The Illusion of Control: The Military War Room as Model for the Dominant Mode of Contemporary Personal Media Practice

Abstract

The personal war room is a metaphor for a specific media configuration and practice – aided by empowering discourses – wherefrom the personal war room commander controls his personal live, through centralisation, rationalization, and prediction. Using the personal war room as metaphor helps us understand contemporary media practice, as the term alludes to a military inspired use of media. This study shows that our understanding of current media practice, discourse and technology will deepen profoundly by looking at the military roots. It explicates a practice and ideology wherein media are as much about defending distance as they are about bridging these distances. The method applied is that of the dispositif, wherein technology, practice, and discourse are intertwined and cross-pollinate.

What started as a military desire – to increase centralised control and to simulate the courses of action in an effort to know possible outcomes – was starting to get materialised at the beginning of the twentieth century. But also the other way around, new technologies necessitated a more rigid approach to information. From both approaches the amount of information increased, further necessitating the war room. A control crisis, or rather, crises, due to the increase of scale, acceleration, and the decline of certainties was met with the war room, not only in the military domain, but also in the fields of business and journalism, which were extremely affected by the changes.

This thesis shows how this concept has dispersed, ultimately into the omnipresence of the personal war room. Both supply and demand will be taken into account: what (social) problems are encountered and what (technical) solutions are offered, which challenges are raised by practice and technology (overload is a poignant example), and which solutions are imagined.

The perceived abilities of the personal war room have become part of an influential contemporary ideology, a vehicle for projecting other desires: a ‘networked’ society capable of producing solutions for a wide range of problems all based on: total transparency, everlasting connectivity, non-hierarchical organisation. Access equates control. In this way this study will 1) position itself against the idea that technology evolves isolated of how practices are developed and discourses are shaped and thus can be referred to as neutral; 2) contribute to the field of visual studies by regarding the technological constituents of interfaces and placing these in a cultural narrative of information management; 3) plot the icon of information management that the war room has become.