tag archive: social media

February 3, 2012

Behavioral Economics Go to War

By . Filed Under: Books & Films, Decision making, Intercultural Communication, International Politics, Narrative Research, National Security, Politics and Policy, Strategic Leadership, War and Violent Conflict.

Review of Behavioural Conflict, Why Understanding People and their Motivations Will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict, by Andrew Mackey and Steve Tatham

I cannot think of any books about warfare’s future that come across as hard-hitting, full of actionable pragmatism, and deeply humane all at the same time. But Behavioral Conflict: Why Understanding People and their Motivations will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict is all three. The authors, both career members of the British military, Major General Andres Mackey (Ret) and Royal Navy Commander Steve Tatham (who I count as a friend, having met him in Ankara a few years ago), make their case by drawing on a combination of their own experience, case studies and close analysis of how communication actually factors in war.

Hard-hitting and pragmatic: Mackey and Tatham are precise and lucid about what they mean by “behavior” and how to make use of it to gain advantage in conflict. They, and behavioral psychologist Lee Rowland, who adds a chapter on the science of influence, are not putting forth any of the following: A call for greater “cultural awareness,” a mushy program about how to change others’ attitudes, or a repeat of the last decade’s focus on consumer marketing as the key to public diplomacy. They offer instead this thesis based on a simple chain of claims:

  • The world of human motivation and perception is inevitably complex.
  • It is more important to try to shape behavior than it is to change people’s attitudes.
  • Behavior shaping begins with a discrete grasp of the circumstances under which people already behave in ways that are desirable, and extends to efforts to replicate those or similar circumstances. Continue reading

Posted in: Books & Films, Decision making, Intercultural Communication, International Politics, Narrative Research, National Security, Politics and Policy, Strategic Leadership, War and Violent Conflict Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
December 28, 2011

2011: Year of the Protest Narrative

By . Filed Under: Intercultural Communication, International Politics, Middle East, Politics and Policy, Popular Culture.

E.M. Forster famously distinguished events that are yoked only by their temporal order from those that we would consider a narrative (which he called “plot”), in which events are causally linked, with this pithy comparison:

1. The King died and then the Queen died (2 events tied only by temporal order)

2. The King died and then the Queen died of grief (the second event is caused by the first)

I’ve had this distinction on my mind as year-end wrap-ups circulate in the media.

photographer: David Shankbone

Protestors on Wall Street, September 30, 2011

The global scope of economic crisis and dramatic protests give commentators a lot of latitude to tell the story of this year in a variety of ways. Did Mohamed Bouazizi’s galvanizing protest by fire, and the subsequent fall of the Tunisian government cause Egyptian protests? And did these, in some way cause Occupy Wall Street? Do the protests in Chile, Tel Aviv and Russia have anything to do with each other, or with others? Continue reading

Posted in: Intercultural Communication, International Politics, Middle East, Politics and Policy, Popular Culture Tags: , , , ,
August 10, 2011

Verifying Sources in the Era of Amateur Video

By . Filed Under: International Politics, Middle East, News and Journalism, Political Analysis, War and Violent Conflict.

The competing narrative continuing to unfold about the ongoing violence in Syria reflect how completely amateur video has now transformed our understanding of what “news” is. Activists’ homemade videos have shattered the idea that the Syrian government’s claim to be restoring “stability” to towns under attack from “armed terrorists” can be taken at face value.

Yet, amateur videos cannot be verified easily, and for that reason also cannot be taken at face value. In order to try to tell the “whole” story, Reuters, CNN and other mainstream sources seem to be frequently reduced to a version of stuttering about how, although they are showing citizen footage, they can’t vouch for it’s accuracy. The New Yorker, commenting on an August 5th video below, notes that, “Like all of the amateur videos coming out of Syria, where the foreign press has been banned, this footage has not been independently verified.”

Other journalists, like Dissected News founder James Miller, are rewriting the terms of journalistic objectivity to try to make sense of, and verify, amateur video claims. Like traditional journalism, this new form requires a zealous desire get the story right and the passion-and knowledge of context-to uncover truth. But it also requires the talents of a film critic—the ability to read images, to interrogate pictures for what they reveal and conceal, and to explore how they are constructed.

As it turns out, a picture is not worth a thousand words at all. A picture is just like words – it may tell the truth, it may deceive, but it is never the transparent conduit to fact we once thought it was. It is up to good journalists to decipher them, and learn to read them as they do sources’ statements: as complex, layered signals that say as much about the worldview of the people making them, as they do about events at hand.

It’s an important task, as Miller points out:

… Some news agencies have occasionally been duped by propaganda promoted by individual “activists”, but those observers who are more tuned in, after months of experience, to the claims of the activists, now know which individuals or groups produce credible information, and they know when to be extra-skeptical about reports. However, many of these claims are reliable, and the media who drop in on the Syria story need to pay attention to the journalists who are working hard to separate the “good” reports from the “bad”. Because in Syria — to take a position — one side is lying, one side is mostly truthful, and thousands of lives are in the balance of the two.

Posted in: International Politics, Middle East, News and Journalism, Political Analysis, War and Violent Conflict Tags: , , , , ,
June 7, 2011

Egypt Uprising Narrative as Youth, New Media Driven: Wrong

By . Filed Under: Intercultural Communication, International Politics, Middle East, Political Analysis, Politics and Policy, War and Violent Conflict.

Ala' 'Abd al Fatah (image courtesy of Wikimedia and Manalaa.net under Creative Commons license)

NPR’s Michele Norris interviewed Egyptian blogger and software Ala’ ‘Abd Al Fattah on June 6 about his role and perceptions of the uprising in Egypt that brought down the Mubarak regime earlier this spring. Among Al Fattah’s insights: the narrative of events in Egypt as a primarily youth led and Internet driven and urban are incorrect. As he notes: “by that exclusion you also exclude a very big aspect of what it is about.”

NORRIS: You’re here in this country in part to describe what happened in Egypt. Are there things that happened there that people don’t well understand? Here, when there are large uprisings or large news events like this, a popular narrative takes hold and sometimes it’s correct and sometimes it’s not completely correct.

Mr. AL FATTAH: I think a lot of it is misunderstood and misrepresented in both internationally and even locally from the framing of this as an Internet-led revolution to a framing that it’s a youth revolution. All of that is based on the aspects of reality, but it excludes the majority of the people who participated in the revolution.

And by that exclusion, you also exclude a very big aspect of what it is about. And also, there’s a lot of focus on Tahrir while you had the majority of the revolution was happening outside of Cairo. And some of its most amazing stories were in - there were six towns that were completely autonomous after the third day of the uprising, and people had to manage the cities and had to organize themselves to keep the cities functioning. And that experience is amazing, and it’s not really being discussed.

Two important questions flow from al Fattah’s interesting observations. One is about what is left out of the popular narrative of the uprising as high tech and youth driven. And the second question is why? What is the function of the high tech narrative?

One kind of answer is supplied by Mona el-Ghobashy. Writing in Middle East Report earlier this spring, the Barnard political science professor outlines “the reality … that Egyptians had been practicing collective action for at least a decade” preceding the 2011 events, although their increasing political sophistication was repeatedly characterized as the effect of economic pain Egyptian officials. While social media and mobile phones enabled the synchronization of protests on January 25, it was this ‘invisible’ history that shaped a people capable of such effective demonstrations they toppled a police regime.

As for why the high tech, youth driven narrative holds such sway in Western media: To a degree it reflects a kind of vanity we hold about ourselves. In the United States, in particular, it is hard for us to imagine political sophistication in parts of the world we do not know well, or what it looks like. So we imagine revolutions in the image of ourselves we like best: as an eternally young (vis-a-vis Europe) country whose technologies have enabled and inspired the rest of the world. In one version of the Egyptian uprising, we see a satisfying reflection of the kind of revolution we would have liked to inspire.

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