Be still my Luddite heart!

Hmmm... Is this the US in 2000?

Last week I posted about how I had to grudgingly admire Twitter for providing Iranians with a means of organizing their movement for free elections, but today, I get to gleefully report that my Luddite self has been vindicated! According to this report from NPR (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105679927), it’s probably impossible that the Iranian protests were organized mainly via Twitter. There are too few Iranians with an active Twitter presence to account for the scale of protest activity. Instead, the report claims, people share information through good old fashioned, face-to-face interaction. Ah, music to my Luddite soul! This makes sense, really, if we think about it. The Iranian government has cracked down on access to internet bandwidth, and shut down text messaging, so what better way to mobilize people than by word of mouth? Unless the Basiji shadow every last one of the more than 3 million people protesting, there’s no way to shut down truly social channels of communication.  I might even go so far to say that it is the hubris of the technophile world to believe that only technology can mobilize such broad-scale political action. But I won’t go that far (though I am tempted to end it there!) Technology is a nothing more than a tool, and as such, it can fail.  Fortunately, we have the best back-up-system ever conceived for sharing information–speech and social connections. We *talk* to our friends, family, co-workers, and peopel we do commerce with everyday and we don’t need Twitter for that.

So Twitter isn’t the mighty force we thought it was in Iran. That must be disappointing for many. But for you technophiles out there, there’s a bit of vindication in this historical moment for you, too. What Twitter has accomplished is provide a means for those of us not in Iran to show our moral support for their fight for democracy.  Twitter has also helped many to participate in active protesting in the US and Europe–protesting that might show Iran that the world cares about what happens there.  Perhaps the strength of Twitter really shines in a culture such as ours–our country is so much bigger than Iran is, and perhaps we don’t have the same sort face-to-face interactions  that give rise to organized protest in Iran (I don’t beleive that is true, though, not in my heart of hearts, we are human afterall!) Whatever the case maybe, I do see that, through Twitter, we can overcome some of our distance (physical and social) to show solidarity and to organize, deomonstrate, and support a peaceful world community. And I really can’t argue against that!

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