Women in the Military: Old Stories, New Media

Women serving in the U.S. armed forces share a long and storied history, but it's just over the last few decades that their roles on the front lines have increasingly merged with those of their male counterparts. Along with countless tales of commitment and courage, women’s military service has generated ongoing friction and intolerance from comrades who consider armed conflict a man’s world. As anticipated by those harboring a male-dominant worldview, women’s service has opened the door to dissension among the ranks, lawsuits, and unwelcome Congressional tampering. This Website samples the range of cultural triumphs and tragedies celebrated and endured by women in the military. It is dedicated to the women in uniform who wish to serve their country with no more—or less—than the deference earned by the service of men in uniform.

Representing an exhibition of cultural objects accessed entirely on the Internet through search engines and hyperlinks, this site was created in fulfillment of the New Media Exhibition Website project assigned by Dr. Mark Pepper, Utah Valley University, for ENGL 3340, Digital Document Design. My rhetorical analysis of the objects exhibited on this site is based on the course text, The Language of the New Media by Lev Manovich. In this work, Manovich examines the roles of digital technology in communicating cultural experience in context with technologies used to generate earlier representational visual forms, from traditional drawing, painting, and sculpture to modern photography, animation, and cinema. In doing so, the author demonstrates our reliance on much of the same language used for those traditional forms to make sense of our present-day interaction with digital representation, visual and conceptual. 

While our tendency to apply familiar terms to emerging cultural trends is natural and even sensible, Manovich contends that our current language describing the causes and effects of computerized media, i.e., new media, is insufficient in understanding our relationship to digital technology and its relationship to us. His aim is to overcome this deficiency by developing the language of “the emergent conventions, recurrent design patterns, and key forms of new media” (12). He begins by classifying the visual objects that represented past cultural understanding together with current information and images we now generate and access on digital platforms as new media objects (15). Yet even when a new media object is nothing more than a digitized old-media image, its transcoding employs “the most fundamental quality of new media that has no historical precedent—programmability” (47).

The new media objects populating my exhibition represent videos, memes, and blogs created, altered, and/or hyperlinked by individuals and organizations of varying degrees of digital prowess and/or cultural sensitivity. “As is the case with all cultural representations,” Manovich advises, “new media representations are also inevitably biased. They represent/construct some features of physical reality at the expense of others, one worldview among many, one possible system of categories among numerous others” (15-16). Each represents a cultural interface (70) designed to inform the culture it addresses, and as such, each succeeds, albeit not necessarily with the intended result of the conveyors… Enjoy.