Did you know that the United States military allows its soldiers to carry and use digital video cameras on the battlefield and then share the footage freely on the Internet? It’s the product of this freedom that is the subject of “MTV News Presents: Iraq Uploaded,” a half-hour special report that explores the phenomenon of U.S. soldiers in Iraq filming in the line of fire and then distributing their videos on user-generated content websites like youtube.com, military.com, and ifilm.com.

A 28-year-old staff sergeant states matter-of-factly at the outset of the program, “everybody has a camera,” and goes on to describe how some are mounted onto the cannons of tanks, others onto soldiers’ helmets. While the U.S. military allows troops to use cameras in combat, an onscreen MNC/I blurb states: “Multi-National Corps Iraq… monitor[s] websites/blogs to ensure security content. It does not address the uploading of video.” With this tolerance or institutional blindspot soldiers are free to create, store, and share what are essentially video diaries of their time in Iraq. As producer and narrator Gideon Yago puts it in his introduction to the program, “From the hilarious, to the sublime, to the gruesome and the terrifying, these are anonymous, unspun visions of Iraq in their raw, stark reality.”

The program is composed of three segments. The first focuses on the filmmakers, the men and women on the ground in Iraq shooting the actual footage. The second explores the audience --- everyone from the soldiers, to soldiers’ families, to curious teenagers. And the third segment concentrates on the same phenomenon from the enemy’s side, the Iraqi insurgents’ sedulous use of video footage to attract new recruits and spread propaganda.

So why this explosion of amateur videography.

Soldiers film because it’s something to do; it’s fun; it’s a way to capture as closely as possible an ephemeral and ultimately elusive experience and attempt to share that experience with others. In other words, they film for the same reason anyone else with a camera lying around might decide to pick it up and film, just in a less ordinary context. And the enemy’s filming seems equally intuitive: they film to send a message of fear to Americans and of power and legitimacy to potential sympathizers and recruits.

But the third issue, the issue of the audience, is what held my attention.

The program aims principally to place the digital video phenomenon in a greater socio-technological context. America saw Vietnam through the limited lens of the nightly news. It watched the first Gulf War through the slightly wider lens of the nascent 24-hour news networks. Operation Iraqi Freedom is now viewable through about as wide a lens as you can get – that of the soldier in action. And with roughly 300,000 views per month and growing for a popular video, this lens is becoming a more mainstream form of media every day.

Through the soldiers interviewed and the statistics flashed and some of the exposition from Yago himself, the point is not a subtle one: this is a picture of Iraq you won’t get from the news stations, or the newspapers, and certainly not from the government.

But let’s explore that justification a little. Despite the greatest efforts of this administration to shield the American public from the horrors of the Iraq war (not to mention the best-laid plans of Howard Kaloogian), I can’t give them credit for much success. Even without the sight of a flag-covered coffin, let alone a homemade movie of a soldier getting shot in the head, the American people can see well enough to know that war is horrible, and opinion polls suggest that they are especially keen to the horror of this war. So then, I couldn’t help asking myself as I watched this program, to what extent is this amount of information really valuable?

In the program, a veteran fallen back into civilian life spends 8-10 hours a day online, compulsively watching and sharing videos, much to the frustration and despair of his wife. Another wife of an active soldier watches the online videos almost against her will in order to get a sense of the scenes her husband hesitates to describe over the phone. And a suburban teenager conducts a miniature remote-control army tank in his front yard and refers to anyone in the military as a personal hero. But after addictively watching hours of footage from Iraq, he says the videos “scared him straight” from becoming a marine.

War messes things up unlike anything else, and the videos seem to offer help – for one demobilized soldier, with coping with life after war, another with understanding her husband’s experience, another with realizing the reality behind the sheen of excitement and glory. But even these characters remain confused and conflicted, and in each case, suffering something akin to addiction to these videos. And that’s not taking into account the purpose the program declines to explore, but which the videos undoubtedly serve for some: the hunger of the detached, enthralled voyeur.

I haven’t spent hours watching the footage on these websites. But I feel like I understand the compulsion. I wouldn’t compare the respective contexts of blogging and filming a war. But I feel the two are driven by a similar underlying urge – the need to document, to capture, to retain, to not miss or lose a single moment. The technology that supports the proliferation of digital images from Iraq is the same that supports the proliferation of blogs and every other conceivable piece of information available nowadays at the click of a button. The proliferation of information is an invitation to addiction.

If nothing else these videos, and this MTV News program for alerting a greater public to their existence, serve admirably as a channel to some of that information. The fact that this particular information concerns the topic of war makes it all the more disquieting and ambiguous, but no less valuable.

“MTV News Presents: Iraq Uploaded” will air on MTV on Friday July 21 at 8:00 pm ET/PT. More related content is available on MTVNews.com and MTV Overdrive.