This monograph focuses on media and communicative framing within the context of strategy and strategic interaction as articulated by some major thinkers in both fields. It examines how informational virtual space, through a medium of strategic deception, constructs contextual frames or what may be called master frames, with the purpose of re-positioning an audience, through a process of conversion, in ways that elicit dynamics of fragmentary and oppositional social movements in the service of hegemonic geopolitical and security interests. In the process it attempts to shed light on the meaning and consequences of framing as a substantive form of political communication embedded in the indirect approach of war articulated by British strategist Basil Liddell Hart.
Beyond simply being an instrument of propagation and propaganda, media has increasingly evolved into a power and security form of social and political organization. It has become a matter of high politics as it frames and re-frames perceptions, ideas as well as psychological and mental structures along lines that touch upon the very heart of a society’s or a country’s national security structure. To the extent that media and war increasingly come to share symbiotic forms of strategic interaction, a symbiosis of soft power and hard power respectively, what evolves is a dynamic of framing — a scheme of comprehension that shapes the physical as well as mental and psychological boundaries and limitations of a group, audience or collectivity with or without them necessarily being aware of its structural impact. This condition renders media a potential weapon of war in its own right equal in scope and dimension to those of the actual physical or military.