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On cyber-revolutions
TAMARA SCOTT-WILLIAMS
Sunday, June 28, 2009
I often receive invitations from friends to join their on-line network of friends and share thoughts and photos of our lives. Often these invitations indicate how many 'friends' my friends already have.
I have one friend whose first invitation to me noted that he had 173 friends. I ignored the first invitation. When the second invitation came, the number of on-line friends had almost doubled. A third and final invitation revealed that he had close to 600 on-line friends.
I ignored all the invitations. Certainly my friend didn't lack friends, and added to that, not once over the course of receiving those three invitations did my friend actually call me, or even send me an e-mail. Apparently, e-mail is ancient and social networking is now. But we spend so much time to trying to find a better, faster, more novel way of communicating that I wonder if we're really communicating at all.
For the uninitiated: social networking is about building an on-line community of people who share interests and/or activities, and who want to know what others are doing and thinking at every moment. Most social network services are web-based and allow users to interact via instant messaging: e-mail is snail mail in comparison. There are, according to Wikipedia, no less than 148 "major active" social networks that one can join.
You can 'blog' and podcast, and if you once dreamed of a broadcasting career you can video-podcast too. There's FaceBook for friends and family and there's a FaceBook just for business marketing. There's MySpace if you want to meet new people, and after you meet them you can Ning them and Ping them and create your own VideoBlog and put that on YouTube for all your new friends to see. There's LinkedIn for young professionals and Second Life for the retired folk. For the social worms there is Digg, and WordPress and Workbench. For the social butterflies there's Flickr, Mixx, Squidooo and Twitter too.
These social networks more than offer an outlet for your thoughts and the minutiae of our ordinary lives. They've influenced everything from company brand management to an election outcome and most recently, social networking, specifically Twitter and the ubiquitous cell phone, helped to convey to the world the seven days of demonstrations in Iran after the disputed presidential election.
Even though President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iranian officials shut down websites and closed newspapers, they couldn't shut down cyberspace, and so the Iranian people were able to get out the word through Twitter and Facebook, and by taking and sending photos of the demonstrations on their cell phones. This new media provided the United States and the world with critical information in the face of Iranian authorities banning Western journalists from covering political rallies.
This was perhaps the world's first cyber-revolution, and this revolution was not without its martyr. Her name was Neda Salehi Agha Soltan: a 26-year-old, philosophy and music student whose brutal death was transmitted around the world in a 40-second video.
The grainy video showed her final moments after a bullet tore through her heart: she sinks backward onto the ground. Her beautiful eyes swell and roll sideways. Blood starts gushing from her nose and her mouth. She dies on the streets in the midst of the protests, defying the desperate cries of the men around her who begged her to stay alive and then urged her not to be afraid going into death.
A reluctant hero, Neda had been forced to walk the street with her music teacher when their car could no longer navigate the streets clogged with protesters. In so doing, she became the global symbol of Iran's regime. Pictures of Neda, the "Angel of Iran", hang outside Iranian embassies around the world. Tribute sites have been set up on Facebook and Twitter. And a vigil for her was planned, then cancelled, in Tehran's centre square.
And soon thereafter she was buried - very quickly and very quietly - and curiously, it seems, all the Twittering stopped and the protestors went quiet.
It appears as though the millions of Iranians and hundreds of millions of others around the world had suddenly had enough, had heard enough, had seen enough, had witnessed in real time much more information than they could handle. By Thursday, planned protest rallies and ceremonies to remember the victims of Iran's post-election protests were delayed, all Internet communications had slowed down and updates on the Iran crisis had given way to news on the death of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.
Other deaths have captured our imagination - if only for a moment. Neda is now a memory. It raises the question: while we use this new cyber technology to get information out in a hurry, especially in crises, what do we do with the information other than use it as a diversion until something new comes along?
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