New media and its contradictions
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The Montreal Review, December 2010
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Many years ago, perhaps twenty or more, I read a book, which I liked a lot, but unfortunately, I lend to a friend, who has never returned it. I never re-read it again. The book was the forgotten today Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange". 1 I read it in Bulgarian, which is a language very similar to Russian, and this was important, because the novel was a linguistic experiment, - Burgess mixed English with Russian - and reading it in my native language facilitated my understanding of the Russian words. I am curious how I would feel if I read it today, in its original English. What I remember from the novel is the main character, Alex, who was a young man sentenced for a murder and treated in the prison with visual sessions of violence (films). The goal of the treatment, which was a new experimental aversion therapy initiated by the government, was the destruction of Alex's violent nature through causing disgust from watching to the others' violent acts - pictures of destruction, torture, and death. For the government officials the therapy was successful, it really destroyed Alex's violent character, but made of him an extremely meek person unable to react adequately to any external force. Set free, as a result of the treatment, he committed an unsuccessful attempt for suicide. His days ended in mental hospital.
Burgess' fiction, although far to become reality, has becoming somewhat real with the expanding influence of Internet and new media. More and more people are exposed to raw images of violence on TV and Internet, and more and more often, they feel Alex's physical disgust of others' criminal acts. The American conservative right often criticize "academia liberalism", the "meekness" of the educated East and West coast elites. But they perhaps do not realize how, for example, a student feels in a program of twentieth century history, where the images and film material are abundant and every weekday starts or finishes with commentary and discussion of the atrocities shown in class. 2 Increasingly, not only the students, but the ordinary people, who stay before the digital screens at home, watching the dying eyes of the Iranian protester Neda or the mass graves in Haiti, are becoming like Alex: equally reluctant to do or to react to any violence.
The liberal democratic western societies, who increasingly admit and accept their guilt for causing unhappiness to others in the past, do not want to do war and violence again. And like Burgess' hero Alex after his treatment and release from jail, they are predestined to meet their former victims, some of them ready to retaliate. 9/11 attacks were such a retaliation. Of course, the West is far from losing its teeth, and the reaction to terrorism resulted in full-blown wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but when these wars began, the world was still different.
Zadie Smith, the English novelist, asked recently from the pages of The New York Review of Books, "How long is a generation these days?" 3 I would add, how today's "Facebook generation 0.2", with its freshness and access to information, would react to acts of terror against it? Would it respond to the violence with violence? Would it accept airport scanning and restrictions on its freedoms? Would it prefer to live in an imagined peaceful, civilized and non-violent world, different from the disgusting realities venting out from the digital screens and history lessons?
Actually, today there are only two generations: the vanishing old one, with its newspapers, radios and few TV channels, and the emerging new one with its digital all encompassing content; the old one with its harmony of well edited news and analysis and well educated foreign correspondents, and the new one with its cacophony of blogs, tweets, and instant unexplained or twisted information.
In 2000, I used to open the Atlantic Monthly Magazine's web page and read all of its high quality content. Today, I rarely recall it. Blogs, Facebook prates, and loads of information, flowing from every device I use (or I am forced to learn how to use), drain my time. When I eventually recall the Atlantic and open its website, I see the same blog type design, the same boring html/css platform, and I feel weariness. It does not look different, its look and titles does not promise more than others do. The Atlantic content and webpage design changed somewhere in 2003, 4 the year when its editor Michael Kelly, who was a supporter of the war in Iraq, was killed near Bagdad after his "Humvee" vehicle was attacked by Iraqi soldiers. Atlantic, since 2003, with the exception of a memorable pre-war article by James Follows 5, has not offered a penetrating, remarkable analysis of the war, sadly, because the analytic journalism was one of the Atlantic specialities over the years. Or perhaps it offered such an analysis, but, because of the emerging new media cacophony, few read and recommended it.
Today is a time of informational revolution, this cliché is absolutely true, and we, as a "revolutionary generation," are still distracted, unable to put in order all the information we succeeded to collect and made accessible. There are still no islands of truly reliable, important and explained information. 6 There is chaos and confusion. "The world is flat," Thomas Friedman declared a few years ago. 7 "The web is flat," we can say too.
New media world is flat. And this is a problem. Metaphorically, it is a world between two extremities: Google's white page of you and your personal question (and we know that the right questions lead to the right knowledge; thus, who will teach us to ask them?) and the clutter of Facebook, Yahoo's "noisy" entry page, the overwhelming number of apps, and the news aggregators. Where are the quiet islands of refined knowledge that will teach us the right questions, will give us the right perspectives, and the reliable answers? Is it The New York Times with its falling profits and diminishing staff? Or the British Guardian? Is it Wikipedia with its anonymous dry fact collecting? Is it the information distributing "parasites" such as the Huffington Post or the "young" Daily Beast who recently swallowed the "dinosaur" Newsweek ? Are we abandoned as Alex in front of screens that make us disgusted, or at least airy, distracted, and having all the information of the world, but unable to use it? What we learned from the war in Iraq? Did we understand its meaning? Do we learn something for us and for others from the flashing pictures? Will we go to another war? North Korea is dropping bombs over her neighbour. Will we watch the atrocities like cowards? Or we will engage in another "unnecessary" conflict? Should we run from Afghanistan and avert our eyes from the images of violence over the Afghan women? With all information we are blessed to have today, we still cannot find answers of these and many other questions.
In April 2010, on the website of WikiLeaks, a self-described "not-for-profit media organisation," appeared a video which I watched masochistically a few times. It started with George Orwell's words on black background, "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." After Orwell's words came the title of the film: "Collateral Murder", 8 followed by an explanatory introduction that said that in July 2007, two American Apache helicopters killed a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb New Bagdad and wounded two children. "Although some of the men appear to have been armed, the behaviour of everyone was relaxed. The U.S. military initially claimed that all the dead were "anti-Iraqi forces" or "insurgents." The film intro explained that two of the killed men actually were Reuter's news employees Saeed Shmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen, and the others were unknown people, but not insurgents. The film continued with pictures and testimonials from the family members and colleagues of the "known" victims and with quotes of the cold language of Lieutenant-Colonel Scott Bleichwehl, spokesman of the U.S. forces in Bagdad, reported by The New York Times : "There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force." "The video has not been released", informed WikiLeaks and added, "Until now." The video itself was an incredibly disturbing real film showing innocent people running under a shower of bullets. There were soldiers' smooth voices coming from the backstage: "Keep shoot'n", "We see two birds and we're still fire", "Hey, you shoot, I'll talk", "Nice", "Good shoot'n", "Thank you" It was showing one wounded survivor moving his leg and head, trying to get up. "Yeh, I got him..." I barely watched the fate of this miserable fellow, I felt like Alex. I felt disgust. Later, a van came in help, people were trying to bring the wounded inside and again - the soldiers' voices: "We're trying to get permission to engage", one of them impatiently was exclaiming "Come on, let us shoot!" They got the permission. In the van, there were two children...
I watched parts of this video for the first time on TV, CNN or CBC, I do not remember. It was the day when WikiLeaks released it publicly. The next morning I opened The New York Times website and instead to find a leading material corresponding to my shock and agitation of seeing these pictures, I found on the bottom of the main page a link to a short article with a belittling title "Iraq Video Brings Notice to a Web Site". 9 Why not "Iraq Video Brings Notice to What Happened in Iraq"? Not only NYT, but also the new media, with all its loads of instant information, with all its treasures of data, was unable to offer me at least one authoritative voice that explains in one consistent material: who WikiLeaks are, who the victims are, what the full story behind this bloodshed is and more importantly, what is its meaning? Yes, perhaps it was too early for opinions and analysis. But no, this footage, which I think is one of the strongest pictures of the realities of modern war and its consequences, disappeared in the mass cacophony of instant information. It has not been discussed enough; it has been left unexplained to the wider public. And forgotten. Other instant news pushed ahead. Nick Denton's Gawker syndrome of constant raising the number of published articles, of instant dispatches, that supposedly assure "competitive" positions in Google and Facebook/Twitter gibberish, was fevering all the media. Today nobody risks stopping and thinking, everybody runs after the new flash of information. And media organizations who can afford to stop and think are too loyal to their donors.
So I tried to understand WikiLeaks' video alone. The short article in the New York Times, which I mentioned, was quoting the opinion of Lisa Lynch, a professor of journalism at Concordia University. I felt lucky; I called her for an interview, she generously agreed to speak with me and on the next Friday, we met at "Cafe Neve" in Plateau, Montreal.
"I think it is very difficult in this day and age to draw boundaries about what journalism is", she told me. "WikiLeaks is committing acts of journalism in the sense that it is presenting and contextualizing information that is frequently incredibly significant, and frequently would not come to the public without the aid of WikiLeaks. If you're asking if WikiLeaks has a way of doing things that sets it apart from the methods of the North Atlantic model of journalism, I'd say yes. But, on the other hand, they are sort of in line with the "honest witness" tradition in journalism, exemplified by journalists like Robert Fisk. At least until recently: I think we can say what they are doing with the Iraq video -- namely, framing the video aggressively to produce a certain interpretation -- is a turn towards advocacy journalism as well." 10
WikiLeaks' direct message, as I understand it, was that the government hides the truth from us and this truth is the reality of war, it shows the methods of how government and army cover their mistakes and how they twist the information. Of course, for every informed and intelligent man this truth is not new, but when we see it in this direct way, we comprehend how serious is everything. WikiLeaks video gave us a picture, evidence, the real scene, and this would not be possible without the digital technologies and Internet.
During the same conversation, Lisa Lynch said, "[WikiLeaks] have ethical responsibility towards documents and sources and in that respect they are incredibly consistent. They do not have a responsibility towards particular nation state. They do not have a responsibility towards a particular politics... One of th e things that new media facilitate is the rise of international transparency movements. We see that there is an increased expectation among citizens of counties around the world to have data, information, primary source documents, and government information available to them." This opinion was proved months later, actually a few days ago, when WikiLeaks uncovered a huge amount of diplomatic cables, that showed how the international politics and diplomacy are functioning. The publishing of diplomatic cables helped the veiled power in the Middle East be rarely unmasked. In Arab world, the population for the first time had chance to learn in a direct way how their rulers trade with America and what are their true positions on hot foreign policy issues. The most striking example was the revelation about King Saud's aligning with the Israel politics toward Iran, he was quoted saying that America should "cut the head of the sneak" (in Tehran). In contrast to the Iraq video, the diplomatic cables could not be evaded by the mainstream media, to be left unanswered. They received a huge attention in the traditional and alternative outlets, but they are still waiting for a serious analysis that perhaps, if it happens, would be left unnoticed by the general public who may turn its attention to a new sensation.
So through my observations (of how the video submerged under the flow of information and how it was not covered well by the leading media), through my questions and additional readings I have reached some conclusions of what happened in Iraq, how the officials and state propaganda usually present the war. But it was not enough. There was an unanswered question: The politicians take responsibility for the war and are officially responsible for their choices, I understand the weight of their task, and I understand even their motives to hide the unpleasant truths, but what about the soldiers who killed innocent people? The video showed that they dehumanized their victims, they were evil and these people will return at home, they have families and friends. What happens with these people when they return? It was impossible for me to find in media an answer to this question in the context of WikiLeaks' video.
Fortunately, and this is the other, the optimistic perspective of the digital revolution, today we have information - it is dispersed, unanalyzed, out of its wider contexts and meanings, but it exists in abundance. This summer, I watched PBS' "Frontline" movie called "The Wounded Platoon". 11 The movie is now available online on the webpage of PBS and on You Tube. 12 It answered my question about the soldiers. It did not show the fate of those from the WikiLeaks' video, it showed more, it showed the fate of the youngsters who fought in Iraq and what happened with many of them after their return in the United States.
"In the past five years Fort Carson, Colorado, has seen 36 of its soldiers commit suicide... What happened in Iraq? What happened when they came at home? " were the introductory words of the film narrator. They still had Iraq inside of them and the ambition of the film producers was to "investigate the invisible wounds of war."
The war destroyed these young people, surely they were not beasts by nature. They were ordinary young men, the same which we walk past in the University hallways, in the streets and at the public transport, but men set in an environment, where the life does not mean nothing, where the victim is an enemy and the mistake to kill innocent is forgivable. It was war; we cannot expect something different. But why these people were in Iraq? Can we argue with the politicians and national strategists that if we do not go to war, one day the war would come to us? Truly, I do not know. I know that young men return from Iraq, battle post-war psychiatric disorders, and instead to build families, they finish in jails for charges on murder. " Barco [one of the soldiers from the Frontline documentary] is now serving a 52-year prison sentence for attempted murder... Once hailed as a hero for saving two soldiers during a suicide-bomb attack that left him with a traumatic brain injury, or TBI, he was also diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and says he was prescribed nine different medications... " There's a whole bunch of people in the unit that killed people [in Iraq] they weren't supposed to," according to Bruce Bastien, who, along with Louis Bressler and Kenny Eastridge, is now serving time for the murder of Kevin Shields... Kenny Eastridge, who is now serving time for the murder of Kevin Shields and other crimes, tells FRONTLINE that he sought help for mental health problems from a combat stress center on Forward Operating Base Falcon. "I was having a total mental breakdown. Every day we were getting in battles and never having a break. It seemed like, it was just crazy," he says. "They put me on all kinds of meds, and I was still going out on missions. They had me on Ambien, Remeron, Lexapro, Celexa, all kind of different stuff." 13
The digital information revolution is a great thing. In this essay, I was intentionally harsh to the new media and "web 0.2 social networks", because now we, as a society, have to learn how to make meaning of all this wealth of images, documents, and evidences. We have to learn how to fight the disgust, the fear and confusion from the violence we see. We must not forget it. We have to remember it not as facts, but as wisdom. It is possible only through understanding the true meaning of the things we see. This is the only way for the society to take the right decisions and start new era. If not, the fate of the liberated Alex might become our own fate.
--TMR
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1 Anthony Burgess, "A Clockwork Orange" (W. W. Norton & Company), Stanley Kubrick made a screen version of the novel in 1971 that was nominated for 4 Oscars.
2 Yesterday morning, for example, I watched in class J. Coll Metcalfe's " In the Tall Grass, (Gacaca)", a documentary about the genocide in Rwanda, in the evening I watched the nominated for Oscar German bestseller "Downfall" (directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel ), a movie about Hitler's last days, full with bloody series of suicides and killings. When I returned at home the news on the TV were reports about the Haitian cholera epidemic and the victims from the North Korean attack against a South Korean island.
3 Zadie Smith, "Generation Why?" (The New York Review of Books, November 25)
4 The breaking point for the magazine was the decision in 2005 to put a pay-wall to its content. With this, Atlantic missed the chance to emerge on the very top of the new web revolution that Google unleashed. The magazine dropped the wall in 2008, but I think it lost a lot in these most critical years of web formation and growth. This was the chance of Atlantic to make people "addicted" to its web content production.
5 Actually, the article appeared in November Issue of 2002. See "The Fifty-First State? " (Atlantic Monthly, November, 2002)
6 Of course, it is an exaggeration. Radio is one of the most successful guardians of the old style analytic journalism. BBC, NPR, Deutsche Welle and CBC Radio are reliable and important news sources. The question is how visible and influential they are after the explosion of new media. Glen Beck cannot appear as a leading commentator in BBC, but he is much more influential and listened among the Americans than any of NPR's media personalities. Magazines like Harper's, New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, are another island of a good journalism, their exceptionality is visible even in the way their websites are designed - simple, but uncluttered.
7 Thomas Friedman, The Word is Flat. A Brief History of Twenty-First Century (Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Hardcover, 2005)
8 http://www.collateralmurder.com/
9 Noam Coehen and Brian Stelter, "Iraq Video Brings Notice to a Web Site" (The New York Times, April 6, 2010)
10 The full interview "WikiLeaks, New Media, and Journalism" (The Montreal Review, April 2010)
11 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/woundedplatoon/
12 see here
13 see or read here
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