Part
1
Decades
before smartphones, the internet, and social media, the philosopher
Marshall McLuhan, who worked on media theory, predicted a future
world war fought using information. While World War I and World War
II were waged using armies and mobilized economies, “World War
III [will be] a guerrilla information war with no division between
military and civilian participation,” McLuhan said, a prophecy
included in his 1970 book of reflections, “Culture Is Our
Business.”
McLuhan’s
prediction may have felt outlandish in his own era, but it seems very
close to our present-day reality. Decades ago, the barriers to entry
for broadcasting and publishing were so high that only established
institutions could meaningfully engage in news dissemination. But
over the past 10 to 15 years, ordinary individuals have been
radically empowered with the ability to record, publish, and
broadcast information to millions around the world, at minimal cost.
The
revolutionary impact of this new information environment — where
any individual or network of individuals can create their own
mini-CNN — is transforming our societies. The loss of gatekeeping
authority held by legacy media institutions has opened up
opportunities for long-suppressed groups to have their narratives
heard: Palestinians, African-American activists, feminists,
environmentalists, and dissident groups working in authoritarian
societies can all find ways, not always without some trouble, to be
heard.
This
new media landscape, though, also created a world susceptible to
unprecedented levels of propaganda, conspiracy, and disinformation.
The epistemological chaos created by the global explosion of “news,”
some of it of questionable veracity, has already led to serious
disruptions in both politics and daily life. But there is another
area of life that might be most seriously impacted by the changing
information landscape: armed conflict.
Propaganda
and information warfare was once the purview of nation-states,
militaries, and intelligence services. Today, even ordinary people
have become important players in these campaigns. Battles over
narratives and information have become an integral part of modern war
and politics; the role played by bloggers, activists, and “citizen
journalists” in shaping narratives has proven vital.
The
examples are rapidly piling up in the second decade of the 21st
century. Citizen journalists and accidental activists helped change
the course of history during uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia,
Syria, and Libya — as well as during Israel’s 2014 war against
Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip. Very quickly, people who
were once considered to be victims of war and great-power politics
have become empowered as political actors. During Israel’s 2014
bombardment of Gaza and the 2016 Russian aerial bombardment of the
rebel-held Syrian city of Aleppo, young women and children came to
international attention for their updates from war zones, helping
wage battles to shape global public opinion.
Distinct
from traditional information operations waged by states, the
narratives of ordinary people and activists benefit from a greater
sense of personal authenticity and emotional connection. This
currency has always been difficult for institutions to capture, but
comes naturally to individuals and activists. Social media’s
ability to bypass traditional media gatekeepers also blew apart the
biggest barriers to marginalized voices being heard: political and
corporate control over publishing.
“Powerful
institutions still exist and remain very powerful, but there is
another currency that has emerged because of social media and the
internet, which you might call authenticity or emotional appeal,”
says Matt Sienkiewicz, an assistant professor of communication and
international studies at Boston College and the author of “The
Other Air Force: U.S. Efforts to Reshape Middle Eastern Media Since
9/11.”
“Everyone
focuses on the producers of media in shaping public opinion, but it’s
really at the distribution level of information where the bottleneck
has traditionally been,” adds Sienkiewicz. “This is what
social media has fundamentally changed. There is a lot of focus on
the ugly side, with respect to viral conspiracies and misinformation
— but there is also reason to be optimistic, because many stories
that would’ve been ignored before are now being heard.”
The
emergence of online citizen journalism has also, however,
increasingly blurred the distinction between participants and
non-participants in conflict, as well as activists and journalists.
For those lacking decent media education, discerning truth from
falsehood is becoming an increasingly Sisyphean task.
Picking
through the pieces of the past few years, a few writers have begun to
examine the ways that social media is shaping our understanding and
experience of modern conflict and politics. “War in 140
Characters,” by the journalist and author David Patrikarakos, and
“Digital World War,” by Haroon Ullah, an author and former U.S.
State Department official, both represent early attempts to
understand the gravity of our current information crisis.
With
the lines of armed conflicts’ central distinctions already being
blurred — between peacetime and war, combatant and civilian —
social media has the potential to draw the entire world into a gray
zone where the lines between participants and non-participants in
conflict is unclear. Whereas the last World War was a clearly defined
clash of nation-states with uniformed armies, our new era of
tech-driven information warfare holds the potential to become so
amorphous and all-encompassing that it could to seep into every
aspect of society, transforming the experience of both politics and
war in the process.
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