A decade of WikiLeaks: So what?

In this article, I consider how WikiLeaks has gone through a series of metamorphoses: from a small, relatively unknown website devoted to giving whistleblowers space to release their material to one of the best-known activist organizations in the world. In addition, it has gone from being an organization that began by operating as an alternative to the mainstream media, to one that worked with the mainstream, and then to a group that devoted a fair degree of energy to attacking the media. I argue that during this tumultuous period of change, WikiLeaks needs to be understood in relation to its impact upon a number of fundamental relationships central to the study of media and journalism. I use WikiLeaks to consider the importance of studying sites and organizations as cultural artefacts, and to examine the idea that ‘everything which has been collected on it, becomes attached to it-like shells on a rock by the seashore forming a whole incrustation’. Academic research itself is, of course, part of this incrustation.