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Matt Armstrong has a must-read analytical, IO piece up at CTLab Review:

New Media and Persuasion, Mobilization, and Facilitation

…New Media is more than 24/7 news cycles. It is the ability to create trusted peer relationships, or the appearance of, to create legitimacy of information as well as depth and breadth of acceptance. This can be done as traditional media or other new media outlets pick up on a bit of “news” for redistribution, giving the impression of validity as the sources go up from one to many, often in excess of the three needed to create a “fact.” It is easier to see you’re not alone in the New Media environment, something that was not possible with radios and film (unless you risked gathering as a group).

There are several defining characteristics of the new media environment. The obvious are hyperconnectivity, persistence of information, inexpensive reach, and dislocation with speaker and listener virtually close but geographically distant. New Media also democraticizes information in the sense that hierarchies are bypassed, permitting both direct access to policy and decision makers and the possibility of “15-minutes of fame” (if even only one minute or less) to everyone. Information can be created and consumed by everyone regardless of “eliteness,” CV, and at minimal cost to any party.

All true and well said. Matt however points to a seldom recognized but critical variable here:

To the insurgent and terrorist, New Media’s capacity to amplify and increase the velocity of an issue that is critical. They increasingly rely on the Internet’s ability to share multiple kinds of media quickly and persistently to permit retrieval across time zones around the world from computers or cell phones. The value is the ability to not just persuade an audience to support their action, but to mobilize their support and to facilitate their will to act on behalf of the group (or not to act on behalf of another group, such as the counterinsurgent).

Velocity is very important in many senses. An accelerating message tempo heightens the sense of crisis in the mind of the audience so long as it does not move so quickly as to slide into unfiltered “noise”. Control of velocity also permits the exploitation of “information lag” in slower moving hierarchies or audiences. Finally, this velocity is really “alinear”; the ability of new media tools to “mash-up” entirely unrelated events separated by time, distance and circumstance and synthesize them out of context permits the scoring of tactical propaganda victories.

Read all of Matt’s post here.

Picked this up on Socialmedian:

Broadcasting Brain – Hyperconnectivity shakes up six degrees of separation

Type 0 and 1 plus:

• Social media and Web 2.0 (social news, social bookmarking, and social networking)
• Microblogging, aggregators, lifestreaming, blog commenting
• Audio and video blogging
• Open IM clients (e.g. GTalk)
• Wireless connectivity

Communication advances have generally created faster and easier to use methods. In the pre-Internet era, nothing was faster than a phone call except for a face-to-face meeting (although travel time to arrange a face-to-face meeting was often prohibitive). Today we have a number of methods that allow virtually real-time interaction and more variations on them seem to appear on a regular basis.

Lots of visuals in this post. The author seems to be alluding to attention economy variables in Part II.

Anyone else having bizarre problems with the log in ?

On a related Web 2.0 note, I just joined Socialmedian where I have just created a news network for “COIN and 4GW” for any readers who are interested in signing up and helping me build that network. Socialmedian needs some time to crawl for potential feeds ( though several obviously come to mind).

This is hilarious. From David Axe writing for Danger Room:

Army Blogging = Horror Story Waiting to Happen?

….While some soldiers’ blogs may be questionable, they are the ones who understand the Internet and the power it has. … Turning loose senior Army officials who do not understand the impact of the Internet is a treasure trove for those who mean us harm!

I am a consultant to a major Army command that supplies soldiers with everything they need — and the command with one of the biggest IT footprints in the Army, if not the [entire] Department of Defense. I have seen first-hand what havoc those in positions of authority can wreak when they post on the Internet, or attempt to use technology without understanding it. Information on troop movements, supply levels, diagrams of weapons systems, chemical munitions, you name it, has been posted to the likes of YouTube and Flickr, and hosted on unprotected and unsecured .COMs. All in a misguided attempt to look “hip” or “cool” or “net savvy.” …

Give a senior service official a BlackBerry and I can guarantee he will transmit sensitive and sometimes classified information on it without thinking. He will use the Bluetooth headset and the built-in phone to talk about sensitive topics without a care in the world as to who is listening. I have lost count of how many times we have had to collect all of the BlackBerries we issue and purge them due to sensitive or classified information being sent on them. The BlackBerry is one of the greatest weapons system in the terrorists’ inventory, and we supply the bullets!

On Culberson-Capuano-Congressional Internet Rules:

Cybersecurity expert and blogfriend Gunnar Peterson of 1 Raindrop posted up:

Dems were for Web 2.0 before they were against it

Looks like a good diversion from normal critical DC wealth destroying activities, and baseball steroid and NFL team filming practices investigations

On the Nuclear Blog Tank:

Twitteramigo Fester at The Newshoggers has weighed in:

What’s the value of a few nukes…

Now if the warhead design is advanced enough to be reduced in size enough to be mounted on either ballistic missiles or on tactical aircraft and the national political leadership has confidence that those warheads can be delivered to their targets, the equation changes. A minimal counter-value deterrant doctrine could be developped.  However since there are very few weapons and very few delivery systems, this deterrant is still minimal or non-credible.  It has the thinnest patina of credibility if the delivery force is highly mobile, highly camoflaged and highly available.  However this force is still a very tempting pre-emptive strike target as only a few targets actually need to be hit to dramatically decrease the probability of a weapon getting airborne.  Also in this scenario, I am assuming some nations will have decent air defense and IRBM and SRBM defenses along the lines of PAC-3 or S-300 systems.  The small nuclear force is not a survivable second strike deterrant, nor even a particulary credible first strike counter-value pre-pre-emptive deterrant. 

On MMORPG:

Jamais Cascio at Open the Future:

Needed: Game Masters/Community Leaders for Superstruct

The Institute for the Future is hiring five community leaders/game masters for the upcoming future forecasting game Superstruct.

….Your job will be to lead a team of players (at minimum, hundreds of players; more likely, thousands of players) in creating a collaborative online forecast of the year 2019. The forecasting will take place through wikis, forums, videos, blogs, Twitter, online comics, photo sets, and whatever else our players use to depict and talk about the future. You’ll be reading and watching lots of player-created content, in addition to making your own content. You’ll give the players feedback, and you’ll synthesize and summarize the most interesting things in a short weekly story. You’ll be moderating forums and wikis dedicated to solving a particular future-problem. You’ll have to help your community manage a careful balance between “wow, the future might be scary” storytelling to “you know what, we might actually be able to solve this problem before it kills us all” optimism. Because the game isn’t just about imagining the future. It’s about inventing the future. This game is a kind of working prototype for the year 2019!