The events in Iran are gripping both as they roil that country and possibly alter the world and as they are reflected in the social media, including especially Twitter. I’m confident that in four weeks – and in four years – we’ll know a lot more about the role of Twitter in facilitating the protests in Iraq, but I’ll guess now that the service will turn out to have been much less important than regular word-of-mouth and other local communication and organization in Iran.
The corollary is that some of us in the “First World” are so enamored of the idea of tweeting the revolution because we are so enamored of tweeting to begin with: we’re seeing what we hope to see and can see (through tweet aggregators like Twazzup, for instance), not necessarily what’s really happening in Iran.
And but so, for my money the medium that’s really showing us what’s going on in the Islamic Republic is the same one that’s been showing us world-shaking events since the 1860s: photography. And nobody does the photo-essay thing better than Boston.com’s incredible “Big Picture” feature. Today’s series on the protests in Iran is nothing less than breathtaking. I can barely stand to look at this shot, for instance:
From my friend Shelley, who has family in Iran:
If you also use Twitter make sure to make your time zone the same as Tehran…that way it makes it harder for their government to track the twitter information coming out of Iran…..they have kicked out all the foreign media so Twitter is the source at the moment…if the whole Twitter world is on Tehran time…then they have no clue as to who is really in Iran….the people there have asked us to do that.