Institutional Wilful Blindness

There's a lot of talk about there in cybersecurity being talked about in military terms.

You've done it yourselves there just a moment ago, threats, attacks, defences.

Genevieve, what does framing cybersecurity in that way do to people, how inside organisations, how they think, how they behave? Does it have an influence? Does it have a bearing on their decision-making process?

I think it's inevitable that it does.

Lots of research into metaphors shaping the way we think about new phenomena or the way we think about risk, think about the future.

And metaphors, in a sense, circumscribe what it's possible to think about an artefact, an event, particularly something as amorphous as a kind of future risk.

And That means if we're thinking about cybersecurity solely in military terms, using those metaphors, and as I say, it's really hard not to.

Just the word security, you know, that immediately kind of brings into all those words and tropes that you suggested.

But it does suggest that someone's going to come to the rescue, that someone is, you socioculturally we have you know inhabited a space where someone will protect us from the big bad and it does then lead to a sense of someone's gonna get you know the cavalry are gonna protect us And I think we could do more with that metaphor.

I mean, we don't think we need to junk it entirely, but think about the keep calm and carry on, all the slogans from the Second World War in Europe.

And there were lots of things that individuals and people in domestic contexts were encouraged to do, to do their bit.

Protecting themselves, really not talking about secrets openly in the street, in the butcher's queue, making sure that they took care in their own homes to preserve the blackout, doing their bit for waste and use of water and energy, etc, etc.

And I think trickling down the action points, the small actions that individuals and families and small businesses can take is something that easily gets lost when we really invest heavily in those military metaphors.

So it's about sort of translating what those big military narratives and narrative framings might mean for individuals who don't see themselves as kind of frontline.

It's quite interesting.

I was thinking about this a couple of days ago, thinking about how lots of visitors to the UK will comment upon the fact that at places like tube stations and often train stations, there are very few rubbish bins.

And I'll always tell them why, because there was certainly a time when IRA bombings were common when I lived in London.

That rubbish bins were places where terrorists would put bombs.

And it reminds me of that campaign where everybody did think it was their job to spot the suitcase that had been abandoned or the parcel or whatever it was.

And there was that sense that it was a shared burden.

And I think that is pretty much dissipated.

Partly because we live in an age of extreme individualism where I'm looking after me, but I don't necessarily feel any responsibility to looking after other people.

And I think as we've also in organizations become much more competitive and systems have been put in place, you know, in school, in universities, throughout our education, that we are competing with others all the time.

I think that generalized sense of social responsibility has faded and mostly, not entirely, but mostly disappeared.