Thursday
18Jun2009
3arabawy BookMarx 06/18/2009 (a.m.)
Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 12:28PM America’s Iranian Twitter Revolution « OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY
- Twitter may be as irrelevant to Iran as it is good for the promotion of Twitter itself, and for the self-flattery of some ardent Twitter users who believe that their tweets and their green-tinted avatars will change the world, or at least Iran. The revolution will not only be tweeted, it will be fast and easy, and it will be led by Americans themselves, “for Iran”.
- None of the Twitter users who made those statements are among even the allegedly Iranian Twitter users, and all except for one locate themselves in the U.S., the other in Canada.
- Yet, some would have us believe that there is a “Twitter revolution” going on in Iran, when there is no such thing. Not only that, what is being boasted about the power of Twitter is almost entirely false. What there is instead is a rush to the finish line, a predetermined conclusion to immediately thank and praise Twitter in the context of Iran’s street protests.
- How representative are Iran’s Twitter revolutionaries? In actual fact, the only allegedly Iranian Twitter users who have been identified by other Twitter users as tweeting about the Iranian protests, are fewer than 45 (see one list here), most of whose locations cannot be confirmed and almost all of whom post only in English. Yet, one can get as many as 2,500 updates in a single minute, on one stream alone (#iranelection), and most of that repetitive and uninformative material is not being posted by anyone except for a huge mass of American Twitter users. In total, only a third of Iranians even have Internet access (we saw in the Canadian case that Internet access does not translate into Twitter use) and, very interestingly, the youth who are most associated with the protests and with Twitter use, consist of 18-to-24-year-olds who in fact comprise “the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups” (poll).
- The Associated Press has produced a similar analysis, noting that in Iran, “Internet usage is mostly still a phenomenon of the affluent, the youth and city-dwellers — meaning Twitter and other networks are used mostly by the young and liberal — and may overemphasize their numbers while ignoring more-conservative political sentiments among the non-connected.” Those interviewed by AP say that the Twitter hype is creating an illusion that Tehran is witnessing another revolution, or that Twitter even matters for Iranians. (See “Tweeting Iran: Elex news in 140 characters or less,” by Rebecca Santana, Associated Press, 15 June 2009.)
- So in this Twitter revolution, Twitter is not representative of Internet users, Internet use is not representative of a wider population, and the youth are not representative of the youth, and the Iranians may not even be Iranian. Fantastic indeed, this power of “social media”.
- “Where is my vote?” I am not sure where the votes of the disgruntled losers of the Iranian election are, but I doubt that they are in Twitter. Perhaps this view is mistaken, perhaps the way they recast their ballot is through Twitter, and one would think that the pretty young females with makeup and jewelry cast their real ballots when they held up signs in Tehran, in English, for foreign news photographers.
- What is even less clear is whether they are saying anything much in Twitter. Some journalists think they see a “new stage in the evolution of social media,” in the form of the “use of Twitter in Iran” (largely mistaking Twitter for Iran with in Iran), and even claim that “information is flooding out of the country — on Twitter” (see “Tweets from Tehran: The use of Twitter in Iran is a new stage in the evolution of social media,” by Ashley Terry, Global NewsJune 15, 2009). The question we should ask ourselves is: what information and what is the nature of this “flood”?
- The problem as we see is that when everybody is in Iran, nobody is in Iran.
- The last point raises the issue of how are we to value the “information” provided by this “Twitter revolt”. The first problem is to get over short attention spans — this is not the first “Twitter revolt” as some in Twitter suggest. The latest, previous revolt was in Moldova, and I personally followed very closely the Greek riots through Twitter and many other media. Indeed, the #griots stream is still active, and when it was especially active in December of 2008, it featured countless links to independent media, loaded with photographs and videos, and many if not most of the tweets were in Greek — it was a Greek event, generated for Greeks and to be consumed by Greeks. Thus previously I have not had the reason for criticizing Twitter as I do now.
- There is virtually no accountability or transparency evident in this now almost mythical “Iranian Twitter Revolution,” as we do not know who is where and why they are saying what they do. It is not as easy to get away with truth-creation in the mainstream media, especially when reporting from conflict zones: as has happened many times in the past, untruthful reporters claiming to be filing stories from the war zone have been unmasked by others as being nowhere in sight, or, if there, as never leaving their hotels. We cannot do that with Twitter. One Twitter user pleaded, “don’t retweet anything until it’s confirmed, spreading rumors will do more harm than good #iranelection” — but then, how is it confirmed? Propaganda journalism often gets unmasked; in Twitter, propaganda gets retweeted and thus remasked.
- As for “social media” providing egalitarian access and voice for everyone, what is most immediately apparent from #iranelection in Twitter is the drive to silence some voices: “all users IGNORE all post except from reliable sources,” said one. How do you know a source is “reliable” in Twitter? “I’m really following this closely. Fascinating watching the protests unfold” — but you are not actually watching the protests. You are entertaining an illusion in your mind that is generated by the tweets.
- Yet none of these people cared about democracy when another of Egypt’s fraudulent elections took place, seeing the arrest and torture and sometimes the murder of opposition activists. In that case, a dictator favourable to American and Israeli interests is being propped up, and “we” dutifully remain indifferent. The same indifference is likely to be shown for the upcoming Afghan elections, when perhaps once again multiple voting will occur.
YouTube - Robin Hamman on Iran's online media battle - 15 Jun 09
Global Voices Online » Iran: Islamist bloggers react to protest movement
Op-Ed Columnist - The Virtual Mosque - NYTimes.com
Thomas Friedman is just getting crazier day by day.
U.S. arms sales seen topping $40 billion
- U.S. government-to-government arms sales are growing fast and will likely exceed the bullish estimate of $40 billion for 2009, the Pentagon's top arms sales official said on Wednesday at the Paris Air Show.
Dissident Voice : The Iranian Election and a Hysterical Media
- Completely missing from Keller’s piece and many other pieces in the US mainstream media (and liberal magazines like the Nation) is any genuine attempt to analyze both the class nature of the different candidate’s supporters and the role Washington plays in the media’s perception of Iranian politics. Keller’s most honest analytical statement in his entire piece: “Saturday was a day of smoldering anger, crushed hopes and punctured illusions, from the streets of Tehran to the policy centers of Western capitals.” Keller and his fellow journalists accept that the desires of Western capitals, especially Washington, should be important to Iranians. While this may certainly be the case among a small number of the intelligentsia and business community in Iran, the fact is that the West, especially Washington, is still not very popular among the Iranian masses. Not only are they aware of decades of western intervention in their affairs, the fact that thousands of US troops continue to battle forces in two of Iran’s neighbors makes Washington unwanted and detested. Why should they do anything to please it? Yet, in the minds of the US news media, it is Washington’s needs that dominate all discussion.
- As for the class analysis. Rightly or wrongly, Ahmadinejad seems to appeal to the majority of peasants and workers in Iran. Just like Marat and the Jacobins appealed to the peasants and urban poor during the French revolution while Brissot and the Girondins appealed to the merchants and educated classes, Ahmadinejad’s support comes from those who need bread while Moussavi’s comes from those with plenty of bread and now want more civil liberties. While it is arguably true that Ahmadinejad’s policies have caused as many economic policies as they have solved, the fact remains that his supporters believe in his 2005 campaign call to bring the oil profits to the dinner table. Mr. Moussavi’s statements regarding the eventual reduction of commodity subsidies that benefit the poor may have hurt him in that demographic more than his supporters acknowledge. In a Washington Post article published the day before the election, it was noted (along with the fact that Ahmadinejad won the 2005 election with a “surprising” 62% of the vote) that his economic policies included the distribution of “loans, money and other help for local needs.” One of these programs involved providing insurance to women who make rugs in their homes and had been without insurance until Ahmadinejad came to power. Critics, including Moussavi, argue that his “free-spending policies have fueled inflation and squandered windfall petrodollars without reducing unemployment.” There are other elements at play here, including the fabled corruption of certain unelected leaders in Iran and the role the international economic crisis plays in each and every nation’s economy–a factor from which Iran is not immune. In addition, the particular nature of an Islamic economy that blends government and private business creates a constant conflict between those who would nationalize everything and those who would privatize it all.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Reader Comments (1)
I think you are right about the Iranian twitter users, but the use of twitter has been vital in disseminating information across borders. Even if the actual posters are not based in Iran, their information is, at least in a number of occasions, coming from inside Iran. So we should not discount it simply because they are not within Iranian borders. There is an interesting piece on my blog that looks at this stuff. http://bikyamasr.wordpress.com