Total Information War

The U.S. military is determined to prevail on the cyber-psycho-cultural field of battle, winning hearts, minds, and Facebook friends with global information operations. In accordance with Pentagon planning document Joint Vision 2020 (Department of Defense, Joint Vision 2020 [aka DOD JV 2020], 2000), the U.S. military will not rest until it achieves information domain dominance with tactical tweets and barrages of blog posts. The Web has been weaponized, and social media militarized. Sign up now for a career in Information Operations (IO).

The Internet, Democracy, and Repression

Everybody knows that social media challenged or overthrew repressive regimes in North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Everyone knows that the Internet promotes Democracy, right? Not so fast, says Evgeny Morozov.

Mr. Morozov emphasizes that networked digital tools can be used to maintain political power as well as challenge it, and recently spoke to the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) about this. The video of his complete lecture is here, but this short animated excerpt is easier to follow and more fun:

Blogging is Dead. Again.

 

“Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.

The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.”

–”Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter,” Verne G. Kopytoff, New York Times.

 Related: ”Social Media and Young Adults,” Amanda Lenhart, Kristen Purcell, Aaron Smith, and Kathryn Zickuhr, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

 Short link: http://bit.ly/hTRv3k

Image (“Anatomy of a Blogger, after Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Goldman Gambles on — and With — Facebook

Goldman Sachs once gambled with other people’s money in an unregulated market in mortgage-backed securities of dubious value. Bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars, the company seems to have learned its lesson. Goldman Sachs is now gambling with other people’s money in an unregulated market in shares of social media company Facebook.

Since Facebook is privately held, isn’t openly traded, and really doesn’t make cash profits, there is no way to value shares of … whatever it is that is thought to comprise the firm’s assets. If shares are sold to no more than 499 parties, the transactions are not subject to regulation, and may be legally traded in yet another shadow market.

Face it: the only thing this country can manufacture these days is bad business deals.

State of the Blogosphere

Technorati’s annual State of the Blogosphere report begins here, but the Fast Company version is a faster read.

 

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Spill Spoof Aids Gulf Recovery

@bpglobalpr, a parody BP public relations Twitter account, has  155,678 followers; the real BP Twitter account has 13,925. The anonymous spoofer has raised $10,000 towards Gulf restoration by selling T-shirts; BP’s repair, cleanup, compensation, and PR efforts have earned nothing but scorn.

 

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BP Twitter Spill Spoof

@bpglobalpr, a parody BP public relations Twitter account, has 64,000 followers; the real BP Twitter account has 7000, wrote Salon‘s Andrew Leonard last night. The numbers have since changed: @bpglobalpr has 84,000  90,000 followers; BP has 7800 8400.

BP wants to shut down the parody Twitter account. It’s unclear if the company will use a Top Hat, Tube Insert, Top Kill, or Junk Shot.

 

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Digital Distraction Drug

 

“ … the Web is also an enormous global timesink, sucking up massive amounts of time that might have gone into more productive, thoughtful, and fulfilling activities. It’s difficult to measure the cost of this wasted time, because it’s impossible to know what people might have done if they weren’t surfing and tweeting and youtubing and huluing and foursquaring and emailing and IMing and googling and etc. The Web often gives us the illusion of having an incredibly diverse set of pursuits when it’s really narrowing the scope of our thoughts and activities.”

– Nicholas Carr, at Rough Type.

 ”The Unplug and Recharge Challenge: Breaking Our Always-Connected Addiction,” Arianna Huffington and Ellen Kunes, Huffington Post.

 

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Social Media Addiction

  
Flash: digitally deprived college students go daffy. The youngsters are social media addicts and feel disconnected when not online.

200 University of Maryland undergrads spent an entire “Day Without Media.”  No Blackberry, laptop, television, iPod, texting, Twitter, phone calls, IM-ing, email or Facebook. OMG!

Participants were students in Professor Susan D. Moeller’s JOUR 175 ”Media Literacy” course at the U of Maryland J-school. After 24 hours of “cold turkey,” they each wrote around 550 words about their mental states and experiences. Could students TXT this in? BTHOM (beats the hell outa me).

Library of Congress Preserves Your Precious Tweets

The Library of Congress will archive all public messages on Twitter.  How was this announced? Twitter. The Twitter corporation is pleased.

The Library has the very first tweet, the Twitter equivalent of the Gutenberg Bible. It preserves Barack Obama’s presidential victory tweet as well as George Washington’s diary.