Sarah Maltby

The mediatization of the military

Through an examination of military media management strategies, this article argues that the military are increasingly ‘mediatized’ where the media act as both a rationale and interface for communication within the military, and between the military and their audiences. Informed by ethnographic work with the British military, it is argued that military media management strategies are increasingly organised to appeal to, reassure and elicit support from multiple audiences – particularly the state and the military’s own internal personnel. In an attempt to move beyond conceptualisation of military media management as merely state propaganda, the author explores the degree to which the military, as a relatively autonomous institution, attempts to harness the power of media influence – whilst also protecting against it – in a manner that may be transforming the media–polity–military relationship and is reflective of the processes of mediatization.

Capability in the digital: institutional media management and its dis/contents

This paper explores how social media spaces are occupied, utilized and negotiated by the British Military in relation to the Ministry of Defences concerns and conceptualizations of risk. It draws on data from the DUN Project to investigate the content and form of social media about defence through the lens of ‘capability’, a term that captures and describes the meaning behind multiple representations of the military institution. But ‘capability’ is also a term that we hijack and extend here, not only in relation to the dominant presence of ‘capability’ as a representational trope and the extent to which it is revealing of a particular management of social media spaces, but also in relation to what our research reveals for the wider digital media landscape and ‘capable’ digital methods. What emerges from our analysis is the existence of powerful, successful and critically long-standing media and reputation management strategies occurring within the techno-economic online structures where the exercising of ‘control’ over the individual – as opposed to the technology – is highly effective. These findings raise critical questions regarding the extent to which ‘control’ and management of social media – both within and beyond the defence sector – may be determined as much by cultural, social, institutional and political influence and infrastructure as the technological economies. At a key moment in social media analysis, then, when attention is turning to the affordances, criticisms and possibilities of data, our research is a pertinent reminder that we should not forget the active management of content that is being similarly, if not equally, effective.

War and the Body: Cultural and military practices

In their introduction to an earlier special issue of this journal, The Body at War: Wounds, Wounding and the Wounded, Cooper and Hurcombe note that ‘the centrality of the wounded body to war demands that we continue to make it the focus of scholarly enquiry’ (2008: 121). This issue takes up that call and revisits the crucial subject of war and the body, building upon the previous work developed in the pages of this journal and elsewhere. Our aim here is not specifically to examine further the act and idiom of wounding, but rather to illuminate and explore some of the multiple modes of embodiment and disembodiment through which political, social and cultural worlds are enacted and contested in conflict and post-conflict societies. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. However, as Scarry notes, although war is ‘the most radically embodying event in which human beings ever collectively participate’ (1985: 71), much military and political discourse surrounding war is marked by a profound denial of embodiment and the bodily mutilation at the heart of war. From the abstractions of ‘rational’ strategic thinking to the

The digital mundane: social media and the military

This article draws on empirical data with British military personnel in order to investigate what we call the digital mundane in military life. We argue that social media and smartphone technologies within the military offer a unique environment in which to investigate the ways individuals position themselves within certain axes of institutional and cultural identities. At the same time, the convolutions, mediatory practices and mundane social media rituals that service personnel employ through their smartphones resonate widely with, for example, youth culture and digital mobile cultures. Together, they suggest complex mediations with social and mobile media that draw on and extend non-military practice into new (and increasingly normative) terrains.

The dis/embodiment of persuasive military discourse

Abstract Persuasive discourse is a fundamental aspect of contemporary asymmetric warfare where the power of military technologies has been displaced by the need for all parties to a conflict to persuade others to act in accordance with particular war aims. Here we suggest that persuasive military discourse evokes corporeality, transforming armies and enemies into individuals, and utilizing powerful corporeal imagery to fantasize ideals or imagine threats. This article investigates the use of the body as a tool of persuasion through an analysis of NATO Psychological Operations materials used in Afghanistan. These materials are primarily used to persuade the local population and Afghan security forces of particular courses of action, whilst simultaneously seeking to dissuade, disrupt and deter Taliban forces. Such an investigation not only offers insights into the ways in which the body becomes a site for political ideals, truths and imaginings but also the extent to which this process masks the lived bodily reality of war.

Broadcasting graphic war violence: The moral face of Channel 4

Drawing on empirical data from Channel 4 (C4) regarding the broadcasting of violent war imagery, and positioned within Goffman’s notion of the interaction ritual (1959, 1967), this article investigates how C4 negotiate potentially competing commercial, regulatory and moral requirements through processes of discretionary decision-making. Throughout, the article considers the extent to which these negotiations are presented through a series of ‘imaginings’ – of C4 and its audience – which serve to simultaneously guide and legitimate the decisions made. This manifestation of imaginings moves us beyond more blanket explanations of ‘branding’ and instead allows us to see the final programmes as the end product of a series of complex negotiations and interactions between C4 and those multiple external parties significant to the workings of their organization. The insights gleaned from this case study are important beyond the workings of C4 because they help elucidate how all institutions and organizations may view, organize and justify their practices (to both themselves and others) within the perceived constraints in which they operate.

Beyond ‘pseudonymity’: The sociotechnical structure of online military forums

This article explores the tensions apparent in anonymous military online forums as sites of publicly visible yet discursively intimate performances of military identity and sites of distinct power relations. This article draws on data collected from British military forums and the organisations that own and manage them. We consider the discursive online practices within the forums and the extent to which the technological affordances of ‘anonymity’ (or what we define as pseudonymity) act as a critical interface between the military community who contribute to the content and non-military observers who read, access, mine and appropriate the content. In so doing, we raise critical questions about the nature of ‘anonymity’ and the complex tensions in and negotiations of private and public, visibility and invisibility that occur through it and the framing and monetising of particular online communities for economic and political purpose.

Identity and Memory Work as News Determinants

The second of the empirical chapters is dedicated to the BBC ‘story’ where I draw upon the ethnographic data collected with members of the BBC in the Falklands (henceforth referred to as the ‘BBC crew’ to distinguish them from the wider BBC institution) alongside the BBC television coverage of the 30th anniversary. Using this data I explore not only how the BBC represented the 30th anniversary of the war but why they bestowed particular events with particular meaning to consider what this might reveal about the relatively neglected and under-researched relationship between journalism and memory more generally (Zelizer 2008:80). In many ways the themes discussed in this chapter resonate with those of the military ‘story’ with regards to the negotiation and performance of institutional work through and in media texts. Yet, whilst in the military story I discussed how the military negotiate conflicting multiple identities (political, military, individual) differently depending on whether they are remembering in or with media (being an object of and subject to media respectively), here I explore how the BBC crew’s remembering with media appeared to inform a conscious and purposeful performance of a particular institutional identity in the remembering texts they subsequently produced.

The Media and the Falklands

Most scholars recognise the media’s ability to capture, store, retrieve, ‘reactivate’ and preserve what is remembered or forgotten (Hoskins 2004; Hoskins & O’Loughlin 2010; Huyssen 2000; Edgerton 2000). This is especially true of the Falklands Islands because of the ways they have become inextricably linked to mediations of the 1982 war. The Islands came into the wider public consciousness (particularly among the UK population) because of the war and its accompanying media coverage. Indeed it is well documented that few among the UK population (including members of the British Task Force) had heard of the Islands or knew where they were prior to the war. Fewer still would have had an understanding of their economy, culture or history. Perhaps it is for this reason that in 1982 the British media were able to privilege certain readings of the war that now form part of a normative landscape around which the Falklands are constructed, (re)constructed and remembered. Even now, whilst other media frames have emerged (and are still emerging) specifically in relation to the unique wildlife and beauty of the Islands, these consistently remain subsidiary to the focus on war in the myriad of British cultural and media products produced about the Islands.

Multiple Identities, Subjectivity and Narrative Sense-Giving

I start this book’s empirical journey with the British military’s ‘story’ for a number of reasons. The first is that it was previous research with the British military that brought to my attention the importance of the media coverage of the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War, particularly in terms of how it had potential to destabilise and de-legitimate wider political and military aims but also normative accepted stories of the Falklands. In that sense, because the military data was the starting point of the research it seems appropriate to begin my empirical analysis with this data. The second reason however is that what emerged from the interviews I conducted with the military was in fact more revealing of the complexities involved in their allegiance to, and performance of conflicting and contested identities and how these intersect with a media remembering. These themes subsequently re-emerged with other participants (the BBC and Falkland Islanders) especially with regards to how identity and agency is negotiated in and through a public and private remembering in and with media. What was especially notable in this regard was that all participants, including the military, used similar sites of significance as a means through which to articulate these negotiations, especially and in particular the (often traumatised) military veteran. The military data therefore offers a good starting point to introduce these sites of significance, not least because of their resonance with other contemporary debates that are not Falklands specific.