This Is Not Your Older Brother’s Twitter
As it turns out, the revolution is certainly not being televised.
Instead, it’s being tweeted. Yes, that’s right: Twitter, the superfluous, idiotic microblogging platform only used by the self-absorbed and insecure, is the driving force behind not only coordinating the anti-governmental movement within Iran, but also the West’s ability to track the current tumult in response to Iran’s disupted election.
Real-time information has been trickling its way out of Tehran and its surrounding environs by way of new media/social media such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, and even Facebook, despite the Iranian government’s attempts to crack down on online communication during the continuation of the protests. Social media users have been spreading this information to increase awareness, to the point at which hundreds if not thousands of tweets have been and are being sent every minute over the past 48 hours and counting. The flow of information has grown so dense, in fact, that Twitter has postponed a scheduled maintainance downtime in order to allow people to continue following the developments from Iran.
It started with a trending Twitter topic called #CNNfail, which essentially consisted of people having problems with CNN neglecting to sufficiently cover the ongoing story. As the protests have escalated, people within Iran have been using Twitter to both communicate with each other and pass information to the outside. Iran’s government has apparently also been trying to keep up by blocking certain keywords from being seen and tweeted inside Iran, although this, like everything else reported by Twitter, is unconfirmed.
Why is this important, you ask? Well, if things are as they appear, it looks like new media has finally jumped ahead of old media. Things have been leading up to this point for a while—remember how the first report of the Hudson plane crash was on Twitter?—but this is something entirely unprecedented, something new. New media is spreading real-time information faster and more efficiently than any of the news networks can. It both breaks the news faster and is able to keep itself from being censored by avoiding government information blocks.
As one person tweeted earlier today, Twitter may no longer be just an Internet fad—it’s playing a part in a revolution.
We don’t want to rehash, so we’ll leave you with some tools and links with which to track this developing for yourself:
- From the New York Times: a feature on the ways in which Twitter and social media are being used during the crisis.
- From Mashable: a guide on how to best use new media to follow the controversy.
- From The New York Times’ “Lede” Blog: your best “old media” source for updates.
- Monitter: a sort of customizable dashboard for following Twitter topics. We suggest plugging in “#IranElection”, “#CNNFail”, and “Tehran”. “#Iran9″ and “RT from Iran” have also been trending on the perimeter.
- From Flickr: an example of some of the photos that are making their way out of Iran via new media. Be warned, some of these are somewhat graphic.
- From Networked Culture: a guide to both participating in the Twitter discussion and aiding Iranian bloggers, should you wish to do so (please note that Break Out The Oreos is not encouraging you to do so).
It should be noted that any and all information originating on Twitter should be taken with a grain of salt. Time will only tell if this is the start of something new or if things are being overblown. From the looks of things, though, Break Out The Oreos is willing to take a chance in saying that most of the information on Twitter coming out of Iran is, in fact, genuine. Let’s wait for the dust to settle.
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Devon Grandy is a writer, blogger, humorist, filmmaker, and musician. The creator and Editor-in-Chief of Break Out The Oreos, Devon is chiefly responsible for the alternatingly mind-numbing and glee-inspiring process of transforming his brainchild into a "for real" web magazine. Read more.
