In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on June 29, 2008

In my last post, I laid out what I consider to be the start of developing a theory of Information Operations (IO). Most of that post deals with an attempt to crate a definition of IO. In the end, the definition I came up with was

Information Operations are a) actions taken by actors, b) based on sensory input from the environment which is c) filtered through one or more interpretive maps, with d) an intentionalty towards a desired outcome.

Depending on the class of intentionality, point d) is modified through a progressive limitation of actions / intentionality. For the case of causing a general change in the actions of others, it is shifted to

d) an intentionality to modify either the sensory environment, input or interpretive maps of another actor.

while in the case of classic military IO, it becomes

d) an intentionality to either modify, deceive or degrade a targets sensory environment, input or interpretive maps while, at the same time, preserving ones own.

I think that this is a good definitional basis to start further discussions, and in this post I want to expand on the concepts of Structure and Function as regards information operations. In particular, I will be dealing with point c) of my definition concerning these “interpretive maps”.

Before proceeding any further, I do want to make a point. I consider Information Operations to be a form of what Habermas called “Communicative Action” and, as such, I consider them to be a basic part of social interaction independent of any military applications. For me, Information Operations actually refers to the processes of consciousness (and other things) an actor uses to navigate through social reality. As such, the political, ideological and military applications / forms of IO are limited sub-sets of the more general phenomenon.

A taxonomy refers to how perceptions / objects / concepts, etc. are organized both culturally and socially. Taxonomies are inherent in language (cf. Edward Sapir, Language, Race and Culture), and form the basis of how a culture thinks about things. As Sapir noted (op cit),

Language and our thought-grooves are inextricably interwoven, are, in a sense, one and the same. As there is nothing to show that there are significant racial differences in the fundamental conformation of thought, it follows that the infinite variability of linguistic form, another name for the infinite variability of the actual process of thought, cannot be an index of such significant racial differences. This is only apparently a paradox. The latent content of all languages is the same—the intuitive science of experience. It is the manifest form that is never twice the same, for this form, which we call linguistic morphology, is nothing more nor less than a collective art of thought, an art denuded of the irrelevancies of individual sentiment….

Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thought.

Taxonomies tend to be grouped around basic perceived divisions of “reality” and are most finely graded based on cultural importance. Personally, I would argue that the “cultural importance” criterion is, actually, based on a process of social construction (cf. Spector and Kitsuse, Constructing Social Problems; Google, Amazon) that bears a startling resemblance to neo-Darwinian theory.

In The Six Essentials? Minimal Requirements for the Darwinian Bootstrapping of Quality, William Calvin defines the six essentials for a minimum Darwinian theory as

1. There must be a pattern involved.
2. The pattern must be copied somehow (indeed, that which is copied may serve to define the pattern). [Together, 1 and 2 are the minimum replicable unit -- so, in a sense, we could reduce six essentials to five. But I'm splitting rather than lumping here because so many "sparse Darwinian" processes exhibit a pattern without replication.]
3. Variant patterns must sometimes be produced by chance — though it need not be purely random, as another process could well bias the directionality of the small sidesteps that result. Superpositions and recombinations will also suffice.
4. The pattern and its variant must compete with one another for occupation of a limited work space. For example, bluegrass and crab grass compete for back yards. Limited means the workspace forces choices, unlike a wide-open niche with enough resources for all to survive. Observe that we’re now talking about populations of a pattern, not one at a time.
5. The competition is biased by a multifaceted environment: for example, how often the grass is watered, cut, fertilized, and frozen, giving one pattern more of the lawn than another. That’s Darwin’s natural selection.
6. New variants always preferentially occur around the more successful of the current patterns. In biology, there is a skewed survival to reproductive maturity (environmental selection is mostly juvenile mortality) or a skewed distribution of those adults who successfully mate (sexual selection). This is what Darwin later called an inheritance principle. Variations are not just random jumps from some standard starting position; rather, they are usually little sidesteps from a pretty-good solution (most variants are worse than a parent, but a few may be even better, and become the preferred source of further variants).

How can this help us understand Information Operations? Well, for a start, let us consider how these two theories, Social Constructionism (Spector and Kitsuse) and Darwinian bootstrapping (Calvin), affect how we construct policy, professional knowledge and resource allocations at the social level. In effect, this is examining what a culture privileges and how that effects the cultural taxonomies.

Let’s start with a simplified example – alright, maybe not so simple .

A social problem is constructed through a series of public claims making activities (my favorite analysis of this is Joel Best’s “Rhetoric in Claims Making”). A “situation” is defined as a “problem” through a process of claims-making where a claim is based on grounds and warrants. As I noted elsewhere,

The grounds or “data” of an argument fall into three main types: definitions, examples, and estimates. Definitions, the range and type of data to be included, serve to control certain areas of communicative “space”; they parse out “what” is to be perceived as a component of the problem and serve to produce the boundary conditions. Examples and, in particular exemplary stories, serve to modify people’s emotional reactions to a given truth claim by associating a particular claim with reactions to the story. Grounds also include estimates of the incidence, growth, and the range of the problem. These estimates aim at producing a rationally based reaction in the audience which has, however, been preconditioned by the creation of emotional reactions from the exemplary tales. The numbers included in the “estimates” are for all examples of the “problem”, as defined by the claims-maker, while the exemplary stories are usually only the most extreme cases.

Warrants draw on pre-existing cultural structures and semantic reactions which define what is “right and proper” and what is “wrong and improper”. Often, these warrants have no basis in “fact” but, rather, draw their strength from perceptions of what “ought” and “ought not” to be. For example, in Just War theory, self defense against acts of aggression is usually considered to be the basis for a just-cause declaration of war. This warrant, however, does not define what constitutes “aggression”.

This process occurs preferentially around other current “successful patterns” (Calvin’s point 6 above). Now, in order for a pattern to be a “success”, as I noted earlier, it must either be already socially defined as a success or it must be of immediate and pressing necessity. An example of a pre-existing “success” in military IO would be the use of electronic technologies to intercept and monitor “enemy” communications (SIGINT), while an example of a “pressing necessity” would be an understanding of Islamist irahabi radicalization in light of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

As the process of social construction goes forward, “new” problems are “discovered” and new “solutions” proposed to meet them, all of which require the application of social resources. As these new problems and solutions are deployed, several things happen.

1. New and finer gradations of taxonomies are created in the professional language.
2. New bodies of “professional knowledge” are created (following Andrew Abbots model in The System of the Professions).
3. From these new taxonomies, new “maps” or perceptual schemas are created as pat of the professional knowledge set.

Now, this creation of new perceptual schemas or “maps” this brings us back to the basic process of Information operations. The creation of these new schemas serves to redefine what “makes a difference” (getting back to Bateson’s definition of information in the first post).

The creation of “new” problem-spaces (i.e. the construction as a social problem of a particular set of ongoing processes and actions) serves to act as an impetus to redefine the social valuation and, for want of a better term, the “application vector”, of certain types of professional knowledge. In some cases, it may be an attempt to apply a pre-existng set of professional knowledge towards a “new” problem-space. A good example of this is in the entire debate over the relationship of Anthropology and the Military brought out in the various discussions about the Human Terrain System or the Minerva Project. In other cases, the construction of a “new” problem space may be the spur for either the development of a new set of professional knowledge, or for the “professionalization” of an existing knowledge set (a good example of this is the increasing calls for professionalization in the Intelligence sector).

All three of these reactions – the exaptation of an existing set of professional knowledge, the professionalization of an existing area of practice and the creation of a new professional knowledge set – serve as the basis for (re-)defining certain other areas in the “problem-space”. In particular,

1. “new” sensory systems (e.g. radical Islamist discussion fora, new techniques of forensic accounting, etc.), and
2. “new” symbol systems (aka perceptual schemas or maps; e.g. how can you tell the difference between a Jihadi and an Irhabi?).

This process of competing professional knowledge serves to consistently redefine the problem space by defining what “makes a difference” and “how we find[perceive] it”. As part of this competition, institutional “patterns” compete for social resources using both the rhetoric of claims making and the rhetoric of experience. Their claims are, at one level, quite simple. First, the rhetoric of claims making establishes a functional problem-space. Second, the rhetoric of experience establishes a structural solution to that problem-space. In its simplest form, these two combine into something like the following.

• Radical Islamist irhabi actions are a problem(-space). In order to solve this problem, “we” must
  • understand the differences between Jihadis and irhabis,
  • understand the process of radicalization;
  • understand how the irhabis communicate; and
  • locate the irhabi centre of gravity.
• The solution to this problem space is to
  • fill in any particular program argument you wish; there are dozens of them
• The proof that Program _______ is a success lies in
  • again, fill in the blanks with whatever claims for success are appropriate to the particular program.

The first set of claims defines the problem-space in functional terms; X is a problem with the following characteristics. The second set of claims centres on the particular structural claims of a given program / solution / what-have-you, while the third set of claims are those of experiential proof that justifies the selection (aka competitive advantage) of Program. Now, I chose the example of radical Islamist irhabi actions, but I could just as easily have taken the example of Company Y is experiencing a decrease in female consumers under the age of 45.

I stated at the start of this post that I was going to deal with point c) of my definition of Information Operations – “c) filtered through one or more interpretive maps” – and this lead into a discussion of how these maps are socially created as professional knowledge systems. These knowledge systems are validated by the social acceptance of a given area as a “problem-space”, which is part of the process of social construction. The varying rhetorical constructions of a given area or “reality” as a problem space contain within them a functional definition of the problem-space (i.e. what is the nature of the problem) and a structural “solution” to the “problems” in the form of some type of program which deploys a professional knowledge system.

What does all of this have to do with Information Operations? Simple, this is the process by which certain specific components of observable reality are defined as “a difference that makes a difference”, and this is also the process whereby competing “solutions” are constructed and institutionalized.

_____

Notes:

[1] Tyrrell, Marc W.D. “What to know before you go: 10 Questions to ask before, and during, a mission”, invited paper at Stability Operations and State Building: Continuities and Contingencies, February 13-15, 2008, Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, Tennessee, United States. Daft available here.

Category: Anthropology, Information Operations, Professionalization
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