Research Paper Title

New Media Warfare: Tweeting From the Front Lines.

Abstract

Whether referring to Hezbollah in the Israeli-Hezbollah War in the summer of 2006, Hamas in the Battle of Jenin in 2002, or the ongoing expansion of the “insurgency” across the Internet, new media has opened up traditional warfare to that of the virtual, and information — and the management and control thereof — has become absolutely paramount for those engaged in new media warfare.

Stated succinctly, new media are the tools of the guerrilla information warfare of the twenty-first century. Often the discussion around new media and its effects are relegated to civil society or business, but there is an arena of interest often overlooked: warfare.

While broadly we may think of new media as, “that combustible mix of 24/7 cable news, call-in radio and television programs, Internet bloggers and online websites, cell phones and iPods” (Kalb & Saivetz, 2007), perhaps a more timeless definition is that which is offered by Dennis M. Murphy, Professor of Information Operations and Information in Warfare at the U.S. Army War College: “Any capability that empowers a broad range of actors (individuals through nation states) to create and disseminate near-real time or real time information with the ability to affect a broad (regional or worldwide) audience using global standardized communications technologies such as the Internet as unifying platforms” (Murphy, 2008).

Document

New Media Warfare, Tweeting from the Front Lines (Fowler, 2009)

Reference

Fowler, J.K. (2009) New Media Warfare: Tweeting From the Front Lines. Discussion Paper.