War and Media

Andrew Hoskins, Ben O'Loughlin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745656175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The trinity of government, military and publics has been drawn together into immediate and unpredictable relationships in a "new media ecology" that has ushered in new asymmetries in the waging of war and terror. To help us understand these new relationships, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin here provide a timely, comprehensive and highly readable survey of the field of war and media.

War is diffused through a complex mesh of our everyday media. Paradoxically, this both facilitates and contains the presence and power of enemies near and far. The conventions of so-called traditional warfare have been splintered by the availability and connectivity of the principal locus of war today: the electronic and digital media. Hoskins and O'Loughlin identify and illuminate the conditions of what they term "diffused war" and the new challenges it raises for the actors who wage and counter warfare, for their agents and mechanisms of the new media and for mass publics.

This book offers an invaluable review of the key literature and presents a fresh approach to the understanding of the dynamic relationships between war and media. It will be welcomed by a broad range of students taking courses on war and media and related modules, especially in media, communication and cultural studies, politics and international relations, sociology, journalism, and security studies.

1

INTRODUCTION

Roger Silverstone writes:

I have a memory of an interview broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on The World at One during the height of the war in Afghanistan which followed hard on the heels of the attack on the World Trade Center. It was with an Afghani blacksmith who, having apparently failed to hear or understand the US airplane based, supposedly blanket, propaganda coverage of his country, offered his own account of why so many bombs were falling around his village. It was because, his translated voice explained, Al-Qaeda had killed many Americans and their donkeys and had destroyed some of their castles. He was not, of course, entirely wrong. (2007: 1)

The world imploded in the twentieth century. Once news could be transferred electronically, rather than via printed paper or newsreels on trains and boats, information about war, conflict and catastrophe could traverse distances almost instantaneously. The potential for global awareness, for a global village, meant danger and suffering could be brought closer to us. And as our fields of perceptions continue to change, conflict and the people involved in it become visible in new ways, affecting our relations to war. Whether through live broadcast or interactive media, we can now connect to war in a manner that was not possible before; we can read and respond to the blog of the soldier in the field of operations, download the PDF terror-training manual, click and donate to the humanitarian worker, or listen to the live translated voice of the Afghani blacksmith as we have our lunch.

Just what these transformations mean for our world is hardly understood. The difficulty that governments, militaries, media organizations and other big institutions have had adapting to this world in the first years of the twenty-first century is hard to overstate. Images and stories have emerged, been debated and reacted to by populations around the world even before these big institutions have decided on their understanding of them, let alone their strategy. All that can be done, some argue, is to have narratives in place for any and every eventuality, just in case.

Human society no longer works according to mechanical principles, if it ever did. Thanks to media technologies, we live in a new media ecology marked by – terrorized by – ‘effects without causes’, to borrow a term from Faisal Devji’ (2005). Things just seem to happen ‘out of nowhere’, such as the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Of course, this is not strictly the case. Actions are planned and executed, whether by occupying powers, terrorist cells or humanitarian rescue groups. But instant recording, archiving and distribution of images and stories add a chaotic element to any action. Nobody knows who will see an event, where and when they will see it or how they will interpret it. Nobody knows how the reactions of people locally or around the world will feed back into the event, setting off a chain of other events, anywhere, in which anybody may get caught up. The Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, images of abuse from Abu Ghraib prison, and 9/11 itself all demonstrate that the effects of events cannot be foreseen by those who originally record them.

Nothing can be gained from reproducing the conventional academic approaches to war and media, be these constructed historically, specifically to a particular conflict, or comparatively, focusing on basic themes. Such an account would be significantly blinkered to the genuinely paradigmatic shift occurring in modern media and in modern warfare – the emergence of diffused war. Providing an intervention adequate to the dynamics of the flux of the post-broadcast era is difficult. Unfortunately, in the study of warfare, the disciplinary boundaries that regulate what is relevant and what is not – in terms of traditions, theories and methods – are not so malleable. This book attempts to overcome these limitations. If we recognize that it is the media surround itself – the new media ecology – that constitutes the very condition of terror for all of us, how can we analyse and understand its dynamics? Media enable a perpetual connectivity that appears to be the key modulator of insecurity and security today, amplifying our awareness of distant conflicts or close-to-home threats, yet containing these insecurities in comforting news packages. This connectivity is the principal mechanism through which media is weaponized, made a tool of warfare. It is not simply that media perpetuate a residual awareness of ongoing distant conflicts and the possibility of terror near or far, but that this connectivity is what enables a world of ‘effects without causes’ in which risk and danger seem impossible to calculate. Such a context makes order and security less easy to achieve. It is this connectivity by all participants and witnesses, in this emergent environment, which anchors and begins our account. It is in the new media ecology that established theories and assumptions about audiences, propaganda and warfare are, at the very least, significantly challenged (Der Derian, 2009: 252).

This book seeks to find intelligibility, not order. Our intention is to provide the concepts and tools for the reader to acquire greater literacy of war and media. For some, this will not be easy. For those used to thinking of military strategy, propaganda and political communications in conventional terms, our presentation of the relation of war and media may jar. But, as Philip Bobbitt writes, ‘almost every widely held idea we currently entertain about twenty-first century terrorism and its relationship to the wars against terror is wrong and must be thoroughly rethought’ (2008: 5). So it is for war and media in general. It is to that challenge that we respond.

1. Diffused War

Our account of diffused war refers to a new paradigm of war in which (i) the mediatization of war (ii) makes possible more diffuse causal relations between action and effect, (iii) creating greater uncertainty for policymakers in the conduct of war. In this section we shall unpack this definition and show how its three axes – mediatization, causality and decision-making – can shape and reinforce one another in ways that make diffused war a coherent and intelligible paradigm. It is significant that we have chosen the term ‘axes’, since each is a matter of degree rather than being simply present or absent. Not all war is mediatized; not all actions have unforeseen effects; and uncertainty rarely paralyses policymakers absolutely. Rather, there is a modulation of each; policymakers’ certainty oscillates over time, for instance. It is our contention that these three axes capture the dynamics of an emerging paradigm of war.

We have not developed the concept of diffused war to explain why war occurs in the first place, but to describe and explain the changing character of war – the what, how, when and where. The causes of war may be relatively stable, a matter of political and economic interests for state and non-state actors. The opening decade of the twenty-first century was marked by wars for control of resources and territory, and the development of private markets for security forces and surveillance technologies, amongst other things. There is little novelty there. However, the way war proceeds – its justification, conduct, reconstruction, remembrance – is changing markedly, and it is these changes that the concept ‘diffused war’ seeks to capture.

It is easier to discern the distinctiveness of diffused war by setting it in a historical context. The ‘first media war in history’ was the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, according to Ulrich Keller (2001: 251).¹ This appears to be a remarkable claim, given the volume of the news, literary and photographic record of the Great Wars, the TV ‘living-room’ war of Vietnam, and the opening of the global satellite era with the spectacle of the 1991 Gulf War. However, for Keller, the Crimean War marked a significant shift from war as a show at which some civilian ‘spectators’ were there, co-present to the event, to something more organized for commercial mass consumption. It was ‘the first historical instance when modern institutions such as picture journalism, lithographic presses and metropolitan show business combined to create a war in their own image’ (ibid.: ix). Aspects of the war were deliberately organized as a mass spectacle. For instance, some phases of the war were highly visible to crowds, who had to be contained by the British cavalry in their fascination to view the colourful uniforms of the advancing regiments prior to a major attack on Sebastopol (ibid.: 251).

Yet, Keller argues, the eyewitnessing of certain historical events has traditionally been the privilege of elite audiences, and it was not until the Victorian era that war became more significantly ‘mediated’, including through ‘theatrically structured performances’:

Even if performed almost simultaneously with the actual events, often by invalids just returned from the theatre of war, these were mediated stage presentations, made possible by the availability of a group of professional eyewitnesses who formed, with their cameras and communication lines, a fully-fledged apparatus of frontline observation. The verbal and pictorial reports of these lieutenants of the urban crowds, together with the art works and show attractions, made the Crimean War the first media war in history. (Ibid.: 251; original emphasis)

Keller’s visual history of the Crimean War illuminates a significant phase in the history of shifting representations of warfare, along with the shifting perceptions of warfare by those whose collective name wars are often fought or claimed to be fought in. Keller’s work usefully questions the notion of ‘media war’ as principally a product of the mass media of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

This is an interesting observation for a number of reasons. For instance, in chapter 6, we suggest that the presence (or absence) of an event in collective or social memory is often related to the mechanism through which a person originally experienced it (usually through media), and the ‘fit’ of its original representations with the media of the day that reproduce or perpetuate a certain history of warfare. The neglect (or amnesia) concerning the Crimean War in modern media accounts has not occurred for any particularly conspiratorial reasons, but, rather, because it did not provide any moving images that would later make good television. And it is the medium of television that has utterly defined the vicarious experience of modern warfare, as well as shaping the way in which war is an object of study, which even historians may take note of.

Keller’s work in detailing the significance of the role of the visual media in mid-nineteenth century warfare raises the important question: how would war proceed in isolation, if our media did not exist? Keller is explicit: ‘Mediagenerated images precede that which they represent; more crudely put, reality nowadays conforms to the pictures, not the other way around (ibid.: ix). Thus, the legitimizing, the contesting and the waging of warfare have become shaped much more by the media ‘production’ of warfare than any discernible ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ experience. But as we move forward through this book, it becomes clear that there are also unmediated aspects of war, either deliberately hidden or taking place in areas where media technology does not reach. The emergence of diffused war is not instant and completed.

We shall now unpack the three axes of diffused war, defined as an emerging paradigm of war in which (i) the mediatization of war (ii) makes possible more diffuse causal relations between action and effect, (iii) creating greater uncertainty for policymakers in the conduct of war.

The mediatization of war

As a result of changes in the communications technologies available to news media, citizen media and to militaries themselves, media are becoming part of the practices of warfare to the point that the conduct of war cannot be understood unless one carefully accounts for the role of media in it. This is what it means to speak of war as mediatized. Stig Hjarvard makes a clear distinction between the terms ‘mediation’ and ‘mediatization’: ‘Mediation describes the concrete act of communication by means of a medium in a specific social context. By contrast, mediatization refers to a more long-lasting process, whereby social and cultural institutions and modes of interaction are changed as a consequence of the growth of the media’s influence’ (2008b: 114). Sonia Livingstone, in her article ‘On the Mediation of Everything’, describes this mediatization of institutions and relations:

[W]e have moved from a social analysis in which the mass media comprise one among many influential but independent institutions whose relations with the media can be usefully analyzed, to a social analysis in which everything is mediated, the consequence being that all influential institutions in society have themselves been transformed, reconstituted, by contemporary processes of mediation (2009: 2).

In other words, they have been mediatized.² War is ‘transformed’ and ‘reconstituted’ in precisely this way; the planning, waging and consequences of warfare do not reside outside of the media. If we probe the connections between humans, technology and media to interrogate the emergent character of war and terrorism, we find that they all inhabit the same and unavoidable knowledge environment, what we have called our new media ecology. To write of the mediatization of the conduct of war is to refer to the manner in which media are integral to those practices in which actual coercive or kinetic force is exercised, such as the guiding of troops and vehicles, the use of drones, the symbolic acts of violence central to terrorism, insurgency and, indeed, major military operations. And rather than mediation and mediatization being processes exclusive to different eras, the two modulate together, although we have seen greater mediatization occurring as time has passed and digital media has become more ubiquitous.

The mediatization of war matters because perceptions are vital to war – the perceptions of a public who can offer support to a war, of government trying to justify a war, and of those in the military themselves, who are trying to perceive and understand exactly what is happening as war is waged. It is through media that perceptions are created, sustained or challenged. For example, Paul Virilio, writing on the emergence of a new ‘logistics of military perception’, argues: ‘[T] he history of battle is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception. In other words, war consists not so much in scoring territorial, economic or other material victories as in appropriating the “immateriality” of perceptual fields’ (1989: 7; original emphasis). In other words, the battle is for how things are seen and perceived. This means both a battle of symbols and representations, and also a battle to construct how perception operates in the first place.

Let us start with battles of symbols and representations. In war and conflict today, making visible and public the capture of large armies or cities may often be of limited symbolic value. For instance, in Afghanistan in January 2008 a Taliban assassin managed to enter and began firing a weapon in the Serena Hotel, perhaps the only hotel in Kabul with a gym in which international women can exercise. The hotel was a purely symbolic target. The act was a message with three audiences. To international people, the message was that you are not safe in Kabul. To local Afghans, the message was that we are still operating and you may want to side with us. And to the Taliban itself, the assassin’s action said: we are still effective, whatever NATO says about its success against us. The Taliban did not need to regain control of Kabul itself or entirely defeat the NATO forces in order to make its point. A few months later, in April, Taliban members infiltrated a military parade and nearly assassinated the Afghani President, Hamid Karzai (Gul, 2008). The Taliban again showed they could access the most secure space that Afghani or NATO troops could provide. Whether or not the President was killed, a symbolic act was achieved. Indeed, the asymmetry of much of the contemporary so-called ‘war on terror’ is related to the high visibility of terrorist targets – presidents, skyscrapers, tourist hotels or nightclubs – versus the diffused form of the propagators of terror. These diffused, ‘small-time’ terrorists are able to shape how we perceive security locally and globally. In traditional war too, such as the 2003 Iraq War, it is snapshot images such as the fall of Saddam’s statue or the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib that came to stand for, or represent, the entire war. To fight a war is to fight to construct and fill in fields of perception.

The interaction of media and war also entails a battle for how perception operates at all. How we perceive war is not just a matter of the content of news, of the images and stories presented to us, but also a matter of how we relate to media. The operations of a terrorist organization such as Al-Qaeda shape how the Internet is constructed and regulated, for instance. Attempts by governments and security services to prevent the diffusion of jihadist materials online may alter use of the Internet more broadly. War and conflict are drivers of the form media take, of how media are controlled and of what information reaches whom. Robots and drones – unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – have been developed for warfare, enabling a new scope to the perception of war zones and the ability to control affairs remotely (cf Chow, 2006). At the time of writing, more than 40 countries produce, market or use battlefield robots or drones, from major powers to Belarus, Colombia, Sri Lanka and Georgia (BBC World Service, 2009; The Economist, 2009). Commanders based in the US can see what their soldiers see in Afghanistan thanks to real-time streaming devices. Indeed, this creates problems: instead of network-enabled, decentralized ‘swarming’ units, tensions emerge about whether it is the distant commander or the local, mediatized soldier who controls the crosshairs and decides who is shot at (Singer, 2009). As these tensions are worked out by militaries, and new perceptual technologies developed, so these tools will spread into domestic, civilian life, shaping how we can engage with each other, with states and with companies. Looking to the future, just as the identity of soldiers as warriors is complicated if they themselves become mere robots controlled remotely by distant commanders thanks to mediatization, so our identity as voters, protestors or even as political leaders may be rewritten by new perceptual technologies.

It is crucial to recognize that the absolute interpenetration of media and warfare has produced an emergent set of far more immediate and unpredictable relationships between the trinity of government, military and publics. These are significantly engaged in an emergent kind of conflict – which we are calling ‘diffused war’ – that is immersed in and produced through a new ‘media ecology’ (Cottle, 2006). War is diffused through a complex mesh of our everyday media: news, movies, podcasts, blogs, video games, documentaries and so on. Paradoxically, this both facilitates and contains the presence and power of enemies near and far. Media bring war close...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Table and Fitures
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Images
• 3. Compassion
• 4. Witness
• 5. Genocide
• 6. Memory
• 7. Vectors
• 8. Radicalization
• 9. Legitimacy
• 10. Methods
• Notes
• References
• Further Reading
• Name Index
• Subject Index