Lifting the Base Gate

The big digital rhetoric story for the week has already been reported in Wired: "Army Orders Bases to Stop Blocking Twitter, Facebook, Flickr."

It is “the intent of senior Army leaders to leverage social media as a medium to allow soldiers to ‘tell the Army story’ and to facilitate the dissemination of strategic, unclassified information,” says the order, obtained by Danger Room. Therefore, “the social media sites available from the Army homepage will be made accessible from all campus area networks. Additionally, all web-based email will be made accessible.”

It's interesting to note, however, that MySpace is still on the prohibited list, presumably because of conventions that encourage more public posting, although the class divisions described by danah boyd may still play a role in this distinction. After some of the embarrassing video incidents that I describe in this article, it may not be surprising that YouTube will also still be blocked.