Perspectives on Terrorism -

Complex Systems Problems in the War of Ideas

The problem with the message influence model of communication is that it’s wrong. When we’re taking about human systems, rather than telephone systems, the transmitter and receiver are people, and the source and destination are their minds. Communication is not as simple as transferring my thoughts to your mind through my mouth and your ears. Complex processes of expression and interpretation mediate our interaction. They are affected not just by the traits and experiences of the people involved, but also by the contexts they find themselves in at the time of communication. For example, “freedom” might mean one thing to an American (freedom to do things), but another to a Middle Easterner (freedom from corrupting influences).

Much more to the point of complex systems, a critical flaw of the old message influence model is that it treats the elements as independent bits that we can break down and optimize. Theorist Niklas Luhmann [8] rejected this idea, believing instead that communication is a property of a complex system in which participants interpret one-another’s actions and make attributions about the thoughts, motivations, and intentions behind them. The complexity arises because of a double contingency. Given two communicators, A and B,

• The success of A’s behavior depends not only on external conditions, but on what B does and thinks.
• But what B does and thinks is influenced by A’s behavior as well as B’s expectations, interpretations, and attributions with respect to A.

Just as the U.S. government believes in the simple message influence model of communication, it also believes the search for the right message takes place on a simple landscape. The U.S. National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication (NSPDSC) [12] released last year provides a good example. It assumes the best message has already been found and sets it out in a set of broad talking points that promote American values and strategic objectives. Most of the document talks about how to optimize various aspects of delivering the message, such as coordination between agencies involved, making use of better spokespeople, and so on.

But in fact, the landscape of U.S. Strategic Communication is a rugged one because of the tight coupling of elements of the system. Multiple agencies have responsibility for strategic communication and sometimes work at cross purposes. Some spokespeople are better suited for some audiences than others. Messages intended for one audience “leak” to other audiences creating mixed messages. Audiences, even as conceived in the NSPDSC, are not independent: “Girls,” one of its target audiences, are also “youth,” another of its target audiences. These are but a few examples of interdependencies in the system that make the search landscape rugged.