Digital Media in Conflict-Prone Societies

This document from the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) focuses on media and conflict. It points out that both media and conflict have changed markedly in recent years. Particularly, from the Executive Summary: "Many 21st-century wars are not only about holding territory, but about gaining public support and achieving legal status in the international arena. Governments seek to hold onto power through persuasion as much as through force. Media are increasingly essential elements of conflict, rather than just functional tools for those fighting. At the same time, newer media technologies have increased communication and information dissemination in the context of conflict. In particular, the growth of citizen media has changed the information space around conflict, providing more people with the tools to record and share their experiences with the rest of the world."

"The ability to communicate, and to produce and receive diverse information through participatory media, is part of a struggle within conflict-prone societies between allowing for non-coercive debates and dialogue that focus on endemic weak-state problems and enabling those seeking power to organize for political influence, recruitment, demonstrations, political violence, and terror.... The question of whether the presence of digital media networks will encourage violence or lead to peaceful solutions may be viewed as a contest between the two possible outcomes. It is possible to build communications architectures that encourage dialogue and nonviolent political solutions. However, it is equally possible for digital media to increase polarization, strengthen biases, and foment violence."

The document includes frameworks for analysis of media and conflict including sections on characteristics of digital media in conflict, each with a set of recommendations: Complexity, Diversity, and Unpredictability; Control and Openness; Connections and Networks; and Digital Solutions and Human Problems. Case studies are included from Georgia, Burma, Kenya, and Pakistan.

Recommendations and project design observations include the following:

• "Policies that articulate digital media networks as either starkly polarizing or as unifying ignore the ambiguous and often multifaceted nature of online and networked communications. The key is to identify projects that respond to specific problems with a focus on media content, resources, relevance to the real world, and relationships within a given network."
• "Existing media should not be ignored. In many places, traditional media will be relevant for many years. Rather, how to integrate different media platforms, and pay attention to technical developments that facilitate convergence should be considered."
  
• "Media literacy in a networked digital environment includes the ability to both consume and create content online. Communities of use may be largely self-generating; projects that seek to engage communities with digital media tools should be aware of existing technological capacities and work with local communities to define their interests and motivations."
• "Media assistance efforts that focus on conflict present an opportunity to design projects with digital media applications that could encourage more open communities and states, provide alternative viewpoints and venues for dialogue, and reduce control of information."
• "Planning for the possibility of future conflict, especially in states where it is endemic, means proactively building networks of both professional journalists and citizen media, designing early warning and incident verification systems, monitoring projects, and making a long-term investment in supporting technical networks, education and media literacy. It also means continued support for the improvement of local media coverage, and resources to support what is most valuable and relevant in traditional journalism - investigative reporting, access to elite opinion-makers, and time and resources for focused beat reporting."
• "Particular attention should be paid to what is happening at a grass-roots, local level, as a great deal of innovation in the use of digital media tools is driven by users and citizen media projects."
• "Given that nonprofit think tanks, humanitarian groups, and others have become information providers, they should supplement social marketing, public relations campaigns, and media relations with a focus on journalistic standards, reliability, transparency of sourcing, presentation and writing, and timeliness. These organizations need to think in terms of multiple audiences, and as primary, unmediated sources of information for different groups."
• "There is a also a need for targeted, specific digital media interventions that build systems of verification and trust, take advantage of the technical capacities, and find ways to mesh them with participatory media tactics for creating and sharing information."