Combat soldier videos in the line of fire

MTV has broadcast a documentary on the phenomenon, entitled Iraq Uploaded: The War Network TV Won’t Show You.

Time says that never before has there been such an uncensored “visual document” of life during wartime.

Every soldier seems to have some form of video camera device; some affix them to their helmets to film firefights. This is a generation raised on games consoles; many of the clips are set to music.

Journalists from MTV have interviewed returning US troops, some of who have shot hours of footage. Some of the troops say making clips has been cathartic and, when they are back home, helps them feel a connection to friends still in Iraq.

Says The Guardian

On You Tube there are 9785 videos on Iraq

However there is as always an alternative perspective on the role of this video footage

implication is that the soldiers’ videos offer “unfiltered” access to the soldiers’ experiences of the war. As MTV reporter Gideon Yago describes it, “from the hilarious, to the sublime, to the gruesome and the terrifying, these are anonymous, unspun visions of Iraq in their raw, stark reality.” But the MTV report doesn’t address the implications of this policy, what it means that the military is allowing this footage to appear online, and that is, by far, the more crucial question.

I think the answer to this question is hiding in plain sight in Yago’s interview with a 20-year old consumer of Iraq War videos. While the interviewee acknowledged that the violence in the videos deterred him from joining the Marines, it’s clear that the videos produced an explicit sense of identification with the soldiers and with the excitement and adrenaline of the war. It’s also worth noting that this “unfiltered” perspective on the war is consciously contrasted with the coverage of the war by the major TV networks. While it’s certainly fair to be critical of the networks’ decision not to show the coffins of dead soldiers, for example, the implication that the soldiers’ videos are providing access to a truth unavailable on the news needs to be interrogated more carefully.

At the same time, Iraq Uploaded is remarkably uncritical when it comes to comparing the US soldiers’ videos with similar videos produced by the insurgents. There’s a strange transition in which Yago interviews a wounded Iraq veteran who was hit in the chest by gunfire. The soldier was wearing a bulletproof vest and along with members of his unit managed to capture the insurgents who shot him. We then learn from a Homeland Security worker that the footage was taken by insurgents who ostensibly intended to use the video for “propaganda purposes,” with the implication being that US soldiers’ video footage serves a more complicated purpose, whether that’s to depict the war to others back home or to help the sodleirs recover from the trauma of war. I’m not suggesting that the soldiers’ videos don’t serve those functions, of course, but the report failed to consider how Iraqi audiences might have more complicated uses for video footage of the war.

The Washington Post reported on the rise of these massive data and information flows, and I think we need now to move forward towards now a deeper understanding of what is happening to our media, how it is created and the role of citizen journalism.

In a matter of weeks, YouTube has become a video Dumpster for a global audience to share first-hand reports, military strategies, propaganda videos and personal commentary about a violent conflict as it unfolds. Anyone can post movies for free, and the site boasts that 100 million videos are watched daily. It is a disorganized bazaar of images that requires visitors to search for a specific topic; searches for both “Hezbollah” and “Israel” yield hundreds of videos, some of them violently graphic, others not so serious.

And

Supporters of citizen journalism, the idea that ordinary people are best positioned to provide information and reports about current events, say that verifying information is often difficult but that eventually there will be a way to make doing so easier.

“The next generation in this will be people who recognize we need a YouTube that has some kind of identity verification behind it, to assign credibility to particular sources,” said Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review at University of Southern California.

The issue is taking on more weight every day, as YouTube gains viewers to the Internet’s most popular amateur video site. YouTube’s audience “in real numbers, I think any broadcast executive would consider it a huge audience — it’s just dispersed around the globe. It would probably challenge hourly ratings at NBC or CNN,” Niles said.

My space has a higer Nielsen rating than MTV

At Mediashift there is a full and expansive report on the Combat Soldier Videos

And the Wartapes

Significantly the U.S. military seems to have a more relaxed policy to these combat videos

When I first queried the military on this issue in January, they told me that CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command) prohibited photographing or filming detainees or human casualties, but that the videos they saw on YouTube didn?t appear to violate policy ? they were simply in bad taste.

But that bad taste crossed a line when Corporal Joshua Belile recently recorded a song called Hadji Girl on video. The song is about a soldier who falls in love with an Iraqi girl, but then is ambushed by the family when he goes to meet them. He then uses her sister as a human shield

Joshua Belile had to issue an apology.

The pressing implication is that control of the an “open media ecology” is very hard if not impossible to do. OK and there is much debate to be had here.

But what is the true driver to these massive date flows in the broadest sense one can imagine? From porn blogs to combat videos and everything else in between. If you start to get to the bottom of this issue you will be looking beyond the immediate phenomena of You Tube and Myspace to think more strategically about engagement.

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Posted in: Convergence, Culture, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Politics, Ethics, Generation C, Government & Politics, Identity, Media, Mobile, News, Participation, Society, Web/Tech, Weblogs

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