Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Assistant Vice President for Partnerships in Strategic Defense Innnovation and Professor of Communication at Purdue University, Director of the FORCES initiative leads research teams that study the relationship between technological and social systems using big data, simulation, and mapping approaches. He published papers and articles in Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Information Society, National Interest, and Foreign Policy. He is the author or co-editor of several books. The most recent is Structural differentation in social media. He also co-edited Ethical Reasoning in Big Data,Transparency in social media and Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets: Theory and Methods (Computational Social Sciences) , all three the product of the NSF funded KredibleNet project. Dr. Matei's teaching portfolio includes technology and strategy, online interaction, and digital media analytics classes. A former BBC World Service journalist, his contributions have been published in Esquire and several leading Romanian newspapers. In Romania, he is known for his books Boierii Mintii (The Mind Boyars), Idolii forului (Idols of the forum), and Idei de schimb (Spare ideas).
The future of drone warfare belongs to adaptive synthetic organisms, not flying flocks of kamikazes — swarms that can lose parts, reassign functions, and keep fighting, as living systems cannot. The future of drone warfare will not belong to the side that…
At the height of the space exploration era, General Vandenberg was a demi-god on a par with his civilian peers: Wernher von Braun, the creator of the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo astronauts to the Moon; Robert Gilruth, the originator of…
Aristotle said it first: “Humans are social animals.” But the military, especially the American military, put this philosophical principle to use. The military does not teach you, as a long-abandoned recruitment slogan tried to convince our youth twenty years ago, to be…
The Navy SEALs (Sea, Air, and Land warriors) are deep thinkers. They even solved, in their own way, the age-old philosophical “mind-body problem”. The life principle that may be derived from their solution could help any civilian organization better integrate and care…
What does the Coast Guard do? It protects the coast. Not. Add: the Coast Guard is not a police force. It is not a maritime DMV. It is not a federal bureaucracy. It is not easy to define the United States Coast…
The ancient Roman general and Consul Cincinnatus lived, as Livy tells the story, with one hand on the sword and the other on the plowshares. Living centuries before the decline of the Empire, when military men became dictators, and the legions were…
I am not a squeamish man. I do not like seeing blood, but it does not scare me. My grandmother, born in 1900, kept chickens, pigs, sheep, a goat or two, cattle, dogs, and assorted cats. I saw my share of slaughtered…
The mission was simple; the fighters were not, and their understanding of what they were doing was even poorer. Yet they did their job BECAUSE of the chaos surrounding them. This is what they learned and will apply in their future civilian…
In the sixty-first year of my life, I was looking down into an abyss. Not of the existential kind. It was a very physical 60-foot drop into the well of the Marine Corps rappelling tower at the Marin Corps Recruit Depot, used…
FORCES military geospatial data science projects THOR, OPMAPS, Barbarossa, and South China Sea turn maps into evidence for strategy.
When Jeff Bezos announced that he would build a 50,000-satellite space data center, Musk immediately plussed with a million-satellite call. The space cowboy drama aside, the prize is real. Data-in-space may finally give the space economy its first real reason to exist,…
Originally published in the Times Higher Education If you know how ChatGPT works, you won’t be surprised to learn that AI detection filters consider it highly likely that the chatbot had a large hand in writing the US Constitution and the Book of Genesis. Nor will you be surprised that ChatGPT…
The article was originally published in The Conversation Quantum computing is like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: You never know what you’re gonna get. Quantum phenomena – the behavior of matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic levels – are not definite, one…
Please cite Matei, S. A. (2022-2025). Transforming Warfighting: The Case for Software-Centric Strategies. Matei.org/I Think Blog. https://matei.org/ithink/2024/05/27/doing-more-with-less-a-data-model-driven-methodology-for-efficient-war-fighting-platforms-design/ Since time immemorial military technologies have been built “just in case,” focusing on technical superiority features. Firearms, artillery, ships, and later planes and missiles…
What are the necessary and sufficient factors that lead to the emergence and use of war-winning strategic technologies? The following definitions and assumptions may lead to the criteria and propositions capable of imagining new war-winning strategic technologies. We use them in the…
In my role as an Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Purdue University, I partnered with two colleagues with solid experience in military strategy research and education to propose a new methodology for training strategic thinkers and doers. David Benson,…
Online human networks are highly centralized, with a few nodes raking in most connections. The conventional wisdom is that this is the product of so-called “preferential attachment.” In Barabasi and Albert’s [1] formulation, new nodes (connectors) added to any network will prefer…
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened Ukraine and its supporters with a nuclear attack that will settle the war he started on February 24, 2022. Some observers claim that the threat is a mere rhetorical trick, while others believe it is part…
In the digital era, “discourse power” is real power. Disinformation has become a preferred method of confounding the adversary and winning supporters. How does this work at the level of great power competition and conflict? Why is this question relevant today? Here…
A potential favoring factor for the invasion of Ukraine and the threats made of China to occupy Taiwan could be that International trade clusters cut across political-military alliances. In a study I conducted with Nagisha Ishinabe and published in The National Interest…
This module is a sequence of the course From Mass Media to Social Media Theory The history of media research is the history of just a few questions, of which the most salient is “what does media do to us?” There are…
What can we surmise about China’s intentions in the South China Sea? Although I have no crystal ball, in this National Interest article I offer some hard geographic, military, and economic facts. Analyzing what configurations of power projection and claim China has…
WHAT IS, HOW and WHY you should join EUNOMIA? Two years ago, the European Union Horizon 2020 program awarded EUNOMIA, a consortium of 10 academic-public-private organizations, three million dollars to create a new type of social media platform on which content is…
Summary: Affordance theory, proposed by Gibson and brought to technology research by Norman , proposes that the use of an object is intrinsically determined by its physical shape. However, when translated to digital objects, affordance theory loses explanatory power, as the same…
The development of AIs capable of targeting, shooting, and eliminating enemies in seconds has reached the threshold of possibility. There is much promise for creating strong defensive weapons but there is just as much fear. What if these AIs could turn rogue…
An experiment by Tromholt Morten from the University of Copenhagen published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking suggests that people who gave up Facebook for a week ended (for that time) happier, less lonely, and less depressed than those who did not.…
On Friday May 24, 2019 I organize in collaboration with the French Laboratory of Excellence in Creative Industries, the ICA preconference “Riding or Lashing the Waves: Regulating Media for Diversity in a Time of Uncertainty,” to discuss whether regulatory and policy changes are…
Once, Socrates was approached at the local gymnasium by a young Athenian man, seeking the tutoring of the great mind of Attica, the wisest man since Solon. “O, Socrates son of Sophronikus, you who know so many things, please take me as…
In collaboration with the Online Masters’ Program in Strategic Communication, I launched the Social Media Analytics Class, which will be available worldwide. Introduction to social media analytics Overview of digital analytics Twitter as a data source for analysis Introduction to social media…
NOTE: In some ways, I am a historian born again as a social scientist. A number of years ago in collaboration with Caius Dobrescu I published this article, which alongside my Romanian language book The Mind Boyars, is the fruit of my…
This article is a companion material to the Course COM 25100 Information, Technology, Society which I teach at Purdue University as a University core class. The course teaches trade-off thinking as a fundamental method for understanding technological choice and innovation. Where does electricity come…
This article is a companion material to the courses I teach at Purdue University as a University core class. The course teaches trade-off thinking as a fundamental method for understanding technological choice and innovation. All technologies are shaped by competing choices Any…
This is an introduction to a set of core concepts related to Internet communication for the Course COM 251 Information, Technology, Society which I teach at Purdue University. One of Aesop’s fables gives a clever answer to the question: “what is the…
This is a tutorial on a set of core concepts related to Internet communication for the courses I teach at Purdue University. In a previous post about the basic architecture of the Internet, I discussed the Internet’s intrinsic decentralization and its layered…
This is a tutorial on a set of core concepts related to Internet communication for my courses at Purdue University. For technical details, take a look at the PowerPoint presentation The Internet is not one net. It is more versatile than that. The…
The results of the French elections are in and the two front runners in the polls did indeed come up as predicted by traditional methods. Marine Le Pen and Emanuelle Macron will be the two contenders of the second round of elections.…
What does the social media crystal ball say about the biggest global event of the day, the French presidential campaign? On social media, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon seemed to be the favorites, running neck in neck on Twitter the day before…
Today I launch a new teaching and research initiative which will empower Purdue students aspiring to embrace careers in big data, social media analytics, or communication. The initiative starts with a partnership with Google News Lab University. The partnership, which includes other…
Donald Trump’s social media campaign is known for its virulence, but relatively less was said about its virality. Trump had a larger base of followers on Twitter. By the end of the campaign, he had 15 million followers to Hillary Clinton’s 11.1.…
Hillary Clinton did a very good job during the debates, as she was expected to, while Donald Trump had a hard time trying to decide if his open glove style is appropriate or not in the given circumstances (it was not and…
The rhetorical struggle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is not only about issues, actions and change, but also about who will ultimately be responsible for everything said. Donald Trump affirms that the agent of change is himself and this is reflected…
Google Trends analysis shows that Donald Trump has been dominating and dominates Google Searches by a large margin. This is a good predictor for public interest and can lead to future changes in intentions to vote. In the last 90 days, the volume of searches…
On the quiet Saturday morning of July 23rd, just after the Republic National Convention, Donald Trump was getting about 7500 Tweets per hour. Hillary somewhere around 5500. The interesting part was that while Hillary got quite a bit of traction from the usual…
Donald Trump rip-roars his way through social media, keeping Hillary Clinton’s Campaign in a tight spot. An average official Trump Facebook page [1] post published after August 1st 2015, when the primary campaigning began, attracts on average a staggering 72,058 likes. An…
I dipped the R cup in the Twitter font of wisdom and here is what I found… For the period April 15-July 16 Trump’s campaign leads Hillary Clintons’ on Twitter by a factor of about 2. Trump’s campaign put out a couple…
Donald Trump has an obsession: Donald Trump. But so does Hillary Clinton. This might give the Donald an extra umpf in the final presidential race. This is one of the conclusions of my analysis of the 2176 tweets put out by the…
The issue if and how much is Trump’s celebrity influenced by a so-called “media obsession” with his persona and ideas has been much discussed during the 2016 nomination campaign. Here are some opinions… The Media’s Not Being Honest About Its Trump Obsession…
On the Super Tuesday (March 1, 2016) Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Bernard Sanders et al. will do the most important battle of the primary season. Two heavyweight communicators, one American (Alex Heffner) and the other French (Joseph Daniel), will discuss…
We live in a world of things. Those who make the things define the way we live our lives. Their decisions impact not only our trivial needs, such as spending a night on Facebook checking the status of our friends. Technologies that…
Technologies such as the power grid, plumbing, or mass media rely on standards that are accepted as simply being there. Electric power is provided at 120V AC, pipe gauges are measured in fractional increments, typically expressed in inches, sitcoms are 30 min…
In Spring 2015, together with my colleagues, Michael Smith, Abrar Hammoud, and Davin Huston I developed a multidisciplinary learning experience whose main goal is to help students acquire competencies related to problem formulation, design thinking, ethical and critical thinking, advanced persuasive speaking,…
Hostages, victims of shootout and explosions reported near the Bataclan concert venue, Stade de France in Paris, France… The French police assaulted the concert hall, where the attackers took over a hundred hostages. Terrorist acts resulted in over 60 dead… #FranceUnderAttack Tweets