August 24, 2005

Roll Over Gutenberg

This post, by Jeff Jarvis, describes the parameters of the "Information Reformation" that's taking place:

The war is over and the army that wasn't even fighting - the army of all of us, the ones who weren't in charge, the ones without the arms - won. The big guys who owned the big guns still don't know it. But they lost.

In our media 2.0, web 2.0, post-media, post-scarcity, small-is-the-new-big, open-source, gift-economy world of the empowered and connected individual, the value is no longer in maintaining an exclusive hold on things. The value is no longer in owning content or distribution.

The value is in relationships. The value is in trust.

And this post, by Donald Sensing, lays out the case for a wartime Civilian Intelligence System, although he doesn't actually use that term:

Yet a scandal can race around the world while good news and success stories are still tying their shoes. The Bush administration has allowed the information status quo of the war to be maintained too long in the public eye. The information agenda has been set by the mainstream media (MSM), attenuated to a significant but not large degree by bloggers. I think the administration should begin immediately a vigorous domestic-information program to do these things:

-remind the American people "why we fight."

-inform the public of successes achieved.

-educate the public of the national objectives being sought, and how.

I have no grand plan on exactly how such a program should be carried out, but its success would depend on sidestepping the mainstream media. None of this information has been unavailable in the public arena. The MSM could have been reporting such stories objectively all along but have deliberately avoided doing so.

What I've had trouble understanding is why, if Jeff is right, we need to await a government lead-out in order to establish this new Civilian Intelligence System? (h/t: Winds of Change)

Contrary to the universal presumption of MSM at this point, as it relys on people like Chuck Hagel and Bill O'Riley for its authoritative insights, we aren't actually losing in Iraq. In fact, in most areas of the country IED attacks are down as is the "success rate" of those attacks that do occur. Only about 25% of IED attacks produce any casualties at all, and the reason why that's the case was incisively covered by Michael Yon some time ago. If you don't see the brushstrokes you don't get the message.

So, what is there about this alternative Civilian Intelligence System that requires a governmental patron? Is it simply that we assume, because it ought to exist but doesn't, that the missing ingredient is patronage? "Trust" is a subjective experience that may or may not be justified. To say that "the value is in trust" is simply to reiterate the concept of the "legitimation of belief," which has been around for a long time in the social sciences. The German people "trusted" Adolf Hitler. I think Donald would probably agree that he's talking about a Civilian Intelligence System even though he doesn't use the term, but the concept was originally projected by The Belmont Club over a year ago:

Although the news media functions as the civilian intelligence system, collecting raw data, processing it and distributing it to the public, for historical reasons it lacks many of the features which professional intelligence systems have evolved over the years: namely a system of grading information by reliability and existence of [an] analytic cell whose function is to follow the developments and update the results.

As always the value is in reliability and validity, and what has changed involves the method by which the public at large arrives at its assessment of those conditions. Every time MSM provides an assessment that turns out later to have been imprecise and even wildly erroneous the public downgrades their determination of the reliability and validity of their information and explanations. But the cycle by which this process unfolds, while nearly instantaneous in some instances, can take up to a year depending on the kind of information involved. And some things, like the brushstrokes of the counterinsurgency in Iraq, are making it through in dibs and dabs. But this is the very nature of brushstrokes. When the entire masterpiece becomes fully visible things may change very quickly, because it will be universally recognized that the critical detail was largely, if not completely, invisible to MSM.

Posted by Demosophist at August 24, 2005 02:16 PM | TrackBack
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