Of content flows and rodeos

I have been reviewing some of the BookTV pieces I taped while on vacation and was impressed with the Saturday, December 18 3:00 pm airing of "Al Qaeda 2.0: The Future of Militant Islam" featuring Salameh Nematt (Washington Bureau Chief of Al Hayat, a London-based Arabic language newspaper) who describes the fight against democracy by various Arab leaders (from Bin Laden to Mubarak) using Satellite television. While many of our Arab allies say they go along with our quest for achieving democracy in the Middle East they are actually steadfast against the very thing that would remove them from power. Nematt describes Bin Laden when given the option between obtaining all of Saudi Arabia under his control or Al Jeezerah, he chooses Al Jeezerah (as a way to recruit supporters). His point about Satellite television is that these stations are owned or run by governments and have as a mission the preservation of these autocracies. He gives examples of how these stations run a steady diet of bloodshed in order to incite the viewers against the West. And co-speaker Michael Scheuer offers that Arab governments desire to rid themselves of troublesome militants by sending them off on Jihad. These observations are able to temper our understanding of Arab media and how the Arab 'street' develops it opinion.

This afternoon I took my family to a rodeo that is in town. I saw another example of how people are dedicated to their endeavors in what could also be called a 'labor of love' (see my Return of the King post). However I also found myself unable to stop thinking about the connection between the C-SPAN piece above and Thomas Barnett's work.

I find relevance at two layers:

1) The direct layer of content flow - whereas we will use connectivity to send our content toward the Gap (Internet, TV, radio, newspapers, word-of-mouth) there are countermeasures applied:
- Disincentivize connectivity (get the West to abandon interactions with those areas through terror and adopt retreat to the homeland isolationist policies)
- Direct disconnection (cut the 'lines', disrupt transmissions, forbid reception)
- Disinformation (use the force against itself as the Arab satellite stations are using 'free speech' to poison the flow)
- Disinfection (filter out undesirable content as the Chinese try to using technology and agreements with the likes of Google, Cisco and Nortel)
- Deceive (use these tools to gain from dishonesty such as using Internet scams to fund disconnectivity programs [North Korea] or Islamic 'charities' to fund terrorist vehicles)

2) The analogous layer - should the Internet remain 'wide open' or should we adopt Barnett's model?
Barnett emphasizes the role of technologies in fostering the war of connectivity although he concentrates on the geophysical context (the Internet has multiplied the effects of globalization but those effects tend to be geographic thus the Gap and Core are mostly bounded by national boundaries with special position given to those countries on the border - 'seam states'). This makes sense as long as the war is fought along physical lines, but some (including myself) are concerned about the impact of cyberwar - that is what happens when the connectivity war starts 'backflushing' upstream? Examples above are one aspect of this. In the cyberworld (electronic communications) there is very little relationship between the physical (location and infrastructure) and the virtual (the content and flow) so the seams or the frontlines are almost imperceptible. (A Korean may have her Hotmail account with all of it's data reside in Seattle and is handled the same way as if it belonged to a man in Iowa.) Clearly China has tried to alter this architecture - the question is should the architecture take into account analogous geophysical global situations or even try to model the architecture along the thinking Barnett offers (in the virtual world regardless of your physical location are you a Core player, a Gap player or a Seam player -> your behavior determines your status not any other factor[nationality, religion, skin tone, gender])? The first option (China) involves firewalling and content control at the physical borders, the second option requires development of identity architectures and virtual firewalling (ala Jericho Forum).

Both layers need to be addressed it just gets pretty interesting in the overlap between the two.

Comments

[Dan]

This is a fascinating post! What a good perspective! I'm down from cold pills right now, but in the morning I'll get a response up.

-Dan

PS: Thanks for the comment! I've added you to my blogroll.