Historicity

This page introduces the broader project and article considering life and war writing, off- and online. It explains how the author approached the topic and media discussed in subsequent sections, all of which were analyzed through a cultural historical lens.

The digital revolution has undeniably altered how we engage with the world, and how we record our experiences of it, both for ourselves and for current and future critics and commentators. The emergence of social media platforms as a tool for life writing, and mobile technology that allows for layers of self and algorithmically determined mediations of experience, create opportunities for communication of life stories. War writing sits within this genre, and for many the stakes associated with the subject matter – violence, suffering, and death – and the nature of the content heighten the sense of cultural responsibility. As a result we are forever contextualizing, explaining, and justifying, always looking for ways to categorize cycles of violence, trauma, and social dislocation in order to historicize personal and collective stories. Online and wired platforms provide spaces for innovative forms and practices to develop, enabling new voices to narrate their experiences directly to international audiences, and to directly make use of historical and emerging war media. These spaces also raise questions about how to share, interpret, and conserve digital narratives and fragmented representations, and how to make sense, culturally, of the conversations about war taking place online.

This article explores a broad range of examples of war writing, produced off- and online. It is not, and cannot be, comprehensive: with some exceptions, the bias towards wars conducted by Western powers in the twentieth century is evident. This is in part because of the material that has so far migrated on to or been recorded directly in the online universe, and where it originates. The global narrative balance is shifting as more and more people gain access to mobile technology and may be more geographically balanced then we at Ego Media (and certainly I) can know or, in any case, represent in one article. War historians have begun to argue against the myopic focus on Western identity and conflict that results in what Patrick Porter describes as “military orientalism” that ignores the “reciprocal dynamic”: “While the rhetoric of war may be one of hostility and mutual abhorrence, the practice of war is often convergence.”¹ This cultural framework contributes to efforts to, as Tarak Barkawi has written, “decolonise” the history of war, not simply by rectifying the balance of accounts and experiences of conflicts, but by reconsidering the methodologies applied to them.² Over the course of this project investments in infrastructure underpinning networks that have traditionally been less penetrable to Anglophone audiences have enabled new interactions, and the emergence of small but significant cracks in intentionally walled spaces (for example, with respect to the Chinese digital realm) hints at future discourses. Offline and online examples of war writing exist wherever wars have been fought – so everywhere, given the sad prevalence of conflict in all places and societies – and will continue to be compiled, discovered, preserved, and analyzed as part of the common human inheritance of war experience. They exist as testimonials unto themselves and provide new opportunities for future mediations operating across layered fields: “cultural, national, political, pragmatic, social, familial, psychic and aesthetic.”³

Drawing on Ego Media colleagues’ insights and innovations, in this article I have worked to identify and compare thematic and formal as well as new dialogic practices in war writing, drawing on a wide if in no way exhaustive range of media. The sections engage with discussions about what Lara Feigel and Max Saunders have identified as “the mediation of [life-writing] forms via the proliferation of online intertextuality and digital remediation.”⁴ The examples manifest themselves in a variety of forms and contexts, some established and some new, enabled specifically by social media: blogs, tweets, posts, app-based mobile podcasts, playlists, etc., to name a few. No doubt this list will continue to grow.

The online records of combat and suffering addressed here primarily emerge from conflicts where traditional, well-resourced media – expressed through war memoirs, literature, journalism, music, photography, radio, television, and film – provide a wealth of material that helps writers to explain their experience of war in the age of social media to online readers.

The case studies considered in this article contain numerous examples of layered mediations from past conflicts, even as they allow individual writers to produce and meld together material from across military and civilian spectrums: news reports that orientated or disorientated writers as they attempt to construct personal narratives; songs they were listening to at key moments; films and games that prefigured but ultimately failed to prepare them for the reality of combat experience and war’s compounding and residual traumas. The critic and historian Hal Foster has written that “today many images neither document nor de-realise the world; rather, the viral ones model their own realities, often without our agency and against our interests, and this is also true of information when it spasmodically erupts as a news flash or a purchase prompt.”⁵ War writing online sits within this complex space as a kind of cultural mash-up that, for all its potential to innovate, is grounded in a long, global inheritance of words, sounds, and images.

Prompted by Foster’s phrase about spasmodically erupting information, I would like to pause here to reflect briefly on the methodologies that underpin the construction of this chapter on life and war writing, off- and online. As a cultural historian who started off focusing primarily on the First World War, I am most accustomed to conducting research in the analog, or offline, world: in archives, working my way through letters and diaries, handwritten copies, and typescripts of poetry and prose, newspaper clippings, and photographs. Discovery does take place in such contexts, but much of the work takes place within systems of knowledge already established by archivists and biographers, and in some instances even by the historical subjects themselves.

Digital research is different, if not entirely unrelated: preset patterns exist but are often opaque. In some instances, in preparing this chapter, while searching for an article, or looking for new books on a given topic, the algorithmic hand of Google or Twitter led me down unexpected paths to a new source or to a writer or artist who kindly talked me through their perspective and practices. Furthermore, the amount of digital material available online continues to astound. While my own thought processes and editing – in other words, my particular self – have produced this analysis of the material, I think it is important to acknowledge the combined human and nonhuman interactions that have shaped it, and their strange, seemingly randomized but in practice algorithmically determined “ordering” of the online world and the experiences that comprise it.

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