the impact of grainy images - >> mind the _

.. and one of the many comments on the infamous mobile video
link even though I don’t agree with the ‘we-have-been-there-too’ impetus, but these following points are very interesting: first is an excerpt from Rob Shields’ posting on spaceandculture, ..

… Linking the visible with the articulable in a new way, changes not just what but how we see the execution and Iraq situation. Studies of â€œvisual cultureâ€ usually donâ€™t capture the effects of shifting what was supposed to be invisible and unheard, into the visible and overheard. It remakes reality….

… second is cited from the link of Anne’s comment to the same article.

… “The unofficial video of Saddam’s execution can be seen as the moment when the new media age moved definitively from shaping the reporting of events to shaping the nature of those events themselves…

In my eyes these grainy images posted are more likely to beat back with the same strategies the major news channles like CNN set up for their credebility and authenticity claims (meant are their pixelated videophone transmissions etc …) and in this sense these images subvert as Fintan O’Toole points out exactly those specific habits …

“But just as conventional military superiority proved relatively meaningless in Iraq, so victory in the conventional propaganda war is proving equally useless… Likewise media strategies can all but flatten independent journalism, but they are useless against the anarchic, formless, hit-and-run nature of the new media”.

Finally it might be an interesting point that from my just recently started observation of the newly raised news channels like aljazeera international or France24, so far I haven’t detected similar ‘old-fashioned’ strategies to create authentical relations. Thus it might be worth to keep an eye on their just developing visual language.