The Effects of the Internet on the 2003 Iraq
Karatzogianni, A: `The Impact of the Internet during the Iraq war on the peace movement, war coverage and war-related cyberattacks', Cultural Technology and Policy Journal, Vol. 1, 2004. In the particular case of post-September 11 information warfare, the assertions of US unity by the Bush administration have resulted in a context in which public statements directed to the international community are interpreted as representative of the US as a political entity and not just the utterances of a particular individual in the current administration.1 Before and during the March 2003 Iraq war, information technologies, and particularly the internet, inspired several groups belonging to all sorts of different backgrounds and ideologies to voice their opinion on the war and in certain instances to engage in symbolic hacking against opposing groups or institutions. But still, the principal originality of this conflict was the effect of the internet on war coverage. This section looks at three levels of the internet's role in the conflict: its effect on the organisation and spread of the peace movement, its impact on war coverage and the issue of war-related cyberconflicts. Before delving deeper, it would be helpful to explain again that with the advent of the internet, new forms of conflict have emerged, not directly linked with information warfare but rather, connected to a more subtle form of societal netwar2, where new social movements, ethnic groups and terrorists use the internet to organise, acquire resources and attack `the other side'. Despite the high-tech name, the groups involved have quite traditional political goals - power, participation, democracy, alternative ideologies - using, however, a postmodern, interactive medium.
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