[Image: cc licensed flickr photo shared by Yahya Natanzi]
It’s been a pretty amazing fortnight for both world news and social media. The ongoing unrest in the wake of Iran’s Presidental Elections has captured a great deal of the world’s attention in several key ways that I’d like to reflect on.
Foremost, these events are a clear demonstration of the power and influence that new media and user generated content have today. Were it not for an amateur army, equiped with portable recording devices, mobile phones, digital cameras and a willingness and desire to connect and engage with the world outside – effectively piercing the guarded walls of the Iranian State – the rest of the planet would have only a minmal clue of the sordid realities that are currently unfolding in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere across Iran.
So effective are these technologies in subverting and connecting that the US State Department (1, 2) has contacted various social media sites to encourage them to keep the channels open and the home fires burning. Given all foreign journalists have been banned from covering the events, social media is in many regards the only voice the average Iranian citizen has on the world’s stage, and as such is a critical means by which the world – previously cut off from all non-government messages – can monitor the national dynamic, and the real story in the Islamic Republic.
There are a few key factors in all this whose importance cannot be overstated.
Group description reads "Current Iranian governmet changed our vote in election."
First, the groundswell of discontent is being captured in and disseminated by a distributed framework. Why is this important? It’s important because distributed frameworks are hard to control, hard to predict, and therefore hard to silence. Iranian citizens and activitists alike are interacting on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, wiki’s, image sharing sites and elsewhere. They’re blogging through proxy servers that mask their locations and posting anonymously to protect their identities.
The loosely linked nature of the technologies enable them to be quickly replaced by other avenues in the event one becomes inaccessible.
On online anonymity
Incidentally, the example of Iran is singularly indicative of why the ability to remain anonymous online is critical and must be upheld at all costs. In some parts of the world, dissent is punishable by imprisonment or death; Iran is one such place. It is only through the masking of people’s identities that we able to gain as much insight into Iran as we are. Freedom of Speech is not universally recognised, therefore mechanisms through which people may speak freely need to be preserved and protected.
Moving Targets
While large scale sites like FaceBook and YouTube are easy targets for government filters and censors, they are but the tip of the iceberg in terms of potential avenues for getting the word out. You can block some of the sites; you cannot block all of them. So the carefully crafted messages the Iranian State would have the rest of the world see have been quickly and effectively eroded by a legion of fearless amateur reporters.
Sites like Boing Boing share information on subversion tactics
Help on the outside
Secondly, and equally importantly, Iranian citizens have help on the outside. The sheer mass of support that has emerged from around the globe clearly exemplifies the willingness of people to work together online, and the incredible speed with which independently situated networks of people can gather en masse when the spirit moves them.
We’re seeing online journalists acting as hubs for distributing information, hashtags quickly established to track and spread the conversations and information, proxies appearing and shifting to enable the messages to get through, Denial of Service Attacks against Iranian government websites, and above all an overwhelming sense of dedication, interest in and support for the cause of those on the ground – people who would have been silenced and blocked off from the world in an age before Web 2.0.
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23IranElection
Rapid Adaptation
Thirdly, the masses are adapting faster and more smoothly that the government is. Trends in large networks are difficult to predict, and yet consensus can rise and spread exceptionally quickly within them. When one wall rises, another path is found and quickly shared. As powerful as the Iranian State has historically been in subjecting its people to a central will, its methods are largely ineffective in an online realm where heirarchies dissolve, access is easy, connections to others are omnipresent, and all who wish to have their voices heard have the capacity to do so.
Iran is perhaps the most poignant example yet of what happens when old paradigms attempt to stifle and block new ones. It doesn’t work. You can’t control the message when voices are everywhere – in the open, in the shadows, in the streets of Tehran, in the US State Department. People will always find a way.
