Terrorism and Use of the Media: the Dark Side of Our Screens

2006-10-11T18:46:00.000-07:00

There is an extensive bibliography on media's strategic role in a war - yet the concept of media refers to production conglomerates and journalists. But what about the "DIY" productions of terrorist cells?* In these "do-it-yourself" productions, these terrorist cells have two audiences, as they have multiple objectives to attain, the "target" audience and the (potential) "auxilary" audience. Western perspectives focus on the terror impression that the videos aim at achieving, and their impacts are as strategically planned as their political and social repercussions continue in time. But these videos also claim legitimacy of representation of certain factions and beliefs as much as they also use these videos to secure and gain fundings and also new recruits. In this sense, these videos literally act as an accountability tool ("this is what we do through your money, your devotion to our cause"), not only as a representation toolt ("this is what we do in the name of our beliefs, which are shared by our comunity). If you remove any allusion to terrorist activites when analysing their strategies, to what extent does their strategies resemble management strategies used by corporations?This raises questions related to modernity and the debate on whether the countries and cultures currently harboring terrorist activites have entered modernity. It would also be relevant to explore further the rationality underlying terrorist activites: the western legal framework identifies a corporation as a moral person, and culturally identifies and speaks of them as such. If it does appear that terrorist cells act and organize their activites in a similar fashion as corporations, what could a depth analysis of both terrorist and corporate behaviors provide to current research and debates on both subjects? But coming back to media coverage, western audiences are more exposed to coverage related to terrorist attacks and activities. Regardless of their depth and accuracy, the images of foreign hostages, such as Giuliana Sgrena, are more important in our visual culture than a handcuffed CEO being rushed to court through a media frenzy. Furthermore, there is more footage available on terrorist activities or war operations than of fraudulent behavior within a corporation - most probably because images of hostages suffering on shabby recordings are more visually striking, and touch the human chords than accountancy cheating. But once again, this is the reading western audiences make of these images, yet these images also serve the purpose of galvnizing potentiel recruits for terrorist cells. Make makes the gap between these audiences? Beyond the ready-made answers that would come to mind, it seems relevant to explore furthermore this question, if we would like to lessen the gap between these audiences, and ultimately between these coexistent systems of thought, whether we could can both qualify them as modern.

The 9/11 Aftermath: Collective Imagery and Cultural Productions

2006-10-11T18:45:00.000-07:00

Like most of the world's population, I can tell you exactly when and where I was when I heard of the attacks. Actually I would have to say when I heard the silence. It was a regular morning in a café in busy Paris, when suddenly, the usual background noise fell by a couple of decibels, and a growing murmur of panic was telling everybody to turn on the television and radios. At first, when looking at the television screen, I thought it was a preview for the latest American blockbuster, then I realized it was actually happening before our eyes: somebody, somewhere, had managed to strike an artery of the United States of America on a media coverage scale that has not been achieved since the Berlin Wall fell. As I wake up every morning on the eleventh of September, I ask myself: how have we been doing? One thing is sure, the "End of History" is not for today.Later during that infamous day, amongst the conversations and awe generated by the events, most of the questions that arose could be boiled down to "What happens now?". I remember that same day I added an entry to my diary, where I summed up all the major events I had witnessed through the media. Born a few years before the Cold War ended, I am part of a generation that mostly remembers living in "The Free World". But like most of my generation, I had a hard time understanding what was free about the world that was unfolding before us. Parochialism replaced communism as an excuse for bloodshed, as liberalism was continuing to "show the way" in media-staged wars where surgery terminology replaced military slang. What I remember, sitting as a child on the floor of my living room was footage of empty deserts showing us the Gulf War as it was supposed to be unravelling for the West and a desolate bridge during the siege of Sarajevo – but I have no recollection of human faces bearing the plight of what was happening. Current criticism of the attacks and the American operations which unfolded from the 9/11 attacks address the media coverage: no bodies are shown on mainstream television, but for the more critical spectator the internet provides a broad variety of often crude footage. As media access is restricted, and sometimes under attack, the movie industry is producing a visual culture that sets standards for our perspective on what is happening elsewhere, but also on the collective process of integrating these attacks in their aftermath.Coming back to the morning of the attacks, what made the might of this drama was not so much the extra-ordinary character of the scene, but rather the simultaneousness of the footage. Whether you were watching it in your living room, at work or in a coffeeshop, every one had the intimate knowledge, at the same moment, that this was a collective experience, that we were living a synchronic moment that was out of time to the extent that it could not seem to belong to our History. Such a collective trauma is bound to leave traces in every culture that are still vividly evoked today. Hollywood and the American movie-industry as a world-leading producer of visual culture is a strategic scene for the production and reading of the September attacks' legacy. An overview of the movies and documentaries produced since all seem to echo either a sense of loss and melancholic reflection on individualism or a vivacious claim to personal resilience and overcoming of personal drama. Documentaries, whether incendiary and visually effective like the ones produced by Michael Moore, or thought provoking like “Fog of War” question the political object, and its accountability, and their messages join an aggregate of increasing voices calling for global governance. Even though these documentaries are enjoying a popularity rarely seen before in movie theatres, they mostly represent the "tip of the iceberg" of our collective imagery. My claim is that movies such as Crash and Babel reflect a continuous process of reflection on that collective moment of disconnection we all experienced the morning of the attacks.When I think back, I think I have rarely felt so alone amongst a crowd – what made that morning stand out in such an exceptional fashion was a collective moment of solitude. Similarly, the thread of “Crash” and “Babel” sketch portrayals of characters self-absorbed in their own worries, who feel misunderstood and experience a sense of atomization, yet who realize as the drama unfolds, that their actions bear consequences in the manner of a spectacular trickle-down effect. In the same way that a collection of minor events trigger an unthinkable line of subsequent events that exceed the characters' ability to react, the movies build a feeling of disempowerment experienced by a set of people all related by fate yet disconnected by the individual internalization of the events. This extreme subjectivity amounts to a general sense of loss of direction, to identity quests that relate to the same question: "Where is this going? How come I feel overwhelmed and disempowered?" questions all too familiar to any spectator of the 9/11 footage. “World Trade Center” and “The Great New Wonderful” also portray individual stories obviously depicting the personal trauma experienced by New Yorkers, may it be on September 11, 2001 through “World Trade Center”, or a year later in “The Great New Wonderful”. The messages conveyed through their respective trailers are insightful enough. Two of Nicolas Cage's lines from World Trade Center, where he portrays a NYC police officer involved in the World Trade Center rescue operation sum up a similar sense of disempowerment: "We're prepared for everything. But not for this." and the closing line of the trailer "Can you still see the light?" translate into a will of resilience echoing the collective trauma. The Great New Wonderful reflects on the 9/11 aftermath through a collection of personal narratives, and its trailer closes on the following "Rebuilding is a process" – all through the trailer there is a sense of anguish and uncertainty mixed with a somewhat sarcastic optimism. It seems that the shocking simultaneousness with which the attacks hit collective imageries resulted in a continuous process of thought through visual culture: in the way the images of the plane hitting the towers are impregnated in every mind, cultural productions are aiming to represent the social and personal effects of this trauma, either through representations of resilience or disempowerment. Through this internalisation of these events, it seems that we are slowly integrating the 9/11 attacks in our History, and by realizing to what extent these events do not qualify as an exceptional and accidental traumatic incident, we are looking at ways to grasp and reflect on their meaning in a modern world.In academic circles, these attacks have been interpreted in different fashions – post-modern, anti-modern, pre-modern – I will not attempt to establish a bibliography on the subject. What stands out is the questioning of modernity in general, and probably the most spectacular moment that could illustrate the limits of the universalising project of liberalism since the Berlin Wall fell. On a general level, the attacks have managed to shake not only a world order, but our individual order and have generated a line of questioning unforeseen by the teleological framework traditionally conveyed by the media coverage of the last century's events. The notion of universal, humanistic progress which has been diffused so largely in cultural productions through accounts of success, happy endings is in part in reaction to the trauma Europe went through after World War II. The attacks, which seemed to have happened at random, destroyed this sense of human progress inherent to the West's perspective on its modernity, and from this impression of a collective solitude sprung the realization that the foreign, the unknown, the "other" is frightfully close to us.11'09''01 - September 11, a collection of short movies of eleven minutes and nine seconds managed to capture best the scope of feelings and the complexity of the aftermath in the events. Through the 11 stories of the movie transpires a will to capture the complexity of integrating the effects of the attacks into our everyday lives and recollection as much as in our individual political power to react.

Vision the Italian Think Tank - Julia

Terrorism and Use of the Media: the Dark Side of Our Screens

The 9/11 Aftermath: Collective Imagery and Cultural Productions