WAR ON THE WEB: RESPONDING JO’S ARTICLE

  “Have blogs been getting an instrument of propaganda?”

I really liked Jo’s open-minded comment in her “Iraq on the web” post. She summarizes not only interesting sides of these blogs but also concealed and worrying parts of war-related videos on these blogs. She thinks that some of the videos by soldiers don’t look like credential and adds:  “In some ways they seem like recruiting propaganda rather than a window into what the war is like for soldiers.”

Back to Jo’s comment about propaganda I’ve made little research on that. In December 2005, The New York Times published an article about the blogs are written by soldiers. (Source:  Wikipedia )

Today we can’t deny blogs’s emerging impact among informative media tools. Many people interested in what soldiers have been doing in their daily lives, which tactics have been used while fighting, how can they survive or how is war atmosphere? The blogs give much more details and variety of sources than print and broadcast media for sure.

Therefore we need to make decision between what we want to know and how much we need to know more. Otherwise we would have a problem with trustworthiness which is one of the biggest problematic issues of our information age.

Furthermore are we questioning how these blogs’s tunes are? Are they becoming propaganda model likewise advertisements and public relations techniques in the past? I think we can not see the whole picture without asking these questions.

Truly blogs have brought more conversation and share to Web World but we need to have our own filter in order to get credible and worthy information among these hundreds blogs.

There are bunch of anti-war and supportive-war blogs on Iraq War. I have linked them on my previous blog entry, titled “Real Time Wars.” You can find extended list of Iraq War blogs here Yahoo Directory.