May 13, 2003
Hey, Soldier, Can We Drop You a Line?... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
When radio came along, they said it would replace newspapers, and when television came along, they said radio was destined for the scrap heap. Then the Internet showed its face, and many said it could easily be ignored. It just goes to show you - what common wisdom says will happen has no correlation to what actually does.
The PEW Internet & American Life Project has just completed a survey and attendant report entitled, "The Internet and the Iraq War ... How Online Americans Have Used the Internet to Learn War News, Understand Events, and Promote Their Views."
So, where did Americans - both online and off - get their War news? Why newspapers, radio, television and the Internet.
It sure looks to me that when a new media technology comes on the scene, it just rolls in and elbows over the other guys.
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The way I read the Pew data, if you were interested in getting news about the Iraq war, you used what you had access to. Nearly 90% of Americans watched television, roughly a quarter of us read newspapers, and nearly as many listened to the radio. And if you had access to the Internet, roughly 1 out of 6 of us used it as well.
Now here's where things get interesting.
Unlike the other media technologies, the Internet is two-way. You're not just a passive recipient of information, and the Pew study tracked that as well.
While 10% of the American Internet community received email from organizations either for or against the war, there is the phenomenon of the individual. Five per cent of the Internet community actually wrote one or more elected officials with their opinion.
Since the majority of American adults have Internet access, that's a lot of communication - well into the tens, if not hundreds, of millions by any estimate of Internet usage. And this direct communication from citizens had to have some impact.
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Obviously, the Internet expanded information consumption. While Internet advocates have complained for years that we are captive to what the TV networks broadcast and the newspapers print, Internet users - quite literally - had every choice in the world. And you know what? They grabbed it.
While the most popular website sites continued to be American TV networks and newspapers, fully 10% of Internet users visited the sites of foreign news organizations. More importantly, these numbers tell us we can expect growth in this area: Fully half of the Internet users reported interest in getting points of view different from traditional news outlets, and different from official government sources.
It is a quiet revolution, but it's a revolution nonetheless.
The idea that there is an information back-story to the Iraq War has been brewing with me for some time, and I see glimpses of it everywhere. Take Time magazine's report on "What Ever Happened to the Republican Guard?" It points out that the American military emailed its commanders, and it is believed to have contributed directly to the decision by thousands of Iraqi soldiers to cut and run as the American ground troops closed in.
Call it "Military Spam" if you must, but I like to think of it as a particularly cogent example of "The pen is mightier than the sword."
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
