In a diversion from conflict, US troops are rather fond of posting pictures of their exploits on the web. Quite a lot of them are gruesome or sadistic. Others are merely overly egotistical and an affront to the notion of human concern for others. The Pentagon is finally getting concerned - this is all rather bad PR. It's also becoming increasingly hard to distinquish the fictions from the facts - something equally obvious in the sheer volume of information and fantasy emerging from Amerika's own hurricane disaster zones. In the modern age we all have good reason to be skeptical about the messages fed to us by the commercial media, but recent events and government incompetence have even re-awakened a bit of the public service ethnic in the mainstream news sources. The problem is that they too increasingly rely on the same "stew" of online data to get their "facts". The amount of research and cross-ferencing required to locate the real "truths" is becoming everyone's full-time job.
For more about online obession and disaster reports check out the latest "Journal of a Futurist" from Richard Neville.
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