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| Media and Terror |
| From the 9/11Debate at De Balie |
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This is a talk I gave at De Balie center for cultural and political discussion in
Amsterdam. This evening on the 11th of September kicked off the Amsterdam
Tactical Media Lab (N5M4). The subject of the evening was Media and Terror, with a particular emphasis on the effect of 911 for on activist use of media. The subject and the short time allotted for the presentation accounts with my limited interpretation of tactical media and some quite crude polemics. I hope that as the TML proceeds other contributors will balance
the arguments. |
Media and Terror
In preparing for this evening I found some words of Naomi Klein?s helpful and wise..In an article she wrote quite soon after the attack last September she asks us to "refuse to engage in (what she calls) a calculus of
suffering." She goes on "Some on the left have implied that the outpouring of compassion and grief post-September 11 is disproportionate, even vaguely racist! Surely (she says) the challenge is to attempt to increase the global reserves of compassion, not to police them." End of quote. So if not prejudice why did 911 hit us who live across the ocean from
America so hard
One of many reasons why we felt the events of that day so directly is actually quite material: al Qi'ada struck at one of the hubs, perhaps the hub of the global information network. A place where there are probably more cameras and more direct feeds per square meter than anywhere else on the
planet. This fact alone turned us into "universal eyewitnesses"..
"In the electronic age (as Mcluhan once famously said) we wear all mankind
for our skin"
I am afraid there is just no escaping the symbolic dimension. However terrible the human cost.. the destruction of the twin towers was overwhelming in its symbolic power.
An attack of this kind depends for its effectiveness on maximum media
exposure.
To call 911 a tactical media strike sounds like a trivialisation but the exploitation of modern media networks by a weaker opponent to turn the tables on the strong is one of the ways in which we recognize our media as tactical.
This is not an academic point. The factual reality of strategic Vs tactical media is not lost on combatants in modern warfare. When powerful military states go to war against weaker opponents their approach to media is the opposite of the guerrilla campaigners. The primary goal of the powerful is to impose maximum constraints on media coverage, where possible restricting
it to sanitized press conferences in which specially trained members of the military do everything in their power to distance us from the reality of what is actually happening..
These revised rules of engagement were brought home to me in a recent interview with Walter Cronkite for Australian radio. The dean of American broadcast journalism put it bluntly.
"The biggest problem we have had frankly, is with the military and the inability of the American press to cover our enforcers in Afghanistan, because the government through the military has refused to permit
correspondents to have access to the combat troops in Afghanistan, that is, the combat troops when they are in action;" This is a carbon copy of the kind of censorship that the current President?s father?s government used in the Persian Gulf War. In that case we also were not able to cover the troops
in action".
I am surprised that Mr. Cronkite is so surprised. By the way it was not GW's
father by the way but Thatcher who was the first to muzzle the press this way during her Falklands campaign. No powerful military state with the possible exception of Serbia wants to repeat America?s blunder in Vietnam
where allowing journalists access helped to turn the tide of American domestic opinion against the war.
But constraining the media in this way does not mean neglecting it. Far from it. Strategic media is easy to recognize by its studied of professionalism. The advertising industry has always characterized its activities in military terms describing its large scale projects as advertising "campaigns". We now have taken a curious twist whereby actual military campaigns are taking on all the characteristics of advertising.
Since the Persian Gulf war was dubbed Operation Desert Storm no US military
action is ever complete without a title that sounds like a Hollywood Block Buster".. It is almost surprising that we are not already getting "from the makers of Desert Storm we now bring you" followed by whatever it is they will call the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein. "Operation Change Regime"?
It is generally the militarily weak (the Davids rather than Golliaths) who want to maximize the actual presence of the media or produce their own guerrilla media. Recent guerrilla campaigns from Al Qauida, to the Chiapas insurgents in Mexico have all sought not only to exploit mainstream broadcast media but also to make media themselves. The most obvious case being Bin Ladin's home brewed camcorder addresses. The last of which was specifically timed for transmission on Al-Jazeera at the moment that the Americans began their attack on Afganhistan.
The fact is that activists in the new social movements do share the tactical use of media and decentralised networking with a militant theocratic Islam. And this realization has not only been exploited by our opponents but has also served to undermine confidence among political activists who once
effectively turned the images and branding strategies of global corporations
jujitsu like against the corporations themselves. Naomi Klein put the issue
in the following way "political campaigns face a sudden, shift. Post-September 11,
tactics that rely on attacking--even peacefully--powerful symbols of
capitalism find themselves in an utterly transformed semiotic landscape."
She goes on to call for "a dramatic change in activist strategy, one based much more on substance than on symbols. More evidence of the growing disquiet and even outright hostility to tactical media among activists can be found recent reports emanating from
the No Boarder Camp in Strasbourgh. These camps are part of a campaign which fights for entry rights for all migrants and refugees. The reports I am referring to identified a growing suspicion among activists against the independent media initiatives. With the anti-media elements accusing the net activists of 'sheltering' mainstream journalists. Apparently there were fierce debates going on about the very presence of cameras and microphones.
Ironically one of the targets of the protests was the Schengen Information
System. A mainframe computer that registers all foreigners,refugees, migrants who try to enter the Schengen countries. Protest actions like this are part of an important shift from emphasizing physical locations like parliament or town halls towards virtuality where the new sites of power
reside often in sophisticated data bases. This is one reason why it is ridiculous to polarize reality and simulation.
A decade ago we began our conferences of tactical media. They were based partly on the notion that many struggles appeared to have migrated into an ideological space of representation, constructed by and through
communications media. This point of view has always been problematic for for some who are committed to direct action and who Like Klein in the article article insist on a hard distinction between real action and the merely symbolic.
I still feel as I did at the last N5M when I wrote with Geert Lovink that this version of a return to the real was nonsense. Even though I hold Naomi Klein in high regard, I still think its nonsense. There can be no meaningful politics that excludes the media and data sphere. Understanding this has
been one of the reasons why the new social movements have had some success in propelling their values into society. We must not be panicked by the terrible events of last September into ceding this advantage to our opponents who will have no such qualms..
Anyone who doubts the cynicism of government manipulation of both media and human catastrophe need look no further than the U.K. where the Blair administration's mask of sanctity momentarily dropped, when a senior ministerial aid, Joan Moore, unwisely sent an internal e-mail declaring that
September the 11th was a good day for the government to release (or as she
injudiciously put it to "bury") bad news. i.e. information embarrassing to the government would be buried in the media rubble and fall out of 911. Of course later (much later she was fired, soon to be followed by her ministerial boss) but not because of what she did. But only because this completely normal practice was exposed by the press. She was the one unlucky
enough to be caught.
I want to end with another another of Marshal Mluhan's prophetic aphorisms:
"World War III (he declared) will be a guerilla information war, with no
division between military and civilian participation." It is indicative of
the dilemmas and questions that we are looking at tonight that has text has
long been the slogan of the Tactical Media crew from Italy.
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