulated knowledge of mankind. We got that too. I dreamed of instant communications networks to pass new ideas. Got it.
My dreams were myopic, just projections and amplifications of what I already knew. But the world doesn’t stop and innovations spawn unexpected changes. The Internet shot clean past my slow moving dreams.
Internet revolutionized the pursuit of knowledge in mostly good ways. You can find out almost anything you want to know and connectedness of the web is increasing scientific and practical knowledge immensely. Knowledge and politics, however, don’t always intersect. Metastasizing politics on the Internet has been less a good thing. Let me clarify with an example.
Blogs made it possible to write about your opinions and experience and easily publish it for others to read and comment. This is just an old technique adapted to new technologies. It is kind of the Federalist Papers on steroids; a quicker marketplace of ideas, this I like. But it didn’t stay on that high plane very long. The messages slid downhill and became shorter and more vitriolic.
The blogosphere and cyberspace in general experienced a kind of evolution, where selection favored the nastiest and the most extreme. Rather than a universe of ideas, it debauched into a multiverse of pseudo-intellectual hostility. Many of the online communities became intolerantly self-policing, driving out anybody with divergent views and in the process increasingly coarsening the rhetoric. Too many online communities became autoerotic circles of hatred, where participants confirmed each other’s prejudices, sharpened their collective teeth, and pulled their groups farther out of the mainstream. We often cannot persuade or be persuaded by others because we occupy completely different dimensions.
There used to be a saying that you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. The new media has developed different fact-universes, each with its own specific sets. This is a challenge and it gets worse.
Now we have all the interactive systems, the Facebooks etc, Twitter as well as interactive gaming. I just don’t know what to do with them. I am not sure it is possible for government based public affairs (i.e. someone in my job) to use these technologies because they are so labor intensive and the messages so often intensely idiosyncratic.
Consider the strengths and weaknesses of a government information operation. My job is to explain the U.S. and U.S. policies to people in other countries. In what we see in retrospect as the golden age (it didn’t seem that back then), we had certain advantages. Most important was that government had a monopoly over some sorts of information, but there were other structural advantages. The technologies favored the one speaker to many listeners paradigm, so a relatively small number of writers could reach a large number of readers/listeners/viewers. Beyond that, our enemies were easy to identify and possible to count. The Soviets produced a lot of deceitful propaganda, but we could usually find the return address if we looked hard enough.
None of this is true anymore. The government no longer has information dominance and is often not the first or the best source even of things about its own activities. The information market has splintered into millions of pieces and our adversaries are harder to identify. Essentially, we went from a situation with one big and dangerous bad guy (or a couple of them) to a world where there are thousands of little ones. The dragon has been replaced by insects, each one inconsequential, but collectively heavier and more intractable. And they are more quickly adaptive to changing circumstances. You could always expect the Soviets to be slow and ponderous, not so our new adversaries.
When it was one-to-many communications, we happy few at State or USIA had a chance to move the communication needle. In the one-to-dozens communication environment, we just don’t have enough people and never will. We can get the occasional “viral” hit, but not with any predictability.
I think we still have a chance. The Internet is starved for content. We can produce content and/or pictures. We can also build relationships that might leverage to larger populations. We can succeed, but I am worried that we will not. I am also worried that I cannot go along on this ride. I have been in this business for a quarter century, but I am afraid I might have reached a river I cannot cross. I have always believed that with the proper tools and permission, I could make a difference and sometimes I have succeeded. I have not always had the means, but I always had the vision, at least I thought I did.
My vision is now failing with the newest technologies. I can understand how something like Twitter can be used to organize a demonstration, communicate sports scores or stock averages, or help maintain an existing social network, but I cannot figure out how we can pass the nuanced explanation of policy over these sorts of networks, nor can I see a way that government officials like me and my colleagues make ourselves trusted participants in enough social networks to make a significant impact. I can understand the theoretical potential for online communities, but cannot stand the profound lameness of “worlds” like Second Life and I cannot figure out its wider impact. It is a big world out there and our efforts may just be a p*ss in the ocean.
This worries me. I don’t know whether it cannot be done in general or if it is just ME that cannot do it. I have a responsibility to add value and I always promised myself that I would not hang around after I outlived my usefulness. I don’t want to try to apply yesterday’s solutions to tomorrow’s problems. It is funny how things come in circles. I am having the equivalent of adolescent angst at my age.
I guess I will figure it out, or more correctly I will find people who have figured it out to work with me. I really don’t understand much of anything, but I have always had the good fortune to find people who do and I have been able to bring out their talents. I add value the old fashioned way – through good people. Maybe the old tricks still work for the old dog. When I cannot do that anymore I will go quietly into that good night – someday, but probably not today. I still have a lot of thinking to do.
I went to see the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. It is not as good, IMO, as the old Bond movies because Bond has lost his edge, or more correctly, the rest of us have caught up. In one scene, Bond calls back to his HQ for a name check. After a couple seconds, the super spy commuter comes up with a picture of the miscreant. Very impressive, but you or I could come up with the same result on Google Images in around 0.9 seconds. Bond would have been better off just using his I-Phone himself. This is the new world of communications.
Web 2.0/PD 2.0
Initial use of the web for public diplomacy and strategic communications involved online versions of familiar delivery methods, such as magazines, radio and television. Despite vast differences among them, all these shared the paradigm of one-way communications, where a set message was delivered to a passive audience in a one speaker to many recipients model. It ignored the web’s special capacity for interaction. Web 2.0 refers to the way the web has changed the nature of communications, making it interactive, more fluid and less centrally organized. Last year, Internet passed newspapers as a source of news in the U.S. For young people Internet is beginning to rival television. [1] This new world can make many people in governments or powerful institutions uncomfortable, since it signals a diminution of their power over information and a dilution of their messages.
We tend to focus on the instant communication aspect of the Internet, but the sinews of its influence are its capacity to find, sort and distribute information. Powerful search engines give individuals the power enjoyed only by world leaders few decades ago and before that time by nobody at all. Governments have lost what monopolies they once enjoyed and are now sometimes not even the most prominent voices. Controlling information is no longer possible. On the other hand, there is a greater opportunity for engagement to harness the power of the nation and the wisdom of the crowds to produce better and more robust products. There is no option of ignoring the development. Internet users demand a degree of interactivity and accept a measure of ambiguity unpredicted a decade ago. These trends will accelerate as the first generation of digital natives (i.e. kids who don’t remember a world w/o Internet) has reached adulthood. This is the new world of communications. Whether we are ready or not, the future has already arrived.
Interactivity and interrelations
The two concepts to keep in mind are interactivity and interrelatedness. The first concept is more obvious but the second is more pervasive. Internet users ostensibly love the possibility of interactivity, but most don’t use it to an extent commensurate with their stated preferences. On any blog, there are dozens, hundreds or thousands of “lurkers” for every active participant. On the other hand, interrelatedness represents the fundamental power of the Internet and its search engines. It is the interrelatedness – the unexpected relationships – that makes the Internet such a wonderful and terrible place to do public affairs. Some say the web provides a venue for the best and the brightest to share ideas w/o the constraints of status or station; others contend it is a place where peculiar people congregate to accrete one dumb notion on top of another. Both points of view are correct. The medium of free and often anonymous exchange produces the best and the worst as it emphasizes people on the long tails of the normal distribution.
Mass customization
The ubiquity and interactive aspects of Web 2.0 offer public diplomacy the possibility of direct engagement with thousands of individuals on a global scale. We can bypass the state run media and the various despotic gatekeepers that have long hounded the quest for truth & knowledge. In the exchange, however, we get a world of constant change, requiring flexibility and creativity, where you have to earn attention again and again every day. The interactivity means just what the word says. When we are trying to influence others, we need to open the possibility of being influenced by them. In a free marketplace of ideas, this would be all to the good. It would produce a synergy greater than the sum of the parts. The caveat is that this marketplace of ideas is not as free and open as it would appear.
Our own presence in the mix is the first sign of a constrained freedom. Although our opponents disagree, our activities are generally benign and broadly truthful. The USG is constrained to tell the truth by its own rules as well as the continual monitoring by our own free media, interests groups and political leaders in opposition. For the most part, we are probably too timid in the defense of our positions. Not so our adversaries. Most of them are heavy handed and incompetent peddlers of web influence, but there are so many out there that some get it right sometimes and others get it right a lot. When it works for them, their campaign is based on plausible lies, ones that play to stereotypes and prejudice, and often based on caricatures and exaggerations of our own real and verifiable mistakes and missteps. In a world where significant numbers of people doubt that there was ever a moon landing and where in communities where majorities don’t think Arabs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks, conspiracy theories go a long way. And the U.S. is probably the single biggest victim of conspiracy theories. In a world often driven by dispersed impersonal forces, people look for someone to blame. The U.S. is always there for that purpose.
Countering conspiracy theories with facts and information is futile. Most conspiracy theories have a built in defense against such quaint ideas as truth or fact. They are, after all based on “hidden,” “denied,” “secret,” or “occult” information. True believers in conspiracies derive significant personal status and feelings of self worth from the idea that they know things overlooked by or kept from the masses of people. It is a true Gnosticism. As they see it, any counter arguments are merely examples of clever attempts to discredit them. We have to recognize that some people are incurable conspiracy theory believers. Others are susceptible to the contagion, but can be cured, but through relationships, not information alone. A trusted and credible source of the information is what makes the difference. Web 2.0 provides the opportunity to create such relationships.
In a New World Where Nobody is Well-Loved
We also need to recognize that the constant vetting and finding of flaws, even when done honestly, will create a permanent state of dissatisfaction among large numbers of people. This is what happens when campaigns go negative and it is just easier to go negative than to defend a positive position. The U.S., as the most ubiquitous presence in the history of the world, will naturally come under the most scrutiny, fair and foul, but it is a general trend that affects everybody. The good new in this is that it applies to our adversaries as well as to ourselves. Al Qaeda’s popularity has also plummeted in recent years among Muslims, for example. [2]
Insiders & Outsiders
Internet 2.0 will strengthen “tribes” as people can go online to find others with whom they identify even across great geographical distances. (Of course, the tribes I am not talking about are not kinship of linage, but kinship of ideas.) This may lead to greater trust within groups, as they become more uniform and homogeneous, but also lead to a general decline in tolerance overall, since most people will be out-groups to any particular in groups. Early hopes that Internet would weave the world together in a kind of cyber age of Aquarius have been dashed against the reality of self-selection and segregation. In a mass information market, differing viewpoints must be tolerated, not so in the case of core groups of believers autoerotically communicating among themselves on the Internet. Where websites and blogs are most developed, disagreements have become sharper and more venomous. However, the impersonal/personalization of web interactions allows people with very divergent views to coexist and performs mutually beneficial transactions that would be impossible in a face-to-face world. General “approval ratings” have already become more transactional and unstable, making it even more important to discount what people tell opinion pollsters and watch what they do and get an idea of their true beliefs by their revealed preferences.
Public diplomacy and the marketing mix
The analogy of public diplomacy with marketing is far from perfect, but it provides some useful insights. When marketing a product or service, you have to understand which communications techniques are appropriate. Those useful for selling Coca-Cola are often not valuable for selling passenger jets or legal services. The same goes for public diplomacy. Our business is more analogous to selling high end legal services than consumer products. This informs and constrains our choices.
Public diplomacy involves communicating complicated concepts to people who come from a variety of backgrounds and the U.S. operates in a truly global environment. It involves long term relationship and trust building. Messages are more problematic. Some of our world audiences will react in sometimes violently different ways to the same subject. Imagine the discussion of U.S. attitudes toward same sex marriage at venues in Amsterdam and Jeddah. Aspects of the discussion popular in one venue would be odious in the other. In this interconnected world, messages cannot be neatly targeted to a discrete audience. Even more challenging is that the more extreme members of each audience will seize on the aspects they find most objectionable rather than look for areas of compatibility. This has long been a problem, but web 2.0 exacerbates it, since one blogger in an audience of hundreds can characterize a discussion for thousands of his compatriots back home.
In other words, web 2.0 has as much or more capacity to puncture and disassemble public diplomacy messages as it does to deliver them. The shorter the attention spans media, the more likely this is to be the case. Twitter with its 140 character limit is a good example. We have used Twitter successfully to send short messages and a give a “heads up” about bigger things, but it doesn’t easily lend itself to any proactive public affairs task beyond notices and reporting the equivalent of scores or stock averages. One the other hand, 140 characters is plenty of space for a slogan or attack. BTW – the last two sentences of the paragraph above had 327 characters counting spaces. These two directly above are 140 characters – exactly the right size for a tweet. Good luck with deep explanations.
So what do we do?
We look beyond or through the technology to our purpose. You cannot answer the how question until you have address they why question. Communication and relationship building is our goal. Rather than be beguiled or intimidated by technology, we simply need to keep our focus on the goal and use whatever technological tools are most appropriate. But we do need to acknowledge that changing technologies have changed the game.
Common themes not unified messages
There is much talk in public affairs about having a unified message. The new technologies, with all the links and leaks they entail in the information net, mean we can no longer have one unified centrally crafted message. We can have themes and goals that are interpreted and alerted by the individuals on the ground and closest to the challenges. We will, however, need to tolerate significant local variations on the themes and welcome the ambiguity of message delivery.
Delivering variations on the themes is much more labor intensive than cranking out a single message because rather than one voice speaking to millions (on the model of the national television program) we will have many voices speaking to thousands or maybe even to hundreds and not only varying the theme to suit particular audiences, but also responding to them and quickly responsive to changes in the environment. It is important that the theme be consistent but the delivery is protean. It requires more of a robust process than a comprehensive plan.
Set the Proper Goals for Each Situation
There are many degrees of distinction between active opposition and enthusiastic support. Americans are particularly afflicted by the desire to be loved in the world, but all that is often required is compliance or even indifference. Although outright opposition constrains our policy options, America’s image in the world has no discernible impact on the sale of U.S. goods or the acceptance of U.S. cultural products. Much of the sound and fury of anti-American prejudice signifies nothing or not very much. The fragmentation of media on the web means that those who dislike us will always have an outlet for their vitriol and they will probably be among those yelping the loudest. The majority may not have a strong opinion on a particular issue. They may voice support for our opponents, but take no steps to provide anything practical.
Military action, which by its very nature is coercive, will almost never be popular and any exercise of power, which inevitably means choosing among priorities, will annoy somebody. Since you usually get less credit for the good things you do than blame for the bad, any use of power will probably create more perceived losers than winners. (The world’s superpower is always on the hot seat. President Clinton gets blamed for not sending troops to Rwanda; President Bush is excoriated for sending troops to Iraq.) Lack of practical support for extremism and neutrality or even indifference toward our policies among the mass of a country’s people may be sufficient to accomplish our purposes. Often neutralizing or discrediting opposition will be the most appropriate tact, and Internet is well suited to this task. We should consider this on a case-by-case basis, rather than compromise practical goals by pursuing the chimera of seeking full throated outright approval.
All of the above
Using technology to communicate will be an all of the above proposition, with a cocktail of technologies usually more appropriate than reliance on any one. We will never find the Holy Grail or silver bullet of communications technology and we will never again have anything comparable to the nationwide television network where everybody is watching at the same time. The ability to reach the whole nation was a historical anomaly. Throughout most of history and in the future, the communication environment was and will be fractured. It is only because we all grew up in that unusually homogeneous media environment that we think of it as normal in any way.
The right tools
We cannot prescribe the particular technological tools for any public affairs task until we have assessed the task and the environment. What we should be looking for is synergy among the tools. For example, a live speaker is very compelling but not particularly memorable, while an internet page has the built in memory (you can refer back to it) but is unlikely to be compelling. Twitter can announce the availability of some piece of information or some event, but it cannot explain the nuances. An event might be very informative, but nobody comes unless they can be told and reminded. Obviously a combination of technologies works best, changing them to adapt to circumstances. BTW – technology is not only high tech or electronic. A technology is merely a way of doing something. A personal meeting is a kind of technology. Sometime the thousands year old technology is the way to go. We seek the right MIX of technologies, not the right ONE technology. There is no silver bullet or Holy Grail of communications. It is easy to be beguiled by the new or the latest big thing, but technology is not communication and the medium is not the message. It is only the method.
Other information is based on personal interviews with those doing public diplomacy as well as extensive personal experience working with USG webpages and blogs.
These might be a little boring and unorganized. My new job requires me to understand better how information is transmitted and received, especially via the new media. I am working this out by writing it. I would appreciate any comments from anybody who wants to read through.
A Few Good Men
The audience is meant to side with the Tom Cruise character when the Jack Nicholson character tells him that he can’t handle the raw truth. Cruise has cleverly manipulated Nicholson into incriminating himself on the witness stand. Nicholson doesn’t get it. He doesn’t like cruise; he see him as a pretty-boy w/o the experience, temperament or character to face the hard facts of life – the Truth with a capital T. The audience sides with Cruise. The court sides with Cruise. Justice sides with Cruise. But Nicholson told the truth. Or was it just a truth.
The use of the definite or the indefinite article makes a big difference. “A” truth (with the indefinite article) is different from “the” truth (with the definite article) and different from truth expressed with no article at all.* How different would it have been if Nicholson had shouted, “You can’t handle truth!” or “You can’t handle a truth!”
Thinking about a courtroom drama is appropriate when considering information on the Internet or in the new media. How useful is “raw truth?” How can we differentiate THE truth from a truth or truth? Has Steven Colbert’s truthiness replaced truth? Do we care if it has?
Eyewitness Not so Good
We overvalue eyewitness testimony and are improperly influenced by how much certainty and passion people express in defending their testimony. In the courtroom drama, we give a lot more credibility to the guy who says that he is certain. He may indeed be telling a truth, but he may also be wrong. A lot of things influence our memories and perceptions. There are things I believed to be true based on personal experience that have turned out to be objectively false. (I read a good book re called Witness for the Defense re which I recommend, but anybody who keeps a journal knows how memory can change.)
Failure of Memory
The key concept is change, not fade. The false analogy is that memory is like a book or a movie. We think that with time some things are lost, but the fundamental integrity of the information is sound. In fact, memory is living and reactive. It constantly reorders facts and perceptions to integrate new information. This is learning and is a good thing, but it changes memory. We usually don’t know this has happened and we are rarely put to the test. We all know that people’s honest recollections of events differ. We are less accepting of the fact that our own honest recollection of facts differs over time.
Memories change. That is why perjury is such a difficult concept and the concept of repressed memory led to such abuse and injustice. It is a virtual certainty that if you were asked under oath to describe a situation that happened six or eight months ago, you would be untruthful about some, or many, of the details. That is assuming that you are trying to be 100% honest. The irony is that some of the things you are most certain about & the things you felt most passionate about would be the ones that were the most wrong. Passion clouds judgment and alters memory. It is a truth; it is your truth, but it is not THE truth anymore.
When I stared to write this, I was thinking about the concept of truth on the Internet and in the new media. My digressions above were necessary because the Internet is a sort of collective memory and it is subject to a lot of the same risks and pattern mistakes as individuals. But it has the added factor of group activity and the magnification that technology offers.
The Myth of the Unfiltered Truth
Internet provides first-person immediacy with all the benefits and traps that entails. First-person accounts appeal to passion. Passion is a big part of humanity, but passion often destroys logic and makes it difficult to see the big picture. There is an old saying that if you make all your decisions with your heart, you will end up with heart disease. Passion tends to lead either to inappropriate action or just as often no effective action at all. First-person accounts are always incomplete.
Listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Everybody knows the story that he was deaf when he wrote it and he couldn’t physically hear the music that has evoked so much passion in listeners for generations since. Beethoven didn’t need to hear the music because he understood the concept and the context. He understood the big picture and could orchestrate it in a symphony. Now imagine you get to hear the oboe player and nobody else. What kind of impression do you have? Let’s expand your world. You “have access” to all the musicians. What are the chances that you can assemble them all into anything resembling the symphony? Well can you – maestro?
I know this from my experience in Iraq. I reported what I saw and heard, but I didn’t always have the context. I was surprised to see how my information, aggregated with others, produced a coherent big picture that was completely beyond, and sometimes ostensibly contradictory to, my on-the-spot perceptions.
Self Organizing Systems & Their Discontents
A lot of people put their faith in the self-organizing ability of the Internet. I have reasonable faith in things like Wikipedia to develop useful truth, although we clearly need to have a “trust but verify” attitude. But most of the Internet is not truly self organizing or truth seeking. Many of the participants on the Internet have no commitment to truth at all. In fact, much of the information on the Internet is put there by people actively spreading their biased viewpoints, if not actual disinformation and propaganda. Many contributors and webpages are well financed by governments, pressure organizations and wealthy individuals.
Internet is easily manipulated by trumped up facts and passions and it is getting worse. YouTube posting can provide compelling pictures and sound that are as manipulative as Nazi or Soviet propaganda shorts. Your intuition tells you to believe the evidence of your own eyes, but it is too easy to forget that the maker of the video controls all the angles, timing and perspectives your eyes are delivering.
The Golden Age That Never Was
Of course, speaking of Nazi & Soviet propaganda, there was really no golden age of truth. The new media doesn’t introduce more manipulation; it just sort of democratizes it. This probably means that most people have a better chance of finding the truth about things that concern them. It is simultaneously easier to pass lies off in the short term and harder to make them stick in the long term. The mass lies of propaganda past are probably made untenable by the Internet. On the other hand, the smaller lies will probably more persistent. “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,” said Abraham Lincoln. The Internet doesn’t change the general categories, but it does change distribution. Internet makes it much harder to fool all of the people even some of the time, but it makes it easier to fool some of the people all of the time. More disturbingly, Internet facilitates the aggregation of those people fooled all of the time. A few isolated weirdos are just curiosities. If enough of them find each other, they may form enough of a mass to become a real menace. Like the embers of a dying campfire, if you spread them out they all burn out, but if you gather them together you can have a conflagration on your hands. Internet makes this much easier.
As I wrote in the first paragraph, I am just working through these ideas. I am done doing that for now, but I really need to get this clear in my mind so that I can do a good job in my new job.
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*BTW while English makes these distinctions, many languages do not. Scandinavian languages stick the direct article on the ends of words with a pattern I never quite understood. Slavic languages don’t have articles (direct or indirect) at all. Arabic has only direct articles. These languages find different ways to make the distinctions I am talking about above, but I wonder sometimes how the ability to easily express certain concepts affects people’s perceptions of those concepts. Linguists and anthropologists have been on this case for many years. They seem to have discovered many truths, but not THE truth, although many particular experts will tell you that he has indeed discovered and explained the ultimate reality.
When I was in college, I read and liked a book called Language, Thought and Reality. This book explained the Whorf hypothesis about language. It made a lot of sense to me. My anthropology professor told me it was wrong and implied that I would get a bad grade if I didn’t agree with him.
That was back in the 1970s. A lot of things we learned in the 1970s, especially in anthropology and sociology, was crap. Those were proto-PC days. Most social scientist still believed some variation of the “blank slate” in those days and the very idea that human potential was limited or partially determined by structures or innate tendencies offended them viscerally. Noam Chomsky, despite his general pernicious misunderstanding of the world and politics is a good linguist, argued persuasively against the Whorf hypothesis. We have come a long way since then and, although the PC crowd still filters the public interface, the inquiry has become more of a science and the truth much more nuanced. The most recent good book on this subject, IMO, is Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought.
It reminds me of that old horror movie where the babysitter calls the cops to ask for help with a stalker who has been making threatening calls. When they manage to trace the call, however, the find out that it is coming from inside her house.
My search for the root problem of America’s image abroad has brought me right back home. That some of the most scurrilous attacks on our values & institutions come from within our country will come as no surprise to anybody who has seen a Michael Moore movie. Yesterday night I was watching “American Dad” with the boys. It is simply horrible. This episode could have been funded by Al Qaida. It portrayed American officials as torturers who liked to do it so much that they would sponsor a telethon to raise funds to continue it. Unfortunately, this is not an anomaly. Much of the Sunday night lineup is like that. “American Dad” is preceded by “Family Guy.” This one has some very funny vignettes, which are the Trojan horses that get the propaganda through the gates, but the overall theme is that the average American “family man” is a selfish, stupid, pervert who thinks only in terms of his own short term gain, short term because he is too dumb to plan much beyond tomorrow anyway.
People accuse me of being an old crank when I complain about these things. Some even imply that I am against free speech. This is unfair. Free speech is useful because it allows us all to judge the good from the bad. Free speech means that people have the right to voice their opinions, whether they are reasonable or stupid. But not all speech is equal. We all have the duty to assess the contentions of others. I would not censor those things I mention above, but I do think intelligent people have to point out how stupid, misguided and harmful they are. It is not just good fun and it is not just satire. These are consistently hateful and misguided attacks. Just because we have to tolerate it doesn’t mean we have to like it or support it.
People usually claim more sophistication than they manifest. Most don’t pay attention to the news and few people in the world could pass even a simple multiple choice test about American foreign policy. American cultural products, however, sell well overseas. We export a lot of good quality material. But it comes with a heavy leavening of the sort of crap that coats our television sets so many nights and what do you think gets the higher ratings? It is not hard to understand why a lot of people worldwide would dislike us if their media images of ordinary Americans come from “American Dad,” “Desperate Housewives” & reruns of “Jerry Springer.” We Americans presumably have real world comparisons to counteract the media images, yet we still harbor prejudices about Americans from different places. What about people who don’t know Americans in person?
Perception is reality.
Imagine if you watched a television series made by the cultural elite of another country that consistently portrayed their leaders as horribly corrupt, bigoted & vicious, and their ordinary people as stupid, shallow and dishonest. Imagine if all the false and pejorative stereotypes you had heard were confirmed by their own media … repeatedly. What would you think? Defenders of this trash say that you would be really impressed that our hypothetical foreign friends were so open that they welcomed this kind of attack on themselves. Would you really? Does holding the tolerant high ground make you immune from real world ridicule? Or does it just invite offense as the next insult tops the previous? If your spouse ridiculed you and pointed out all your faults in front of your friends every time you went out, would that improve the reputation of your family? The best you could get is someone who calls down a plague on both of you.
It is like the story of the drunk who smashes into his wife’s car parked in the driveway and comforts himself with the idea that the other car is as wrecked as his.
A good test of fairness, BTW, is substitution. Watch one of these “satires” and substitute for the American any other nationality, ethnic group or affiliation. How long would an Arab “Family Guy” stay on the air? Is it still funny or is it just plain mean and bigoted?
Picture below is from the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City.
I stay out of specific politics on this blog, but now that both candidates have come down to nuanced but similar policies of staying in Iraq as long (or as short) as the need exists, I feel a little freer to ask what the hell is wrong with the American media?
During the bad days in Iraq, not long ago, they were writing the American obituary. They had no trouble finding and quoting experts telling why we couldn’t win in this sort of environment. Now they cannot seem even to notice success. Isn’t that an extraordinary story? In the heart of the Middle East, on a battlefield chosen by Al Qaeda as their key front for their war against civilization, in a place where they proclaimed the beginning of their new caliphate we have driven them to virtual extinction. As they cower in their spider holes, fearing the arrival of our Marines or our Iraqi allies, their frustration is palpable. This was supposed to be their victory, not ours. They thought they had the weight of events on their side; they were mistaken. Why is this not story worthy of investigation and exposition by our esteemed journalists?
My experience with journalists informs me that many, perhaps most, work from their existing models and do not actively seek out information that disconfirms them. They have a narrative that is generally accepted by other people in the media and that tends to constrain their perceptions. This is not something limited to journalists, but they are particularly susceptible precisely because they think they are not.
The narrative that their conventional wisdom accepted was that Iraq was mostly lost and that we were in a holding pattern heading for a long term failure and withdrawal. They fixed the various data points around their narrative and the stories more or less made sense back in 2006. This narrative is now unraveling but the MSM has yet to figure out a new one to replace it. It is not a conspiracy, but it is a syndrome, a kind of a group-think. It will take a lot of changed facts and a couple of courageous leading journalists to break out. We have the changed facts on the ground; what we need now is the courage.
BTW – I was reading one couragous journalist today. People who have been here recently know a lot more. Stay away from those pundits and bloggers who have been to Iraq years ago … or never.
