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DOES MY BLOG LOOK FLAT?

After much procrastination, I finally broke down and bought a copy of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat in the ” 2.0″ updated hardcover. I’m thinking of reading it back to back with Richard Florida’s The Flight of the Creative Class in order to have a “Flat vs. Spikey” comparison.

I have no strong opinion on Friedman. I found much to like in The Lexus and The Olive Tree though at times, I also found passages in the book to be gratingly irritating which is why I put off reading The World is Flat as long as I have. I have had some nice exchanges with Dr. Florida on his blog which means he is relatively accessible if I have questions while I am reading The Flight of the Creative Class – an advantage that will no doubt be absent with Friedman.

If anyone out there has read both books -or either book for that matter – feel free to chime in now. I’d like to hear your opinion.

BRIEFS AT DNI

Defense and The National Interest has two powerpoint briefs up that are worth your time to read and review:

The first is in file format ( thus no link) available for download by Dr. Chet Richards, provocatively entitled ” Neocons and neolibs: Their Edifice Has Crumbled“.

Richards work is always worth consideration for the combination of conceptual boldness and analytical precision he employs. For example, instead of running with 4GW a priori, Richards asks and then answers the question if we are facing a new form of warfare:

“We don’t know – still being worked out. To be useful, it has to be something other than state military vs. state military or insurgency vs. a state. Possibilities include state vs. state (nonmilitary) and state vs. nonstate (other than classical insurgency).”

Like most of his previous briefs, Dr. Richards wastes little time getting to the heart of the matter in COIN situations – political and moral legitimacy – a difficult intangible to directly establish with military operations, particularly without the larger non-military context in mind and well-understood. This powerpoint is also, again like Richards’ earlier pieces, deeply rooted in the ideas of Colonel John Boyd. Richards suggests the possibility of aligning with, rather than against, insurgencies as a better geopolitical bet. Though he does not mention it, this was a policy most recently used by the United States in the 1980’s against Soviet clients in the form of The Reagan Doctrine with varying degrees of success, but abandoned by the first President Bush in favor of a return to direct military intervention.

The second brief is by Colonel G.I. Wilson, one of the originators of 4GW theory, entitled “Terrorism:Psychology and Kinetics” (PDF). A short meta-analysis of literature on terrorist psychology, the most interesting sections deal with the terrorist profile and cognitive restructuring to dehumanize potential terrorist targets ( a process we also see, historically speaking, on a larger scale to psychologically prepare a society or movement to commit genocide). Wilson stresses the heterogeneous nature and rational functionality of terrorist groups, at least within the context of their own cognitively restructured terms.

This strikes me as likely, as I recall reading that researchers had previously determined from the 1970’s and 1980’s studies that ” professional” terrorist recruiters were at pains to screen out the obviously disturbed psychopaths and nut cases who might threaten group harmony.

More posts to come later today.

IC AND THE BLOGOSPHERE

Dr. Barnett used the widely circulated Belmont Club post ” The Blogosphere at War” to make some salient points about the intelligence community and the blogosphere:

“What Wretchard describes is essentially the competition the unclassified blogs are already offering the classified world of the intelligence community, which is why the IC is replicating this function from within (problem being, it’s still the same isolated, self-selecting community inside the IC, just armed with different conversation tools).”

As it has been put previously elsewhere regarding intellipedia, social networking software isn’t going to work if the users express great reluctance to be social. Blogs are only read if the blogger puts down something interesting in a post.However that doesn’t impugn the utility of the tools, just the users. Effectively using such “conversational tools” on a large scale will require significant cultural evolution -if not a revolution – within the IC, but it is heartening that there is at least, a start ( Haft of the Spear and Kent’s Imperative have written on the new tools more than once).

The psychological change could come with generational turnover but we really don’t have the luxury of adopting a leisurely pace in the middle of a war just so that so that USG graybeards who have their secretaries print out their email won’t be thrown into “futureshock”. The inch wide and mile deep vertical thinking style, reinforced by security compartmentalization is simply going to have to change in an era when a pediatrician and a multimillionaire construction company owner can launch a transnational insurgency.

“That opponents already actively target this realm says several things: 1) the blogosphere is more immediate and responsive than the IC to both pulsing from without and self-correction on bad analysis (the blogosphere is nothing if not cruelly self-critical,and gleefully so); 2) this gap is likely to widen, thus making the blogosphere the more natural target for information operations (which means we should meet this challenge symmetrically, and yes, the IC considers this option very seriously, but I suspect it will be terrible at it (and already is) for all the usual cultural reasons (it’s just not the personality they attract, not in the individual skills, but in the confident capacity to act en masse, although a generational shift within the IC may fix that with time); and 3) shaping hearts and minds goes both ways (an essential reality of 4GW).

Many in the U.S. national security establishment will want to go symmetrical on this score, but I think that would be a mistake and probably fruitless. I believe the blogosphere will evolve and grow in such way as to allow it to handle this field of perceptions battle quite nicely, making it within a decade or so to be more important than the IC itself in the Long War.”

The learning curve for the blogosphere will be less steep on this score when a few veteran experts on planting disinformation, orchestrating black propaganda and other elements of psychological warfare begin some blogs that critique the ongoing IO campaigns that swirl through the media the way that that former political consultants were hired as talking heads to deconstruct the tricks of election campaigns.

BAR-YAM’S SHIFTING HUB: BUT ARE MEMES A CRITICAL FACTOR IN NEW LINKS IN THE BLOGOSPHERE?

Sam Rose at The Cooperation Blog highlights a paper co-authored by complexity theorist Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam on “ highly connected hubs in social networks“:

“If you’re one of sixty million or so monthly visitors to social networking websites like MySpace or Facebook, you’ve probably noticed them— “network hubs,” people who have many more contacts than everybody else. While most users have a few or a few hundred connections, a tiny percentage of users have thousands upon thousands. Maybe, with a twinge of jealousy, you’ve wondered what makes them so special. Is it about coolness? Influence? Popularity?
How about “none of the above”? Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the New England Complex Systems Institute have discovered that social networks and the roles of the individuals that make them up vary drastically from day to day. Until now, scientists have largely thought of networks as fairly stable, changing only slightly over time–say, when someone makes a new contact.

“The most influential people are not the ones with the biggest address books,” says Bar-Yam. “What really matters is who is talking to whom. By looking only at who knows whom you lose a lot of important details about when people actually talk to each other.”

Rose goes on to add:

“This is interesting to compare with social media networks online, like the blogosphere, which do tend to see certain people or channels stabilize as a ‘hub” for a while. But then, social media is still not direct many-to-many communication. There is likely more communication going in one direction. This was discussed a few years ago, with Ross Mayfield’s “Ecosystem of Networks” model.

Whereas, in the blogosphere, if you do not have the time, or sources for information, you’ll likely opt to use a pretty much fixed set of blogs and websites of your choosing as channels of information. “

What causes new linking though between blogs with no prior connection ? I would suggest that memes play a central role in ” attracting” and later sustaining such connections. Sociability is certainly an important variable but I don’t think that is critical in making initial decisions to make contact in the first place. The blogosphere is a very detached place; after all, if we really wanted to be “social”, we’d get off the computer and go speak to a live human being ! Many of us are online (or are online addicts) because we are craving intellectual stimulation that may be lacking in our professional or personal relationships.

LINKS:

Ross Mayfield -Ecosystem of Networks

Ross Mayfield – Distribution of Choice

Zenpundit -Complexity and Connectivity:Bar-Yam Again

Dr.Von -Features of Analyzing Complex Social Systems: Individuals vs Superorganism

UPDATE:

Curtis Gale Weeks at Dreaming 5GW has posted a response ” Interlude: Static Visualized, Conceptualized“. Some nice explanatory graphics have been included ( Curtis is giving Dan a run for his money in 2007)

TRYING TO FIX COMMENTS

Somebody who does not have a Blogger account, please try to leave a comment on this post. Thanks !

UPDATE:

Thank you to all who commented – I think it is now functional.