It isn’t shocking to consider how our media technology has developed parallel to our taste for mainstream media; I think a fitting example is the modern military narrative. It wasn’t painfully long ago when the drama in military movies featured little more than a lot of archetypal, well-dressed white men walking on a quiet ship deck speaking of war as if its affect on their lives was on par with a chess game. Fast forward 50 years and The Hurt Locker—which, granted, features the familiar ‘guts and glory’ hero character, as well as the bumbling coming-of-age private character—vies for our attention with its hyper-specialized view of the unimaginable tasks of IED-defusing squads in Iraq (and it’s very good).

But the military narrative perhaps finds its next essential transitory format—trending quite desirably toward the ‘real’—in the active blogs of our fighting men and women abroad. While the original trend of realism in military movies too often meant ‘realistic blood’ ten years ago, the emerging auto-narratives explore an entirely new concept of the ‘real’ in our military—humor. And not just ‘humor in spite of the overbearing conflict of war,’ as is often the case in the male-camaraderie punch line humor of many fictional movies about the military.

The more thorough posts are almost journalistic in their analysis of humor, compiling a number of stories from the frontline and drawing rational conclusions about what it’s really like to be in our armed forces abroad [this blog belongs to a friend of a friend, and I’ve enjoyed reading it a great deal for this reason].

I wrote on hyper-specialization in the blogosphere in a previous post—military bloggers may just be another example, but who can deny that if anyone has a story to tell it’s our soldiers?

Photo couresy of LAS ADVENTURAS DE ANTOINE DOINEL using Flickr Creative Common license.

Tags:   big screen/small screen week · Chris · military · narrative · war · writing1 Comment