Wikileaks: implications for the communications industry.

With a few mouse clicks, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and volunteer staff of Wikileaks have picked up the chessboard of international politics and given it one hell of a shake.

It’ll take a while for the dust to settle… and it’ll be very interesting to see what the game looks like when it does.

In reality much of the changed landscape of this ‘new game’ will only affect people directly involved in the Machiavellian cut and thrust of international politics.

However the various scandals have drawn into focus some very interesting changes in the way people share information. And if like me, you’re involved day-to-day in corporate communications (an industry that you could argue is a minor league version the international diplomacy game) then you really should be watching closely. Here are a few concepts that have caught my attention:

The scientific approach to communications.
When Wikileaks published the “Collateral Murder” tapes showing a United States helicopter machine gunning civilians and journalists they didn’t just release a ten second clip… they released the full, unedited camera tapes. Sure you could see an edited version, but if you didn’t believe the conclusions they drew, you could download the unedited version and decide for yourself. It’s what’s known as the scientific approach journalism.

The idea stems from the dusty world of peer-reviewed science journals where you don’t just publish your conclusions; you publish the hypothesis, the methodology and results too. The idea is that readers can view your data and see if they draw the same conclusions, or if they like, repeat the experiment and see if they get the same results. It’s a fairly high standard to achieve, but it’s one that clearly separates objective from subjective; fact from opinion.

In the pre-digital age, cost and logistical constraints prevented the news media from using this approach. The result was an arrangement that forced readers to rely on the subjective opinions of reporters and the subjective choices of editors. It was an imperfect system, to put it lightly.

But on the internet there is no such constraint and so we see a growing number of communications organisations showing not just the tip of the inverted pyramid… but publishing the whole thing (mummies and all).

So how does this relate to someone selling mountain biking holidays, or real estate packages?

Well, twenty years ago the column inches constraint applied to corporate communications too - so you could say “trust us you’ll love it” and people would generally be happy enough with that. But as the world’s ability to transmit and process information grows it seems likely that the businesses that say “trust us you’ll love it… but if you want proof, here it is” will be the ones who come out on top.

Of course not everyone will look at that proof; not everyone has the time. But if you’re trying to convince people to buy into your idea, be it a product, political campaign or news story; and you’re not prepared to show them demonstration videos, independent field trials, customer reviews, etcetera to back it up… then you’ll need a to think up a pretty damn good reason why not.

No more porky-pies
The second revelation to come out of Wikileaks actually stems back to an essay “Conspiracy as Governance” written by Julian Assange back in 2006. In the essay, which forms the philosophical underpinning of Wikileaks Assange argues that unjust organizations by their nature will create leaks and that those leaks will have a negative nonlinear effect on them.

“The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaptation.”

Once again Assange was writing is in the context of tyrannical government regimes… but again the principles apply on a smaller scale. As the world’s ability to share information increases, organizations that behave duplicitously; whether that’s over-selling a product, over-spinning their public relations activities or just plain lying; are increasingly going to find themselves outmanoeuvred by their honest competitors.

That’s not to say you can’t have conflicting points of view and it definitely doesn’t mean that everyone has to agree with everything that you do (in fact having some people vigourously dislike what you do can galvanise your supporters and actually be beneficial… but I digress). However, what it does mean is that by keeping your rhetoric and your actions in line you’ll make your organisation more effective - and more profitable.

One obvious sticking point will be the traditional difference between ‘back-of-house’ and ‘front-of-house’ communications. Communication is always going to be context specific and shifting contexts will invariably distort the meaning of the message. Anyone who’s taken their spouse to a work Christmas party will understand.

There is however a big difference between this sort of cross-contextual friction…and conspiring to deceive the public at large. It’s a hazy line I’ll admit, but with information passing between contexts more freely than ever, it’s one that professional communicators are going to have to watch very closely.

What’s your name again?
On a more technical note, it’s interesting to observe that Wikileaks was able to operate almost entirely unhindered without even having a domain name. After EveryDNS cut ties with the company claiming the denial of service attacks on the Wikileaks site were threatening its ability to serve other customers, the URL www.wikileaks.org effectively ceased to exist.

You’d think they would have been dead in the water, but the site was still easily locatable via Google at its numeric IP address: 213.251.145.96 and continued to run more or less unhindered.

So what? Well, the old marketing adage: “build a better mousetrap and the world with beat a path to your door” is generally quoted as a description of how things used to be done – before the wonders of modern marketing. It seems these days, with a little help from Google the saying is true once again… especially if you’re looking to catch very big, corrupt mice.

Out There - in print!

Check out January’s edition of Wilderness Magazine for the first installment of the Out There column, exploring the etiquette of bringing music into the wilderness. The story is the first in a series on philosophy and travel that I’ve agreed to co-author through 2010 (and hopefully beyond). The column’s brief is a dream: a thousand words on philosophy and travel – basically explore with your mind or your feet… then write it up. It’s going to be a fun year!

The eco-tourism paradox

Visit our country… or the monkey gets it!

Here’s an interesting concept… well at least I thought so: Is travelling to developing countries a good or bad thing for the environment. Could it be both in the same action?

In a lot of ways this whole economic downturn and the flat tourism market it’s produced are doing great things for the environment. People are taking staycations instead of vacations, thereby saving vast quantities of increasingly scarce fossil fuels and their associated carbon emissions.

By not travelling people generally consume less plastic, less paper, and less water – on the whole we just seem to consume less when we’re at home and we generally do so in locations that are better able to cope with the resulting waste.

But… and this is a really big but (think J.Lo), over the years tourism’s big gift to the planet is that it’s attached an economic value to nature. Developing communities have generally realised that the big old trees in the forest are worth more standing unharmed than they are chopped down for paper pulp. The monkeys swinging through their branches – they’ll educate the local kids.

However, when the economy slows down and the tourists stay home, those old trees start to look pretty tempting once again. It’s obvious to all that going back to the bad old slash-and-burn days is a short sighted solution, but in developing countries people often just don’t have the financial backing to ride out a global recession.

So what to do? Travel? Stay home? It might just be that we’re equally damned… and equally blessed whichever we choose.

As far as I can tell there’s no easy answer. The most likely fix is for travellers to exercise a bit of intelligence – ask some pointy questions before you make that booking: Is there a short-haul destination I could visit instead? Who owns this hotel? Where do you get your water? Is this food local, or did you fly it in?

But perhaps the most important thing you can do in terms of the environment while travelling is try to learn from the locals. Behave like a missionary in reverse. Odds are, if you’re travelling to a developing country your hosts will have a smaller ecological footprint than you. So look around, and see what ideas you can bring home.

Go forth, travel, think, learn and you might just land on the positive side of the paradox.

Order, chaos, ethics and the backcountry

Can we have unfettered liberty and powder for all?

In the seventies and eighties rock climbing went through an adolescence of sorts. As the pursuit’s popularity grew, the elite climbers of the day, guys like Yvon Chouinard, Royal Robins and Tom Frost took the existing concept of climbing “by fair means” and developed it into a code of ethics to ensure the newly mainstream sport wouldn’t collapse under the weight of its own popularity.

It was quite a feat, given the anarchic band of self-confessed degenerates and misfits that constituted the climbing fraternity of the time.

This set of ‘rules’, developed by the people at the lunatic fringe, dictated the big no-nos, things like chipping holds and retro-fitting bolts to a climb, as well as things to be avoided like scaring the rock by hammering in pitons and de-vegetating cliffs to establish routes.

At the same time they somehow managed to instil the concept of good or ‘pure’ style into the climbing culture. The epitome of which is the on-sight free solo; a lone climber ascending a previously unseen cliff, un-assisted by ropes or equipment, from bottom to top in a single push, then leaving it completely un-changed for the next person.

It’s a philosophical goal that not many climbers ever achieve, most are happy to accept impurities like anchors, a rope and harness, but the idea that climbing is really just about testing your mind and body against the rock and gravity is a concept that’s held the climbing community in good stead for half a century. By applying a little order to the chaos, climbers have created and preserved a sport that has a ‘soul’ like no other.

These days, looking at the steady crawl of people skinning out of the Remarkables , it would seem that backcountry skiing is going through a similar growth-spurt.

A new breed of burly touring bindings like Frichi Freerides and Naxo NXs mean that skiers can now carve up the resort’s groomers, tackle the terrain park, and tour the backcountry all with the one rig. Now you can have your cake and eat it.

Consequently AT bindings are becoming the SUV of the ski field. You can be certain that most of them will never make it off the piste let alone out of the resort. But even so, with sales of these all terrain vehicles booming the resort-adjacent backcountry that was a land of anarchic solitude just a few years ago is becoming decidedly, ahem, social.

So do we need to start thinking about a code of ethics and style for winter backcountry travellers? Can we apply order to the chaos? Should we?

I’m increasingly thinking perhaps we should have a go. Over the years the amount of people I’ve seen making ski touring faux pas seems to have increased exponentially. It seems every time you go out now you see skiers and boarders dropping into slopes with people skinning below them, skiing drunken descent lines that track-out a bowl in three runs and my favourite, heading out ridiculously under-equipped – armed with skins and a transceiver… but not much else.

The question is how do you do it? How do you get a bunch of people who’ve left the resort largely to escape the plethora of rules and regulations, to self-administer a whole new set of rules? I don’t think there’d be many who’d welcome (or who’d read) signs saying, “Welcome to the backcountry, please follow these rules or else… and have a nice day.”

Perhaps the answer lies in convincing the lunatic fringe to think level headedly about the future of the backcountry. Perhaps we need to get the professionals, the gear manufacturers, the mag editors, photographers, guides and of course bloggers to lead the concept of good ethics and pure style in the backcountry rather than just worrying about their sales or circulation statistics.

It might take a bit of effort, but I think saving the soul of the backcountry is probably worth it.