On September 11, long loading times made using the internet as newsfeed difficult or impossible – at least for people who weren't sitting at their workplaces in a company equipped with broadband. Within an extremely short space of time, however, the Net was again able to excel as a generator of alternative news, provoking increased attention. The role of a critical authority is not the only thing to be associated with the medium – a plethora of rumors confirms the manipulative, unofficial characteristics of the cyber channels. The DIY principle has created a dense network of central intellectual texts through the simple creation of links. After a first phase of hasty emotional reactions, however, communication functioned mainly via »collaborative text filtering.«

S11 gives cause to scrutinize the Net as a communications and information medium. Does it really increase information potential? Are news reports available on the internet that aren't published anywhere else? The possibility of unfiltered expression of opinion is inherent in the internet, but at present it can by no means be seen as a place where political opinion is created. Only when political decisions, alternatives, etc. are realized outside of the communications space will it be possible to speak of the political effects of this technology.

The simultaneous and uncontrolled sending of chain letters like the one on October 31 in Berlin that warned against traveling on city railroads or the subway has been a part of everyday life on mailing lists for some time. In this case it was meant to be a private note left by an unknown Afghan for his girlfriend in Berlin. To find out for sure which news items should go straight into the trash, you can get information at the Hoax Info Service (www.tu-berlin.de/www/software/hoaxlist.html) or at snopes2.com. Both of these are daily updated web sites listing false reports and unfounded warnings. The number symbolism of a flight number allegedly associated with the attacks achieved symptomatic fame: if you changed the typeface in a Word document to Wingdings, a code appeared that showed S11 to be an attack planned by Israel. Similar conspiratorial discoveries have been put about during the past few weeks, such as that of a devil's face in the smoke clouds rising from the WTC. Parascientific products like this one have been on offer online for weeks. The Net project touristguy.com, for example, is obtrusively sophisticated: among other things, it contains a simple portrait of a backpacker on the WTC's viewing platform, with the first »attack plane« visible in the background – a cynical sidelong glance at the real-time zeal of the media.

In addition to the many already existing web sites that have established a »September 11 link,« countless new sites have come into being in the past few months, documenting the course of events with unfiltered subjectivity. With open-source programs like Blogger, anyone can easily set up a web page and post contents. This mostly takes the form of a webmaster stringing together text links with short comments – thus further multiplying the already existing information chains of information (www.blogger.com). In the brief history of the internet as a news medium, the net landscape on the one hand shows that it has limits – for example, owing to language barriers –, but on the other hand, it offers the possibility of publishing historical texts, video material and radio files for an indefinite period and, what's more, in much more balanced news rations than on CNN.

[b]Thinking Aloud[/b]

On the mailing list Nettime, Ivo Skoric, a Croat living in New York, puts together »Media Watch« e-mails at irregular intervals. These are mostly Web links that are sorted into background texts and news texts. But there are also sections such as »young (aimed at youth)« or »gimmicky.« In his first »Media Watch« issuance, »One Man Medium« Skoric explained his motivation for wanting to make these sporadic postings on Nettime into a specific media format: »Driven by the failure of the US mainstream electronic media to report on the anti-war protest in Times Square on October 7, I decided to start a media-watch project, the way Western NGOs did with Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian media during the Yugoslavian wars. In those days, people thought that the state-owned electronic mainstream media were being used by the national governments to create approval of the war. In the words of Noam Chomsky, the media here in the US are now being used in pretty much the same way.« Skoric's analytical commentaries appear almost daily and examine material such as the video messages of Bin Laden – whom Skoric has now reduced to the label OBL. His service is a kind of critical commentary on the press.

[b]Symbolic Negotiations[/b]

The need for action after S11 thus led first and foremost to interminable lists of links. Since S11, there are complete reference libraries full of reading material on the economic, political, and historical implications (see www.bpb.de, for example). This opens a discursive field in which the operators of the web pages concerned have to fight with forced information management. Even on the media-independent news page Indymedia, which is an important point of reference for the anti-globalization movement, the WTC section is directly under the headword Genoa. Since S11, there has been increased confusion within this movement, caused above all by the fact that a clearly defined space for counter-actions against US-dominated globalization seems to be gradually disappearing. Rather, the impression is growing stronger that a certain symbolic spatial order is primarily moving into the foreground – that of the cultural codes. Commenting on this, »No Logo« author Naomi Klein wrote that »symbols of capitalism find themselves in an utterly transformed semiotic landscape« (see her article »Signs of the Times« at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011022&s=klein). The recontextualization, the image wars, the subversive appropriation of the anti-globalization movement, however, have to turn their back on negotiations on a symbolic level to gain in power. In saying this, Klein suggests that, despite the political »setbacks« of S11, social and economic alternatives must still urgently be looked for. For the Net scene, this means among other things that new activities will probably soon be prepared via mailing lists and web sites, and that the medium will thus again be used in the way its main advantages suggest: for sounding out new potential for action amidst confusing excesses of information and rumor.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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