Almantas Samalavičius (AS): You insist that the nature of war has dramatically, even fundamentally changed, and that this shift has been strongly influenced by so-called technological progress – a defining feature of modern life. Moreover, you argue that the wars of our period no longer bear any resemblance to last century‘s “radio” and “television” wars, as Marshall McLuhan labelled them. You say they are fundamentally different from those wars. McLuhan as well as other members of the Toronto School claimed that neither media nor other forms of technology are neutral and in this respect they largely differed from mainstream media research. Even if some of their observations are outdated because of new realities, what do you think of the Toronto School‘s insights for understanding how technology restructures our lives? How do digital technologies determine the nature and character of contemporary wars?
John Keane (JK): My thinking focuses on the powerful role played by communications technologies in shaping the form and substance of war. In matters of war, runs my framing idea, we are living in a strange world unknown to our grandparents and great grandparents, a world immeasurably different from both the
Cold War of the 20th century and recent talk by Niall Ferguson and other scholars of “Cold War II”. We’ve entered the age of destructive wars in which digital communications technologies are enabling not only frightening transformations of the modes and weapons of warfare – zero space-time coordination of armies, Hellfire precision-guided, air-to-ground missiles, and sophisticated cyber weapons capable of jamming and seizing control of enemy satellites – but also, paradoxically, media representations of war by governments, military PR propagandists, breaking news journalists, and soldiers and citizens that “gamify” war, beautify its horrors, and lullaby millions of people into nonchalance about wars that are seemingly emptied of blood, cruelty, and genocidal destruction.
The central point of this unorthodox interpretation is to highlight the way texts, sounds, and images are produced and circulated during wartime is of foundational importance in understanding wars past and present. I studied in Toronto, where Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and others taught us that media of communication aren’t just add-on features of any given society, or to be understood as timeless “neutral” channels that convey ‘information’. They emphasized how different historical modes of communication differently structure people’s bodily senses, their mobility, patterns of cognition, mental horizons, and daily spacetime experiences of the world, even shaping the conduct and interpretation of war.
Please let me mention some examples. Think of times defined mainly by oral communication when news and rumours of war were conveyed by word of mouth and written messages carried by foot runners, horses, donkeys, and camels. Information about battles, sieges, victories, and defeats was reported only after the fact. War did not know instant media coverage. Now think of the electrification and time-space shrinkage of war reportage and the beginnings of mass broadcasting of war. This first happened in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. The reshaping of the conduct and public experience of war by the application of radio, and then film and television technologies, was a defining feature of the 20th century. Electronically mediated messaging within the ranks of whole armies was normalized. By conquering illiteracy, distance and time lags, radio paved the way to the mass broadcasting of government propaganda to large audiences captivated by the weirdness of strange voices entering the home, factories and offices, bars and restaurants, and public squares. Just as FDR enchanted mass audiences and prepared them for war by means of his pioneering radio fireside chats, so shortly after his first radio speech in 1925 the thunderous voice of the former journalist and newspaperman Mussolini helped spread the spirit of ‘each village and school must have a radio’ fascist militarism through the airwaves of Italy, the country where radio broadcasting evolved under a totalitarian government to become a source of fascist entertainment, as in the broadcasting from Berlin of the 1936 Olympics, and an instrument of battle, for instance during the invasion of Ethiopia.
Marshall McLuhan accurately remarked that just as the Second World War was a radio war, the Vietnam War was the first television war. In his War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) he noted the historic significance of the way journalists for the first time used portable, battery-powered video tape “portopac” cameras and filed filmed dispatches by jet aircraft overnight to supply television outlets news for the next
morning’s broadcasts at home. His point was not only that war had been rendered highly visible and its butchery made more emotionally palpable – that war had drawn closer to people’s lives and clawed at their senses as immediately ‘as the smell of a cigarette’. McLuhan invited us to remember the key historical point: in any age, in matters of war, the reigning forces and relations of communication structure how war is prosecuted, how war is reported, why this or that war is deemed significant, and how it “feels” to victims and witnesses alike. On the battlefield and in the living room, the medium shapes the sent messages – and the public reception of those messages.
McLuhan’s emphasis on the shaping power of communication infrastructures was soon to be confirmed by the advent (during the late 1960s) of satellite broadcasting which he predicted would wipe out time-space differences and promote a sense of “all-at-onceness” among audiences huddled around television sets at various points on our planet. McLuhan did not live to experience the communications revolution to come: the shift to digital technologies that would have transformative effects on the modus operandi of armies and their weapons of war and immerse audiences in a strange new world of digitally integrated newspapers, radio, and television, the multiplication of gatekeeper and gate watcher media platforms, a satellite/fibre optic/wi-filinked world in which war is mediated by PCs, laptops, smartphones, cameras, podcasts, search engines, audio books, chatbots, video games, live-streamed music, digital marketing, instant messaging, cloud storage, and audio-visual conferencing tools such as Webex, Zoom, and China’s Voov.
AS: Despite the fact that the attrocities of the war are sensationally reported, they are seldom accompanied by realistic images of what mutilated dead bodies as well as the grief of the victims of war really look like. You seem to imply that digital media provides a kind of aestheticized version of the unspeakable horrors and brutalities of war. What are the social and cultural consequences of this
“beautification“?
JK: It has long been said that war is hell on earth. When war begins, the devil opens hell, runs an ancient English proverb. But a weirdly puzzling historical fact is that the hellish brutality of battlefield violence can be both neutralized and rendered aesthetically attractive to media audiences. In the 1920s, broadcasting media
were used for the first time by ruling groups to beautify war, as the German literary critic Walter Benjamin spotted. In the age of mechanical reproduction, he commented, war came wrapped in “illusion-promoting spectacles” charged with ‘aesthetic pleasure’. Despite Benjamin’s one-sided conviction that fascism was the prime driver of this aestheticization of war – he had little to say about the parallel contributions of Soviet communism – and although in the difficult political circumstances he probably didn’t get to watch Triumph des Willens (1935), Olympia (1938), and other propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl or the Nazis’ 1944 documentary “Beautiful Theresienstadt: the Führer Gives Jews a City”, he correctly foresaw that electronic media could have electrifying effects – that radio and film would be used to adorn war for mass consumption by turning its life-and-death horrors into multi-media entertainment
The public beautification of war – I speak descriptively, if sarcastically – is among the oddest features of the meta wars of our century. With the help of communications media, war becomes an elaborately staged, picturesque tableau designed to transfix audiences and wall them off from war’s horrors. Savagery and ghastliness are no more. War becomes bloodless. It undergoes a form of beautification more subtle and more insidious than ever happened in the era of radio, film, and television. Our wars are ‘meta’ in the sense that they undergo a gamification. It is as if audiences living outside of war zones are invited to enter and immerse themselves in rooms in which wars are no longer violent, beastly, or soul destroying, entertainment rooms in which nobody has their brains or chests blown out, or is crushed under rubble, left limbless, scarred emotionally for life, or forced to live with broken hearts in ruined ecosystems. Yes, media reports are awash with dazzling images of drones in the sky, tanks advancing across fields, guns fired by ear-muffed soldiers in uniform, clouds of black smoke, and blackened buildings. Yes, there are press conferences, footage of diplomats sitting around flagged tables, war cabinet meetings, official warnings about “terrorism”, and predictions of progress. And, yes, there is non-stop deployment of metonyms, keywords, clichéd phrases. Incursions, evacuations, unconfirmed reports, footholds, confrontations, ground assaults, front lines, power targets (an Israeli specialty, matarot otzem, the total destruction of hospitals, high-rise residences, universities, mosques, and other civilian targets), safe zones, abandoned villages, military analysts speaking on the condition of anonymity, intelligence reports, cease-fire negotiations, civilians fleeing fighting, overcrowded shelters, tent camps, and peace talks. But war seems no longer to be death’s feast.
