War by Website

Dan Baum has a fascinating article in The New Yorker about the US Army's painful but promising transition from a top-down, one-way "instrumentalist" communication model to a two-way interactive online communication model. Soldiers on the ground in Iraq are now using websites to share their experience and lessons learned with colleagues still in training.

Educators are still slow in understanding the significance of the interactive "constructivist" model as an inherent trait of computer-based communications. While I consider the US Army the greatest single educational institution in history, it's clearly just as hidebound as most of us civilians. But Baum argues that Gen-X officers and men are more imaginative, and less respectful of hierarchy, than their Boomer superiors. They also take the Internet for granted, so the interactive, "horizontal" constructivist model is something they've grown up with.

Whatever your views of the war (and mine are highly negative), this is an important glimpse into the way the Web is changing us.