Abstract

It was Edward Said who once defined an intellectual as someone who can speak truth to power (1993)[i]. Writing from a French perspective, Régis Debray, in his book Pouvoir intellectuel (1979) proposed the existence of three historical stages for the dissemination of  ideas by intellectuals in modernity. These were: the period of the university; the period of the printed journal and that of television. This article advocates that we have now entered a fourth period of intellectual representation, that of the Internet. This came into being in the late 1990s and the conflict over Kosovo would serve as the first time the Internet would be used as a vehicle for the dissemination of ideas between individuals in states that were in conflict with each other, in what has also been described as the first Internet war (Ignatieff, 1999). Clearly the role of the Internet in time of conflict has moved on since then, with the term Cyberwarfare emerging as a modern day phenomenon of the information society. What this paper sets out to do is provide an historical illustration of how the Internet was used by the Serbian intelligentsia in the period that Mary Kaldor has since designated as that of the new wars (2000).

Key Words: Conflict, Cultural Politics, Identity, Internet, New Media, New Wars

^JCMRJournal of Communication and Media Research, Vol. 2, No. 1, April 2010, 1 – 16.

About the author

Robert Hudson is Professor of European History and Cultural Politics and Director of the Identity, Conflict & Representation Research Centre, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Technology, University of Derby, Kedleston Road, Derby DE22 IGB, United Kingdom.

Full Article

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Article Citation

Hudson, R. (2010): Conflict, identity and the internet: Use of the internet by Serbian intelligentsia during the 1999 Kosovo conflict. Journal of Communication and Media Research 2(1): 1 – 16.