I was signed up to do a documentary for the week that we were planning on screening "Control Room," which I remember seeing when it was released and which I thought captured an important moment in journalism. Three things happened. First, our plans changed, and we watched "Our Brand is Crisis" instead (which I thought was interesting, but put a wrench in my plans). Then someone else posted a review (I had failed to notice that the two of us were both signed up), and I began to wonder whether I should write it up again, or whether I should write about something else. Finally, I was overwhelmed by the pitch packet project, and deferred any consideration of this issue to a later date. So here we are.

I realize now that there is an opportunity to do something different with my write-up. I may be missing the mark by writing about something other than a documentary film. I think that's fine; to be honest, I wish we had done more with other media in this class.

I want to question whether our reliance on documentary film was really the most challenging way to drive our conversation. To be sure, we watched documentaries that addressed many other media. We discussed cable television, websites, cell phone cameras, and online videos. The big guns and small arms fire, as we put it, now enjoying a global reach that has changed our understanding of events, identities, conflicts, and what it means to be a social being. And we blogged it. Yet I think those steps only scratch the surface of what can be done in a classroom to study and explore global media, especially considering the incredible pace at which new media are changing public discourse. We could have done more to explore the ways that the internet and its outgrowths have really changed how we experience media. We could have ‘screened’ web-based media, invited online media scholars and practitioners to our class, and really invested in our blog/vblog as a means to draw in new people and new ideas.

There are moments when the influence of new media becomes evident to a new group of people or in a new way. We all know about many of these turning points from the past few centuries, and we discussed the three "Effects" of the past two decades. We acknowledge how significant it is that in the space of fifteen years, we have witnessed two wars in Iraq situated in vastly different media environments; we have missed a big part of the point, however, if we see that acceleration and fail to really dig into the specifics of where we stand today and where we are headed.

During the Gulf War, the government released videos showing guided weapons hitting their targets. These videos gave the impression that American forces were technologically advanced and committed to minimizing civilian/unintended casualties. Stories about the scores of Iraqi deaths resulting from ‘smart’ and ‘dumb’ bombs alike struggled to compete with the portrayal of the war as clean and justified.

Contrast that cockpit footage with a tape that was leaked to The Sun this spring. It showed American pilots strafing and bombing vehicles, and then realizing that their targets were British tanks. The video is hard to make out, but the audio feed from the pilots and controllers paints a grim picture of their judgment. Whereas fifteen years ago the military was largely capable of controlling the media coming out of Iraq, today it can hardly filter even the media that it collects itself. On The Sun’s website—and quickly on YouTube—the video has received millions of views, presumably from around the world, stoking sentiment against how (and why) the war is being waged. People didn’t need a paper copy of The Sun to read about it, or a report on TV news to see an excerpt of it: they could easily watch it and redistribute it online any time.

American politics are reverberating from the impact of new media. Following the model attributed to Dean '04, campaigns have learned how to connect with activists, shape a message, and raise buckets of money online using conventional websites, mailing lists, blogs, syndicated audio/video, and outreach to other sites. These political 'netroots' not only signify a new hyper-political arena, but they also seem to be charged with passion for particular topics. The idea of the candidate as a personification of a platform seems to be augmented by the constant roar of conjecture, commentary, and breaking news that cycles through websites great and small. Straw polls and key quotes and leaked memos add flavor to the discussion, and there is no shortage of policy debate among fellows and between opponents.

It seems clear that, for many people, the portal to national politics is no longer print, radio, or television media. Instead, information is filtering through a web of news sites, blogs, search engines, aggregators, and user-generated communities. This point was driven home to me recently over lunch at Antonio's. Two of my friends who I don't consider political junkies were discussing the first Democratic presidential debate. They weren't talking about Clinton or Obama, or even Edwards or Kucinich. They were talking about Mike Gravel, the little-known former senator from Alaska. They were describing his performance in great detail, and it was evident that his message-- vehement opposition to the Iraq war and disdain for politicians who do too little to end it-- resonated with them on some level. The mere fact that they knew about his role in the debate surprised me at first, but it made sense when they said that they had heard about his comments and decided to watch clips on YouTube. The event was unchained from its slot on CSPAN and brief coverage on the evening news and in major newspapers. Someone had taken the small step of uploading the footage, and it entered an arena in which access is practically free and available any time to a functionally limitless number of web users. Presidential politics are sure to change now that the entire election cycle is being covered and archived online, where standout performances and slipups can gain momentum.

I don't know too much about Watergate, except that the nation read Woodward and Bernstein every morning to follow a soap opera at the highest level of the government. There are investigative reporters and columnists who try to bear that torch today, but there is also a growing portion of people who distrust 'the media' and blame it for sustaining the White House's drumbeat. It is now possible to follow national politics without going to a major newspaper or CNN as a principal definitive source. Blogs and video sites permit creators and consumers to focus their attention where they want to, and to take on an active role in dispersing and commenting on stories as they unfold.

The medium is a fascinating component of the message of the testimony given last week by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Such hearings are often televised on CSPAN and summarized on news shows and in papers, but unless the consumer response is tangible, the coverage likely will neither continue for long nor attract wide audiences. Online, however, it is possible to watch Comey's testimony, discuss it, repost it on other sites, and begin a conversation whose only bound is interest. In this case, the drama of the story and its presentation makes it headline news in many media. The video has circulated extensively online, bringing the primary source to people who may have missed it as it happened and heard about it afterwards. Such hearings may have been widely reported for decades, but the primary recordings of them are now just becoming available to the general public to consume and share in real time. It is not insignificant that these new media are blossoming at a moment when huge numbers of people are skeptical of and angry at the government. These tools at once stem out of-- and lead to-- the drive that many people have to follow, understand, and evaluate governance.

This wasn't intended primarily as a criticism of the course, thrown in after the fact. I think we got a great deal out of the course, especially as a result of the access we had to filmmakers. However, I think there is a case to be made for pushing this course further into the online environment. The power of these emerging media is shocking, and it is also just beginning to be understood in bits and pieces. We are living in the moment immediately following a lightning strike on the horizon: we can tell that the weather has turned, and the distant flash assures us that something serious is on the way.