Related Posts

• July 2, 2011 -- +1 Takes on New Meaning With Launch Of Google Plus (4)
• April 7, 2011 -- Will the Revolution be Tweeted? Power and Money Still Rule the World (1)
• January 17, 2011 -- Did Social Media Propel the Tunisia Uprising? (11)
• November 15, 2010 -- Smoke on the (social media) Water (3)
• September 3, 2010 -- Storytelling, the new Studio System and the “Death” of the Web (4)

Image from "This" Magazine

If this past summer’s controversial presidential election in Iran was any indication, Twitter has fast become a major platform for political discussion and grassroots organization on the global stage.  Social media, particularly the micro-blogging service Twitter, flexed its muscles during the opposition protests of the Iranian election results, and, at least for a month or two, it seemed that a global on-line conversation about democracy in Iran might actually help change the political climate of that country.  While it appears that the government of Iran eventually succeeded in squelching the unrest and cracking down on protests, it has become pretty clear that the nation of Iran will never be the same – and Twitter is partially to thank for that.  Considering the case of Facebook use in Iran, once you’ve got a taste of that sort of social freedom, it’s difficult to turn back.

In light of the above, I took a recent interest in what impact Twitter might be having on developing nations in Africa, where political unrest, tribal warfare, and social upheaval is a way of life.  It’s tough to surmise just how many people use Twitter in Africa (as Jason Wojciechowski at Future Media Change recently discovered via Wolfram Alpha), but if Twitter’s 2008 announcement that they would stop their international SMS*** service poses any revelation on the matter, it would be safe to deduce that the number of African Twitterers is not exceptionally high (please correct me if you find data to the contrary!).  Of course, Siena Anstis recently reported on the effect of Twitter during the Kampala rioting in September 2009, so we know it’s becoming a viable platform in parts of the continent.  Still, while Twitter is fully available to Africans via the Web and a few third-party applications (SARCASM ALERT: because you know everyone in Africa has a Blackberry and an iPhone – d’oh!), SMS messaging is certainly a vastly important gateway for Twitter. And this is not to mention texting’s big impact on global mobile communication as well.  The NYT reports that over 2.5 trillion text messages were sent world-wide in 2008, a number that has surely gone up in ’09.

So, what gives?  Well, in 2008 Twitter estimated that it would cost them about $1000 USD per user to continue their international SMS services, something of a money drain for a potentially multi-billion dollar business yet to announce their IPO.  With a nearly constant stream of bad news about violence, warfare, and genocide flowing from many African nations (including today’s warnings about the major potential for violence during Rwanda’s upcoming elections in August 2010), one has to wonder what role Twitter could have played in many of Africa’s ongoing social and political struggles during the past few years.  With status updating stymied by a lack of Twitter SMS, will the world ever feel the immediacy of the African situation when the next major African event unfolds, the way it did this past summer as Iran turned, at least for a moment, in to a focal point for the global social discussion on-line?

Luckily, as it stands, cell-phones are the primary portal to the Web for most Africans, so Twitter will continue to be available via the Web for millions of mobile users in Africa.  But, considering how the Iranian government worked so hard to shut off Internet access during the summer’s unrest, surely SMS plays a vital role in Twitter use when the Web is down.  By not enabling international Twitter SMS updates, Twitter is forceably creating a window of opportunity that other players will probably ultimately exploit.  But, considering the increasing ubiquity of Twitter around the world, let’s hope that’s not the case.

For more on why Twitter is so important for Africa, please see this August 2008 blog post at the White African, who beautifully summarized the impact of Twitter in Africa.  His post was partly what inspired this Flip the Media entry – we’ve got to revisit the Twitter question in Africa!

_____

*** – This does not affect users in Canada, India, or the United States.

Matthew Stringer is the blogger at Nerd Acumen, a current student of the MCDM, and a New Media Producer.

Related Posts

• March 1, 2011 -- An MCDM Alum Reflects from an Emerging Market (3)
• January 14, 2010 -- Storytelling, Digital Media and Constrained Communication: Town Hall (2)
• June 15, 2009 -- #iranelection (9)
• April 7, 2011 -- Will the Revolution be Tweeted? Power and Money Still Rule the World (1)
• March 21, 2011 -- Africa Calling (2)

But what, exactly, do we know about Twitter and the Iranian election?

We know that opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters have used Twitter as a platform to claim that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole last week’s election. We do not know if these claims are accurate, although the Guardian Council is investigating 646 poll complaints.

We know that Twitter has helped spread false information: that 3 million people protested Monday in Tehran (rather tens or hundreds of thousands, according to newspaper reports); that Mousavi was put under house arrest (he appeared at the protests); and that, last Saturday, the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid (not reported by any news organization although the committee is investigating hundreds of claims).

We know that Twitter has helped spread one-sided information. For example, there has been little mention of demonstrations supporting Ahmadinejad or an independent poll “which suggested a two-to-one level of popular support” Ahmadinejad over Mousavi.

We know that the blogosphere — and thus Twitter — has also spread two different sets of voting tallies supposedly “leaked” from the Interior Ministry. One set claims Ahmedinejad received only 28 percent of the vote, and another says he got only 13 percent. What we don’t know: is this sophisticated misinformation, a la Card’s Locke and Demosthenes, or is either data point grounded in truth?

We know that western intellectuals are positioning Twitter as the technological equivalent of the second coming. Just look at the headlines: Social networks support Iran election protests, Iran Election Dispute Plays Out Online, Twitter Serves As Lifeline For Iranian Citizens; Pushes Back Downtime, Clinton says Twitter is important for Iranian free speech, Up To 200000 Tweets About Iran Sent An Hour, The Iranian Revolution Will Not Be Televised — It’ll Be Twittered (the verb should be tweeted!), In Iran, cyber-activism without the middle-man, and McCain: ‘We Must Be A Symbol Of Hope For The Iranian People’ (a reminder: this is the political philosophy that got us into Iraq).

Injecting A Note of Reason In a Sea of Emotion
Analysts, such as Stratfor, note that the English-speaking population of Iran’s cities form a distinct minority within the culture (a culture, by the way, where there is no single language spoken by 100% of the population, according to the CIA Factbook).

Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading — because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy — people Americans didn’t speak to because they couldn’t. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.

Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization — a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook “iPod liberalism,” the idea that anyone who listens to rock ‘n’ roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran — a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.

American intellectuals, represented in this case by NYU professor and author Clay Shirky (a man I know and respect), characterize such claims as “Ahmadinejad supporters” who are “try[ing] to damn the dissidents.” The Daily Kos disses by characterizing questioning as a Twitter “backlash.”

I disagree. In the case of Stratfor, they are trying to use reason, rather than emotion, as a guide to their analysis about what’s happening on the other side of the world, events happening not in an information vacuum but in an information deluge of unknown veracity.

Thus, the essence of what we are talking about are beliefs, not facts. There are very few facts coming out of Iran, and that is a bad thing. But it’s not enough to read a tweet or a blog post and accept it as unconditionally true.

The True Impact of Twitter
Although Twitter can be used as an organizing tool, in the Iran election example, the evidence suggests Twitter has, instead, been a critical publicity tool. Twitter has become its own echo-chamber, with a ratio of posts-to-reposts as great as 1-to-20. This is five times as great as prior viral memes on Twitter, according to social network researcher Mike Edwards. Business Week reports: “There is this romantic notion that the people tweeting are the ones in the streets, but that is not what is happening,” Edwards said.

In addition, an American mediascape currently in the midst of a teenage-like crush on Twitter has generated its own echo-chamber. One result: liberal media around the world have publicized the protests, far beyond the scope of the protests and deaths that have been going on in Georgia for months. The result, today there are protests across the United States as well as other western democracies in Europe and Australia.

I’ve said for some time that breaking news is no longer the monopoly of professional journalism. Instead, in this era of “real time” publicly disseminated news, the professional media have a new role. That role includes verification as well as contextualization. It is a role that the media have, in general, ignored. There are a few cautionary articles, now that the protests are almost a week old, but they pale in comparison to “news” about protests.

Let me repeat myself: many people are protesting based on bad information. This is not to suggest that the situation in Iran is “good” or “just” or “right.” Or that Twitter is unimportant. Rather, we don’t really know what is going on there. Twitter has helped ignite moral outrage globally, facts (or lack thereof) be damned. Not unlike in Ender’s Game.

And, as Clay noted in his interview with TED, “as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional.” We may be finally living McLuhan’s vision of “electronic interdependence“:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

We’ve seen this happen on Twitter, just two months ago when Amazon was accused of deliberately discriminating against gay and lesbian authors. Clay compared the fallout of that outrage to that surrounding the infamous Tawana Brawley “rape” of 1987:

Though the event initially triggered enormous moral outrage, evidence that it didn’t actually happen didn’t quell that outrage. Moral judgment is harder to reverse than other, less emotional forms; when an event precipitates the cleansing anger of righteousness, admitting you were mistaken feels dirty. As a result, there can be an enormous premium put on finding rationales for continuing to feel aggrieved, should the initial rationale disappear. Call it ‘conservation of outrage.’

Clay notes that he was “easily seduced” by the idea that Amazon had acted deliberately “because the actual, undisputed event — the change in status of LGBT-themed work on Amazon, while heterosexual material and anti-gay tracts kept their metadata intact — fit a template I know well, that of the factional use of a system open to public access.” As a result, the belief made him “stupid” (his characterization). Many people still believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that Amazon discriminated “on purpose” and have vowed never to buy another thing from the giant retailer.

Today’s moral outrage at events in Iran fits a template as well: a western anti-Muslim bias, a western “our liberal democracy is the only, right, true way to govern” bias, a western technological optimism bias. It’s ok to have a bias; what’s important is to realize and acknowledge how our biases color our view of the world. Just ask (the fictional) Ender Wiggins about the “Buggers” or the Bush Administration about Iraq.

Related Posts

• January 26, 2011 -- Social Media Fuels Egypt’s Largest Protest in Years (6)
• January 14, 2010 -- Storytelling, Digital Media and Constrained Communication: Town Hall (2)
• November 20, 2009 -- Revisiting Twitter in Africa (7)
• July 14, 2009 -- Teens, Banking, Twitter and Media Madness (3)
• June 30, 2009 -- MCDM Spotlighted At Seattle Wine Awards (1)

Just last week, a Harvard study concluded (as breathlessly summed up by the BBC) “Twitter remains the preserve of a few, despite the hype surrounding it.”  Tonight, NBC’s “Chief Foreign Correspondent” Richard Engel is back in network’s NYC studio, banished by Iranian authorities, relegated to monitoring — as we are — firsthand reports on “Twitter…and other online sites.” [p.s. I worked with Richard in Baghdad in 2004]

So where do we stand?  Can we finally put the social media naysayers to rest, now that traditional journalism is seemingly vanquished on the streets of Tehran?

Yes. No.  I’m having a hard time filtering through #iranelection, beyond the re-tweets and second-hand information passed around by Twitterers outside the country.  The expat Iranian opposition is well organized, and will do what they (as well as others with a vested interest in the downfall of the mullahs) can to keep this political fire burning.  And without a doubt, this thread has attracted a huge amount of commentary from folks who would not normally pay any attention to an overseas story like this — except that it has hit upon that magic, unknowable recipe of universal appeal.

This is social media at its strongest — inspiring, emotional, instantaneous — a seemingly unstoppable force. And as Convergence Culture author Henry Jenkins points out: voluntary, temporary and tactical.  In other words, transitionally powerful.  Is that enough to replace the battle-weary beat reporter?  Yes.  No. Will this army of activists continue to fight for justice once this story is over? Will they seek to start a social news organization and keep exchanging information? Will they even remain friends? Were they friends to begin with?

Right now, it may not matter.  We are witness — and some of us are participating — in a truly awe-inspiring act of political resistance through networked communication.  As Jenkins would say: No one knows everything.  Everyone knows something.  All knowledge resides in humanity.  As imperfect and fickle as we may be.  That extra dose of humanity may be exactly what we need in this crisis.  “Flip The Media’s” muse Jonathan Zittrain, in today’s New York Times might agree:

Twitter [is] particularly resilient to censorship because it [has] so many ways for its posts to originate — from a phone, a Web browser or specialized applications — and so many outlets for those posts to appear.

As each new home for this material becomes a new target for censorship…a repressive system faces a game of whack-a-mole in blocking Internet address after Internet address carrying the subversive material.

“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world,” Mr. Zittrain said. “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”

UPDATE 6/15/09 1649 Pacific: NBC: Iran bans cameras, cellphones barely working. CNN: State Dept. asks Twitter to keep it up.

Related Posts

• January 14, 2010 -- Storytelling, Digital Media and Constrained Communication: Town Hall (2)
• November 20, 2009 -- Revisiting Twitter in Africa (7)
• April 7, 2011 -- Will the Revolution be Tweeted? Power and Money Still Rule the World (1)
• January 26, 2011 -- Social Media Fuels Egypt’s Largest Protest in Years (6)
• January 17, 2011 -- Did Social Media Propel the Tunisia Uprising? (11)