Place, Space, and Mediated Communication

Exploring Context Collapse

Carolyn Marvin, Hong Sun-ha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138227927
• eBook ISBN: 9781315394169
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Place, Space, and Mediated Communication explores how new communications technologies are able to disrupt our spatial understanding, and in so doing, reorganize the boundaries of human experience: a phenomenon that can rightly be described as 'context collapse'.

Individual essays investigate 'context collapse' in a variety of geographical and temporal settings, including: the US drone war in Pakistan, social media and sexuality in Paris, privacy and privilege in Brazil, and videogames and resistance in Iran. This cross-disciplinary collection of essays demonstrates how communication and space are co-constituted, and models exciting new paths of inquiry for researchers.

Place, Space, and Mediated Communication is suitable for students and scholars of media and communication studies, cultural studies, urban studies, and sociology.

Part I
Proximity and its discontents

Chapter 1
Drone media

Grounded dimensions of the US drone war in Pakistan

Lisa Parks

Editor’s Note: This chapter was originally written to include images of drone strikes and protests. Given their often uncertain provenance, however, the images could not be reproduced under fair use policies. Readers interested in knowing more about the images may contact the author at her personal website.¹

Drone warfare is often imagined from positions of computer simulation, networked communication, and remote control, and writers ranging from Paul Virilio to P. W. Singer have commented upon the button-pushing interactivities and joystick robotics that define them.² While critical analysis of these practices is crucial, there is often such a fascination with the game-like dimensions of drone warfare that there is a tendency to neglect what happens beneath the belly of the drone. This chapter explores visual media that depict grounded dimensions of a covert US drone war that has killed thousands of people in a remote area of Pakistan. Since 2004 the CIA has conducted a secret drone war in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, a contentious and hard-to-access rural region on the border of Afghanistan that is inhabited by Pashtun tribes, controlled by the Taliban, used by Al Qaeda operatives, and occupied by the Pakistani military. The FATA region is extremely difficult for international journalists and relief workers to access and locals have been punished for carrying cameras there.

Despite the fact that the US drone war in Pakistan has been conducted as a “covert operation,” when I began conducting research on this topic in 2011 information about it abounded on the Internet. News organizations and citizen journalists have published reports about it. Photographers have taken risks to document it. And activists worldwide have protested it. Since 2009, when investigative reporter Jane Mayer broke the story about this CIA secret drone war in The New Yorker, a flourishing of “drone media” has emerged that includes photographs, video, maps, data visualizations, and infographics. These media have served as vital sources of information about a drone war that US leaders have refused to officially acknowledge. In this way, drone media have drawn attention to top-down surveillance practices that have generated new crises of power.

Given the lack of US transparency, drone media are often cast in shadows of obscurity and confusion, and as such are part of a broader “context collapse.” Historically, the vetting of information during war was handled by state agencies and professional journalists. In the age of the Internet a greater volume of information and perspectives now circulate, but processes of authentication and verification have broken down. Now information is recognized as tenuous on every side. The result is a drone media formation ridden with uncertainty. Details about drone strikes are presented as unconfirmed or preliminary. Photos of drone strike scenes are missing captions and source details. Casualty and injury counts are approximate or non-existent. And victims’ names are unknown. Where the fog of war once seemed limited to the battlefield, it has drifted into the democratized circulation of images. Users/viewers not only seek out and customize their news, they must assess the provenance and credibility of the information they encounter. Drone media thus expose the difficulty of reliably grounding information in an apparently democratized online world. And, at a more general level, they suggest how the militarized drone – as an emergent technology of transportation and communication – is participating in the production of new contexts of power, crisis, and struggle. Since drone warfare has the potential to decimate and fracture lifeworlds – to literally cause contexts to collapse – it is essential that information about the technology’s use be subject to ongoing scrutiny and critique.

To probe these issues further, this chapter critically examines several kinds of “drone media” – drone attack photos, aerial assault videos, and drone protest images that have circulated on the Internet. Rather than define “drone media” only as the aerial views of drone sensors, I conceptualize the term to include grounded visual documentation of sites, events, or bodies in a range of US military drone operations. My analysis is based on the collection and study of 72 drone attacks and 183 drone protest photos using Google image search in 2011 and 10 aerial assault videos on YouTube, Dvids, and Live Leak. In the process of building this visual archive, I examined these photos and videos in their online contexts and in isolation. I also studied them individually and comparatively in an effort to identify patterns in their depiction of grounded dimensions of US drone strikes. While my findings point to uncertainties that characterize drone media, rather than dismiss these media as “unverifiable” or “indeterminate,” I argue that they serve a vital function by generating tactical speculations about US drone killings, injuries, and damages in Pakistan that may never be fully acknowledged or accounted for by US officials. By tactical speculation I am referring to the earnest yet tenuous, persistent yet partial, resolute yet questionable properties of knowledge that arise when transparency collapses. As drone media convey grounded dimensions of drone attacks, they challenge the widely-held assumption that US military drones enable a remote and precise form of warfare that minimizes casualties and collateral damage for all involved. By helping to expose how deeply and profoundly this “surgical” method of warfare has affected lifeworlds on the ground, drone media model the kinds of knowledge practices that are needed when democratic states fail.

Drone attack photos

Since 2004 there have been between 2,467 and 3,976 killed and 1, 152–1,731 injured by US drone strikes in Pakistan.³ Photographing scenes in the aftermath of such strikes is risky business. On one occasion the Taliban captured a man who was investigating drone attacks that killed civilians and held him for 63 days alleging he was a US spy.⁴ On another a 16-year-old Pakistani boy, Tariq Aziz, was mysteriously killed by a US drone three days after agreeing to be trained as a drone attack scene photographer.⁵ While the Taliban reportedly rigidly controls access to drone attack scenes, the Pakistani ISS and Minister of Interior have also been involved in monitoring and inspecting these sites to confirm casualties. In addition, a handful of professional journalists have managed to photograph some of them as well. Wire services such as Associated Press, Agence-France Press, Reuters, and Getty Images have distributed drone attack scene photos in international news outlets ranging from the BBC to PakAlert Press, from CNN to Indian Express.

Whether taken by professionals or amateurs, drone attack scene photos often appear online without any or with minimal captions and credits. Some have been re-posted as general “stand in” images to accompany reports or commentaries on the US drone attacks rather than as illustrations or evidence of a particular attack, which is consistent with the general pattern of obscurity and confusion that has defined this CIA campaign. Within such conditions, the images that do surface and circulate online are all the more charged and loaded with the burden to communicate information about the drone attacks, even if their truth status is somewhat confusing or uncertain.

Photographs of drone attack scenes depict areas on the ground in the aftermath of drone strikes and fit into three general categories: survivors in ruins; funerals; and dead or injured bodies. The first category features survivors and/or bystanders standing amongst and picking through ruins, presumably after a drone strike has occurred. An uncaptioned AFP-Getty photo from February 2011 and published on a blog/website called The Raw Story features several men standing next to a building in ruins destroyed in a US drone attack.⁶ The roof of the building has been blown away and turned into a pile of rubble and the re-bar that once held it in place is exposed and bent toward the ground. An uncaptioned photo that appeared on the Current News website on February 22, 2011, reveals a small boy standing in front of a mound of cement bricks and a barely standing structure with a gaping hole barely looms behind him as he looks into the camera.

Another photo, from June 2009, shot by Tariq Mahmood, appeared on CNN’s website with the caption “Drone strikes are unpopular in the region because of the threat to civilians.” The photo features three men and a child picking through a pile of rubble above which two giant wooden crossbeams have fallen. When I looked for further detail about the photo on the Getty Images website I found another caption indicating the image had nothing to do with a drone attack and was in fact the site of a Taliban suicide attack in Peshawar. The caption indicated: “Pakistani residents stand amongst the rubble of a classroom after militants blew up a girls’ school on the outskirts of Peshawar on June 22, 2009.”⁷ Not only does this suggest editorial carelessness at CNN, it exposes the lack of specificity and generalized confusion that underpins much drone war reporting. Despite this, these and other photos of rubble are used to visualize the material effects of drone warfare, foregrounding the thick accumulations, blockages, and grounded messes that are vivid counterparts to the drones’ orderly cockpits and aerial viewfinders. The photos of ruins also serve as bold reminders that drone warfare is fundamentally an attempt to control the surface of the earth, to reshape and reform the material world.

The second category of drone attack photos portrays funeral processions or gatherings to honor the dead. Photography at such events is often forbidden, but there is a vested interest in allowing the world to witness the effects of the US drone attacks and thus sometimes it is permitted. A Reuters photo taken in February 2009, which appeared on England’s Channel 4 website, features six caskets with white flags implanted in them as a crowd of over one hundred “Pakistani tribesmen” stands in the distance and they “offer funeral prayers for the [27] victims of a missile strike attack in Miranshah.” The caption indicates: “A suspected US missile strike destroyed a major Taliban training camp in Pakistan today, killing at least 27 people, said to be militants (Reuters).”⁸ Phrases of uncertainty such as “suspected US missile strike” and “said to be militants” are characteristic of drone attack reporting, though are applied unevenly as “major Taliban training camp” goes unquestioned. A photo that appeared in The Christian Science Monitor in June 2011 reveals four caskets propped on platforms in a rural location as about one hundred “Pakistani villagers” “offer funeral prayers for people reportedly killed by drone attack in Miranshah…” (my emphasis).⁹

Since most Muslim funerals occur within 24 hours after death, these photos capture hurried efforts to honor drone victims. While these images create a dividing line between the living and the dead, they do not distinguish the militant from the civilian and neither do many US drone strikes. On some occasions, funerals and cemeteries themselves have become drone targets. A 2006 photo taken by a Predator and later provided to NBC allegedly shows a group of almost 200 Taliban insurgents gathered for a funeral at a cemetery in Afghanistan. US military officers apparently wanted to attack targets within this group, but claim to have held off because the rules of engagement prohibit attacks on cemeteries.¹⁰ In 2009, however, a US drone attack on a funeral procession in the Makeen district of South Waziristan killed at least 60 people and left many others injured.¹¹ Funerals and other public gatherings, including weddings, have been singled out for so-called “signature strikes,” which target groups of men believed to be associated with terrorists, but whose identities are not always known.¹²

The third category of drone attack photos foregrounds the damage drones do to the flesh, representing dead or injured bodies. These photos have been shot either at an attack scene, a hospital, or a funeral, and at times are used in a sensationalistic manner, often featuring children. One such image that has circulated on multiple websites comes from the South Asian News Agency (SANA) and shows the faces of three dead child...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction: context collapse and the production of mediated space
• PART I Proximity and its discontents
• PART II Places on the move
• Index