Exploring old and new media: Comparing military blogs to Civil War letters

Abstract

Comparing new media to older media can help identify fundamental uses and perceived effects of communication technology. This study analyzes one soldier's milblog (military blog) and one Civil War soldier's letters and diaries to understand how milblogs compare to older forms of soldier correspondence. Despite the overt distinction in technical systems utilized, this analysis demonstrated that the communications through the milblog and letters/diaries share tremendous similarities. In composing their correspondence through these distinct media, each soldier maintained similar anxieties over technological affordances, perceptions of their audience, and motivations for corresponding. Though there were certainly differences in style and content, little that was done or accomplished via the milblog was without direct precedent in the Civil War letters and diaries.

“Hero-Worship” or “Manipulative and Oversimplifying”: How America’s Current and Former Military Service Members Perceive Military-Related News Reporting

“…Given such issues with mainstream media coverage, it is not surprising that many in the military have turned to new media technologies to tell their own story. Such service-member-created media has also been studied, and research has considered military blogs and letters (Shapiro & Humphreys, 2013), visual media (Kennedy, 2009;Struk, 2011), video (McSorley, 2012;Silvestri, 2013), and the differences between first-person accounts distributed via social media and traditional news coverage (Maltby & Thornham, 2016;Parry & Thuminim, 2017;Silvestri, 2015).…”

Confessions and Tweets: Social Media and Everyday Experience in the Israel Defense Forces

“…The penchant for these soldiers to write their missives to kin back home points to the ways in which “peer to peer friendships” on more contemporary social networking sites mirror the “kin-based networks” that are so characteristic of home and work life (Miller, 2012, p. 147). As Shapiro and Humphreys (2013, p. 1152) have noted despite technological innovations, this historical material reflects many of the same themes found in the military blogs of contemporary American soldiers. Likewise, the social media posts of Israeli draftees and junior officers on sites such as Facebook provide a means of “writing their version of war and [mitigating] some of the challenges of soldiering,” in ways that bypass (though wink at) official IDF regulations and policies (Shapiro & Humphreys, 2013, p. 1165).…”

“…Social media sites offer soldiers an outlet to express their hopes, desires, fears, and frustrations regarding mandatory military service in ways that invite comment from their peers. To be sure, soldiers have long expressed frustrations with the more onerous aspects of military service (Shapiro & Humphrey, 2013), yet they had done so in ways that were more or less isolated from the everyday experiences of other units. Soldiers in previous wars had no real capacity to share those experiences across disparate theaters of operation and in many cases even beyond their own individual units.…”

‘When he’s in Afghanistan it’s like our world/his world’: mediating military experience

“…Materials produced or co-produced by serving personnel have also attracted recent academic attention. In addition to the work on memoirs and fiction (Robinson, 2011; Sylvester, 2014; Woodward and Jenkings, 2012), we note research on letters and blogs (Shapiro and Humphreys, 2013). Others have explored the motivations for soldiers to capture their own experiences in visual form (sketches, photographs, video), both in terms of the antecedents for such practices and the more recent public sharing and networked nature of often disturbing imagery (Kennedy, 2009; Struk, 2011).…”