Social Media and the Counterinsurgent
While the senior leadership of the military's ambivalent attitude to blogs and bandwidth-hogging sites is well known, most of the young rank and file tend to mirror the US population in their internet activity.
In Wikinomics, the authors cite the example of FBI field agents using a first person shooter MMOG ( massive multiplayer online game) platform to "talk shop" as they game and get around cumbersome, dilatory, official, FBI channels to share information on cases that they are working. I'm curious as to the extent to which troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been availing themselves of social media apps for reasons other than personal amusement.
Strategic Communication, Public Affairs, and who needs to know what when
I'd like feedback on a study we at OSD New Media had done through the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at NDU. Completed in May, the New Media and Strategic Communication study was to look at the issues in the news media industry and help us identify where we, as an organization, need to adapt to the transformation. Thoughts? Ideas? Comments?
Feedback - do not start from this?
The paper is rather dense reading on a VDU and the layout needs to be improved.
I dislike the emphasis on the DoD being at the centre of strategic communications etc. Yes, relevant in combat zones like Afghanistan, not in Sub-Saharan Africa for example. What the USA has to communicate must come from clearly identifiable civilian sources, not the military.
The focus appears to be on the developed world, with it's electronic media access and variety of sources. In the less developed world internet access is the exception; radio plays a far more important role - cue the BBC World Service.
After 7/7 in London the Metropolitan Police (MPS) explained at a seminar that although they had excellent contacts with the mainstream media (of all types) they had next to no contact with two hundred plus non-English speaking radio outlets broadcasting in London. Reaching them would take time and a willingness to accept what MPS wanted to communicate. Curiously the multi-lingual press were not covered and in the UK their reporting / editorials appear rarely to reach outside their readership.
What media do non-American audiences use? I cannot recall seeing a mention of that, although it could have been in the footnotes.
IMHO designing a communication strategy without clearly stating that is doomed to fail.
Accepting a strategy is selected how will non-government US-based / US-owned media react? There will be no common "song sheet", rather I suspect the reverse - except in times of crisis.
What is the message the strategy seeks to deliver? That the USA is a good neighbour / friend and the worst enemy you can ever wish for once awakened?
In summary, I would not start this uphill fight based on this document.
I wholeheartedly agree with David
on my first reading; very bad format, over long, redundancy, developed world centric, inadequate attention to AM radio, etc. etc. DoD should only be involved at the operational and tactical level and then only lightly. It does not really address interface or dealing with a potentially hostile US media presence who will challenge anything done by the government just so they can say they did...
That said, however, like Sam, I'm still mulling.
How Insurgents Shape the Media Landscape
Insurgency Research Group, 24 Sep 08: How Insurgents Shape the Media Landscape
Quote:
Last week the Insurgency Research Group at KCL held a workshop on How Insurgents Shape the Media Landscape. The theme of the workshop was as follows:
The so-called Age of Terror, often said to have begun in 1968, changed irrevocably with the end of the Cold War. Where formerly news access had been sought by insurgents eager to draw global attention to their cause and struggles, the choice of what to highlight and where to focus journalistic coverage remained with news organisations. When ‘hot’ stories were supplanted by breaking news in fresh locations, public interest would inevitably shift with the departing reporters. However by the turn of the 1990s free market expansion accompanied the demise of bipolar ideological politics. At the same time information and communications technologies proliferated, offering terrorists low-cost, efficient ways of recording and disseminating their own message. An explosion in global satellite television and the consumer internet expanded the reach and penetration of groups no longer solely interested in conventional state overthrow. Instead, these aspire to transnational ideological and religious transformation by appealing to diasporas scattered around the world. Today a new wave of jihadi insurgent increasingly controls its own publicity agenda through instant connectivity of ‘battlefield’ imagery via internet, mobile telephony, and television satellite uplinks. Has the balance finally shifted away from news editors in favour of the insurgent? As time-frames between event and broadcast/publication shrink, are news organisations now wrong-footed by insurgent commanders who create and seek to shape the story? Are we in fact witnessing a revolution in the media landscape?
Daniel Bennett (a PhD student in the department who blogs at From the Frontline) has posted a 2 part report: How Insurgents Shape the Media Landscape, Part 1 and Part 2.