the Armchair of El Diablo

‘Make no mistake, this was a Twitter revolution’

This was Reza Aslan’s (Harvard scholar, Daily Show guest and founder of Aslan Media) response to my question whether Twitter’s role in the 2009 Iranian protest had been overstated. 

With the other panellists (the savvy Ali Alizadeh and the remarkable Sara Haghdoosti) at this weekend’s Sydney Writers Festival session,  Aslan discussed the role of technology in Iranian politics spanning from the (likely CIA-backed) revolution of ’53, and the religious revolution of ’79, to last year’s so-called ‘Twitter’ or Green revolution.

Some of the most interesting points:

• No Leader req’d: In previous revolutions, revolution leaders used illegal cassette tapes that were copied and passed around.  Last year, when the leaders tweeted messages – such as “don’t turn up to Naghsh-i Jahan Square, police are waiting”, people would turn up, often in greater force. For some reason Twitter didn’t become another leader’s mouthpiece to be obeyed, it became an expression of mass will.
• #CNNFail: This was among the most common hashtags during the Iranian tweetstream - no mainstream agency could keep up with Twitter as a news source, just as the security agencies struggled to keep up with flashmobbing youths.
• Mobiblogs – In the lead-up to the election, ‘mobiblogs’ were written in SMS, then forwarded through people’s mobile phone contact lists. These were extremely popular, fast-travelling and were almost completely untraceable to their source.
• Ingredients for a tech-revolution: What would have happened if there was Twitter in Tiananmen Square in ‘89? Probably nothing. It seems certain preconditions are required to make it possible for mass political movements to be sparked through Twitter. These elements were:

1. -      High levels of Literacy & education (Iranian women are particularly literate with high proportion of PhDs after the Irab-Iraq war decimated the young male population).

2. -      Tech savviness.

3. -      Established middle class.

4. -      Stark clash of political ideas: the motivation to resolve a political issue.

Will Twitter ever make a splash in Australian politics?

This Twitter effect doesn’t only happen in developing or turbulent nations. I’ve banged on before about when I fell in love with Twitter, during the G20 protests in London last year. 

In Australia there exists all Reza Aslan’s preconditions… except the motivation. We’re a safe and stable democracy whose real crimes will be written in the fossil record, rather than the news.

Julian Assange, the wispy frontman of Wikileaks, said yesterday that “Australia is a bit of a political wasteland. That’s ok, as long as people recognise that. As long as they recognise that Australia is suburb of a country called Anglo-Saxon.”

He has a point. Here, Twitter will remain an interesting political niche, used mainly for conversation and link sharing. It’s a fortunate pity that Australians won’t experience Twitter in its most interesting capacity: as a rapid, mass-mobilisation tool.

24 May 2010

• Tags
• Iran,
• mass protest,
• Twitter
• Mobile
• revolution
• journalism