I have moved this thread to this arena, where there are some threads on the theme, although none recently.
There has undoubtedly been change here. Exchanges of views do happen, but may be rarer. In part that reflects in my opinion as an "armchair" participant big changes in the audience, which to my knowledge remains primarily American. War weariness is one factor, plus people simply change career - so once regular posters have retired and work hard in new jobs.I was once very active in SWC, and have returned to a position where periodic review of the discussion could be useful, but I am noticing what seems to be a shift in type of posts and a drop off in traffic.
I do not have access to the site traffic data, but there are plenty of readers even if few posts in response. That is why I add in the 'last Edited by' the number of views and sometimes the number since the previous post. That is how I can judge the value of posts. See this thread as an example:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...t=8689&page=25 A thread where I was surprised at how many views there had been.
We also have rivals. For example WoTR which takes a far broader viewpoint and a number of former Forum moderators pop up there as authors.
I only observe a tiny part of the professional debate on modern war, from a British viewpoint and cannot fully answer this.Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly the change in warfare. However, there seems to be a relatively robust community on Twitter discussing similar issues, but in what is undoubtedly a worse forum.
My prompts are, therefore, twofold:
- Have the changes in the social media environment fundamentally altered the role of groups like SWC?
- Has the changes in the nature of fora helped or hurt the study and practice of warfare
To be clear I'm talking about over the last 15 years. Obviously war is different now from when we communicated by telegram/semaphore/horseback. I have some intuitions, and this is my area of study, but because I haven't been as active here as many others, I'd love to know what you think.
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