MEDIA & "THE FUTURE WAR"

New Age Media

- G.P. Singh

THE PEOPLE thinking hardest about warfare in the future know that some of the most important combat of tomorrow will take place on the media battlefield.

The media revolution is rewriting all the rules. The military propagandists know that putting the right "spin" on war news can, at times, be as important as devastating an enemy's tanks

Propaganda through Media

Propaganda, writes historian Philip Taylor, "came of age under the ancient Greeks." But it came of age again after the industrial revolution gave rise to the mass media. The most common  mind wrenches ,  what the Russians call "maskirovka" (deception) and "dezinformatsia" (disinformation) transmitted through the mass media are listed below.

The first technique is the atrocity accusation,  stage-managed or otherwise. A second common tool is hyperbolic inflation of the stakes involved in a battle or war. Soldiers and civilians are told that everything they hold dear is at risk. A third mind-wrench  is demonization and/or dehumanization of the opponent. A fourth tool is polarization. "Those who are not with us are against us."   A fifth is the claim of divine sanction. Finally, perhaps the most powerful mind-wrench of all is meta propaganda--propaganda that discredits the other side's propaganda.  Each of these "mind-wrenches" is designed to exploit the mass media to sway mass emotion in mass societies.     

More recently, the use of the above techniques were evident  in the Gulf War. President Bush's effective mobilization of United Nations support was accompanied by propaganda suggesting that the United States, rather than acting in its own interest, was merely doing the UN's bidding. The strategic purpose of this campaign was to isolate Iraq diplomatically, and it succeeded. Similar propaganda has been used  at operational and tactical  levels also .

 

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

 

1. DECENTRALISED MEDIA

Thousands of high speed digital networks & computer-based "bulletin boards", linking millions of individuals around the world, crossing national boundaries permit the exchange of vast volumes of data through multiple, redundant, and decentralized channels, often out of easy reach of military censors.   The overlapping and interlinked networks on which these systems depend are almost impossible to stamp out. Given the proliferating new media, crude centralized propaganda pumped down from above by the state machinery may increasingly be countered from below. The web sites of banned organisations like naxalites is a glowing example to prove the point. The TV set will eventually be replaced by a (possibly wireless) unit that will combine a computer, a scanner, a fax, a telephone, and a desktop tool for creating multimedia messages all rolled into one and networked to one another. And instead of keyboards, these "telecomputers" may eventually be operated by speech commands in natural language. What all this points toward is a world in which millions of individuals have, at their command, the power to create Hollywood-like special effects, virtual-reality-based simulations, and other potent messages--power that not even governments and movie studios had available in the past.

 

2. THE PINPOINT MESSAGE

 Precision-targeting information is just as important as precision-targeting weapons, and the new media will make this possible to an unprecedented degree.When targeting audiences,  tomorrow's media manipulators,  will have to demassify the messages, crafting different versions for each audience segment--one for African-Americans, another for Asians, still another for doctors, and another for single mothers, as the cases may be. Fake atrocity stories will, no doubt, someday be engineered in this way,  "victims" being described differently in each version, so as to generate maximum sympathy or hatred for each set of viewers. Such segmentation, however, is only a half step towards the ultimate goal; individualization. Here each message will be massaged to produce maximal impact on one person, rather than a group.

Seemingly impossible and costly today, this ultimate customization of communication will become quite feasible when the future media and telecommunication systems are fulyl developed.

 

3. REPORTING IN REAL TIME

This shift toward total de-massification will be accompanied by a further acceleration into real time. And this will intensify conflict between the military and the media. In 1815 two thousand American and British soldiers killed one another in the Battle of New Orleans because news of a peace treaty signed two weeks earlier in Brussels didn't reach them in time. News moved at a glacial pace.

Today battles and peace treaties become news before they are concluded. By the time U.S. forces arrived in Somalia, an army of TV cameras were on the beach to greet them. Presidents and prime ministers learn what is happening from TV before diplomats can report back to them. Tiny satellite dishes in homes around the world will someday pick up the evening news from anywhere and everywhere. Writing on "Information, Truth and War," Col. Alan Campen notes that "satellite technology makes moot the issue of censorship."  Commercial reconnaissance satellites will make it almost impossible for combatants to hide from the media, and with all sides watching the video screen, instant broadcasts from the battle zone threaten to alter the actual dynamics and strategies in war. It can, Campen says, "transform reporters from dispassionate observers to unwitting, even unwilling, but nonetheless direct participants" in a war.

 

4.UNREAL REAL TIME

The new media, change not merely reality, but even more important, our perception of it. This new media is beginning to create a sense of unreality about real events. Early critics of television lamented its immersion of the viewer in a vicarious world of soap opera, canned laughter, and false emotions. These concerns will seem trivial tomorrow, for the new media system is creating an entirely "fictive" world to which governments, armies, and whole populations respond as though it were real. In turn, their actions are then media-processed and plugged into the fictional electronic mosaic that guides our behavior.

This growing fictionalization of reality is found not only where it belongs, in sitcoms and dramas, but in news programming as well, where it may promote the deadliest consequences. This danger is already being discussed around the world.

 

5. SIMULATION

New technologies for simulation make it possible to stage fake propaganda events with which individuals interact, events that seem intensely vivid and "real." The new media will make it possible to depict entire battles that never took place or a summit meeting showing (falsely) the other country's leader rejecting peaceful negotiation. In the fast-onrushing future, not merely truth but reality itself may be a casualty of war.

 

CONCLUSION

The media of tomorrow is fusing into an interactive,  self-referencing system in which ideas, information, and images flow incestuously from one medium to another. Instead of a handful of centrally controlled channels watched by all, vast numbers of humans will eventually gain access to a dazzling variety of over-the-border messages, their political and military masters may not wish them to hear or see. The countries world over have started  thinking creatively about how to exploit the new media. Policies dealing with the regulation, control, or manipulation of the media--or for the defense of freedom of expression--will form a key component of the  strategies of tomorrow. But win, lose, or draw, the media, including channels and technologies unimagined today, will be a prime weapon for future combatants in both the wars and anti-wars of the future.