The Blogs of War
War is online, and it's public. It is no longer the sole burden of soldiers and commanders. We, as a community, are involved in this war, whether we like it or not. And we are not a small community either. The blogging community has well surpassed 20 million and keeps growing exponentially. Search engines like MSN, Yahoo! and Google show results of user generated content and blogs alongside more traditional media sources. In response to this growth, Google took it a step further and launched a blog-centric search engine. In other words, milblogs cannot be any more public.
The appeal of milblogs is the insight it gives the reader into formerly forbidden, unknown worlds. They bring to life real accounts of another fascinating experience foreign to our own spheres. These milbloggers give us a superficial peek at how it feels to be on the front line, in the trenches of war: we can experience life through them in a very real-time way. But doesn’t this then make us liable?
Perhaps that is what milblogger Chris Missick meant when he stated that “the implications of thought expressed by soldiers daily could be explosive.” Involving the community in such an intimate and real-time way implies that the government will have to be prepared for the consequences, since it will be held accountable for blog content. The leakage of digital images of Abu Ghraib caused an international uproar and a domestic scandal. The damages and consequential investigations caused by such information, clearly demonstrate how powerful and explosive information can be.
But the real question is: how should the government respond to this medium? Should the government be defensive and regulate this communication forum? Large companies embrace blogs in such a way that they continuously monitor and research this online community like it was a living organism; companies interpret blogs as the voice of the people and rely on them in order to avoid PR disasters. Big businesses are forced to review the consumer complaints, because they simply cannot afford to ignore these “rants”.
The Pentagon is investigating the implications of milblogging in the war zones, and the type of regulations it will impose on Internet communication. However, it should take the large corporations and their blog-friendly relations as models. In a large company, there is some information that is confidential similar to the type of information that would violate Army regulations such as military operations. However, other thoughts and topics of these milblogs do not violate regulations and can be of a benefit to the military and the DOD in the same way that blogs offer valuable feedback to businesses.
The essential issue is that the DOD will need to accept the milbloggers as a powerful and beneficial community, a representation of the voice of the people. It will need to be open to the idea of redefining the private sphere of the combat zone into the public space. It will need to recognize the fact that in the 21st century, mainstream media (MSM) is rejected in favor of citizen-journalism. It is all related to the concept of the Trust Barometer: we tend to trust the average person who is just like the rest of us. Essentially this idea is what drives the popularity of the milblogs: he’s one of us, I can identify with him, and hence I can trust him. Why rely on MSM corporations that are so far removed from my world? People just trust journalists less. The implications of this type of power is best described by milblogger Blackfive, he states that “ he can mobilize thousands of people and their wallets, all from a wireless hot spot at his local Starbucks.”
But with this amount of power comes responsibility, and since citizen-journalists and milbloggers have usurped media sovereignty, the line between authenticity and fallacy can easily become blurred. It’s a double-edged sword: will the average blogger be accountable for what he reports? Will the facts be honored? Is citizen-journalism a system without any verification?
One can argue that the beauty of it blogging is if someone disagrees with you, they have the full right to do so, and they have equal power and voice. There is no hierarchy between a blogger and the audience, since the idea of an audience has been obliterated from this medium, and has in effect become transient.
The Pentagon will need to answer these questions and many more, because of the potential volatile nature of milblog content. But it will have to eventually come face to face with the blogging community and create some type of relationship with it. It is inevitable in the digital age that the combat zone will remain in the public sphere. The war is public after all, and the Internet is No Man's Land.
