So! The Pentagon's new "open-door" policy on social networking is, oh, around five days old. How's that working out? The results of our totally unscientific reader survey are in.
Commenter "C2dude" said: "Called the IT help desk yesterday, and they hadn’t even heard of the new memorandum from the DOD … I had to forward it to them."
A reader with U.S. European Command wrote in to complain: "EUCOM is still blocking access to Facebook and Twitter."
An airman working with the Army in Haiti commented: "We have total access to GMail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's pretty good because I can be in practically full contact with family at home while at the work station. My main issue is being friends on FB with my superintendent. He knows now that I am not working. Oops. Unfriend."
Okay, so a mixed bag. Perhaps the biggest issue, though, is cultural. In a bloggers roundtable yesterday, Department of Defense social media czar Price Floyd said the Pentagon has to deal with the generational divide between people who grew up with MySpace and YouTube, and those who remember 5 1/4" floppy disks and punch cards.
"Using social media I think is as much a cultural issue as it is an education one," he said. "People who are coming into the military, they take all this for granted. They can't imagine a world where one didn't have access to these sort of sites.
"For those of us who are a little longer in the tooth, and I'd put myself in there, this is something that's fairly new," he added. "Only in the last couple years have we discovered this and found how useful it can be. I think people at the most senior levels understand it as well. I think in the middle, we have some education, cultural shifting to do. And then that's going to take a little time."
[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]
