15 June 2009

The revolution may not be televised ...

... but the internet is on the case. Solarbird says:

If you weren't already convinced of the American media's complete and wretched incompetence, dereliction of duty, and propaganda-lacky degeneracy given — just for example — the continued whitewashing of the American torture regime, the fact that they are essentially completely missing the coup d'etat and possible second revolution in Iran should seal the deal for you. Andrew Sullivan is doing the best he can to collate and relay material coming in from twitter and foreign services that are actually covering what's going on. Here is his weekend summary post, with a zillion links. There's more coverage at The Huffington Post.

Or, you can watch CNN, which spent the weekend talking about the Jonas Brothers and tomato-throwing contests. Go ahead.

Flikr is awash in photojournalism. They're saying at least a million people on the street in Tehran:

[image lost, alas]

At the moment, Google News shows 2730 results for iran twitter. Take for instance Stephen Fry — yes, the actor! — tweeting:

Functioning Iran proxies 218.128.112.18:8080 218.206.94.132:808 218.253.65.99:808 219.50.16.70:8080 #iranelection - feel free to RT

Important work. Andrew Sullivan passes along a comment from one of his readers about this.

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.

(note that I cannot allow mention of Sullivan without pointing to my long follow-up post about how thoroughly terrible he is)

Plus I'd be remiss if I didn't plug my friend Tori's amazing blog View From (Outside) Iran; last week she was already telling the tale of the role of digital media in the Iranian election, among many other things.

My Iranian Facebook friends have all turned green. I don’t know if they are recycling or conserving energy, what I do know is that they have put a green overlay on their profile images in response to Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s green campaign for president of Iran.

Do you think we should vote? An old friend texted me this morning.

Are you kidding me? I texted back. In the election four years ago, this same old friend tried to encourage friends, family, and strangers to vote for the Reformist candidate Moein despite calls for a boycott. “Do you think America or some other superpower is going to save us? No. We have to vote. It’s the only thing we can do.” In the end, he influenced a couple of people, but could not even get his own family to the polls.

Today he is on his way to Azadi Square to participate in a human chain of Mousavi supporters that will stretch to Sadaghieh about 1.5 kilometers away.

Today is a Bruce Sterling moment: digital culture stands with the Iranian people. I promise to never joke about Twitter being useless again.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not to be contrarian, but I think that the Twitter Misinformation Project is demonstrating how bad digital culture is when it comes to news.