Joint modeling can be used to link thoughts and messages. If these thoughts had received more attention, I cannot help but wonder if communication technologies would have been designed in the past few decades with closer fits to user needs. Like Everett Rogers today, Licklider said that communicators should differ in values of parameters, but converge toward common understanding. In addition, they contributed a basis for designing communication technologies to aid political communication between governments of nations. Licklider correctly generalized that each side in international conflicts try to hurriedly model what the other side is doing and intending.
Simplification occurs when it overly risky in such situations.
This line of thought is consistent with analyses of foreign policy leader communication, cognition, and decision-making. Perhaps better communication, aided with better communication technologies, can help national leaders understand the intentions and motivations and mental models of adversaries in ways that can reduce military interventions and battles. Licklider rejected a Utopian view of computers as media which would automatically solve communication problems. He said that we should be concerned more with the modeling aspects of communication. When he talked about communities of computer network users in 1968, there were 6 such networks.