Right in the middle of the time described back then, came the first Gulf War. Me and my flatmates got all our portable TVs together, piled them in the living room and tuned them all to different channels. The audio was turned up on the middle, biggest TV. We’d switch that one to whatever visuals caught our eye at the time. Occasionally, I’d walk outside into the snow, deep for London, and watch the dozens of planes flying over and try and imagine them as scuds, flying over my city, ignored by patriots, unstopped by the tanks at Heathrow.
These days, I don’t have a TV in the house. I have a little video capture card in my PC, but it only picks up a few spanish-language stations and the usual evangelicals and desperate public stations that sit in the abandoned low rent terrestrial airwaves of America. So I’ve been watching this war almost exclusively over the Net.
So, for the first few days of the war, I’ve been in IRC – #war-news on irc.debian.org, #iraqlive and #iraqlive-fox on IRCnet. The latter two are just closed caption (teletext subtitle) feeds of CNN and Fox News. I’ve been walking, slowly, over the warblogs. I keep hitting reload on Dear Raed. I watch the realvideo feed of the BBC News 24 occasionally, and I kept the Baghdad Webcam up until it felt too ghoulish. But mostly, it’s all been very textual.
The IRC feeds make it feel like I’m watching historical sources being written in realtime; live streaming footnotes. #war-news is strange; when I was there, the pro-war and anti-war folks were taking shifts. The pro-war folk would go to bed around midnight PST, and then the anti-war folks would turn up, back from their street protests. The channel is run by Raph Levien, who designed Advogato, and was arrested during the Berkeley demonstrations. There has been restraint on both sides.
So how do I feel? I get the feeling of open space, of vacuum. It’s like the negative image of the fog of war here, an airy white lack of news. There’s no information overload, because there’s precious little information. The TV news is all human interest about the microcrosms that surround embedded journalists. Google News collapses most commentary into a couple of Iraqi stories, because there’s essentially no difference between them all. There’s no context. At the moment, I’m trying to pinpoint what’s going on by flicking between the CNN reports and Aeronautics.ru, a low-credibility Russian site that at least takes its rumours from other sources than the big media corps. But you can’t triangulate from two points.
So what can you say? It’s not going as well as the American forces would like us to think, but they’d like us to think it’s going so splendidly that that’s hardly a revelation. It’s war. It’s a horror show. There should be an IRC channel somewhere that just has someone leaning on the “a” key for the duration of the conflict. That’s what war sounds like, even from a safe distance.