At this stage it is hard to ascertain whether the protests in Iran will simply be crushed into silence (like Tiananmen Square) or whether this is the beginning of the end for the rule of the Islamic theocrats. One thing is certain; the protests have been marked by the flowering of the new social media and furious debates over the political effectiveness of the new media, in particular the micro-blogging platform, Twitter.
This is not to downplay the enormous international impact of the video footage of the brutal repression in Iran; but to note that most of this footage was delivered to the world through Twitter messages or posting to social platforms like YouTube. Blogger Lisa Derrick in La Figa describes how she came upon the shocking video of the attack on the young female protester, Neda:
The global community has been galvanized by the tweets, Facebook logins, cellphone pictures and reports from Iran. Now comes this video of a young a woman shot in Tehran by Basiji police force, which I came across after seeing "neda" and "#neda" on Twitter, where the words kept showing up in in the Tehran and Iran threads. "Neda" means "call" or "proclamation" in Farsi, an odd and chilling coincidence.
Blogging seems to have emerged as a new mass medium in the chaos and questioning that followed the devastation of the World Trade Center in the 911 attack. in a similar way, Twitter, so mobile, so quick and so difficult for oppressive regimes to silence, has exploded into world awareness with these Iranian uprisings.
However the actual effectiveness of Twitter as a political medium is very difficult to decide. The Economist, in a measured assessment of the situation declares that:
Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do. Even at its best the site gave a partial, one-sided view of events.
The report also observes that "Both Twitter and YouTube are hobbled as sources of news by their clumsy search engines", betraying a journalist’s frustration with these platforms as reliable sources of information. Yet, this is surely not the significance of these platforms which are primarily about connections, rather than information in the traditional journalistic sense. Twitter provided a real-time connection to the events as they were happening. This connection was what galvinised people around the world. What consequences this network of informal connections will have for the protests is the really interesting question. The Economist report suggests that the flurry of tweats fired off in support of the uprisings actually stymied the effective flow of information. While from a more aggressively political perspective, the researchers, John Palfrey, Bruce Etling and Robert Faris argue in The Washington Post that
Twitter’s own internal architecture puts limits on political activism. There are so many messages streaming through at any moment that any single entry is unlikely to break through the din, and the limit of 140 characters — part of the service’s charm and the secret of its success — militates against sustained argument and nuance.
