So now it's Strategic Communication, huh?
So what's new?
Slightly different perhaps, turned into doctrines and policies perhaps, but for
the most part just another part of basic human every day life hyped up ,
polished up and turned into yet another commodity with a new name since the last
had bad associations and wouldn't sell.
Like renaming lying "mismanaging of truth" to sneak it past people's
perceptional radar of bad experience and associations.
People communicate all the time, as soon as there are one or more people exposed
to my behavior everything I say and do will be perceived.
Skilled communicators, actors and the demagogues of ancient Greece for example,
can control most of the means they have of communicating in each particular
instance - verbal and non-verbal - and make them all facilitate a desired
results in the intended audience.
For all us less skilled - or less interested - in "streamlining" all our
signals, we usually limit ourselves to chose our words and maybe the other
signals we send out will support what we say or at least we will not be caught
with the contradiction.
So, this is basically it - making as much as possible of the means of
communication at our disposal put under conscious control and intent, and then
make them join efforts in supporting a desired reaction to what we
communicate in the minds and behavior of the audience we focus on.
Strategic communication is nothing more than making communication become one
tool among others in trying to obtain as certain objective - or desired result,
if we leave out the Military jargon.
So what's new?
It is nothing new that government officials play up to whatever part of the
public they want to manipulate/manage the perceptions, minds and hearts of. We
expect them too, and we even act as if we did not notice all the times they act
against what they say - such a great audience.
What is new is perhaps that the manipulation of minds and heart by means of
communication is now housebroken and legitimized by repetition without
objection, sneaking by legitimizing one thing that is in all but the name the
same as what is met by negative attitudes and perceptions, and - of course - by
selling it as the bets thing since sliced bread in securing the best for all and
the national security.
I communicate with strategies - in this case my objective is to inflate the hype
of Strategic Communication and tell it like it is. Everyone wants to alter
others perceptions in a way that benefits them in some way - it is too much a
part of what each and every one of us do, and of what makes society work, to
make it illegal. It would be possible only to try to create legal categories for
who, when, where and how it can be done legally - but such legislature will be
too slow, too filled with loopholes, too hard to enforce.
Much easier would be to instead see it as the responsibility of anyone who wants
to become a less easily manipulated target, to get wise.
After all, legislature was never meant to be a substitute for thinking.
