15:08, Monday 24 Mar., 2003 Link

Michael Sippey: Notes on the Embedded Media coverage in Iraq. Great notes! Particularly incredible is this Rumsfeld quote: "And what we are seeing is not the war in Iraq. What we're seeing are slices of the war in Iraq. We're seeing that particularized perspective that that reporter, or that commentator or that television camera happens to be able to see at that moment. And it is not what's taking place. What you see is taking place, to be sure, but it is one slice".

That information flow is so cheap we can afford to see snapshots/ That reporting and analysis+synthesis have been decoupled/ That we've acknowledged this is the case and changed reporting appropriately/ That this organised (or maybe gardened?) war is so complex is can't be grasped sufficiently to understand by any person. Like a hair to long to see both ends of, but if you stand back to see both ends: too thin to see at all. How to report that?

(That Rumsfeld is thinking like this... the www worldview (biological, diverse, complex, ungraspable) intruding on the controlled, everything classifiable (Classical Physics) view. A worldview that can handle ambiguity? To an extent.)

Counterpoint: Unembedded journalism has a different view. We need all types.