Milblogs Stories Told First Hand
March 17, 2008 by alpersa
Military blogs are become a very popular means of communication. Just image the knowledge and information the world would have had military blogs been around during the civil war, the revolution war, even World War I and II. They are not only a great means of communication for soldiers with there families but it also gives other civilians a first hand look at the war.
Look at Vera Brittians famous memoir Testament of Youth it took her several decades after the war to be able to write a copy of her memoir in a way in which it satisfied her. However, over the period of several decades it can be questioned if she remembered and described events exactly as they happened. Had the technology and access been around for her to write a blog she may have been able to recall important details more vividly.
Also the book Slaughter House-Five would have greatly benefited had the technology of milblogs been around. Kurt Vonnegut even states in his book that it was difficult to remember details and had to relay on many of his friends for information. This makes you question how accurate history really can be.
Military blogs first appeared in 2001 after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. David D. Perlmutter a journalism professor at the University of Kansas states: “milbloggers go where no other man is going.” The popularity of blogs are continuing to grow history professors around the world are ecstatic this will give future generations a more accurate and exciting way to portray history.
When text books are being written in the next several centuries about the war in Iraq and ones that in the future there will be excerpts from military blogs this gives students the ability to have a first person narrative about what actually accrued during that time period.
Source
Milblogs in the News: Military blogs evolve in unexpceted way
Milblogging.com
17 March 2008
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I like your last paragraph about text books in the future, I think having excerpts from today’s blogs would be a great and provocative way to teach future generations about past wars and soldier’s experiences. I also think it would be interesting to see what these soldiers who are writing today would write if they published a book years after their experiences.
It’s an interesting idea that you bring up, certainly. Soldiers talking about these events as they happen can help give at least some better insight into what their experiences are. Yet I always think that, as pervasive as these military blogs are, they still don’t offer up the entire story, and honestly couldn’t when you get right down to it. For all that is said, there is much that remains unsaid, and for all that post, there are those that don’t post. I kind of go into the issue of the act of remembrance in one of my recent posts, and how sometimes people just choose to not remember or write things down as a sort of psychological defense mechanism.
Still, this is a very interesting writeup you’ve done.
I like the way you look at milblogs. I agree with you that milblogs are a good source of information for soldiers to have later on on when they are out of the war and decide to write a book about their experiences. Our memories are not always accurate even when we think they are because with age, our mentally capacity only decreases. For instance, if a war veteran who is being treated with Alzheimer’s disease decides later on in his life that he wants to share his adventure and all the good deeds that he did during his time in the war could use his milblogs instead of his memory to write a book.
One of the worries that I have about milblogs is its accessibility. Almost everything that we put on the internet can be accessed by anyone even when there is a block that says click her to make it private. Site managers and operators can look into anyone’s blog without their permission. Of course, they do this secretively. With that in mind, I think soldiers should always be careful on following guidelines set by the military when they make entries. If a mistake occurs, then it can affect them in a disastrous way such as making an entry involving secret military information.
The other day i was thinking about this same idea of not being able to make history very accurate because of the fact that it is like the game ‘telephone.’ The one in which a message is passed from person to person, and by the end of the phone line the meassage is drastically different. So, whenever we hear a history story told to us by a book or teacher we have to ask ourselves just how much of the story we are told is true and how much was a result of exaggeration or simply inaccurate sources. But now with the use of the internet we can have a direct connection to first hand experiences and therefore know that the stories are nothing but the truth. Well, ok maybe we still run into some stories that are not so true because they may be relied by unreliable sources. However, for the most part the information will be genuine and uncorrupted by the face of time and continuous re-telling of the story.
Good point. I think it’s easy to overlook the importance that miliblogs might have in our future interpretations of war. Modern technology kind of reminds me of that story about the frog in boiling water. We’ve all heard it: throw frog in boiling water and it jumps right out. Put the frog in cold water and heat it gradually, and it will cook to death. (This isn’t true, but that’s not the point.) When I look around I don’t notice any recent leaps forward technologically. Looking back though, I realize how far we have come in the last ten years. I never realized how inconvenient it was to carry around CDs until I got my iPod.
It’s easy for people to look at miliblogs as a fad right now, much like Myspace or Facebook, but it is very possible that these first-hand accounts of soldiers’ lives during a war are sought out relentlessly by future historians. The WWII letters we read might be thought of as the CDs (or even 8-tracks) of history, while miliblogs could be the new iPods. I guess it is one of those things that will reveal itself with time.
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