The Coast Guard in recent months has embraced web 2.0: The service launched a new multimedia site and took enthusiastically to Twitter. Even Adm. Thad Allen, the Coast Guard commandant, has been updating his blog. And some smart search-and-rescue controllers even used Facebook to locate an overdue mariner. It's something of an about-face for the service, which once looked on the new media with some suspicion.
As Noah reported recently, the military services are starting to get the hang of this whole Internet thing. The Army recently ordered its network managers to give soldiers access to social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, reversing a longstanding ban on web 2.0 locales on military networks.
Over at CGBlog, an unofficial Coast Guard blog, Ryan Erickson recently wondered if the Coast Guard would follow suit by giving its personnel more access to social networks. "As some of you already know we on the Coast Guard network can already get to, and without any work-around, sites such as Delicious and Flickr," he wrote. "But the popular social site of Facebook and the micro-blogging system of Twitter have been cut off from the inside… for the most part."
In a recent conversation with Danger Room, Allen said he wanted to empower Coast Guard personnel to use new media, but he suggested that openness has its limits. "We seen this repeatedly since we started dabbling in this, if you will," he said. "It’s the different set of rules that we have to play by, because we’re the government, versus everybody else. When I became commandant, one of the models I lived with just about my entire life is transparency of information breeds self-correcting behavior.
"But there’s a limit to how transparent you can be when you’re constrained by law. You’re always going to run up against folks who say, you’re not being transparent, we don’t have access at work, so there’s always going to be tension involved – I don’t think it’s a bad tension. There are always going to be people who are going to be unhappy, because they can’t access sites from their .mil domains. And we sometimes are going to say, that’s just the way that it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t have a presence over in .com somewhere or .org and go ahead and continue to populate and inhabit the new social atmosphere."
It will be interesting to see how the Coast Guard continues to adapt. Not too long ago, blogs like CGBlog were feeling the pressure to cease and desist; now the service seems to encourage this online community.
[PHOTO: U.S. Coast Guard via Flickr]
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