Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media. A distinctive tactical ethic and aesthetic that has emerged, which is culturally influential from MTV through to recent video work made by artists.
Tactical media are media of crisis, criticism and opposition.
But once the enemy has been named and vanquished it is the tactical practitioner whose turn it is to fall into crisis. More theoretically the identity politics, media critiques and theories of representation, that became the foundation of much western tactical media are themselves in crisis. These ways of thinking are widely seen as, carping and repressive remnants of an outmoded humanism. To believe that issues of representation are now irrelevant is to believe that the very real life chances of groups and individuals are not still crucially affected by the available images circulating in any given society. And the fact that we no longer see the mass media as the sole and centralized source of our self definitions might make these issues more slippery but that does not make them redundant.