Al Jazeera – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Encircling Empire: Report #19—Militainment

Encircling Empire Reports is a selection of essays, blog posts, and news reports covering a given time period, providing links and representative extracts or key passages from each resource, usually focusing on certain countries/continents and/or processes in each report. The focus of the reports ranges from imperialism discussed in broad strokes, to specific facets of […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Now on YouTube: Libya–Race, Empire, and the Invention of Humanitarian Emergency

While the audio is somewhat clearer, and the video motion is “smoother” for those using older computers, the disadvantage is that the video had to be cut into two parts given restrictions placed on my account by YouTube. Overall, however, the file sizes are smaller than they were originally, so the video should also be […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

2010 In Review

2010 has been a great year for Zero Anthropology, with so much to celebrate that it’s difficult to know where to begin (and when to stop). From July onward we witnessed a steep comeback in terms of the number of our on-site readers, eventually breaking all of our records to the extent that now for […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Militainment: U.S. Military Propaganda in the News Media, Hollywood, and Video Games

“Propaganda is at its most effective when the audience does not know it is being manipulated and one of the best, glitziest examples of that is when propaganda is delivered on the big screen in the guise of a Hollywood blockbuster.”–The Listening Post, 12 June 2010 Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post had an excellent review […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Coming soon on Al Jazeera.net

Starting next month, I will be joining Al Jazeera as the author of a series of monthly columns, beginning with articles on issues raised here, dealing with soft power, social media, digital activism, and almost certainly something about the Minerva Research Initiative and the Human Terrain System. I am very thankful to Al Jazeera’s editors […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Interviewed Today on Al Jazeera: Social Media, Soft Power, and American Empire

Al Jazeera Arabic invited me to participate in its hour-long program, In Depth (19 April 2010; 3:00-4:00pm EST), and I was happy to do so via satellite earlier this evening, hosted by Ali Al-Dafiri, with my fellow guest, Mohamad Takriti. One of the main topics that the host of the program, Ali Al-Dafiri, asked me […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Looking Back at June 2009, Looking Forward

June was one of the best months yet for this blog (with hidden ironies for me), thanks in large part to the article, America’s Iranian Twitter Revolution, published just days after the street protests began in Tehran, alongside the explosion of communication about the events on Twitter. So far that article has received 5,100 views, […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Tweets of Conflict in the New Online War Zone

As the new year begins with a renewal of the obsessive media attention to “terror” and “Muslim extremists,” one of the two terrors mentioned in the previous post ending 2008, one of the novelties has been the expansion and projection of the conflict into new media like Twitter. I am still new to Twitter, which […]