PNM & 4GW: PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE AND THE MEDIA ENVIRONMENT IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION [ UPDATED]

Earlier this week, on his blog, Dr. Barnett commented on 4GW theory and propaganda:

“We are told by Fourth Generation Warfare adherents that what is real and what is perceived are two different things, with the latter almost always trumping the former’s impact on the 4GW battlefield. Much as with cyberwar, however, 4GW’s theory of conflict often seems overwhelmed by the sheer mass of stuff that goes on accidentally in the global environment, such as the recent journalistic snafu by Newsweek.

Point being: as globalization grows and complexity takes root over more and more of the planet, the ability of any 4GW-waging warrior to have his attacks rise above the level of “white noise” in the system gets harder and harder. “

Critt Jarvis suggested to me and a few others that this topic bears further examination and I agree. Information and perception are critical aspects of connectivity and the media has become a dynamic feedback loop that helps shapes how people, individually and collectively, will frame and interpret events. This of course depends on what information succeeds in capturing their attention. Those of us in the Core live not only in the era of ” White Noise” but also in the age of Mass Distraction.

Some background to consider:

First, while we face an ever increasing onrush of information the format by which ” news” content is sorted before we receive remains primarily “Pulitzerian”, regardless of the source. That is to say in the journalistic ” what, where, who, why, when – lead paragraph ” frame invented by the 19th century newspaper titan Joseph Pulitzer, whose method was swiftly copied by all his rivals and later adopted by both Radio and Television news broadcasters essentially unchanged. It is so ubiquitous a method of organizing information that its implications are virtually invisible. It is ironic, but al Jazeera is an unwitting conduit of Westernization. Their broadcast content may be critical of America and sympathetic to Islamism but the broadcast format itself is teaching their Arab audience to process information like Westerners. The medium here, as McLuhan wrote, is the message. No indigenous Arab or Chinese or Indian or other cultural-epistemological model of news information processing will be likely to develop because the triumph of the Pulitzerian frame has preempted such an evolution.

Secondly, the twentieth century was an era of top-down, centralized, communications. In free press America, until the 1990’s, our access to information was effectively determined by a narrow Oligopoly of the broadcast Networks and the New York Times which set a tone of corporate liberalism for the media. While the occasional cranky voice might appear on the Right (Col. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, William Loeb’s Manchester-Union Leader) or Left (The Village Voice, The Nation) it was a fairly monotonous political consensus. The totalitarian states, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, the USSR, Red China took message control to the nth degree – so much so that Russians and Germans became more adept at reading what information was made conspicuous by its absence ( or finely graded nuance) in the state media organs than by what was actually published.

The overall effect was that globally, societies operated ” on message” to a relatively low ratio of ” White Noise”; public attention was directed to subjects and opinions within a set of defined societal parameters and then to only a few subjects at a given time.

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