Proceeding Details

Title:All-encompassing War: An Exploration of Information Disorder Countermeasures Through Smooth and Striated Space
Award_Name:2023 Meheroo Jussawalla Research Award Winner
TitleEtc:, Postdoctoral Scholar, School of Communication and Information, University of Hawaii At Manoa, USA
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Abstract:A key challenge facing Western policymakers and professionals in the telecommunications and digital media industries is the use of digital information to further adversarial state’s political agendas as part of a broader war effort through “information disorders” like disinformation and malinformation. These efforts create and exploit differences and divides in society to weaken the capacity for resistance, to which scholars, policymakers, and professionals are exploring countermeasures to these efforts juxtaposed against the need to preserve broader democratic ideals. The known need for the development of a unified strategic concept to develop and coordinate effective countermeasures motivates cross-disciplinary reviews of current and proposed countermeasures as well as the use of common theoretical lenses. In this article, I use Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notions of smooth and striated space to explore current and proposed information disorder countermeasures arranged along offensive, defensive, and supporting approaches. This analysis highlights opportunities to develop coherence across these categories of approaches that reflects the information’s impulse to flow across borders and boundaries (geo-political, social) that are fundamental to information disorder’s power, and the broader implications for society that political information disorder and corresponding countermeasures portend.