Thought it would be appropriate today to talk about what’s going on with military blogging. Last August, John Hockenberry explored the world of war blogging (or milblogging) at length in a Wired article, The Blogs of War. Hockenberry noted that war bloggers are not just recording events — rather, “they engage in the 21st-century contact sport called punditry, and like their civilian counterparts, follow few rules of engagement. They mobilize sympathizers to ship body armor to reserve units in combat, raise funds for families of wounded soldiers, deliver shoes to barefoot Afghani kids, and even take aim at media big shots.” He also drew a connection between the influence and prominence of milblogs and the few restrictions imposed on them by the military: what’s radical about milblogs is that “anyone can publicly post a dispatch, and if the Pentagon reads these accounts at all, it’s at the same time as the rest of us.” Still, Hockenberry added, even the bloggers themselves were feeling like the freedom they enjoyed wouldn’t last.
How right he was. Only a week after the article ran, the Army issued a memo to all personnel saying they were going to crack down on the milbloggers. It’s probably not a stretch to imagine that the Wired piece and a similar article in the Washington Post caught the eye of someone in the Public Relations office. According to an NPR story on the topic, some soldiers felt like the crackdown had a less to do with security than with the fact that some military bloggers were becoming increasingly sour about the war. Since the new regulations were released in October, several influential milblogs have been “vanished” from the web by the Army. One notable recent example is Daniel Goetz’s All The King’s Horses, a eloquently written blog by a patriotic but disenchanted soldier in Iraq. Goetz’s final post, on October 22, was a creepily Orwellian retraction (literally, since he titled it Double Plus Ungood) of what he’d been blogging in his final weeks:
“For the record, I am officially a supporter of the administration and of her policies. I am a proponent for the war against terror and I believe in the mission in Iraq…Furthermore, I have the utmost confidence in the leadership of my chain of command, including (but not limited to) the president George Bush and the honorable secretary of defense Rumsfeld. If I have ever written anything on this site or on others that lead the reader to believe otherwise, please consider this a full and complete retraction. I apologize for any misunderstandings that might understandably arise from this. Should you continue to have questions, please feel free to contact me through e-mail. I promise to respond personally to each, but it may take some time; my internet access has become restricted.”
There’s been a great deal of discussion of David’s fate in the blogosphere. Daniel’s girlfriend, who has been blogging herself in Daniel’s absence, posted his entired deleted blog on her own site.
Author Archives: lisa lynch
more on blogging and academe
Hi there, this is Lisa Lynch. I’m new to the Institute and I’ve introduced myself over on the Institute’s Next/Text site, where I’ll be spending much of my time. Come on by!
Just in time for Friday’s conference, this article from Inside Higher Ed describes a Nov. 2 blogspat that may adversely impact the academic career of one of the bloggers. According to Inside Higher Ed, the trouble began after Paul Deignan –a 41-year-old mechanical engineering Ph.D. candidate at Purduewho writes a blog called Info Theory — posted comments attacking the pro-choice posts of blogger Bitch PhD, a junior professor who won’t disclose the name of her university. Bitch Ph.D. deleted his comments:(according to a policy stated clearly on her site, she deletes rude comments and will ban the IP addresses of trolls. Before the posts were deleted, however, they attracted the attention of University of Northern Iowa history professor Wallace Hettle, who decided to report Deignan to his Ph.D. committee for unethical behavior.
Now Deignan wants to sue BOTH Hettle and Bitch Ph.D. for libel — Hettle for reporting him, and Bitch Ph.D for suggesting on her site that Deignan might have tried IP spoofing to suss out her identity.
This episode is troubling on many levels, but for me the most sinister aspect is the suggestion that this might represent the dark side of academic debate on blogs; increasingly, academics (and other folks, of course) may start to see one another as lawsuit fodder and will begin squirreling away blog entries as material evidence.
As much as I admire a knight in shining armor, I’m also troubled by Hettle’s actions. Deignan’s posts were really none of his Ph.D. committees’ business. If Deignan was really IP spoofing, than his behavior was criminal, not simply unethical, and Bitch Ph.D. could have pursued legal options. If he wasn’t spoofing? Academics consider themselves accountable to certain ethical standards, but (alas) politeness is usually not one of them. Apparently, Deignan’s advisors asked him to refrain from “exceeding his bounds on a private site.” But should they have? Is there a slippery slope here between reining in Deignan and establishing a policy banning blogging and/or commenting on blogs in academe?
weaving textbooks into the web
Mark Crane put forth an interesting possibility for digital textbooks in TechRhet Daily Digest Volume 2: Issue 74: “I’ve been thinking about ways to swap “playlists” of favorite online readings as a sort of virtual textbook, and it occured to me that social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and wurldbook might be a way to start to do this. For example, if you collected a series of links related to technical writing, you could publish that “playlist” to a service like del.icio.us and tag the readings as “tech comm” or “tech comm reader” or something for other people to use via a single url, perhaps.”
Mark’s idea is very exciting because it suggests a direction the future textbook might take as it learns to incorporate the vast and ever-expanding body of scholarship available on the web. An ephemeral “links” list could also be attached to a more durable body of content, like an ebook. The electronic textbook could offer these “playlists” as a dynamic index which would be continuously updated by the user community.