The Current and Future Use of Social Media Technologies (SMT) on Military Personnel and their Families

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The use of social media technologies (SMT) is one of the most important issues confronting the UK military in terms of maintaining operational security and managing morale amongst serving personnel and their families and friends. In the last decade, the UK military have been involved in a number of overseas campaigns (Afghanistan and Iraq) alongside more routine operations (e.g. Falklands and Cyprus) with implications for service personnel and their families in terms of coping with deployment rotation. The security implications regarding SMT range from the accidental to the calculating. With the advent of SMT, real-time geo-coded tweets from theatre are now a day to day reality facing military commanders as are regular Facebook postings by service families. So while MOD protocols and guidance exists including recognised and approved social media platforms (e.g. http://www.blogs.mod.uk/social-media-guidelines.html) senior military officers responsible for maintaining military welfare (e.g. Colonel Duncan Dewar of the Royal Marines and a member of our project advisory board) informed us that monitoring and possible intervention represents a major managerial challenge. Moreover, officially sanctioned online sites such as RN Com (https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/) co-exist with more public online platforms such as Facebook. Anticipating not only current usage but also like technological and behavioural innovation is a source of considerable anxiety for senior officers in the MOD (Colonel Dewar, per com, November 2012). This project draws together unique expertise in the fields of informatics, mathematical biology, human geography, geopolitics, sociology in order to address the quantity and actual content of this interactive process Previous research indicates that frequent electronic contact can have positive and negative consequences. Social media contact can increase the stress that soldiers are under having a negative impact on morale and group cohesion. Staying in touch can have purportedly 'stabilising' effects on military personnel, boosting morale. This research project adopts a three phase research model for researching and visualising social media communications, their online manifestations and their impact and influence on online and offline communities related to the UK military. After a thorough review of MOD and RM policies regarding SMT. This will be followed by a second more quantitative phase of research, during which we will undertake quantitative analysis of language usage and information flow on both officially sanctioned sites and more public sites such as Facebook and Twitter (we have been granted permission to access official military forums and to contact members directly and access the messaging chains). Language usage studies will include simple studies such as the usage and frequencies of different words, co-occurrences of words and phrases, and studies of other language features such as word endings. This quantitative stage will be complimented by qualitative and ethnographic research (stage three). For the purposes of this study we propose working within the Royal Marines communities based in Taunton (40 Commando) and Plymouth (42 Commando). This research will be undertaken using three distinct techniques; semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and user-generated 'diagrammings' or mappings. Colonel Duncan Dewar and his staff associated with Welfare Support at RN Portsmouth will facilitate introductions and access to these communities. This research will be initially undertaken through the deployment of semi-structured interviews with serving Royal Marines and their family members. The fourth phase of the research programme will allow for the active interaction of quantitatively-accrued data with the quantitative models developed in phase 1 and active development of policy-relevant findings.