Keeping in touch With Military Members

Servicemen, especially those who stay in, quickly find that transfers and reassignments will scatter friends all over the world. Right now, I have friends in the service on four continents.

Leaving contact for the next time you get together is a sure path to losing those friendships to time and distance. Without a sense of being involved, enough can and will occur to blur the sense of knowing each other you shared when you were constantly around them.

Traditional methods of keeping in touch, now called snail mail, are not a good substitute. Mail takes a long time to arrive in the more interesting parts of the world, where soldiers tend to be posted. It also takes a great deal of time to write a letter that will stand up to the passage of time. Frequently, this time is too much to seem reasonable.

Email is the alternative that is of growing importance. Messages can be sent around the world in seconds and are immediate enough that there isn’t a need to write prose that will stand the test of time. Instead, messages can be chatty and about things that happened this morning, rather than deeper concerns and thoughts that aren’t tied to specific events. However, you can write those too, and it appears to be more likely when there is a dialogue going which doesn’t pause enough to lose the train of thought between messages.

However, even email has its disadvantages. Social Networking sites are a growing trend on the internet, and there is no reason this cannot be harnessed by servicemembers as well. The social networking sites will normally allow some pictures and perhaps other files to be stored on site, allowing all of your friends to browse recent pictures. Bulletins can be sent out to everyone on your friends list, allowing good coverage when an important announcement is needed such as a birth or marriage.

With the ability to send out real time bulletins, even friends half a world away can stay current and feel involved in your life. A note that your dog has just had puppies, or that a friend has just broken a leg can reach people and allow them to feel almost as if they were there.

The ability to send out bulletins is a powerful tool, but blogs are potentially even more so. While email tends to be chatty and focused on immediate concerns, blogs tend to be more thoughtful and less connected to a specific time or event. Especially when several friends or relatives are on a service, a thoughtful and insightful blog post can spark similar reactions from within the circle and create a long standing and fascinating discussion and examine the topic far more exhaustively than a single person can ordinarily manage.

Article Source: http://www.content.onlypunjab.com

For a great way to network with or keep in touch with US Military members please check out the author's US Military based social website at militarysociety.com

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