Social Media, Gender and the Mediatisation of War: Exploring the German Armed Forces’ Visual Representation of the Afghanistan Operation on Facebook

Studies on the mediatisation of war point to attempts of governments to regulate the visual perspective of their involvements in armed conflict – the most notable example being the practice of ‘embedded reporting’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This paper focuses on a different strategy of visual meaning-making, namely, the publication of images on social media by armed forces themselves. Specifically, we argue that the mediatisation of war literature could profit from an increased engagement with feminist research, both within Critical Security/Critical Military Studies and within Science and Technology Studies that highlight the close connection between masculinity, technology and control. The article examines the German military mission in Afghanistan as represented on the German armed forces’ official Facebook page. Germany constitutes an interesting, and largely neglected, case for the growing literature on the mediatisation of war: its strong antimilitarist political culture makes the representation of war particularly delicate. The paper examines specific representational patterns of Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan and discusses the implications which arise from what is placed inside the frame of visibility and what remains out of its view

The role of clustering on the emergence of efficient social conventions

Multiagent models of the emergence of social conventions have demonstrated that global conventions can arise from local coordination processes without a central authority. We further develop and extend previous work to address how and under what conditions emerging conventions are also socially efficient, i.e. better for all agents than potential alternative conventions. We show with computational experiments that the clustering coefficient of the networks within which agents interact is an important condition for efficiency. We also develop an analytical approximation of the simulation model that sheds some light to the original model behavior. Finally, we combine two decision mechanisms, local optimization and imitation, to study the competition between efficient and attractive actions. Our main result is that in clustered networks a society converges to an efficient convention and is stable against invasion of sub-optimal conventions under a much larger range of conditions than in a non-clustered network. On the contrary, in non-clustered networks the convention finally established heavily depends on its initial support