Studio Session I Reflection - Carolyn Schmitt

During the first Studio Session on WikiLeaks, I researched the basics of the organization and the major figures related to it. Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning are all key figures that I anticipate will be important in future research. In particular, I think the exposed "Collateral Murder" video would be a significant media text to analyze in the project, because it is often cited by articles as having a major impact upon its release. My group discussed the background knowledge that we previously had about WikiLeaks from other Media Studies courses, which helped direct the research done in our group. One question that I posed to my group towards the end of class was, "would people in the United States care as much as they do about WikiLeaks and complete transparency if no U.S. content was shared by Snowden and Manning?" It's fascinating that WikiLeaks is a global issue, but became prominent in the US media when the exposure is about the US.

From the general-level research I did in class, the theme of private versus public became immediately apparent. One thing that I found to be particularly intriguing was that while WikiLeaks promotes transparency and openness, WikiLeaks as an organization is so private and anonymous. I think this creates an interesting dynamic wherein to reveal massive amounts of confidential information to the public, one must be extremely private.

This dynamic stands in contrast to the trends of Social Media sharing. Typically, the "public" person releases only certain small amount of information that he or she consciously chooses. For example, on sites such as Facebook, one does not allow for complete transparency, such as providing a home address, but may share a photo of the exterior of his or her home. This sort of filter may be comparable to the editing and shortening of extensive documents and film that WikiLeaks prepares and sends to news organizations. I anticipate exploring this public/private sharing dynamic throughout this project.