Affecting the Cognitive Dimension of the Information Environment through Cyber-Enabled Information Operations

摘要

Defining information operations as activities designed to convey specific content to target audiences for influencing the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, attitudes, understanding, beliefs, or behavior of those audiences in ways that advance the interests of the conductor of such operations, this paper explores some of the impacts of cyber-enabled information operations on the thinking minds and feeling hearts of target audiences. The main lesson is that concepts of operation, tactics, techniques, and procedures for information operations developed in an era of static content and analog delivery mechanisms will no longer suffice to understand how the target of an information operation will construct meaning from content or make inferences about intent or agency. Because the space of possible constructions and inferences is much larger in a cyber-enabled information environment, the job of the information operations planner will be much more complex in this world than in an analog world.