1. The Department of Defense Encounters the Blogosphere
Rebecca L. Goolsby, Ph.D.
Code 341
Office of Naval Research April 2, 2008

2. The Changing DoD mission
The Three Block War
New emphasis on “non-kinetic effects”-- building communities, providing humanitarian assistance, disaster relief
Little doctrine, little guidance
Concepts like “influence”, “shaping”, “nation building” increasingly emphasized
DoD Directive

3. DoD consumers/producers
Intranet and covert networks have blogging tools; very popular
Soldier sites: blogs from the frontline keep soldiers close to friends, family
News mashups such as Blogs of War, Counterterrorism Blog have large audiences in the DoD
Some exposure to relevant international blogs such as Baghdad is Burning and others

4. Social Computing and the DoD?
YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, Forums, Webpages, Games: Diverse Applications
Believed to have uses in:
Training
Collaborative work
Intelligence Analysis?
“Targeteering?”
Modeling? (and thus “prediction”)‏

5. The “Blogosphere”
As of July 31, 2006 there were 50 million blogs counted by Technorati (including:
40,000 in Arabic
12,000 in Farsi
15 million in (South) Korean
blogs in Kurdish
Turkmen blogs
Iraqi blogs
Afghan blogs
Pakistani blogs.
Large blog communities tend to be found in places that are urbanized, with a strong IT infrastructure, and good education (high school and above).

6. DoD illusions (and delusions) #1
Blogs and other social media will provide incredible troves of information suitable for providing a basis for decision making
Need for tools to mine it effectively
Need for automatic translators to get over the hump of non-Western language issues

7. DoD illusions (and delusions) #2
The internet, including blogs, can provide modelers with a good basis for developing new models about behavior, culture and society.
“Data scrapers”
Relational databases (based on strong ontologies)‏

8. DoD illusions (and delusions) #3
There is a well-connected, advanced “Dark Web” on the Internet that can provide the help, financing and tradecraft for future terrorist groups
Tools for “targeteering” -- finding the “key bad guys”
New disruption strategies?
Surveillance techniques and tools?

9. Cyberspace culture is largely youth culture
Predominantly urban, where electricity and internet access is available
Phone internet access is very common; by 2003, there were more phones than PCs connected to the Internet
Many young people are exposed to computers and the Internet through their schooling experience.
They learn how to use search engines, , browsers and other simple tools; blog-writing software is available free, online, in most major languages.

10. Virtual Places for Virtual Lives
“The new generation of terrorists will increasingly meet up on the Internet.” – Scott Atran, anthropologist and terrorism expert, 2008, at a talk on his recent work.

11. Drawbacks of Web 2.0 data
Short Shelf-Life! Information on blogs in particular and Web 2.0 generally grows old and is superseded by new data very quickly.
Idiosyncratic/Sporadic. Information on blogs, especially non-Western ones, isn't posted daily
No provenance. There is often no way of knowing where a fact came from, or if it is valid.

12. And More Drawbacks
Propagandists and audiences are not typically “terrorists” --they may be radicals, sympathizers, supporters but not necessarily the “real bad guys”
CONTEXT—especially history and the state of current events in a particular place—are often critical to making sense of statements.
CULTURE: Koranic references, in-jokes, slang help provide a more full understanding of texts

13. From User Illusion to Science
New tools and techniques are needed
To better understand radical blog authorship and radical blog readership
Better understand their rhetorical techniques (and hopefully find methods to counter)
Better understand the spectrum of opinion about the U.S.
To mine data from a variety of sources, while preserving critical metadata
To assist SMEs and intelligence analysts in analyzing blog data in other languages.

14. Developing a research agenda for the DoD
Step 1: Understand what Web 2.0 can tell us about the larger world, especially in non- Western contexts, and what it cannot
Step 2: Develop a new “user illusion” that will help produce productive research objectives
Step 3: From those objectives, develop a robust, scientifically sound research agenda that will take our understanding of social computing to the next level

15. Practical Goals for Studying Web 2.0
To better understand the cultural and social worlds of those who think of themselves as US adversaries
To better understand social behavior on the Internet, in order to find trends and processes that might lead to violence against civilians in many contexts
To better understand opinion in non- Western contexts, in order to promote peace, stability and security.