Reflections

(NB. This post is for the purposes of a university subject!)

On Niches

This is not the first time that I have created a blog. I used to have one a long time ago, using the ubiquitous livejournal programme, upon which I wrote poems that I’m sure were very boring for any reader who happened to chance upon them. But this current blog is the first wordpress blog that I’ve owned, and also the first I’ve had in many years. It felt surreal at first to be pulling words out of my synapses by force, and to string sentences together in the form of a pseudo-academic yet conversational style. However, it helped enormously that we had the freedom to choose our own niche for the blog. Tapping into the niche of armed conflict not only allowed me to explore a topic of interest with licence, but also motivated me to monitor new developments on the news. It pushed me to reach out to other armed conflict observers on the Internet (e.g. the blogs of war correspondents, photographers, military authorities, and academics). There is a whole network, indeed a Long Tail, of such netizens and sources out there, and I am only receiving this revelation with each tiny step of my blogging sojourn.

Against Creative Commons- for one reason

OK, give me a little space to diverge from armed conflict, and have a little rant about matters relating to the blogosphere. After all, I am a new blogger, and like a toddler off exploring a new world, I need a bit of freedom to explore, criticise, and enthuse about the whole new universe I’m in. Tolerate me, won’t you.

Proponents of a free exchange of creative information tout Creative Commons (CC) as the new God that can dismantle the control of property laws over the Internet. Co-inventor Lawrence Lessig called for a revolution to bring back the freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, the freedom to imagine. It is imagined that CC could fill this gap with its ability to increase a body of creative work that comes from the masses, for the masses, and emphasise that this new regime complements, rather than supplants, traditional intellectual property laws. I suspect that the last point was engendered out of a need to avoid stepping on the legal toes of intellectual property giants. However, the fact that the fairly modern invention of cyber intellectual property law may be called ‘traditional’ in the face of CC, is an indication of how ‘modern’ and ‘revolutionary’ CC actually is. As popular youth opinion would have it, CC is something of a feller-me-lad Gen-Y David who is in the process of challenging the older, and far fatter, Goliath of IP law. Goliath hasn’t really fallen yet, but a few more stones would get him there.

An iconic parallel between the French Revolution and CC: par le peuple, pour le peuple! This image has no CC licence and I haven't checked for any- simply because an iconic image by the people, for the people, should belong to the people (without any CC regime of regulation either).

How even armed conflicts can be made beautiful

Kudos to photographer Richard Mosse

General Janvier gives up warfare for modelling in Eastern Congo.

Photographer Mosse apparently uses an obscure photography technqiue, Aerocrome, to pick up on a spectrum of light that the naked eye cannot see. He aims to overturn our impressions of violence with a whimsical approach, photographing in Eastern Congo, including Tutsi town, North Kivu.

Limits to blog debate?

Public debate in the blogosphere

There have been rumblings in the earth that the blogosphere represents cyberdemocracy, where people get together in the HTML public sphere to debate contrasting opinions and new ideas. Pushing aside unsettling questions of what exactly constitutes a ‘democracy’, let’s just say for the moment that democracy on the internet involves a free exchange of ideas. People get together, express their beliefs through the keyboard, bicker in a rational fashion, and contribute to democratice decision-making arising out of public consensus.

Or: birds of a feather flock together?

Surely the blogosphere does not resemble what Geert Lovink calls a ‘homogeneous webcloud’, where communities of like-minded people flock together, engage in an illusion of a debate, and emerge failing to be intellectually challenged at all. Surely it isn’t all like this, especially not for a topic concerning armed conflict or conflict pending all-out war!

There might be different patches of cirrus cloud, but at the end of the day they're all quite homogeneous.

But I wasn’t so sure. So I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to pick a blog post on a current issue of state tension, pending all-out war, to see whether commentors are having a lively discussion and getting that exchange of ideas from opposing ends of the spectrum flowing? One ideological camp could be demonstrating support for a state, one ideological camp for the other, and a couple of stragglers could be straddling the fence and not be entirely sure which camp to join.

A different kind of battle: control over design

Pipes that are not pipes help to explain what 'cool' design means. It's just not really design.

Let’s digress a little bit from the discussion on stereotypical battles and media battles over the portrayal of battles, and talk about my own battle on this blog.

Cover-ups exposed

Mistakes in war pay… They pay very badly.

Summary of events from US classified video, leaked on 5th April 2010:

Journalist and assistant walk down a street in Baghdad with cameras slung over their shoulders.

US soldiers scouting the area in an Apache helicopter think the journalists are carrying AK-47s. Request permission to engage. Request granted by other US soldier, with condition attached: “Just fuckin’, once you get on ‘em just open ‘em up.”

Tell us a story, and then we’ll start to care.

Nowadays, the distance of a thousand kilometres may be compressed into the travelling time of one day. Our television sets and Web 2.0 interfaces have taken a large skip and hop over geographical boundaries, and have brought images of armed conflict up close and personal. Depending on how far you prefer to sit from your television or computer screen, the distance between armed conflict and yourself could measure anywhere within a range of three metres to three inches. One could even reach out and, literally, touch armed conflict, hopefully without the alarming sensation that armed conflict feels pretty much like the hard coating of one’s computer screen. Well, it just amazes me, the fact that I could be tracking the progress of troops right over my takeaway Chinese noodles, while wondering why the cook keeps insisting on putting so much salt in my chicken.

Yet, with the closeness that television and the internet bring (we must also include iPhone apps), come the culture of distance that television and the internet may enforce. In the arena of war and bloodshed, these media platforms bring war zones up close and personal, and slam their messages home by  filling our visual and sensory nerves to the brim. Al-Jazeera, for example, has created something of a consumer niche, or a Long Tail, in showcasing graphic images of conflict victims that nobody else wants to show. Yes, there is a niche market in gory images. Some say that they want to know more about the grueling reality of war, while others like to learn how our insides look like.

Al-Jazeera, featuring a smashed Iraqi car on the one hand, and Obama on the other.

We will Write of fear and hate. You shall Read and Take Notice.

I’ve noticed, as an average member of the public who saunters along the street without a camera or AK-47, that it takes a special breed of person to write about war from within a conflict zone.  Someone who is fearless, but writes about fear and hate. Someone who looks at things with a steady and clinical eye, tainted with just that touch of concern for the next unpredictable thing that is going to happen; just the right dose of righteous indignation for the maimed and the dying. Someone who writes as an authority on the subject.

Anyway, I am no authority on the subject. I think a lot of journalists aren’t, either. Here are some tips on how to report on Afghanistan by Christian Bleuer. He likes to pinpoint key news elements on Afghanistan so every journalist can continue to keep standards the way they are (i.e. low).