When I wrote my first blog in 2004 to report on a two-week visit with Christians in Russia, few members of our church understood what I was doing. A year later, I had to explain the concept again to family and friends when I blogged from Guatemala about the adoption of our third child. Soon after that trip, I stopped merely testing the blog waters and dove in headfirst. I launched a column and a blog about political blogs for NationalJournal.com, gave lectures and joined panel discussions about blogs, and was cited as an expert source on the subject by the likes of The Washington Post and CNN. The New York Times even asked me to write a column about political bloggers after the 2006 election. I’ve created a few other blogs (AirCongress, Taxation With Representation and U.S. Presidential Homes) since 2005 and contributed to others (Tech Daily Dose, NewsBusters and The Next Right). For better or worse, blogging is a major part of my life. So imagine the culture shock when I walked onto the USS Kearsarge this week and heard one question over and over again: “What’s a blogger?” It’s like I’ve been transported back in time four years and am being forced to educate another whole sector of America that has been bypassed by the information age. Here’s how I want to respond: What’s a blogger? Are you serious? There’s a whole community of ‘milbloggers’ who write about the Navy and the rest of the armed forces on a regular basis. They’re telling your stories – the stories the mainstream media won’t tell – and you don’t even know they exist? Political bloggers have become a major force in electoral politics over the past five years. Blogs are so common now that even the journalists who maligned them for years are blogging. Sports blogs are big, too. And food blogs, and parenting blogs, and just about any other kind of blog you can imagine. You haven’t stumbled across any of them? That’s how I want to respond. Then I realize I’ve become a bit bloggity. I remember that Navy men and women, as well as their brethren in the Army, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard, uhave better things to do than read or write blogs. And they certainly have better things to do when they’re not deployed -- like enjoying the families they will have to leave behind again soon. I do hope that in time, more people in the military will write their own blogs -- and the brass will let them. They can tell their stories far better than journalists/bloggers like me who are largely ignorant of military life. They also could learn a lot by reading the fine milblogs that already exist. But just as the president needn’t actually use technology himself to excel in office, sailors don’t need to be steeped in the blogosphere to do their duty. If nothing else, this trip will serve as a humbling reality check for me. What’s a blogger indeed? Absolutely nothing once you see what young men and women are accomplishing in service to their country and to the rest of the world.
