It’s been easy to cast Twitter as an avalanche of trivia, a new tool for narcissists, or as the latest step in the dummification of America. But then came the Iran elections. Protesters took to the streets with devices in hand, and they tweeted onto the world stage, sending messages, sounding warnings, and bearing witness.
Observers were quick to voice its impact. NYU mew media prof Clay Shirky announced, “[T]his is it. The big one.” He called the protests “the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.”
A blogger at The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder wrote a post entitled “The Revolution Will Be Twittered,” and it stated, “when histories of the Iranian election are written, Twitter will doubtless be cast as a protagonal technology that enabled the powerless to survive a brutal crackdown and information blackout by the ruling authorities.”
His colleague Andrew Sullivan widened the import: “It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before. . . . The key force behind this is the next generation, the Millennials, who elected Obama in America and may oust Ahmadinejad in Iran. They want freedom; they are sick of lies; they enjoy life and know hope.”
On NPR, Yocki Dreazen declared, “this [revolution] would not happen without Twitter,” while TechPresident’s Nancy Scola mused, “It’s looking possible we’ll look back at the last days’ events in Iran and see the start of Web 3.0 — on-the-ground historic change through social media.”
Mark Pfeifle at Christian Science Monitor pondered giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Twitter, for “It has empowered people to attempt to resolve a domestic showdown with international implications — and has enabled the world to stand with them. It laid the foundation to pressure the world to denounce oppression in Iran. . . . 140 characters were enough to shine a light on Iranian oppression and elevate Twitter to the level of change agent.”
Those quotations all come from an article a few weeks back in The Weekly Standard by Johnathan Last called “Tweeting While Tehran Burns”. Last assembles these fulminations, mounting as they do toward apocalyptic enthusiasms. Shirky gives the world-historical meaning of it: “Technology has not just made the world more dangerous; it has also enabled freedom to keep one small step in front of tyranny and lies. One thing you can do is use Twitter to fight the regime yourself. Help bring these fascist bastards down at the end of your modem.”
Last’s comment: “Improbably, Ahmadinejad and the mullahs weathered the storm.”
Yes, he notes, Twitter activity was daunting, but the hype was absurd:
“As the Iranian protests unfolded, PC magazine asked, ‘How did we have revolutions before Twitter?’ At the height of the action, Twitter was logging 220,000 tweets an hour about Iran. Three thousand YouTube videos were uploaded from Iran, along with some 2 million blog posts. Mir-Hussein Mousavi was ‘friended’ by 100,000 people on Facebook. However impolite the comparison, the Iranian radicals of 1979 had none of those advantages, yet managed to bring down the shah. It is worth contemplating what they had that Twitter doesn’t.”
When such discrepancies open between rhetoric and reality, something else is going on. For Last, Twitter isn’t about politics, but about poses.
“In the end, what matters to social-networkers isn’t action or results, but words and feelings and poses. Which is why they become so invested in their own agency, needing to see the effects of their support everywhere around them. Because if turning your Web site green doesn’t help the Iranian cause, then you might as well have just read about it in The New York Times two days later, like all the other saps. It means that whatever your wishes or hopes, the universe is indifferent.”
And the place for gestures isn’t in the government or the army, but in the media:
“Fortunately for the Twitterers, there is one sector of the universe that always responds to their attention — the media. On the weekend the Iranian protests began, Twitterers became preoccupied with what they deemed CNN’s inadequate coverage of the events. So they set up a designated Twitter feed to criticize the network. By Monday CNN had correspondent Octavia Nasr on the air, reading Tweets aloud as they appeared on her BlackBerry.”
10 Responses to The State of Twitter
goxewu - September 11, 2009 at 8:16 am
Prof. Bauerlein says, in effect: Take any failed revolution and blame the failure of that revolution on the shortcomings of the most advanced technology used by the rebels.I look forward to his blaming the failure of academic conservatives to break the hold of liberal faculty on college humanities curricula across the country on the technological shortcomings of his own posts “Brainstorm.”
markbauerlein - September 11, 2009 at 10:29 am
Nothing here about Twitter being responsible for the failure of the revolution, goxewu, only that the reports of Twitter’s revolutionary impact were greatly exaggerated. And do you really think that Twitter is “the most advanced technology”?
goxewu - September 11, 2009 at 11:19 am
Oh, come on. The clear implication of the cut ‘n’ paste job that is Prof. Bauerlein’s post is that the Iranian opposition, and pundits sympathetic to it, thought it could win with Twitter and didn’t because of Twitter’s inherent limitations. If the limitations of Twitter weren’t crucial to the failure of the Iranian opposition, then there isn’t much point to Prof. Bauerlein’s post, is there? While Twitter might not be “the most advanced technology” out there absolutely anywhere (I’m sure the CIA has something more cutting-edge), it’s the most cutting-edge thing in popular use. Which is what I mean and what I suspect Prof. Bauerlein of pretending not to get.Does Emory University require Hairsplitting 101 in its core curriculum?
slowlearner - September 11, 2009 at 12:57 pm
One noteworthy contrast between the 1979 revolution and the events of 2009 is that in 1979 the protestors kept coming back stronger and stronger each time the Shah’s security forces massacred demonstrators. In 2009, the protests began to thin out and dwindle the harsher the security forces cracked down. Revolutions do not stand much of a chance in the face of violent countermeasures unless you have a lot of people who are willing to give up their lives for the cause. I don’t blame the 2009 protestors in the least. I very much doubt that I would be willing to put my own life on the line in order to change the government or to win political freedom. It is difficult to strike up a revolution among the modern middle classes. We treasure our lives too much. You cannot enjoy political freedom if you are dead.
_perplexed_ - September 11, 2009 at 1:29 pm
slowlearner is exactly right…What was missed by the Twitter enthusiasts cited in the original post is that the very ease of using Twitter makes it a poor test of commitment to a position or course of action.
markbauerlein - September 11, 2009 at 3:53 pm
In fact, goxewu, I have no idea what the protesters thought that Twitter would accomplish. I will guess, though, that they had a much more realistic of the possibilities of their technology against the guns of the State.
luther_blissett - September 11, 2009 at 8:29 pm
The rhetorical pose vs. real action binary goes way back before Twitter and is a fairly common bickering point in nearly every political movement I’ve ever read about. The 60s radicals are often criticized for their “radical chic,” the style and language of their politics as opposed to the real action they took. (Meanwhile, those who took “real action,” like The Weather Underground, are viewed as evil terrorists.)Victor Hugo discussed this common binary opposition with the Friends of the ABC student group in *Les Miserables*. And I think an obscure playwright named Sophocles contrasted Kreon’s tendency to hollow political rhetoric with Antigone’s hastiness to act.The question isn’t whether Twitter was effective or not. It’s about whether or not Twitter vs. Action is a zero-sum game, as MB implies (more Twitter, less Action, and vice versa). But as has been pointed out, I think it comes down to people being willing to put their lives on the line, and there’s no evidence that Twitter reduces politically-motivated suicide-by-army.
goxewu - September 12, 2009 at 9:53 am
Prof. Bauerlein claims to have “no idea what the protesters thought that Twitter would accomplish.” This is disingenous. The bulk of his original post consists of quotes on the Iranian opposition and its use of Twitter which he considers to be wrongheaded in their optimism, and other quotes about those quotes which support Prof. Bauerlein’s opinion of wrongheaded optimism. If he hasn’t sussed out from his own material what the protestors “thought that Twitter would accomplish” then there’s no point whatsoever to his post. He could just as well have posted on how, say, the protestors ate lots of bananas before taking to the streets but still lost.Prof. Bauerlein’s virtues on “Brainstorm” are many. He posts on relevant topics, supplies data for his arguments, argues fairly reasonably, and engages commenters. If he has a salient vice, it’s making clearly implied claims–e.g., the Iranian protestors overestimated the power of Twitter and failed partly because of that–and then backpedaling furiously away from them when challenged.Note: “…against the guns of the state” is the situation of any revolution. The revolutions that succeed don’t usually succeed because, somehow, they’ve amassed more guns than the state has, but because the people aiming those guns are either unorganized, inept, corrupt, secret sympathizers, or won’t, when the crunch comes, fire on their own countrymen. The initial success of a revolution, e.g., the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, is, however, often a prelude to a civil war in which “the guns of the state” do ultimately decide the matter one way or another. But the initial success of a revolution–the rebels taking over the reins of government–is usually accomplished in the face of a great nominal disadvantage in guns.
markbauerlein - September 13, 2009 at 8:51 am
Again, goxewu, I don’t see anything in my post stating or implying that the “protesters overestimated the power of Twitter.”On revolutions, I agree with you. Trotsky once said that they succeed only when soldiers facing people in the streets can’t bring themselves to pull the trigger.
goxewu - September 13, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Prof. Bauerlein (“Again, goxewu, I don’t see anything in my post stating or implying that the “protesters overestimated the power of Twitter”)……allow me to introduce you to…Prof. Bauerlein (“When such discrepancies open between rhetoric [[the citation about 'the Iranian radicals of 1979 had none of those advantages, yet managed to bring down the shah. It is worth contemplating what they had that Twitter doesn't'] and reality [the current Iranian oppostion failed], something else is going on. For [Jonathan] Last,* Twitter isn’t about politics, but about poses…”).* Prof. Bauerlein clearly agrees with Mr. Last and quotes him approvingly, to bolster his argument about the limitations of Twitter.