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1. The Information Environment
2. The Affordances of Cyber-Enabled Information Operations
3. Mechanisms That Change Perceptions of Intent
3.1 Incentives
3.2 Dissemination and Amplification
3.3 Automation
4. Mechanisms that Change Interpretations of Content
5. Mechanisms that Change Perceptions of Agency
6. Conclusion
Abstract: 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.
1. The Information Environment
This paper defines the information environment as "the aggregate of individuals, organizations, and systems that collect, process, disseminate, or act on information."1 This environment consists of three dimensions: (1) the physical dimension, consisting of command and control systems and supporting infrastructure; (2) the informational dimension, consisting of where and how information is collected, processed, stored, disseminated, and protected; and (3) the cognitive dimension, encompassing the thinking minds and feeling hearts of those who transmit, receive, respond to, and act on information.2
The physical dimension and the informational dimension can loosely be associated with cyberspace: the physical dimension corresponds to the hardware in cyberspace (e.g, computers and net work technology interconnected through the Internet, but more than that as well), and the informational dimension to the information carried within cyberspace. The authors will focus primarily on the cognitive dimension as the locus of human judgment and perception as applied to information, and where people process, react to, and make decisions based on information.
Of particular importance is the fact that it is ultimately the cognitive dimension that is the...