Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
might care to think. But what distinguished the events in Abu
Ghraib was not that they happened, but that the means of recording
these activities was so readily and shamelessly embraced by the
participants themselves; thus such graphic evidence was easily
obtained and distributed because of the availability of cheap digital
cameras, often built into mobile phones, and the ease of burning
the images taken with them onto CD-Roms or of uploading them
onto the Internet.
Similarly, much of the more critical debate about Abu Ghraib
and the Iraq War more generally also took place (and continues to
do so) on the World Wide Web, particularly through blogs, which
allow for far more unbridled comment and even news than the
increasingly supine news media in the United States. Blogs entered
the public consciousness in the States when they became an impor-
tant component of Howard Dean's campaign to become the
Democratic candidate for the 2004 Presidential election, along with
internet tools for grass-roots organization of groups. Though, in
the end, Dean failed in his ambitions, nobody could fail to notice
the capacity for mobilizing support at a grass-roots level that such
technology offered. In a recent topic, media theorist Brian McNair
has described the result of the emergence of the blog as 'cultural
chaos'.
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For McNair the fact that anyone, or at least anyone with
access to the right technologies, can blog means the end of what he
describes as the 'control paradigm', in which the media help sustain
the social order through the dissemination of dominant ideas and
values and at the same time serve the interest of those in control.
There are now numberless blogs on the Web, not least because
setting one up is both easy and often free. The very proliferation of
blogs does of course militate against individual voices being heard,
but nevertheless some do, and, in the light of an increasingly
conformist and often cowardly news media, blogs offer at least the
possibility of genuine debate (as well as a lot of highly debatable
and often offensive ideas).
