Die Bundeswehr und Social Media – Transformation der militärischen Kommunikation

Kurzfassung/Abstract

In their article, Claudia Auer and Liane Rothenberger describe the changing relation between the German military, the traditional and the new media. They discuss the different purposes of military and mass medial communication and explain the influence of the media coverage on foreign and security-political occurrences. Besides, they elucidate the potentials and risks of web 2.0 and social media for military media relations. The authors come to the conclusion that the public nature of web 2.0 and of social media is faced with the security of soldiers and the military’s strategic secrets. However, the new media allow communicating consistently and independently from the mass media, thus creating space for public discussion and exchange. One essential problem the German armed forces still have to negotiate is, according to the authors, the lack of temporal and personnel resources and the necessity to constantly maintain a successful social media presence.