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STRATEGIC

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INSTITUTE

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Strategic Studies Institute Monograph

CULTURE, IDENTITY, AND INFORMATION 

TECHNOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY:

IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY

Pauline Kusiak

August 2012

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distribution is unlimited.

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copyrighted.
ii

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ISBN 1-58487-541-0
iii

FOREWORD

In this monograph, Dr. Pauline Kusiak traces 

global trends in the use of language and media in order to identify the national security implications of 

cultural change and identity formation. Her analysis 

suggests that in the next several decades, the world 

is likely to be more ideologically fragmented than at 

any time during the 20th century. In such a context, 

not only will the ability of the United States to push 

back against other rising “centers of influence” be 

comparatively reduced; other rising powers themselves are unlikely to be able to wield the same forms 

of influence that shaped international politics in the 

20th century. Instead, Dr. Kusiak offers a sociological 

perspective on these global trends, suggesting that the 

emergent norms of future generations will challenge 

existing legal frameworks and bureaucratic methods 

that states have until now relied on to manage and 

provide secrecy and security. At the same time, the 

influx of digital “immigrants” from the developing 

world to the information domain will indelibly shape 

the information society as we know it today. For the 

first time, “cultural engagement” will no longer be an 

experience that exclusively happens in “far-off” lands, 

as the global expansion of the information society enables the beliefs and values of foreign societies to impact our day-to-day lives more frequently and more 

directly.

Ultimately, the monograph makes a compelling 

case for policymakers to attend to the strategic implications of cultural change and to reach beyond statecentric approaches in security studies in order to do 

so. The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to offer 

this monograph as a contribution that enriches our 
iv

understanding of the future security environment and 

furthers policy debate on U.S. national security and 

defense strategy.

 

 DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

 Director

 Strategic Studies Institute
v

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PAULINE KUSIAK is a foreign affairs specialist in the 

Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. In 

this position, she has worked in the areas of strategy, 

stability operations, and special operations and combating terrorism. Dr. Kusiak was the first program 

manager for the DoD’s Minerva Initiative, a basic 

social science research initiative launched by Secretary Robert M. Gates in 2008. Before joining OSD, she 

worked as a social and cultural research specialist for 

the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort 

Bragg, NC.

vii

SUMMARY

This monograph describes strategic trends in cultural change and identity formation in the 21st century. While it is impossible to predict credibly the 

values and beliefs of future generations, the first part 

of the monograph provides a modest forecast by tracing global trends in the use of language and media, as 

well as in the use of information and communication 

technologies. The second part then draws out potential implications of these culture and identity trends 

for the strength of the U.S. “signal” in the global infocommunication sphere. 

The analysis by Dr. Pauline Kusiak suggests that in 

the next several decades, the world is likely to be more 

ideologically fragmented than at any time during the 

20th century and that the ability of the United States 

to push back against other “centers of influence” may 

be comparatively reduced. At the same time, existing 

legal frameworks, bureaucratic methods, and strategic communication techniques are likely to be greatly 

strained by the emergent norms of a future saturated 

by information and communication technologies. Ultimately, Dr. Kusiak suggests that in the informationdominated 21st century, the beliefs and values of 

foreign societies may increasingly and more directly 

impact our own national security, making it ever more 

critical for policymakers to understand issues of cultural change and identity formation from a strategic 

perspective.

1

CULTURE, IDENTITY, AND INFORMATION 

TECHNOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY:

IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY

National security and defense strategy for at least 

the last decade has taken a particularly cosmopolitan 

outlook on world affairs. The 2010 Quadrennial Defense 

Review as well as the most recent Defense strategy, for 

example, suggest that the place of the United States 

in the international system can best be sustained by 

engaging newly emergent centers of influence and by 

pursuing measured responses to multipolarity. They 

both also argue that building the capacity of partners is 

the surest, most economical way for the United States 

to hedge against regional and transnational threats. 

This monograph will suggest that effectively actualizing this approach to world affairs and maneuvering 

through the complexities of the future operating environment will demand of 21st-century policymakers 

an even greater understanding of the beliefs, values, 

and cultures of foreign societies—as those beliefs and 

values pertain not only to the international relations 

of states but also to subnational populations and to 

transnational actors—than was required just a few decades ago.

Over the last several years, the Department of 

Defense (DoD) has built numerous programs to respond to the tactical and operational challenges of understanding foreign cultures. However, the strategic 

implications of cultural understanding have received 

comparatively less focus.1

 Since changes in interpretation and meaning are highly unpredictable, formulating a strategic appreciation of cultural and identity 

trends is indeed a daunting proposition. While some 

comparatively definitive assertions can be made about 
2

demographic trends, economic growth rates, and climate patterns—i.e., that there will be more people on 

the planet, that those in the global North will be graying while those in the global South will stay young, it 

will be warmer and non-Western nations that will be 

important economic players—it is far more difficult to 

predict how that world will be interpreted and understood by those who live in it. 

Ideally, a strategic assessment of cultural trends 

would give us a glimpse of the values, beliefs, and customs of the people who live in this future world. The 

adaptability and complexity of human behavior make 

it effectively impossible to produce credible predictions about specific values and beliefs. Nevertheless, 

this monograph intends to highlight some key global 

trends that may shape the politics of culture and identity issues in the 21st century. It will then pose several propositions about potential implications of these 

trends for national security and for defense.

EMERGING TRENDS 

OF THE INFORMATION SOCIETY

Knowledge about foreign societies has been shaped 

throughout the 20th century by various forms of global 

engagement, as well as by the security concerns raised 

by such engagement. The social science discipline of 

anthropology, for example, largely grew out of the 

expeditionary experiences of France and Britain, and 

many early anthropologists were employed by the colonial militaries of these nations.2

 Similarly, the Cold 

War created a new kind of premium on deep expertise 

of foreign societies, as Sovietologists, Kremlinologists, 

and other kinds of area studies specialists studied indirect symbols and leadership profiles of the Union of 
3

Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) to discern the inner 

workings of an otherwise closed regime.3

If colonial expeditions framed interactions with 

foreign societies in the early-20th century, and the 

Cold War structured encounters with non-Western 

cultures in the mid-20th century, the unfolding of 

the information society—in which distant places and 

peoples can more directly impact our day-to-day 

lives—is probably the key dynamic that will shape 

how culture, identity, and security are studied and 

understood in the 21st century. Scholarly concepts 

of “region” and “place” have already been fundamentally transformed by the emerging norms of the 

information society, as have the means available to 

study that social behavior. Platforms such as Google 

and Facebook are not simply mediums through which 

social intercourse takes place; now they are also readily mined as sources of raw data about human social 

interaction.4 Just as security concerns fostered the 

study of non-Western cultures and later funded the 

development of area studies, today the U.S. defense 

and security sectors are investing millions of dollars in 

computational social sciences to improve data-mining 

and targeting mechanisms of all kinds. From courtship 

to diplomacy, from social networking to warfare, the 

intersection of people’s values, beliefs, and customs 

with the virtual domain will drive cultural trends and 

identity dynamics, as well as the way we understand 

those social behaviors, for the foreseeable future.

As noted by scholar Benedict Anderson, the way 

that social groups understand themselves as a people 

is largely structured by the symbols and media that 

comprise their social context.5

 While we cannot predict how people will interpret phenomena and events 

in an information-saturated future, it is possible to 
4

note trends in the use of tools and mediums that will 

likely structure those interpretations. What languages 

will people speak? What will people be reading and 

listening to? How and from whom will they be learning? If we want to know what trends may shape the 

politics of culture and identity in the future, one way 

to start is to trace global patterns in people’s use of 

language and media, as well as their relative degrees 

of connection to one another through information and 

communication technologies.

• Language Use: Language is the medium 

through which human beings establish and 

maintain relationships. It is the foundation of 

mutual intelligibility and shared symbolic systems. As such, trends in language use provide 

some data about the raw materials that future 

generations will be using to interpret and make 

sense of their world. Such trends suggest that 

while English will continue to be an important 

vehicle of international communication, the 

comparative influence of the English language 

in the future may be less than it is today.

— The percentage of the world’s population

that speaks English as its first language is actually declining. In 1995, the most common 

language spoken in the world was Chinese, 

followed by English. Current projections 

suggest that in 50 years English will probably drop down to the fifth-most-common 

native language spoken in the world after 

Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, and Arabic.6

— English will probably continue to be a widely spoken second language in the future, but 

it may no longer have the same dominance 

it enjoyed in the 20th century. At the begin-
5

ning of the new millennium, about 20 to 25 

percent of the world’s population spoke English as a first or second language.7

 However, 

as non-English-speaking countries begin to 

comprise a larger percentage of the world’s 

total gross national product (GNP), these 

trends are likely to shift. Some researchers 

speculate that in the future, more people will 

speak more languages, and that Mandarin 

Chinese will become the next “must-learn” 

language, particularly in Asia.8

— The relative influence of foreign languages in 

the future may also be partially reflected by 

the relative ability of their speakers to read 

and write in those languages. North America and Europe continue to have the world’s 

highest literacy rates. Asia and Latin America have the second-highest rates globally.9

Despite a lower literacy rate, however, China can still boast 1.2 billion literate Chinese 

people, more than double the total number 

of first and second English language speakers—literate and nonliterate—worldwide. In 

contrast, more than half of the world’s population of illiterate adults live in South Asia. 

An additional 176 million illiterate adults 

live in Sub-Saharan Africa.10 As youth literacy rates continue to increase around the 

world, however, adult literacy rates should 

continue to improve among future generations globally.11

• Information and Communication Technologies 

(ICTs): Few inventions altered the course of history as radically as did the printing press. Some 
6

historians suggest that as literacy extended to 

the average person throughout the 15th, 16th, 

and 17th centuries, attitudes to received wisdom as well as understandings of knowledge 

more generally were irrevocably changed. In 

particular, individual reason and the ability to 

question authority were more highly esteemed, 

such that these values ultimately came to characterize the split between the Middle Ages and 

the Modern era itself. It is possible that the values and behaviors that the Internet is fostering 

today will similarly fundamentally alter the 

way societies around the world interact and 

behave tomorrow. In light of that potential, it 

is notable that over the course of the next decade, the largest pool of “immigrants” to this 

new digital community will likely come from 

non-Western countries and nations. As these 

newcomers enter the digital domain, they will 

likely import their own languages, values, and 

norms, changing the texture and complexity 

of the information society we all inhabit in the 

process.

— Access to the Internet around the world continues to expand. In 2009, worldwide fixed 

and mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide passed the 1 billion mark.12 About 1.7 

billion people, or 26 percent of the world’s 

population, report regularly using the Internet.13

— Internet penetration rates are still much

higher in developed countries than in the 

developing world, where between 58 to 77 

percent of the population are online. However, in the decade between 2000 and 2010, 
7

the highest growth rates for new Internet 

users were in Africa, the Middle East, Latin 

America and the Caribbean, and Asia.14 China overtook the United States as the world’s 

largest fixed broadband market in 2008.15

— A 2010 CISCO report notes that between 2005

and 2010, the share of the Internet Economy 

(that is, the approximate amount of purchasing power in the hands of Internet users) 

held by advanced market countries fell from 

85 to 70 percent.16 Due to differential gross 

domestic product (GDP) growth rates between the advanced and emerging countries, 

the expansion of the middle classes in these 

emerging countries, and the aging populations of more advanced countries, they predict that emerging countries will account for 

more than half of the Internet Economy by 

2025.17

— English is currently the most commonly

used language on the Internet (with 536.6 

million users), followed closely by Chinese 

(with 444.9 million users). The next most 

common languages on the Internet (Spanish, 

Japanese, and Portuguese) are several hundred million users further behind.18 Given 

the relative population sizes and the growth 

of Internet access in Asia, it could potentially take less than a decade for Chinese to 

become the most commonly used language 

on the Internet.

— In 2006, fewer than one-quarter of global Internet users were based in the United States, 

and users in the United States spent less time 

online than users in Israel, Finland, South 
8

Korea, the Netherlands, and Taiwan.19 Facebook hosts more than 70 different languages, 

and about 70 percent of its 500 million active 

users are outside of the United States.20

— Mobile cellular penetration in developing

countries has more than doubled since 2005. 

In 2009, 57 out of 100 inhabitants had access to a cell phone in developing countries, 

while 67 out of 100 people worldwide had 

mobile cellular subscriptions.21 The primary 

source of global growth has been the AsiaPacific region. Including India and China, 

the Asia-Pacific region accounted for 47 percent of global mobile connections in 2010.22

• Media Sources and Penetration: While more 

people are connected globally and have access 

to the Internet, the sources of news and information they are accessing through those means 

are also more numerous than they were even 2 

decades ago. Such trends suggest that the relative influence of American-generated, Englishlanguage media and news sources may shift 

as sources of news splinter and become more 

regionally “localized.”

— Circulation rates for print media have fallen

in the developed world over the last several 

years, but have actually increased 13 percent 

in Asia and 4.8 percent in Africa between 

2005 and 2010. At the same time, the number 

of newspaper titles worldwide has actually 

increased 1.7 percent since 2008, with the 

increase in new titles being greatest in Asia 

(at 2.7 percent). Asia claims a total of 67 of 

the world’s 100 largest daily papers. Despite 
9

having far fewer literate people, the sale of 

daily papers in India actually exceeded those 

in China by one million, and was more than 

double the sales of daily papers in Japan and 

the United States.23

— When CNN launched in 1980, it was the only

24-hour news station in the world. Three 

decades later, news-on-demand services—

from specialized cable television channels 

to online sites—have largely replaced large 

broadcast media and restructured how the 

public is informed about world events, both 

domestically and internationally. As of 2007, 

Al Jazeera claims 40-50 million viewers 

worldwide, a statistic comparable to that of 

the BBC.24

— Hollywood no longer dominates the global

market for idealized media images. The 

world’s largest film industry today is actually India’s Bollywood, and exports of Bollywood DVDs and Bhangara music CDs 

are popular in other media markets, such 

as Africa.25 With an average release of 50 

full-length feature films per week, Nigeria’s 

“Nollywood” is the world’s second most 

productive film industry.26 Like Bollywood 

films, Nollywood movies feature love stories, arranged marriages, family dramas, 

travails of migrating to urban areas—themes 

that resonate with audiences themselves experiencing the challenges of modernity more 

than do Hollywood swashbucklers. The medium is also widely used for evangelizing by 

Christian churches in Africa.27
10

• Infrastructure/Transportation Networks: Improvements in transportation have increased 

our connection to foreign cultures and societies 

in the physical domain as much as in the virtual 

one. Nevertheless, the contrast between growth 

in virtual connectivity and growth in transportation capabilities is in places quite stark.

— Whether through use of automobiles, buses, railways, or aircraft, people around the 

world have increased their travel demand 

from an average of 1,400 kilometers (km) to 

5,500 km over the past 5 decades. The biggest increase occurred in the developing 

world, where the combined growth in per 

capita GDP and population was the largest.28

— Nevertheless, there is still a significant mobility gap between developing and industrialized regions. In 2000, residents in North 

America, the Pacific (Japan, Australia, and 

New Zealand), and Western Europe traveled 

five times as much as people in the developing world. Residents of North America, the 

region with the highest level of mobility, 

traveled 25,600 km per year, while people 

in sub-Saharan Africa (not including South 

Africa) traveled only 1,700 km per year.29 Between 1990 and 2000, the percent of paved 

roads in Africa may actually have declined.30

— There have also been some noteworthy shifts

in hubs for international travel. In 2009, 

China became the first non-U.S. or United 

Kingdom (UK) based airport in a decade to 
11

be one of the top three busiest airports in the 

world.31 In 2010, China’s Beijing Capital Airport became the second busiest airport in the 

world, second only to the Atlanta HartsfieldJackson airport.

In sum, the above trends suggest that, in the future, we will increasingly be connected to international actors, if unevenly. English will be less commonly 

spoken than other languages, and more sources of 

news, information, and entertainment with a local and 

global reach will not be in English or originate in the 

United States. In the next decades, the largest number 

of immigrants to the digital domain opened up by information and communication technologies are likely 

to come from emerging economies and developing 

countries. Combined, these trends raise several questions about the relative strength of the U.S. “signal” in 

the global info-communication sphere.

FUTURE POLITICS OF CULTURE 

AND IDENTITY 

Given these trends in the use of language, media, 

and information and communication technologies, 

what are some potential implications for culture and 

identity issues in the 21st century and their possible 

impact on U.S. national security? The following are 

some propositions about future politics of culture and 

identity for further exploration.
12

No One Country or Region Will Be Likely 

to Monopolize Global “Influence” in the 

21st Century, Including Us. 

While the trends outlined above suggest that the 

culture and values of emerging centers of influence 

will spread beyond their borders, the degree of that 

influence may not be comparable to the kind of experience the United States had in the 20th century. With 

so many more sources of information, a segmented 

consumer base, and the proliferation of non-English 

sources of news, the market for global ideas will simply be more saturated, making it difficult for any one 

source of images and ideas to dominate.

Fundamentally, a more globalized media marketplace of ideas may challenge the influence and appeal 

of the regionally based identities that dominated the 

20th century. Many pan-regional identities are vestiges from post-colonial nationalist movements and have 

already lost their persuasive appeal among younger 

generations. Pan-Africanism and Arab Nationalism, 

for example, already seem less compelling to contemporary youth as older generations of leaders have become discredited by corruption and poor governance. 

In other areas, such pan-regional identities never held 

much sway. The Asia-Pacific region, for example, has 

historically remained remarkably diverse. Hinduism, 

Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam have all found a 

home here, and the area remains one of the most ethno-linguistically heterogeneous on the planet. Together, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, for example, 

account for more than 22 percent of the world’s oral 

languages, the majority of which are not spoken in any 

other country.32 Over the last 10 years, the number of 
13

active or recently resolved insurgencies and civil wars 

in the Asia-Pacific region has been more than double 

the number that have taken place across the Middle 

East in the same time period. Given such a diverse 

backdrop, it is not clear that any rising Asian Pacific 

power would find ideological integration on behalf of 

shared regional identities to be an easy task. 

At the same time, population influxes to developed Western nations will likely impact the stability 

of existing regional and national identities. Demographic shifts, the connection of diasporic communities through information technology, and immigration patterns could all trouble 20th-century nationalist 

ideas and images. According to the Pew Research 

Center, by 2050, one in five Americans (19 percent) 

will be an immigrant, compared with one in eight (12 

percent) in 2005. Of the increase in the total U.S. population (from 296 million in 2005 to 438 million in 2050), 

82 percent will be due to immigrants arriving between 

2005 and 2050 and to their U.S.-born descendants.33

Combined with the decreasing prominence of the 

English language in business and commerce transactions, and the increasing domestic visibility of images 

and ideas from distant places, this influx of migrants 

could heighten debates about national languages and 

provoke an identity crisis in the United States, as fears 

grow about the increasing influence of other countries 

over segments of the U.S. population. 

Ultimately, unstable domestic identities, combined with an erosion of the power of older regionally 

based identities, are likely to work against nationally 

based models of global influence in the 21st century, 

in the process eroding any one country’s monopoly on 

global influence. 
14

The Prospects for Master Narratives to Unify 

International Action May Be More Limited. 

Throughout the modern era, certain cultural ideals 

have provided grand totalizing schema and narratives 

to organize human activity, (e.g., “all men are created 

equal,” “human reason will triumph over superstition and ignorance,” etc). Given the vast array of information sources available today and the increasing 

regional specificity of the sources of news and media, 

the ideological threat of the future may less likely be a 

reigning alternate ideology to our own (for example, 

communism vs. capitalism), but rather the breaking 

apart of any universalizing narratives at all. As the 21st 

century unfolds, we may find that the proliferation of 

images, ideas, and communication networks limits the 

power and persuasive appeal of such grand totalizing 

“-isms” as such. The ability to mobilize international 

coalitions to action may be significantly weakened as 

a result. The clash between science and religion is one 

example of the kind of discursive confusion that could 

become more common in the future. 

In the 20th century, science and technology were 

not just tools that could be used to develop nations; 

they were also useful cultural narratives that could 

help unite the nation-state and act as a universalizing language in the conduct of international affairs. 

Many of the international security challenges that concern U.S. policymakers today—for example, climate 

change, space or cyber security—not only demand 

high levels of international cooperation, but depend 

on high levels of scientific and technical (S&T) expertise of one kind or another. While S&T-heavy issues 

such as these could continue to be a source of inter-
15

national cooperation, they may also become sources 

of potential strain on international relations in cases 

where education levels are uneven, cultures of policymaking markedly differ, or ideological bases may 

exist for rejecting secular, science based-arguments. 

While shared scientific facts are probably still the 

way foreign policymakers in the United States prefer 

to legitimize political, military, or diplomatic interventions, for many around the world religion is an increasingly important basis for such ethical decisions. 

As Scott M. Thomas points out in an article in Foreign 

Affairs, the world is simply becoming more religious: 

the number of evangelicals worldwide is on the rise, 

and more people are reporting that religion plays an 

important part in their lives.34 Additionally, religious 

people around the world have more children. Thomas 

observes that as these trends continue, religion will 

increasingly shape the way that millions of people 

around the world interpret democracy, human rights, 

and economic development. Furthermore, information and communication technologies make it even 

more possible for religiously identified groups to connect to one another globally, for the first time disconnecting religious belief from geography. In this sense, 

religious discourse could also become a universalizing 

language in international relations, comparable to the 

role that science and technology have played for Western policymakers throughout the 20th century. While 

U.S. policymakers are well trained to deploy scientific 

and technical expertise in their international relations, 

today they are less likely to know how to interpret or 

respond to the strategic impact of religious or spiritual belief in diplomatic action. This could put current 

and future U.S. foreign policymakers and U.S. foreign 

influence at a distinct disadvantage as future popula-
16

tions around the world become increasingly comfortable operating through religious idioms. Ultimately, 

sustained cooperation may become more challenging 

as the need to translate policy into multiple registers 

in order to communicate with divergent domestic and 

international audiences becomes exponentially more 

complicated. 

ICT-Inundated Society Will Drastically Change 

the Way Humans Interact, in Particular Regarding 

Issues of Privacy, Trust, and Transparency. 

Phenomena like Wikileaks may already be demonstrating the limits of the forms of governance developed in the mid-20th century for managing 21stcentury leaderless, networked social action. As the 

meanings of trust and privacy continue to be transformed in the information society, existing legal 

frameworks and bureaucracies for managing secrecy 

and security may be greatly strained. 

Increasing bandwidth seems to be putting more 

and more information instantly at our finger tips, allowing ever more kinds of social interactions to go electronic and, in the process, irrevocably changing core 

social institutions. Email and texting have already imported improvisations into ordinary language use, in 

the process creating “cyber creoles” that “non-native” 

speakers (that is, older generations) have difficulty 

understanding. Many believe that the Internet and 

eBooks have forever imperiled the publishing industry and that libraries, textbooks, and even postal mail 

will soon be relics of a bygone era. Domestic law enforcement agencies and online dating sites use similar 

technologies to match us to targets of interest, taking 

the guesswork and labor out of building community 
17

relations or intimate relationships. The social and cultural impacts of the digital transformation of these 

basic social institutions are likely to be significant. As 

more and more aspects of our lives are conducted “virtually,” traditional lines between truth and falsity, for 

example, already seem to be blurring. Some researchers hypothesize that because people use screen names, 

postings are anonymous, and there are no physical 

cues to keep behavior in check. The also hypothesize 

that computer-mediated communication is particularly disinhibiting and allows “people to say just about 

anything they feel like saying.”35 Online “avatars” 

may be idealized versions of ourselves, but for many 

“digital natives” (those who have been raised on the 

Internet since the late 1990s), the distinction appears 

to be largely irrelevant.36 The orientations of younger 

generations to digital media could pose a significant 

challenge to current social conventions about privacy 

and truth telling, and potentially to governance institutions and security classification processes based on 

those conventions. 

If the norms and cyber habits of younger generations push the boundaries of 20th-century security institutions, the attitudes toward and online behaviors 

of those from different countries may be an even bigger challenge. If, as several of the statistics cited above 

suggest, the vast majority of newcomers to the global 

digital community in the next 2 decades will come 

from emerging economies and developing countries, 

the challenges of cross-cultural engagement may 

come home to us in some rather direct and intimate 

ways. Ethnographers have long noted the ways that 

different groups of people adopt distinct attitudes 

toward truth telling, the maintenance of privacy, and 

even expectations of transparency. We can reasonably 
18

anticipate that those who are coming to the digital 

community from political cultures very different from 

our own will similarly adopt distinct orientations to 

the use, management, and governance of information. 

One major source of “419” advance-fee scam emails, 

for example, is Nigeria, where the ubiquity of corruption is unparalleled and where rumor serves as an 

equally credible source of information as does journalism.37 The Internet thus enables localized norms and 

practices to reach out and touch millions of globally 

distributed in-boxes daily. This kind of information 

piracy, identity theft, and fraud can slow down other 

forms of global socioeconomic exchange, rendering 

a range of systems effectively inoperable. If a greater 

share of Internet users and a greater percent of the 

global Internet market shifts to the Asia-Pacific region, 

and to China in particular, the social conventions that 

govern global Internet behavior today could slowly 

orient toward an entirely different set of political cultural norms about knowledge, trust, and privacy. We 

do not yet understand what the impact would be of 

the importation of these different cultural norms on 

the operation of the Internet as a whole and would 

need many more ethnographies of these sociotechnical interactions to even begin to get a clear sense of the 

potential implications of a cyber environment that is 

dominated by non-Western users.38

The DoD has already begun to invest human capital 

and infrastructure into cyber defense and security, but 

it is not just deliberately nefarious action we should 

be concerned with. Given the role that information 

and communication technologies already play in our 

daily lives, it would behoove policymakers to also begin proactively considering the costs and benefits for 

building governance institutions for cyber space, as 
19

well as weighing our technopolitical options for “socializing” newcomers into the digital norms that best 

support our national interests. 

CONCLUSION: POTENTIAL IMPLICATIONS 

FOR SECURITY AND FOR DEFENSE

The above analysis of cultural and identity trends 

suggest several issues that national security and Defense policymakers should take note of:

• In the next several decades, the ability of the 

United States to push back against other centers of influence may be comparatively reduced. For the first time, America’s notorious 

unilingualism and cultural chauvinism could 

become a real strategic liability, not just a tactical or operational challenge.

• The world is likely to be more ideologically 

fragmented than at any time during the 20th 

century. This will make it comparatively more 

difficult to use common unifying narratives to 

mobilize international actors to action, since 

such ideas will have to be simultaneously translated in near-real time into multiple languages 

and registers in order to assuage concerns of 

divergent local audiences, let alone achieve 

consensus among foreign leaders.

• The way that knowledge production is organized, managed, and compartmentalized within the intelligence community and security sectors today will prove dangerously outdated for 

the way that information will be created, circulated, and reproduced around the world in the 

future. As younger generations who have been 

born and raised in the information society enter 

military or government service, the U.S. Gov-
20

ernment’s means of managing secrecy, largely 

developed in the mid-20th century, may be 

outpaced by the developing norms and practices of information sharing more common in 

broader society. At the same time, current assumptions about the quality and use of public 

information is likely to be challenged by the 

arrival to the information sphere of more and 

more non-Western users with very different expectations about knowledge and secrecy than 

our own.

• Finally, it is not clear that anything in the “strategic communication” or “strategic engagement” 

toolkit will be up to the task of maneuvering 

in the complex, multi-directional info-communication domain of the 21st century. The 

organizational structure, as well as the Tactics, 

Techniques, and Procedures of psychological 

operations (PSYOP)/military information support operations (MISO) are long past outdated 

for the kind of multi-level influence we will 

need to wield in an information-saturated 21st 

century. Further, the lack of integration and 

synchronization between a range of U.S. Government communication efforts will continue 

to be a major stumbling block. Perhaps most 

crippling, however, will be the antique, topdown knowledge production paradigms that 

in still too many places structure our national 

security institutions. The combined impact may 

render the life world of national security bureaucracies (and, by extension, of the governments they represent) increasingly alienated 

from the worldviews of the populations whom 

they are supposed to be serving and communicating with.
21

This monograph has focused on sketching out 

future trends and has been light on articulating solutions for policymakers about how to respond to these 

challenges. I will conclude by pointing to a few broad 

steps that could be taken now to prepare us better 

for some of the possible outcomes discussed herein. 

Reforming government structures and ruthlessly flattening the way our bureaucracies work would, at a 

minimum, help those institutions keep pace with the 

information and communication norms of the private 

sector and wider general public. Recruiting younger 

generations, people with foreign language proficiency, and more first- and second-generation Americans 

into the security sector work force would proactively 

use America’s diversity to our advantage. Perhaps one 

of the most important things we could do, however, 

would be to deliberately and more explicitly address 

cultural change and identity formation in our strategic 

intelligence assessments instead of treating these issues as merely tactical or operational problems. Embedding this kind of strategic appreciation of cultural 

change into our foreign policy calculus would better 

posture policymakers to respond as these shifts are 

unfolding—something that may be ever more important given the impact that the beliefs, values, and cultures of foreign societies may increasingly have on our 

own national security in the information-dominated 

21st century.

ENDNOTES 

1. Notwithstanding Secretary Robert Gates’s Minerva Initiative, the bulk of Defense funding for sociocultural capabilities is 

currently applied toward operational and tactical challenges rather than strategic initiatives.
22

2. George W. Stocking, The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other 

Essays in the History of Anthropology, Madison, WI: University of 

Wisconsin Press, 1992; and George W. Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951, Madison, WI: University of 

Wisconsin Press, 1995.

3. David Engerman, Know your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of 

America’s Soviet Experts, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

4. D. Lazer, et al., “Social Science: Computational Social Science,” Science, February 6, 2009, pp. 721-723.

5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the 

Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York: Verson, 1991.

6. “What Languages Will the World Speak in 50 Years?” Science, February 27, 2004, available from www.eurekalert.org/features/

kids/2004-02/aaft-wlw020805.php. 

7. English is estimated to have 341 million native speakers 

around the world and 508 million second-language speakers. 

Language statistics from “Science Encyclopedia,” available from 

science.jrank.org/pages/8450/Bilingualism-Multilingualism-LanguageDiversity.html.

8. “What Languages Will the World Speak in 50 Years?”

9. United Nations, Human Development Report 2009: Overcoming 

Barriers: Human Mobility and Development, New York, 2009.

10. UNESCO, Adult and Youth Literacy: Global Trends in Gender Parity, available from www.unesco.org/education/ild2010/FactSheet2010_Lit_EN.pdf.

11. Ibid.

12. Measuring the Information Society, Geneva, Switzerland: International Telecommunications Union, 2010, p. ix. 

13. Ibid., p. ix.
23

14. “Internet World Statistics,” available from www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

15. “ITU News Country Rankings,” available from www.itu.

int/net/itunews/issues/2010/03/26.aspx.

16. CISCO defines the Internet Economy as the approximate 

amount of purchasing power in the hands of Internet users. See 

CISCO, The Evolving Internet: Driving Forces, Uncertainties, and 

Four Scenarios to 2025, August 2010, available from newsroom.cisco.

com/dlls/2010/ekits/Evolving_Internet_GBN_Cisco_2010_Aug.pdf.

17. Ibid. 

18. “Internet World Statistics.”

19. Victoria Shannon, “The End User: More World on the 

Web,” The New York Times, May 10, 2006, available from www.

nytimes.com/2006/05/10/technology/10iht-ptend11.1711582.html.

20. “Facebook Press Room,” available from www.facebook.com/

press/info.php?statistics.

21. Measuring the Information Society 2010; ibid. 

22. “Over 5 billion mobile phone connections worldwide,” BBC 

News, July 9, 2010, available from www.bbc.co.uk/news/10569081.

23. “Generally Upbeat World Press Trends Highlight Regional Differences,” Editor and Publisher, August 10, 2010, available 

from www.editorandpublisher.com/Headlines/generally-upbeat-worldpress-trends-report-highlights-regional-differences-62266-.aspx.

24. “Al Jazeera Audience Demographics and Viewership Profile,” available from allied-media.com/aljazeera/JAZdemog.html.

25. Andy Hines, “Global Trends in Culture, Infrastructure 

and Values,” The Futurist, September-October 2008, available 

from www.scribd.com/doc/7597839/Global-Trends-in-Culture-Infrastruture-and-Values-by-Andy-Hines.
24

26. “Nollywood: Lights, Camera, Africa,” The Economist, 

December 18-31, 2010, pp. 85-87.

27. Ibid. 

28. Andreas Schafer, “Long Term Trends in Global Passenger Mobility,” The Bridge, Vol. 36, No. 4, Winter 2006, 

available from www.members.nae.edu/nae/bridgecom.nsf/weblinks/

MKEZ-6WHQ3Q?OpenDocument.

29. Ibid.

30. “Trading Economics, Indicators for Sub-Saharan Africa,” 

available from www.tradingeconomics.com/sub-saharan-africa/roadspaved-percent-of-total-roads-wb-data.html.

31. “Airports Council International,” available from www.

aci.aero/cda/aci_common/display/main/aci_content07_c.jsp?zn=aci&

cp=1-5-54-55_666_2__.

32. Language statistics from Science Encyclopedia, available 

from science.jrank.org/pages/8450/Bilingualism-MultilingualismLanguage-Diversity.html.

33. “Pew Research Center,” available from pewsocialtrends.

org/2008/02/11/us-population-projections-2005-2050.

34. Scott M. Thomas, “A Globalized God: Religion’s Growing 

Influence in International Politics,” Foreign Affairs, November/

December 2010, pp. 93-101. 

35. About 20 percent of online daters admit to deception in 

their online activities. Comparisons between users’ self-description and their actual income, height, and weight suggest that rates 

of online deception are actually much higher. Robert Epstein, 

“The Truth About Online Dating,” Scientific American—Mind, 

February/March 2007, available from drrobertepstein.com/pdf/

Epstein-TheTruthAboutOnlineDating-2-07.pdf.
25

36. A 2008 AP study found that 25 percent of 1,280 youths surveyed made no distinction between online friends and the ones 

they saw every day. Andy Hines, “Global Trends in Culture, Infrastructure and Values,” ibid.

37. Andrew Apter, “IBB=419: Nigerian Democracy and the 

Politics of Illusion,” John and Jean Comaroff, eds., Civil Society 

and the Political Imagination in Africa, Chicago, IL: University of 

Chicago Press, 1999, pp. 267-307.

38. As a 2010 CISCO report points out: 

The evolution of the Internet in the past 40 years has underscored the notion that it is in the network’s nature to evolve organically and configure freely as opposed to being determined 

by strict, static designs. This will remain a powerful assertion 

going forward, leading governments to focus their efforts on 

preventative measures affecting the use of the Internet in their 

sovereign territories and possibly producing disparities not unlike those observed in financial regulation.

Ibid., p. 6. 
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General Anthony A. Cucolo III

Commandant

*****

STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

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Professor Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr.

Director of Research

Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II

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Dr. James G. Pierce

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Ms. Rita A. Rummel

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Mrs. Jennifer E. Nevil