“Expectation calibration and expectation management is essential at home and internationally.”

-- Harvard Professor and Barack Obama Foreign Policy Advisor Samantha Power, February 21, 2008

Source: http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/apple-my-eye-us-fancies-huge-metaphor-reposit

Apple of my eye? US fancies a huge metaphor repository
The US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity building a system to understand human metaphorical speech

Researchers with the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity want to build a repository of metaphors. You read that right.  Not just American/English metaphors mind you but those of Iranian Farsi, Mexican Spanish and Russian speakers.

Why metaphors? “Metaphors have been known since Aristotle as poetic or rhetorical devices that are unique, creative instances of language artistry (for example: The world is a stage; Time is money). Over the last 30 years, metaphors have been shown to be pervasive in everyday language and to reveal how people in a culture define and understand the world around them,” IARPA says.

The group, which develops high-risk, reward research projects for the government says Metaphor Program:

Shape how people think about complex topics and can influence beliefs;

Reduce the complexity of meaning associated with a topic by capturing or expressing patterns;

Show uncovered inferred meanings and worldviews of particular groups or individuals: Characterization of disparities in social issues and contrasting political goals; exposure of inclusion and exclusion of social and political groups and understanding of psychological problems and conflicts.

In the end the program should produce a methodology, tools and techniques together with a prototype system that will identify metaphors that provide insight into cultural beliefs. It should also help build structured framework that organizes the metaphors associated with the various dimensions of an analytic problem and build a metaphor repository where all metaphors and related information are captured for future reference and access, IARPA stated.

“For decision makers to be effective in a world of mass communication and global interaction, they must understand the shared concepts and worldviews of members of other cultures of interest. Recognizing cultural norms is a significant challenge, however, because they tend to be hidden.  We tend to notice them only when they are in conflict with the norms of other cultures. Such differences may cause discomfort or frustration and may lead to flawed interpretations about the intent or motivation of others. The Metaphor Program will exploit the use of metaphors by different cultures to gain insight into their cultural norms,” IARPA says. 

The Metaphor Program is divided into two phases, totaling 60 months, and is intended to begin in November 2011.

Understanding language is a hot topic amongst the government research folks. Last year you may recall, the military’s research folks at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said they wanted to know about how stories or narratives influence human behavior.  To this end, DARPA hosted a workshop called “Stories, Neuroscience and Experimental Technologies (STORyNET): Analysis and Decomposition of Narratives in Security Contexts.”

“Stories exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity. It comes as no surprise that these influences make stories highly relevant to vexing security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution. Therefore, understanding the role stories play in a security context is a matter of great import and some urgency,” DARPA stated.

Source: http://www.modernmythology.net/2011/08/vivisecting-verses-darpa-investigates.html

Vivisecting Verses - DARPA Investigates the Neurobiology of Narratives

By David Metcalfe

“If I were a betting man or woman, I would say that certain types of stories might be addictive and, neurobiologically speaking, not that different from taking a tiny hit of cocaine,”
- William Casebeer of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Virginia

Despite the fact that it’s readily apparent Mr. Casebeer has never tried cocaine, DARPA’s current interest in narratives is an interesting development at an agency known for unique scientific inquiries. On April 25 and 26th DARPA held a conference called Narrative Networks (N2): The Neurobiology of Narratives. The purpose of this conference was to follow up a Feburary 26th event which sought to outline a quantitative methodology for measuring the effect of storytelling on human action.

We owe much of the early development of the internet to DARPA, along with remote viewing, remote controlled moths, invisibility cloaks and other wonders of the contemporary age. Now they’ve got their sites set on stories, and we can be assured that, in the near future, there will be some fatly funded scientific justification for what we already know. I mean, come on, Modern Mythology and Weaponized just published The Immanence of Myth exploring this very topic, and I assure you there’s more in there than a tiny hit to get you inspired.

And that’s the unfortunate thing about these scientific inquiries, they’re always years (usually centuries) behind the times. I seem to recall an author who spent his entire career developing this theory, and effectively influencing television, film and music with his ideas. Who was that? Something about word viruses? Oh, yes, William S. Burroughs. Who in turn got much of his inspiration from other thinkers like Brion Gysin, Alfred Korzybski, and really beyond all this name dropping, what true poet or writer doesn’t understand the fact that their writing takes on an effective reality?

The Medieval Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno wrote a treatise, called De vinculis in genere (Of Bonds In General), which has been used at the London School of Economics. It may be written in latin, but it details these exact theories and, if our scientists today were properly literate, everything there is perfectly quantitative. They don’t even have to be bilingual. Cambridge offers a perfectly viable translation that I’m sure would be easily accessible via any local library.

In fact Bruno’s theories are merely the quantification of the European bardic arts, Grecian theatre, and Egyptian ritual, which were themselves already quantified, encultured forms of earlier story telling techniques. And that’s just within the Western tradition.

So what’s new here? What secrets of the narrative art will be unveiled in this quantitative analysis?

Nothing much, other than what was once an art-form will suffer yet another reduction into a somewhat less effective means for moving markets, and manipulating populations. And that, in the end, is really the goal. For all the money they spent on remote viewing tests, Russel Targ, one of the lead scientists during the SRI tests, admits that it’s fairly easy to do, and that the most telling instruction manual they still have on the subject is a centuries old yogic training manual from India.

I ran across information on this symposium from a link posted by Joseph Matheny (who has himself already proven the ability of storytelling to motivate action) to a brief piece on Dollars and Dragons. The piece contains links leading on to other posts, one on Verilliance, a blog about “Better Marketing Through Science,” and one from a professor of Narrative Philosophy who has been studying this phenomenon for 30 years.

While Casebeer states the purpose of the project is to develop an understanding of how narratives effect the development of terrorism and violent behavior, with the attendant goal of creating “counter-narrative strategies.” If his understanding of a little nip of yao is any sign of his social savvy, it’s obvious that there are others with less noble goals who will gladly leap on these developments and ride them for all they’re worth.

...continued…

Rest assured, however, these quantified tales will stink from being stripped of their true marrow. What a hustler is able to do every day on the streets to grab a few bucks for a beer, or a hit of heroin, and what poets and prostyletizers have been banking on for millennium, it’s doubtful DARPA will be able to add anything new with an MRI or EKG strapped to the head of some already desensitized citizen, or college kid looking for a couple of extra dollars to pay rent.

What we need today is the actual passion of the storyteller, which is the direct encounter with the mystery of storytelling that will be missing from any state funded exploration of narrative theory. I was surprised to read the positive reaction of the narrative philosopher to these DARPA inquiries, and the use of neurobiology, to explore this realm.

DARPA is late to the game already, with marketing firms and corporations having spent millions on testing the neurobiological importance of just about everything we encounter during the day. The inherent ethical violations in this would seem to me to spark the heart of anyone who’d read more than a smattering of philosophy, and I’d hope in 30 years the engagement was somewhat deeper than a facile overview.

This kind of naiveté is what has provided the gate for so many horrible violations in the past, and continues to be a pressing issue. The narrative philosopher comments in her post, “for someone like me who has researched and written about Narrative Philosophy (philosophy involving the phenomenon of storytelling) for close to 30 years, with special emphasis on Narrative Ethics, it is particularly gratifying to watch the latest developments in neuroscientific research concerning the human urge to tell stories.” Really? That’s incredibly silly of you.

But that’s just it. There’s no room for reality in the mediated realm of inquiry formed by government and universities. It really is up to us, as individuals, to tackle these issues within our own lives. Seeing something like this come up is merely a call to action to apply what we already know. You can wait for the official response, read The Immanence of Myth, or get out on your own and explore these ideas within the rich history that’s already afforded to them.

Whatever you do, know that there are powerful influences out there (with a lot of money behind them) that are looking into how and why you appreciate a simple story.

And of course: http://www.skilluminati.com/research/entry/newt_gingrich_on_using_language_for_social_control/

As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that “language matters.” In the video “We Are a Majority,” Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates, we have heard a plaintive plea: “I wish I could speak like Newt.”

That takes years of practice. But we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.

This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that, like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used....

When I present progressives with my whole rap about social engineering and language control, the response skews in two directions:

2) We need to be doing this, too, ASAP.

As it turns out, George Lakoff was ahead of that curve:

Founded by the prominent cognitive linguist George Lakoff, the Rockridge Institute sought to examine the way that frames—the mental structures that influence our thinking, often unconsciously—determine our opinions and values. Based on extensive research in human cognition, the Rockridge Institute argued that the way an issue is framed—the language used to describe it and the metaphors used to understand it—influences our political views as much, or more, than the particulars of a given policy.

Accordingly, the Rockridge Institute attempted to monitor the manipulative use of framing, particularly by right wing organizations and politicians, and to promote frames that encourage progressive thinking. A much discussed example of framing is the Bush administration’s use of the phrase War on Terror to describe its policies following the September 11th attacks. The use of the “war” metaphor, the Rockridge Institute and others contended, had a tremendous effect on U.S. policy and public debate. They further contended it has allowed the president to assume war powers, makes opposition to the “war” seem unpatriotic, and was used to justify the invasion of Iraq, although cooperation between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had not occurred.[7] If the U.S. response to September 11 had been framed as a criminal proceeding, the Rockridge Institute and others argued, such extraordinary measures would never have garnered sufficient political support.

The Rockridge Institute sought to raise consciousness about manipulative framing and to propose progressive frames on a wide range of issues, including the economy, immigration, religion, and the environment.

Of course, this gets presented as a “Liberal Conspiracy”—which is loaded language but certainly not far off. This is, after all, a War of the Magicians with no good guys in sight, despite Lakoff’s noble intentions. Lakoff is a Professor of Linguistics @ UCAL Berkeley and I like the cat—he was clearly way ahead of the IARPA curve and clearly not interested in lining up for their pork. The wiki indicates a horizon way beyond the subject of this thread but still extremely interesting for Us Weirdos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff

Source: http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml

Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics

By Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter | 27 October 2003

BERKELEY – With Republicans controlling the Senate, the House, and the White House and enjoying a large margin of victory for California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s clear that the Democratic Party is in crisis. George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, thinks he knows why. Conservatives have spent decades defining their ideas, carefully choosing the language with which to present them, and building an infrastructure to communicate them, says Lakoff.

The work has paid off: by dictating the terms of national debate, conservatives have put progressives firmly on the defensive.

...

Why was the Rockridge Institute created, and how do you define its purpose?

I got tired of cursing the newspaper every morning. I got tired of seeing what was going wrong and not being able to do anything about it.

The background for Rockridge is that conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing. Even the new Center for American Progress, the think tank that John Podesta [former chief of staff for the Clinton administration] is setting up, is not dedicated to this at all. I asked Podesta who was going to do the Center’s framing. He got a blank look, thought for a second and then said, “You!” Which meant they haven’t thought about it at all. And that’s the problem. Liberals don’t get it. They don’t understand what it is they have to be doing.

Rockridge’s job is to reframe public debate, to create balance from a progressive perspective. It’s one thing to analyze language and thought, it’s another thing to create it. That’s what we’re about. It’s a matter of asking ‘What are the central ideas of progressive thought from a moral perspective?’

How does language influence the terms of political debate?

Language always comes with what is called “framing.” Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like “revolt,” that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That’s a frame.
If you then add the word “voter” in front of “revolt,” you get a metaphorical meaning saying that the voters are the oppressed people, the governor is the oppressive ruler, that they have ousted him and this is a good thing and all things are good now. All of that comes up when you see a headline like “voter revolt” - something that most people read and never notice. But these things can be affected by reporters and very often, by the campaign people themselves.

Here’s another example of how powerful framing is. In Arnold Schwarzenegger’s acceptance speech, he said, “When the people win, politics as usual loses.” What’s that about? Well, he knows that he’s going to face a Democratic legislature, so what he has done is frame himself and also Republican politicians as the people, while framing Democratic politicians as politics as usual - in advance. The Democratic legislators won’t know what hit them. They’re automatically framed as enemies of the people.

Why do conservatives appear to be so much better at framing?

Because they’ve put billions of dollars into it. Over the last 30 years their think tanks have made a heavy investment in ideas and in language. In 1970, [Supreme Court Justice] Lewis Powell wrote a fateful memo to the National Chamber of Commerce saying that all of our best students are becoming anti-business because of the Vietnam War, and that we needed to do something about it. Powell’s agenda included getting wealthy conservatives to set up professorships, setting up institutes on and off campus where intellectuals would write books from a conservative business perspective, and setting up think tanks. He outlined the whole thing in 1970. They set up the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and the Manhattan Institute after that. [There are many others, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which date from the 1940s.]

And now, as the New York Times Magazine quoted Paul Weyrich, who started the Heritage Foundation, they have 1,500 conservative radio talk show hosts. They have a huge, very good operation, and they understand their own moral system. They understand what unites conservatives, and they understand how to talk about it, and they are constantly updating their research on how best to express their ideas.

Thanks for the brainfood, and the revitalization of these forums. I’ve been ignorant of Lakoff to this point - I will rectify that.

The fact I just realized
1) who Lakoff was (thought he was an Obama staffer the way Conservatives bitched about him: “framing” @ work) and
2) what he has been doing for DECADES....

Well, that sort of thing used to bother me but for a confluence of reasons, it’s serious one of the most inspirational things that’s ever happened to me. This guy has been out on the frontlines since forever ago and my monkey ass never really heard of him. Most of all, he is still energized and positive in his winter years, so my current crisis of faith suddenly looked quite petty by comparison. It was a huge re-fill for my energy banks.

The material itself is also f’ing excellent, so that helps, too.

Turns out Anthony “Laetus in Presens” Judge has a Metaphor Project of his own, although it’s an outgrowth of the Club of Rome era “World Problematique”—a vast, largely mis-understood undertaking that Judge is still carrying the torch for decades later.

http://www.un-intelligible.org/projects/homemet.php

Background

The purpose of this project is to review the range of communication possibilities and constraints of metaphor, pattern and symbol. This is partly in response to the narrow focus of recent major intergovernmental initiatives under the extremely misleading titles of “International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems” (limited to the mass media) and the “International Communications Year” (telecommunications hardware) by UNESCO and ITU respectively. It is however a direct consequence of participation by the editors in the Forms of Presentation project of the Goals, Processes and Indicators of Development project of the United Nations University.

Since the early 1980s, in relation to the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential, the role of metaphor and pattern in relation to governance, understanding of world problems, articulation of more appropriate organizational strategies, transformative conferencing and dialogue, and knowledge organization. This has been presented at a number of international meetings.

And Lo!—permaculture even shows up as a conceptual toolkit here…

Pattern language: The pattern language work of Christopher Alexander suggests the possibility that the physical pattern he explores of relevance to architecture and urban planning may be of relevance as templates to organization at the social, conceptual and psychic levels. Of his 253 patterns, 66 have been explored in this way (5-fold Pattern Language, 1984). The approach is discussed in a commentary.

The 253 entries are an editorial experiment based on a “pattern language” developed by a team led by the environmental designer Christopher Alexander as an aid to designing physical contexts in which quality of life is enhanced. Selected patterns have been used, according to the methods of the previous section, as substrates for metaphors such as to suggest ways in which social, conceptual and intra-personal contexts may also be “designed”. A special merit of Alexander’s approach is the detailed integration between the component patterns provided by relationships reflecting a profound understanding of the socio-physical environment which is extremely realistic, exceptionally harmonious and unusually sensitive to development potential. The cross-references presented here are metaphorical versions of the relationships indicated by Alexander’s group.

More recently, Judge proffered a dense (and barely comprehensible, at least to me) response to the IARPA iteration of the Metaphor Project—a mashup of Rene Thom’s catastrophe theory / toplogy and....the Kama Sutra and I Ching.

Source: http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/musings/triadic.php

#classics

Source: WaPo

UPDATE: PREPACKAGED NEWS

Tuesday, February 14, 2006
How much is good press worth? To the Bush administration, about $1.6 billion.

That’s how much seven federal departments spent from 2003 through the second quarter of 2005 on 343 contracts with public relations firms, advertising agencies, media organizations and individuals, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.

The 154-page report provides the most comprehensive look to date at the scope of federal spending in an area that generated substantial controversy last year. Congressional Democrats asked the GAO to look into federal public relations contracts last spring at the height of the furor over government-sponsored prepackaged news and journalism-for-sale.

Armstrong Williams, the conservative commentator, had been unmasked as a paid administration promoter who received $186,000 from the Education Department to speak favorably about President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law in broadcast appearances.

Around the same time, a spat erupted between the GAO and the White House over whether the government’s practice of feeding TV stations prepackaged, ready-to-air news stories that touted administration policies (but did not disclose the government as the source) amounted to “covert propaganda.” The GAO said that it did. The administration disagreed, saying spreading information about federal programs is part of the agencies’ mission, and that the burden of disclosure falls on the TV stations.

Congress sided with the GAO. Lawmakers inserted a provision into an annual spending bill requiring federal agencies to include “a clear notification” within the text or audio of a prepackaged news story that it was prepared or paid for by the government.

The new report reveals that federal public relations spending goes far beyond “video news releases.” The contracts covered the waterfront, from a $6.3 million agreement to help the Department of Homeland Security educate Americans about how to respond to terrorist attacks; to a $647,350 contract to assist the Transportation Security Administration in producing video news releases and media tours on the subject of airport security procedures; to a $6,600 contract to train managers at the Bureau of Reclamation in dealing with the media.

“Careful oversight of this spending is essential given the track record of the Bush administration, which has used taxpayer dollars to fund covert propaganda within the United States,” Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), ranking Democrat of the House Government Reform Committee, said in a statement yesterday.

-- Christopher Lee

Well, I guess I’ve got to dig into topology and, more specifically, triadic topology now. It’s synchronistically shown up a couple times in the last week, in network science readings and, uh, THIS - http://www.radicalsoftware.org/volume1nr3/pdf/VOLUME1NR3_art01.pdf , a pseudo-proto-5GW hippie info-warfare… thing.

On some must-read shit: Paul Fernhout

This guy’s bio is great: http://twitter.com/#!/pdfernhout

The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.