Woody Evans

The H+ article Be More Than You Can Be in the New Enhanced Army said

US Military culture is famously weird (to civilians), and infamously efficient at fueling our war-making organizations. With the exception of melodramatic and shallow takes on warrior’s rituals as presented in popular media, the culture is largely closed to civilians, and very dear to the men and women in uniform. Even the very modern rites and rituals of warriors have roots that can be traced back hundreds or thousands of years. The tradition of single combat, for instance, is still alive in the “grudge matches” of US Army Infantrymen. The sometimes lethal hazing of sailors “crossing the line” (equator) in the 1800s has meandered into gentler forms of pollywog abuse, oft involving Jell-o or cheese… and bare-bellied Chief Petty officers.
 
The new network-centric warriors of the post-Rumsfeld era live in a military culture that straddles the traditions between yesterday and the techno-savvy warriors that they are expected to become for tomorrow’s conflicts. The tools that today’s warriors now must use edges them closer, individually and collectively, toward a transhuman state. This practical instantiation of (some of the grosser elements of) transhumanism still run aground of the older military mindset and culture. How do you maintain a strict hierarchical chain of command in an organization moving toward the valuation of a networked ethos? Let’s look at some of these likely hotspots for cognitive dissonance, and consider their effects.

Woody Evans was the author of this article and is a writer and librarian living in Dubai. Woody has written about technology, the social web, transhumanism, and military matters for Library Journal, American Libraries, The Journal of Evolution and Technology, h+ Magazine, Mississippi Libraries, ONLINE, Searcher Magazine, Acceler8or, and others. His new book, Information Dynamics in Virtual Worlds, is out now from Chandos. He also recently authored the following books on Kindle: Shelf Stable: Collected Observations of 21st Century Librarianship and Arc Sodium: Various Transhuman Positions.
 
He authored Searching the Widgetized Web, The Social Web and Civil Life, Embryonic Web 3.0, We Find It All: Wikia’s New Social Search Engine, Sphering the Square: AOL’s $25 Million Widget, Addict-o-matic Angles for Web 2.0 Metasearch Turf, My MySpace Comment, Online Strategic Intelligence: Five Companies to Consider, Singularity Warfare: A Bibliometric Survey of Militarized Transhumanism, Arphids in Ascendance, Your World, Tagged, What Drives You?, and They’re RFIDs, Not “Arphids”. Read the full list of his publications. Follow his Twitter feed.