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For personal army, break glass is a post from: The Inquisitr

For anyone following any of the reports coming our of Iran it isn’t very difficult to see that to potential for change is sitting on the cusp. It’s been bloody, it’s been violent and people have been hurt and some have died. Change doesn’t come without a cost but most of the world are only getting an inkling of the cost being incurred by the people of Iran. News organization after organizations have been tossed from the country and those mainstream media reporters and photographers who have managed to stay do so at great risk to their lives.

The only window we have at this point into this watershed moment in Iran’s history is because of those gallant and dedicated journalists and photographers. However they are not alone in the documentation of change. Right at their side, like never before, are the people of Iran. Using tools that didn’t exist when Ayatollah Khomeini took control of the country in 1979 the people are telling the world what is happening in their country.

Iran and its quiet world of social media

I won’t claim to be any more knowledgeable about the politics and inner workings of Iran than the next person – that would be foolish. What I do know is that for some time the Iranian people have long been users of social media tools like Facebook, and now Twitter as well as Friendfeed. It has never been an overtly publicized usage as it is here in the US or other countries around the world. It has been a quiet usage because their government is well known for throwing up blocks to keep them from being able to access the web.

As a result the knowledge of how to get around the government filters is passed quietly among those who want the world to know what is going inside of the country. As Anne-Marie Corley writes at the Technology Review blog [referencing her conversations with Ethan Zuckerman]

Zuckerman attributes the continued information flow in part to "latent capability": savvy Internet users in Iran already know how to circumvent blocking measures, so in a political upheaval they don’t have to relearn the process. "The longer a country censors and the more aggressively it censors," says Zuckerman, "the more incentive it gives citizens to learn how to get around that." Because Iran has been filtering since at least 2004, says Zuckerman, a lot of Iranians already know how to use proxies–computers that route traffic around a government-imposed block. So even if you’re just using a proxy to surf porn, says Zuckerman, suddenly, a political crisis hits and you already have the means to communicate.

However the recent events in the country have raised that previous quiet use of social media into a large worldwide voice that isn’t letting this event fade quietly away under the repressive measure of a government being called into question by its citizenry. In most countries this kind of uproar would be one thing to deal with but it Iran this isn’t just an outcry against a questionably elected government. As of Friday it is also a voice against the religious leaders of the country and that – for Iran – adds a whole different meaning to what is going on.

As CNN foreign affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria said in an interview about what was happening in the country

No, I don’t mean the Iranian regime will fall soon. It may — I certainly hope it will — but repressive regimes can stick around for a long time. I mean that this is the end of the ideology that lay at the basis of the Iranian regime.

The regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, laid out his special interpretation of political Islam in a series of lectures in 1970. In this interpretation of Shia Islam, Islamic jurists had divinely ordained powers to rule as guardians of the society, supreme arbiters not only on matters of morality but politics as well. When Khomeini established the Islamic Republic of Iran, this idea was at its heart. Last week, that ideology suffered a fatal wound.

What is going to happen in Iran is anyone’s guess right now. All we do know really is how little we know and how little is making it out of the country. Unlike revolutions before this one though there has never been the concentration of the world on what is happening and that is only possible because of social media. For the people of Iran though this isn’t a story about social media. For them social media is just a tool to be able to tell the story of Iran – their story.

Social Media’s growing voice in the world

While a lot of attention is being showered on Twitter and to a lesser degree the other tools of social media like Facebook and Friendfeed the idea that these tools are something new to the world of social change couldn’t be further from the truth. As Ethan Zuckerman points out in a recent post

I’ve been asking some of the reporters I’ve spoken with where they were on other recent social media and protest stories. Citizen media has emerged as one of the key spaces for journalism in Fiji in the wake of a coup government that’s censoring mainstream media. It’s been a key source of information in Madagascar as that country’s suffered through a violent change of government. (One reporter who I mentioned this to remarked that Madagascar was “just a speck of an island somewhere”. That speck is twice the size of Great Britain and has the population of Australia…) In Guatemala, online media publicized the assasination of a lawyer by forces close to the president… and government authorities began arresting people for twittering the story to amplify it. These weren’t huge stories for most newspapers – the Iran story is huge not because of the social media aspect, but because protests in Iran are a huge story independent of citizen media.

As well Noam Cohen points out in a New York Times post

Social networking, a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, has already been credited with aiding protests from the Republic of Georgia to Egypt to Iceland. And Twitter, the newest social-networking tool, has been identified with two mass protests in a matter of months — in Moldova in April and in Iran last week ….

Where once we might have cracked jokes about all those silly tweets and pointless poking on Facebook suddenly they are providing us with a way to have front row seats to a changing world. Like never before the people directly involved in social change within their country are able to let the outside world know what is going on – with words, pictures and video. As you saw from Paul Short’s post earlier today these tools have the very power to bring a young woman’s death into our homes.

Only iconic pictures of a dead Kent State protester, or the young Vietnamese child running screaming from napalm burns, or the aftermath of Hiroshima carry the same impact. Except this time you can see the life draining from her – you can’t escape it because it is real and you know it. It isn’t state manipulated information or photoshopped cheering crowds around a false victor.

The way we look at our world, or the way we participate in our elections will ever be the same. Social media has changed all that.

The aftermath and responsibility

Just as we have had front row seats to what is happening in Iran we will probably have as well those same seats to see how it ends – good or bad. In the meantime how do we deal with sitting in those front row seats?

In some cases we have seen DDoS attacks against Iranian government sites but at the same time we don’t question is this really the best way to help. As Evgeny Morozov points out in a post at the Foreign Policy net.Effect blog

But these little subtleties get lost on an angry online mob that wants revenge on Ahmadinejad without taking the effort to educate themselves about the repercussions of their cyber-activity. It’s a shame that some American bloggers are participating in this campaign and are even encouraging others to take up their "cyber-arms". Not only is this irresponsible and probably illegal, it also hurts users in Iran and gives their hard-line government another reason to suspect "foreign intervention" – albeit via computer networks – into Iranian politics.

The net effect of this being of course the pulling of the Iranian Internet plug which would then leave us totally blind to what was happening. More importantly though it would also take away the one important way for those Iranians trying to alert the world of what was happening.

Sure it might give you a gratifying sense of doing something for the ‘cause’ but the fact is that many of the so-called anti-Iranian Government actions on the web may actually exasperating the situation. As hard as it might be sometimes the best help you can give people to to do everything in your power to make sure that the only door they have to the world stays open.

I have long maintained that Social Media has the power to be a changing force in our society it all depends on how we use the tools given to us to be a part of that change. Even in the few short weeks since the Twitter Revolution of Maldova the idea that these self-same tools that we play silly games on could be a potential factor in a change of country from both a political and religious perspective is amazing.

As is Iran standing at a cusp of change so is our larger world but we don’t see it yet. While some will definitely laugh at me and suggest the cranky old fart has finally lost it I will stand here and say that Social Media is coming of age. It is too bad that it is taking the look from the dying eyes of a young woman in Iran in a video on YouTube to show us this.

Iran and Social Media – watershed moments in history is a post from: The Inquisitr

Or is all just a case of wishful thinking from a minority of people in the Social Media realm trying to pin the popularity of Social Media to the coattails of an event that was bound to happen.

When it all started

It was the Saturday prior to the 14th of June that the first rumbling began to be heard moving through the Twittersphere. The rumblings of a people who felt that the election for the next Iranian president had been stolen from the people as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was reelected. It was also during this time that it became apparent that if you wanted to find out what was happening in Iran you weren’t going to hear it from the mainstream media.

As Sunday rolled around all kinds of questions were being asked on Twitter as to why organizations like CNN weren’t providing more than just a ticker news bite at the bottom of the screen mentioning who won the election. According to what you heard / read on Twitter or a growing number of blogs, CNN and the other mainstream outlets were totally ignoring the growing Green Revolution that was beginning to roll across the Iranian landscape.

There were those however that tried to point out that while the coverage might not have been perfect CNN did in fact provide more coverage than other news organizations

“This is an incredibly important story that CNN, across all of our platforms, has covered thoroughly every day for a week with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in Tehran, among others,” CNN spokesperson Bridget Leininger told the WSJ. “We share people’s expectations of CNN and have delivered far more coverage of the Iranian election and aftermath than any other network.”

In fact, CNN had 101 mentions of Iran up until 1pmET on Sunday — then a 70% increase in mentions over the next nine hours. As of 1pmET yesterday, FNC had 75 mentions and MSNBC 53.

Source Mediabistro

Even CNN’s Rick “Mr. Tweeter” Sanchez went to the airwaves to defend CNN

CNN’s Rick Sanchez took the #CNNfail criticism head-on this afternoon, in a segment at the end of his 3pmET hour. “There have been some questions raised on Twitter as to whether we covered any of the events enough over the weekend,” said Sanchez. “Frankly, it’s a compliment that you expected us to cover it more than our competitors, and we did.”

 

Source: Mediabistro

As did apparently Don Lemon

Twitterers expressed early on that CNN wasn’t satiating their news needs, and the CNN failure meme (#cnnfail) became so prevalent that anchor Don Lemon took to Twitter to defend the network. On Sunday, CNN improved its coverage, but a press crackdown in Iran meant that, for all major news outlets, reporting became difficult and dangerous.

Source: Daily Intel

The fact was though that all these news organizations seem to be spending more time talking about Twitter and Iran rather than providing news about Iran itself

Meanwhile, Howard Kurtz had Rick Sanchez and sportswriter Gregg Doyel on Reliable Sources for an utterly useless but incredibly ironic debate over Twitter’s relevance. To his credit Sanchez, a mildly obsessive Twitterer, sort of gets it, mentioning that he interviewed someone in Tehran on his show that he’d met on Twitter, but no one on the show seemed to grasp the fact that the Twitter was in midst of handing CNN its proverbial ass as a news source before, during and after the airing of Reliable Sources.

Source: Valleywag

It’s more than just Twitter in the game

While much of the attention centered around Twitter and how it was being used to get the news in Iran out to the world it wasn’t the only Social Media tool that was being used – or misused. It turns out that Friendfeed was becoming another really popular spot for Iranians to get the news out, and because of the way Friendfeed handles conversations there was a lot of comments being made on the news. Unfortunately this isn’t something that the controlling Iranian government wanted so it blocked all access to Friendfeed from within the country

Interestingly enough just as Twitter and Friendfeed were all about getting the news out to the world it appears that YouTube was doing exactly the opposite. According to some preliminary investigating by Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins YouTube is taking down any and all videos it can of the uprising in Iran

If you do a Twitter search using the terms ‘youtube’ and ‘removed,’ you’ll come up with hundreds of tweets from folks who’ve ostensibly had their videos of the riots in Iran removed. This points to a larger pattern of removal, and based on what I’m reading, it seems to center around description and title keyword matches around words like “beating,” “death,” and “killed.”

There might be other terms, and if this is in fact the case as to why the videos are being so quickly removed, it’s a new tactic to me.

If this is indeed the case and this news gains any real traction YouTube could potentially find itself in a PR nightmare.

From Monday forward

Then Monday came the news that the election results had been leaked, showing that rather than being the winner Ahmadinejad actually came in third. Surprisingly though, the Iranian supreme leaders called for an investigation into the election but this has done very little to quell the growing uprising.

At the same time that Twitterites and other Social Media mavens are slapping #CNNFail to their tweets it is becoming increasingly difficult for mainstream media to even report about what is happening

This morning Iran’s Culture Ministry stripped all foreign media of their press accreditation and warned that any journalists seen filming or photographing in the streets will be arrested. But all is not lost — luckily, they are still allowed to report from their hotel rooms (about the firmness of their mattresses or the softness of their toilet paper, we guess).

Source: Daily Intel

This in turn is making Twitter an even more important vehicle of getting news out – even if it is raw and hard to substantiate. Important enough that apparently the State Department was the one responsible for getting Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance that would have shut the service down for a period of time.

Senior officials say the State Department is working with Twitter and other social networking sites to ensure Iranians are able to continue to communicate to each other and the outside world.

By necessity, the US is staying hands off of the election drama playing out in Iran, and officials say they are not providing messages to Iranians or “quarterbacking” the disputed election process.

But they do want to make sure the technology is able to play its sorely-needed role in the crisis, which is why the State Department is advising social networking sites to make sure their networks stay up and running for Iranians to use them and helping them stay ahead of anyone who would try to shut them down.

Source: CNN :: Anderson Cooper

And help is coming in all forms as the Iranian government continues to try and stem the flow of news making its way out to the world. Whether it be all out attacks against Iranian government sites to people from around the world providing constantly updated lists of web proxies for those in Iran to use the news keeps flowing out to the world.

Even as we hear reports of protesters dying the news doesn’t seem to be stopping. If anything it is growing like a tidal wave. Granted this isn’t the first time that Twitter has been used to get out the news about a country in political upheaval but it is the first time that it has forced mainstream media to focus on the very thing it is supposed to do – that is bring us the news as it is happening.

As much as we might like to believe that technology can be responsible for tearing down the walls of a repressive government the fact is only time will tell if this is indeed the case. Additionally as much as we might like to point out the failings of mainstream media in this case it is interesting that those suggesting that old media has to change are also among the ones calling for that old media to give them even more news. As Louis Gray put it

That CNN did not lead the way in covering the Iran conflict this week, after decades of our relying on them to be there, as they were in Desert Storm, Operation: Iraqi Freedom, Somalia, Bosnia and others, is not up for debate. But the question is – did we really not want them to fail, or are you happy that they did?

Twitter and Social Media as a whole may be on the vanguard of change and letting us all be a part of that change but that doesn’t change the reality that we still expect our news standard bearers to keep us on the frontlines.

Does this mean that organizations like CNN failed in this duty? – most definitely.

Does it mean that we can only expect that Twitter and other Social Media tools are the only way we should be getting the news as it happens? – most definitely not.

It does mean however that the two can work together and when they do we win. Instead of spending so much time knocking old media or making fun of the new social media tools we should be working on ways to get them to work together. Each serves a purpose and in this changing world they can both help effect social and political change.

That is what Iran is teaching us right now.

Twitter, Social Media and the revolution in Iran is a post from: The Inquisitr