Is the Keyboard The New F15?

You may remember that during the cold war, particularly during the Vietnam conflict, we were told that the battle was for the “hearts and minds” of the enemy. We understood that in conflict, propaganda, particularly as told through narrative, was an important tool of warfare.

Narrative, if successful, was there to reinforce the battle. The ultimate expression of this was the phrase, sometimes attributed to both John Wayne and Chuck Colson, that “if you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

Today, in our 24/7 always on, social media saturated world, the objective has changed. Now, the battle through social media and television, for the proverbial hearts and minds, is sometime the goal, in and of itself.

As we’ve seen with Russia in both the Ukraine, and in it’s new cold war with the US, sometimes control of the Twitter and Facebook narrative is enough to create disruption, to change the terms of the conflict itself and ultimately to win. Suddenly, in cold war 2.0, a keyboard has as much power as an F15. That's the reality that David Patrikarakos lays bear in War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with David Patrikarakos:

Can Democracy Survive Social Media?

There are many forces transforming our modern world. Some driven by technology and some by increased knowledge.

On the one had we are relearning the value of collaboration. In classrooms, in Silicon Valley and in successful partnerships of any kind. We are discovering that knowledge and success rely on sharing experiences and shared information.

Concurrently technology and it’s child social media, has given us the world's most powerful tools to communicate and collaborate with each other. It seems like it should be the perfect marriage

Unfortunately in the context of the social and political times we live in, these two forces have come together in an almost perfect storm, to drive a deeper wedge into the way we are divided politically, economically, racially and socially.

The result is devastating for the institutions of democracy. Rather than enhance what the founders gave us, the long tail of the internet has sliced and diced our biases and given us the ultimate tool for self reinforcement. What it means for the future of democracy and of this republic is an open question. One taken up by Harvard law and former Obama administration official Cass Sunstein in his new book #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media.

My conversation with Cass Sunstein:

Why Social Media is the norm and why mass media was the fad

We look at social media today, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, as if it’s something new that could revolutionize the world. In fact, the antecedents of social media define the very evolution of civilization. It is the mass media; newspapers, broadcasting and the one way dissemination of information, of the past two hundred years, that is the exception, not the rule. Today, the sum of all of our technology actually takes us back to our roots, as a more social and interconnected society.

Tom Standage, the digital editor of the Economist gives us historical context for social media and shows how it perfectly echoes past centuries, in his new book Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years.


My conversation with Tom Standage:

The real digital divide

If you watch movies or read novels or simply understand the drama that is the human condition, you know that human behavior is often shrouded in mystery. Why we do what we do, how we act and what we think about at four AM, are at the heart of what make us who we are, and in fact what makes us interesting. On the other hand, if we reveal everything about ourselves; if Facebook, and LinkedIn and social networks in general track our every move, our every action, where is the mystery? If every thought is posted, or tweeted, or shared, then where is the human discovery? If we forget that we are more than the sum total of our data points, then Andrew Keene is here to remind us. Keen argues in his new work Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us, that the social network may be weakening, not building up our relationships.

My conversation with Andrew Keen:

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