Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Socail Networking: Your Best Weapon During The Revolution

I've been watching the news closely over the past few days for news about Iran. For those of you who might be out of the loop, basically President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (as I will hereto refer to as Crazy Ahmad) has suspiciously won an election in his country in a landslide. Naturally, after hundreds of thousands of Iranians turned out for the election to vote him OUT of office, they have started protesting. And it's about time.
This has caused Crazy Ahmad and company to fire back by not guaranteeing the safety of his opponent in the election, Hussain Mousavi. The protests against Crazy Ahmad have been going on for days now and basically Iran is staring a revolution in the face. But, as the old saying goes, the revolution will indeed not be televised.
The reason is not because Crazy Ahmad has shut down the media in his country (even though he has) but the word of these protests did not get out through CNN or any other major news company, but from normal everyday bloggers and social networkers in Iran. As one blogger wrote, "Iran is going to crap and CNN is showing a program about dogs." (I misquoted that but it was something to that effect).
As the Iranian government has shut down all media stations and ousted foreign journalists, social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are the only ways for the Iranian people to get news out to the world about whats going on. It's even gotten to the point that the US State Department has recently asked Twitter to delay an update to their site that would put the site offline to the Iranian people for most of the day. Twitter has since complied with the request stating that they realized how important of a role their site was playing in the grand scheme.
As I heard about this, I was elated. Iran has needed a revolution for quite some time and it was so amazing to know that social networking sites were protesters best weapon against Big Brother. The Iranian government has continued their efforts to silence the protestors but with current technology, they are fighting an uphill battle. Finally, we can be assured that the people, the regular everyday people of the world, have the power.
At least until this escalates towards violence. Real weapons are always the ultimate silencers but the truth about the events that are happening now will stand as a witness against those who will use real violence to silence their people. This government might try to squash the truth, to hide it but the world will know. I hope this protest can end peacefully with real change and freedom coming to the Iranian people. But if that is not possible, we will know. And we will know through tweets and status updates. Welcome to the 21st century. Power to the people.

3 comments:

Amber said...

i'm leaving a comment here too - this really would make an excellent professional blog post - this is really excellent writing about a very relevant topic - WELL DONE!

Stacy said...

I am so happy that not all the people in Iran are following crazy Ahmad! Good post!

Nene said...

I missed this post - probably when I was at my parents without internet. Very interesting and great post! Are you sure you don't want to be a newspaper or magazine reporter?