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The Myth of the Internet War
For days now, the media have been calling it the Internet War. "Now," reported Newsweek in its April 12 issue, "the Web is a vivid mirror of the struggle for Kosovo, a first in war." Serb hackers shut down NATO's website, an alleged war criminal named Arkan chatted on MSNBC.com, an anonymous journalist filed to Slate.com, and an Albanian teenager e-mailed her friend in California, an exchanged excerpted on NPR.
CNN websites said they'd served a record 154. million page impressions for the week following the start of the NATO bombing. The CNN sites, which include CNN.com, CNNfn.com, and Allpolitics.com, said they'd served 578 million page impressions for the Month of March, double the traffic a year ago. Traffic on CNN.com from Macedonia was up 1025 per cent, Croatian traffic was up 946 per cent, Slovenian traffic was up 797 per cent and traffic from Bosnia Herzegovina was up 570 per cent.
The Net, said the New York Times, had become an alternative source for news-hungry Americans as well as Eastern Europeans. The war, said Michael Kinsley, editor of the on-line magazine Slate, "shows the difference the Web can make. "Unless they shut down the whole telephone system, they can't stop information from getting out, or getting back in."
The myth of the Internet war, media's latest over-hyped meme about the Net, was both widespread and wrong. If the war in Kosovo demonstrated anything about the Net, it showed that it's a dreadful medium for covering a war. This was a New York Times and Washington Post and Times of London and CNN story, a military strategy, policy and politics story perfectly suited for journalism in its traditional incarnation - TV networks and reporters stationed in world capitals.
Like most modern wars, this one was fought at least in part on TV. Three images shaped the Kosovo conflict from the beginning: bombs hurtling towards targets; the three beaten and bruised American soldiers, and the streams of battered refugees pouring into Albania and Macedonia.
The anonymous correspondents, monks and teenagers filing reports via various websites were interesting, sometimes even revealing. But none were significant. None shaped the policy that affected the conflict from either side. None influenced or altered public opinion in any measurable way. The Net isn't about making wars, but the complete anti-thesis of it.
CNN may not know what to do with itself most of the time, but it knows how to cover a war. CNN permits all the principals in global conflicts to see the same images and statements at the same time. Bob Dole went on "Larry King Live" to warn Slobodan Milosevic that he was running out of time. And Milosevic or some close aide was almost certainly watching.
Anonymous posters have little credibility precisely because nobody knows who they are. For all their faults, journalists are accountable for the things they report.
The Net and the Web, in addition, are too fragmented to the primary focus of a story like this. At any given time, millions of people are e-trading, e-shopping, or e-lusting online. Millions more are writing programs, working on Linux, or corresponding with their grand-kids. That techno-diversity is what the Net and the Web are really all about.
The world still can't get used to the idea of the Internet. It's continuously either denounced as a plague or hyped to the skies.
Kosovo is no Internet War. It's all too typical a one - brutal and incomprehensible. Technology is about human beings, not machines. There's nothing digital about the days and nights of the captured American soldiers, the people who live in bomb-torn Belgrade, or the hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming out of Kosovo.
What is a shame is that people go flocking to CNN for the "official" government spoon fed fare and we don't see a proliferation of alternative means of news being used on the internet.
I think that very soon gone will be the days of stories like the CIA drug operations and soon all we will see on the net is "E-commerce" sites that we go to via the approved "web portals". Witness the "Linux revolution" being played out in the press. When I look at the mainstream press cover linux, what do I see? Red Hat, and sometimes Caldera being covered, with Linus as a sanitised folk hero and RMS as a nut. I have yet to see a review of FreeBSD, Debian or any other totally free project... even Gnone fits in only in that it will become part of commercial offerings.
Even Slashdot, I hate to say, has really become just yet another way of supporting commercial interests. "Look at the neat new gadgets you can buy" or links to approved official sites. Those ZD people must love all the traffic slashdot funnels to them. Less attention is given to non-profit sites run by members of our "community".
Anyway, it just saddens me how well what Mills would call "the power elite" has become at not squashing revolutionary new movements, but how well they can embrace them and make them their own. The enviromental movement, Open Source software, the "free" internet... they either control or are in the process of taking total control of all of these things...
Sorry for rambling, gotta get to class..
If Kosovo is an "Internet war", then was VietNam a "TV war", or World War II a "radio war"?
Nowadays, the Web can be used as TV and radio are used - as a mass communications medium to broadcast to the world. It can carry truth, and it can carry propaganda, in the same way that TV and radio do. In the past (and indeed in this war), opposing forces have worked to knock out the opposition's communications, by destroying TV and radio transmitters and jamming signals. Cracking NATO's website is analagous to this kind of activity; the difference being that Web-based attacks aren't purely the domain of the military.
The war isn't being fought with the Net. It's being fought with aircraft, missiles, bombs and guns. Those are the things that are killing people.