“Information-as-Persuasion and Radicalization” is a phenomenological approach to the philosophy of information and how this is potentially relevant for understanding narratives used for countering violent extremism (CVE).
My idea is similar to Claude Lefort’s use of the traditional philosophical distinction between politics and the political as-such: rather than look at the myriad ways that either content or methods of delivery may be persuasive, instead take a step “lower down” and see that information as such is a form of persuasion — or put another way, to propose that the underlying unity of the aspects of information is actually what we attribute to the aspects themselves, and hence they owe their character to this essence.
I gave the presentation at the second annual Central Asia Security Forum in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan at the invitation of the Civic Initiative for Internet Policy. My audience included representatives of intergovernmental and national governmental organizations, civil society and a handful of local national security types. I suspect that I primarily succeeded in mystifying them!
Spiritual Journalism 