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The Twitter Revolution
One of Andrew Sullivan's readers writes:
Ahmadinejad's and Khamenei's websites were taken down yesterday — I saw the latter go down within a couple of minutes because of a DDOS attack organised via Twitter. @StopAhmadi is a good source for tweets on this. The other important use of Twitter has been distribution of proxy addresses via Twitter. This would be how most video and pictures of today's rally have gotten out.
Andrew comments: "I have to say my skepticism about this new medium has now disappeared. Without it, one wonders if all this could have happened."
It's true that however things turn out in Iran, this will probably be forever known as the Twitter Revolution. And yet, I want to dissent a bit.
I followed the events of the weekend via three basic sources. The first was cable news, and as everyone in the world has pointed out, it sucked. Most TV news outlets have no foreign bureaus anymore; they didn't know what was going on; and they were too busy producing their usual weekend inanity to care. Grade: F.
The second was Twitter, mostly as aggregated by various blogs. This had the opposite problem: there was just too much of it; it was nearly impossible to know who to trust; and the overwhelming surge of intensely local and intensely personal views made it far too easy to get caught up in events and see things happening that just weren't there. It was better than cable news, but not exactly the future of news gathering. Grade: B-.
The third was the small number of traditional news outlets that do still have foreign bureaus and real expertise. The New York Times. The BBC. Al Jazeera. A few others. The twitterers were a part of the story that they reported, but they also added real background, real reporting, and real context to everything. Grade: B+. Given the extremely difficult reporting circumstances, maybe more like an A-.
Twitter has been a great tool for the Iranian protesters — and for us. Marc Ambinder rounds up the evidence here. But protests have happened before without either Twitter or the internet. And if we westerners had to rely on only a single news source to tell us what what going on, I'd still choose the dwindling band of serious outlets that provide real reporting from dangerous (and expensive) places. Cable news may not have covered itself with glory this weekend, but there are still a few precincts of the MSM that did.
BBC
My local NPR station broadcasts BBC world new every night between 11 pm and
5 am. I thought their take on the Iranian situation was quite informative and so
I would give them an A.
It is worthwhile to remember that Iran doesn't like foreign journalists - just think
of Roxanna. Nor do they like inspectors being on their property.
Twitter vs MSM
I think you got it about right, Kevin. Andrew Sullivan has an email from one of his followers who says that blogs are showing why the MSM doomed, but I don't quite see it.
Andrew's site is doing a great job of compiling immediate reactions. But by relying so heavily on things like Twitter feeds, it's easy to get a distorted view of the larger political dynamic. They're both important, and I think the different approaches complement each other quite well in this case.
You're missing the point.
You're missing the point. It's not the "twitter revolution" because we are able to follow it, it's that because it allowed the revolution to happen. It's basically the only electronic means of communication left in Iran that's dependable. Also, if you pay attention to the right people, as listed on Andrew's blog, you get the info and video.
I've been seeing this
I've been seeing this asserted a lot, but with virtually no evidence. By most reports the site is blocked and the mobile phone network is unreliable (and I'm not sure if Twitter offered an SMS interface in Iran to begin with). The site's being accessed via proxies, which of course could be used to access any other website or service just as well.
Twitter has been an important part of the situation in Iran, but as far as I can tell it's mostly been important to those of us in the west who are trying to follow the events. It's been quite good for spreading around the information that has made it out of Iran. But are enough Iranians both using Twitter and able to reach it that coordination between protesters is occurring? So far I've seem no indication of that. Instead I see a bunch of westerners watching and retweeting intently, and more than a few narcissistically patting themselves on their backs.
If Twitter would have been
If Twitter would have been available to Iran's student revolutionaries, they would have occupied and exposed the CIA spies in the US embassy sooner.
We are entering the dark
We are entering the dark ages of journalism: a time when the grand empires of journalism (the daily newspaper, and network news) is being replaced by the chaos and anarchy of Twitter, blogs, and the like.
From this may come a new journalism. But for now it is hard to trust any news outlet -- mainstream or new stream.
I am not nostalgic for the old system -- no way -- but the lack of foreign bureaus at the major newspapers and networks is making it impossible for "professional" reporters to get the news. As a result, we have
some
great citizen journalism mixed in with a lot of really bad citizen journalism.
The result: I "hear" more, but "learn" less; I "hear" more, but "understand" less; I "hear" more, but "trust" less.
An idiot-fest on NPR
Today, NPR had a Iran discussion featuring the full range of opinion, from neo-con to crazy neo-con, "both sides" being represented by Kathleen Parker and James Kirchick. Does NPR deliberately seek out people who really don't know anything about the situation?
NPR "Idiocy"
Just finished listening to the segment tof "Talk of the Nation" to which you are referring: it was about political extremism, not Iran, but otherwise, I agree with your basic point. Both Kirchick & Parker made ridiculous assertions about the moral equivalency of the left and the right, none of which were challenged by the host. Some callers tried to inject a little light into this, but their points were dismissed or not adressed at all.
Simply put, there IS no megaphone of the left which begins to rival the rightwing echo chamber of Limbaugh/Drudge/O'Reilly/Hannity/Cheney/Gingrich, not to mention the on-line scho chamber of the right:one only has to look at memorandum to see the swarms of rightwing blogs which engage the pettiest slight they perceive.
This underscores the fundamental difference between the thinking of the left and the thinking of the right. The left, generally, is composed of independent thinkers. The right, generally, consists of followers - I would add: easily scared and gullible. A left-wing echo chamber would be virtually impossible to create: it would be too much like herding cats.
Sorry to thread-jack - got carried away.
dark age?
That there are blogs out there that don't meet the standards of high quality journalism doesn't mean that there are no professional journalists who don't meet those same standards. Think about all the talking head / parrots.
I'd rather take a few minutes and compare blogs, look at the various POVs being professed, and make informed decisions about which sources are more trustworthy.
Ambinder
Ambinder enters the realm of absurdity by seeming to posit that Mousavi may only still be alive because of a dozen Twitter users, and he certainly doesn't seem to be referring to the actual country of Iran (more like Pakistan).
Put down the bottle and pull the wool out from your eyes.
Media ranking
I'm generally with Kevin about the relative worth of the media:: social network segments when it comes to 'news', especially when you throw the Iranian elections into the empirical analysis.
Someone recently said it best when they noted that the wrong part of the 'media' is going out of business.
Short Memories...
When the Soviet Military tried to stage a coup in 1991, they didn't block email. They blocked mail and normal phone communication. The protesters used email to organize against the coup.
Soviet protesters organised
Soviet protesters organised through email in 1991? In that case we should've kept the old USSR around! We didn't get widely used email in Australia until the mid to late 90s. I know I got my first email account in 1998 (hotmail). I first heard of the internet in 1995.
Those soviet protesters were really on their game!!
Arms race dynamics
This is the next step in the arms race between power mongers and people. Each pass through the cycle is a learning experience and another shift in tool use.
Think about why TPTB (the powers that be) are so against peer to peer networking. They shut down Internet stuff & SMS. Twitter is simply the one that the Iranian power circle didn`t think about being used. Next pass through the cycle there will be something else. There are more people working for the open flow of information than there are working against it.
Think ahead.
"There's this peculiar asymmetry in time which is that you can know everything you want about the past and you can't change a bit of it and you can know absolutely nothing about the future but what you do changes everything." - Stewart Brand
BBC
That was actually me Andrew quoted from my email. It was late GMT Sunday and @stopamadi linking to a refresh address for Katemi's website. Literally within a minute of his tweet the site was showing an error.
I kindof agree with you here and quote the head of BBC News making similar points in this blog post Twitter and the events in Iran - http://paulcanning.blogspot.com/2009/06/twitter-and-events-in-iran.html
However, on Sunday the BBC's reporting and The Guardian's was terrible because, I assume, it was a Sunday. It was very noticeable that the latter launched a 'liveblog' on Monday and the first few hours were spent with the journo catching up.
I also watched the BBC go from 'Amadi won' to something a bit more nuanced and taking much more reporting from their Tehran guy and thier Persian service by yesterday morning.
The real star reporters has been HuffPost. Andy Sullivan has been good but has repeated a lot of rumours and not put them in context.
looking under the lamppost
There is a distinct feeling of "looking under the lamppost" when it comes to following the twitter threads. (Referring to the old saw about the drunk who loses his keys at night and only looks under the lamppost because thats where he can see). Whats so much more interesting right now is what is happening in the shaddows where Musavvi and maneuvering to put pressure on the regime to take action and what is happening outside of Tehran. The tweets aren't letting us in on any of that.
That said, the tweeting does matter. But the difference is with us here sitting on our Western couches following along. The big difference between a twitter revolution and a text-message revolution is we can see the twitters and feel a part of the movement (hence Andrew starts posting the twitters in a twitterish green font, and we can feel caught up in the drama). That's useful for the movement for sure; they need and want our support and the more we can identify with them, the better.
But I'm not sure I buy that its a qualitative difference in how the movement comes together.
MSM
The reason twitter and blogs do not replace the MSM is that the MSM has a job to do. I mean that literally - these people get paid to provide a product that meets a journalistic standard that has been honored for centuries. Twitter and the rest of the internet are communication tools, but they don't result in journalism. They are raw information. Even blogs are raw relative to what you read on the NYT. How many bloggers have editors?
Of course, this is a particularly exciting nexus of events and real-time technology, and there's no doubt that "breaking news" happened on blogs as the initial events unfolded. But if you wait a few days, you go to the NYT and the BBC to get the most complete, accurate, and diligently checked summary of what has happened. It may be a day or even two old, but to a guy sitting in Massachusetts, that's just about what I'd expect.
This is why I' so concerned about the struggles of the MSM. The issue, at its heart, is money. Real journalists get paid, and they go where the news is. If the MSM can't survive, who will do real journalism?
Anarchy
Following the sometimes breathlessly inane and often hysterical ranting of Andrew Sullivan, all I could think was that good journalism still matters so very, very much and how what Sullivan is doing is such a poor substitute.
Far from being dead, what the Iranian twitter revolution proves is that anarchists are poor substitutes for professional journalists.
no I am not a journalist, but have many good friends who are
Bigger response
Hi Kevin
I've expanded on my comment here
More on Twitter and the events in Iran
all Iranians will become victims of Western hegemony
The people in Iran who have cell phones, internet connections and twitter accounts are not the poor who have to wait in queues for potato handouts by the government. The people in Iran who can twitter are the upper classes, not the majority of poor people. It should not be surprising then that the twitterers in the West have an affinity for the twitterers from Iran, and use these communications to formulate personal opinions based on impartial reports to events to inform their opposition to a candidate belligerent to Western hegemony. The people in Iran protesting Ahmadinejad's victory will become victims of Western aggression just as much as Ahmadinejad's supporters will, and many of those who will support that aggression are today claiming solidarity with those future victims.
RE: "all iranians will become victims of western hegemony"
In response to "The people in Iran who can twitter are the upper classes, not the majority of poor people."
I think that is completely untrue. As somebody who visits the country often, the majority of the lower middle class citizens actually do have this access because they have been highly interested in social media from the beginning because of the lack of fair/true media in Iran itself. I don't think it's smart to make it so black and white. I have a friend who can fix any cell phone, hack into any site, and he makes $200 a month.
might want to check into where @StopAhmadi comes from
might want to check into where @StopAhmadi comes from
Wikified emo news and propaganda
It's naive to think that only "our side" - the guys we feel are on our side - can use blogs, twitter or even planted news items to drive their causes. Of course the ayatollahs - or 10 Downing Street, or the corporations, here or in another scenario - can do that too. And they can be just as convincing. Using this particular revolt as the blueprint for a wikified uprising and its news reporting is nothing but a dangerous fallacy.
It's easier than even many pro journalists - and certainly Gladwell or Shirky - want to admit, to make up something that LOOKS, for the five minutes it takes to see the clip or read the news, like an evident fact or the shadow of a big street movement.
(Quote fr Victor Purinton above) "The reason twitter and blogs do not replace the MSM is that the MSM has a job to do. I mean that literally - these people get paid to provide a product that meets a journalistic standard that has been honored for centuries. Twitter and the rest of the internet are communication tools, but they don't result in journalism. They are raw information. Even blogs are raw relative to what you read on the NYT. How many bloggers have editors?"
Hear, hear! And before you think all stories that swarm around are true, remember the Kuwaiti nurse who told us how Saddam's soldiers had rampaged round the hospital and killed the subnatal children. She was, in fact, the daughter of a diplomat and had ben hired by a PR firm. Her testimony was a vital part of the Bush Sr propganada effort. In a volunteerized newsflow woithout sane editing and criticism, we'd get a hundredfold more of her kind.
Sad, but true story about
Sad, but true story about the Iran Election.