What a hard topic for me to broach.
As many of you know, I am a former Air Force officer, and I deployed at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was one of the people the military charged with helping the Old Media tell the story of what was happening. That experience seems like it’s from a different lifetime when I look at the war through Web 2.0.
Because I still have many ties to people in the military — many of whom are deployed as I ponder this — it is almost impossible for me not to have a strong personal reaction to the coverage provided by so many people for and against the war, regardless of their proximity to it or risk associated with it.
The first thing I listened to was the podcast done by Swarthmore College students. Their idea to go directly to the people in Iraq to get interviews with them about the war is an interesting one. It offers a voice to people who would scarcely have one otherwise. First person accounts of what life has become are hard to dispute. Hopefully the listeners remember that even those accounts are from people with biases.
Some of the military blogs were entertaining and informative. In particular, I enjoyed Army of Dude. I followed several of his links, and one I recommend to everyone is Lt Nixon Rants, written by a smart, funny Navy lieutenant who does a great job of balancing arguments for and against the war.
Kevin Sites brought home some realities of war: realities that most people — including me — don’t want to think about. In war, people die. Some die in ways society has deemed justified during wartime. Some die very differently.
Web 2.0 has brought us pictures, sights and sounds of war and people’s thoughts on it and made us much more aware. The question I still have, though, is, are we any smarter?
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