Panel 3 generally looks at the future with Smith-Mundt Act as the United States rebuilds its arsenal of persuasion. What should be done, how and why are central - but not the only - questions here.
The discussants and moderator for this panel, including their bios, may be found here.
Is the U.S. government prepared to look into truly innovative, alternative models for organization? If so, what do you think about Ori Brafman's "Starfish" concept as a model for self-organizing the national strategic communication community?
I think the Starfish concept can work to create innovation for public diplomacy in the field and for delivering strategic communications messages more effectively. We (EUR Bureau) try and find as many ways as possible to empower our PD Desk officers here in DC and the PAS in the field to think creatively and share innovations. Some of the sharing is done on the internet via internal web sites but it also takes place during regional gatherings and at our annual PAO conference in DC. In addition, our Weekly Highlights (for internal use) allows everyone from the Ambassador to the FSN to see best practices from all embassies and consulates which generates a lot of cross-fertilization.
Elsewhere in these forums, Alan says:
"I would argue whether or not it is propaganda can only be defined by the receiver’s view of the content, not the senders."
This is demonstrably false. Returning to the Pentagon Analyst scandal, the information products this program produced were not identifiable as propaganda. Indeed, misattribution – a key ingredient to much propaganda – ensures that good propaganda is not recognized as such. The products became identifiable as propaganda only when the organizational structure that produced the information products were revealed to the public. To suggest that the Pentagon did not know that it was "propagandizing" is at best mincing words, and at worst disingenuous.
It seems that in an era where, technologically, a bifurcated audience is impossible, protection of domestic citizens from government propaganda must shift away from the bifurcation paradigm and toward a paradigm of something approaching a definition of "accepted methods." The United States government, of course, does have a right to communicate to its citizens, but it is the nature of this communication, not its target audience, that must now become the focus of debate. This makes it necessary to define propaganda as a series of practices, not, as Alan suggests, via some ephemeral capacity of the receiver.
My question for this panel is: With respect to size, scope, and aim, in what sorts of information practices does the panel think the Unites States Government should not engage? As a preliminary let me suggest that we can all agree that lying is prohibited for legal, ethical, and practical reasons.
Modeling Democracy's Cultural Agility in Response to Great Challenge and Opportunity
I suggest one thread of our persuasive cultural communication to be finding and sharing the best practices of democratic governing, culture and diplomacy. We need to cultivate what we can learn from other cultures and countries as we cope with our shared global crisis and opportunity. We can find and share "best practices" of governing, leveraging new technologies and how to integrate new technologies into government and international diplomacy.
Why should we model "cultural agility?" The rate of change in the world is radically accelerating. If humanity is to survive, we, as national cultures need to be agile, proactive, and to coordinate our response to:
1) The great danger of accelerating global warming and environmental degradation,
2) The greater global opportunity of accelerating technology advances.
Brothers who are fighting, quickly unify against an outside threat. Similarly, nations will needs to "democratically" unify in a global effort to overcome the "outside threat" of accelerating environmental degradation.
If we do not collaborate, we will collapse like the 12 or so ancient civilizations that over-stressed their supporting local environments, and suddenly collapsed at the peak of their development like Easter Island. Our typically rigid human cultures have a record of not reacting in time. Here we go again. We need to get it right this time.
The most important element in our future is the opportunity presented in accelerating technology.
For startling evidence of technology acceleration see the 30 or so exponential curve charts of multiple accelerating technologies in Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near."
http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Biology/dp/0143037889/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1231434941&sr=1-1
Specific coming critical technology developments are documented at:
http://www.techcast.org/
Consider the fantastic opportunities presented by the synergy of multiple technological breakthroughs. We will need foresight and agility.
another two great resource is the Army's Proteus at:
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/proteus/
The UN sponsored Millennium Project, Global Futures Studies & Research is a great resources and a model of an agile, collaborative, multi-national effort:
http://www.millennium-project.org/
One of our underlying purposes should be to envision and model this process of sharing information, best practices, and to coordinate global efforts and cultural agility to survive this "outside threat." The U.S. can model democracy's evidence based agility and collaboration in response to this great challenge and opportunity, as it had done in the past.