Hard News and Software

There has been a lot of press lately about how blogging software has cross-polinated with traditional discourses from the public sphere, but I would argue that two recent news stories show how other software applications also shape discourses of the media and public diplomacy.

It was interesting to read Paul Krugman's piece on "Bullet Points over Baghdad" that appeared in the New York Times (and also in the International Herald Tribune, where I read it in Paris). He also noted that the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq looked very much like a PowerPoint presentation of the type lambasted by Edward Tufte. As I pointed out in Design Your Life, the original PDF version of the Victory in Iraq document was even worse: an incoherent array of checkmarks, arrows, and bullets that was further marked up with boldface, italics, and underlining, often redundantly. Peter Norwig's satire of the Gettysburg Address assumed the conceit of presidential oratory as PowerPoint, but now the farce appears as tragedy in our contemporary life. (Even if the administration's aim is pedagogical, the Chronicle of Higher Education says that PowerPoint fails as a teaching tool.)

In other news, I have been reading the editorial section of the Los Angeles Times much more carefully, since appearing on a panel with veteran blogger Kevin Roderick of LA Observed. What struck me in yesterday's opinion page was Max Boot's article, "Navigating the 'human terrain'." Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, exuberantly praises Tactical Iraqi, a military video game for teaching Arabic to soldiers, about which I have expressed serious reservations, most recently in a paper for the Digital Arts and Culture Conference. I'm not alone: Mark Marino has also voiced concerns. Yet in the LA Times, Boot enthuses about visiting "the Expeditionary Warfare School, where captains study Arabic by playing a sophisticated computer game complete with animated characters." Boot argues that this provides critical training that simulates "the human terrain" of the theater of conflict in Iraq. What I find troubling is the fact that Tactical Iraqi may be winning so much media praise (notably in NPR and the New York Times) and earning a top DARPA award not because it is an effective way actually to teach Arabic but because it provides an easy interface to SHOW the teaching of Arabic to U.S. soldiers to the public as a form of display. It enables a kind of spectacle of cultural sensitivity aimed at outside audiences that traditional classroom learning can't provide. Thus the learner can become a virtuoso performer in Baudrillard's Simulacrum.