Impact of Social Media

Pakistan as a state and decision makers of Pakistan are struggling to grapple with impact of social media. A book review relevant to the subject is posted here for the readers. Assuredly, it will be worth your time.

WAR IN 140 CHARACTERS

(Book Review by Dr Muhammad Samrez Salik)

The book ‘War in 140 Characters’ is permeated with the theme ‘How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century’. David Patrikarakos has authored it. It was published in the US in 2017 by Basic Books, a subsidiary of Hachette Books Group, Inc. The hard-bound book of 301 pages has a high standard of printing, quality paper, and fine binding.

        David Patrikarakos is a London-based journalist and an alumnus of Oxford University. He is the author of Nuclear Iran, The Birth of an Atomic State. He is also a contributing editor at The Daily Beast and Politico. He has also written for The New York Times, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. His media background, coupled with his insightful coverage of war zones from Congo to Ukraine, garnered his prowess for evaluating the impact of social media on modern conflict. The book reaffirms David Patrikarakos’s credentials for writing on this momentous subject. It is a well-researched book annotated by fifteen paged notes. The book is divided into eleven chapters. The introduction of the book, as well as the conclusion, covers conceptual aspects. The book is handy for war strategists, war practitioners, media managers, and narrative builders, as well as for academicians and planners. Its factual, easy, and non-technical parlance makes it even more palatable for laymen. The evolution of warfare has been an ongoing process.

        The nature of war is constant; the character of war adapts itself to the zeitgeist of the time. The drivers of conflict include economy, technology, tactics, and grievances. The advent of mass media in the last few decades, in general, and the recent phenomenon of social media, in particular, is influencing all dimensions of human life. There is a consensus among the experts on how and why social media is transforming human behaviour, attitudes, and perceptions. Many students who have been involved in conflicts and wars have keenly observed the impact of social media. In this context, the book is the first authentic, comprehensive, and palatable material on the subject. The book is about the study of the changed conduct of war. It is also about stories, the narratives of conflicts and conflict of narratives. The modern means of conflict are taking us closer to Sun Tzu’s dictum, “To subdue the enemy without fighting is acme of skill”. Social media has provided a means to build narratives, perceptions, and sapping of will, enabling us to subdue the enemy without fighting.

The author argues that social media has fundamentally changed the character of war and blurred the line between the battlefield and political discourse. Facebook posts and tweets are increasingly emerging as sources of information and determine who wins the narrative. In today’s world, the narrative is what largely determines victory. Military muscle alone does not suffice; wars are evolving every day, but today, a new element has entered them: first-hand information sent by people to inform the world and sometimes change the narration of events. The author understands how social media drives operations in today’s undeclared grey zones of conflict and sets the conditions for the reader’s understanding of the modern operational environment. Key conceptual aspects are:

• Social media has opened vital communication spaces for individuals once controlled exclusively by the state.
• More than a war fought by tanks and artillery, it matters who wins the war of words and narratives.
• Within the ambit of the Hybrid War, social media has gained the extraordinary ability to endow ordinary individuals, frequently non-combatants, with the power to change the course of the physical battlefield and its discourse.
• The narrative dimensions of war are arguably becoming more important than its physical dimensions.
• War, as a military fight distinct from peace, still exists. However, the general tendency, driven by the information revolution, is away from that paradigm and towards open-ended networked conflicts that occupy a grey zone between war and peace.
• Homo digitalis is a new type of hyper-empowered individual, networked, globally-connected, and more potent than ever before.
• They can actively produce content on social media platforms with almost no barrier to entry.
• They can form transnational networks Using [various] forums.
• They are especially dangerous for authoritarian states.
• If you don’t understand how to deploy the power of new media effectively, you may win the odd battle, but you will lose a twenty-first-century war.
• Social media platforms now spawn a political reversal: a regression from centralised communicative modes to an earlier age’s more chaotic network effect.
• Social media is both centripetal and centrifugal. It shatters unity and divides people in two overarching ways. The first is obvious. It sets them at loggerheads as direct engagement between opposing camps becomes more accessible. The second is more insidious. Most of the populace gets news from social media.
• Social media platforms are not impartial; they are capitalist enterprises designed to profit from their users.
• It is both a force for good, bringing greater transparency, and a force for evil, destabilising.
• It has brought the post-Truth Era, which denotes circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
• Tweets are replacing metal bullets.

The book can also be reviewed in the context of war theories, grouped into psychological, anthropological, sociological, information, economic, and Marxist theories. Clausewitz’s Trinity of Military, Government and People also changes its complexion. While the military remains the primary fighting tool, the government controls it, and people support it. In conflicts before the advent of social media, the military operated in a confined space of governmental control and with people’s support. The mass media, in general, started eroding control of governments in the decade of 80s. The advent of social media has further eroded this control. About people’s support, it is now transcending the borders of states and even regions. People worldwide have started affecting the conflict rather than those of belligerent states. Media and social media have occupied a significant space in this Trinity. The following postulates can be discerned:

• Given Psychological Theories, social media impacts the psychology of the masses, decision-makers, and leaders. EFM Durban and John Bowlby postulated that war is innate to human nature. Social media is making homo-sapiens frustrated, impatient, anxious, and impulsive, thus increasing the propensity for conflict. Nationalism is also on the rise in the age of social media; thus, akin to Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin, there is a greater probability of warmongers. 

• Anthropologists view war fundamentally as cultural, learned by nurture rather than nature. Theorists such as Ashley Montagu emphasise the top-down nature of war. According to the author, social media is centripetal and centrifugal, thus propelling nationalistic tendencies, which are considered drivers of conflict.
• In sociological theories, the works of Eckart Kehr and Hans-Ulrich Wehler see war as a product of domestic conditions. They opine that World War 1 was not a product of international disputes, secret treaties, or the balance of power but a product of each state’s economic, social, and political situations. Social media is driving unrest amongst the public due to greater awareness of social and economic disparities. The underprivileged have better access to the state of the overprivileged. This aspect also increases the chances of conflict.
• Given Information Theories, scholars of International Relations such as Geoffrey Blainey argue that all wars are based on a lack of information regarding the enemy’s capabilities. For example, Argentina knew Britain could beat her, but their intelligence failed to assess the UK’s response. Conversely, there is access to information and disinformation in the media-savvy environment. Incorrect assessments are more likely.
• In Economic Theories, war is postulated as an outgrowth of economic competition in a chaotic and competitive international system. Wars begin as pursuits of new markets, natural resources, and wealth. In the World in transition, a lot is happening in the field of economy. Social media is generating multiple analyses, which can lead to faulty assessments and knee-jerk responses from rivals.
• There appears to be no relationship between Marxist Theories of War.
• The balance of Power is in transition from unipolarity to multipolarity. New alignments are in play. The waning of existing power and waxing of new power has reintroduced the Thucydides Trap. The prevalence of a tremendous amount of information and disinformation is causing anxiety and chaos. Social media is raising concerns among the public, which might compel leaders to apply military means.
• Social media has rendered new tools for Psychological Operations, Guerilla Warfare, and Non-Kinetic Operations. Hybrid war and Grey Area Operations have become the order of the day. Short of conventional operations, these forms of conflict are being facilitated in social media and internet environments.  
• Power has shifted from hierarchies or institutions to individual citizens and networks of citizens. Social media is propelling chaos, thus supporting realism as opposed to liberalism. However, China, the emerging power, is favouring liberalism.  Social media platforms now spawn a political reversal: a regression from centralised communicative modes to an earlier age’s more chaotic network effect.
• Instead of Clausewitz’s concept of “war is a continuation of politics by other means,” conflict is now the practice of politics itself. Clausewitzian war is becoming displaced by what Simpson calls coercive communication.

The author has also cited a few case studies. Tweets of Farah Baker, a Palestinian teenager, sparked international outrage against Israel. Her story illustrates that ‘a lone teenage girl can now battle—and threaten—the institutional power of one of the world’s most powerful armies. In an asymmetric conflict like that between Palestine and Israel, the author argues, Palestine could not hope to win the military battle. But ‘Homo digitals’ like Farah won the discursive political struggle.

Anna Sandalova, the ‘Facebook warrior’, is another prime example. She raised over a million dollars via Facebook for uniforms and equipment for the under-resourced Ukrainian army during the 2014 crisis. Able to mobilise resources in ways Ukraine’s corrupt state apparatus never could, Sandalova was proof of the ongoing power transfer. Patrikarakos describes: ‘As the state fails, homo digitalis (hyper-empowered individual, networked, globally-connected, and more potent than ever before) rises to take its place’. Nowhere is this transfer of power more evident than in the story of Eliot Higgins, the obsessive online gamer whose social media investigation challenged a global superpower. With just an internet connection, Higgins and a small group of individuals conducted an open-source investigation into the downing of MH17 more effectively than the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies.

While individuals like Sandalova and Higgins quickly assume roles traditionally filled by nation-states, how are governments responding? Not fast enough, argues Patrikarakos. Most world leaders ‘govern like twentieth-century officials in a twenty-first-century world’, unable to come to grips with the past few decades’ cultural, social, and technological transformations. But Patrikarakos identifies at least one exception, a leader he calls the ‘master practitioner’ of contemporary warfare: Vladimir Putin. Russia’s ‘twenty-first century ‘military doctrine’ relies on mass-produced memes to reinvent reality. The state may be losing its power to control narratives, but Russia is striking back. The book is worth reading for anyone trying to comprehend Russia’s orchestrated campaigns and to help us anticipate the social media challenges of future wars. Even the so-called Islamic State is trying to establish a Digital Caliphate. There is a whole chapter on how Sophie (living in France) was recruited for ISIS in Syria.

Finally, the author concludes that new information technology is reshaping almost all the practices of war from the battlefield to cyberspace. The transformation has empowered people to a degree previously unthinkable: a simple smartphone now opens up a world of information. This empowerment has created Homo digitalis- a hyper-networked individual, above all Manichean, responsible for both good and evil. The boundary between war and peace is also blurred, and social media disrupts the older order in three ways: time, space and method. Military operations can now become information operations that seek political rather than specific military outcomes. Clausewitzian war is becoming displaced by what Simpson calls coercive communication. The shift from hierarchies to individuals and networks of individuals is clear. Everyone can now be a broadcaster, but not everyone can be a journalist. Populists are once more dominating international politics. The global environment is more conducive to wide-scale conflict than ever since 1945.    

These aspects are equally applicable to our situation in Pakistan. Extremists, recently in and around Pakistan, used a mix of ideological, political, religious, social, and economic narratives based on a range of genuine or imagined grievances. Social media has been widely used to spread images, pictures, and memes to further the cause. This clearly shows the impact of social media, which is even being used in Pakistan for political ends as well as by our enemies as part of a hybrid war. We need to adapt to these transformations.