Connecting to the War in Afghanistan: Basetrack: One-Eight
US Marines shield themselves from the rotor wash as a V-22 Osprey helicopter lands at Foward Operating Base Delaram, in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan. (Photo: Teru K uwayama)
America's all-volunteer military means that less than 1% of Americans are directly affected by the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Despite being the longest war in U.S. history, with over 700 dead on the coalition side this year alone, and costing upwards of 100 billion dollars per year in US military spending, the vast majority of the public has tuned the war out, according to TED Fellow Teru Kuwayama. Just as television was the "disruptive technology" that gave Americans a new perspective on the Vietnam War, Teru wants to use social media to engage people in discussion of the Afghan War. "Wherever they fall on the spectrum of the war, they should be thinking about the war," Teru says of the American people. "If we're going to fight a war, then we should do it consciously."
Basetrack: One-Eight homepage
Teru was invited to join the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines as an embedded photojournalist for the battalion's seven-month deployment to Helmand, a remote Afghan province with little Internet connectivity. To tap into the hunger of Marines' family members for information on their loved ones, Teru and collaborators of project Basetrack: One-Eight regularly update a Facebook page with photos and links to basetrack.org. The journalist post articles and audio interviews of the Marines to the website. Teru says the photos keep the family members' attention, but he ultimately hopes the information and interest will spread through the families' social networks to a wider audience. To aid that goal, all the photos and interviews released, and even the framework of the basetrack.org website (designed by TED Fellow David Gurman, with much of the coding done at TED Fellow Eric Berlow's Swall Institute) are open source, available for anyone to use and pass on.
Providing reliable Internet access has proven even more difficult than the One-Eight team had anticipated. During sporadic moments of connectivity, the reporters upload their photos, articles and audio interviews for an intensely eager and grateful Facebook audience. In fact, the page's community has grown so strong, that even when One-Eight is cut off from the Internet, the page still gets updated by family and friends with news from other sources and encouragement for one another.
Basetrack: One-Eight Facebook page
According to Teru, one of the most interesting outcomes of the project has been this "window into the psychology of the families," who staunchly support the Marines, but are often unclear of the mission and want their loved ones to come back home. Teru says his team is "more deeply embedded with this battalion than journalists normally are, because we're also actually embedded with the families." Teru and his team members have even received care packages of socks and cookies from grateful moms.
It is this special connection, perhaps, that has provided some unique opportunities for project One-Eight. After having a number of their photos and articles censored, Teru and his team developed software that allows the military personnel to black out text and images at their discretion, but every time they do, a pop-up window asks the reason for doing so. The question must be answered in order to continue, and answers are made visible to readers of the censored information. It remains to be seen whether the military will agree to use the software. But Teru thinks he's able to push the typical media-military relations a bit because unlike embedded journalists who are more easily dismissed from a deployment, project Basetrack: One-Eights' connection to the battalion's families means it would be "very noticeable if we disappeared."
Teru clarifies that the commanders are very open to having him with them. "I don't want to make this seem like they are evil people," he said. “Their priorities are bringing their Marines home alive, not new media experiments.” Teru says he was encouraged to put out an honest record, from an outsider's perspective, of this battalion's experience. "Within the military there is, I think, this frustration about the fact that they have been out there constantly deployed for almost a decade, and the rest of the population is completely tuned out," Teru says. "I've heard an expression: 'The Marine Corps is at war; America is at the mall.'"
Though he doesn't have funding to maintain Basetrack after the deployment, Teru thinks there may be a second life for the project's online community. "It's not something I thought about originally, but since these Marines will be out there for seven months at a minimum, and very disconnected, when they come back it's quite possible that one of the first things they'll do is go to this website that's been recording their deployment. So there might be a surge of activity there." Currently largely maintained by family members and friends, Teru says the demographics of the Basetrack online community's population may shift in the future.
How to Get Involved:
- Visit basetrack.org or its Facebook page.
- All the information One-Eight posts is open source. Pass on links, photos, audio clips and more via Facebook, Twitter,email, blogs, etc.
- One-Eight wants to quantitatively track the effectiveness of this social media experiment. If you have analytics skills to track the way One-Eight's information is spread, please contact Teru by going to this page.
