The cultural factor in information warfare

In its most general meaning, information warfare is based on disrupting, faking or limiting access to information by whatever opponent you have. Usually, information warfare analyses are centred on the technical skills needed, on the specific instruments used and how to use them, and even (mainly in threat analysis) on the motivations that could push someone to use old, direct methods or more sophisticated kind of attacks. Thanks to its effects on how somebody (and even a social group) reacts to information, an important factor in the possibility, effectiveness and likelihood of an information warfare attack is the cultural framework in which the attack is done, or (wherever different) the mutual interactions between the cultural frameworks of the attacker and the attacked opponent. In this paper, I look at some example of different reactions to information taken from various cultural contexts and from various fields (like advertising, software localisation and international working environments) in which the problem has already been studied, and I try to show how this can affect information warfare, making this a variable which must be accounted for every time in order to make an effective analysis.