Stone Cold Pimpin'

Are camera-phones and digital imagery the new Gutenburg Bible? Or are
we congratulating ourselves too much?

href="http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/05/11/moblogging_from_the_fr
ont_and_the_new_reformation.php">Moblogging from the Front and the New
Reformation

James Hong of HotorNot fame launched YAFRO as a Friendster clone (the
acronym is for Yet Another Friendster Rip-off.) Since then, they¹ve turned
it into a moblog, and Hong has recently posted a list of US soldiers posting
pictures to YAFRO from Iraq. Images straight from the front, with Dan Rather
nowhere in sight?

Jaques Barzun, author of the marvelous history of modernity From Dawn to
Decadence (1500 - present), makes the point that the Catholic Church as a
pan-European political force was done in by the Protestant Reformation,
itself fueled by the printing press. Once the Church lost the ability to
control the direct perception of scripture, thanks to the printing of
(relatively) cheap bibles in languages other than Latin, their loss of
political hegemony followed.

This is what we are seeing now relative to the military¹s control of
information. A year or so ago, someone in the DoD told me that the thing
that would most affect the prosecution of the war in Iraq would be images of
DAB¹s ? Dead American Bodies. The unplanned spread of photos of coffins, and
now of torture victims, means that control of this part of the war is
outside the military¹s hands.