Gatekeepers

This section considers gatekeepers as interfaces and the extent to which social media allow war writers to circumvent established institutions to reach new audiences with their multimedia life writing.

In 2006 Cari Lynn Hennessy and Paul S. Martin presented a joint paper on “Blogs, the Mainstream Media and the War in Iraq” to the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia. They had run a series of data collection exercises designed to assess how from 2002 to 2006 selected influential bloggers and blogs – including Juan Cole of Informed Comment, Daily Kos, Instapundit, Eschaton, and Little Green Footballs – gained status and established audiences, using major and local newspapers as a proxy, and digging into how their views were coded (as “Opinion,” “News,” etc.). The studies tested the authors’ core hypothesis about the influence of various new and emerging voices on the framing and conduct of the Iraq war.¹ The paper identifies some of the future challenges that would be faced by social media companies like Facebook, who now need to consider designations of war writing on a much larger scale than did the media organizations who sampled from the still large, but inherently more static and stable blogosphere, of the early twenty-first century.

Even in these early days of social media, independent actors, armed with digital tools only imagined by past war writers and commentators, have emerged to narrate twenty-first century wars.

In the wake of the controversial Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, two online war writers showed the potential for independent reporting and the positive effects – when used responsibly, with the aim of informing, not inflaming – of war’s datafication. Eliot Higgins was an unemployed Leicester (UK)-based financial administrator who first began blogging about the war in Syria under the pseudonym Brown Moses. Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian, noted with fascination and respect Higgins’s ability to analyze open source information and to build audiences: “By working entirely in the open – analysing social media and up to 450 YouTube channels a day – he became one of the world’s leading experts on the technology used in that conflict. Within a short period, he was attracting 250,000 page views a month.”² Higgins was later appointed a visiting research associate at King’s College London and joined the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab as Senior Non-Resident Fellow. His website Bellingcat.com is now a hub for international open source citizen journalists working to understand modern weaponry – human and technological.

While Higgins and Bellingcat place technology at the center of their work, the focus of many of the stories they break is ostensibly humanist. Meanwhile, Andy Carvin, who is now also a Fellow at the Atlantic Council, used Twitter creatively and extensively to report on the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia for National Public Radio (NPR). His approach offers a case study of how sourcing has changed as social media connectivity has expanded, allowing for the “co-construction of news by journalists and activists.”³ Deploying quantitative methodologies, researchers Alfred Hermida, Setch C. Lewis, and Rodrigo Zamath built a data set comprising over 60,000 of Carvin’s tweets posted between December 2010 and September 2011. They concluded that his practice of promotion of “alternative voices” and nonelite sources did represent a shift: Carvin “adapted,” as opposed to “transferring existing practices to new tools,” turning against the “paradigm of new media normalisation.” In so doing he centered the fragmented life writing of individuals experiencing the uprisings on the ground in real time. Readers in turn accessed this material not only on Twitter, but as it passed on to gatekeeper news sites like the New York Times, The Guardian, and the Washington Post.⁴

Investigative war writers, operating independently and/or linked to news organizations, work to center human perspectives and narratives. Official organizations increasingly use personal stories to advance particular institutional narratives and to some extent to counter disparate, critical war testimonials and the effects of policy. In her thesis “Blog.gov” assessing the US State Department blog, Amal Benaissa concludes that “the Second Gulf War marked the advent of blogging in government when soldiers began blogging from the battlefield to recount their own narratives of the war; it was not long before the government entered the blogosphere to set up its own version of events,”⁵ creating off- and online dialogues competing for audiences.

Social media not only allow individual testimonials to circumvent potential second-party reviewers; they allow governments – or would-be governments – to do so as well. Responding to questions about Taliban Twitter accounts like that of @Abalkhi, Blogs of War creator John Little offers an opinion as to their varying degrees of success on social media platforms as they become key tools in the arsenals of those perpetrating information – and analog – warfare: “They all bore me, but for different reasons. Taliban, Shabaab, and their ilk do a better job of speaking with an authentic voice, but they are only speaking to the true believers. You’ll never see them effectively engage outside of their narrow world view.” He mentions the American jihadi @abuamerican who attempted to live tweet assassination attempts: “that didn’t go over well and he is now dead, at least in part, because of it”; his online presence made him easier to track and ultimately target in the offline. Little goes on to critique established institutional social media efforts: “There are public affairs officers and layers of bureaucracy that are just absolute death to compelling content in the social media space. A million of them have contacted me over the years. They write up their stories about NFL cheerleaders visiting forward bases or Marines rescuing a puppy and beg me to repost it. I did that a couple of times, but won’t ever do that again.” What he desired as both a war writer and reader was “intelligent and informative content,” which did not appear.⁶

Other online examples of war writing and cultural criticism – in the form of established news organizations’ collaborations with whistleblowers and hackers – assume a wider frame and structural critique of centrally controlled war narratives. These purport to advance transparency and accountability. In 2010 The Guardian joined an international consortium – comprised initially of the former, Der Spiegel, and the New York Times, and later expanding to include El País and Le Monde – that published, in partnership with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, a number of stories on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rusbridger details the considerations that dictated what was published and when, across three time zones, as well as the overlapping legal jurisdictions and approaches to digital security and press freedom. National sensitivities emerged: for example, the New York Times was wary of publishing information about Yemeni collusion with the United States military, whereas their European colleagues felt this was a key strand that exposed complicated regional and global dynamics.

Editorial decisions also reflected particular cultural differences with respect to priorities: given the scale of material available and concerns about anticipated legal challenges from various governments, decisions about what to publish in the initial trove were not straightforward and were likely to be, in Rusbridger’s words, “too much for the general reader to absorb.”⁷ Further complications arose when Assange’s reputation was undermined by two credible accusations of rape, meaning that the news consortium felt it necessary to make clear that they were “under no obligation to defend him against charges of sexual misconduct, especially as he seemed to be distributing misinformation about what had happened.”⁸ The Guardian and its partners ended up publishing a curated version of the Iraqi war logs⁹ released by WikiLeaks in October 2010 that continue to inform their reporting at the time of writing: an example of a gatekeeper news organization acting as a kind of digital repository of war writing.¹⁰

It is worth noting that it is the digital infrastructure that enabled the transfer, storage, and publishing of material associated with this particular WikiLeaks operation, which included releasing 300,000 reports on Iraq alone to selected press associates.¹¹ The quantity of the material to consider is difficult to comprehend: consider the number of individual stories encompassed in this database, and the potential for collateral damage to sources operating in particularly violent contexts, which was not insignificant. As with the use of body counts to tell the story of the conflicts as they unfold, reminding readers of the human beings serving as life-writing sources with particular perspectives, experiences, and vulnerabilities remains a major concern for proponents of open databases like this one and appears to have guided the news organizations’ approaches to the material.

And yet it is difficult – if not impossible – to think of ways to navigate a clear ethical path that balances privacy and transparency. As Clare Birchall has written in assessing data collection by the state and others: “Sharing prevails as a standard of the system because of the difficulties of un-sharing data and the ‘effort’ of safeguarding or rendering data proprietary.”¹² For all their value, the Iraq war logs raise a number of ethical and legal questions, even as this opening of formerly closed data sources provides the public with the opportunity to engage in critical debates about the planning and managing of wars, the effects of which remain both human and superhuman in their scale and complexity.

Again we are grappling with issues of how to balance perspectives: small and large stories, pushing news in real time. Journalistic institutions, in incorporating mixed methods with respect to war coverage, implicitly privilege voices and perspectives. This has always been the case: sourcing is paramount in the compiling of details into coherent narratives, and editorial decisions are – and have always been – required. However, there are some signs that the mixed approach to war coverage, built on digital networks and enabled by social media, is producing particular distortions. Writing in the summer of 2018 about the balance of coverage of wars in Syria and Iraq, Patrick Cockburn offers the following assessment of the nature of war coverage in the digital age and the framing devices used to try to make sense of the violence to Western audiences across various media:

Five sieges decided the outcome of the wars in Syria and Iraq: Kobani, East Aleppo, Mosul, Raqqa and Eastern Ghouta. Just how much these sieges had in common wasn’t immediately obvious to the outside world because media coverage was so different. The sufferings of civilians in East Aleppo and Eastern Ghouta at the hands of the Syrian government and the Russians was extensively reported, with graphic photographs and film of injured and dying children. Their production, and the eyewitness reporting of events, was effectively outsourced by international media to local activists: the only people who could operate as journalists in jihadi-held areas. In Mosul and Raqqa the news coverage was very different: in both cases the foreign media downplayed the civilian loss of life, or blamed it on IS for using people as “human shields” and not allowing them to escape – it was true enough that IS didn’t care how many civilians were dying around them.¹³

Multiple stories were being told simultaneously, but the particular framing created narratives – widely disseminated and affirmed across digital publications and social media– that downplayed civilian casualties inflicted by Coalition airstrikes (the deployment of siege – hardly a “modern” form of warfare – as a descriptor further articulates the alien nature of these campaigns, at least for Western readers). This was enabled by the mix of graphic, embedded, deeply specific reporting enabled by mobile digital technologies that provided compelling detail but not scope or scale. The critical stories about IS, Syria, and Russian forces implicitly advanced the idea of Coalition technological precision and general humanitarian aims even as the situation on the ground deteriorated and broader strategic definition and coordination remained elusive.

Perhaps the greatest potential distortions occur in the space where mediation and commodification of war stories meet. The critic Jodi Dean has written about how the tensions play out online:

Just as industrial capitalism relied on the exploitation of labour, so does communicative capitalism rely on the exploitation of communication. In communicative capitalism, reflexivity captures creativity, sociality, resistance, and critique enclosing them into mediated networks for the financial gain of the corporate and shareholding class. Within mass social and personal media networks, expressions of dissent enrich the few and divert the many.¹⁴

Automation reinforces patterns and forms of power created and maintained by the gatekeepers; this work is currently done by proprietary and hence opaque algorithms, which may in the future become more or less responsive and potentially draconian. Individual artists might attempt to circumvent these systems, or at least to critique them. Donald Judd, in response to questions about how artists should respond to the political situation that had built up during the 1960s, pronounced the following in an article published in Artforum in the autumn of 1970: “The citizen, individual person has his interest and rights. He or she’s not and shouldn’t be an economic, military or institutional entity.”¹⁵

Yet the extent to which any individual could be independent of these estates, off- and online, remains an open question. There are a number of ways of looking at the potential opportunities for war writers enabled by the expansion of the online – and now mobile – realms with their real-time, hypermediated, and connected elements. The tools useful to those attempting to construct meaningful war narratives are varied and ever increasing. But owing to the structures from which they have emerged, who owns them, and how they have come to be used, they cannot be fixed or appropriated. In reviewing Hito Steyerl’s Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary War (2017) for the London Review of Books, Hal Foster succinctly sums up the evolving reception of documentary media that have been core to advancing public understandings of modern conflict: “Although photography and film captured the real in impressive ways, gradually, as they were woven into the fabric of things through advertising and the like, they served to derealise the world too, and by the 1960s terms like ‘simulation’ and ‘spectacle’ were needed to grapple with the effects.”¹⁶ Often, in practice, the commercial trumps the critical: as discussed, James Bridle’s critical art project Dronestagram, listed on Instagram as @dronestagram at the time of writing, ranks second in a Google search, losing out to @dronestagr.am. The latter showcases attractive photographs taken by drones around the world, advancing their image as consumer-aesthetic – as opposed to ethically concerning surveillance – technologies. Somewhat ironically, and at the same time indicative of the contested nature of online war narratives, new media theorists were themselves frustrated that Bridle’s “New Aesthetic” work secured so much attention, arguing that it demoted complex theoretical ideas in favor of digital prettifications.¹⁷

Our discussions about the complex and sometimes uncomfortable relationship between war, corporatization, and commercial entertainment have historical antecedents. Writing about the “moral language” that developed in European capital cities during the First World War to frame deprivation and sacrifice, the historian Jean-Louis Robert has elaborated on the hierarchies that emerged: “The first and foremost carrier of this kind of social good was the soldier, whose comportment constituted the prototype of citizenship, and on whose fortitude the well-being of the community and nation as a whole reposed...Diametrically opposed to the soldier, the man of sacrifice, were those who benefited from the war without risking their hides.”¹⁸ But the image of the soldier – and in some cases the soldiers themselves – has a long history of commodification: think of the myriad ways the G. I. Joe figure – once associated with the careful, restrained Second World War chronicler Ernie Pyle – has morphed, spread, and embedded itself in popular commercial cultures across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This marks a longer trend in the West, and particularly in the US, where some aspects of online war writing have been aggressively commodified. The milblogging community that grew up in the early 2000s initially focused on the sharing of war stories from all those connected to the military: soldiers, veterans, and their families. Eventually a number of sites were collected under the aggregator MilBlogging.com, which launched a series of conferences. In 2017 the conference rebranded as the Military Influencer Conference (MIC), reflecting the shifting language that had developed since 2006 to describe ascendant, aspirational social media practices. ScoutComms, which describes itself as the “most effective full service public relations and corporate social responsibility firm operating in the veteran and military space” and now works on the annual MIC conference, in a blog about the 2017 event asserted that it was not only “entrepreneur or business-focused,” but that it “also provides useful content and engagement for the non-profit and advocacy community.” The blog also noted that that year, “Some 60 percent of the attendees were military spouses! That’s the nature of today’s veteran and military family community. Military spouses have stepped up to share their experiences, build successful businesses and become the leaders of our unique world.”¹⁹ The language used to describe the 2019 iteration of the conference was grounded in commercial social media. Would-be attendees who were looking to “connect your brand with the large and influential military community” were directed to sign up for themed sessions including “Empower” (targeting military spouses); “Content Creators” (content marketing); “Social Impact” (nonprofit); “Pitch and Launch” (startup founders); and “Going Live” (podcasting and video).

Speaking in the autumn of 2018 to the ways in which gender can act as as a prohibitive gatekeeper, the war writer and editor Rachel Kambury related her repeated encounters with men in the war writing and military section of a popular New York City bookstore, and their assumed ownership of the entire topic.²⁰ The degree to which the digital repetitively re-presents such assumptions as the cultural baseline or default is less well examined or understood. A simple search further illustrates how gendered accounts of war proliferate and are reinforced online. When I enter soldier in to my Google search box on a given day in May 2019, the following examples are offered up by the algorithm (the extent to which this “simple” search can be replicated by others, or is itself an example of hyperpersonalization encompassing a complex set of human and nonhuman interactions, is an open question).

With respect to photographic images, the “face” of the soldier provided in my list is overwhelming male, with one interesting exception, perhaps predicted by my reading of blogs, journal, and newspaper articles written by or about women soldiers: the search throws up a Times of Israel profile by Josefin Dolsten on Debbie Zimelman who, as a photographer, spent five years chronicling the lives of women serving in combat units with the Israeli army, which began integrating women into forward positions in the 1990s. Zimelman stresses an “empowerment” narrative in this article about the photographic essay and book; she speaks of difficulties in bridging the authenticity gap, which she felt she achieved after spending forty-eight hours bedding down at a border observation point on a base near Eilat.²¹ This story subverts established hierarchies of military experience: that of the elite special forces veteran, accounts of which remain compelling to established news institutions, themselves repositories of emerging war writing. In 2018 Lauren Katzenberg, editor of the New York Times “At War” forum, spoke of her frustration when, on the day the blog featured a story about NATO security forces that are training women to join the Afghan security forces, the New York Times Magazine instead offered the majority of the homepage time to a photo essay on American special forces. The former story offered an underreported story, written by a woman who had embedded with the female troops, about how the war was shifting ideas about what women could do in times of conflict. And yet the Magazine chose to promote the familiar, dominant narrative and requisite images. Katzenberg recalled that, “It was like 17 photos of American bearded dudes with guns, patrolling around the valley of Nangahar and it was like, we haven't seen enough of those yet?”²² These imagined types remain saleable, if oversold in terms of representative war narratives.

Some creator organizations sit somewhere between the nakedly commercial and public education and service; many have been forced by cuts in public funding to consider new ways to reach audiences. They are identifying ways to use social media platforms to spread information about warfare that speaks to its technological materialism, as well as a broader fascination with the research and general scientific progress it can – sometimes accidentally – accelerate. For example, the Imperial War Museum’s educational film about sound-ranging techniques that developed at the end of the First World War, illustrated by Rebecca Hendin.²³

The animation has also produced a comic GIF – a relatively gentle nod to the bathroom humor that is a feature of war stories and is certainly not absent from the online sphere.²⁴

Some commercial entertainment industries wishing to trade commercially on war stories must – in theory – tread carefully for fear of being charged with profiteering. As technological games design has advanced, so has big games designers’ capacity to render virtual worlds with stark and striking detail. Some do so for particular intents and purposes. Operation Overmatch represents something that the US Department of Defense describes as “early synthetic prototyping.”²⁵ The game is being distributed to thousands of soldiers with the aim of generating data that are “soaked up with a frequency not found in actual combat.” The aim is for this information to help to inform military development and procurement and “to develop tactics...with the aim of building a more forward-thinking, prepared force.”²⁶ Such practices have echoes in past practice: Patrick Wright has written about how important simulation and wargaming became to the US military in the 1990s as it attempted to anticipate how to counter future on- and offline weapons.²⁷

Others games are presented as “pure” entertainment. In its third iteration the influential Call of Duty series allowed players to deploy avatars to Second World War battlefields; perhaps in an effort to attract younger audiences growing up with a different conflict as their aesthetic touchstone, in 2007 the fourth version, Modern Warfare, transplanted the digital warrior to the landscapes of the War on Terror. In the same period Konami canceled production of the game Six Days in Fallujah because its anticipated documentary realism promised to too closely mirror actual events in the offline; the creators of Medal of Honor, which had been marketed as having been developed in partnership with veterans, debated whether or not to allow players to deploy Taliban fighters as avatars in multiplayer modes.²⁸

The designers employed military advisers to “imbue the game with the realism, values and ideological framing to support the DoD’s assumptions about the US conduct of war and the heroic nature of the struggle against global terrorism.” Players around the world – including soldiers who would be, were being, or had been sent to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq – lived out digital fantasies of combat. That is, they pre-experienced scenarios and landscapes built on direct encounters with wars being fought in simulated real time. Call of Duty and its many successors warp actual time and reality. As a specific mediation it was a commercial success even as it supported military recruitment efforts and shaped the ideology of combatants – the latter serving, in some people’s minds, to circumvent charges of exploitation and profiteering. For Lenoir and Caldwell, these games do something else by achieving simultaneously sanitization and realistic interactivity: “the military-entertainment complex produces audiences as depoliticized subjects – ‘citizen soldiers’ – and transmits support for American militarization by making the conduct of war seem cool and fun.”²⁹

Cool and fun are not words that necessarily belong paired with killing and death if we are to believe people who have experienced war zones. That is not to say humor and entertainment are not important aspects of surviving conflict – they are and always have been – but some subjects demand consideration, as opposed to pure consumption. Not just video games but the way war stories are presented more broadly on screens relies on readers to disentangle serious news from entertainment, making it difficult to pause and consider exactly what one is reading or “experiencing.” The fact that many fail to do so raises serious ethical questions. Gatekeeper organizations, particularly in the West, continue to grapple with this, in all media forms, with respect to war writing and the broader normalization of violence, off- and online.

Carry on to Databases and Networks, the next subsection of Life and War Writing, Off- and Online.