Informatics, Risk, and the Post-Modern World

Catalog description

Provides in-depth study of how security informatics is influenced by the risk and post-modern culture. SRA 471 Informatics, Risk, and the Post-Modern World (3)The post-modern world provides a changing climate and context for defining and understanding threats, intelligence, decisions, and risk. Likewise, post-modern cultures consist of beliefs that are heavily influenced by psychology, social connectivity, collective behavior, religion, ethnicity, and political systems. This system of systems is heavily dependent upon and influenced by information, information technology, and the web (social informatics). When examining human behavior as it impacts risk, these various social-technical factors must be considered in planning for terrorism, intelligence analysis, and emergency events. As the post-modern world becomes increasingly complicated, the ability to discern, identify, and address threats in terms of risk becomes exceedingly more difficult. Provision of learning underlying psychological, social, political, religious, and technical components of how risk accelerates through various stages will be critical for protection of national and international interests within the security sphere. Security informatics will be at the heart of both recognizing emerging situations and employing tools/agents/measures to assuage emergency, terrorist, or even national disaster events. This course provides the student with a broad perspective to critically examine both theories and practice of security informatics as related to the cultures in which threats emerge asymmetrically. Students will be placed on the role of systems analysts to problem solve and analyze information from a broad bandwidth of information specifically as informed by culture, post-modern thought, psychological intent, and situation awareness. The course will be grounded by participation in case studies and/or analyzing exercises of risk. Students will be required to do comprehensive reading assignments, engage in team cognition-social interaction, and become familiar with social informatics concepts and tools as related to risk, terrorism, and information warfare. As the post-modern world becomes increasingly complicated, the ability to discern, identify, and address threats in terms of risk becomes exceedingly more difficult. Provision of understanding some of the underlying psychological, social, political, religious, and technical components of how risk accelerates through various stages will be critical for protection of national and international interests within the security sphere. As extreme events become more prevalent in society, security informatics will be at the heart of both recognizing emerging situations and employing tools/agents to assuage emergency, terrorist, or even national disaster events.