War in 140 Characters or Less

The war in Gaza is the first to be broadcast in 140 characters or less.

In the late 1960s, Walter Cronkite and the television news broadcast the horror of the Vietnam war, American servicemen's coffins and all. At the same time, the Nigeria-Biafra civil war became the first televised humanitarian crisis. The moving pictures of starving children launched a wave of citizen-driven relief efforts and kick-started the era of media humanitarianism. Television was a powerful medium for inspiring humanitarian compassion and revulsion. In the late 1960s, there weren't a hundred different channels you could switch to if you wanted to keep yourself oblivious.

The internet is both more and less powerful. It is more powerful because our access to information has never been greater or more instantaneous. There are so many voices, the only filters are those the users choose. Of course, this is the same reason that it is less powerful. There are many ways to escape news you don't want or opinions you don't agree with, and there is no voice so powerful that it repels escape. There is no modern equivalent to Walter Cronkite and the trust and confidence the public placed in his voice.

The war in Gaza is the first modern conflict to be carried out across the social media-sphere. The Israel Defense Force and Hamas both have Youtube Channels (or equivalent), and the Twitter chatter from voices both formal and informal has been nonstop.

The optimist in me thinks this is a good thing. The reason that Biafra captured our attention was that the images of hunger seemed so close, so immediate. There had never been mass media equivalent to the images of those starving children that seemed to highlight, so forcefully, the fragility of the human experience. But the times have changed and we've become desensitized to images of violence and poverty. To some extent, this is a necessary survival strategy. With the sheer amount of media available, we'd crumble under the wait of the world if we didn't have sharp emotional filters.

But sometimes, events need to pierce that veil. The optimist in me wonders if when the only tool you need to get your voice out is a mobile phone or a Twitter account, could the rawness and unfiltered emotion rise to the surface and capture the world's attention? The moral complexities of war deny simple explanation. If the voices we associated with Israel and Palestine weren't talking heads and full-of-it squakboxes from either side but average citizens who are sick of violence and sick of being scared, would it change the way we care and the way we act?

The optimist in me hopes. Wired wrote yesterday that news station Al Jazeera had used Ushahidi's open source software to create a tool for reporting the conflict that takes SMS and Tweets from Israeli and Palestinian citizens to create an interactive map and time line of the war. In the long run, this could challenge our desensitization.

But I also have a pessimist lurking inside. Its the pessimist who recognizes how hard it is to overcome the feeling that average citizens don't have much of a hand in foreign policy. Its the pessimist who recognizes that "humanitarianism" is often used as a euphemism for war, and who recognizes the truth of the quote that there are "no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems." Its the pessimist in me who recognizes that social media can just be another propaganda tool. And itts the pessimist in me who recognizes that even technology that gives us the opportunity to be close to pain and suffering does not provide those who would rather avoid it a reason to open themselves to that pain.

I'm trying to be excited about the innovation and entrepreneurship of citizen-level war reporting. I'm trying to draw strength and faith from the capacity and resilience of the human spirit that war tends to bring out uniquely. But its hard.