The arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the hirsute former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, revived memories of the 1990s Balkan wars, especially the massacres of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, for which Karadizic has been charged with murder by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. The cruelty again being displayed from those wars is appalling and yet one of the most striking aspects of the video clips and photographs is how faded the period and its imagery now feels. After all, these were brutal conflicts on the European mainland in which vast numbers of civilians—as many as 250,000 by some accounts—were killed and millions of people were displaced. These were wars, which ended barely more than a decade ago, on a scale comparable to Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are many reasons why the Yugoslav wars feel remote. Secretary of State James Baker was widely quoted as saying in the war’s early years, “We don’t have a dog in this fight.” Eventually, during the Clinton administration and using NATO as the framework, the United States did take the lead in brokering an accord. But the 1990s were the years, after the end of the Cold War and before Al Qaeda and Iraq, when Americans could justify the instinct to let conflicts around the world run their own course. The unraveling of Yugoslavia was, at its height, of only marginal interest to most Americans, and the 1994 slaughters in Rwanda barely even registered at the time in policy circles or the public.

Another probable reason for the sense of distance is that in the mid-1990s, imagery was so much less available than it has since become. The Internet and the World Wide Web were not in such common use, there was no YouTube, Google, blogs, and related paraphernalia, and there was much less round-the-clock cable news, including the international networks such as the BBC. Remembering Srebrenica and the summer of 1995, I recall newspaper and weekly magazine coverage, public radio and some network television news. That’s a lot, but it was “appointment viewing” instead of the endless loop of information (and trivia) now supplied from the moment we switch on our computers, PDAs, and cell phones in the morning until we shut them down at night, regularly checking our bookmarks and peering at videography of every kind. The Yugoslav catastrophe was a big story, but not an indelible one.

Obviously, the number of people who spend their days immersed in images of global mayhem is still a tiny fraction of the population overall. But the point is that every kind of imagery is, at least potentially, so much more available than it was even fifteen years ago. What impact does the pervasiveness of what we can see have on our perception of events as they unfold? And how vivid will these images and impressions seem a few years from now?

The power and omnipresence of images means that the contest to control them is becoming more intense, especially in war zones where the United States is involved. Just as Vietnam became known as the first living-room war because of television, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the first of the developed Internet era. We’ve seen a seemingly nonstop reel of ravaged Iraqis and Afghans in the years of these conflicts, but very few images of American GIs, dead, dying, or in agony. Last weekend, the New York Times told the story of a freelance photographer who was banned from covering the Marines after he posted pictures on the Web of unidentifiable GIs killed in a suicide bombing. The paradox is that, with so many delivery systems providing images, we may be getting less than we would if the coverage was more limited and therefore, perhaps, less a matter of official concern and control. The New York Times story said that a recent count turned up “only half a dozen Western photographers” now covering the war in Iraq, raising yet another significant issue: we have the capacity to receive images, but in Iraq at least, fewer of them of Americans are being gathered for our consideration.

Radovan Karadzic was a profoundly evil man and a character in an especially savage, modern, but, for Americans, faraway war. For all that history can teach us through pictures delivered in ever-increasing means of display, it is not at all clear yet whether these images will add much to our long-term grasp of events. Let’s hope they do.

Peter Osnos is Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation. Sign-up to receive Osnos' columns weekly by email here. Read past columns here.