{"id":9241,"date":"2014-10-31T11:22:18","date_gmt":"2014-10-31T16:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/college.unc.edu\/?p=9241"},"modified":"2024-07-02T14:43:50","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T14:43:50","slug":"take-five-with-cori-dauber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/?p=9241","title":{"rendered":"Take Five with Cori Dauber"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Cori<\/a>
Cori Dauber, right, fielded students\u2019 questions about the 9\/11 attacks during a teach-in on Sept. 12, 2001.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At a teach-in with students on Sept. 12, 2001, communication studies professor Cori Dauber told the students she feared the 9\/11 attacks would become the defining event for their generation \u2013 \u201ctruly another Pearl Harbor\u201d \u2013 yet strangely different.<\/p>\n

One thing the terrorists wanted was publicity, and they succeeded, she told her students. \u201cWhat did you do yesterday? You ran to the first television you could find and didn\u2019t move.\u201d It wasn\u2019t just the commercial jets that were turned into weapons of war, she suggested, but the tools of mass communication and the practice of journalism itself.<\/p>\n

Since 9\/11, Dauber\u2019s research has focused on the information strategies of terrorist groups. In particular, her work has explored how Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups such as ISIS have employed the Internet to their advantage. From 2008 to 2010 and from 2011 to 2012, Dauber conducted research at the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, as part of a program allowing universities to \u201cloan out\u201d faculty to the military.<\/p>\n

In 2009, SSI published Dauber\u2019s heavily cited book \u201cYouTube War: Fighting in a World of Cameras in Every Cell Phone and Photoshop on Every Computer.\u201d In August, SSI released \u201cVisual Propaganda and Extremism in the Online Environment\u201d that Dauber edited with Carol K. Winkler (a free digital copy can be downloaded at\u00a0www.carlisle.army.mil.)<\/p>\n

How did the 9\/11 terrorists turn television into a weapon of war?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Terrorism is a fundamentally communicative act that is different from other forms of violence in that, if there is not an audience, it fails. Whatever else New York City is, it\u2019s the media capital of the world. The two planes that attacked the World Trade Center were staggered in time so that after the first plane hit, every camera in the city was trained on the towers. That way, when the second plane hit, it would be filmed live from every possible angle. In that sense, 9\/11 was orchestrated for a television audience.<\/p>\n

Soon after the war in Iraq began in 2003, you started a blog called Rantingprofs that examined how terrorists engaged in random acts of violence to achieve their long-term political ends. How well did that strategy work?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Terrorism targets the political will of a country, so they weren\u2019t attacking things in Baghdad after the U.S. intervention because they thought they had a real chance to win on the battlefield. Al Qaeda in Iraq understood they would never be able to defeat U.S. forces militarily. What they were going to do was to blow up enough stuff \u2013 and enough of our people \u2013 to convince the Americans to go home.<\/p>\n

Part of that strategy was always visual; they wanted to blow up things on camera. Their efforts to manipulate the professional press coverage were always a key to making that strategy work. That is not to say journalists reporting those events should be blamed for aiding them, in effect, by doing their jobs. It\u2019s just that terrorists understood the nature of the Western press and were gaming it.<\/p>\n

ISIS seems to have a different use for Western journalists: to kill them on camera and post the brutality on the Internet. What is their objective?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In the 1980s, a reporter could tell a terrorist, \u201cI am here to tell your story,\u201d and that statement served as their protection. Today, that protection is gone because terrorists can tell their story themselves. They can take their own footage, edit it and upload it. That ability allows them to use the reporter as a kind of prop for a new form of psychological warfare.<\/p>\n

If they kill a reporter and film that death themselves, they can get more coverage than ever before by using platforms like Twitter and YouTube and Instagram. That is the motive behind it. These videos are a faster way of spreading fear and radicalizing and recruiting new converts with the added advantage of not having any journalistic filter to muddy the message.<\/p>\n

You have students in your current course on \u201cWar and Culture\u201d watching ISIS videos. Why?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

We are not looking at graphic depictions of violence. We are looking at what I call the softer side of ISIS. Part of what ISIS is trying to represent in many of the videos is how happy people are in the areas that they control and how happy they are to have joined the brotherhood. They depict ISIS fighters feeding ice cream to little kids. They also show, with great reverence and respect, the dead bodies of ISIS members who died as martyrs.<\/p>\n

They are spreading a vision of Islam that says you please God by killing people, a vision we know the vast majority of Muslims would be horrified by. Yet, the videos are replete with religious symbols all Muslims would recognize as a way to inspire a growing number of them to join the movement. If you miss those symbols, you miss the point of what is going on with a lot of those videos.<\/p>\n

Is the United States doing enough to counteract these ISIS communication strategies?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I can only speak of the effort I\u2019ve seen in the State Department\u2019s \u201cThink Again, Turn Away\u201d campaign (see twitter.com\/ThinkAgain_DOS), and it just isn\u2019t going to get the job done. It isn\u2019t aggressive enough, in the sense that it is not producing the quantity of videos needed. And these videos are not effective in getting to the core of the ISIS videos to neutralize their underlying message.<\/p>\n

For instance, a video showing Christian, Jewish and Yazidi children who have been killed also has to make the argument that these children do not deserve to be killed. Similarly, the campaign advertises to would-be recruits that they might die if they join ISIS. That doesn\u2019t help when their recruiting material advertises that joining ISIS is a chance to become a martyr. So we will have to dramatically up our game if we are going to beat them at their own game.<\/p>\n

We can say over and over that the vast majority of Muslims are completely peaceful people who want nothing to do with ISIS and groups like them. Obviously that\u2019s true. ISIS has only about 30,000 members. But we have to look at what they have done. We have to deal with the fact that there are thousands of people around the world who ISIS continues to pull into their vision.<\/p>\n

By Gary Moss, Gazette<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At a teach-in with students on Sept. 12, 2001, communication studies professor Cori Dauber told the students she feared the 9\/11 attacks would become the defining event for their generation \u2013 \u201ctruly another Pearl Harbor\u201d \u2013 yet strangely different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":9254,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fine-arts-humanities","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47002,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9241\/revisions\/47002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}