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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

SYNCHRONIZING INFORMATION: THE IMPORTANCE OF NEW MEDIA IN CONFLICT
MAR 6, 2008 - 4:24PM PDT
Posted by Matt Armstrong

The effectiveness of information campaigns today will more often dictate a victory than how well bullets and bombs are put on a target. Putting information on target is more important when dealing with an asymmetric adversary that cannot – and does not need to – match the military or economic power of the United States and her allies. Insurgents and terrorists increasingly leverage New Media to shape perceptions around the globe to be attractive to some and intimidating to others. New Media collapses traditional concepts of time and space as information moves around the world in an instant. Unlike traditional media, search engines and the web in general, enable information, factual or not, to be quickly and easily accessed long after it was created. The result is a shift in the purpose of physical engagement to increasingly incorporate the information effect of words and deeds. Thus, the purpose of improvised explosive devices, for example, is not to kill or maim Americans but to replay images of David sticking it to Goliath. The U.S. military is actively and aggressively revising its role in shaping its own narrative in cyberspace, but this is falling short. While the U.S. is finally coming to grips with the centrality of information and perceptions, it remains confused as to how to use information effectively. American responses seem to stem from the belief that the message and the messenger we are countering are the same without regard for the target audience, intent, or how the message fits into a larger narrative, which perhaps mirrors our own perception of information as propaganda. The link between the propaganda of deeds and the propaganda of words is very real and is increasingly established not in traditional media but online through instant and persistent media that reaches a growing audience. The U.S. needs to master this link in real time in order to win the information war and ultimately the physical one. The American Firewall Bifurcating the means to inform and counter adversarial messages challenges our effectiveness in telling our story. The uniquely American firewall between conversations with overseas audiences and domestic audiences limits our ability to create a discourse with foes and their base, allies, "swing-voters," and the domestic public. The result is a foreign policy shaped more through unanswered adversarial narratives rather than American narratives. This fear of being overheard in America has done more to neuter U.S. responses and to encourage the creation of new information functions than anything else. The American response has been to allow the development of an information architecture that cares more about how a broadcast, flyer, or message will play in Iowa than in the primary center of gravity of the fight: the minds of the support base of our adversary. In 2008, the Defense Department (DoD) will look into how the National Security Act of 1947 should be modified to adapt to 21st Century conflict. In February, the Defense Sciences Board on Strategic Communication released its report. While the DoD-sponsored report has…... FULL TEXT
 
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