The Duck of Minerva

After Wikileaks; or, the next phase of Diffused War

Various and Sundry

by Ben O'Loughlin

3 November 2010, 2025 EDT

In Diffused War, Andrew Hoskins and I argued we’ve entered a new paradigm of warfare. The wikileaks stories seem to confirm much of this account. War is mediatized, we wrote, as the institutions of war and those affected by war take a form governed by continual media recording, display and archiving. This creates diffuse causal relations between action and effect, since mediatization can amplify or contain the cognitive and emotional response any action generates in ways not dependent on the initial action itself. Militaries, NGOs, insurgents, journalists – none can predict the outcomes of their actions or the display of their actions. US and UK military practitioners did not envisage their communications going public, but their institutions allowed those records to exist. And as my Duck colleague Charli Carpenter notes, they’ve started shredding documents. This is to counter the greater uncertainty now faced by those conducting war. While who sees what, when, and where is usually largely controlled (most people still rely on mainstream media), the potential for surprises is permanent and unavoidable, such that the worst case must always be built into decision-making.



In contrast to the splutterings of military chiefs, for my students wikileaks is already the norm. So what should we expect to see next? Where might novelty lie? Let’s take a risk and look briefly at some ideas in contemporary art, which has long dealt with mediatization and how it reconfigures human relationships and our ideas of the image and representation. Nicolas Bourriaud recently wrote that, in our ‘control+S’ culture of instant archiving of all political and social life, ‘an insistence on the “here and now” of the artistic event and a refusal to record it are a challenge to the art world’.  What is notable now is what goes unrecorded or is not made public. He discusses Brian de Palma’s 2003 Iraq war film Redacted, which pieces together soldiers’ blogs, cameraphone footage and other media from the war to produce a style of ‘organized proliferation’ that is now common in TV and movies generally. Pushed to its limit, Bourriaud suggests, ‘the degree of spatial (and imaginary) clutter is such that the slightest gap in its chain produces a visual effect’. In other words, we now expect the depiction of war to amalgamate several media recording technologies, a chain of styles, textualities and episodes edited into any single news summary or Hollywood movie. And if a gap occurs, something is wrong. If no citizen-generated content emerges, that is surprising. If footage from the helicopter gunship’s point of view is absent from the news report, and we now know such a perspective is continually recorded, then at least a few members of the audience might begin to ask why there’s no footage. 


We’d expect the next phase of military media management to employ the full range of textual styles to which audiences are now accustomed. Its a question of credibility, and studies show audiences are far more savvy than military practitioners assume. With that in mind, instead of shredding documents and looking like you’ve something to hide, perhaps a truly pre-emptive PR agent would deliberately create a full, convincing range of leaks for wikileaks such that a controlled version of the worst is already on show. It would then appear there are no surprising gaps. 

Ben O'Loughlin is Professor of International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is Director of the New Political Communication Unit, which was launched in 2007. Before joining Royal Holloway in September 2006 he was a researcher on the ESRC New Security Challenges Programme.

1 Comment

  1. Vikash Yadav
    Vikash Yadav on 4 November 2010 at 14.45 EDT

    Ben, I am a bit skeptical that the military will change its current PR policy.  First, the American public does not care about the current conflicts in which its military is engaged (unless they have families and friends in the military) — in large part because the conflict does not map onto a domestic battle between Republicans and Democrats (as it did in the 2nd Iraq War).  Second, the mainstream and even the non-mainstream media is willing to rehearse talking points emanating from the military (e.g. the way the Wikileaks story was quickly deflected and contained). Even liberal academics seems oriented to rebuilding the cathedral rather than embracing the untamed and unaccountable bazaar of open source news and intelligence.  

    The current PR strategy is working so well that the military does not even seek to ensure information dominance through a fire hose approach as it did in the First and Second Iraq War and the beginning of the Afghan War. It is almost as if the Pentagon knows it can be passive about the news because no one cares and if they do come to care they can be persuaded back into a gentle slumber…  Given that the current strategy is working, the most the military has to do is to keep stoking the perception of new emerging threats (e.g. Yemen)…

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