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 …

New Books Network Interview

Peter JonesMedia Ecology, Systemic Design

Kristel and I held a wonderful interview with Kevin Lindsay of New Books Network last year, and after editing and staging other interviews, it was recently released. New Books in Systems and Cybernetics As I slowly settle into 2023 — reflecting on the blur that was 2022 — I can’t help but think about the complex problems (aka big messes!) we face at every turn: from increasingly devastating manifestations of the climate emergency, to the ubiquitous homelessness crisis, to the perplexing challenge of accessing a family physician in prosperous regions such as British Columbia, Canada. At the same time I am buoyed by the promise of Systems Thinking. Systems practices can take many forms and have the potential to inform — and guide us through — sensible, comprehensive and creative problem-solving. Here on this channel, we have explored some of the origins of systems and cybernetics by talking to knowledgeable …

Contexts – The Systemic Design Journal

Peter JonesMedia Ecology, Research innovation, Systemic Design

The board of the Systemic Design Association and our Publications team have published Volume 1 of Contexts – The Systemic Design Journal. Now available online. Executive editor Cheryl May and I have finished our build and test sufficiently to soft launch the journal and maybe get some early feedback. We have a small collection of five articles and an editorial, in online and PDF formats – which is not huge, but the very first set on a new platform does take some work.We first announced the journal project at RSD10 and showed the first articles in press at RSD11, and its live as of this week. The following titles and authors are included: Find the journal site page on the SDA platform, and the articles at the Volume 1 Table of Contents. The journal was a system design from the beginning, and has taken us until the first month of …

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 …