Digital participation
How do smart devices and platforms enable allcomers to participate in warfare?
Digital technologies have liberated production and distribution from the mainstream, empowering every individual and giving voice to an astonishing array of ideas, opinions and experiences. War is located in and through messaging apps and platforms. Individual locating and targeting, surveillance, psychological operations, trolling, and disinformation, are all enabled through digital networks, streams and archives. These aspects of war thrive precisely because of the rapid growth in the recording and sharing of all those on the battlefield, and their clicking, swiping, linking, liking, emoting, sharing stories, messages, images, memes and videos.
These forms of war have never been so plentiful, pouring today from the battlefield from militaries, soldiers, journalists, states, NGOs, citizens, artists — weaponizing the smartphone and satellites — and which overwhelm in their sheer scale, seemingly beyond human apprehension. But war is also produced and distributed through a frenzy of participation, a stream of commentary, emojiing, linking, chatting, liking and so on that creates a new complex layer of mediation and interpretation, which continuously (re)personalises and (re)mixes media content of all kinds.
This project will show how participative war, new ‘architectures of participation’ (O’Reilly, 2004) offered by Web 2.0 platforms and connected and mobile media devices enable a wide range of actors to have their say and participate in warfare in an immediate and ongoing fashion.
It investigates Telegram as a unique and emergent platform of participation in the 2022– Russian war against Ukraine. This project treats the scale — the sheer volume of messages, images and videos — as both the subject matter that provokes this work and the opportunity.
This project investigates the war in Ukraine being the least and yet most sanitised war in history. Never have so many images and videos of the suffering, injured, captured, mutilated and the dead, civilians and soldiers, been so immediately and easily available from a war zone.
