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Military Report: Let's Co-Opt Blogs

Wired's Danger Room has found a 2006 report titled "Blogs and Military Information Strategy," written for the Joint Special Operations University. It has some interesting ideas about how the military can deal with that dang blogosphere.

Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence... to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog. In some cases, their talents might be redirected toward operating blogs as part of an information campaign. If a military blog offers valuable information that is not available from other sources, it could rise in rank fairly rapidly.

Members of the armed forces need "cultural and linguistic training" before they can blog? Are they serious? The military is filled with cynical 20-somethings—it's built for blogging! There are hundreds, probably thousands, of military men and women already doing it. Of course, they're doing it in good faith, which is not what this report is suggesting.

A military spokesman says the comments were "not 'actionable', merely thought provoking." I don't believe it. Which prominent blogger is a undercover secret agent? Any guesses?

Posted by Jonathan Stein on 04/01/08 at 7:26 AM | Comments (1) | Email | Print

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