'Digging' Iraq

In an effort to take full advantage of the creativity possible through blogging and the internet as a unique medium, I went straight to one of my favorite websites: Digg.com.

I simply performed a search for the word "Iraq" on this popular news gathering site and was presented with over 1400 results. Digg.com is unique in that it draws upon hundreds of news sources and article databases and organizes the results of each search based upon the number of "diggs" (essentially votes from readers who found the article interesting) that every article, video, or image has received. To be honest, I had no idea what to expect from this search and I really did not know how I was going to incorporate the results into a blog post. However, the first five articles (the five that had the most 'diggs') truly surprised me in their similarities.

With 2986 diggs, the most popular "article" was actually a video from www.thinkprogress.org entitled "O'Reilly: 'We Didn't Invade Iraq'." The next four results were also videos from various websites and were entitled:
"Unbelievable Iraq Truck Explosion"
"Very Close Call In Iraq"
"Jon Stewart Standup in 1996"
"6 Raw Videos From Iraq"

First, the fact that the five most popular sources of information about the Iraq war are all videos says a great deal about our culture of immediacy. As a society, we want to know as much as possible about this war (including seeing images and video for ourselves), but we rarely wish to read through the news ourselves. According to Alexa.com, which ranks websites based upon their traffic, YouTube is the third most popular website in the world. This fact really speaks volumes about our developing desire for immediate information that is easy to digest and interpret for ourselves.

Secondly, it must be noted that none of these five Iraq videos on digg.com are representative of any legitimate news source. One video is intended to be funny while the rest sensationalize the actual violence occurring in Iraq. It seems that at this point in the war, we are less captivated by what politicians and news anchors have to say, and more by the amateur videos that pop up on the internet. Perhaps this is once again a sign of our need for "immediate" information -- we want a soldier-perspective without the possibility of a news source doing any of the interpreting for us.