Москва
+7-929-527-81-33
Вологда
+7-921-234-45-78
Вопрос юристу онлайн Юридическая компания ЛЕГАС Вконтакте

Thinking with information

Обновлено 02.03.2024 06:16

 

Just as geopolitics is thinking in space, so information policy should become thinking in information. There are more powerful and less powerful "machines" for generating information, they are tied, among other things, to some countries, and this allows us to more adequately prepare the ground for future actions, since the following has become an important rule of the present: no action makes sense without appropriate information PREPARATION. We have seen this since the preparation for the war in Iraq, since the beginning of the confrontation that unfolded in Ukraine.

Information today is an essential element not only of the industrial sphere, but also of the economic, military, diplomatic, political, and social spheres. The number of people engaged in the processing and dissemination of information is increasing. The number of tasks that humanity is able to solve has increased precisely due to the adequate functioning of the information sphere.

How did humanity move to this new type of thinking? Today, those countries that have the opportunity to enter openly into any information flows benefit, since this is what ensures their accelerated functioning. The control system has been replaced by an openness system. The countries that benefit in the world are those that can influence the formation of news, that is, they themselves create the necessary types of information.

Example. The United States, Great Britain, France, and other European countries have powerful international media, news agencies (CNN, BBC, France Press) that shape the agenda and spread it throughout the global information space. But as soon as Russia achieved more or less significant success in this matter by creating Russia Today, the Sputnik Agency, which began to produce a high-quality information product that allows Western society to get acquainted with a different point of view, reproaches for a variety of sins began to pour in - interference in elections, creation of fakes, aggressive propaganda, etc. This shows how important it is for the Western world to dominate the information space.

What does the information space give us? It provides an opportunity for dynamic development, since it simplifies the processes of testing new things. This is its dynamic function. Thus, the dynamic component of the information space gives us the opportunity to reach new people and new leaders in an accelerated mode. At the same time, its conservative component, or rather the unifying component, makes it possible to create one's own identity, to form one's own model of the world. Any society cannot exist without it either.

The information civilization builds all its activities on information technologies organized in an information network and which rally around information processing.

However, the information society is becoming not only stronger, but also more vulnerable, because there is a serious information dependence. Al-Qaeda used precisely these opportunities of the information society, since its members were not geographically connected, they were united thanks to modern information technologies. As a result, a non-governmental actor can be equal to the government armed forces, which happened on September 11, 2001.

J. Arkwilla, as one of the modern theorists of information technology, emphasized in the case of Al-Qaeda that since it is a network structure, influence on its members can be exercised only when it is possible to control the narrative functioning in this environment, since it forms the composition and structure of its members, defining its model of the world. Hence Arquilla's demand to see two sides to the information. On the one hand, information is like a broadcast (a familiar view).

On the other hand, information is an organizer of a system or structure (a completely new look).

The development of mankind has gradually brought information and knowledge to the forefront, pushing aside land and industry as dominant components.

Therefore, today in the military sphere there is a transition from the concept of information warfare to the concept of the war of knowledge. What is the reason for this?

The transformation began with a change in the knowledge system.

Examples.

1917 gave the maxim "Plunder the loot", "Peace to huts, war to palaces", and these concepts became dominant.

In 1985-1991, in the Soviet Union, not only the headquarters were shot at, but also all the symbols of Soviet society (Lenin, the Party, the Komsomol). And it ended with the fact that a powerful state was destroyed, but society did not stand up for it. It was only over time that many residents of the Soviet Union realized what they had lost.

2004 gave Ukraine the idea to make it anti-Russia. But it didn't work out the first time. In 2014, this idea was further developed. The rupture of Ukraine's economic, cultural, and political ties with Russia has begun.

The idea of decommunization is aimed primarily at destroying any connecting threads between Russia and Ukraine that successfully existed in a single state - the USSR.

Changing the knowledge accepted in society can make it possible to make fundamental changes - to change the social system, geopolitical positioning.

Therefore, there is a problem: how to influence the decision-making of an opponent/enemy and how to protect your own decision-making system from such an impact. By the way, today this is a separate scientific area where influence networks (influence net) or influence tree are being built.

What influences our individual decision-making?

Mass consciousness is better influenced by mass culture. Let's take cinema as an example. In the thirties, both the Soviet Union and the United States formed their own hero system. In the USA, it was Superman and Batman. They have two or three essential characteristics. This is a muscular force higher than an ordinary person, this is a restriction of sexual contacts (heroes always remain alone), this is an attempt to punish evil.

Soviet heroics was also built in the same way, one can even assume that heroics in some ways repeats the axiomatics of Christian saints. The hero always wins over the corporeal. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya or Gastello give their lives, P. Morozov conquers his biological for the sake of social victory. If the hero of the movie "Home Alone" defends his house, then the Soviet hero defended a public house.

By the way, a mix (combination) that combines the real and the unreal (informational and virtual) has a better effect. Such objects can be created from material objects with different symbolic loads.

For example, during the war in Afghanistan, American planes could drop bombs and food packages.

The American military, both once in Vietnam and in Iraq or Haiti, had a program called the Combined Action Program, according to which they should help local residents (provide drinking water, comfort, etc.). All this creates the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, when it is difficult for us to combine opposing interpretations in our heads.

The use of new technologies opens up fundamentally new opportunities, the consequences of which we are just beginning to feel today. Any technological innovation must necessarily have social or political consequences.

A number of professions are emerging in society that are related to the information space.

Let's list some of them:

- journalist,

- public relations specialist,

- political strategist, - advertising specialist

, - information warfare specialist / psychological warfare specialist,

- negotiation specialist,

- a propagandist.

There are now more public relations specialists than journalists. If we add here not only those who create information, but also those who analyze it, then we can also recall such areas as the creation of psychological portraits in the system of political psychology, as well as specialists in frame analysis in the system of cognitive psychology.

In general, for all these professions, the following rule applies: the feeling works better when a person makes a decision himself, and not someone forces her to do it.

Three dimensions are most important for a person: real, informational and cognitive. They should be depicted as a triangle, because they affect each other. The task of any influence is to move into the cognitive space, using either informational or even real for this purpose. The cognitive space has less dynamics than the information space, so it is much more difficult to make changes to it. Journalism is almost the only profession among those mentioned that works on the segment from reality to information, because all other professions try to influence the information or cognitive space to get results in real space.

In general, we can say that today we have technologies capable of transferring changes from the information level to the military, diplomatic, social, and political. For example, what is an election?

These are actions in the information space that can produce results in the political space.

Frames.

Frames are ready-made interpretative structures that give us the structure of the world around us. Frames are also interesting because when a fact and a frame collide, the victory remains with the frame. We can say that this is an accident, it is not true, preferring the interpretative schemes that have been introduced.

The frames are used by journalists when talking about certain events.

It should be added that we are gradually moving into a new type of civilization - virtual, because we spend more and more time in virtual worlds. If in the future the information world turns into a virtual civilization, the military will seize not knowledge or information, but virtual space, because it is in it that it is decided who is right and who is to blame. For example, the United States is already trying to work with the virtual space of the Islamic world. Among such techniques, it is proposed to provide more opportunities for modernists to reach a mass audience against fundamentalists or traditionalists, which will allow introducing fundamentally new ideas and new people into the Islamic world. This is also a variant of information intervention in the traditional version of the world, which, as a rule, is very closed.

The new information society is gradually taking over an increasing number of countries. Using its advantages makes it possible for both small and large countries to be competitive in the modern world.