Databases and Networks

This subsection considers how war databases and networks as repositories of cultural memory have been transformed by social media. It poses questions about the extent to which these capture and enliven the past. It also discusses how the interactions they enable are influencing and in some cases transforming individual and collective narratives of specific conflicts, within and across cultures.

Networks connecting war writers to emerging technologies and subsequently to new audiences have formed in the offline as well as the online. The material testimonies they create, expressed in various media, themselves become overtly or implicitly linked as grouped and cataloged objects. The literary historian Santanu Das has written about colonial hierarchies, narrative forms, senses, and voices of Indian soldiers recorded during the First World War. Drawing on the 2,677 audio recordings made by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission between December 29, 1915, and December 19, 1918, which included the stories of Indian soldiers serving on the Western Front, he also considers alternate forms of testimonial: objects, letters, and songs. The recordings relied on a technological breakthrough at the time. Taking a theoretical perspective, Das also explores the nature of the database of recordings, which are “precarious and ramshackle, tipping over to the world of ‘make-do’ with its assemblage of half-known sonic, textual and material fragments.” Individually as collectively they challenge “our notions both of life-writing and war-writing, raising questions of agency, posthumous presence and reception,” which carry “even more vital intensities of meaning” in the colonial and as artifacts in the postcolonial context.¹

Das echoes concerns about the fragmented nature of storytelling online, and in particular war writing, while arguing that it is not without its value, not least as this potential source material circumvents hierarchies that would render certain voices flat and, in some cases, silent.

Social media offer a means to elevate some stories out of particular places and cultures and to focus attention on war’s victims, but the processes that enable these elevations are complex. However compelling the war writer’s material, virality depends on the capacities of the individual writer to achieve a particular voice, to secure followers who themselves can amplify the message, and then to attract the attention of other gatekeeper individuals and organizations who act as unofficial canonizers of a particular moment or period. With respect to war writing, analysis of sources is key to the development of stories and to the historical record.

In his memoir Reporter (2018) the American journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story about the 1968 My Lai massacre, one of the most famous atrocities of the Vietnam War, detailed the slow, disparate way that he initially came upon the story: “My many speeches about the perils of chemical and biological warfare had put me in contact with leaders of the antiwar movement around the country, and I was familiar with the war crimes research that had been published by the Quakers and other church groups.” One of these contacts was Seymour Melman, a Columbia University economist, who passed on a summary of reported war crimes compiled in the volume In the Name of America (1968) – a kind of offline database anticipating resources like Airwars.org – that included clips of magazine and newspaper accounts, as well as testimonials from American soldiers from the Bertrand Russell War Crime Tribunal convened in Stockholm and Copenhagen.² Had Hersh not been put in contact with Melman, and trawled through the material, he might not have discovered and been able to put together this particularly transformative story.

Social media platforms enable faster connections between writers and readers that circumvent gatekeepers, and make it (potentially – and perhaps too much so in some cases where journalists report only on social media and nothing else) easier for individuals like Melman and Hersh to find one another, and to locate, compile, and share relevant information. Platforms enable individuals concerned with history and cultures of commemoration to reach new audiences by asking them to imaginatively place themselves with the help of technologies into historical situations and narratives. With, at the time of writing, only fifteen cinematic Instagram Story posts that reenact (with actors) the Holocaust diary of Eva Heyman, @Eva.Stories reached over 1.7 million readers (or followers) and was the subject of numerous news and opinion pieces published in international gatekeeper publications.³

Such platforms walk a careful line between engaged commemoration and offensive appropriation. In framing an interview with the Eva Stories father and daughter creators, Mati and Maya Kochavi, for Haaretz, Nirit Anderman posed the unresolved question: Is a platform like Instagram – which is based on “likes,” rating, visual images, and short videos that inevitably lead to shallow discourse – the right place to bring to “life” a Holocaust story?⁴ This is not the first time questions about insensitive uses of social media have been raised in relation to the Shoah. In 2016 the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, requested to be removed from Pokemon Go’s location database.⁵ In 2017 the Israeli satirist Shahak Shapira published the controversial Yolocaust blog. In order to critique people taking, posting, and sharing selfies at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, Shapira photoshopped the selfie takers into historical images of the concentration camps.

Writing with a sense of ambivalence to some if not all social media interventions that gives way to tacit acceptance, the critic Natalia Winkelman has reflected on her reaction to the @Eva.stories project. She presents it as both a valid and provocative example and a stimulator of life writing told through the prism of the history of genocide:

Every day, appalling, terrible things are conveyed to me through my iPhone, arriving on Twitter or Facebook or news apps. Typically, I look to Instagram for fun stuff—cute animals, delicious food, friends, fashion, art. It’s understandable that, for many, it would be jarring to see this safe, superficial space merge with war and suffering. But that jarring-ness is part of the point. The Holocaust’s memory is a painful one, but these days, it is perhaps more painful to realize that it might not persist, that as the atrocities grow further away in the rearview and fewer survivors remain, the Holocaust is liable to lose resonance.

She continues her analysis, offering a personal parable: “While watching Eva, I kept thinking of a story that’s told at Passover during one of the best-known parts of the Seder. It identifies a ‘Rebellious Son’ as a child who asks his parents, ‘What is this service to you?’ and thus separates himself from his community. The Seder story’s goal—to teach kids to feel engaged in their culture so that the Jewish memory doesn’t fade—is the same as the mission of Eva Stories.” She concludes that “like Eva herself, the project is reporting from a new frontier of difficult storytelling, and its timing is crucial.”⁶ There is something disconcerting and imprecise in this conclusion, which contains within it the paradox of war writing on social media platforms, issues of balance and storytelling, and mediation more generally: is the Eva of whom she speaks the Instagram construct, or the actual Eva of the original diary? What is lost and what is gained in this example of appropriated and mediated historical war writing that has been so consciously adapted for social media audiences?

Another innovative war writer also waded into debates about the appropriateness of invoking Holocaust stories as living histories online. The “#AnneFrank of Palestine,” or Farah Baker, a Gazan teenager who achieved a following on Twitter, saw her tweets and interviews disseminated by broadcasters and publishers in English, Arabic, and a variety of European languages. Her success was not without controversy: she ultimately changed her Twitter handle in reaction to the outrage expressed by some followers, who considered the “appropriation of a Jewish icon by a Palestinian Muslim...as an act of war.”⁷

Baker’s framing of her experiences through the lens of Anne Frank – one of if not the most famous of life writers about war – was an attempt to express solidarity between all victims of war, rendered more poignant by the intensity of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and associated discourses. Her Twitter persona offers fragmentary glimpses into the day-to-day life of a young woman growing up in a strange and specific captivity. As Hope Wolf has argued, her example also provides an interesting parable of an individual whose Tweets serve as an example of a unique form of war reporting. Wolf points out that such conversational, temporal, and expressive war testimonials are often ignored by professional writers, who themselves are criticized for being too writerly, just as nonprofessional writers are praised for their authenticity even as their work tends to be thought of as ephemeral. Baker’s tweets successfully navigate this perceived binary, mimicking “the variable intonation and volume of speech.”⁸ She conveys something that social media are very good at documenting and amplifying: human emotion.

Although her diary is a more traditional and ostensibly literary offering, Frank’s similarly fresh, conversational, and confessional style provides a historical corollary⁹ to Baker, just as the broad-brush parallels of the stories conveyed by the two writers open up a dialogue. And finally, Baker’s invoking of Frank “lent a kind of authority to her ephemeral posts.”¹⁰ Baker’s is a conscious drawing of offline discourses online for the purpose of offering up a perspective on war that feels both familiar and new.

Frank’s diary imagines a conversation that is controlled by its author; Baker is continuously performing one in partnership with her followers. The extent to which Baker or any war writer is able to curate responses on social media platforms remains limited, and the extent to which digital war writers must self-censor to maintain an audience for their writing is worth considering (it is also worth remembering that Frank’s offline diary was itself also heavily edited – not least to remove any traces of homoeroticism). Writers on platforms like Twitter wishing to build receptive, loyal followers balance “personal authenticity and audience expectations,” mapped across a variety of contexts, which as Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd have argued are constantly collapsing in on themselves and one another.¹¹ Taking into consideration these demands, Baker’s abandoning of her original handle makes sense and can be read as an expression of sensitivity resulting from dialogue with her readers, or as a way to avoid a sharper, more contentious dialogue about identity politics, war, and suffering.

When censorship remains primarily the responsibility of established, identifiable institutions who at least attempt to codify practices, systems develop that enable a discourse between writers and readers. This was the case, for instance, in the US during the Second World War, where George Roeder has shown how public tolerance of an overly sanitized narrative of the war ebbed away as government offices, working with media partners, attempted to “ration death.” Ultimately, graphic war stories and images came to be seen as the “most powerful weapons in their motivational arsenal.”¹² When readers are also editors, and where writers engage in conversations with their readers in real time, self-censorship in wartime, which has been deployed to degrees in all conflicts, becomes an even more layered and complex cultural activity, with varying effects on forthrightness and exploitation. The ephemeral nature of the medium means that there are no analog drafts from which one can derive the author’s original intention. Self-censorship is internalized, although in some cases – as in Baker’s – it is possible to trace the evolution of approach, albeit in fragmented form, in real time. How long the body of tweets for a digitally native war writer like Baker will be preserved, and who owns and manages the process of preservation, remains an open question.

For all that war writing and war stories presented across various media have created hierarchies of experience as well as intense political dialogues, life-writing practices in online spaces can in some cases subvert static formulations. This is something that social media platforms have long claimed justified their immunity from regulation: in leveling the playing field and allowing new voices and perspectives to circulate, they encourage open communication and human progress. In other sections of this online “book,” Ego Media colleagues interrogate this premise and find it overstates the reality. When it comes to the open circulation of war stories, it is arguable that examples of critical transparency and empathetic discourses balance out more disturbing communicative practices that make a fetish of violence in the name of state security and conquest. Yet there are some examples where external chroniclers, using digital tools, have been able to break through seemingly closed discourses to achieve genuine dialogue. They have created new narratives about war and its broader social and cultural implications.

Rob Gallagher has shown how artists, often literally pushed out of the analog public spaces by gentrification and assertive state power, have moved online and managed to form new critical networks and subcultures. For example, when it comes to gamer communities, the most successful war video games “create ‘epic’ affective experiences minimally attached to reality” and “extensively commodify gameplay rather than deliver a realistic or procedural narrative.”¹³ These are primarily – and overtly – consumerist expressions, replete with their own commercial aesthetics. Yet in some instances they have been appropriated by war writers and artists, making their way into online and offline narratives in new media forms. Other creative examples of sophisticated reimagining also exist – for example, the Senegalese-Kuwaiti artist Fatima Al Qadiri’s 2012 EP Desert Strike, which takes elements of what she deemed “one of the ugliest video game soundtracks I’ve ever come across,” released in 1992, to tell her own experience of “Operation Desert Storm” with all of its “ethical ugliness.”¹⁴

In so doing, these multimedia war writers and artists implicitly push back against the established networks that limit diverse narrative voices and criticism of mainstream cultural framings of conflicts. Multimedia artist Hassan Blasim, an Iraqi refugee now living in Finland, works in film, poetry, and prose. He initially self-published online in Arabic. His first commissioned collection in English – The Madman of Freedom Square – appeared in 2009. The reception to this work, which is banned in a number of countries in the Middle East, is emblematic of the strange ways in which some war writing, in this case Bashim’s parable of the refugee, with its “preoccupation with the farcical or macabre representation of the operation of power,” is deemed too controversial to penetrate official state firewalls.¹⁵ This is despite its initial breaching of the offline to online divide that allowed for the discovery of Bashim by various readers and critical audiences in the first place.

Online cultures do, in some instances, take the lead on or at least articulate shifts in the political and moral frames for war. In response to discussions about how to balance issues of scale, perspective, and participatory commemoration, online initiatives have activated memorial cultures and elevated strands of storytelling told by long-ignored noncombatant participants, sometimes across national lines. Facebook and YouTube now provide fluid spaces for interactive commemoration; for example, Britta Knudsen and Carsten Stage have shown how Danish YouTube pages allow “for a new type of commemorative practice, which, unlike the traditional war monuments of the nation-state, is marked by explicit differences of opinion concerning the status and legitimacy of the war.”¹⁶ Milbloggers now articulate the experiences of military spouses as well as combatants and veterans; the former is now a core narrative strand of commercial and noncommercial war writing about military cultures in the US. The Oxford First World War Poetry Digital Archive began as a digitization project for schools and researchers, and expanded – through offline collections and an active Flickr group – to form the Great War Archive, populated by over 6,500 digital items and associated war narratives.¹⁷ The project now works with the Europeana 1914–1918¹⁸ initiative, providing an active repository for networked war stories. It has allowed students, professional, and nonprofessional historians to learn more about this global conflict while gaining a greater understanding of the material culture that sustained it. It is interesting to consider whether such a project could be undertaken with a developing or ongoing conflict, or whether – for institutions at least – the historic nature of the material renders it less politically controversial and supportable.

Other institutional initiatives push the dialogic potential of online engagement further. The Australian-based Operation Wandering Souls project integrates data collection practices with commemoration and reconciliation. The name of the project itself is a subtle reference to one of the Vietnam War’s many instances of dehumanization. Sergeant Major Herbert A. Friedman has blogged on www.psywarrior.com about the original Operation Wandering Soul; a recently declassified 1972 memorandum from Henry A. Kissinger to then-President Nixon provides further context about US-led programs.¹⁹ The document provides information about the eponymous CIA-led program of technological and psychological warfare in Vietnam. The campaign played on the US military’s mobile technological superiority. It also exploited the grief of the Vietnamese people, co-opting and debasing Buddhist burial and mourning practices by invoking the spirits of the war dead. American engineers appropriated “voices” of the “Ghost Army” of unburied soldiers, projecting recordings outside of US bases and via loudspeakers attached to combat helicopters. The haunting, disembodied pleadings urged North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers to stop fighting.^20,21

In 2009 the Vietnamese government assisted Australian counterparts in locating the remains of six long missing in action (MIA) soldiers (around 50,000 Australians served in Vietnam: 519 were killed and 2,348 were wounded).²² Recognizing the scale of the MIA problem in Vietnam, where an estimated 300,000 soldiers who died in the conflict remain unaccounted for, Australian and New Zealand veterans, working with academics at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA), working under the aegis of the Operation Wandering Souls Project,²³ compiled a database comprised of information about battles and firefights involving Australian and New Zealand forces that led to the deaths of (then) North Vietnamese soldiers. Information including numbers, names, dates of death, and burial sites was plotted on Google Earth.

In 2013 veterans also traveled to Vietnam to return personal items collected from Vietnamese soldiers on the battlefield: this aspect of the project allowed for veterans and families to connect war stories that had, for years, been fragmented along national lines. The project is ongoing: in 2015 the research team put out a call via the ADFA’s Vietnam War blog and UNSW’s website, media contacts, and social media platforms to “Please rummage through your old steel trunk or where the items are, find them and send them to the Operation Wandering Souls team along with as much as you can recall about the circumstances by which you ‘captured’ them.”

Collected items would be digitized and, hence, preserved by the ADFA as part of the object narrative of the war, before the objects themselves were returned to Vietnamese families.²⁴

Projects like these – and in particular the Wandering Souls initiative, which speaks to the common humanity of grieving relatives, but also acknowledges that the Vietnamese veterans families’ technological and material resources are by no means equal to their Australian counterparts – do create spaces for new forms of commemoration to emerge. In so doing, they subvert traditional war hierarchies by creating cross-cultural networks that, through their individual and collective actions, center the voices of aging survivors and their extended families: voices that have traditionally existed only on the margins of acknowledged and promoted conflict narratives. These networks generate new war stories of their own built around mutual understanding, respect, and forgiveness. Such examples have the potential to inform empathetic cross-cultural dialogues and, if we can take a moment to be somewhat hopeful, to show how through careful examination of historical conflicts we can preempt and even avoid the dehumanization that so often leads to future wars.

Carry on to “Future” Wars, the final subsection of Life and War Writing, Off- and Online.