And the question is...

I've been thinking a bit about the service's embrace of social media. Well, the Thadmiral's embrace of new media... and the host of people who are waiting for next summer.

A couple of my compatriots, er, shipmates in the vernacular, I guess, have decided that the heat is cranking up. There are too many dinosaurs and it is too darn easy to post something that is thought to be career ending. Too bad, frankly. I know that SIGNO 1 values honest dialogue, but too many other senior officers and civilians are running scared. And scared for the darnedest things. I even had a senior officer deny me organizational data for a dissertation -- yes, the bloody doctorate I've worked on for five years -- an academic exercise done under the close supervision of the university's institutional review board. Not blogging, for sure. And he has denied me access to all organizational data. I didn't want names, just numbers; numbers of vacancies over time, numbers of attrition and retention, numbers of formal and informal civil rights complaints. Nope, nada, nil. And, why? Fear. The same reason people are down on social media. Fear. Said the naysaying senior officer: "Once you have the data, you are free to interpret it as you wish without the filters of a command structure." Er, isn't that the purpose of academic research? But, hey, I'm just one person, and sorry if this puts a "crimp on [my] educational goals but the security of sensitive data, the trust of our people, and the reputation of [the agency] outweigh any individual benefits."

Bloggers and academics, beware. "They" don't want the truth to rear its ugly, ugly head. I fear where we might be in 12 months.