On August 5th, my friend Matt Armstrong posted a very interesting article entitled New Media and Persuasion, Mobilization, and Facilitation (cross-posted at the CT Lab). As with most of Matt’s work, it is a great blending of solid academic analysis (in plain English!) aimed at an applied topic. Since Matt’s specialty is Strategic Communications, I was certainly not surprised to see him produce a top notch piece of work. In the piece, Matt tracks how various groups are sing the “new media” to spread their messages and, in the conclusion, he notes that

We have returned to an time in which the value brute force is reduced and the pen, or keyboard and camera-phone, is mightier than the gun. The United States created a term for this “unfair” fight: asymmetric warfare. The only asymmetry was the adversary understood the power of information to persuade, mobilize, and facilitate action.

Matt is, in his usual pithy way, quite correct; the US government does not understand this type of competition at all, even if certain individuals within it do, and the same is true of most Big Organizations for one simple reason: the “new media” has activated a very old form of communications style.

The Canadian Communications Tradition (CCT)

Back in 1982, Walter J. Ong published a really nice book entitled Orality and Literacy (re-released in 2002). In it, Ong looks at differences in consciousness arising from the primary modes of communication of a culture. Ong’s ideas, along with those of McLuhan, Innis and Grant, get wrapped up into a way of analyzing communicative media called Canadian Communications Theory (CCT; while Ong isn’t Canadian, he should be!). For most of the past 25 years or so, much of the work in the CCT has been applied (i.e. studies of particular trends such as Heather Menzies No Time) and/or “poetically” descriptive (e.g. DeKerckove’s The Skin of Culture) rather than theoretical in the sense of expanding the basic model. I’ve posted about the CCT before (see here), but I think it may be time to expand on certain concepts in it.

Media as an “extension”

One of the basic concepts, from Marshal McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man) is that all media are technological extensions of “natural” human capabilities; usually extensions of the senses and/or sensory processing abilities (this is why McLuhan went off on his “cyborg” kick, e.g. Mechanical Bride ). But, as with all technology, extensive use will atrophy the basic “muscles” as we come to rely on the technology rather than the “self”. Thus, one of the first things to ask when looking at an individual media extension is “what does it extend/replace?”

A bias in time and/or space

A medium of communication has an important influence on the dissemination of knowledge over space and over time…. The relative emphasis on time or space will imply a bias of significance to the culture in which it is embedded.
The Bias of Communication , page 33

Harold Innis’ observation about biases in time and space is crucial. While Innis originally conceived of this bias as a clue to the biases of the culture using that medium, it is really a feedback loop where the medium effects the culture and the culture effects the medium. For example, cultures that “write” on mountain faces or on monumental architecture have a bias towards a long temporal horizon (e.g. Egypt in the Old and Middle Kingdoms).

The bias feedback loop operates in many ways, not least of which is to “harden” the control or spread of a communicative medium. Thus, for example, cultures that use highly complex written languages such as hieroglyphics or cuneiform will tend to develop specific classes or castes that can read and write which, in turn, will attempt to ensure that “writing” remains under their control. Writing is only one example of the feedback loop operating to allow a small group of people to gain control over a medium, others would include newspapers, radio and television, which brings us to…

The “cost” of a technological extension

All technological extensions (media) have a “cost”. What that cost is measured in, however, varies depending on a number of factors. Broadly speaking, these “costs” relate to three specific processes involved in using the medium: encoding a message, transmitting a message, and decoding the message.

Encoding “costs”

The ability to encode messages varies with the medium. The human default values of this are a) learning to “speak” a language (broadly speaking, but it could include languages such as ASL) and b) learning to use body language communications. These are the basic “costs” for message encoding, which are “paid” in part by our genes and in part by our basic enculturation (i.e. the time/cost of child rearing).

These costs rise significantly under a number of different situations.

1. Moving to a new culture and having to learn a new language and, possibly, relearn body language may be quite costly but, also, necessary for people to be able to operate in that culture.
2. Learning how to use specific genres of speech (or body language) may require significant amounts of time and resources (e.g. studying under a “master”). At the same time, mastery of specific speech (or body language) genres may be the required skill to open up cultural opportunities for advancement.

When we add a specific technology into the encoding cost, things become more complex. Consider, for example, the costs associated with learning how to write Traditional Chinese, Egyptian hieroglyphs or Babylonian Cuneiform scripts. In some cases, it may take up to 20 years of study to gain mastery of a written language. The base “entry cost” of a written language is, also, directly related to the number of symbols in the system of writing. Thus, for example, hieroglyphic systems are the most difficult to learn, syllabries (one symbol per syllable) are the next most difficult and alphabetic systems are the simplest. But learning to “write” also includes having access to the technologies for writing, and this is reflected in the tools used to write, the script produced, and the medium on which that script is enscribed.

If we look at other media, the encoding costs are even higher. For example, painting, sculpture, theatre and music all require learning additional “languages” (sometimes more than one), as well as having the resources to produce the message (e.g. paints, canvass, cameras, marble, staging equipment, instruments, etc.). Radio and television require specialized production equipment and technical skills as well. This is one of the key changes in the past 10 years, a drop in the cost of technological encoding of media such as audio and video.

Transmission “costs”

Encoding a message is only the first part of the communications circuit. In order for a message to be received by someone, it must be transmitted, and the medium of transmission is subject to costs. For most messages, this is the cost of production and distribution in time, resources and money. This is where the true change has happened in the past 10 or so years with the advent of the “new media”; a collapse in the transmission and, most especially in the distribution, cost. For example, I can write and globally distribute this short “paper” (blog post) in about 3 hours at a cost (excluding time) of about $1 CDN ($.954 for US readers).

This is a point that Matt alludes to when he discusses how groups are able to “increase the velocity of an issue”. The effect of the new media is not that it increases issue velocities but, rather, that it has decreased the encoding and transmission costs to the point where the lumbering broadcast models of the mainstream media cannot compete (which, as a sidenote, is one of the reasons why many newspaper authors are now also required to be bloggers). The fact that this has broken the broadcast monopoly model should not surprise any student of history: exactly the same thing happened with the development of the cheap printing press (e.g. mimeographs and gestetner machines).

Decoding costs

Few people nowadays outside of the Intelligence sector and parts of academia ever think about the costs of decoding messages. But the costs of message decoding are, actually, almost always higher than the cost of encoding messages. Let me expand on this, because there are several types of message decoding involved. First, there may be a cost involved in receiving the message; for example, buying a radio, book, etc. Second, there is the basic, default cost associated with learning the “language” of the message which is, usually, the flip side of learning to encode the message. Third, there is the cost associated with attempting to extract the message from transmission “noise”. In face to face communications, this often means learning to tel if a person is lying or shading what they are saying, as well as figuring out their motivation. Fourth, there is a cost involved in what might be called “aggregate decoding”; basically looking at a history of messages and analyzing them along a variety of dimensions.

One key “cost” involved in decoding is time. Certain media aim their messages at emotional responses (e.g. video, theatre, music) while others are more targeted at intellectual responses (e.g. most formal writing genres). Messages may be decoded “immediately” (e.g. I watch TV and “understand” it) but, in order to really understand the message, I have to spend more time analyzing it asking questions like “what did they really mean?” and “what are they going to say / do next?”.

This time element is one place where Innis’ observation of time / space biases in media really shows up. Globally, the new media has had a “warping” effect on both time and space by compacting them; China is as close as Kanata, and what happens now is as close as what happened five years ago. This compaction, however, has some very startling effects on our consciousness and ways of thinking, especially when it comes to decoding. Increasingly. messages are produced that aim at simple, emotion grabbing “points” - the “sound byte world”.

But the compaction of messages like this actually requires longer to decode (in the sense of aggregate decoding) than newspaper articles of 100 years ago. We expect and require “simple” messages and we are being conditioned by the media (i.e. the technology) to react emotionally and simplistically to them. As Matt notes,

The same is true of consumers who frequently take less time to question and cross-check information as they increasingly demonstrate an intellectually lazy, but easy and comfortable, preference for reading, listening, and viewing content that does reinforces their view.

Asymmetric “warfare”?

Let me return to the excerpt from Matt’s original post that I quoted earlier

We have returned to an time in which the value brute force is reduced and the pen, or keyboard and camera-phone, is mightier than the gun. The United States created a term for this “unfair” fight: asymmetric warfare. The only asymmetry was the adversary understood the power of information to persuade, mobilize, and facilitate action.

There is no doubt in my mind that the advent of the “new” media has created the structural and cost conditions that enhance the likelihood of increased, let us call it, “message competition” (I dislike the term “democratization” which is often used for this phenomenon; it is inaccurate and emotionally biased). The costs of encoding, transmission and decoding of messages through a variety of media has dropped so significantly that, as Matt puts it, “a guy in a cave [can] out-communicate the United States”.

This should not surprise anyone, however, since

• a similar band of raggedy rebels out communicated the British Empire in 1776-90,
• another group of wild-eyed fanatics out communicated Imperial Russia in 1917-18, and
• a bunch of blood thirsty savages did for the British again in 1970-80 in Rhodesia (now under he control of those same blood thirsty savages).

In each case, the cost of message encoding and transmission in the dominant medium of communications had dropped significantly, and the rebel groups took advantage of this while the various governments retained older models of communications.

This point, about competing models or modes of communications, is crucial to the problem that Matt is dealing with, and it goes back to a basic point I made earlier about the bias feedback loop “hardening” the control of a communicative medium. What Matt refers to as the “Old” media (newspapers, radio, television) is really a collection of media that are based on a broadcast relationship; from a centre to a periphery. In this model of communications, control is centered in the area of message transmission, rather than encoding or decoding.

The broadcast model of communications fits in exactly with hierarchical (Authority Ranking in Fiske’s terms) organizational models: “data” (raw material for stories, messages, etc.) flows upwards and inwards to one or more central points where it is triaged, encoded and distributed back to a population for decoding. In this model, there is very little interactivity between the information redactors (editors, writers, producers, etc.) and the information consumers. This is not “new” or an artifact of the Industrial Revolution; exactly the same process can be seen in the development of Sumerian cuneiform where the Temples controlled all communications media (and most of the economy) except for face to face communications up until ~2800 bce.

But what about the “New Media”? Well, the technologies are new, but the form of social relations that they support is not (see here for example). The “new” media support a model of communications that might be termed as either “distributed” or, possibly, “social”. In reality, the “new media” are based on highly distributed encoding, transmission and decoding systems with a low cost and no apparent centre for control.

One effect of the low costs involved is the ability of most people to engage in message creation and distribution which, I might note, is an analogic parallel with face to face communications. The “new media” structurally encourages us to seek out and establish relationships with people who we share common interests with. The primary difference is that, unlike face to face communications, we are not bounded by spatial limitations. But, for humans to interact and communicate, we unconsciously use models of social relations that we already have and, in the case of the relationships built using the “new media”, this means adopting a variant of reciprocity systems (Equality Matching in Fiske’s terms).

I wrote earlier that the “new media” has “no apparent centre for control”. Certainly, in comparison to the broadcast model, this is the case but, if we dig deeper, we find that both models have exactly the same locus of control: “trust” in the source of the message. In the case of the broadcast model, “trust” is manufactured by control over the volume and density of information sent out to a populace. It is easier to maintain “trust” in a broadcast setting when your message actually gives a coherent context to what is happening in your life, especially when two or more broadcast organizations are in competition. Thus, for example, Voice of America was “trusted” more in Eastern Europe that, for example, Pravda. In reciprocity systems, however, trust is not so much placed in organizations as it is in individuals. “Trust” is also much more nuanced as well since it is based on the situational expertise of an individual rather than on the asserted (manufactured) expertise of an organization.

The basic (aggregate) unit of a reciprocity system (a network and/or community), however, usually covers less functional area than that of an organization in a “modern” society, even though it will cover greater geographic scope. Within these networks / communities, individuals establish reputations that are the basis for people’s “trust” in them. But, as Matt and others have noted, these networks / communities are self-selecting (within broad structural limits) and have a tendency to re-enforce pre-existing biases and perceptions. They also tend to shape and condition the encoding and decoding of various messages by constructing specialized “languages” that must be mastered in order to be a part of the network / community.

Is this situation “new”? Not at all. If the broadcast model of communications is old (and it goes back at least 5,000 years), then the networked based model of communications is even older going back at least 30,000 years and, probably, well over 2,000,000 years to our beginnings as a social species. What is new about it is that the spatial constraints have been “lifted” for many of us.

Let me return to the implicit question of asymmetric warfare. For warfare, or any form of competition, to be symmetric, all people and groups involved must agree to play by common rules. For the “modern” organizational mindset, these rules were established as a result of the Peace of Westphalia where it was agreed that the basic definition of a “player” was a nation state and that the “game” (warfare) would follow certain (minimal) rules which could be updated by everyone in the “league” getting together and agreeing to the changes. No one else would be allowed to “play”, although “expansion franchises” were allowed under certain conditions as part of the “league” negotiation process (apologies for the hockey analogy, but I am Canadian ).

In order to support the existence of this “league”, and to maintain the “owners/players” monopoly, it was imperative that the “audience” agree to the general terms, and this was done by a variety of different means (see, for example, Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition) using a variety of different communicative media. Crucial to this project was the construction of “nationalism” and the definition of individuals as both members of and in relation to nation states - in effect, the state had to become the focus of individual definition and the primary structural influence on individuals lives, and this requirement was played out in the increasing bureaucratization of the state, including control over broadcast media.

But times change, and states and other bureaucratic, hierarchical organizations that had demanded so much from their citizens could no longer deliver on their promises. The social contracts that the states had relied on to maintain their monopolies on warfare were breached by their own actions and, in the words of Yates

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

We now live in an age where “expansion franchises” are no longer the goal of social movements, although they may, as Matt noted about Hezbollah, drape themselves in the symbols of them. Our current conflicts are not “Wars of National Liberation” so much as they are wars against the very concept of the modern nation state, at least in its current forms.

This, for want of a better term, “Anti-State Warfare” is being waged by numerous groups, many of which are not engaged in open, kinetic operations. It is also an inherent property of this type of conflict / competition that it will inevitably be “asymmetric” since the “Anti-State” groups (networks, communities , etc.) cannot and will not compete in an area where they will loose (that’s basic natural selection operating - the groups that try get smashed).

This type of conflict, pro-nation state vs. anti-nation state, is, to my mind, the type of conflict we, as a species, will be involved in for the next half century or so as we “renegotiate” our emerging global culture. My concern is that by polarizing the “terms of discourse” in this “renegotiation” process, we, as a species, will exclude alternatives that are neither nation states or networked collectivities.