James Hong of HotorNot fame launched YAFRO as a Friendster clone (the acronym is for Yet Another Friendster Rip-off.) Since then, they’ve turned it into a moblog, and Hong has recently posted a list of US soldiers posting pictures to YAFRO from Iraq. Images straight from the front, with Dan Rather nowhere in sight…
Jaques Barzun, author of the marvelous history of modernity From Dawn to Decadence (1500 – present), makes the point that the Catholic Church as a pan-European political force was done in by the Protestant Reformation, itself fueled by the printing press. Once the Church lost the ability to control the direct perception of scripture, thanks to the printing of (relatively) cheap bibles in languages other than Latin, their loss of political hegemony followed.
This is what we are seeing now relative to the military’s control of information. A year or so ago, someone in the DoD told me that the thing that would most affect the prosecution of the war in Iraq would be images of DAB’s — Dead American Bodies. The unplanned spread of photos of coffins, and now of torture victims, means that control of this part of the war is outside the military’s hands.
The spread of images from Iraq, both relatively plain ones like most of what’s on the YAFRO blogs to the horrifying images of torture and abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison are all part of the removal of bottlenecks that will change the political structure in ways we can’t predict.
And it isn’t just military affairs, its politics and business and everything else, from attempts to coordinate evidence of Apple’s manufacturing errors (previously handled case-by-case, but now becoming a kind of grass-rooots class action protest, to Apple’s horror) to the distributed amicus brief on the SCO case conducted by the Linux community to the recent right of Americans to get their medical records on request and within 30 days to the publication of spoilers for popular TV shows. (Read this last link now — its from the Times and goes away in 5 days, and although on the surface its about TV, its really a musing on life in a fully disclosed culture.)
I remember hearing about the security efforts being put into place around delivery of Ken Starr’s Whitewater (Lewinsky) report as it was delivered, and thought “Why are they bothering? It will be in the web in 48 hours…” I was wrong, of course — it was on the web the next day. Now I hear that military officials are debating whether to release other photos with evidence of American torture of Iraqis, and I wonder again why they are bothering. If the images exist, they will be released. It’s a fantasy to assume that they can re-assert control of the spread of images by fiat.
A parallel and a counter-parallel jump to mind. The parallel is Barzun’s point that during the initial furor of the Protestant Reformation, neither the Church nor Luther and his peers wanted a schism — on the contrary, all of them constantly maintained that what they wanted was to preserve the Church. It’s just that the Lutherans wanted to preserve the Church while reforming the relationship between the institution and the laity, while the Church itself was willing to talk about all sorts of reforms except institutional privilege.
At a guess, filtered versus unfiltered information, in many settings and particularly around control of audio and visuals as opposed to words, is going to precipitate the same sort of conflict. (The music industry is a canary in that particular coal mine.)
The counter-parallel is from Hunchback of Notre Dame, where Dom Claude holds up a newly cheap and accessible bible, points to his beloved Cathedral, and says “This will kill that.” The word was more powerful than the image.
Now we are in a mirror world, where the newly free production and distrubution of images is the novelty. Hearing about DABs or torture victims is nothing like seeing them — I had to rip the cover of the Economist this week because my wife can’t stand to see the image of the man on the box with the electrodes in his hands.
New tools for spreading of the word are powerful, of course — witness the weblog explosion in all its complexity. But the spread of images is a different kind of thing, not least because images pass across linguistic borders like a lava flow. Now that production and distribution of images are in the hands of the laity, it’s a safe bet that we are entering a world of “That will kill this.” We just don’t know what parts of society “this” refers to yet.