Tweeting Every U.S. Drone Strike

Daily Intelligencer ?@intelligencer

.@joecoscarelli interviews Josh Begley, the guy behind @dronestream, which has been tweeting every US drone strike:


Tweeting Every U.S. Drone Strike Is Taking Way Longer Than Expected

____ When 28-year-old New York University grad student Josh Begley first decided he would tweet more than a decade of reported U.S. military drone strikes and their aftermaths in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, he thought he could finish rapid-fire in ten minutes. Four weeks later — with his pace slowed a bit over the holidays — Begley is just nearing the end of 2010. The @dronestream project, conceived as part of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, is a follow-up to Begley's Drone+, an iPhone app mapping every drone strike in real-time that was banned by Apple, and draws constant, methodical attention to a hush-hush reality. Wondering just what Begley was hoping to accomplish with what's now become an extended part-time job, we e-mailed him a few questions.

Why tweet all the reported drone strikes if they’ve already been reported? Where did this idea originate?

The idea came from a conversation with [NYU professor and media theorist] Douglas Rushkoff. In his class, Narrative Lab, we talk a lot about narrativity and the way stories are told on the web. It also came from a love of how Teju Cole uses Twitter; his "small fates" project is so beautiful and devastating at the same time.

When I started reading all the reports of drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, one thing stood out: the flatness of language. There are words like "militant" and "compound" and "hideout," which come to mean very little when you read them in such volume. I sincerely didn't know what the contours of our drone war looked like. So I wanted to dig into the data set about every reported U.S. drone attack and try to surface that information in a new way. (Dronestagram has been a big inspiration in this regard.)

Dronestream turned into more of a journalistic feed, of course — and you're right to say that the strikes have already been reported. I'm just pulling them from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and inserting them into a different medium.


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