News for June 24

Twittering the Revolution edition

I’m back from my world travels (I spent eight days in Nicaragua, a journey I’ll share in in a series for The Xenia Institute’s Featured Articles in the coming months), but before we get back to regular programming, I’d like to extend a warm thanks to Clint Collins for his stellar work filling in with the news last week! Great job, man!

Now on to the news …

John Cole/The Scranton Times-Tribune

Social media such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have taken center stage in media coverage on the deadly election protests in Iran. Not only are the sites one of the only ways to get information about what’s happening on the ground, but some observers say the protesters are also using them to coordinate their actions. While some bloggers are lauding the focus on the power of new media, others are aware that the social media is benefiting those outside of Iran more than those facing the Links include:

Politicoholic |  “Over the last couple of days I’ve been glued to Andrew Sullivan’s blog over at The Atlantic. Andrew’s blog is already high-quality content on a daily basis, but over the weekend he began blogging up a storm in real time as the events unfolded in Iran. Unlike big mainstream media outlets, whose reporting has been hindered by elaborate quality regulations, a lack of foreign bureaus to provide them direct on-the-ground footage, and a strong dislike for all forms of new media, Andrew’s blog has been going nonstop, hindered by none of those things. He is updating multiple times a day, sometimes multiple times an hour, every time he has any new piece of information.

…

Old media types might shudder at the idea of linking to an unknown blog, but new media journalists like Sullivan aren’t concerned about how big the readership of your blog is or whether you’re just a student writing your observations on Twitter. It’s not about your press credentials; it’s about free flow of information. In this new media landscape, if you’ve got information, it’s worth sharing — no matter who you are.”

• Related link: Worse Than We Thought?  |  Andrew Sullivan @The Atlantic

Global Comment |  “The story is about Twitter only to the extent that it’s about us, the rest of the world outside of Iran and especially here in the U.S. Yes, it’s inspiring to see a field of green avatars on Twitter, or to see people normally uninvolved in politics even in their own country passing on information about a protest thousands of miles away, but when the comments are mostly about what Obama is doing about Iran, I have to remind myself that this isn’t our protest.”

Salon |  “Though U.S. media outlets can’t get enough of the idea that Twitter — already a press darling — is the greatest thing to hit the democracy movement since Gandhi, reality is a little more complicated. Authorities in Iran probably realize that the Tweets and Facebook updates aren’t the main threat to the status quo right now — instead, it’s what’s happening in the real, not virtual world. Iranians who are Twittering the protests are mostly doing to help spread the word to people outside Iran, not inside the country (as Business Week and Slate have noted). “The main message with respect to social media and Twitter is not so much that it’s having an impact on the political situation in Iran,” Fassihian said. “What those tools are really having an impact on is how the outside world is viewing what’s happening in the country.” Relatively old-fashioned text messages, using cell phone networks that also appear to be straining during the crisis, is helping to spread the word much better than any newer tools. So the idea — which even the State Department seems to believe — that Twitter is essential for organizing the rallies and marches in Tehran is a little much. “That would be really stupid,” Morozov said. “If you want to plan a revolution, you never do it in public — the authorities show up and arrest everyone. It’s just beyond me that somebody would start posting locations on secret meetings on Twitter.”"

Alas, a Blog |  “Due to the heavy pressure on foreign journalists inside Iran, these technological tools have come to play a significant role in sending the messages and images of the movement to the outside world. However, the creative self-organization of the movement is using a manifold of methods and channels, many of them simple and traditional, depending on their availability: shouting ‘death to dictator’ from rooftops, calling landlines, at the end of one rally chanting the time and place of the next one, and by jeopardizing oneself by physically standing on streets and distributing news to every passing car. The appearance of the movement which is being sold by the media to the western gaze – the cyber-fantasy of the western societies which has already labelled our movement a twitter revolution, seems to have completely missed the reality of those bodies which are shot dead, injured or ready to be endangered by non-virtual bullets.”

FiveThirtyEight |  “Since the Iranian elections were held a week ago Friday, this website has received 2,065 visits from Iran. That’s not particularly many and represents just a fraction of a percent of our overall traffic. But considering that we’d had just a couple dozen visitors from Iran in the entire history of this website prior to 6/12, it becomes more impressive.

“One thing I noticed, however, is that 67 percent of our Iranian visitors are from Tehran, even though Tehran accounts for only about 10 percent of the country’s population. This is not particularly surprising considering that Internet access in Iran is highly inequitable: of the 33 ISP’s in Iran as of 2005, 19 were in Tehran Province.”

Asian Pop |  “Twenty years later, as Iran erupts in the turmoil that some have hyped as “Tehran’s Tiananmen,” digital technology has revolutionized the way we’re watching potential revolution. Even as CNN and other 24-hour broadcast networks struggle to cover the breaking story of that country’s rapidly changing landscape, thousands of Iranians are using a platform readily (and literally) at hand — their digital camera-equipped cellphones — to capture images and document events as they occur, transmitting them to the world via myriad feeds on services like Flickr, Facebook and most of all, Twitter.

“Which is why a recent tweet by fellow Chronicle writer Jeff Chang (@zentronix) resonated with so many of us who remember watching the events of Tiananmen unfold. “Mesmerized and thankful for Twitter updates on #iranelection,” he wrote. “If only we had this 20 years ago to follow what was happening in Tiananmen” — the implication being that the protest might have gone deeper, reached higher, changed more, perhaps even changed everything.”

The Daily Beast |  “Beyond boosting the site’s profile, drawing in new users, and casting Twitter as a diplomatic hero, the events of the past couple weeks have had a number of other benefits. For many of those who saw Twitter as little more than a monument to shrinking attention spans and ego-centric navel gazing, the election in Iran established the site as a valuable and credible medium for news. And despite the influx of traffic, Twitter proved itself technically sound, avoiding major technical failures and keeping downtime to a minimum.”

The Washington Post |  “Yet for all their promise, there are sharp limits on what Twitter and other Web tools such as Facebook and blogs can do for citizens in authoritarian societies. The 140 characters allowed in a tweet are not the end of politics as we know it — and at times can even play into the hands of hard-line regimes. No amount of Twittering will force Iran’s leaders to change course, as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made clear Friday with his rebuke of the protesters, reportedly followed by the security forces’ use of tear gas, batons, water cannons and gunfire to break up demonstrations yesterday. In Iran, as elsewhere, if true revolution is coming, it must happen offline.”

GOOD Magazine |  “Capturing the immediacy—that is what Kapuscinski did for us in Shah of Shahs. That is what Iranian Twitterers and others are doing for us outside Iran today, as a new river of agitated people flows down those same streets. This time, they are “able to be seen and heard” because they are doing the preserving themselves, writing their own story 140 characters at a time, uploading their film reels to the new flea market that is YouTube. Journalists like Sullivan, digital heirs of Kapuscinki, are collagists, quoting them unadorned, and offering informed, throat-choked responses that do not, because they cannot, shy from emotion. Those of us left simply to read are, like me when first I read Shah of Shahs, or me today in front of several screens, stunned, more knowledgeable, sure that this will be an unforgettable experience and, of course, crying, because we are unable to do anything but.”

• Related link: #Iranelection @Twitter
• Related link: In a Moment of Neglect I Might Fly  |  Obsidian Wings
• Related link: Meddle, No; Twitter, Yes  |  Truthdig

How Twitter Can Make History  |  TEDTalks

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

Related link: A Digital Revolution?  |  Clint Collins @The Xenia Institute