Your Opinion Is Wrong™

Prompted by Christop's recent post (and after following links as I tend to do), I ended up reading an article (http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html) about the Facebook/Myspace thing and how it seems to reflect the class division in the U.S. Not entirely relevant in Australia, I know, but still interesting to read. I didn't realise this, but Facebook was actually started as a private college network that was opened to the public relatively recently. You learn something new every day.

One paragraph stood out to me, though:

"MySpace is the primary way that young soldiers communicate with their peers. When I first started tracking soldiers' MySpace profiles, I had to take a long deep breath. Many of them were extremely pro-war, pro-guns, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, pro-killing, and xenophobic as hell. Over the last year, I've watched more and more profiles emerge from soldiers who aren't quite sure what they are doing in Iraq. I don't have the data to confirm whether or not a significant shift has occurred but it was one of those observations that just made me think. And then the ban happened. I can't help but wonder if part of the goal is to cut off communication between current soldiers and the group that the military hopes to recruit. Many young soldiers' profiles aren't public so it's not about making a bad public impression. That said, young soldiers tend to have reasonably large networks because they tend to accept friend requests of anyone that they knew back home which means that they're connecting to almost everyone from their high school. Many of these familiar strangers write comments supporting them. But what happens if the soldiers start to question why they're in Iraq? And if this is witnessed by high school students from working class communities who the Army intends to recruit?"

It's interesting to note that this might be evidence of a lack of organisation with the U.S miltary/government - while they seem to be perfectly willing to control information, they don't seem to be very good at controlling it in a timely fashion. You'd think that somebody would have seen this coming.

On the other hand, it could just mean that the higher-ups assumed it'd work as a fire-and-forget (excuse the terminology) propaganda device. It would appear an attractive idea to those who are in charge of recruitment, especially if they believed so much in their cause that they weren't willing to consider that the grunts in Iraq may actually begin questioning their purpose.

Not that I'd actually know how all of this works. It's likely that none of it's anywhere near as simple as that...