PressEthic

The war for porn connection is nothing if not a sign of the times. “Citizen journalism”, as Courtney Balestier wrote, is on the rise. Ordinary people are picking up cameras and instantaneously documenting and uploading the world around them—a scenario predicted more or less correctly by tech writer David Brin. In Transparent Society, he talked about the immense differences technology—particularly cameras—can have on a society. On the one hand, he said, they can create an Orwellian nightmare. On the other, they can create an empowered citizenry with access to total transparency.

In City Two, such micro cameras are banned from some indoor places... but not Police Headquarters! There, any citizen may tune in on bookings, arraignments, and especially the camera control room itself, making sure that the agents on duty look out for violent crime, and only crime.

Not that we’re anywhere close to Brin’s utopia, but we’re far closer than the author was even seven years ago when he wrote Transparent Society. Yet Balestier’s flip side to an empowered citizenry is duly noted—that you’re average tech geek or soccer mom isn’t equipped to handle documenting the traumas of real life. They should use their cell phones to call 911, she said, and not take a snapshot.

But what about you’re average soldier in Iraq, who can’t call 911? As John Hockenberry wrote in “Blogs of War” (in the August issue of Wired), blogging among soldiers in Iraq and beyond is—just as it is among regular citizens that aren’t stationed in warzones—on the rise. There are hundreds of soldiers (“a hundred regulars and hundreds more loosely organized activists, angry contrarians”, etc., he said) blogging and graphically capturing the world around them. Chris Missick, one of the “milbloggers” profiled in Hockenberry’s piece, wrote that “Never before has a war been so immediately documented, never before have sentiments from the front scurried their way to the home front with such ease and precision.”

The photographs of Iraqi carnage seem, in some ways, an extension of milblogs. Yet, because they're available on a porn site, they throw a wrench into what has otherwise been seen as an exercise in free speech and a compelling use of technology—or do they? Are the soldiers simply posting to get free access to porn? Are they trying to provide a glimpse into a war that journalists have had extremely limited access to? (In one forum with pics of uncovered mass graves, someone responded by saying "Thank God some of us out there know the truth. Most of the world fails to see what Saddam . . . really did to the good people of Iraq. Thanks bro.") Or are soldiers using these forums as a way to help them cope, as one said to Chris Thompson at the Eastbay Express: “What you interpret [as] maliciousness and bravado may be how [soldiers] react to situations where they almost die or they just saw their buddy get killed…”

Regardless, the photos say as much about the soldiers as they do about the state of US media—or rather the democratization of US media. Frontline sketches and snapshots of Iraq are no longer only available through independently run blogs; they’re available on a porn site in a devastating combo of sex and violence that most people would probably like to ignore. The military, which has fought hard to manage the flow of information and images in Iraq among the press, has been trumped by soldiers’ access to technology. And while it might not be as pleasant as David Brin imagined, it’s a harrowing testimony to power of cameras and computers.