World War II soldiers would love e-mail

I remember reading a book about the life of Ernie Pyle, who was a famous World War II combat correspondent. His gritty, realistic stories into the lives of the men fighting that war captivated a newspaper-dependent nation thousands of miles away. Mothers and wives hoped that Pyle would find their son or husband and write about him. Because the story was printed faster than mail, it was the fastest way for women to find out about their fighting men.

 

Thanks to the Internet, the military no longer needs to rely on letters that take three weeks to arrive. A soldier can come back from a harrowing mission, plop down at his computer, double-click on Internet Explorer, pull up his or her hotmail account, and type away. Within seconds of hitting send, mom, dad, or all of Pittsburgh can know that little Suzie or Billy is still alive. This revelation in the sharing of information has transformed the world in more ways than I believe any of us know.

 

From Glenn Reynolds’ postings on Instapundit.com to Dan Gillmor playing a part in the downfall of CEO Joe Nacchio (Gillmor, “We The Media,”), citizens, journalists, soldiers, even garbage haulers have the ability to add their informative views and ideas to the world. We will not just watch or read the news anymore; we will be active participants, through e-mail, blogs, user-generated movies or any other number of ways that haven’t been invented yet.

 

With the Internet having been created as an open-source world, there is hope that what’s created on the Internet can’t be patented, but copyright protection has been granted to online companies, and this, to me, is another form of a patent. Thus, we could see large aspects of the Internet become copyrighted, and I think this could create stifled creativity and innovation for the Net’s future. I just hope the trends of corporate consolidation seen in journalism does not spill over to the Internet, so that mom and dad don’t get the message that since Billy’s e-mail from Iraq wasn’t sent by their e-mail company, he will have to send a letter…that takes three weeks to arrive.

 

Discussion questions:

 

Why does Gillmor think that citizen-journalists will play as equally an important role as traditional Big Media journalists?

 

What kind of effect have blogs had on the journalism world, and why?