Russia/Georgia: War of the Web
In its
war with Georgia, the first truly global user-generated conflict, Russia's
digital guerillas have been drafted into a state-waged propaganda war
When a few years ago Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU and
one of the chief proponents of citizen journalism, tried to describe the fundamental
shift in the balance of power between the media and the public caused by blogs
and other forms of user-generated content, he famously spoke of "the
people formerly known as the audience". "[They] are simply the
public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable", he
stated in a rather solemn tone.
Call me elitist, but I never fully embraced the
notion that this great unwinding of reality, fiction, and predictability
merited that much celebration. Watching the information wars of the last few
months-first in China in the aftermath of the Tibet and the Olympics protests and
now in Russia in light of its war with Georgia ands its coverage in the Western
media-I couldn't help but wonder if Rosen fully understood all the implications
of his otherwise spot-on diagnosis.
My biggest problem with Rosen's optimism is that,
when applied in the international context-where "media" are the CNNs
and the BBCs of this world, and the public are the Russians and the Chinese
angry with their coverage (most often because their governments told them so) -
it is not at all clear what those "former audiences" have really
morphed into. Rosen is correct: passive they are no more. They-and especially
the young people- are all actively producing information on blogs, forums, and
comment sections of the sites belonging to some of the most venerable names in
the news media. But could it be that the people formerly known as the audience
have become the people currently known as the information warriors?
The online spats that have followed the information
war between Russia and the West lend much evidence to this claim (notice that
Russians don't view this as an information war between Russia and Georgia -
it's an information war with the whole of the Western media which, according to
the most bellicose of Russians, plays along with Georgia). This information war
is the first truly global user-generated conflict: the war of the professional
sound bites and the TV imagery has been relegated to the background, with blogs
and comments playing the leading role (the most egregious of the professional
TV propaganda have found a temporary home on YouTube). Even the conventional cyberwarfare - the hacking
of servers and the defamation of sites, while also present in this campaign,
seems of very little strategic importance to either side in this conflict.
The Western media conspiracy
Instead, it is the comment sections and forums of New York Times, BBC, CNN, The Guardian and the like -
and some of the silliest online polls that they organized (e.g. CNN's "Do you think Russia's actions in Georgia
are justified?") - that are the real battleground for the
ultimate truth. Russians have taken to these websites in droves, posting links,
photos, facts - anything that could only convince their Western counterparts
that they live inside an anti-Russian media bubble constructed by complicit
Western corporate media advancing political interests of their countries
(detailed media analysis of the CNN coverage and the coverage of the conflict in the British media
was quick to follow). As most of these sites have a strict moderation policy
and don't publish openly extremist comments, many Russians only get angrier:
their deeply held suspicions of a big media conspiracy against Russia have been
proven again.
Some Russians want to engage with the West so badly
that those of them who didn't speak English started posting templates with
messages like this one with comments that
contained links to inaccuracies in reporting and coverage exhibited by a
handful of Western media (Google spotted more than 600
identical instances of this very comment springing up in the last few days).
Some Russians may not have fully understood what they were posting, but they
were confident that it was a good way to educate their peers abroad and help
their country in an unfair struggle with the Western media.
In theory, this sounds wonderful: people whose
opinions were badly suppressed for ages have finally acquired a voice and are
eager to engage with the world, providing ample material for case-studies in
the soon-to-be-published textbooks on intercultural online communications. But,
on closer examination, such conclusions ring shallow and, at best, resemble the
starry-eyed optimism of utopian visionaries like Nicholas Negroponte, who, back in the mid-1990s, eagerly spoke about the end of nationalism that
would happen as the whole world gets online and starts clicking.
But none of that happened; the loud chorus of mouse
clicks heard around the world today sounds more like the deeply disturbing
nationalist operas of Richard Wagner than the funky world beats of Peter
Gabriel. That nations would finally transcend their biases and join in a
globalist unison extolling their commonly shared virtues of human rights and
liberalism was the never-fulfilled early promise of the Internet. Given the
loud and all-pervasive nationalist outcry heard around the Web today, even the
truly internationalist online outlets may soon need to qualify their names to
reflect this disturbing reality. "Feeble Global Voices" would be a
more appropriate way to describe the rapidly shrinking online influence that even
the most brilliant among them exercise today.
Netizens unite!
The fundamental element missing from Jay Rosen's
analysis is the difference in the starting conditions between the political
situation in the US and places like China and Russia, where the state still plays
a key role in most political, economic, and social processes. While the
Internet may have diminished the already-dwindling influence of traditional
media, it may have done much to augment - often in subtle and non-obvious ways
- the influence of the state.
What happened in Russia is that the people formerly
known as the audience did not have to wait too long for a new identity; many of
them simply got drafted (or volunteered) to assist in state-waged propaganda
wars, sometimes even launching and leading guerrilla campaigns of their own.
With the advent of the blogosphere, Goebbel's famous line - "if you tell a
lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe
it" -- has taken an entirely new meaning. Now, the state doesn't even have
to repeat it - they just need to loudly pronounce it once and the digital
guerrillas will do all the necessary repeating.
The only important role left for the state then is
to convince the netizens that the stakes are high and that there is a real
enemy out there that could be fought online. Thus, one of the primary
objectives of the Kremlin-funded propaganda machine has been to paint the West
- and particularly most of the Western media- as ignorant, biased, and mired in
opinion, not reporting. The bet was that as more and more ordinary Russians are
convinced that the West is dishonest, it would be much easier to fend off any
real and substantiated criticism and accusation from abroad. The eagerness with
which many Russians have taken to the Web during the war with Georgia proves
that Kremlin's bet has paid off.
One of the chief ways to create such a climate was
to fund the proliferation of sites that would selectively pick reports from the
Western media, translate them into Russian, and offer ample space for
commentary, often resulting in many articles amassing thousands of comments
from angry Russians. The primary pillars of this e-smear campaign in Russia
have been sites like Inosmi.ru (a shorthand for "Foreign
Media", owned by the infamous RIA Novosti agency) and, to a lesser extent,
Inopressa.ru
(a shorthand for "Foreign Press", it belongs to Newsru agency ).
These sites would typically pick a dozen articles
from the foreign media - mostly American and British, but also that of the
Baltic states and Eastern Europe - and translate them into Russian. Needless to
say, they usually do their best to pick the most heinous articles, most of them
full of bad reporting and stereotypes about Russia. This may seem relatively
innocent but Inosmi has quickly gained a large following, which particularly
delights in commenting on articles, mostly to report on inaccuracies in the
articles and ignorance of their authors.
Sites like Inosmi do their best perpetuate the myth
of the "great brainwashing" -- that the Western media is either
utterly biased against Russia or simply incompetent - and that the Western
public and policy-makers are being constantly kept in the dark as to the true
nature of things in Russia (this in itself is quite comical, as Russians
themselves squandered most of their independent media in the early Putin years;
arguably, they are in much greater darkness).
That many Russians don't even consider the
possibility that they themselves may have been "brainwashed" only
attests to the strength of their convictions and the success of sites like
Inosmi in their campaign to perpetuate the myth of the "great brainwashing".
It surely the work of such sites - which now even accept voluntary translations
of articles done by their readers - that explains why so many Russians all too
eagerly engage in "comment warfare" on foreign web-sites: they do
feel that they have something to prove.
The asymmetry of this information warfare makes it
all the more potent, as, thanks to sites like Inosmi, Russians can now easily
point their British and American counterparts to the low quality of BBC or CNN
reporting on Russia, but most of the Brits and Americans wouldn't be able to
name even a single Russian news channel (for most of them broadcast in Russian
and are thus are saved from any external criticism). But reading Russian
media's coverage of the West (or, more tellingly, the war with Georgia) would
surely produce many more suspicions of media being too closely tied to Kremlin
and entirely brainwashed by the state.
Commenting on the Western media's response to the
war in South Ossetia, many Russian bloggers asked why the Kremlin wasn't doing
anything in the online space and it was up to the individual bloggers to defend
the pride of their motherhood. Don't the bureaucrats realise that winning the
sympathies of the West is as important? The Kremlin may have been smarter:
after all, why bother with artificially constructed narratives, lobbyists, and
manipulating traditional media, if there are thousands of bloggers and
commentators, eager to advance Kremlin's line for free, and often much more
effectively?
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Jay Rosen (not verified) said:
Wed, 2008-08-13 18:12Thanks for this most interesting post, Evgeny, and for your reference to my post, "The People Formerly Known as the Audience."
A couple of points by way of reply.
I'm not sure where you are getting this optimism I am guilty of. I didn't feel when I wrote it that I was predicting only good things would follow from the changes I was describing. I certainly did feel that the shift in power was real, and overdue, and ought to be recognized, but there is simply nothing in the post that says: "citizen journalism is going to be wonderful and the people formerly known as the audience are beneficent and wise." I urge you to read it again and try to see if you can find such a sentiment. It's not there.
The post does not specifically say this, but I was not trying to describe the situation in all social and political contexts where audiences have gained the tools to become media producers. I was talking only about relatively mature press systems in relatively open societies such as the US and Western Europe where the state is not the major player in media. Applying what I said to societies like Russia and China today would be a mistake because there the "shift in power" I talked about is immensely complicated by the media power of the state.
Thus is may very well be that that the people formerly known as the audience have become the people currently known as the information warriors.