By Craig Hayden

Matt Armstrong recently posted a lengthy, thoughtful piece on the new media landscape and its implications for persuasion and mobilization in the “war of ideas.” Overall, I think it’s an important consideration of the multitude of factors that implicate the constraints of a medium with the objectives of information operations or public diplomacy. More to the point, Matt succinctly notes what the likes of Manuel Castells and other communication researchers have already observed. New media enables a new kind of legitimacy and credibility to communicators because it is often peer-to-peer and fast – thus making such media useful for social mobilization, organization, and political action. I want to revisit this post, because I think it raises a number of questions that continue to energize research in communication, political science, and argumentation studies. What I would like to do here is respond to some of his claims in order to further the dialogue. This is not meant as a criticism of Matt. Rather, I think we as a blog community need to push the boundaries of media’s significance in international conflict – and be inclusive of work not necessarily framed as PD or IO work, but nonetheless useful.

1) Matt draws a distinction between an older mass media (radio) and the internet. Here he notes, perhaps channeling a little Canadian medium theory, the capacity of the previous mass media to divide:

“This medium [radio] fell short in building active networks of support as listening was passive and you could not know if you were you one of one or one of many.”

In so doing, Matt establishes that the internet changes the communicative terrain – or as Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Sorin Matei, and others describe, the “communication infrastructure” represented at the technologically mediated intersection of interpersonal, mass, and organizational ‘storytelling networks.’

But the transition to “mass” was a historically charged by other factors that make predictive statements about the 21st century a bit more complicated. The “mass” in 20th century mass media was a reflection of shifting socio-economic conditions – agrarian to industrial life in the cities, increasing urbanization, etc. Mass media did divide – yet in the early days of this technology and its predecessor the telegraph, many praised its capacity to unite. So perhaps we should be asking the question – how do the U.S. enemies incorporate media into both their info campaign strategy, as well as how they imagine the technology to reflect their ideological and social ambitions. How does the Internet sustain the virtual community of U.S. adversaries – amplifying or augmenting the role of opinion leadership and frame entrepreneurs. Or, perhaps this technological adoption sows the seeds of eventual ideological dissolution.

In Daniel Czitrom’s excellent history of media in the United States, Media and the American Mind, he cites numerous examples of people valorizing the technology of the telegraph, radio, and TV. I bring this up only to suggest less sharp distinctions between the capacity of older media to affect social change and new media. What new media “enables” is often a reconfiguration of the historical baggage we bring to using it. Why does this distinction matter? Before we herald the dawn of a new era of e-persuasion, we should consider how people use, access, and adopt the technology, and the social contexts freighted with previous norms of communication. Daniel Kimmage’s observation that Al-Qaeda and its media proxies still operates their media operations in a decidedly non-web 2.0 mode illustrates the social constraints on media use.

2) Matt also, rightly points to the democratizing benefits of the internet. Here, he describes the characteristics of the medium by allowing “direct access to policy and decision-makers” and by its capacity to bypass “hierarchies.” I think this point requires some caveats. It serves Matt’s argument by suggesting how the rapid dispersal of information requires agility in the technologically-driven “market for loyalties” (Monroe Prices’s term) that is the court of global public opinion. And perhaps at some level, rapid persuasive and symbolic activity on the internet may be sustaining virtual filters on the global news feeds. But, is the internet truly democratic? From a political-economic perspective (see the work of Lessig and Vaidhyanathan), the internet is rife with structural issues of access, ownership, and control that cast some doubt on its status as being truly democratic. Perhaps more importantly, there is little research confirming significant impact of media forms on the outcome of foreign policy decision-making. While many acknowledge a change in process, we haven’t yet come across significant evidence the internet, let alone any media, has transformed the calculus global power politics (see Eytan Gilboa for some good summaries of this).

3) But perhaps the most interesting (for me at least) of Matt’s observations is his focus on the importance of symbolic action carried through new media – especially for insurgents and terrorist organizations to reach, persuade, and mobilize audiences. I think his claims raise very important questions that are clearly beyond the scope of his post…

For starters, that non-state actors like Hezbollah now use images of nationalism is important – but perhaps for reasons that go beyond the fact that such organizations actually have media production centers. It’s important because we see non-state actors leveraging the tropes, symbols, and appeals that were once the domain of nation-states communicating to their subjects. So much for the decline of the nation-state under media globalization, or, the eroding inertia of nationalistic rhetoric. Hezbollah, and the “virtual states” emergent in Iraq, draw upon the repertoire of the 20th century (when not re-fashioning fantasies of medieval Islam). I’m not sure it would even qualify as “hybrid” in the media studies sense.

But essentially, lurking behind Matt’s essay is a medium-dependent observation about the changing nature of persuasion and its link to social mobilization. For Matt (and many others), “new media” is important because of its speed, its reach, its relative ease to produce, and its flexibility in message-tailoring. It not only changes the range of actors who could use media to effect change, but also the potential for those to actually foment attitude and policy change.

Matt’s depiction of the new/old media environment depicts media conflict as rapid-fire, diminishing the vaunted credibility of traditional media while media consumers spend less and less time to consider and interrogate alternate perspectives in the global media market. For Joseph Nye, this is the “paradox of plenty” that complicates the media-based strategies for nation-states and other actors. For social psychologists, this state of affairs merely affirms that media audiences are “cognitive misers” – where the plurality of media options make us gravitate to outlets that we agree with.

Yet these factors together suggest something other than new media as forming enduring communities. New Media divides as much as it unites. As Lance Bennett and Jarol Mannheim observed, new media is increasingly divisive, targeted, and socially atomizing in its capacity to deliver (or even construct) media consumer niches. Perhaps this is the point of stasis in Ben Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld. The technologies of new media serve the mobilizing purposes of creating “project identities”(See Castells), but also isolated consumer-subjects.

What does the mean strategically? Matt laments that the United States lacks a declared understanding of what constitutes persuasion in this new environment. As numerous blogs, reports, and white papers on this subject suggest: the United States should have a more developed (and justified) capacity to react rapidly, and with symbolic flexibility, to the arguments and visual arguments put forth daily by its adversaries. But what might this capacity look like? Is it somewhere between the general strategic rhetoric of a global info policy to the tactical imperatives of rapid reaction through media to events, situations, and controversies?

Given the talk about how important new media is to the new strategic environment for the U.S., I think we need equal consideration to what constitutes changes wrought by the media themselves. If media enables mobilizations, is it because of some changing micro-practices of persuasion – up-ending age-old practices of communicators linking doxa with situations pertinent to the audiences at hand? I think a lot of celebratory and expansive talk about new media’s transformative potential for international relations is based on some fundamental assumptions about how we reason publicly, and how that translates into communities of action. If new media transforms what constitutes good reasons, sound evidence, and how we establish our shared symbols – then new media truly does require a new kind of knowledge for transnational persuasion campaigns. In particular, I think these questions remain for students of new media and international relations:

1) How do new media sustain, over time, communities of action and belief that have decidedly ideological ambitions.

2) Can new media cultivate enduring “project identities” that are primarily motivated to reject a status quo, alongside the requirements to elaborate a world it seeks to create? I think this highlights tensions between the rejectionist motives of extremist or terrorist organizations with their utopian ambitions.

3) Does new media facilitate the centrality of specific kinds (or genres) of public arguments? In other words, do certain appeals “work” better in trans-cultural or transnational venues?

4) And here’s the zinger. We can generally agree that the U.S. needs a more substantive, or at least informed, array of information policies to combat the threat posed by its non-state enemies. But what about the construction of its messages? There’s some interesting work already done on this. What kinds of message strategies can be crafted to reconcile the reality of current global public opinion, the strategic goals of the U.S., and the supposed potential of the new media themselves on how persuasion “works?”

Clearly, there’s a lot more to research and discuss about the true significance of new media for U.S. national security, let alone how academics more generally comprehend the transformative potential of new media.