New Media, Image War and the War on Terror
Workshop: Swansea University, June 24, 2011
Co-organized by Dr. Nathan Roger and Dr. Lee Jarvis
Hosted by the Department of Political and
Cultural Studies at Swansea University
Co-sponsored by The Callaghan Centre for the
Study of Conflict, Power and Empire and the
Centre for the Study of Culture and Politics
(C-SCAP) at Swansea University and the British
International Studies Association (BISA) Art and Politics Working Group
Supported by the BISA International Communication Working Group
Keynote Address
Dr. Andrew Hill (The Open University)
The War on Terror, World War I and Lepanto: Three Scopic Economies
**********
Introduction
The September 11, 2001 terror attacks signalled
the start of a war on terror, it also marked a
paradigm shift in warfare: from techno-war?
which dominated the post-Cold War period ? to
image war. The opening up of this new image war
theatre of war has to date largely been
overlooked by militaries as they have instead
decided to focus their attention on reworking
techno-war for the new security challenges of
global terrorist war. This situation is also
replicated within academia as many academics
have chosen to rework techno-war for the war on
terror. However, it is not sufficient to merely
rework techno-war for image war as this new
theatre of war requires that new strategies be
developed in order to correctly understand
it. A growing number of IR and Visual Culture
theorists are now beginning to theorise image
war and this workshop will bring together
academics from these different backgrounds to
further develop theory on image war.
The war on terror is simultaneously also taking
place in a new media ecology ? participatory
media ? and this, similar to image war, is also
impacting on contemporary war. A number of
academics, in IR and Media Studies, are
currently engaged in theorising the impact of
new media on the war on terror. However, the
link between new media and image war is an area
which is relatively under theorised and as such
warrants further investigation. This workshop
will bring together academics engaged in
research about the impacts of new media on the
war on terror with academics who are concerned
with image war in the war on terror and it will
encourage a cross-fertilisation of ideas between
IR, Media Studies and Visual Culture. The
result being, a more sophisticated understanding
of the new security challenges currently posed
by global terrorist war in an age of image war
and ongoing new media revolution.
This workshop will build on the established
research programmes of the BISA Art and Politics
and International Communication Working Groups ?
including past Workshops (?Art, War & Terror? at
St. Anthony?s College, Oxford in November 2009),
a Special Section ?Art, Politics, Purpose?
edited by Alex Danchev and Debbie Lisle in
Review of International Studies 35(4) October
2009 and a Conference ?Terrorism and New Media:
Building a Research Network? at Dublin City University in September 2010.
The BISA Art and Politics Working Group have
made available 8 travel bursaries of £50 each
for graduate students who wish to attend this
workshop. If you would like to be considered
for a travel bursary please email Dr. Nathan
Roger
(<mailto:(n.roger /at/ swansea.ac.uk)>(n.roger /at/ swansea.ac.uk))
with your name, University, level of study and
also the name of the place you will be
travelling to Swansea from. The deadlines is
Monday 4th April 2011 and successful applicants
will be contacted after this date.
Programme
9.00-9.30 ? Arrive / Registration
9.30-10.00 ? Welcome and Introductory Remarks
10.00-11.30 ? Keynote: Dr. Andrew Hill (The Open University)
?The War on Terror,
World War I and Lepanto: Three Scopic Economies?
11.30-12.00 ? Coffee
12.00-13.00 ? Dr. Philip Hammond (London South Bank University)
?Image War: Causes, Conduct and Consequences?
13.00-14.00 ? Lunch
14.00-15.30 ? Annie Bryan (PhD Student, Swansea University)
?Televising Terror: (New) Media Images in 7/7?s
Live Coverage and Commemoration?
? Ian Jackson (PhD Student, Lancaster University)
?Image War and the Blogosphere: Does the
Increasing Ubiquity of New Media Vectors
Necessitate a Paradigm Shift in the Way Traditional Media Forms War??
15.30-16.00 ? Coffee
16.00-17.00 ? Professor Gillian Youngs (University of Wales, Newport)
?New Media in Historical Context: Communication
and the Politics of Space in Warfare?
17.00-17.15 ? Concluding Remarks
Abstracts and Biographies
Annie Bryan
Televising terror: (New) media images in 7/7?s
live coverage and commemorations
The occurrence of the London bombings on 7th
July 2005 (?7/7?) marked a new chapter in the
so-called ?War on Terror?. The four blasts on
the city?s transport network triggered carnage
of an unprecedented nature, as fifty-two people
were killed and more than seven hundred injured
in Britain?s first suicide bombings. This paper
examines the ways in which the attacks, as well
as their subsequent commemorations, were
mediated in British television news coverage.
Particular analytical attention is paid to the
images which were used to represent, and to remember, 7/7.
This work is part of a larger interdisciplinary
project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities
Research Council, which explores how traumatic
events (in this case, 7/7) are mediated and
later commemorated on television, and how they
subsequently come to be remembered by the
public. Data comprises 11 hours of
video-recorded, transcribed footage from five
British TV channels, including both live
coverage of the attacks (5.5 hours) and coverage
of their first-year anniversary commemorations
(5.5 hours). References are also made to data
collected on the fourth- and fifth- year anniversaries.
The method adopted is discourse analysis,
specifically a critical semiotic approach (see
Kress 2010). The key tenet of such an approach
is that all discourses are multimodal, and so
analyses should strive to account for all the
semiotic modes at work within the data.
Correspondingly, the paper examines the images
within the coverage as well as the complex ways
in which they interact with the verbal and sonic
modes inherent to the medium of television.
The paper seeks to conduct comparative analyses
of the images used to represent 7/7 in the
commemorative reportage vis-à-vis those which
featured in the breaking news coverage. To this
end, it explores such questions as: what kind of
images were used to represent the bombings?
Which of these images were re-used (or not) in
the commemorative reportage? How did images
contribute to the remembrance of 7/7, and how
did this change as further anniversaries of the attacks came to be marked?
To address these issues, a range of image types
are considered. A major focus is the use of
mobile media footage (both moving and still
images) within the corpora. I examine how such
material, as a form of ?new? participatory
media, was embedded within the television
coverage (an ?old? medium). Consideration is
also given to the nature of the footage that was
specially (re)produced to reconstruct the events
of 7/7, especially in the context of witness?
personal memories of the atrocity. The paper
reflects upon the ideological factors
underpinning these practices, and considers
their implications for the ways in which
terrorist acts are mediated and remembered. In
so doing, it contributes to understandings of
the nexus of image warfare, memory and media,
and highlights the interpenetration of ?new? and ?old? media therein.
REFERENCES
Kress, G. (2010) Multimodality: A social
semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London, Routledge.
Annie Bryan is a final year PhD student in the
Department of Language and Literature at Swansea
University. Her thesis employs multimodal
discourse analysis to examine the role of
television news coverage in mediating and
memorialising traumatic events, using the 2005
London bombings as a case study. She has
recently published, with Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, an
article in Discourse and Communication on the
recontextualisation of mobile media footage in
the live coverage and commemorations of 7/7.
Dr. Philip Hammond
Image War: Causes, Conduct and Consequences
Several scholars have drawn attention to the
importance of image and presentation to
contemporary ?mediatised? conflict. So far,
however, there seems to be little consensus on
how far, and in what ways, this differs from the
past, nor on what has given rise to the
phenomenon of ?image war?. This paper proposes
that image war is primarily a political
phenomenon: that is to say, it is driven less by
developments in media technology and culture,
and more by attempts on the part of Western
elites to simulate a political project for the post-Cold War era.
Discussing examples from the ?humanitarian?
interventions of the 1990s as well as the
?war-on-terror? actions in Afghanistan and Iraq,
the paper examines the difficulties encountered
by political and military leaders in conducting
image wars. Successes have been few in number,
usually only short-lived, and rarely
uncontested. A case in point is Iraq, where
despite the coalition?s careful efforts to
construct the ?defining? image of the campaign
(thought to have been achieved in the toppling
of Saddam?s statue), the equally enduring image
of the conflict is the scenes of torture and degradation in Abu Ghraib prison.
Such difficulties point to the fact that the
consequences of image war are unpredictable and
difficult to control. In this light, a number
of features of contemporary media can be
understood as shaping the uncertain ground on
which image wars are fought. The paper briefly
examines four such factors: high levels of
popular media literacy, the manipulability of
digital images, the culture of Web 2.0, and the
development of transnational audiences for global news media.
However, while there are important developments
in the contemporary mediascape, these do not in
themselves explain the rise of image
war. Rather, they can be understood as symptoms
of the same underlying development that gives
rise to image war itself ? namely, the absence
of those larger frameworks of political meaning
which collapsed with the end of the Cold War.
This helps to explain the domestic orientation
of image war: although it is played out on the
international stage, the most important
audiences are at home. If the popular
disengagement from politics and the
hollowing-out of public life that have troubled
Western societies in the post-Cold War era
provide the impetus for engaging in image war,
however, these underlying problems also limit
its success. In these circumstances, waging
image war tends to be counter-productive and
self-defeating, encouraging media self-consciousness and public cynicism.
Philip Hammond is Reader in Media and
Communications at London South Bank
University. He is the author of Media, War and
Postmodernity (Routledge, 2007) and Framing
Post-Cold War Conflicts (Manchester University
Press, 2007), and is co-editor, with Edward
Herman, of Degraded Capability: The Media and
the Kosovo Crisis (Pluto Press, 2000). In
September 2010 he organised ?Screens of Terror?,
an international conference on representations
of war and terrorism since 9/11 in film, TV drama and documentary.
Dr. Andrew Hill
The War on Terror, World War I and Lepanto: three scopic economies
This paper will seek to delineate what is
distinctive about the role played by imagery
and digital technology in the War on Terror by
locating this conflict in regard to two previous
moments in the evolving relationship between war
and the visual: the Battle of Lepanto (1571, an
exemplar from the pre-photographic era), and
World War I (the age of photography).
Focusing upon the connections between the first
person, embodied experience of the act of seeing
and developments in visual technology, the paper
will assess the role played by seeing in each of
these conflicts in regard to: a) how wars are
fought (?in the battlefield?); b) how conflicts
are encountered and made sense of by publics.
Introducing the notion of a ?scopic economy? the
paper will trace the shifts in how the act of
seeing has been organised and distributed in
each conflict. In so doing it will evaluate what
is specifically new and distinctive about the
role played by digital imagery and new media in
the War on Terror, and what the ramifications of
these changes are for this and future conflicts.
Andrew Hill is Research Fellow in Visual
Culture, Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural
Change (CRESC), The Open University. He is the
author of Re-Imagining the War on Terror:
Seeing, Waiting, Travelling (Palgrave, 2009).
Ian Jackson
Image war and the Blogosphere: Does the
increasing ubiquity of new media vectors
necessitate a paradigm shift in the way traditional media frames war?
Daniel Hallin?s model of media collusion centred
on spheres of consensus, legitimate controversy
and deviance focused almost entirely on domestic
media consumption; one nation?s consensus is another?s deviance.
But what of the blogosphere? As a truly global
media vector and with usage having increased by
444.8% in the last decade the homogenous support
of the domestic media has become diluted.
The elegant British solution to the perceived
damage a hostile media did to America?s efforts
in Vietnam; to embed journalists within the
naval task force during the Falkland?s war was
repeated in both Gulf Wars. And yet it?s
effectiveness as a solution was certainly
diminished by 2003 when bloggers from all over
the world voiced dissent on a public forum. This
paper will attempt to examine some of the issues
around the way new media vectors have
transformed the media management of war, discuss
whether access to new technologies has rendered
the ?embedding? solution moribund and assess
whether the ability of networks like Fox News to
frame conflict in a manner both politically and
militarily palatable to the elite has remained
undiminished. The paper will challenge
preconceived notions about the changes taking
place in new media by drawing both from
contemporary literature and direct interviews
with important and high profile bloggers such as Faiz Shakir.
Ian Jackson previously studied Journalism at
Murdoch University in Western Australia and is
currently writing his PhD within the Media
Department at Lancaster University. He is a
founding member of Lancaster University?s
Art/Terror/ Politics reading group, a successful
columnist and some time guest speaker for the Skeptics (sic) society.
Professor Gillian Youngs
New Media in Historical Context: Communication
and the Politics of Space in Warfare
This paper focuses on the relationships between
new media shifts in communication patterns and
processes and long term thinking about the
politics of space and warfare. It opens up a
number of themes related to communication that
have been commonplace in the historical study of
international relations and may well be worth
revisiting in the context of the contemporary
?war on terror?. The paper includes critical
reflection on the implications of limited focus
on technological and sociotechnical factors in
IR and the benefits of engaging insights from
international communications and globalization studies.
The arguments link debates about the influences
of uses and functions of new media to well
established critiques of state-centrism and
territorially-bound conceptions of ?inside? and
?outside? in traditional approaches to
sovereignty and security. The paper explores the
extent to which contemporary communications test
established concepts of the state and identities
associated with it. The new media environment
and the diversity of information flows within it
challenge familiar notions of the state and its
potential for control, as the Wikileaks
revelations of US military documents on the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq graphically demonstrate.
The paper works with a fresh approach to the
politics of space developed by the author in
relation to the global economy and digital
developments. This perspective argues for a
focus on ?sociospatial? (virtual online)
environments as well as the ?geospatial?
(physical offline) environments and the linkages
and tensions across them. There is a new
complexity involved in thinking about the
politics of space and communications flows,
networks and actors, and issues linked to
different forms of authority or influence. IR
as a discipline has to date made limited progress in such directions.
The paper argues that there are well established
and new reasons for this and both are worthy of
examination to shape IR as a discipline fit for
purpose in the 21st century. These reasons
highlight the reluctance of IR in general to
give prominence to sociotechnical analysis and
to integrate the related insights of
communications and new media studies on the
changing nature of political processes and contexts.
The specific and enduring nature of the ?war on
terror? and new research related to it have
illuminated this problem and laid out lessons
that need to be learned to expand the analytical
reach and policy relevance of academic work in
IR. The discipline has always had
interdisciplinary characteristics at its heart
and this is among its strengths but this paper
argues that some of these interdisciplinary
parameters now need to be stretched in
fundamental ways that may not be sufficiently clear to date.
Gillian Youngs has recently been appointed to a
University of Wales Alliance Research Chair. She
is Professor of Digital Economy and Academic
Director at the Institute of Advanced
Broadcasting, University of Wales, Newport. She
will be leading an ESRC Research Seminar Series
?Digital Policy: Connectivity, Creativity and
Rights? 2011-13 with colleagues from
Universities of Leicester, Oxford and Leeds and
she led an ESRC Research Seminar Series ?Ethics
and the War on Terror: Politics,
Multiculturalism and Media? with colleagues from
Universities of Oxford and Birmingham 2006-9.
Her publications include: International
Relations in a Global Age (Polity, 1999); Global
Political Economy in the Information Age
(Routledge, 2007); the edited volume Political
Economy, Power and the Body (Macmillan, 2000);
the co-edited volume Globalization: Theory and
Practice (Continuum, 2008), first published in
1996 and now in its third edition. She is
currently completing Virtual Globalization:
Digital Economy (Routledge). Her recent
publications on the war on terror include: ?The
?new home front? and the War on Terror: Ethical
and Political Reframing of National and
International Politics.? International Affairs
86(4) 2010, 925-937; ?Media and Mediation in the
War on Terror: Issues and Challenges.? Critical
Studies on Terrorism 2009 2(1), 1-8;
?Cosmopolitanism and Feminism in the Age of the
War on Terror: A Twenty-first Century Reading of
Virginia Woolf?s Three Guineas?. In M. Nowicka
and M. Rovisco (eds) Cosmopolitanism in
Practice. Farnham: Ashgate. 2009, 145-159.
