YouTube Battles

While terrorist attacks have often been carried out with an eye toward media attention, the age of cell-phone cameras and YouTube has made that angle much more prevalent and worthy of note in today's world, according to a new report sponsored by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute:

Terrorist attacks ought to be understood as consciously crafted media events, and while that has always been the case, today it is more true than ever before in two ways. First, the terrorist attack is itself often designed and intended for the cameras. Terrorist attacks are designed for an audience. Their true target is not that which is blown up -- that item, or those people -- for that is merely a stage prop. What is really being targeted are those watching at home. The goal, after all, is to have a psychological effect (to terrorize), and it isn’t possible to have such an effect on the dead.

This means that the terrorist attack is a media event in the sense that it is designed to attract the attention of the media, the same way that a political campaign event is a media event designed to attract the media's attention and thus garner coverage. When we discuss media attention, we are really first and foremost talking about television, and we are really then talking about gaining the attention of the cameras—and the way to do that is to provide good visuals, however those are defined in a particular context.

Understanding the interaction between media needs and the way terrorist attacks satisfy those needs is essential. This is the case because developing strategies to fight an insurgent enemy has become more challenging as today’s wars are taking place in a radically new information and media environment, and today’s terrorists and insurgents have been brilliant at capitalizing on this environment in their operational art.

For today, terrorism is a media event in a second sense. Terrorists and insurgents are now no longer dependent upon the professional media to communicate. In fact, to an unprecedented degree, the professional media have become dependent upon them. This is due to technological developments which permit any terrorist to film, edit, and upload their actions virtually in real time whether Western media are there to serve witness or not.

Several new technologies, all of which have become relatively mature at relatively the same time, together have made this new information environment, and it is this environment on which terrorists and insurgents are capitalizing. An information or communication technology becomes mature when it meets several criteria. First, it must be available off-the-shelf. Second, it must be affordable, something within financial reach of a decent percentage of the population. Third, critically, it must be small enough to be easily portable. Fourth, it must be available in most of the world, and not just in the developed countries.

Not only do those videos help decrease a nation's desire to continue the counterinsurgency fight, they are also valuable recruiting tools for insurgents, according to the report written by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Associate Professor Cori Dauber:

Between June and roughly November 2007 (roughly the period corresponding to the "surge"), American forces captured eight media labs belonging to AQI ((al Qaeda in Iraq)). In these labs they found a total of 23 terabytes of material that had not yet been uploaded to the web. Coalition forces made the labs a priority target under General David Petraeus because of their importance to AQI operations, recruitment, and funding. The loss of those labs, according to the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), resulted in more than an 80 percent degradation of AQI's capacity to get new material on the web as of September 2007, critical because it was the videos that played a large role in bringing in recruits from the larger Arab world.