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PN 325
Homefront Hashtags: Sharing War in Six Words
L. Silvestri
1
1
Gonzaga University, Spokane, USA
A new digital project called The Six Word War promises “real stories from Iraq and Afghanistan in just six words.”Touted as “the first crowd-sourced war
memoir,”the project’s creators site Hemingway’s famous six word short story,“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn,”as the inspiration for the project.This paper
examines the SixWordWar story as a cultural artifact and practice that reveals something larger about our contemporary relationship to truthful storytell‑
ing. Social network site communication encourages a compulsion to visibility that ratchets up the rate of interpretive processes. We seek concise, familiar,
and easily identifiable narratives. It’s easy to see why six word war stories would be an attractive way to communicate about the complexities surrounding
US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. But if a fundamental goal for communication is to reach understanding or “truth,”what if anything, do six words
help us understand about these wars? And what does our collective interest in a project like The SixWordWar reveal about our evolving attention structures
and commitments to one other as global citizens?
PN 326
Milblogs and Soldier Representations of the Afghanistan War: The Case of Sweden
M. Hellman
1
1
Swedish Defence University, Stockholm, Sweden
Building from the notion that military blogs can support national strategic narratives (Hellman and Wagnsson, 2013), the aim of the article is to deepen
our knowledge about how more precisely blogging that depict soldiers’ personal experiences of ‘everyday life’ can serve to support a strategic narrative.
This ties in with the question of opportunities offered by social media articulating individual and subjective experiences of ordinary people and how these
are used and negotiated in collective and institutional settings. The article explores empirically, how Swedish milblogs published between January 2010
and April 2012 articulate their experiences of being soldiers in the Afghanistan mission. Through their blogging the soldiers become media producers, but
the diary format constructing self-representations, might also be seen as defining them as the prime audience, thus simultaneously making them into
members of the audience. The milblog sphere might thus be studied as a site where reception and production merge. The analysis shows that soldiering
is treated as an everyday practice, de-dramatized and routinized where military assignments are meshed with civilian duties. The article concludes that
the ‘normalisation’of war in milblogs can potentially serve to strengthen national strategic narratives, facilitate recruitment of soldiers and add to growing
‘militarism’(Woodward and Jenkings, 2012) in society.
PN 327
Discussing British Military Experience Through Contemporary Media and Popular Culture
K. Parry
1
, N. Thumim
1
1
University of Leeds, School of Media and Communication, Leeds, United Kingdom
This paper reports on a qualitative research project which invited those with direct experience – as serving personnel involved in media operations, military
veterans and forces family members – to respond to a variety of media genres and discuss how such portrayals of military experience correspond with their
own perceptions and their own representational practices. It is our contention that mediated representations – whether film, television, websites, museum
and gallery displays –offer significant and interconnected spaces through which to explore negotiations of the meanings of military experience in contem‑
porary public culture. Drawing on thematic analysis from our six focus groups, we address a number of research questions: What kinds of experience are
‘knowable’and how are they expressed and shared? What role do varied mediated encounters have in this process and in perpetuating misunderstandings
as well as offering a space for contemplation and even therapeutic benefits? Which media materials invoke the strongest responses of opinion and feeling
in our interviewees, and what does this reveal about the public discourses of resilience, rehabilitation and reconciliation?We argue that this is an especially
noteworthy time to be examining the perceptions of the military, soldiering and recent wars in the UK context due to the ‘end’ of combat operations in
Afghanistan (albeit with the threat of escalating war in Iraq and Syria), alongside a period of sustained and deliberate attempts to reconcile civil-military re‑
lations especially since 2007 (Forster 2012; Kelly 2013). In total 31 participants took part in group interviews or‘focus groups’conducted during the summer
of 2014: this comprised 15 veterans from three different organizations, six serving personnel who work within media operations, and 10 family members,
all wives. In the group interviews, we showed the participants media extracts that depicted varied aspects of contemporary military experience drawn
from a range of forms and genres (e.g. documentary, comedy, websites) to encourage group discussions. But in addition to the participants’comments on
the media materials, we were also interested in the themes and concerns which emerged without prompting, and how representations of soldiering evoked
memories and reflections on their own identities as part of a ‘military community’.