DARPA is holding its Network Challenge to mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet. The competition is meant to explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

Well, as of Saturday, the balloons are up in the air.

Now, here’s the real deal - DARPA’s payout of $40,000 is distorting the experiment in a what-is-seen-as-a-confusing-by-some-citizens way.

Really?

Confusing?

Clearly, this is the goal - encouraging secretiveness and deception rather than cooperation.  THAT is the experiment.

DARPA wants to understand social netowrks and how they will be used as a collective force with the common man - in studying this, they will actually  discourage people from using the power of social media to find the balloons, instead re-engeneering the information flows to find out what doesn’t work.

What better to know how a toy works than to break it first, right?

In the formal sense - here is what I am saying: Non-rational factors affect the determination of public policy. Points of vulnerability to the influence of non-rational factors are identified in the policy-forming process and in the policy-implementing process. In this case, the DARPA Red Balloon Experiment suggests that a normative model for a public policy applied to virtual worlds or digital communication channels can be dealt with in a rational manner.

In line with domestic public policy - policies that have been used for over 60 years in the US - here’s what you should expect:

Disinformation
All large players - even DARPA themselves - will be engaged in mis- and disinformation not to throw people off track [as is being reported] but to see how false information is mitigated [negated or reinforced] within social media channels.

Deception
Again, the goal here is to disrupt the common good of social media - how and when would you, as a networked citizen, sell your ‘friends’ out?  Formally, what is the economic rent and elasticity of ’social friendships’?

Introduction of Incentives
DARPA will test the power of incentives, introduced into public policy in the 30’s, and how they will create socioeconomic classes within social networks - does a non-friend deserve loyalty because he pays more?  Who are the ‘real’ friends and how to they communicate?

Smart.  Very smart.

This is a great experiment - Edward Bernays would be happy - almost as good as the Anonymous vs. Scientology experiment …

… wait a minute …

OK - now I get it

UPDATE:

See - told ya so ….

I always find these topics interesting and this is also very thought provoking.  Listen and learn.

Why so important?

Clearly, the voice of the Internet is being ‘bought’ by large media conglomerates and becoming more commercialized. The Internet is now used to promote products and services. What was news is now simply a public relations exercise.

The Social Media movement, including ‘purchased’ A-list bloggers and $ocial Network enthusiasts, are now being used to sell goods to unsuspecting users-slash-buyers so this article in the NY Times about sentiment analysis tools comes at an interesting time [thx to someone where i saw this ...].

In a genuine initiative, I have been evaluating online credibility in my role at the United Nations - trying to visualize and understand the +/- trends of the news for credibility and bias.

Online, perception is everything. If users know the sentiment trend of the online opinion and news, users can evaluate its credibility.

Throw this information on a Google API and you now have a ’sentiment map’. Put this on a time variable slider and you have a comparative ’sentiment-over-time’ visual. Map this against your Communications strategy and you now have some empirical understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

Interesting.

Perhaps the semantic web isn’t that far off.

The “big beasts” of the pre-digital media age are in big trouble, the Guardian tells us. In the last year, they have faced, not only structural challenges but the worst recession for a generation:

“As advertising revenues dried up, newspaper, television and radio owners – especially those in local media – faced a stark challenge: adapt or die. The result was tens of thousands of job losses and unprecedented uncertainty over how the media landscape will look in just a few years’ time. How many national newspapers will survive? Can commercial radio avoid complete meltdown? How much are people prepared to pay for content online – if at all?”

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jul/10/overview-mediaguardian-100-2009)

At the heart of the uncertainty lies the internet and how to make it pay.

For 100 years the corporate mass media has flourished thanks to its monopoly of the means of mass communication. Reviewing the history of the British media, James Curran and Jean Seaton write that the industrialisation of the press in the early twentieth century triggered “a progressive transfer of power from the working class to wealthy businessmen, while dependence on advertising encouraged the absorption or elimination of the early radical press and stunted its subsequent development before the First World War.”

The effect of advertising was dramatic: “one of four things happened to national radical papers that failed to meet the requirements of advertisers. They either closed down; accommodated to advertising pressure by moving up-market; stayed in a small audience ghetto with manageable losses; or accepted an alternative source of institutional patronage.”

It’s happening quietly all over but the flood is just beginning.

“Announcing that workers nationwide will be forced to take more time off without pay, the chief executive of the largest media chain in the U.S. told employees there is no foreseeable end to the crisis facing the news business. Craig Dubow, president and CEO of Gannett Co., sent a memo to staffers today saying the company’s income remains on what called a “downward slide.”

http://www.heatcity.org/2009/03/gannett-ceo-no-relief-in-sight.html

“It says much about the confidence and wit of the pink paper of business that it not only published the letter but also headlined it “How FT leads from the front”. That rise was the third since June 2007, when the FT was selling for £1, yet the increases appear to have had no deleterious effect on the paper’s British circulation, which has run at about 125,000 copies throughout the past year. Newsprint sales revenue is only one side of a newspaper’s income equation. Advertising, as with every title, national or regional, big or small, has fallen away during the economic downturn. The FT’s chief executive, John Ridding, hinted as much in a memo to staff saying that “with our customers and advertisers being affected, we need to prepare for difficult times”.

Read more here

But let’s get real - the media bosses are blaming the ‘economic downturn’ instead of the real culprit - the adoption of digital and social media.

One cannot dismiss that, according to a recent Forrester study, digital and social media is expected to reach $55 billion and represent 21 percent of all marketing dollars spent in 2014 as advertisers shift money away from traditional media to search marketing, display advertising, e-mail marketing, social media and mobile promotions.

How this helps non-profits is the inherent characteristic new media - content tone. New media uses a conversational style, in contrast to the approach of traditional communications and early corporate blog experimentation, which emphasizes messaging and sanitized talking points.

Nik Gowing, in a new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism also discusses the way in which the ‘new media channels’ are having such a considerable effect on the structures of power.

Exponential changes in portable digital technology are redefining, broadening and fragmenting the nature of the media in a crisis by way of a new omnipresent breed of ‘information doers’.

New ‘media players’ have an unprecedented mass ability to bear witness leading to a proliferation of instant impressions in a crisis that get wide and immediate distribution.

The resulting new matrix of real-time information flows is highlighting the inadequacy of the structures of power to respond both with effective impact and in a timely way.

Interesting times ahead?  Definately - I can’t wait!

The globalization of communications.  Internet communications.

Politically, the suttle role of foreign affairs is on the increase all over the world.

Culturally, due to information and communication technologies becoming more important parts of our lives and constituting critical elements of all countries’ identity and well-being, the United Nations (disclaimer: I work there) is again tackled by the problems of global media and how to get on board.

Communication globalization is a term suddenly found in most debates on current cultural, political, and economic processes and across the United Nations. It has become a buzz word, a phrase that is starting to have a life of its own.

But, we see the term “globalization” is often used interchangeably with Americanization (whatever that is) and Westernization, adding to the confusion. Although globalization is to a large extent about expanding American cultural and political influence, particularly through the so-called soft power, the two processes are not identical.

Now the globalization of communications.

There are several aspects to this process, most of them related one way or another to communications media. For one thing, by causing enormous space-time compression, modern media have rendered both place and time obsolete. With information and capital traveling across continents in seconds, it is now possible to work from any place in the world.

When discribing ‘flow’, Csikszentmihalyi describes a specific psychological state - a particular state of mind - which arises in particular situations and settings. He happened to use the word ‘flow’ to name that state, but he might have used some other word.

We see the same today for those that have access to global communications.

Global media are increasingly accessible in the most remote places on Earth, having a significant, if yet unknown, impact on local cultures. Large media events are now uniting the globe by providing common experiences, which can change the world instantly.

Given the massive social change that globalization entails, it is no wonder it stirs heated debates and provokes protests, which, ironically, happen to be global as well. With the Internet, the world has really become a global village.

The United Nations will have to adapt - just as the people it represents has and will.

However, the vision of the global village has its limitations.

Uneven access to information is the most obvious of them. In line with the 1970s knowledge gap hypothesis, due to advances in information technologies, disparities between the rich and the poor in terms of their access to knowledge and information are growing bigger rather than smaller, both within and between nations.

A careful look at the Statistical Abstract of the United States proves only too well that billions of people and entire nations are excluded from the global village.

While the average American citizen has over 2 radios, fewer than 2 Pakistanis in 1,000 own any radio at all. While daily newspaper circulation in Germany is 593 per 1,000 people, in Japan-687, and in the United States-249, the numbers for Pakistan, China, and India are 15, 37, and 26, respectively.

The global village is clearly a Western concept and, largely, limited to the Western world.

Why?  Common interplay between four elements:

1. Government and the legislative institutions that control the telecoms
2. Independant institutions serving national mass communication needs
3. Privately owned institutions offering mass media services or Producers
4. and finally, the audience or Consumers

Main media of information - and of influence - in the 21th century will focus on those with non-literate skills, for example, in e-mail, telephony, and video conferencing allow high levels of transnational interaction between people without applied literacy.

Western mass communication already focuses on non-literate qualities:

• Cinema, Video,
• Journals, Magazines, Electronic Publications, Newspapers,
• Radio
• Telecommunication
• Television
• Internet

What evolution is in the West will be revolution in the developing and emerging nations.  Clearly, there is resistance but should the United Nations be an accomplice?  or should it promote the (r)evolution?

Rhetorical.

Information flow is an important topic for our generation. The Internet allows for greater communication and information flow than has ever been possible before, but we must figure out how to build networks and applications that help people communicate in this medium efficiently.  Especially in thise areas that suffer from low or no connectivity.

The free flow of information doesn’t mean that every piece of information is available to everyone; it means that people can share information as they like with exactly the people they would like. Therefore, privacy and enabling people to share information privately without exposing it to others is critical.

Information flow is an important issue because our ability to solve other problems is generally limited by our ability to communicate with other people and share ideas and information. The free flow of information is important because many times corporations or governments try to control this flow and that impedes good communication between people.

The Internet represents a new channel for communication. Although the world has seen
the Internet differently, as the network of networks

The Internet is a communication network made up of intertwined connections through which a number of messages travel. In this process, a website functions as a node that passes messages and determines their paths according to a selection of hyperlinks.

International information flow has been perceived as a primary topic in the study of international communication. In the “information society,” drawing the information flows among nation-states based
upon their hyperlinks may be a necessary first step in mapping the new structure of international
communication - and social dimensions

The ideas above mash to described the structure of communications flows among websites may be used to measure to examine interpersonal and interorganizational communication.

New communication networks are in the process of evolution incorporating other elements from within the existing social system.

Internet communications and social networks in the physical world may be seen as co-constructing each other, such that offline relationships can influence how online relationships are developed and established.

This has a big impact on how bottom-up communications (grassroots, civil society communications) impacts top-down (policy and largely mass social) communications.

So the question again arises - How do online communications articulate wide-ranging offline (or other online) ties?  Do they really reflect social networks in the physical world?

Or do they contribute to building online relationships across offline boundaries?

Clearly, the wider the Internet’s global reach, the greater the number of regional and national preferences (or cultures).  Do cultural differences influence the communications structure/approach among websites?

The effective use of ICT as a strategic communications instrument could help bring developing countries more quickly towards their development goals; the attainment of development goals was only possible if the use of online communications was highlighted in various countries’ development programmes.

There were many differences among countries in their use of ICT, and the primary task of the United Nations should be to bridge this divide.

Efforts in that regard should involve not just United Nations, but also government, development banks and programmes funded by private donors.

So the question is, ‘How will economic and technology trends influence the way that society develops and what is our role in the near future?’

Our roles are becoming more specialized. In essence, I believe that the ‘renaissance man’ is an anachronism in our modern society, due to the huge driving force toward specialization.

No longer is a writer a writer, a chemist a chemist, or a philosopher a philosopher. They are each specialized in a subdivision of their field, often with little interest in other realms of knowledge (within their field, let alone even daring to venture outside of it).

This specialization seems to hinder progress within each field, as each group of specialist develops a highly distinct, individualistic mode of communication (a new, lonely language) that excludes non-specialist and hence fortifies the barrier of communication between knowledge fields and, in effect, humans.

Our society and the mechanism that define and regulate it are drastically changing exactly because of this specialization of knowledge.

Seems bad but not really - it’s an opportunity.

We now have a chance to re-think the way we adapt to society and its influences. Global societies and their interactions are the most complex structures in the world. We barely understand it and how it works. We theorize, evaluate and research but do we know the main mechanisms that govern our societies?

No.

In order to balance the inequalitie between loosely consolidated private power (that initiate innovation) and highly consolidated public and capital power (that regulate it) requires creativity and a different mechanism of control - not hierarchical in nature but rather networked and layered.

This is where I was today in a large, rather heated discussion. The question boils down to a chicken and egg discussion. Some would believe that these attributes (networking, self organizing, multidirectional), as a result of technical innovation, are leading societal change.

My specific argument is that these attributes are actually being developed after the fact to fill the voids and gaps left between public and private power.

Global society is developing as a result of a higher consolidation of power (market, capital and governance or influence) within the hands of fewer people and thus, the development of networks and multidimensional matrices are a creative innovation of the common man or private power.

Social technology (or social media) is the result - not the cause – of these changes.

Why? How?

Our world is at a transitional moment. This transitional moment will be (or is) very disruptive and costly but that’s another 3 hour discussion so I won’t include it here.

The point here is that in our (my) world, at the intersection of technology and society, this discussion helps us to define what Web 3.0 will become.

By my definition, Web 3.0 is the new paradigm of the collection and sharing of human knowledge.

This will be the defining factor on how the New Blank Society will be shaped. Web 3.0 won’t be simply be a term attached to the Internet because the Internet is changing and in a few years from now, the so-called Internet will look very different to what we see currently.

By my definition, Web 3.0 will scale to define our society in the future.

It will include inherent support for private power and the creativity of innovations and rewards to support future innovation. And it will include a balancing mechanism that will define public power and the governance models that will allow and accept redistributive equality into the ‘social knowledge sharing’ equation.

Web 3.0 will be a defining initiative for society in the near future. I hope we get it right.

The conclusion of the research didn’t have an opinion on Anonymous or Scientology, per se, but focused more on this unique experiment of ‘online to offline crossover influence’; the fact that an anonymous group of so-called ‘hackers’ could mobilize a physical demonstration against an organization.

We are now seeing a secondary experiment with the mobilization of demonstrators intended to protest the torch run of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

In both cases, a very large proportion of the demonstrators were not personally involved with the organizations, in these cases, Scientology or Tibet. Most demonstrators have rather illogical reasons for participating … but here they are .. in large numbers.

Why?

Is Scientology the most pressing ‘religious’ issue that the world is facing? Is Tibet the most important ‘political’ issue? Of course not - they are mere distractions and are, at most, emotionally charged. Perhaps that’s the key - emotionally charged or better yet, mass irrationality.

Sound like a Freudian conspiracy?

I have also been watching the RSA conference closely as well. In addition to the usual suspects - botnets, infrastructure security and greynet activities, there is an unusual amount of ‘channel’ security in discussion. Channel security? Read: monitoring your online activity.

A few quotes from US homeland security chief Michael Chertoff:

‘We take threats to the cyber world as seriously as we take threats to the material world. Please send some of your brightest and best to do service in the government. It is the best thing you can do for your country’ … and then he talked about the federal government’s new cyber security ‘Manhattan Project’, an ambitious and expensive initiative to, in part, monitor the complex computer networks of all federally funded agencies.

Federally funded agencies? Do a search on this - you’ll find university programs, NGO programs, corporate programs and ALL government websites.

And in the spirit of ‘Minority Reportitis’, my favorite quote, ‘The best way to deal with an attack is before it happens rather than after it has occurred’.

Speaks for itself.

At the same time, we have the Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell stating in an interview that the Intelligence Community, ‘must have access to Google [and presumably all other search engine’s] search histories, private emails, and file transfers in order to identify cyberterrorists – and terrorists.’

You can draw your own conclusions but it seems that these virtually initiated demonstrations are starting to get the attention of the darkhats.

Conspiracy theory?

Probably - but remember, 80% of all propaganda is ‘disinformation’.

THE NEW WEB COMMUNICATOR

The Web offers one of the most significant opportunities to
communicators in modern history, but requires a total
redefinition of what communications is.

Traditional communications is one-way, passive and past-tense.
It is all about telling people what you have done, what you are
doing, or what you are about to do. There is a core belief among
certain traditional communicators that people need to be
“educated”.

Traditional communications is not all that different from
traditional journalism. There is a saying in traditional
journalism: “The reader is not as stupid as you think they are.
They’re more stupid.”

There might have been some truth in such a view forty years ago,
but we are now in a different age. It is not the digital age. It
is not the information age. It is the informed age. The very
success of the Web is based on a questioning society. We are a
society that searches because we want to find out.

The Web is where we go to know, to be informed. Those societies
that want to control what people know, who fear independent
thought and action, will always fear the Web. Those societies
who think it is exclusively the job of the elite to inform the
masses will always fear the Web.

But the people love the Web. They love the Web because they can
find out for themselves, from people like them. They love the
Web because the Web is many messages, and the Web gives people
the chance to compare, rate, question, talk back, and-most
importantly-act.

The essence of the Web is action. We go to the Web because we
have a task; there is something we need to do; there is a
problem we need to solve. What helps us do? What helps us act?
Written words. The oxygen of the Web is written words. There is
no life on the Web without written words.

Written words are the tools of the communicator. But these
written words have a very different function on the Web. I
analyze a lot of government websites. Unfortunately, too many
overflow with vanity, pomposity and waffle. Some of them are
little more than campaign websites full of puff pictures of
preening peacock politicians.

Many web teams still struggle to convince their PR and
communications colleagues that on the Web you communicate by
doing. A friend of mine was worried about his wife, who had just
given birth. She was not well and he believed that the doctor
has misdiagnosed her.

He went to the Web, and on his journey to find out, ended up on
some government websites, where he was faced with puff PR about
how much the government was investing, and what the Minister for
Health had for breakfast. He didn’t want to know how much was
being invested. He wanted help; he wanted to read content that
could help him find out what exactly was wrong with his wife.

He found answers, and he was right-she had been misdiagnosed.
This is the power and potential of the Web, and this is the
challenge and opportunity for the communicator. Show by doing.
Inform with active verbs. Make your words work for your
customers.

Regular channels, including the media and 90% of the bloggers who blog about bloggers, didn’t notice the IRC and the /chan/b/ activities and the ’sudden’ arrival of a group of Internet activists known as Anonymous and their coordinated attack against Scientology.

This isn’t an alt.2600 play like, ‘c4n sUm1 h31p m3 w1tH h4×0RiNg mY sk00lz c0mPz?’

Here’s a few links:

1st Contact (Jan 21, 2008)

The Economist claims that,

‘it [Anonymous] is promoting cyberwarfare techniques normally associated with extortionists, spies and terrorists.’

No it’s not. Here’s why:

The economy of the developed world is moving from focusing on producing goods (i.e. cars, houses, food, and computers) to being based on the exchange of information. This shift may be compared to the transition from feudalism to capitalism where the power shifted away from the landed aristocracy to the newly enriched bourgeoisie. Recently, the power shifted from the owners of productive capital (i.e. factories) to those of informational capital.

As predicted by Marx, we have seen a strong shift away from productive capital to financial capital in the last 15 years. But as the new access points to information increased, the ability for speculative investments to wreck havoc on national economies (such as Mexico’s 1994 crisis, Southeast Asian financial crisis, the sub-mortgage debacle last year) became clear. Each day over 3.1 trillion dollars is traded in international currency markets. Financial capital was the overwhelming power of the state - as we see with the Chinese government owning 80% of the US national debt, it isn’t any more.

Now, the economy has entered a new stage [I have discussed new economic models before, especialy the XY model] and a new class has gained power. This new class of “info-bourgeoisie” have become targets as hackers fight over the ‘technopower’ that has arisen from the imbalance of information ownership. Thus the recent ‘corporatization’ of the Internet’ and the public efforts to move to a post-capitalist and socialistic economic model?

Although they have only recently raised their public head, Anonymous, the g00ns - as well as many other backchannel groups - have been around for a long time and have been active for several years. They are very good at what they do and better at exploiting what they want you to notice them doing.

Some of these groups, as reported in the broad media, ARE a self-mobilizing collection of scriptkiddies (whitehat operators) but more [certainly more than you want to know about] are individually funded by corporate, government and military ‘onint’, ‘intint or ‘nn’ programs.

This is not new - this is not the beginning - this is not a conspiracy theory - this is real and it is certainly is not the end.

Traditionally, following the storyline of Frank Abagnale Jr., who was hired by the Ant-Fraud section of the american FBI, the US, French and Israeli military has been the best employers and trainers of online intelligence agents to ’search’ the Internet and ‘gather’ darkchannel information. The creation of ‘honeypots’ has been publicly downplayed for several years and the skill of these institutionalized hackers is extraordinary.

But as new money rolled in, self-proclaimed “ethical” hackers now work on blackhat operations for private and semi-public figures/organizations all over the world.

Sound like a Bond movie? No. Darknet is very real. There are a reported 5000-8000 DDoS every day. Repeat: EVERY DAY. That’s not including other l33tspeak activity - and this is definately not lutz matter.

Hackers are move beyond their previous limitations (broad gender based, deeper politicized, and more concern for recruitment and teaching) and have now become hacktivists. They work with non-technologically based and technology-borrowing social movements in the struggle for global justice.

Humanitarian organizations need to get more involved with technologically based social movements or face difficulty continuing to maintain their power base to the new technopower elite.

Smart people can do the research and see where I am going with this; the Internet has changed and Anonymous (and groups like them) are now public. Their call to action on February 10th will be successful and this meme will not pass.

They are Anonymous
They are Legion
They do not forgive
They do not forget
They will be heard
Expect them

1 We will advertise at you

“When you use Facebook, you may set up your personal profile, form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, add applications, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalised features.”

2 You can’t delete anything

“When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information.”

3 Anyone can glance at your intimate confessions

“… we cannot and do not guarantee that user content you post on the site will not be viewed by unauthorised persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users have copied or stored your user content.”

4 Our marketing profile of you will be unbeatable

“Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg, photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience.”

5 Opting out doesn’t mean opting out

“Facebook reserves the right to send you notices about your account even if you opt out of all voluntary email notifications.”

6 The CIA may look at the stuff when they feel like it

“By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States … We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.”

Want more bite? Read this …