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Lisa Silvestri on Social Media in the Combat Zone
Our ‘Friends’ at ‘the Front’ Today many US troops are staying culturally connected to the home front through mobile communication technologies. Constant and immediate access to home marks a revolutionary change from how we once imagined combat deployment; a lonely soldier suffering through months of desperate isolation. Now an individual warfighter can chat with his mother from a forward operating base and receive the dreaded “Dear John” instantly via status update. At first glance social media appear to be a morale boost for the troops since they can stay in touch and receive emotional support from loved ones back home. Yet even as social media present opportunities to create digital…
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James Rodgers on Reporting the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
The challenges which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represents for diplomats, and for the news media, are changing. Addressing them is complicated by a lack of political will, and, as always, the absence of obvious solutions. All this is made even more difficult by the fact that the attention of policy makers, correspondents, and military strategists is currently focused further east, in Syria and Iraq. For the last two years, I have been researching different aspects of the reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for my new book, Headlines from the Holy Land. My interest goes back much further than that, though. From 2002-2004, I lived and worked in the Gaza Strip as…
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Digital records take something precious from military history
Blog post By Andrew Hoskins, University of Glasgow @andrewhoskins Digital networks and databases appear to crush historical distance. Archives of war increasingly come to us. A simple YouTube search throws up a chaotic mix of official and unauthorised, user-generated content, from helmet cam footage to images of snipers in the field. But this immediacy, volume and pervasiveness can mean less reflection. The rawness of media memory distills a history without horizon and without hindsight. The sheer scale and complexity of digital data as primary source creates an immediate but unwieldy archive. It also hides what is really lost in paper’s demise. And now the official guardians of military documents are…
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Popular Online Figures Who Inspire The Syrian Fighters
Post by Joseph A. Carter, Shiraz Maher and Peter R. Neumann All comments welcome… Over a twelve month period from early 2013 to early 2014 a team of researchers at ICSR created a database of social media profiles of 190 Western and European foreign fighters. More than two thirds of these fighters were affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusrah or the Islamic State (IS) – two groups that have, at one point or another, maintained formal relationships with al-Qaeda. The social media activity of these users provided a unique and unfiltered window into the minds of Western and European foreign fighters in Syria, which provided the information for the ICSR’s very well…
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Arrested War: After Diffused War
Ben O’Loughlin and Andrew Hoskins introduce the concept of ‘Arrested War’ to describe how mainstream media is re-appropriating the images and stories that describe contemporary conflicts. All comments welcome…. Arrested War: After Diffused War In the past two decades we have passed through three phases of media ecology, and each has shaped a different way media have entered into the operations and understandings of war and conflict. The 1990s saw the final stage of broadcast era war. National and satellite television and the press had a lock on what mass audiences witnessed, and governments could exercise relative control of journalists’ access and reporting. By the turn of the millennium, mass internet…
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