#iranelection

June 15th, 2009
hybrid media

I have been trying to follow the events in Iran as best I can, toggling between the mainstream media—mostly the New York Times via their wonderful website—blogs, and, of course, Twitter (#iranelection).  The main story, about the stolen election itself, is deadly serious for all of us, from the personal risks courageous individual protesters are taking, to the future political landscape of the Middle East.  

The 2nd-order story, about new media’s role in all of this, is also fascinating. (See Smart Mobs). Twitter is center stage here, and its power is winning over some influential participant-observers, like Andrew Sullivan. 

There is also another twist in the story, that of the users of a ‘new’ medium consciouslyasserting themselves, in aggregate, against the practices of an older medium.  I’m struck by how a reasonably large proportion of the twitter traffic is around issues like raising trendshare, and #cnnfail. That’s a lot of meta-positioning to accomplish <140 characters at a time, but it seems to have reached a self-sustaining crescendo with this geopolitical event.   The Economist’s Democracy in America had another take on these 2nd and 3rd twists:

It’s worth noting, though, that in this networked era, the “American response” need no longer be a crude synecdoche for the American government’s response, for good or ill. Those who truly want to know what’s happening on the ground in Iran as it transpires will eschew American papers—let alone the truly pathetic coverage coming in from the cable-news channels—and look to the Twitter stream, which Anglophone Iranians are using to communicate both with each other and the rest of the world. At the same time, technophiles here have been doing their best to get information back into the country—passing on the internet protocol addresses of proxy servers that can be used to circumvent state filtering, for example.

More controversial is an online effort led by new media strategist Josh Koster to bring down the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting site via a distributed denial-of-service attack. That site does indeed appear to have been down since last night—though whether as a result of the efforts of Twitter activists is unclear. While at first blush this is a fine case of crowd-sourced table turning, giving a censorious regime a taste of its own medicine, it also risks handing that regime ammunition—just as a too-strong statement from Mr Obama might—by buoying the narrative of an opposition influenced, aided, or even directed by hostile foreigners.

Perhaps not uncoincidentally, US-Iran relationships have a particularly tumultuous history in the mediated area.  A long time ago I wrote an undergraduate paper on the role of TV news in the Iranian Hostage Crisis.   I watched a lot of tape from the networks, and read good books by Gary Sick and Jeff Greenfield, among others. TV news was not a mere chronicler of the Iranian Hostage Crisis – the crisis itself was intertwined with TV. Ted Koppel started Nightline as special coverage of the crisis.  With no direct diplomatic links between the governments, leaked trial-balloons and pseudo-event stagecraft, offered nightly on the news, become an important channel of communication between the US government, the students, and the government in Iran. Meanwhile the relentless media coverage helped set the terms of debate for the 1980 presidetial election.

I’m not saying that 1979 TV = 2009 Twitter. The circumstances are quite different, and the level of global, grassroots, real-time participation in this story, via Twitter and the blogosphere, is something that was unimaginable in 1979.  I am, however, saying that the media, old or new, has been an actor in, rather than observer of, the US’s relationship with Iran for a long time. ’Coverage’ and ’attention’ have blurred into ‘action’ before.  

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