Images as bioweapons in the informational milieu

Terranova’s book is one of the more engrossing and compelling I’ve come across in a long time, and I’m grateful for the circumstances that led me to read it. Beyond a useful (necessary) background for understanding the political and social issues raised in her book, the text makes me appreciate our semester’s work as a comprehensive body with strong political and social implications. For me, she more than everyone else we’ve read raises the question: What’s at stake?

The passage I found most personally interesting was that regarding communication, transparency, and democracy. Introducing both Stiglitz and Habermas (two of my favorites), she engages with Stiglitz’s assertion that transparency and freedom of information is a salve on the wounds of democracy and global governance through Habermas’ discussion of the ‘public sphere.’ While public space was once (in the 18th century) a place for the rationalization of authority, media and the inclusion of the masses distorts this space into a contested war zone of manipulation. “Communication has never only been about the sunshine of reason illuminating the dark secrets of governance, but it has always cast its own shadows”(133). Terranova points out Berlusconi, Osama bin Laden, Bush, etc, as ‘masters of the mediascape,’ arguing that control of the media ‘is restricted to those who can afford it.’ More than that, the increasingly ‘televisual nature of politics’ demonstrates the direct involvement of the state and private interests in ‘the public sphere,’ now a ‘site of permanent conflict,’(135) which could also here be called an informational milieu.

Moving onto Baudrillard’s theory of the mass, it becomes difficult, in other words, to parse the propaganda from the information or knowledge in these info milieus, be they the internet or other forms of media, particularly because ‘the image’ is “not so much decoded for meaning as consumed, that is absorbed and relayed.”(141) (My working definition of propaganda is something that tells you what to think rather than something that informs how to think.) Here I thought of the informationization (to hark back to chapter one) of the news event or insurgency act in the form of the videoed suicide bombing. Al Qaeda’s media department in Iraq has self consciously turned event into packaged visual information to be consumed by the masses by documenting the process and success of suicide attacks and dispersing them over the Internet. I’ve always found this interesting because of the duality or redundancy of the event, it’s two audiences, two different aims, and two different acts; one in the informational milieu and one in the war zone. While seemingly adding to ‘transparency’ in communication by providing the world with moving images of the situation in Iraq, many of which news agencies such as CNN have used in place of their own footage, the creation and distribution of these home-made news clips are also clearly acts of media warfare, and definitely propaganda. I think the fact that both CNN and Al Qaeda have shown the same footage to their different ends throws light on the relationship between the mass and the consumption of images, of fascination and yet distracted perception. (Side note: ‘Perception management’ consultancy firms sounds so sinister).

It is both sad and hopeful that Baudrillard’s singularly cynical view of the masses shifts as a ‘networked multitude’ into a discerning, fragmented, and (according to Terranova) intolerant world. Although equipped with an ‘active power’ of differentiation, Terranova argues (perhaps too pessimistically) that as a political milieu this network culture resembles a battlefield more than a utopia, and I’m inclined to agree, with a dose of optimism.