Military Report: Secretly 'Recruit or Hire Bloggers'

Posted by Dennis G. Jerz on April 6, 2008 9:28 PM | | Comments (0) ~
Last year, I enjoyed reading In the Clickstream, a speculative blog-based thinkpiece from Mike Edwards, who teaches composition at the U.S. Military Academy. With Mike, I participated in a workshop at the 4Cs, where I got to meet two majors who are also composition instructors.  Both my brother and sister work for defense contractors, and I grew up just outside Washington D.C., so I'm not a stranger to the culture of the defense industry, but it was a very interesting experience hearing military instructors talk about their experiences teaching literature and composition officers-in-training.  One of the many things I picked up at this conference was some cultural context to help me to interpret this piece from Wired:

Since the start of the Iraq war, there's been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs -- and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops' time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad. 

This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, "Blogs and Military Information Strategy," offers a third approach -- co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering," write the report's co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.



Categories: Academia , Culture , Ethics , Government , Social_Software , Weblogs , Writing

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