The Web Makes Crackdowns Global Spectacles

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

What might have been the outcome of the 1979 Iranian Revolution had it been seen on YouTube?

Just take a look at this clip from YouTube contributor houmank of recent demonstrations in the city of Shiraz, Iran. Notice how many video cameras and cell phones are out taking pictures and video! They are everywhere!

No doubt many of those cell phones are out because scenes of burning cars and masked demonstrators makes for compelling souvenier photographs. But many are also out purely for the reason of documenting Iran's political protest... just in case. One never knows whene the Revolutionary Guard or their militias will come running from around the corner wielding batons, or start shooting from rooftops.

Iranians understand the power of the web in expressing their grief, gathering disparate groups and individuals together for a protest, and sharing with the world their struggles. Just take a look at these tweets from Twitter user Persiankiwi:

everybody try to film as much as poss today on mobiles - v\imptnt - these are eyes of world

gov now worried - anything could happen 2day - e\body be very carefull - stay in big groups

anyone with camera or laptop is attacked in street

Compelling, is it not?

The ability of YouTube to expose violence and injustice in less than democratic states if not new to Iran (though the demonstrations post-Iran election may be a tipping point of sorts).

Witness the cold blooded murder of Japanese reporter Kenji Nagai covering political demonstrations in Rangoon, Burma in 2007.

According to the BBC, "TV footage has emerged which raises the possibility that the 50-year-old may have been deliberately targeted rather than caught in police cross-fire." And if so? Japan ordered an investigation into the incident and rescinded some of its aid to the Burmese regime.

Or, sometimes nothing much happens when a country's journalists are killed... Intrepid independent journalist Brad Will, for one, was gunned down by plainclothes federal policemen in Oaxaca, Mexico in October, 2007--and yet to the best of my knowledge, the United States issued no sanctions against the Mexican government, nor withdrew foreign aid and assistance. Would the U.S. have acted differently if Will had worked for The Washington Post? (The video of Will's death is readily available online, but too real and graphic for me to post here).

The effect of Twitter and YouTube on political demonstrations in Iran and elsewhere is still to be determined. No doubt the mediums are influencing the masses in Tehran and worldwide, but to what extent? And how long can the interest outside of Iran be sustained by soundbite interested Americans, for instance? It remains to be seen, but the results of this phenonomenon are sure to be interesting on so many levels.

Lampiri's The NamesakeGone Too Soon

Submitted by jddunn on Thu, 06/18/2009 - 19:47 #

I wonder if this won't be a marker for the end of several different eras. It's the effective end of the top-down broadcast model for news and information. CNN's only real coverage of this is covering how Twitter and YouTube are doing their jobs for them and making them irrelevant. This has been coming for a long time of course, but it was strongly underlined by my experience Saturday spending all day avidly following an unfolding revolution on the net while CNN ran Larry King re-runs and MSNBC had a marathon of Prison Rape or whatever the hell that show is. Comparing this to what I remember of the coverage of Tiananmen and the '89 revolutions is just shocking. This could be a great story and get a large audience, that's obvious, but they've somehow just lost the capacity to actually cover news when it happens outside the US, at the same time the world has rapidly globalized and networked and become much smaller. It should be incredibly easier for them to cover this than it was to cover the events of '89, and yet the coverage is miles worse. It's just shocking. As you alluded to, it's also maybe the end of the surveillance era and the beginning of the sousveillance era, at least for states that want to enjoy the advantages of the global economy and networks. North Korea and Burma can still get away with running a totalitarian state, but the sacrifices involved are so great that few states will choose that route. Presumably Tehran hasn't shut down the networks entirely like Burma did because it would be just too much of a sacrifice to the interests in power, and/or they can't because running a society controlled enough to even enable that kind of clampdown was too much of a sacrifice to begin with. And, of course, we don't know yet, but maybe it's the beginning of the end of the authoritarian regime in the Middle East. From within, as it should be done. Lots of other countries there have similar demographics and similarly unresponsive and brutal regimes. Iran has the advantage of better education and a better economy, but that also should be an advantage to stability for the regime. It'll be interesting to see what happens next if this one succeeds, and if we're able to keep from meddling and just let things happen for a few years at least.

Submitted by shaun on Wed, 06/24/2009 - 12:31 #

You touch on a lot of subjects, but I'll only address one, the first. You claim "It's the effective end of the top-down broadcast model for news and information," with which I'll only kinda sorta disagree... I say kinda sorta because you specifically point out broadcast, and I can't vouch one way or another on this--I don't have television. What I take issue with is that online venues like Twitter and YouTube are doing the jobs of journalists and making big or traditional media irrelevant. In depth news, reporting, and analysis cannot happen on Twitter where comments are limited to a mere 140 characters. And as far as I know, there is no original, substantial, relevant analysis happening on YouTube from non "experts" or "journalists." YouTube is great for posting short clips of on-the-ground activity, and re-posting segments or whole television programs of the traditional broadcast media. Moreover, when I visit Twitter and click on the #iranelection live results feed, more often than not the posts are comments to other users, re-tweets of what has already been said, or links to YouTube, and yes, CNN articles. So, are we seeing the re-shaping of the top-down model of broadcasting news and information? I don't think so. Bits of news and bits of information come from these online networks, but not very substantial material (let's not get into the substance of CNN broadcasting, which I can only assume is often soundbite-ish, or trite, e.g. Octo-Mom). Clearly, what is needed is a reformation of Big Media to generate more thoughtful, substantive, quality news and information broadcasting (a la Democracy Now! or News Hour). And of course Twittering can never replace the long form reporting done by print outlets like the NYT, The New Yorker, and a revamped Newsweek. Saying venues like Twitter are making broadcast media irrelevant is like saying Huffington Post makes print media irrelevant (after all, HP rehashes material from other sources). Making CNN irrelevant? No, but it does highlight the inadequacies of popular cable news networks. Lastly, was CNN only showing English language feeds of Twitter? Imagine what is happening in Iran in Farsi! It could very well be that Twitter is not much of a tool there (considering most Iranians are not online or carry iPhones). I suspect that more traditional outlets in Iran (and in other developing democracies) like print and television are having far more of an impact than YouTube, at least for those populations.

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 16:07 #

Maybe I wasn't very clear about it, but I don't so much think that Twitter et al are making broadcast or mainstream media irrelevant for journalistic purposes. Broadcast media are making themselves irrelevant, and social media are filling the gaps where possible, and not very well at that. I was lamenting the decline of broadcast more than cheering the rise of social. Following this Iran thing has been fascinating, and despite the limitations of the mediums involved, lots and lots of valuable info has been getting out... but as you say, the coherence and analysis is the problem. Blogs have done decently well at that in terms of selecting and curating, but it's still hard to tell exactly what the hell is going on big-picture-wise. I wish all this stuff was supplementary, instead of all we really have. We just aren't getting the kind of live coverage on the ground that we got in '89. And I don't think it's just because Iran's a closed society... BBC and Al Jazeera/Arabiya are there, and Iran today isn't really a more closed society than China was in '89. CNN couldn't cover Iran because they cut all their international bureaus over the past decade, and they just don't have the capacity anymore. Hell, they came thisclose to turning into the E! Network before the 2008 election brought them back from the brink. The major papers besides the NYT are little better, and the NYT is in trouble too. Capitalism and media as currently constituted don't seem to be able to support the sort of journalism you a rightly defending the value of. I don't know what the new model for supporting it will be, but I think most of the current players are either going to be doing news-lite and entertainment or going out of business, so we'd better figure something out soon.

The MANTLE newsletter

The Web Makes Crackdowns Global Spectacles

Post new comment

Thought Cloud

Blogroll

Secondary links