CONCEPTUAL REFLECTIONS ON DISCOURSE FORMATION AND DISSEMINATION
CONCEPTUAL REFLECTIONS ON DISCOURSE FORMATION AND DISSEMINATION

Author(s): Neville Bolt
Subject(s): Media studies, Government/Political systems, International relations/trade, Security and defense, Political behavior, Politics and communication, ICT Information and Communications Technologies, Peace and Conflict Studies
Published by: NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence
Keywords: War; aggression; NATO; Russia; Ukraine; Vladimir Putin;
Summary/Abstract: There’s a fallacy shared by most who practise strategic communications. The common mistake is to talk of messaging and the possible effectiveness that attaching such messages to grievances and those who hold them can achieve. Messages like narratives are an overused term, put through the wash once too often and bleached of the intellectual col-our they once sported. It is as if by sending out a slogan, a cause-and-effect relationship can be brought to bear on a pre-identified audience. The danger inherent in this ‘post-it’ approach to communications is to place all hope on linear, one-way agency while ignoring the nature of the discursive context or what is frequently and unadvisedly called the information environment. As if communicators were caught in a call-and-response exchange or a dangerous thrust-and-parry. By this token, communications is forced into a zero-sum game, rather than the organic or fluid negotiation between contiguous discourses that it really is.

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