Cognitive Warfare Reality (Part One)
Human beings have radically changed since the 1990s. Our senses have rapidly become accustomed to dissecting sets of realities that all working together make up what we understand as our everyday life. From this sociological vantage point, it is possible to disentangle everyday life into two parallel trajectories that continuously guide our cognitive expressions: a) individual everyday life and a) social/community everyday life. Therefore, it is not casual or a mere consequence of sociological evolution that we are suddenly confronted with cognitive reality.
Even though newer/youngest generations might not be completely aware, due to technological naturalization, the twenty first century is also rapidly becoming unrecognizable for those who grew up during the 1990s or the prior decades. Our understanding of what is “technology” has dramatically changed, but also the practical and cognitive uses that we perform with it.
As a child with a personal computer growing up during the 1990s, one of the advantages that I recognized quite fast was the tele-communicative possibilities that having an Internet connection brought upon my personal horizon. All of a sudden, and often tired of only psychosocializing with the kids at my school, I began to use my English skills to chat online with as many people as possible. Despite the current risks that engaging with strangers may imply, I established contact with people from the United States, other parts of Latin America, India, Japan, among other countries located on the other side of the Atlantic. Besides chatting online, accessing digital information was another asset that I accepted as well, and this way I became one of the first kids in my school to bring Internet-based homework to the classroom (World Economic Forum: 4 ways the web has changed our lives — and will shape our future).
Back then, the practice of plagiarism was not as disputed as these days in which we are witnessing the emergence of computer-based generative modes of writing in the form of GPTs and other Machine Learning strategies. If I think about that kid growing up during the 1990s in Mexico City, one of the very few in his classroom with access to an Internet connection, I must accept that we are suddenly living in an amazing global reality that offers all sorts of unthinkable possibilities.
As a first-generation Millennial (Pew Research Center: Millennial life: How young adulthood today compares with prior generations) that eventually moved, indeed at an early age, from Mexico City to Europe and the United States to pursue what now I understand as global education opportunities, I feel quite optimistic about the future. I acknowledge that my global coming-to-age experiences were greatly thanks to my parents bringing home a computer with an Internet connection: my father went to the United States to buy our first Samsung Sensor CPU as it was difficult to purchase a “good one” in Mexico City during the early 1990s.
Even despite the fact that humans are surrounded by digital contents and Internet-powered devices, I see cyberreality as a puzzle-like compendium of megaspaces that allows users to navigate it based on their individual and psychosocial expertise, level of education, language processing capabilities, but above all based on their cognitive paths of inquiry. (Education Resources Information Center: Meta-Analysis on the Community of Inquiry Presences and Learning Outcomes in Online and Blended Learning Environments).
Cyberreality can reduced human entities to mere popular users/creators. It is somehow like entering a library: there is a clear divide between those who grab and accept the books that they see right away at hand because librarians have placed them upfront precisely to influence users, and those who take the risk and time of perusing as many shelves as they can, even if they do not exactly know what they are looking for or expect from their time invested at the library. Knowledge selection processes have become a key component of the reactions that we enact while confronted with any form of information/knowledge (ACL Anthology: Difference-aware Knowledge Selection for Knowledge-grounded Conversation Generation).
This way users can end up meandering the lists of media content of social media platforms or perusing invisible and gigantic online stores or clicking on the first results produced by their (un)methodical prompts. This latter one is indeed one of the premises at play regarding the personal use of Copilot or ChatGPT, among other “thought-formatting” generators that depart from the formulation of prompts (there are already AI-based prompt generators), which as we know can be as simple as a command or as sophisticated as engaging in a debate about the political repositioning of the Far-Right across Europe (POLITICO: Mapped: Europe’s rapidly rising right).
What we are indeed doing when we participate in the global cyberreality belongs to the core of human thinking and the epistemological processes inherent to education and human behavior. If we all let the kinds of Siri or Alexa, or even wearable gadgets like the new Ray-Ban meta smart glasses (The Internet of Things/IoT), become our primary sources of information/knowledge (the epistemological divide between these fundamental concepts has not been as blurry as during these times), we might run the risk of giving up some, if not many, of our critical thinking skills in order to engage/interpret/react based on highly monitored and sanctioned datasets that in sum constitute the basic epistemological units of cyberreality (Cognitive Warfare: Engage/Interpret/React website).
This epistemological scenario, however, could be more complex and even perceived as “risky” if the user finds herself amidst an inquiry dilemma. It has become overly evident what cognitive cyber-objects most Westerners are engaging with within the cyberreality. Manifold quantitative studies keep providing preliminary and provisional glimpses into this early twenty-first-century cyber-epistemological phenomenon (Arxiv: TikTok Actions: A TikTok-Derived Video Dataset for Human Action Recognition & Public Books: What’s on Top of TikTok?).
However, and recovering the scenario of the inquiry dilemma mentioned above, under what circumstances a user/actor/individual would find herself submitting a Freedom of Information Act Request Form through The United States Special Operations Command website (USSOCOM)?
Part Two of “Cognitive Warfare Reality” series will engage this question.
In the meantime, stay free, take care of yourselves, eat well, drink lots of healthy and clean water, and strengthen with kindness and empathy your communities of interaction.
¡Hasta la próxima!
