There is a something to be learned from looking at what a person says they are going to do and then looking at their actions. It is, in fact, one of the main reasons why all quantitative work, such as survey research, should be checked against qualitative work such as observational research (”shop-alongs” or “micro-ethnographies” in market research terms). In fact, the reason for doing this is, at least structurally, quite simple: both speech and action are forms of communications.

In a previous post, I came up with the following definition of Information operations:

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.

Point d) varies depending on the class of intentionality becoming more and more specific.

When the set of intended consequences is to change the actions of other actors, then point d) needs to be modified as follows:

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

Note that this particular modification covers advertising, religious / political / ideological prosletyzing, trying to “change someones mind”, etc. For the more specific, military version of IO, section d) should be modified to

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.

In thinking this over for the past several days, I think that this last variant should read “…while, at the same time, preserving and enhancing ones own.”. Still and all, the point is fairly clear that, at least in the less general cases, the desire is to act within an environment and to shape the actions of others.

Information Operations (IO) are communicative acts, but they are neither simple nor simplistic in terms of making certain that the intended audience or target of those acts the acts in the way intended by the originator of the message. To a large degree, this is because these actions do not take place in a vacuum, away from other acts by the “same” actor. This is not really “heavy theory” :).

Let’s suppose a company says in their advertising that “Quality is our number 1 concern”. You go to their store, buy one of the house brand products, take it home and assemble it and it falls apart within a day. What “message” will you take away from these actions? Well, first, you will probably think that they are all liars. Second, and especially if you are like me and a touch cynical, you may reinterpret their spoken message to read “Quality [defined as how much profit we can make from suckers] is our number 1 concern”. Put simply, you probably won’t trust them or, in another manner of speaking, you will trust them to lie whenever they can.

Now, you notice that I said (wrote, actually, but CMC tends to parallel oral rather than written conventions) “you will trust them to lie whenever they can”. Now, that is what is called a “sense-making” activity, and it operates within a set of similar sense-making activities that are one of the core components of cultures. In this case, it is drawing off of a generic narrative of the potential sleezyness of businesses - a narrative that allows us to categorize actions by businesses as, for want of better terms, “Good” or “Evil”. Now, this was a simple example: two “actions” by a business and one persons reaction to and interpretation of those actions.

Let’s take a much more complex example: “We are here to free you from Tyranny, to bring democracy to Iraq, and this will make your lives better”. Well, books could, and have, been written about this “message” and I am certainly not planning on spending the next month on it. However, let me make a couple of observations. First, the “message” is actually a compound message with stated goals that are non-specific in terms of actions. Second, there is an assumption implicit in the message as to the relative value of “democracy” and “tyranny”, and third there is an assumption that the replacement of one by the other “will make your lives better”.

Compound messages are tricky to convey, especially non-specific compound messages. Without getting into the relative merits of “tyranny” vs. “democracy”, let me just point out that certain cultures at certain points appear to prefer a tyranny to a democracy (e.g. Russia for the past 400 years or so, Rome after Actium, etc.). This point was somewhat sarcastically make by one of my favorite science fiction authors H. Beam Piper in a short story entitled A Slave is a Slave - a less sarcastic fictionalization of the problem appears in Crown of Slaves by David Weber and Eric Flint (Google, Amazon, Webscriptions). Indeed, the history of race relations in the US bears out many of the key points in both novels - you cannot shift the perceptions and expectations of an entire population and its surrounding populations quickly.

Of course, this is not to say that individuals in the concerned populations are not capable (and willing and wanting) of operating in this “new” environment. What I am talking about is populations, not individuals, and the relative frequency distribution of the capabilities of operating in a new socio-economic form. A rapid shift from “tyranny” to “democracy” when it is imposed either from outside of the target population or by a minority from inside the target population will tend to replicate the older tyranny but with a new “face” (e.g. Soviet Russia, Haiti, Zimbabwe, etc.).

What does this “sidetrack” have to do with communications? First off, it gets back to the basic problem of a “formal” (spoken, written) message and the experience of the message recipient. Saying “we are here to make your lives better” will not and cannot be believed when a) the everyday reality (continuing message via action) is worse than the previous reality, and b) there is no population level belief/hope that things “will get better”. In effect, what you have is a message and a lived reality that are at dissonance with each other and, most importantly, the population will revert to its existing narrative to interpret that dissonance.

What is crucial in all of this is the interpretive framework of the population - they must believe that “things can get better”. For the MNF forces in Iraq and the NATO forces in Afghanistan, this potential for “getting better” must be grounded both in their actions and in the communication of their opponents actions. By this, I do not mean the facile spreading of propaganda in the pejorative sense. For a whole variety of reasons, it is imperative that they tell the “truth” as much as possible, even if this means saying something “good” about their opponents or “bad” about themselves. This may sound strange but it really comes down to a matter of trust, or lack thereof, in a source that will spill over into trust of that sources’ other messages.