Some of the most popular videos on the Youtube.com site are by soldiers in Iraq -- clips they shot while engaged in live combat. "What’s striking about the videos of Iraq combat is how well produced they are," writes Mark Glaser, in his "Media Shift" guide to the digital media revolution blog for PBS. "There are titles overlaid on the action, as well as soundtracks with gangster rap or heavy metal music. Much of the footage portrays the soldiers as heroes, suiting up to go into combat, and then showing a series of explosions or gunfights."
"While many of the videos look authentic," Glaser points out, "it’s hard to tell for sure, because there is no verification system on YouTube other than the online community’s trust. As with other user-generated content such as blogs and photo-sharing sites, a healthy dose of skepticism is necessary."
Glaser reports that one of the more produced combat videos, Battleforce 3/327 puts combat footage to a rock beat. "Even if the music follows in the tradition of films like 'Apocalypse Now,' and various hard-hitting MTV music videos," Glaser observes, "it’s horribly dehumanizing to turn mortal combat into an entertainment video."
On the other hand, "for soldiers seeing death and destruction for months and perhaps years at a time, the videos could well represent a way to deal with the anguish, to rationalize what’s going on around them. In other cases, the videos reveal the soldiers’ stark view of the enemy as being less than human. In one rap-tinged video, a lyric from the song — 'we eat pieces of s—- like you for breakfast' — is overlaid over a bombing in the distance, and audio of soldiers celebrating in the foreground."
Kiersten Marek, a clinical social worker, posts a comment on Glaser's blog saying the videos "give me the willies. It's bad enough that so many of our soldiers are coming back with major post-traumatic stress disorder, and that the rate of suicide and mental illness for soldiers from this war is extremely high. Now we are adding to this the possibility that people can get videos of combat directly from soldiers. I can see why this would be against the army code of conduct.
"I can also see how this could make for more traumatized individuals in the world. It seems like...this will mostly lead to further dehumanizing of the enemy. I guess this helps us understand just how sick the mind needs to become in order to fight in war, but other than that, I don't see the point."
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