Slashdot Mirror
DARPA Wants To Know How Stories Influence People
coondoggie writes "DARPA in a nutshell wants to know how stories or narratives influence human behavior. To this end, they are hosting a workshop called 'Stories, Neuroscience and Experimental Technologies (STORyNET): Analysis and Decomposition of Narratives in Security Contexts,' on Feb. 28th to discuss the topic. 'Stories exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity. It comes as no surprise that these influences make stories highly relevant to vexing security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution. Therefore, understanding the role stories play in a security context is a matter of great import and some urgency," DARPA stated.'"
People apparently watch Fox news and believe everything they are told. I think it's some kind of witch craft, probably Obama's fault too.
Why are they spending tax payers money for what is already known and available through any field of story writing, be it fiction or fact or some combination?
If there is any urgency it only because the near 7 billion people on this planet are starting to wise up to the less than 1% fabricating crap that causes problems for the rest of us. Ultimately we all are not going to need or be able to afford the ongoing BS produced by politicians and control freaks of war game players Instead those wasted resources on destructive technology can be far more effective in fixing real world problems and hence greatly reducing motivations of war and terrorism and... bla bla bla destructive fabrications for the self supported dependencies of the addicted to the mental handicap of having a lack of morals and ethics. And there can be plenty left over to put them into rehab for life.
What the World Wants, but not the mentally handicapped control freaks otherwise it'd already be happening.
What we have instead is even more on defense for 2011 than shown HERE
I worked for the local university, which had a sweet tuition remission policy. I ended up taking classes in anything I was interested in, hopping from college to college. Linguistics, American Studies, Film Studies, lots of literature, some sociology and anthropology... After a few years of this, the university sent me a letter demanding that I declare a degree and f'ing graduate already, or they wouldn't let me take any more classes.
The course load was so varied that it was hard for me to shoehorn it into a single field. I had to figure out what tied them all together.
I realized that I had been studying the ways the stories and cultures interact and affect each other. Lots of semiotics, language, and that sort of idea encoding, but also study of cultural reactions and re-manifestations of stories to "fit the times." Propaganda was a big part of that. (I declared the program in early 2001. That September, I discovered a wealth of research material.)
There was no discrete program to fit that into, but there *was* the catch-all "University Studies" degree: a sort of roll-your-own program that, if you could make a case for hanging your classes together somehow, you could graduate.
I call my degree "Propaganda Studies" for my own amusement, I work in I.T. to pay the bills... but now I can go apply at DARPA! Fat government research grant, here I come!