War in the Smartphone Age, book talk and discussion with Matthew Ford

The Emergent Nonfiction Lab (part of the Counter Evidentiary Futures project) at the University of Salford welcomes Matthew Ford (Associate Professor, Department of War Studies, Swedish Defence University) for this online talk on his new book War in the Smartphone Age: Conflict, Connectivity and the Crises at Our Fingertips, with respondent Miglė Bareikytė (Assistant Professor of Digital Studies, European University Viadrina).

Thanks to smartphones, war is everywhere, all the time. Anyone can view, analyse and comment on photos, videos or other warzone media. Where did this technology come from? And what does it mean for the future of war?

This book explains why you see what you do on your phone, and how these devices shape our knowledge, conduct and representation of war in the 2020s. It shows why smartphones are indispensable in peace and wartime: every device is a potential weapon, lines blur between war and daily life, and conflict becomes a shared digital experience. Social media platforms displace state-controlled narratives, amplifying violence and shaping war’s legitimacy. Apps democratise conflict, enabling anyone to identify and attack perceived enemies. As the Ukraine war has shown, this new reality involves complex, unevenly distributed infrastructures, merging civilian communication with military targeting.

With war accelerating beyond our comprehension, militaries have raced to benefit from and adapt to the smartphone age. Matthew Ford explores critical questions about today’s hyper-connected battlefield.

Matthew Ford is an academic focusing on war and the data-saturated battlefields of the 21st century. His previous book - Radical War (Hurst & Co, London and Oxford University Press, New York 2022) - with Professor Andrew Hoskins from Edinburgh University traces war’s data trajectories, from the epicentres of battle out to distant parts of the world, into history, memory and as it is memed into the platforms that mediate digital culture. Matthew's first book, 'Weapon of Choice - Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation', is an analysis of military innovation and culture and was published by Hurst & Co, London and Oxford University Press, New York in 2017. Matthew is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK); an Associate of the IWM Institute; a senior non-resident fellow at the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida; an Honorary Historical Consultant to the Royal Armouries (UK); a former visiting scholar at the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA; a former West Point fellow; and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal for Military History.

Miglė Bareikytė holds the Chair of Digital Studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), where she is a dual member of the Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences and the European New School of Digital Studies (ENS). She has been researching digitalisation for many years, with a special focus on Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2022, she has been leading the CRC 1187 project “War Sensing”, which involves investigating civilian media and data practices, digital war witnessing on Telegram messenger, and AI imaginaries during Russia’s war against Ukraine in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Siegen, the Center for Urban History in Lviv, the University of Bern, and beyond. In addition, Bareikytė’s research extends to the study of historical and contemporary disinformation practices and conflicts in platform economies.