The digital mundane: social media and the military

Abstract

This article draws on empirical data with British military personnel in order to investigate what we call the digital mundane in military life. We argue that social media and smartphone technologies within the military offer a unique environment in which to investigate the ways individual s position themselves within certain axes of institutional and cultural identities. At the same time, the convolutions, mediatory practices, and mundane social media rituals that service personnel employ through their smartphones resonates widely with, for example, youth culture, digital mobile cultures.Together they suggest complex mediations with social and mobile media, that draws on, and extends non-military practice into new (and increasingly normative) terrains.

“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).…”

Social media, gender and the mediatization of war: exploring the German armed forces’ visual representation of the Afghanistan operation on Facebook

“…In this context, social media like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube are crucial (Seo and Ebrahim 2016). 4 In this paper, we turn our attention to one particular facet that has only begun to receive attention, namely armed forces' activities on digital social media (Crilley 2016;Forte 2014;Jackson 2016;Maltby and Thornham 2016), which are a crucial site of legitimating the military and its activities, particularly so because they de facto 'collapse the gap between the military and the media', which makes them an interesting topic in its own regard (Crilley 2016, 51). Moreover, analysts of military recruiting have also pointed to the importance of paying attention to the production of media by states themselves (Rech 2014).…”

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

“…Access to the Internet, however, is not limited to “official” Israeli military outlets. Digital technology itself has become mundane (Maltby & Thornham, 2016, p. 1157), such that nearly every Israeli soldier has a smartphone in his or her pocket and is constantly checking and updating social media platforms. While in uniform, Israeli soldiers regularly share their thoughts and feelings on sites such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.…”