In an effort to understand Health Care Reform I used a number of Online resources and was really impressed by the scope of information available. Apparently, I am not the only one using the internet to check out health care (surprise, surprise). PEW offers great material on the way that the public are accessing information about health care online.

Especially the New York Times blog Perscriptions – Making Sense of the Health Care Debate offers a number of good resources, such as a history of health care reform, a look at several meaningful statistics, the opportunity to estimate how you will be affected and the chance to discuss all of this with other readers and ask questions.

Of course there are a bunch of other sources available: i.e. a number of health care blogs, a variety of grassroots sites and your usual array of internet weirdness (just search for “health care” on Youtube).

After reading up on the reform for one rainy weekend day, I can safely say that I still understand hardly anything but I know the key words now and definitely have an opinion (or five).

As most of you will know, my colleagues and I are trying to understand how public knowledge of war is structured and procduced by all kinds of media formats: from CNN to diaries.

A very different way of trying to grasp a war are reports by institutions which aim at recording the events and try to get at what happened on the ground.

The UN Goldstone report released last week is an interesting example of an attempt at capturing the confusion and chaos that is war. The reactions have obviously been varied, showing that not only is it difficult to capture the different perspectives and experiences of a war as such, but that any such attempt at understanding and ordering the events is part of a politically charged field.

Whatever your judgement, take a look at this very elaborated way of writing about war for an alternative to three-minute features or 500 word postings.

Ich hatte, glaube ich, gar nicht erwaehnt, dass ich Anfang September nach Osnabrück auf die Tagung Wahrheitsmaschinen des Remarque-Friedenszentrums fahren wuerde. Auf jeden Fall war ich dort, die Tagung war sehr gut und es gibt dort eine exzelltene Ausstellung zum gleichen Thema.

Außerdem wurde die Konferenz auf Heise online besprochen und ich wurde zusammen mit den anderen Kollegen, die sich mit Neuen Medien auseinandersetzen, sogar namentlich erwähnt.

Noch mehr gefreut hätte ich mich allerdings, wenn der Inhalt meines Vortrags etwas weniger frei zusammengefasst worden wäre:

“zeigte die Amerikanistin Johanna Roering anhand von US-amerikanischen Blogs wie Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief, dass Blogger häufig in die Rolle von “Warrior-Citizen-Journalists” geraten, also in einer Parteinahme für die eigene Truppe oder auch deren Kombattanten enden. Das Resultat sind Newsblogs, die bestimmte Nachrichten verlinken und den Blogger zu einer Spielart des Embedded Journalist machen.”

Entweder mein Abstract oder der Vortrag waren mißverständlich oder der betreffende Journalist malt mit grobem Pinsel. Es ging in dem Vortrag darum was passiert wenn US Soldaten, klassisch zu einer unpolitischen Position in der Oeffentlichkeit bestimmt, durch Neue Medien an einem oeffentlichen Diskurs zum Beispiel ueber Krieg teilnehmen koennen.  Parteinnahme in dem oben angefuehrten Sinne war nicht Thema und Embedding habe ich gar nicht erwähnt und den WCJ schon gar nicht als eine Spielart dessen benannt.

Ingrid Hotz-Davis, Sirpa Leppänen and Anton Kirchhofer have just published a collection of essays on the various aspects of fictions online with the classy and straighforward title: Internet Fictions.

I am very happy about the scope of the essays, ranging from investigations of build-it-yourself toys to classical hypertext.  And most of the essays focus on case studies! This is an analytical focus much needed in a time of all kinds of crazy assumptions about the Internet and its emancipatory or apocalyptic potential.

My essay on Television Characters Blogging is grouped with other essays concerned with the commercial aspects of Internet fictions.

Buy, read and review!

Kaboom, one of the Milblogs I will be writing a chapter on, is going to be published by Da Capo Press end of this year or early next.

This is especially pleasing because he was censored and forced to take down his blog in June 2008. (Although, thanks to the wayback machine, google cache and the quick relaunch by Kaboom himself, the blog never really was offline.)

He hasnt commented on how they are going to solve the problems that surface when translating a blog into book form. Filling in the gaps with some background information and additional commentary by the blogger himself seems to be the most established solution.

It would be fun if an experimental publishing house combined some of the ideas of publishing hypertexts from the late 90s with blogging principles and came up with, I dont know, a Milblog in a Blogger-shaped Mamushka boxset or something.

God is with You: Intertextuality and Interactivity in Milblogs from the Iraq War

I have been wanting to upload this talk I held at the yearly conference of American Studies in Germany (DGFA) in June 2007 for quite a while. Its been a little since I held it and there are some things I would change if I had to write it again, still I think it is an interesting take on how addressing a superior power as a form of relief during wartime is shaped under the conditions of blogs.

Plus, it offers a close reading of an excerpt from A Day in Iraq, which is one of the more eloquent and moving Milblogs I have read.

There is a worthwhile interview on the altogether very worthwhile netzpolitik.org (at least for readers that know German) with Thomas Rid, who not only has excellent taste (having chosen the same fjiord layout for his wordpress blog as me) but recently published War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age with Marc Hecker.

The podcast spends quite some time on soldier’s blogs and their potential value as  PR in the various counterinsurgency efforts the US is currently involved in. This is something milbloggers have been saying for quite some time and which the Army seems to be picking up on, slowly but surely. (Am thinking of LTG William Caldwell’s appearance at the 2008 Milblogging Conference for example).

I have ordered the book and can’t wait to read it!

I happened on the article ‘Erzählstimmen aus dem Terror‘ about Milblogs by the Literary Studies scholar Stefanie Fricke based at the LMU in Munich. This is only the third academic article I know of that has been published on Milblogs in Germany next to the two I published.

The article does a good job of introducing  important Milblogs and raises some interesting questions concerning language and narrative in blogs.

I am not quite clear on what is meant with ‘aus dem Terror’. Is terror meant as a general description of the state of war or as ‘a state of being’ and or as a ‘frame of mind for writing’?

Lets hope that this is one of many articles yet to come!

I recently found a rather interesting if somewhat aged article by well-known neoconservative and Wolfowitz-Advisor Eliot Cohen which discusses (in a very declarative and normative way) what Cohen calls the “unnerving rebirth of the citizen-soldier” in a professional US Military.

One of the concerns he has, is that the continued myth of the citizen-soldier is making it possible for the professional military to demand individual rights (free speech, political influence etc.) which threaten the discipline necessary for a functioning military according to him.

I am neither capable nor willing to evaluate his take on the rights and duties of soldiers (professional or citizen) – and he is obviously still in conversation with the military about this.

What I found interesting is that he had been thinking about the enduring concept of the ‘citizen soldier’ long before Milblogs were popularized and brought this issue to the forefront of the milblogging community. Milbloggers famously demanding ‘the right for free speech by those who make it possible’ are doing just what Cohen is criticizing, demanding a right guaranteed to citizens but not guaranteed to soldiers.

In terms of my project the intersection between bloggers’ self-styling as ‘citizen journalists’ and the emergence of a ‘citizen’ concept in the military are very interesting and in my latest chapter (which will be available sometime in the future in book form) I discuss possible ways in which libertarian bloggers might have influenced soldiers in their quest for individual rights.

Yet another Wiki!

http://blogsofwar.pbwiki.com/

Filled with online essays, the presentation-pdfs, reading and tasks from the cultural studies class ‘New Media Texts and the Iraq War’.

We were examining the relation between media and war on a larger scale at the beginning of the semester and then focused on Milblogs as one type of text produced during the current war in Iraq. The essays cover a wide range of topics and reflect the depth and curiosity with which the students approached this topic.