Strategic, Spectacular Transparency in WikiLeaks

For the next ECREA 2012 session, I'm attending a panel which starts with Christian Christensen's presentation on WikiLeaks. His interest is in how WikiLeaks has been engaging with mainstream media in its publishing of leaked content; WikiLeaks relied on mainstream outlets as a means of summarising and promoting such materials.

This relationship with mainstream journalism might position WikiLeaks as a form of radical media, subject to some very aggressive rhetoric from the US government and other interested parties which refuse to classify it and its participants as journalists (which would afford it constitutional protection in the US, of course).

WikiLeaks engaged with mainstream newspapers and magazines, rather than with alternative news sites (or, notably, Arab-language media), bolstering their reputation to some extent; this can be seen as a kind of Faustian bargain which soon failed. As it failed, WikiLeaks lost any potential suburban audience.

This approach, then, also means that WikiLeaks moved away from truly alternative forms of organisation – for example because the media collaborations meant that information was subject to strategic, staggered releases, rather than being released at once and in a fully transparent manner. Such distribution also worked against the potential to democratise data and archives by fully releasing them.

WikiLeaks has highlighted the continuing importance of nation states, too; their implementations of freedom of speech, press, and information laws had a direct effect on how WikiLeaks could operate. WikiLeaks' approach to transparency is informed by direct action, rather than the machinery of freedom of information; at the same time, WikiLeaks also operationalises transparency in a strategic fashion, and has had an effect (a chilling effect, at that) on governmental approaches to transparency.

WikiLeaks' release of information is tactical and designed to maximise impact; there is an internal tension between the site's push for transparency and its attempts to make its releases as spectacular as possible. The real meaning of the site may not be in content, but in the symbolism of the act of releasing it. At the same time, as the Bradley Manning case can attest, there are real consequences of such acts.