He has of course been second-to-none on using Twitter to get the best-available information early on, all the while acknowledging that it is a *risky* source of information. Like many of us twitter users, he comes from a background of changing from "twitter is stupid", to "twitter can be invaluable or stupid, depending on the situation".
(Full disclosure: yours truly is another who went through a similar change of opinion, albeit mine was several months ago.)
Anyway, I think Sully nails it on what the *root* fundamental card that twitter brought to the table specifically in the case of Iran.
Short version: On twitter, we are all just internet users, and qua internet users, a lot of the real-life social/cultural/racial baggage doesn't make it into the intertubez. Upshot: empathy for the plight of the Iranians was immediate, massive and deep. And note that even *if* CNN hadn't turned into #CNNfail, they never could have brought that humanizing piece of the puzzle into the game. That phenomenon is intrinsic to people talking to people.
But enough babble; read the article.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6544276.ece" 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.
...
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.
Of course, this model has serious limitations. The tweets themselves were often reporting rumours; by the end of the week the authorities were setting up decoy tweets to lure protesters into traps or to spread disinformation. I could not verify anything.
Yet I could use basic common sense and judgment, provide context and caveats, offer an array of breaking opinion sources and quotes, and let my readers use their own judgment as to what was going on. That meant occasional corrections and revisions – but the point of blogging is a first draft of history, warts and all.
When you review the Twitter stream of the past week, it reads like a stream of constantly shifting consciousness. It is a kind of journalistic pointillism. From a distance it gains heft. It is history rendered in the collective, scattered mind and it has never happened before - millions upon millions of tiny telegram messages sent to the world.
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. "
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