( Wired ) -- That 's the argument John Timpane made in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Thursday : that our hypermetabolic , Twitter-fueled media culture allowed the remarks from General McChrystal 's crew to spread so far and so fast , Obama had almost no choice but to relieve him . Think of it as information blitzkrieg . `` Fast , overwhelming , decisive : It 's a case study in how tightly connected 21st-century media can whip a story into a full-on tsunami , with startling consequences for individual careers and national policy ... Noah Shachtman , a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and a blogger at Wired magazine , says : 'The fact so many of us are networked together enabled the information to spread speed-of-light fast . That turned what might have been a slower-burning flame into an instant conflagration . ' [ Okay , okay . That sounds a little pretentious . But you get the idea -- ed . ] How fast ? The Rolling Stone article that started it all ... does n't hits newsstands until today . '' Obviously , the content of the story -- and the progress of the Afghan campaign , and the political environment back home -- mattered more than the speed of the news . The story tapped into a lot of latent anxiety and hostility about the war in Afghanistan that had n't been given an outlet yet . Combine that with the 24-second news cycle , and ... Well , you see the results . Update : Stars and Stripes ace and Twitter fanatic Kevin Baron does n't buy the Inquirer 's argument . `` Every reporter in the Pentagon news room , and many beyond , had a copy of the Rolling Stone article by late Monday night . I had it about 6 p.m. , which from what I read is before even Obama saw it , yes ? Then at about 10 p.m . I got a copy of the McChrystal apology from ISAF which was even more stunning than the article for its total lack of a denial . So before most of Twitterdom went to bed not knowing anything of it , we were already doing reporting on it , and writing -- with a few posting it , obviously . Before I finished my morning joe ( lowercase ) I saw NBC news ' Samantha Guthrie 's Tweet that the WH had summoned McC to the flagpole , which hit every cable station about a millisecond later . THEN the story went viral , '' he e-mails Danger Room . `` I love Twitter , but it was n't the golden goose this time . '' Hendrik Hertzberg contends the troops ' connectivity -- not just the civilians ' -- played heavily into McChrystal 's fall . `` Frontline troops nowadays are also online troops . They are plugged in to the Internet , to Facebook , to blogs , to e-mail and Skype . They talk to each other in chat rooms with little or no supervision from the brass . It 's all instant and it 's all in their face . And that , I hasten to add , is not a bad thing . It 's a good thing . But it makes the morale of the troops that much more fragile , that much more apt to be affected by relative trivialities . The fact that General McChrystal , along with his 'Team America ' posse of adjutants , understood none of this was reason enough to send him packing . His 'conduct ' was n't just a disservice to his President ; it was a disservice to the men and women under his command . '' Subscribe to WIRED magazine for less than $ 1 an issue and get a FREE GIFT ! Click here ! Copyright 2011 Wired.com .
Author : Martin McKenzie Production Manager :