Everything You Know About Counterinsurgency History Is (possibly) Wrong!

[marct]

OK, I can dig that, so the people make choices and act based on the information to hand. More information, more action. Makes sense, but how true is it today relatively?

It's really interesting - at least to me - how we react to changes in information systems. Let me pull that apart, 'cause otherwise I'll be using way too much academic shorthand....

Basically, I view information as a "difference that makes a difference" (Gregory Bateson's influence there....). All information is perceived via some form of sensory processing, which is inherently a communications loop - raw input comes from somewhere "out there", gets processed, decoded, processed against existing "meaning templates" for "difference" (amongst other things) and then stored/referenced against linguistic taxonomies. Where the technologies come into play, and where I see them as having a significant causal effect, is in the coding / decoding area, storage, and secondary communication.

A Few books to 1,000's of Books is a very great change - even with literacy at below 1%. No Radio to radio, is a big change, but less profound than books. Same for telephones. Has the Internet really changed human behaviour and politics in a decisive and profound way, as seen with books? - and books only really took off once literacy took hold.

Hmmm, let's think about this for a bit. When we look at early "literate" societies, say pre-1400, one of the things that becomes pretty clear is that the requirements for encoding / decoding (readin' and writin' in this case ), were originally really, REALLY, complex. It took about a decade to teach someone how to read and write in cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, traditional Chinese pictograms, etc. One of the effects of this, and it was probably partly due to the fact that most writing systems were developed in "temples", was that "writing" was viewed as "sacred" - consider the Hebrew alphabet for one example.

Even later on, say during the first centuiry ce or so, most "writing" was mean to be spoken (this, BTW, has been forgotten by a lot of people; BTW, Harris' Ancient Literacy is great for a systematic analysis of this situation after the development of alphabetic writing). Books didn't really take off until after the development of the Gutenburg press which allowed for the cheap, rapid production of large print runs. Literacy, at least in the sense we now use the term, didn't really take off until roughly the same time, but not because of books - it was because of broadsheets (sort of a 16th century version of the tabloid press). The two, books and literacy, didn't really tie together at the level of general, popular culture, until the development of both cheap books and cheap education systems.

I don't know if it's possible to quantify differences in levels of effect of mass publications and the radio. One point I'll note is that the process of decoding radio is much simpler that learning to read - a point well know to and used by the Taliban. You don't need a cheap education system in order to deploy radio while still communicating with large numbers of people. Afterall, providing people with cheap transitor radios is a lot less expensive than setting up an education system!

One other key difference between the two is that with radio, there really isn't much of a storage mechanism beyong, say, recorders. The "messages" are immediate, and it is really quite challenging to go back and critically examine those messages at a later date; something that is simple with books. This means that whatever group controls the broadcasting "centre" can control the message.

Has the 'net changed the nature of politics? I don't know - I could argue both sides of the question. Honestly, i don't think we have enough data yet to say that it has or hasn't. Let me toss out a few exemplars in the afirmative.

Are you familiar with the United Breaks Guitars case (story, 1st video, follow up)? The use of 'net 2.0 technologies forced a major corporation to give in to a single person. In another example, less well know and not covered on CNN , Rogers cablevision decided that they were not going to carry WPBS from Watertown NY in Ottawa any longer. A facebook group was setup to oppose this decision, which they took without consultation. Rogers has, as a result of that and other efforts, now reversed themselves.

Where I see the 'net effecting our politics is in the realm of temporal immediacy. Basically, I suspect that the frequency distribution of indiviual efforts and collective action is conditioning our political actors (corporations, politicians, etc.) to react quickly to popular groundswells and embarassment. That's at a minimun.

I think that we could also look at how is has and is changing the geographical scope of warfare. For example, fairly cheap and sophisticated use of 'net 2.0 technologies enhance the probability of homegrown terrorism both by indoctrination (those interpretive templates i was mentioning earlier) and by providing do it yourself methodologies. Are these having a political effect? Yup - we can see it in the creation of DHS and in recent suggestions that Americans should be taught to spy on each other.

Having said all that, my thinking has been profoundly and usefully effected by SWJ. I actually think 18 months here equates to 5 years on intense study in terms of getting from where I was to where I am, but I may be emotively overstating the case!

LOL - definitely!!!!!