The Iraq war as a testing ground for the development of domestic digital images

Abstract

The Gulf War of 1991 was designed as the great live war of a time when television had a central space within the media sphere. The promise failed and it became a spectral war in which image computing and simulation strategies where visible. The 2003 Iraq war should have been the revalidation of the television, but during the twelve years between both wars a series of changes to the information paradigm have taken place. Live broadcast TV had to compete directly with the live network, CNN had to compete with Al Jazeera and professional cameras with domestic cameras. The article analyzes the impact that non-professional film systems generated in the digital age have had on the processes of visibility of the Iraq war. The real war has become a testing ground of a war of images that has served to reinforce some of the resources of the web 2.0. It has also shown how the great utopia of informative objectivity has been threatened by the emergence of new subjectivities. The fundamental challenge posed by the future lies in the conception of the file, to glimpse the extent to which history is written from the use as a document of professional images of the television or amateur images that have been posted on YouTube.