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.
1. Dorothea Salo on May 11, 2004 12:29 PM writes...
Not to nitpick -- okay, I'm nitpicking.
Quasimodo does not say "This will kill that." Quasimodo is semi-mute owing to deafness from bell-ringing.
Dom Claude the archdeacon says it.
Permalink to Comment2. Dorothea Salo on May 11, 2004 12:30 PM writes...
And on a second look -- wrong book. You want _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_. Apologies for multiply-commenting.
Permalink to Comment3. Clay Shirky on May 11, 2004 12:49 PM writes...
Fixed, thanks
Permalink to Comment4. Alex Steffen on May 11, 2004 1:10 PM writes...
Hey Clay!
Jamais Cascio made some good points related to this:
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000680.html
"Digital cameras may have had their Rodney King moment this last week, with the pictures taken of prisoner abuses by American troops in Iraq, sent via email around the world. When coupled with digital technology, that three-step process -- See, Snap, Send -- becomes revolutionary action. Whether the people taking the pictures did so out of a sense of outrage, a desire to document a moment, or misguided amusement, the result is the same: the knowledge that anyone, anywhere, with a digital camera and a network connection has enormous power, perhaps enough to alter the course of a war or the policies of the most powerful nation on Earth."
Permalink to Comment5. Marc Hedlund on May 11, 2004 1:31 PM writes...
I've been calling this the Distributed Intelligence Agency. The moles already exist in every organization and community, and they're forwarding their reports to the edge rather than the core. Analysts are everywhere.
They can post "Absolutely no photos of any kind" signs at Abu Ghraib, and Rumsfeld can rant about digital cameras before Congress, but the only real fix is to remove the subject itself. (Isn't it interesting that the first court-martial from the case, against Jeremy C. Sivits, charges him not with abusing prisoners but instead with photographing the abuse?)
Shooting the messenger, shooting the torture.
Permalink to Comment6. Zbigniew Lukasiak on May 11, 2004 1:53 PM writes...
The next move will be when rendering pictures will be fast enough to fake such reports with minimal effort.
Permalink to Comment7. Liza Sabater on May 12, 2004 9:52 AM writes...
Hi Clay,
I've tried to TB several times the post to no avail. I just posted this last night:
http://www.culturekitchen.com/archives/000778.html
With your comment about umediation, I could not but rethink the slogan : The revolution will not be retouched.
Permalink to Comment8. Liza Sabater on May 12, 2004 9:54 AM writes...
WHOA! OT : Sorry about that. Is the pinging a problem with my server or yours? Please delete all copies.
Permalink to Comment9. Clay Shirky on May 12, 2004 1:48 PM writes...
Liza, problem's with our server, looking into it, thanks
-c
Permalink to Comment10. Adrian on May 12, 2004 3:33 PM writes...
I also had trouble doing a trackback to your site. I really enjoyed your article. Here is what I wrote on my blog:
As we begin to recognize the tremendous impact digital photography is having on our world, I think there are very important questions we need to ask. The one that come to mind first is: How do we recognize truth in photography? Any graphic designer knows how easy it is to manipulate an image. A photo should never be confused with truth. Working in advertising, that is not something we want people to recognize. We want people to follow the equation that product = happiness = reality. I think that the digital revolution is starting to crack that formula for success. Perhaps like the church, advertising will benefit from a reformation.
I wrote a bit more on my blog at http://www.beadesigngroup.com/blog/archives/000024.html
Permalink to Comment11. Adrian Hanft on May 12, 2004 3:35 PM writes...
It looks like I had the same problem as Liza. I sincerely apologize for cluttering your site!
Permalink to Comment12. Lucas on May 13, 2004 9:19 AM writes...
I have recently had an opportunity to rethink my position on this issue. Only a few weeks ago I would have agreed with Clay. But I now think that unmediation, and indeed the entire concept of personal empowerment via consumption -- and even production -- of information via the internet needs to be revised.
Why this sudden change of face? Well, first of all there is a hidden (and quite naive and probably dangerous) assumption to the argument that more information -- even the right information at the right time -- leads to more informed decision making and thus empowerment. The frightening truth of the matter is that the internet tends to be a gigantic time-suck for most people most of the time. The torture images over the last few weeks need to re-enforce not the idea that images are our salvation (how very Christian of you Clay) but that the image, and even the word, need to serve our more base insticts such as fear. Fear can be a good thing, such as when it gets you off your fat ass and helps you come to grips with reality. With all due respect my friend, get off your pulpit. I'm off of mine.
Permalink to Comment13. Lucas on May 13, 2004 10:00 AM writes...
Arg. As is usual for me, that last post took on unnessarly incendiary tones. Clay's intentions are admirable, and I do not mean to besmirch him or his ass in any way. Seeking a way out of this mess is honorable. But I think we need to look in the mirror and honestly ask ourselves how this great expanse of information that is the internet has improved our lives, and not just served as a form of diversion. The word may serve the image, but both need to serve life.
Although the question of mediation is an interesting one, and surely deserves serious dialog, it needs to be discussed within the context of actionability. An unactionable mediated image is perhaps just as bad as an actionable unmediated one. I don't see anything actionable about torture images, only a debased form of voyeurism, no matter how visceral they may be.
Permalink to Comment14. Bill Seitz on May 13, 2004 12:15 PM writes...
Perhaps it's implied in calling the new cheap bibles "accessible", but it's worth making explicit the fact that those bibles were the first ones in German, which non-priests could actually read.
This was a key re-Framing of the relationship between laity, priesthood, and their God.
Permalink to Comment15. Bill Seitz on May 13, 2004 12:25 PM writes...
I think I side more with Clay than Lucas.
I think we'll go through a period of "wasting" time with a lot of non-actionable data. Part of that is entertainment, part of it is seeking progress/enlightenment but not knowing how to get there.
Then I think we'll recognize that we're running in circles, and start looking for ways to make sense. At some point the wall of ComplexSystems smashes us in the nose. I don't know how to get around that yet. Maybe GeneralSemantics, maybe ArgumentationVisualization...
But (a) volumes of data allow for some potential of finding a basis for a new Model of some piece of reality, and (b) raw data sometimes has a way to cutting through abstraction to a CommonSense or SharedValues level (which then needs to be questioned, not just reacted to viscerally).
Or something...
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/MakingSense
Permalink to Commenthttp://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/GeneralSemantics
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/ArgumentatIon
16. Lucas Gonze on May 13, 2004 3:46 PM writes...
This is a didactic point that may or may not be relevant.
The Catholic Church was done in most of all by itself, not by the printing press or by the reformation. The Church had become a hollow institution with chronic dependence on states, canon legalism, and eventually a weak attempt at becoming a state itself. It's true that the possibility for laymen to read and interpret the bible was revolutionary, but that was not the message of the reformation. Luther did not believe in direct revelation, he believed in a new set of canon.
As a general thing, I agree that direct access to printing presses will have a political impact. But this has more to do with the moment we're living in. Once the political power of the media was recognized during the Nixon/Kennedy campaign, political actors pursued ownership and control of the press, leading to the press becoming the same sort of hollow and theologically inert institution that the Church was.
- Lucas Gonze
(I Am Not A Historian, just currently engrossed in Paul Johnson's excellent book "A History of Christianity")
Permalink to Comment17. Clay Shirky on May 13, 2004 4:19 PM writes...
I think that's relevant, and I don't disagree, but it's a bit like arguing after a baseball game whether the home team lost because their pitching and fielding was bad or the other guys' hitting was good, to which the only possible answer is "Yes."
The Church was rotten, and this rottenness was what moved Luther and gave his arguments moral suasion. But his arguments were also based on giving people direct access to the text -- not to the degree that later Protestant sects would take it, of course, but far further than the Church was willing to tolerate.
The failure of the Church as it existed in 1517 may have been a foregone conclusion, but the particular time, place and manner of the collapse was fueled by the printing press.
Permalink to Comment18. Liza Sabater on May 14, 2004 2:44 AM writes...
Clay and all,
I would like to ask a question to further this idea : You're focusing on the tool (the printing press) used by Luther but what about the channels of distribution.
I have to brush up on my history to look into that aspect. I cannot remember exactly how the bibles and books at that time were distributed. Because this is what I think is the key to the discussion : It is not just the tool that is important but the manner and speed of the distribution.
Immediacy as an aesthetic value is a product of the practice of moblogging : If the channels of distribution are as accessible as a celular call, why PhotoShop an image if you can take the best one you can and immediately post it?
The Protestan revolution would have not been possible if distribution were not easy. As I recall, Luther's 95 Theses were posted on the church door at Witenberg. The fact that he did not have them pressed in a big fat book (like the early Gutenberg books, which mimicked illuminated manuscripts), clearly points to the materiality of his theories : Make the Word accessible by making it as easy to carry and distribute as a sheet of paper nailed to the church door.
The moblogged images from Iraq are an iteration of those 95 theses on the church door. And the reason why they spread like wild fire was not just because they were on blogs. They memefied thanks to RSS. RSS is playing a HUGE role in the speed at which information is circulated on the web.
So my question is, what was the prescursor of RSS back in Luther's day? What practices emerged that made distribution of bibles and text real simple and fast back in those days?
I'm gonna have to crack open those history books.
Permalink to Comment19. Bill Seitz on May 14, 2004 10:01 AM writes...
It seems like prior to Gutenberg there weren't enough books for distribution to be much of an issue. And prior to bibles being in German there wasn't much point in printing them because almost nobody could read them.
Permalink to Comment20. Ross Mayfield on May 14, 2004 10:58 AM writes...
The point of production, not just its abundance, cost and distribution, also matters. Control can be more easily asserted over professionals than amateurs.
Permalink to Comment21. NTR on May 16, 2004 10:48 PM writes...
From the article above:
'... [The Church's] loss of political hegemony followed. This is what we are seeing now relative to the military’s control of information.
[...]
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.'
Drawing a parallel of my own I would cast the U.S. government in the role of the church, being those who wish to retain control over society by controlling information i.e. keeping secrets, interpreting for the laity. In the role of the Lutherans are those who wish to reform the use of information and hence the role of government i.e. sharing 'secrets' to serve the laity. One of these 'Lutheran' ideas, directly applicable to the U.S. (and other governments) is Open Source Intelligence (OSINT):
"At its best, OSINT is the complete marriage of the proven process of intelligence, from requirements definition and collection management to timely analytics, with all -- and I do mean all -- legally and ethically available sources. It is important to emphasize the paucity of those endeavors that are limited to English or the main European languages. If one cannot work in 29 plus languages on a 24/7 basis -- that is in real time and near real time, -- one is not serious. Print and broadcast media are actually the smallest part of the open source universe. Untapped perceptions, oral histories, informal exchanges, limited edition local publications, pre-prints, and geospatial as well as imagery information of all kinds -- including photos from cells phones with geospatial positioning system information -- this is the larger open source universe.
Lest you might believe that the U.S. government does OSINT, but does not advertise, I will briefly highlight the fact that in August 1995, in an overnight exercise, I defeated the entire U.S. intelligence community -- all agencies -- in what is now known as the Burundi exercise. I did this with six telephone calls on my way to the airport. It was not a fair contest -- if you believe that only secrets matter, then you will tend to not know where to go for the non-secrets. There has been no real change since then, despite the best intentions within the FBIS community and the federal research Division at the Library of Congress, because of persistent opposing mind-sets at the highest levels." -From “THE NEW CRAFT OF OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE: HOW THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE SHOULD LEAD” by ROBERT DAVID STEELE. CEO, OSS.NET; AUTHOR; REFORMER, FORMER U.S. INTELIGENCE OFFICER
Open Source Intelligence Overview
Permalink to Comment22. Seb on May 23, 2004 9:17 AM writes...
There's a new blog out there that focuses on these kinds of questions: http://ratchetup.typepad.com/iraq/
"Camera/Iraq is a special project of Carleton College's Cinema & Media Studies Department and Ratchet Up to gather articles, commentary and photographs about public and personal image practices associated with the War in Iraq."
Permalink to Comment23. Jon Husband on June 3, 2004 2:04 AM writes...
I guess I interpret many of the above examples as wirearchy having an erosive effect on traditional hierarchy, sorta like electronic grains of silicon being continuously driven against the sandstone pillars of our exiting fortress-like institutions.
They may not be quite as impenetrable or solid as once they seemed.
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