I rhink that the crucial thing that is being left out of a lot of the discussion, including the blogs , is the distinction between a medium and a message. Contra McLuhan, the medium is not the message (anyway, the title of the book was, actually, The Medium is the Massage - no, it's not a joke ), but it does influence the interpretaton of the signal - it "massages" it .
CNO, EW, and, to a lesser degree, Media Affairs are, to my mind, all medium based knowledge groups. PA, CA and PSYOPS are more "full spectrum" (of media) based groups. And, while we're at it, standard TTP's for COIN are genre based as well; at least in the sense of message genre.
All of this is why I think that IO, as a hierarchically superior taxon, needs to develop a theory and, perhaps more importantly, a professional language,m that cross all of these areas. Doesn't mean that you can't, or shouldn't, have specialists in each area; I'm just more interested in seeing that they are all capable of talking to each other and have a (fairly) unified model of what effects could / should be produced.
Marc
ps. Option C, definitely!
Bookmarks