instant wars - instagrammed into instant propaganda.

Social media and smart phones are revolutionizing photography.  Together they've radically democratized photography, making it easy for billions of people to make photographs that can be seen by billions more all over the world.  Most of these photos are about parties and pets and matter only to the people who made them and, maybe, their families and friends.  But some are about much bigger things.  Some are about war.

[Click on any image to see a larger version.]

This revolution is no secret.  Stephen Mayes, the managing director of the VII photo agency, made these points just this week, in an interview posted on Wired's Raw File blog.  And he's certainly not alone.

As fast as the changes have been, over the last decade or so, they've accelerated madly over the last few days.  As any historian will tell you, war changes everything.

There's always been more to war than bombs and bullets.  Words and images are weapons, too.  They're the raw material of the propaganda that's designed to strengthen friends and undermine enemies.

Propaganda has been a part of every war that history knows anything about, and creating and disseminating it has largely been the job of professionals -- war doctors, priests, reporters, photographers, politicians, bureaucrats.

Social media and smart phones have let amateurs in on the action.

People are using these images in a variety of ways.  It's not about reasoned discourse -- that's not something at which images excel.  Instead they're about emotions -- anger and grief -- about demonising the enemy and about justifying the actions of one's own side.

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