Illuminating pathways through text, video and photography


In today's era of instant information gratification, we have ready access to opinions, rationalizations, and superficial descriptions. Much harder to come by is the foundational knowledge that informs a principled understanding of the world. This is my attempt to synthesize the fundamentals of complex ideas.
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Created and curated by Gregory Bufithis. More about me here.

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TECHNOLOGY IN WAR

Part 1 : visualizing the news - the power of mobile


Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been called the first social media war. For anyone vaguely aware of the conflict (even children), the constant stream of video carnage and horrifying tweets has been unavoidable and overwhelming since Russia invaded the country more than a month ago.

8 April 2022 (Berlin, Germany) - The extensive documentation of the war - supplied by thousands of smart phones, satellite imagery, unencrypted military communications, and open source intelligence - has also afforded news organizations an opportunity to provide more detail and context about events in Ukraine than in any war coverage previously produced. Visual investigation and graphics teams are more valued in their newsrooms than ever.

My team and I have gathered (I have 6 full-time staffers and I've added 6 freelancers to cover the Ukraine War, with our base in Krakow, Poland) some of the more useful and impressive multimedia stories, overviews, and graphics published about the conflict so far. From radio intercepts to interactive maps, these reports and explainers offer an immersive and accessible view of the war, and represent some of the best digital journalism constructed to address the destruction in Ukraine.

Waging war

One of the most surprising aspects of the conflict has been the overall effectiveness of Ukraine's defense against the invasion. Despite ostensibly mismatched forces and with Western military support confined to funding and equipment, Ukraine has limited much of Russia's movement around the country and into most major cities. The following multimedia and video pieces help explain how:
ABOVE: The New York Times has produced consistently impressive multimedia pieces on Ukraine, including this examination of why Russia's seemingly superior forces were unable to capture Kyiv. A birds-eye view alternates with footage of Ukrainian attacks on Russian troops as you scroll.

ABOVE: This video produced by the New York Times' Visual Investigations team collates information from social media and official statements with Russian military radio transmissions during an attempted seige of a town outside Kyiv, revealing the disarray within the Russian forces.

ABOVE: Reuters' graphics team details with diagrams and maps the various weaponry deployed in Ukraine, from Molotov cocktails and Turkish drones to Iskander missiles and cluster bombs.

Maps

Like the videos and photos of wastelands left by Russian shelling and of civilians fleeing the devastation, maps of Ukraine are now ubiquitous. Many aren’t particularly useful. But some well-designed maps paint a digestible picture, with context, of the many factors influencing the conflict. Others are interactive and updated minute-to-minute, combining the geography of war with geolocated details of attacks and other events.

ABOVE: the Reuters graphics team has a collection of pages with unique maps and charts that cover various factors influencing and influenced by the conflict, including energy, sanctions, weapons, and air travel.

ABOVE: The Russia-Ukraine Monitor Map by the Centre for Information Resilience gathers "significant incidents" verified by the open source community with details of each, including video, photo, or satellite imagery.

ABOVE: The Live Universal Awareness Map connects points on a constantly updated map to a social media-like feed of the latest news, photos and videos of events in and around Ukraine.

Humanitarian suffering

Russia's invasion created an immediate exodus of Ukrainians that only accelerated over time. According to the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, more than 4.2 million civilians have left the country, and the UN's International Organization for Migration estimates that more than 6 million are internally displaced. These populations are escaping Russia's ongoing assaults on urban and civilian infrastructure, which have led to accusations of war crimes from world leaders and an investigation by the International Criminal Court. Numbers are never adequate to describe human suffering, but when news outlets juxtapose them with images in novel ways, the scale and misery of the humanitarian catastrophe is plain to see.

ABOVE: Doomscrolling social media is one way to absorb the totality of the annihilation in Ukraine. Another is to look at this compilation of footage verified by the New York Times, which says it shows how "everyday life for many people in Ukraine has been obliterated as Russia is investigated for potential war crimes."

ABOVE: Like Reuters, USA Today combines data with simple visuals of the people the data represents—in this case, stunning photographs of families on trains and children walking alongside cars packed full of refugees.

ABOVE: To visualize the scale of the refugee crisis, nothing quite equals the artistry of Reuters' animated portrayal, which counts Ukrainians fleeing the country as millions of blue dots that coalesce into bar graphs comparing the migration to other recent crises. Click here for the animation.

Picturing barbarity

Sometimes the most effective multimedia is the most traditional.
ABOVE: The New York Times keeps a single, rolling page updated with the extraordinary images its first-rate photographers have captured of Ukraine these past few weeks. Scrolling through these seemingly endless photos of war is an unadorned interactive experience that can educate and appall, simultaneously.

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COMING IN PART 2

Last weekend I was completing my essay on the Ukraine War and military technology but as the news of the massacre in Bucha began trickling out I put it aside.

Part of that essay echos the words of Jacques Ellul, the French philosopher and sociologist, who I have quoted numerous times. In the 1950s he wrote about “technique”, publishing three seminal works on the role of technology in the contemporary world. His basic thesis was that technology gives human beings more power to control their world – good and bad.

But I would add to that the price for giving us that increased power means technology fundamentally transforms the experience of human life in unexpected ways that are difficult to comprehend even after the changes have already happened. In other words, technology “complexes” our world.

Military technology, unfortunately, is part of that. I served in the U.S. Marine Corps. I am not an expert in military technology or in the subject of warfare in general. But I know military vocabulary, I have attended enough programs at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania (graduate-level instruction to senior military officers and open to invited civilians) and I've met with a score of military experts in order to write this series.

And there are a few trends I’ve noticed while mainlining news from the battlefields of Ukraine. It's fairly simple: if you give human beings new capabilities, some of those humans are going to use those capabilities to try to conquer and kill each other. This doesn’t mean that we should restrain the development of technology out of fear that it’ll be used for military purposes — it seems to me that (some) new technology has made humans steadily richer and happier over time without making war any more prevalent or destructive than it was in the past. But it's "iffy".


Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should remind us all that the U.S. isn’t the only militaristic country in the world — rapacious, militaristic conquerors still exist, and it’s better to resist those countries than to not resist them. U.S. and European military aid to Ukraine has been essential in helping it fend off the brutal assaults of its much larger neighbor. This is a good thing. We should do more of this.

But the Ukraine war is also showing how recent technological advances have changed the nature of human conflict. In the 70s and 80s, innovation largely shifted from “atoms” to “bits” — our jet engines and rockets and vehicles are only a little better than they were back then, but our sensors and communication networks and information processing tools are vastly better. The Ukraine War has showed us that, but that "atoms" are not quite out of fashion.

In Part 2 I'll examine war technology vis-a-vis what has been on display in the Ukraine War.

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Home base: Palaiochora, Crete, Greece
Other work studios: Brussels, Paris


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