The Blogs of War
The Blogs of War“The Blogs of War”
Everyone has curiosity about what is going on in the war and why war starts. The best way to find out this information is listening to military blogs. If you have the same level of curiosity that many Americans have wondered all the time what is a military blog, who writes them, what are the pro and cons of military blogs? In the passage, “The Blogs of War” John Hockenberry explains these points with firsthand accounts of soldiers in the war in Iraq.
In the passage, Hockenberry defines these military bloggers aka milbloggers as would-be poets. Would-be poets offer unprecedented real-time, real-life windows on war and the people who wage it. This meaning soldiers that sound like poets expressing their feelings and views of the war in blogs rather than in poems. “Black five”, a former army intelligence officer and paratrooper says that milblogging may be the result of an explosion of communications technology throughout the military and an increase in brainpower among the lower ranks. Basically this means when email, Skype and other ways to communicate started being brought around, it became easier for soldiers at war to keep their family, friends and others around the world updated on what is going with them. This allowed someone to think more in depth to figure and say “Since I can update my loved ones about what is going on why not give the world a front row seat on what is going on at war?” Therefore, military blogs are blogs written by soldiers to keep the people updated with info about the war from their point of view without restrictions and censorship.
There are many pros and cons when dealing with milblogging. The biggest con is that it can give up secret locations of your team’s position while at war. It can be seen in the words of lieutenant colonel and DOD spokesperson Christopher Conway explains it the best, “Before, you would have to shake down your soldiers for matches that might light up and betray a position. Today, every...