Cybersystemic Media Design to Counter Cognitive Warfare: Toward a Peace Plan

Peter JonesCivil media, Cybernetics, Media Ecology

Presented at ISSS Washington D.C., Jun 12, 2024 Presentation PDF As a knowledge weaver between the SDA and the systems societies, I often attend both the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) and the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) conferences. This year both were held in Washington, with an IFSR Conversation Day even held between these two meetings. I presented two parts to a series of talks that draw on media ecology and cybersystemics to develop arguments and strategies for long-term “peace plan” to counter the deleterious societal effects of the militarized information arena, in the domain of what has been called “cognitive warfare.” A cybersystemic framework to counter pervasive, multi-platform information control is proposed. NATO and other militaries have championed so-called information operations, the multiplexed multiple-channel insertions of semantic propositions disseminated as media campaigns. These mobilizations take shape at scales from short-form social media insertions to mainstream televised …

Systems Change for New(s) Media

Peter JonesCivil media, Media Ecology, Systemic Design

(First posted on Medium) We have credible understanding to suggest that news media, and the journalism supposedly informing the news, no longer contributes to a meaningful shared public reality. With the arrest of Julian Assange, and Big Media’s denouncement of him as a publisher/journalist and as a person, society suffers another major blow from officialdom in the ongoing struggle to locate responsibility in public reporting. Assange built Wikileaks into a self-organizing publishing system, the newsroom of the future. If Western media actually cared about access to truth via “certified authentic documents” there might be less distrust of the content, process, and intentions of news organizations. But instead, when the Guardian (of all outlets) and New York Times actually cheer on the framing and takedown of an influential independent publisher, who has arguably put his life on the line, it serves the function of a political gang hit on a rival …

Systemic Barriers to Effective Societal Response to Terrorism

Peter JonesCivil media, Dialogic Design, Governance

“Organizational learning must concern itself not with static entities called organizations, but with an active process of organizing which is, at root, a cognitive enterprise. Individual members are continually engaged in attempting to know the organization, and to know themselves in the context of the organization. At the same time, their continuing efforts to know and to test their knowledge represent the object of their inquiry. Organizing is reflexive inquiry.” (Argyris & Schön, 1978, 16–17). Systems Thinkers Toronto turned out a dozen people last week for a demonstration the new SDD dialogue management software and a discussion of dialogic design practice, which can be seen as an embodiment of organizational and social system cognitive organizing.  I teach a basic form of the methodology in my Systemic Design course in OCAD University’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation graduate program. As a core practice of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras these methods have been developed from Christakis and Warfield’s Interactive Management over the last decade. The formal …

Flourishing Cities: Toward an Ecological Governance

Peter JonesCivil media, Sustainable Systems, Transformation Design

We held a participatory design workshop at Urban Ecologies 2015 (June 19) to test-run a process with the Flourishing Cities canvas, a system map for citizen co-design for planning future governance commitments and preferred future outcomes The Flourishing Cities framework adapts a design tool from the Flourishing Business Model, a planning system for constructing strongly sustainable business models. The design tool in both cases is a visual organizer for engaging stakeholders in co-creating values-centred operational guidance, in the Cities case, adapted for civil society engagement with urban planners and local governments.  This is based on research work developed from OCADU sLab Strongly Sustainable Business Model group as applied to the flourishing of cities and settlements. As suggested by the “strongly sustainable” terminology, the normative commitment of the planning system is toward a fullY-integrated social system of an organization with its inclusive societal contexts, human participants, and the natural ecosystem. A significant design challenge of our …