Andrew Sullivan: Twitter ripped the veil off ‘the other’ – and we saw ourselves

[seafan]

Twitter ripped the veil off ‘the other’ – and we saw ourselves

By Andrew Sullivan
June 21, 2009

.....

As I have spent the past week hunched over a laptop, channelling and broadcasting as much information, video and debate about the momentous events in Iran, nothing quite captured the mood and pace of events like the tweets coming from the people of Iran.
With internet speed deliberately slowed to a crawl by the Iranian authorities, brevity and simplicity were essential. To communicate, they tweeted. Within hours of the farcical election result, I tracked down a bunch of live Twitter feeds and started to edit and rebroadcast them as a stream of human consciousness on the verge of revolution.

.....

The misspelling, the range of punctuation, the immediacy: it was like overhearing snatches of discourse from police radio. Or it was like reading a million little telegram messages being beamed out like an SOS to the world. Within seconds I could transcribe and broadcast them to hundreds of thousands more.
As I did so, it was impossible not to feel connected to the people on the streets, especially the younger generation, with their blogs and tweets and Facebook messages – all instantly familiar to westerners in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade or so ago. This new medium ripped the veil off “the other” and we began to see them as ourselves.

All the accumulated suspicion and fear and alienation from three decades of hostility between Iran and America seemed to slip away. Whatever happens, the ability of this new media to bring people together - to bring the entire world into this revolution on the streets of Iran - has already changed things dramatically.

.....

This was, as Clay Shirky, the internet guru, put it, the “big one”. The unprecedented eruption from below on the streets of Iran was met with an eruption of new media to cover it. Shirky elaborates: “This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted ‘the whole world is watching’. Really, that wasn’t true then.
“But this time it’s true . . . and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends and they’re even providing detailed instructions to (allow) internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary.”

This rolling, constantly changing, utterly dispersed and devolved event was ideally suited to the blogosphere and social media, who realised the importance of the story while the American mainstream media were still ignoring it.
The blogs also picked up the story sooner than much of the mainstream media because Iran has the third-largest number of bloggers in the world. In a police state theocracy, the internet became an alternative reality for the next generation of Iranians to live in. They are tech-savvy, western-oriented and always broadcasting. “One Person = One Broadcaster” was one tweet from the front line.

We simply became a hub for all this breaking information. This requires journalists getting out of the way of the story rather than attempting to put their own stamp on it and delivering their own version of the truth. I felt last week more like a DJ than a journalist, compiling and sampling and remixing the sounds, sights, events and words streaming out of an ever-shifting drama.

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I don’t know where this media revolution is headed any more than I know where the Iranian uprising is headed. What I do know is that something changed last week - something we will not forget and that will transform the way we cover and consume breaking news.
It happened suddenly and from the ground up. No one can control it any more. They can merely stand by and die or join in and create. This was indeed the “big one” - and it is just getting going.

And we are all witnesses to this historic transformation.

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Sully is right

This week, the tyrants of the world were obliged to hit the drugstores for Kaopectate, Imodium, Prilosec, and other remedies for their reactions.

The Rodney King incident was the first crack in the armor. This is the death-blow.

--d!

[Joanne98]

2. Bye bye MSM.