The Social Media Revolution

June 15th, 2009 20:28 UTC by John ·

Like any political junkie, I am fascinated by the recent turn of events in Iran. But the geek component of the protests makes it doubly interesting.

Long before the election, I had noticed the sizeble Iranian presence on FriendFeed, mainly in the feature request and tech support groups for the site itself. Then, as events related to the election began to unfold (SMS and Internet outages in certain areas of Iran, for example), the ingeniousness and determination of the students became obvious.

Using proxies and hacking through filters and blocks isn’t exactly cutting edge, but various participants in protests are using Twitter and FriendFeed to circumvent efforts to control information. While Iranian authorities shut down the Iran-based web sites of Dr. Ahmadi-Nejad’s election opponents, Presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi has an official Twitter account, a YouTube account, a Facebook page, and a Google Sites web site which the Iranian authorities can’t block.

The National Iranian American Council also set up a WordPress.com blog to disseminate information.

US-based bloggers have become aggregators of content.

While it’s early days still, it’s fair to say that the Iranian student movement is a textbook case study on using Web 2.0 tools to advance a cause. It’s equally obvious that Iran’s Universities are filled with intelligent, capable geeks who care deeply about their country.

In 1989, we watched Tienanmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall come down live on CNN. In 1991, the presence of CNN ensured the failure of a Soviet coup. But in 2009, we watched dozens of participants report the story directly while CNN broadcast a Larry King rerun.

This weekend, we may have seen two revolutions.

Update: Rachael Maddow reports.

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Update II: Clay Shirky:

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.