<nettime> Robot Journalists and the Ironies of Tactical Media

["McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark@hotmail.com>]

The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual
McKenzie Wark [version 3.0]  part 4/4



6. Afghan eXplorer

The Afghan eXplorer is described on its website as "a
tele-operated, robotic war reporting system, able to
provide images, sound, and interviews in real time."
It bears an uncanny resemblance to the Mars
Explorer. As the website notes "One central
advantage of Afghanistan over Mars is that
Afghanistan features tens of thousands of miles of
functioning roadways." It's makers note "the system
may be retrofitted, with only minor software
modifications, to work in other potential hotspots,
such as Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon,
Indonesia, Pakistan and Qatar." These might all
qualify, in the eXplorer's subtle and ironic
displacement, as alien landscapes to Western
journalism and its audience.

Chris Csikszentmihályi, who led the team that
designed it at MIT's Media Lab, reports that when
journalists started to hear about the eXplorer,
interest rapidly snowballed.  Journalists love to write
about themselves, and journalists tend to write about
what other journalists are writing about. So
Csikszentmihályi found himself fielding calls from
journalists in a wide range of media, all interested in
the eXplorer. The eXplorer touches on the interzone
of journalistic experience.

Csikszentmihályi says he studied Noam Chomsky's
approach to responding to interviews, and learned
from Chomsky the practice of ignoring the journalist's
questions and hammering away at one's own agenda.
The agenda as far as he was concerned was to
emphasize the closure of the field of conflict to fair
and unbiased reporting by the military, and the use
of what he calls "robotic killing machines" in Operation
Infinite Justice. The eXplorer calls attention to the
effect of the vector in a double sense: the robotic war
vector appears in a displaced form as the robotic
journalism vector, which in turn refers to the absence
of journalists from infrastructural deployment of
military vectoral power.

While Csikszentmihályi would not necessarily
embrace the term, I want to use the Afghan eXplorer
as a striking instance of tactical intellectual work.
Csikszentmihályi was able to exploit mainstream
media's fascination with its own practices of
reporting, and also a fascination with technological
solutions to political problems to his advantage,
inserting a point of view into the media feed that is
not oppositional, but which cuts across Wedom and
Theydom at an ironic tangent, displacing the terms
within which one may think about the event. The
eXplorer manages to reconnect the naturalism of the
experience with its quirky form and function, with
the realism of the abstract relations of vectoral power
for which it is so ironic, and iconic, an interzone.

Csikszentmihályi was able to insert at least some
mention of this other perspective into interviews with
journalists not only in the United States, but also in
Pakistan, and at the BBC World Service. He notes
that live radio and television interviews were
particularly good tactical opportunities. Print media
journalists usually plug the facts of the Afghan
eXplorer story into pre-existing scripts. The eXplorer
provides the tactical leverage for a fact gathering
mission into what for many artists or scholars is the
alien world of news media time.

One way of disentangling this practice of the tactical
intellectual from opposititional or alternative media
strategies is to see it as being a kind of micro-event in
itself. The media tactician presents an images that
endangers the conventions of journalistic narrative
time, yet which is capable of inserting itself into it.
This kind of tactical media ironically displaces the
boundaries drawn by the machine of the news story.
The moment when such a tactic is most likely to be
successful is when news media time has itself already
been disrupted by an event of a much larger scale -- a
weird global media event, for instance. In that
moment of instability, the ironic displacement of a
tactical media micro-event may find its purchase on
media time.




___________________________________________________

http://www.feelergauge.net/projects/hackermanifesto/version_2.0/
                   ... we no longer have roots, we have aerials ...
___________________________________________________


_________________________________________________________________
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: 
http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net