Welcome...and initial guidelines...

This blog will be used in the spring of 2008 by 80+ students at Drexel University to investigate the effects of Iraq on culture and the reverse. Our goal will be to better understand why the US is in Iraq, and to question whether literature can help us on this journey.

Weekly plans and other materials will always be posted in Vista, not this blog. So go to Bb Vista to get the discussion prompts and other instructions.

I intend this blog to manage our discussions and track our collective investigation.

You should have received an email from me inviting you to become a contributor to this blog. The email was sent Monday afternoon to your official Drexel email address.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

CyberJournalist

The blog I chose to do, based on the fact that it was the only one not chosen (as far as I could tell), was called Cyber Journalist. The little blurb under the link to the blog states that the blog focuses on how the Internet and technology relate to the Iraq War. After I clicked on the link, I have to say I was quite surprised. Obviously the blog isn't updated anymore because it looks like a bomb went off on the page. This may just be from my end, but everything was a mess. There were errors all over the page and many parts of the website no longer existed on the domain. The blog seems to follow this style: Find an article online, write a one paragraph description of the article, then hyperlink. Looking further back, the recipe seems to stay the same. The articles and blog posts from the past seem to be better kept and more well though out, but all in all they are the same. There really doesn't seem to be a distinct tone throughout the whole blog. Since it is more or less a collection of articles, it seems to be pretty objective. The only time the poster takes a stance is when the article he is talking about takes a stance. The CyberJournalist seems less like a blog and more like a website akin to Digg. The only thing I really took out of this assignment is how much coverage this war has received. With the advent of the Internet and how information can be sent across the world almost instantaneously, it boggles my mind to think of how we can improve upon this and also how further wars will be dealt with. A blog like this makes me wonder how World War II would have been treated had it been given the same exposure as wars that are fought today.

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