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Milblogs: Yesterday and Today |
| January 28th, 2008 under Blog Program, Military Programs, New Media. [ Comments: 13 ]
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The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is supposed to have said that “war is the father of all things.” It is absolutely true that where we live, the language we speak, the flags we fly, the beliefs we hold, the land we live on, and even our genetic heritage have been affected by who won and lost wars. Likewise, much of our technology was created for or improved toward making war. As I talk about in my newest book, BLOGWARS: THE NEW POLITICAL BATTLEGROUND, ( Oxford University Press, 2008), the commercial and public Internet is a case in point: It began in the 1960s as ARPANET, a project of the American military to create a decentralized “command and control network” that would survive nuclear war. Now the Internet is a crucial “front” in the war on terrorism. And, of great interest to people concerned about the future of war, from historians to generals, the warriors themselves are embracing the social interactive media, like blogs, that the Internet has spawned.
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NEW MEDIA OBSERVATIONS |
| January 25th, 2008 under Blog Program, Military Programs, New Media. [ Comments: none ]
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By Holt, Charles, AFIS-HQ/IC
November 6, 2006 I was transferred to American Forces Information Service, Department of Defense Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Internal Communication, New Media Directorate. My tasking was to figure out what was the New Media environment and how to engage. I studied U.S. Central Command’s Blogging Best Practices
published by Joint Forces Command as the Blogging Handbook and initiated contact with some of the bloggers listed there-in. Initially the discussion centered on how to get bloggers credentialed with the various public affairs and press offices and how to get bloggers embedded with troops downrange.
Some of the bloggers had limited success on their own, but it wasn’t until U.S. Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell and U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mark Fox decided to engage with bloggers did our discussions bear fruit. These initial engagements lead to the development of the Blogger’s Roundtable, the Blogger’s Roundtable website, and numerous bloggers embedded
with U.S. troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
February 2, 2007 the Department of Defense conducted the first Blogger’s Roundtable with U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mark Fox from Baghdad, Iraq via telephone conference call. What began as a once a week conference call with bloggers whose interest is the U.S. military and DoD operations has grown into an average of once a day conference calls with a wider variety of subject matter experts but primarily still focusing on the Global War on Terror and SME’s and
decision-makers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During this time I have studied the New Media terrain and followed what has been happening in traditional media in response and reaction to developments in technology. What follows are my observations on the changing mediascape.
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