Introduction

Abstract

This book explores the nature of images in contemporary warfare, addressing the changing ways in which they circulate within society and the impact this has on the conduct of conflict. I argue that a significant shift has occurred in the relationship between images and the media system which enables their circulation and identify this as a shift from a mass communication system to a rhizomatic communication system. This shift is driven by changes in technology and in the `communications system’. Technological developments, such as the Internet, blogs, camera/video phones and more, have fundamentally altered the ways in which governments, militaries, terrorists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and citizens engage with images. To employ Manuel Castells’ term, ‘a space of flows’ (Castells, 1989) has opened up and thus has replaced the unidirectional flow of information and images with, in Daya Kishan Thussu’s language, ‘multi-directional flows’ (Thussu, 2007) of information and images. In the context of military action, I theorize this as a move away from the ‘mobilization of images’ (attached to the twentieth-century notion of propaganda and the mass-media society) to the ‘weaponization of images’ (which is attached to the networked/information society connected with new media).