In the battle(field): the US military, blogging and the struggle for authority

One of the most noted communication phenomena that grew out of the second war against Iraq has been soldiers’ use of social media such as blogs and photo/video filesharing sites to distribute their own grassroots, unsanitized views of the conflict. The rise of this form of media content and dissemination represents a window for seeing into the social relations of the military arena as it responds to a new communications environment in which an agreed upon set of practices has not yet been reached (Andén-Papadopoulos, 2009; Christensen, 2008). In this commentary, I examine these conflicts over the role of social media, with a focus on blogs in particular, in publicly communicating about war. Practices surrounding their usage are still in flux and key institutions such as the Pentagon appear to have been taken unawares by the arrival of these new communication tools, making this topic a particularly fertile area through which to consider the ways in which power is claimed and maintained within the military.