Is the Tweetolution taking place?
by Peter Bradwell
18/06/09
Everybody is talking about Twitter. Again. This time because it has become intimately entwined in the fallout from the Iranian election. It is the source for pictures, commentary and news from inside an increasingly closed media environment. The only way to monitor developments and feeling from inside a country that seems on the brink of change is through the networked and open channels of Twitter. That has become the source for mainstream outlets. Twitter is the one direct feed from Iran.
This seems like the first time that the interventions of an international community in the affairs of another country have been propelled by this kind of mass participation. The question is how the field of international relations copes. People justify their involvement by refering their actions to some big idea of what's right and wrong. The inflluence of this kind of participation seems to be growing. The problem is that it’s becoming a million times easier to get involved with the things you think are right, but a million times harder to figure out if they really are.
So as well as celebrating the first time the effects of open participation, aided by social media, have played out in such a grandiose arena - the first 'big one' as Clay Shirky has put it - it seems this is throwing up some pretty tough questions.
Firstly, news is intermingled with campaigning. Mainstream media always had an influence, of course. But this social media wave destroys these boundaries and makes influence even harder to grasp. Twitterers are pretty clearly behind the protestors in support of the defeated candidate Mirhossein Mousavi. It's activist news on steroids. Secondly, what legitimacy does this participation have? Where would that legitimacy come from? Thirdly, how can we be sure about the validity and accuracy of the information, campaigning and lines coming from sources apparently within Iran?
It's easy to presume that these networked campaigns are on the side of international justice. A couple of my colleagues have drawn parallels with the 'International Brigades' who joined the Spanish Civil war. These new complex networks are prone to manipulation that is, if anything, much more difficult to fathom in these kind of environments.
There are demands for a new kind of transparency in our formal politics. But as Twitter and other social media seem to open us up, they by no means make the world less opaque. If the 'Gulf War did not take place', then I've no idea what level of reality we're working with now.
Mhairi
I wonder if the substantive significance of Twitter in this, and other contexts, is not overplayed in Western media coverage. As you note, the mass participation it promises makes the world no less opaque and all the really big questions opened up regarding the line between communications/ campaigning, the integrity of its information and the legitimacy of transnational participation in domestic politics have existed from time immemorial.
We all (states, societies, individuals) consistently intervene, commentate and attempt to manipulate international relations and social movements - for reasons transparent and partial, informed and ignorant, ideological and pragmatic - and we always have. It is the tools of our meddling that vary, not the substance. The difference, it seems, with tools like Twitter is the sheer speed with which it allows us to communicate (and our slowness in catching up with the implications, as ever), and its potentially mass character.
But again, as the above poster noted, this ‘mass’ participation is dubious. It is not necessary to exaggerate caricatured fault-lines between a government-supporting rural poor and a technologically-sophisticated Tehranese elite to acknowledge that this technological ‘revolution’, as with those before it, will be neither accessible to all nor equally manipulable for all. Its role in the Iranian crisis is therefore highly prejudicial to one side, at least for the time being - as evidenced by the fact the US state dept though it worth intervening to keep the service running on Tuesday.
And it won’t do, unfortunately, to dismiss the genuine support Ahmadinejad appears to command by claiming those who vote for him are misinformed, have vested interests or are otherwise incapable of making the ‘right’ choice, i.e. the one we believe we would make. People wept with sorrow when Stalin died and Ahmadinejad, for all his noxious posturing, hawkish belligerence (and, it seems to me, a substantial helping of short-man syndrome), is no Stalin…
Mike
I wish society could organize itself somewhere along the lines of twitter... anarcho-socialism!
Michael
One might also suggest, though as a gross generalisation, that those supporters loyal to Ahmadinejad have largely been the rural poor, for whom internet connections are essentially non-existent, whilst the Twittering of the Mousavi supporters perhaps demonstrates the metropolitan middle-class nature of the rising.
Of course, this is largely anecdotal against which exceptions could no doubt be found, and I don't wish to suggest that opposition to Ahmadinejad is as shallow as all that, but it is something that the British media seems largely to gloss over, much like it did, if I remember rightly, with its reporting of similar situations in Thailand 8 months or so ago.