When I went to bed last night, I had planned on spending Monday morning writing up a progress report to let you kind folks know what I’ve been up to; but while I slept, Tehran exploded.
Communication is my vocation, not politics. I don’t intend to go on a spirited rant about the questionable Iranian elections, and I’ll be honest: I don’t know enough about Mousavi or Ahmadinejad or the situation to do so. I know enough to know whom I feel is the lesser of two evils, but I know too little to truly understand by how much. I’m under-informed. I’m not proud of that.
Yet for the past few hours I’ve been glued to the internet, watching events unfold—often in real time—as reports about the situation in Tehran have filtered in. Not from the cable news bureaus and web portals, of course; most of them are too busy hawking features on careers with “bad reputations” and tripe about “Speidi” (both of which I refuse to link) to give such news items precious column space.
But while mainstream headlines are still reporting the same one widely confirmed death of a protester that occurred hours ago, a resident in Tehran* is tweeting—right now—about ISP outages and men on motorbikes creating mayhem around the city. Students under siege* in the university posted updates before finally finding their chance to flee their dorms. Everyday citizens with camera phones and digital cameras are uploading videos documenting daytime injuries and nighttime chants to youtube. Writers Andrew Sullivan (The Atlantic) and Robert Mackey (The New York Times) are compiling eye-witness reports, analyses, photos, and videos of the events as they unfold, while actor and author Stephen Fry and dozens of others are broadcasting proxy IP addresses to make it possible for locals in Iran to communicate around government filters and censors.
These aren’t old friends bombarding you with chain letters and braindead Facebook quizzes; these aren’t 140-character updates on Junior’s latest bowel movement or Aunt Sophie’s cats. These are real people in real time sharing the real life crises that they are living through, and doing so with the help of social media sites and strangers from around the world.
Not every report or source will turn out to be credible: for the last 36 hours, Mousavi’s Wikipedia page has been revised more than 50 times, many of those changes reflecting pro- or anti-Mousavi stances (as well as others’ attempts to neutralize the language). In the middle of a hurricane, it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Independent observation is needed; the mainstream media needs to wake the hell up.
But hundreds of thousands of people came together in Tehran today; they formed a crowd five miles long and peacefully made a statement. They aren’t faceless multitudes. Whether you agree with them or not, these are people fighting to be heard—and because their own media will not speak for them, they have found a way to speak for themselves.
I am disturbed to read of the violence and fear, and I really hope things settle down. But I am just in awe of our ability to globally communicate like this. It’s amazing. I’ve got no excuse to know so little. Somehow, some way, information is getting out there, and information is powerful.
*Although such citizens have been well documented elsewhere, I prefer to err on the side of safety and paranoia and have therefore removed links to their Twitter pages.
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“You can’t stop the signal.”
Very eloquent post.
Thanks, Robyn. Funny enough, I considered ending with that same quote. It kept going through my head all day.