An Introduction to Reality Sharing

Writing and New Media

2022.02.13

I am pursuing a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (MAIS) with a focus on Writing and New Media. Here is a short description of that program from Athabasca University’s website:

“The Writing and New Media focus area is for students interested in all aspects of writing, both professional and creative. It explores the ways in which the new media of publication and communication (the Internet, the World Wide Web) provide new forms and genres of writing and communication.

“This stream will interest students wishing to explore the many ways in which digital multimedia communications change modes of communication, interaction, and publication and, with them, social, political, and economic patterns of experience and behaviour on a global scale.”

Put more simply, the program asks two questions: (1) How have digitally networked communications changed writing? And (2) how have those changes impacted social and political life?

I have provisional answers to these questions. First, the new media have created an insidious new form of writing called weaponized narrative. Second, weaponized narrative has led to a new method of waging war that I call “epistemic warfare.” Unlike other forms of warfare where adversaries compete over tangible things like land or wealth, the aim of epistemic warfare is to destroy an opponent’s consensus reality. This is accomplished by using weaponized narratives to attack consensus-building institutions such as journalism, academia, and election processes. Strategic actors such as authoritarian nation states and terrorist organizations are waging this kind of warfare against liberal democratic countries like Canada. And they are winning.

My primary research interest is in developing cognitive defence capabilities that will empower Canadian citizens to fight back in the epistemic war, to defend the sovereignty of their own minds. I have deliberately chosen an interdisciplinary program to conduct that research because understanding epistemic warfare requires an interdisciplinary approach. Weaponized narratives are very hard to examine from within the confines of any single academic department. My assumption is that to build cognitive defences against such weapons will require work in fields as diverse as computer science, sociology, communications theory, and literary criticism. The weapons systems deployed to attack consensus reality – such as mis- and disinformation or election interference – are not beholden to the procedures of any one academic discipline.

For that reason, an important first step toward detecting and defending against weaponized narratives is to build a theoretical framework that integrates the various disciplines required to conduct the research I am proposing. That is what I have begun doing in MAIS 601: Making Sense of Theory. Several of the readings in this course have given me the conceptual tools required to begin building such a framework. Thus far, the two most important readings for my purposes have been “A Framework for Integrative Thinking about Complex Problems” by Paul D. Hirsch and “On the Way to Computational Thinking” by Berry and Fagerjord. These articles focus on synthesizing multiple modes of rationality through tools such as heuristics, abstraction automation, and layered modelling. I believe those synthesizing tools can be operationalized to restore consensus reality.

I intend to build a systematic methodology that enables such a synthesizing process at a societal level through collective action. I call that process Reality Sharing. The images below demonstrate an abstraction of how it works.