Modern Warfare
by Orit Gat
It’s a windy day outside of
Mosul. The sound of wind, familiar from so many phone calls made on the street
or news reports on extreme weather, is as mundane as the echoes of construction
the microphone is also picking up: a truck reversing, machines moving building
materials, faraway conversations in a foreign language (Arabic? Kurdish?). It’s
12:20pm on Monday 17 October, and I’m on Channel 4 News’s Facebook page
watching a livestream of combined Iraqi and Kurdish forces as they advance
toward Mosul, the last Islamic State stronghold in Iraq.
Later on, I’ll learn that the
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi has signalled the beginning of the
offenisve (Operation Conquest / Operatio Fatah) earlier that morning and that
broadcasters set up cameras in the closest safe zone to Mosul a week prior, and
are planning on moving them forward as IS retreats. At 12:20 pm there are
mainly tractors in view. There’s also dust, images of drones, tanks and people
running across the screen. When I log on at work, between tasks and trying to
hide the fact that I’m on Facebook from my boss, it’s pretty consistently
tractors and people loitering around.
What are those tractors doing
there? Are they building a safe zone for those escaping the city? Are they
fortifying? Are they, in front of our eyes, physically drawing a new border?
It’s a silent form of news. I try to understand what is happening, to place it
geographically, to see if there are signs of war in the background. I look for
drones or fighter jets in the sky. There’s nothing but the camera feed, no
commentary, no voiceover: the only language surrounding the live feed is the
comments section.
Staring at the comments feels
like the old chatrooms of the 1990s, with single lines in an infinite vertical
scroll. It also brings about the fears of old chatrooms: that you’ll see a raw,
human response that you hoped to never be exposed to. ‘There was blood
earlier?’ one comment reads. (And obviously, it’s one of the first I see.) The
word offensive rolls on the tongue. Its military use fitting, as it is with
another term: react. Facebook invites you to ‘react’ to the livestream and
familiar emojis flow across the screen: a desert scene with uniformed men
running above smiley faces, thumbs up, hearts and crying faces.
The headline of the Daily Mail soon after reads: ‘Channel
4 defends streaming the battle for Mosul on Facebook Live amid criticism it is
using war as entertainment,’ which seems ironic from a website that actively
disguises entertainment as news (‘Is YOUR phone spying on you?’). Conflating
Facebook with entertainment or thinking of it as just a social media platform
is incorrect; Facebook has much loftier ambitions. It doesn’t want to be just
another website you visit, it wants to be the internet. So that everything around you
that is networked (which in the near future will include your house keys and
fridge, your entertainment, your work and private conversations) will be
mediated via your Facebook account. That’s why Facebook has bought Oculus VR,
chatting platform Whatsapp, and Parse, which has become one of the biggest
Internet of Things projects.
And the news? Facebook
centralizes information. It has signed deals with most major publishers to run
articles via Instant Articles (that quick-to-load in-Facebook reading window,
especially noticeable on mobile, that redirects you to the article your friend
shared without actually sending you out of Facebook). Publishers can either
sell ads on those articles and keep all the money to themselves, or leave
Facebook to sell the ads in exchange for a 30 percent commission.
Here’s the problem with this, writes Michael Woolf: ‘Netflix will pay approximately $3
billion in licensing and production fees this year to the television and film
industry; Hulu is paying $192 million to license South Park; Spotify pays out
70 percent of its gross revenues to the music labels that hold the underlying
rights to Spotify’s catalogue. Now here’s what Facebook is guaranteeing a
variety of publishers, including the New York Times, BuzzFeed, and the Atlantic,
which are posting articles in its new ‘instant articles’ feature: $0.’ There’s
the problem with entertainment. Not that Facebook is entertainment, but that
Facebook promotes a two-tier content system where entertainment is streamed at
premium prices and licensing fees, and text is offered up for free. This is
news now. This is how Facebook Live is becoming a news outlet: journalists see
Facebook as a partner. Channel 4’s livestream of Mosul is not entertainment –
it’s the death knell of the financial model that has sustained journalism until
now.
‘Maybe the battle isn't
happening today!!’ reads another comment. In the current issue of The Paris
Review, there’s an essay by American novelist Ben Lerner, introducing a
series of photos of Chris Marker’s studio taken by Adam Bartos between 2007–08,
before Marker died in 2012. Though the photos were taken while the studio was
still in use, they are empty. ‘What appears,’ Lerner writes, ‘appears to wait
for the return of the human, but since nothing is as human as waiting, as the
experience of duration that is boredom, I begin to invest things with
feelings.’
On a Facebook feed, war is
much slower than you’d think. To watch the livestream means to wait – that most
human feeling – for what the movies had taught us was fast. On Facebook, of all
places, we learn that ‘live’ does not mean ‘action’.
I’m watching with 2.3k others.
Over the next few days, I learn that well over a million people viewed the
attacks at some point in the three-hour livestream. Another Facebook comment
rolls across my screen: ‘Live coverage of a war. We are doomed as a world.’ I
look at Facebook the day after. It reads ‘Channel 4 News was live’. The video
is slow to load and the thumbnail is of the press conference at its end, where
a Peshmerga general explained the progress of the battle.
Nowadays we see so much that
our relationship to images, moving images and the structure of the news, is
reshaped constantly. Still, viewing the livestream is an uncanny experience:
discouraging, painful, curious, demoralizing and impossible to look away from.
Making sense of it and finding its utility is yet to come. It’s quite likely
that after this novelty, Facebook users won’t know how to react – besides a
thumbs-up or a sadface – to streams of the real world. That’s not what they are
on Facebook for. But it’s also possible that this silent, long-duration viewing
is so foreign an experience that it may mean a new form of proximity, or
empathy. I cut Lerner’s quote above, just short of the end. In full it reads,
‘I begin to invest things with feelings. And then the things look back at me.’
Orit Gat
Orit Gat is a writer based in
London. She is the features editor of Rhizome and the managing editor of WdW
Review.
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