OPEN

A post by Ian Douglas at the Telegraph points to an article about Web 2.o in the military in, appropriately, Military Information Technology.

Makes for an interesting read, and then some. Also reminded me of a story I’d meant to blog about recently but didn’t get round to… 

I was having dinner with some learned PR colleagues the other day after holding a seminar about social media.

One of them turned out to have been a tank commander  in the past (I think).

We were all talking about Facebook and blogs and networks and the rest of it when suddenly he piped up: “I’ve got it. I think I know what it’s all about. It’s like a battlefield.”

I was intrigued, to say the least.

“On a battlefield the best soldiers are the ones who are able to absorb this chatter and distil meaning from it without necessarily being focused on the detail.

“They have a picture in their mind that’s always shifting of what is going on across the whole area. They also have a sense of what it all means, the direction the battle is heading in.

“They make their decisions about where to move their troops or tanks accordingly.”

It sounded startlingly like Stowe Boyd‘s concept of Flow – a state of mind where a constant flow of messages from your network (IM, email, Twitters etc.). (If you’re interested in this – the video is now available of Stowe Boyd’s presentation at Reboot 9.0).

However, if there was Facebook on the battlefield maybe everyone could just end up friends?