David, I generally agree with your skepticism of the Iraq war. I find my country (Denmark), as one of only 3-4 countries participating in war against the majority opinion here in Denmark and around the world - a very frustrating experience, when you belong to that majority! I too, have noted the absence of war-related mails in a couple of days, not just on this list but also on at least one other I am participating in. I have a feeling that once the war started some of the discussions leading up to it seemed futile to many (to late to avoid it). Second, there might have been a general need of a little time to make sense of the information coming from the war zone. As to the appropriateness of discussing 'non-curricular' issues on a list like this? Generally, I think not, unless the discussion is clearly related to the Internet as a phenomenon. However, some times there are exceptions to rules - I think a war like this is exceptional enough for people to voice their opinion in this forum (as exceptions to the rule - a continued discussion could be carried out off-list) - sorry for carrying it on here ;-) Best, Rune ________________________________________________ Rune Dalgaard | MA, Ph.D. Candidate | Information and Media Studies | Aarhus University | Denmark runed@imv.au.dk | http://www.imv.au.dk/medarbejdere/runed
For those interested in the role of weblogs during the Iraq conflict, as well as the press coverage, take a look at http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20030324/wr_nm/iraq_blogg... Aldon __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop! http://platinum.yahoo.com
Well I think people should remember that this is the second Internet Gulf war. There was a book published by an individual on the messages he sent to an email list I was on in 1991. "Notes from a Sealed Room: An Israeli View of the Gulf War" http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/080931830X/thealmostcomplet/104-66811... Here are some IRC archives from Israel and the first gulf war http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/communications/logs/Gulf-War/ Related newspaper articles. ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/academic/communications/papers/irc/Michigan.Daily.article First Monday had a discussion of the lost of this material. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_9/lukesh/ All this relates to historical consciousness, media, and the current debate. I find it interesting on this point to reflect on the words of Alistair Cooke Broadcasting from the US to the world since the 1930s. Yes he is now in his 90s. He talks about his memories and how the past relates to today. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/letter_from_america/215344.stm Regards Quentin
This is not directly, and perhaps only very indirectly, internet/war related. I had a very odd experience today giving a guest lecture to a group of undergraduate students in an introductory course. We spoke about the internet and its potential during the war...or I should say that I spoke about it, virtually to a person none of them seemed to want to talk about the war in any way, shape or form. I couldn't tell if it was fear, anxiety, not caring, etc. Now, meantime, at that very same time today and just outside the lecture hall, a demonstration was going on (I don't know how many students were there since I was in the classroom, but judging from the police presence afterwards they must have expected quite a crowd). One student said after class that she was tired of hearing about the war, "there's too much news about it even when there's no news" and it breaks into regular TV programming, while another said he prefers to get war news online because he doesn't care for the reporting on TV, radio and print. In the main they seemed, if nothing else, to want to keep the war "compartmentalized" or at least outside the boundary of the classroom walls. I'm wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience? Our campus is very, very diverse (from a university publication: "The nearly 25,000 students who study at the University of Illinois at Chicago come from the city of Chicago and its suburbs, and from all 50 states, three United States territories, and 95 foreign countries. The student body is rich in its diversity, its youth and maturity, and its cultural heritage. Of the more than 16,000 undergraduate students, 55 percent are female and 45 percent are male. Minority enrollments comprise 50 percent of the total enrollment") and our student body has been a model of racial, ethnic and religious understanding and tolerance, IMHO, while it has also been somewhat politically active (though it's hard to compare it to other campuses very easily on that score). I'm wondering quite how to account for the attitudes I encountered today. Sj At 11:35 PM +0100 3/24/03, Rune Dalgaard wrote:
David, I generally agree with your skepticism of the Iraq war. I find my country (Denmark), as one of only 3-4 countries participating in war against the majority opinion here in Denmark and around the world - a very frustrating experience, when you belong to that majority!
I too, have noted the absence of war-related mails in a couple of days, not just on this list but also on at least one other I am participating in. I have a feeling that once the war started some of the discussions leading up to it seemed futile to many (to late to avoid it). Second, there might have been a general need of a little time to make sense of the information coming from the war zone.
As to the appropriateness of discussing 'non-curricular' issues on a list like this? Generally, I think not, unless the discussion is clearly related to the Internet as a phenomenon. However, some times there are exceptions to rules - I think a war like this is exceptional enough for people to voice their opinion in this forum (as exceptions to the rule - a continued discussion could be carried out off-list) - sorry for carrying it on here ;-)
Best, Rune
________________________________________________ Rune Dalgaard | MA, Ph.D. Candidate | Information and Media Studies | Aarhus University | Denmark runed@imv.au.dk | http://www.imv.au.dk/medarbejdere/runed
_______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l@aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l
Re: the discussion, or lack thereof, about war Why aren't people discussing the war in classrooms, even when framed within an internet-usage context? Could it be that mass media has indeed turned this war into a video game? One in which hi-tech imagery and bravado is causing the classic mass comm narcotization effect? Maybe. But that can't be the whole story? What about pain? The mere fact that it is quite painful to hear, let alone discuss, the fact that people are killing people. That mega-ton bombs are *pounding* a population of people. It's hard enough to discuss gender issues in class, let alone sexual orientation. And as for war... It's been, what, a week since the invasion occured? When the war in Vietnam started, were people quick to discuss it? (I'm not being rhetorical here; I was but a wee babe then, so me memory needs a prodding.) What if we put a historical pause in here, before we come up with an answer. How 'bout we apply an internet metaphor to side-step the problem. Cogitate - packet switching. All media messages, now, seem to travel in packets - uniform bundles that all meet at the receiver, where, hopefully, they are reassembled and read/decoded. As for television coverage, it is only one of many routes that the message bundles can travel. There is also of course the internet, word-of-mouth, art, magazines, newspapers, radio, etc... Even though these bundles are uniform in size, they are not the same in content. I'm not seeing the same message bundles being transported across these different media multiple lines. Seymour Hersh is throwing out completely different bundles, as compared to Katie Couric. And, needless to say, Arab websites show yet another facet. You may say that, regardless of all this, most Americans are only getting the TV war message. Well, maybe for the moment that is true. But over time, all those other message bundles will seep out into that population as well. To some degree, it's inevitable. And then what happens, when all those message bundles regroup and reassemble at that endpoint? There will be discussion. The key is redundancy and flexibility, which is what is occuring. This was not the case during the Vietnam war. Media channels were slim pickins. Maybe the problem is not narcotization because of trivialization and overload. Maybe we just haven't figured out how to decode all the bundles as they come in. Isn't that what teachers are for? -robert tynes
participants (6)
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Aldon Hynes -
Nancy Baym -
Quentin (Gad) Jones -
robert m. tynes -
Rune Dalgaard -
Steve Jones