Re: <nettime> Steve Coll: Leaks (The New Yorker)

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

I am nonplussed by the seeming compulsion of people on this list to
find some way of debunking Wikileaks and explaining that it too is
part of a controlled and manipulated flow of information. The only
explanation I have for this is that everyone seems to want to defend
themselves, like paranoids, from the dangerous risk of believing
anything. Well, OK, I understand that, I'm paranoid too, and belief
is hard to come by these days. Still, in terms of the tactical media
that once facinated and inspired us on this list, Wikileaks is a big
big innovation, far more interesting than anything else that could
possibly be termed "tactical media" in recent years. It successes are
also bought with great risks all down the line by everyone cooperating
to produce them. Of course its raw material requires analysis, but I
have read excellent analysis on the basis of that material. I am a lot
more impressed by the material itself and by the serious analysis of
it than I am by the rather childish efforts undertaken here to prove
that you, or we, or I don't who, is more intelligent than the rest
of the world, and therefore able to spot yet another form of media
manipulation. As though every media intervention were not in some way
a "manipulation." Maybe y'all are just jealous that your own blog does
not have such interesting stuff on it?

best, BH






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