There is no question that Twitter is performing a heroic and invaluable service during this period of civil unrest in Iran. Reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog and the tweets it posts from Iran, for example, has been enthralling.
But it’s amusing to see the mainstream news media fall over themselves to praise the revolutionary aspects of Twitter itself when it comes to these movements. Part of the hyperbole stems from the fact that the CNN’s of the world don’t have good access and have essentially been shut down in Iran, so the drama of their news coverage has now been transferred to covering the social networking aspects of this story. And dramatic it is, and worthy of discussion.
But I can’t count how many times I saw pundits re-phrase a variation of the same question posed by Joe Scarborough from MSNBC (on Twitter, of course, so it carries “street cred”):
Will Twitter and the Internet prevent a Tiananmen Square-styled crackdown in Tehran? Will technology trump theocracy?
Almost every pundit I saw on the news asked the same question – and frankly, I don’t get it. A violent regime won’t crackdown on its people because of the people’s ability to get the news out via Tweets? If they’re going to crack-down or not, I promise you that social networking tools are not going to factor into the decision-making process. It’s the 21st Century. Word is going to get out one way or another about these things and the regimes know it. Twitter might help any protestors or even counter-revolutionaries organize themselves, but prevent a crackdown? Twitter is an important tool, but it’s not that powerful.
This news hype is, rather, a “perfect storm” of multiple phenomena coming together all at once. First, we’ve been hearing about this “Twitter” thing in the press for months now, so the hype had already been building (how many clueless executives read about it in the paper and called up their marketing agency to ask, “Are we doing the Twitter thing?”). Now, we have a dramatic and clear example of its usage in Iran that almost helps these news outlets explain what Twitter and its utility is.
The combination of these facts, the shutting out of the traditional media from access in Iran, the media’s trend towards general hyperbole and preponderant cluelessness about Internet technology all have brewed a concoction in which Twitter is now going to be the savior of peace and harmony in the galaxy.
Twitter has played a great role in this thing, but one of its side effects (or benefits) is to highlight the increasing uselessness of some of these traditional media outlets.
