Chapter 6 - War and Media Studies

Summary

Over the last decades both 'war' and 'media' have been unleashed – both conceptually and in practice – in ways that defy conventional understanding of the terms. One obvious reason is digitization, the explosive, closely entangled growth of cyberwar and cyberspace. This make it all the more important to scrutinize the peculiar mutual attraction the study of war and the study of media tend to exert upon each other. For media studies, the study of war, and the progress of weapons technology in particular, allows for the creation of evolutionary models that privilege internal dynamics of technological supersession at the expense of external factors. The focus on new, increasingly autonomous media technologies, in turn, privileges variants of technological solutionism on the side of military experts and historians. In both cases, however, conceptual difficulties arise not only from the unprecedented growth of new infrastructures, but also from the realization that both 'war' and 'media' were never – or only in a fairly limited post-1648 European context – what the terms commanded them to be.