Sinnreich adds a psychological component. “A lot of us really know next to nothing about what’s really going on militarily in Afghanistan,” he says, “so when a schism like this opens up, we think, ‘There must be more to this.’ ” A “collective detection mentality” takes over, he says, and thousands of people start piecing together thousands of bits of information to get a bigger picture.
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If anyone is wondering how I come up with this stuff, I will explain. I will read about one interesting concept, store it away in my brain, and then when I hit some trip wire ideas that fit in with that prior concept, some ‘illumination’ occurs. In this case, I was reading about human-flesh search engines a week or so ago, and then the Rolling Stone atomic bomb of a story comes out, and I started putting two and two together.
First, let’s discuss what each component is and then we can discuss how they fit together, and then finish up on how to weaponize the concept (if possible). Because if you look at what happened here, the best general that the US had, second only to Petraeus, was effectively removed from his post, all because of what was said in an article and the flash fire effects of new media. That is one hell of an attack if you could figure out how to reproduce it.
The first part of the concept is the human desire to want to know. And the tools we have available to us these days, give us the ability to ‘know’ what is going on very quickly. The news cycle and people’s ability to get that news, and how it allows us to pass it on to the next guy is mind boggling fast. It doesn’t combust like a fire, it explodes like a bomb, and new media/social media is the facilitator for everyone who wants to know.
For example, when the McChrystal ‘Runaway General’ news came out, I had heard about it via Facebook, Twitter, newsletters, updates via email, and my RSS reader. I also got the news via my iPhone, which means I did not have to wait until I got home to read all of this stuff. The news exploded, and like most, I passed that news on to my network. I then got to work on posting a blog entry about the thing, because it was a big story. And so did thousands of other journalists, bloggers, forum participants, etc. So analyzing the whole thing kicked in instantly as well.
On my RSS reader, I saw multiple blog posts coming up from all over about the story. People analyzing and giving opinions, and everyone was reading everyone else’s stuff and trying to come up with the best conclusions. Partly because they wanted to know the real deal, and partly because they wanted to choose the right angle on the whole thing so they would not look like an ass to their readers and friends. So not only did bloggers want to ‘know’, they wanted to be the ones that looked like they ‘knew’. All of these bloggers, to include myself, were furiously going over the material as it came out over the internet. Our business is to know, and believe me, we were trying to do that.
That process of wanting to know, or what the professor up top worded as ‘collective detection mentality’ is the first part to understand here. We are human, we are competitive, and knowledge is power. When everyone is fighting to learn and know what is going on, that process creates the informational tsunami. That information wave can also do much to force an action and create a desired outcome for whomever originally intended to create such a thing. If you look at how President Obama and the upper command reacted to this incident, it is startling. This didn’t happen over the course of weeks or days. It happened virtually overnight and a top general has been removed from power.
The second concept to look at is the idea of human-flesh search engines. This is a concept out of China that has equally startling results. If a person is made a target by whomever on a forum, and whatever act this target did was sufficient to bring on interest and vengeance, well then you have all the elements of a human-flesh search. People want to ‘know’ why this target did what they did, they want to ‘know’ who they are, what they are doing, where they live, and most importantly, they want to make sure the target suffers for any wrong doing.
It is that power of wanting to ‘know’ that fuels the crowd in sort of virtual lynch mob. A prime example of this was the whole Jax Desmond affair here on the blog and forums. When it came out that Jax was lying about who he was, this industry reacted to it much like how the Chinese human-flesh search engines turned out. My readers were at first picking apart the guy’s lies, which was great, but then you could see on the forums that people wanted vengeance. Folks were posting his address, real name, etc. and doing all they could to get back at Jax. In their minds, he deserved everything he got, and each person out there was going to contribute to his demise. My point with this is that a crowd with the desire to ‘know’, coupled with the desire for vengeance against an individual they perceive as bad, can be quite impressive to watch and certainly damaging to the intended target. As a result, the Jax Desmond name is mud in this industry, and when the crowd decided they ‘knew’ enough to act, they quickly dispensed their justice.
Now let’s put them together, and build a snowmobile. Could you initiate a human-flesh search attack (HSA), that could create a desired result? I think you can, but only with a multi-faceted approach, and persistence. You must identify your target, identify the element that the crowd would like to ‘know’, and really exploit the virtual mob mentality if that target has done something that would be considered immoral. Your HSA strategy should strive to mimic other incidents that showed all the hallmarks what is mentioned in these two articles, and the examples I have provided. Most importantly, persistence is key, because you cannot say for sure if your HSA will work the first time out. It would take a constant attack from multiple angles, to be successful. It helps to throw the match in the right places though, and that is the key. The forest fire analogy fits well with conducting HSA. If you can keep shooting flares into pockets of unburned fuel, from across the canyon, eventually you will get one of the pockets burning and they will start the fire that you wanted to start.
The other thing about Human-flesh Search Warfare is defending against such a thing. Yet again, I look at the forest fire fighting analogy for the defense. You must create fire breaks to defend crucial aspects of your forest. Or in terms of what we are talking about here, you must protect yourself or your principle by insuring you have the appropriate defenses in place. Having journalists from Rolling Stone hanging out with you for a couple of weeks is probably not a good idea–no buffer there. Making wild and false claims online about your company or your personal actions, would also not be a good idea–not much buffer there either.
But most of all, you need good intelligence that focuses on you and the enemy. ‘Know yourself, know your enemy’ as Sun Tzu would say. Because if you know yourself, you will know what weaknesses, immoralities, etc. that the enemy might possibly use against you in this kind of attack. Knowing your enemy will help you to figure out their intentions towards you or folks like you, and how they like to conduct HSA. You should also stay up to date with technology and ‘knowing’ yourself. Use the same tools and resources that your enemy uses, if you want to really know what he knows. You can also try to copy your enemy’s strategy and tactics, and add one little technological or operational piece to that package to get an edge. If your information officer, or whomever is assigned to be your virtual body guard cannot do these basic things, then you should look at firing them. Because this is something any good practitioner of strategic communications or new media should be wary of and try to understand, so they know how to best build that fire break or place the match in the right patch of fuel in the forest.
Well, let me know what you think. If I am missing something here, or you have something to add to this stew of ideas, I would be interested to hear what you got.(be sure to read both stories below because they are relevant to this post) –Matt
New media too speedy to outflank
Edit: 6/25/2010- I wanted to add one more human-flesh search warfare case to this, for further thought. Wikileaks is an excellent example of the power of human-flesh search, and what it could do to the war effort. Some Army Intel kid leaked the videos anonymously to Wikileaks, and that was all that was necessary to spark the human-flesh search engine. Media was linking to the videos and site, and overnight, war leaders and politicians had to deal with this. When that came out, it exploded as well. But if you look at Wikileaks, what was the element about it, that would attract that Army Intel kid to contribute in the first place. That is why this is such an intriguing idea to talk about.
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New media too speedy to outflank
By John Timpane
Jun. 24, 2010
It began as a scattering of acid remarks within earshot of a Rolling Stone reporter. But – thanks in large part to Twitter, the Web, and cable news – barely two days after those remarks were disclosed, a media firestorm ended Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s tenure as commander of U.S. and NATO Coalition Forces in Afghanistan.
Fast, overwhelming, decisive: It’s a case study in how tightly connected 21st-century media can whip a story into a full-on tsunami, with startling consequences for individual careers and national policy.
“Rolling Stone broke the story, but it was Twitter that got the story rolling,” says Aram Sinnreich, a media professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “The peer-produced social media are doing to cable-news networks what cable news did to broadcast. We’ve gone from the one-day news cycle to every hour on the hour to second by second.”
Noah Shachtman, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and a blogger at Wired magazine, says: “The fact so many of us are networked together enabled the information to spread speed-of-light fast. That turned what might have been a slower-burning flame into an instant conflagration.”