Instant global communications constitute a revolution

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday June 22nd, 2009

If you are not a cartoon character and you call yourself "Supreme Leader" you are already headed for trouble.

That is just one of the many comments about the Iran election protests which can be overheard right now on Twitter.

The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, The Business Review and the Globe and Mail, and the Times & Transcript have all had news articles in the last few days talking about the "revolution that is happening online."

By that, they do not mean that online things are revolutionary, they mean there is an actual revolution; and it can be seen through social networking.

The quick recap behind all this is that Iran has a governmental system that is different than ours, with a Supreme Leader who elects a 12-cleric Guardian Council, who oversees the Parliament. On June 12 the current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was re-elected with 66 per cent of the vote.

Almost immediately the opposition, headed by Mir-Hossein Mousavi, alleged that there had been vote tampering and that the election was not legal.

There have been almost constant rallies in Tehran since then, pro- and anti- the current government, and with it has come a lot of violence.

I might be getting a little cynical this week, but can you imagine this happening here?

I mean, no one expected Harper to win the last election, and yet. . .

Perhaps I have trouble imagining tens of thousands of us taking to the streets in protest. After all, only about 64 per cent of us even bother to vote; and out of that, there isn't even a clear majority.

What we have in Canada is more like a disagreement about which sibling should make the decisions this month; not a real politically active conflict.

Provincial and municipal elections are even worse. Few people vote in these and yet they affect us more.

We live in one of those few places where our personal opinion matters without the necessity of bloodshed and rebellion and yet we throw it away as if it did not matter.

Iran, on the other hand, is a place where voicing an opinion can get you killed.

Imagine what it would take to stand up and be counted in a world where doing so might mean instant and painful death.

Enter Web 2.0.

There has not been such protest in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution; and the protest has almost become a global movement, fought on and fuelled by the world wide web.

And it all started on Twitter.

Remember, last week I said that Twitter could change the world; well, it has proved to be an extremely effective way for activists to post rapid-fire updates on the situation on the ground in Iran.

Iranian Twitterers, many writing in English, posted photos of huge demonstrations and bloodied protesters throughout the weekend, detailing crackdowns on students at Tehran University and giving out proxy web addresses that let users bypass the Islamic Republic's censors.

By Monday evening, it had become such a movement that Twitter postponed maintenance scheduled for the wee hours of the morning, California time -- midday Tuesday in Iran.

The maintenance was rescheduled to be between 2-3 p.m. in California which happens to be 1:30 a.m. in Iran.

A couple of Twitter feeds have become virtual media offices for the supporters of Moussavi. One feed, mousavi1388 (1388 is the year in the Persian calendar), is filled with news of protests and exhortations to keep up the fight, in Persian and in English. It has more than 15,000 followers.

Mr. Moussavi's fan group on Facebook has swelled to well over 50,000 members, a significant increase since Election Day.

Now, in support of Iran, many of the users of Twitter, Facebook, and other networking sites have changed their icons to dark green, the colour of support for the people if Iran.

Here are two things that I see coming out of this; first of all, I knew nothing, or next to nothing, about the politics of Iran three days ago. I am someone who follows news, I knew who the president was, I knew that the U.S. seems to have a bad opinion of him, but after that, nothing.

Now I know so much more because of links provided by people both inside and outside of the country.

Not only that, but I know, albeit virtually, some Iranians; and I have to admit that they are not a unified, anti-world bunch of terrorists like they have been painted to be.

Secondly, I see a united front towards human rights. There are lawyers, artists, writers, actors, doctors, surveyors and everyone else, who have shown their support for these people and their freedom. They are from every country that I can imagine, and they all are trying, in their own small way, to make a difference.

Sure, it is token support, but it is also forming a community of people who care enough to get involved, perhaps in small ways, but it is a step in the right direction.

What you surely have here is international leverage that did not exist before. The American State Department even got involved asking Twitter not to shut down for maintenance.

The thing is, the way we communicate is getting even faster, and even more complex. At the same time, the power of communication is getting even simpler to understand.

The thing is, we have to start caring more and more about the information we receive. Other people are willing to die for what they believe, and that message in itself can be a powerful motivator to help us stand up and be counted.