Could the spread of information via digital media reduce mass atrocities?

Yes; or make them worse.

Most technologies are content free. The history of media – especially widely distributed media – is that it can power social forces both good and ill. Political entrepreneurs will race to use them for mobilization – whether for social justice, or mass atrocity, remains to be seen. Radio, for example, was the most widely distributed media in Africa when it was used by Rwanda’s genocidaire to mobilize, harass, and intimidate people into participating in genocide.  

On the positive side, cellphone technologies can empower individual people to report on incipient atrocities. Or to avoid dangers – in Haiti, families used text messages to warn one another where gangs were loitering, reducing risks.

Social mobilization has always been part of mobilization and revolution. In the Italian Risorgimento, revolutionaries painted “Verdi” in town squares – an innocuous graffiti in support of the famous composer, to authorities; secretly, a coded rallying cry for the usurper “Viva Emmanuelle, Re d’Italia”.

Technology changes. The struggle between oppression and justice continues.

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There is no question about it. Digital media produce awareness, and awareness is essential to stopping mass atrocities. Visit the website of the Enough Project. At the MIGSR2P conference last week Jon Hutson described the work they are doing, and in particular I discussed with him the Sentinel Satellite Project. It uses photographs that provide the same resolution as the best satellite imagery that was available only in the intelligence world a couple of decades ago. Look as well at the Ushahidi Project which “develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.” There is the explosion of video enabled cell phones, combined with GPS for location as well as a date/time stamp. There is an enormous amount of information available; it needs to be organized, presented and distributed. That’s happening. It is all about bearing witness, and the digital revolution provides enormous resources to facilitate wide spread knowledge, the necessary basis for action.

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Information dissemination can be used towards both good and bad ends.  Let’s hope that digital transparency and collective human conscience trump.

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Digital media is revolutionizing how private citizens and advocacy groups communicate and share information with the news media and influential political actors. Now, in a matter of seconds, a person halfway across the globe can upload a picture documenting a mass atrocity crime and send it like a missile through cyberspace via Twitter directly to the White House, the Prime Minister’s Office or to CNN or the BBC.

While their is no guarantee that governments will necessarily act on this information, a plethora of journalists are now curating this information to generate news stories, which in turn shapes public opinion and will increasingly put pressure on our elected leaders to invoke the Responsibility to Protect at the United Nations.

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