Iran Matters
Andrew Sullivan is doing some of the best and most important coverage of the protests in Iran right now. There’s also Twitter, of course, and the mainstream media is just beginning to catch up.
Why is this important? Glenn Greenwald, Daily Reveille, and my friend RealThog offer some thoughts that illustrate different aspects of why people should care. Laura Ann Gilman makes a good point, too. You can’t stop the signal. Our interconnectedness as human beings is reaching the point of the instantaneous and obvious.
This would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago. It was unthinkable even fifty years ago. It is incredible and amazing that the whole world can be watching this sort of thing go down, that we can have updates of events as they happen from the people actually involved. Wow. Just…wow. And Twitter responding to calls to change its scheduled maintenance and downtime for 1AM or so Iran time so the protesters can keep using the service was a Good Call by a company. They’ve bought themselves a lot of credibility and goodwill with that one move.
I am reserving judgment on a lot of things related to this issue at the moment. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that the people of Iran, or a significant portion of them, are protesting peacefully and do not trust the election results. The government has replied with truncheons and jackboots. I don’t think it will go so far as revolution, but I’m thinking Ahmadinejad didn’t win the election cleanly or clearly and what happens now will be incredibly important not just for the people of Iran but in the broader Middle East and by extension, the world.
And I’m thinking, thank God we have a President who thinks before he speaks now.
Wow. Just…wow.
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Tags: shooting from the hip, the internets they know everything
June 17th, 2009 at 9:51 am
You know the way we communicate today is absolutely amazing. I picked up Ludlum’s Bourne Identity the other day on whim and am just about done with it. It was published in 1981 I believe and as I was reading it I started thinking about how different it was just 25 years ago. I started counting the number of things we take for granted that they didn’t have in 1981. The stuff is staggering. The Bourne Identity movie is filled with high tech jargon and computers, GPS and high tech communication. The book is filled with phone calls from different red phone booths, hand written notes passed by hand and long drives in the dark. There are no cell phones, laptop computers (the computers weren’t even really fit for home yet…but close), Facebook, Twitter and GPS. It has been an entertaining read. I can totally understand how the lack of open and instantaneous communication could’ve led to the distrust and fear that was so rampant in those days (and earlier). It’s truly amazing how active we as an online community can be in events happening half a globe away.
Great post, sorry for the long response.
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:15 am
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