The First Internet Conflict?

Why the Web Is Too Fast for War

By Scott Berinato

March 31, 2003 — CSO — I could have ignored the war completely here and written about, say, software patch management. But that would have felt forced, just as it would have felt forced to sensationalize the hacking of al-Jazeera's Web site or to create tenuous links between IT security and the war. It appears by research and news stories that you're not doing anything different with security since the war started. If you are doing something different to secure your infrastructure now, you probably weren't securing it well in the first place. But you know that.

Instead of trying to force the war into the mission of this column, Id like to focus instead on what weve all become over the past week: consumers of the war through the Internet. This was, after all, supposed to be the first "Internet war," in the same culturally significant way that Vietnam was the first "television war" and the first Gulf War was the first "24-hour cable news war." But, so far, I've found the Internet wholly incapabable of delivering anything new or different or better than other "old media."

Note that the first stories about the Internet's role in the war focused on how well the infrastructure held up to a suddenly ravenous demand for online newsas if it were a massively impressive fact that the Internet didn't fail. That doesn't say much for what we expect from the Internet.

At any rate, the stories people have been compulsively clicking to have proven both less in-depth than newspapers and radio (even reprinted newspaper content is not nearly as navigable online as it is on a broadsheet) and less compelling than some of the imagery on television. I've yet to feel any of the horror of war from a single moment on the Internet, though I've felt several reading the newspaper, listening to radio and watching TV. What we're getting from online news sites is a regular refresh of pretty pictures of desert sunsets and soldiers looking soldierly.

And we're getting headlines. Lots of headlines.

Scrolling headlines. For several hours two nights ago and the next morning, CNN.com scrolled the fact that paratroopers had just landed in Northern Iraq.

Big, new bold headlines. "Battle for Nasiriyah" blared Boston.com, but it led to an old story with a new paragraph tossed on top of it, like a sandbag on a bunker, which simply added the moniker to the battle we had been reading about all morning.

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