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The revolution will be tweeted or whatever. People’s power and technology.
Sunday evening I spent almost an entire train ride from Ottawa to Toronto glued to Twitter following the posts from #iranelections, which is a way to get all the posts about the elections in Iran and following a twitterer with the handle Change for Iran who was posting from his roof top every few minutes and then going down to join the protests and coming back. It was an amazing experience to directly follow what was happening on the streets of Tehran as it was happening. More important, though, Twitter became a major source of information for those opposed to Ahmadinejad’s government and protesting what they consider to be fraudelant election results.
Knowing there would be protests the Iranian government shut down Facebook, MySpace, reduced internet access and even cell phone messaging capacity, which had been a major source of information for many activists. I guess they didn’t know about Twitter, which doesn’t need broadband access.
The MSM (mainstream media) has been reporting the protests pretty accurately but of course people in Iran cannot get access to that so Twitter has become important to inform them as well. I am not very well informed about Iranian politics and I am trying to catch up. There lots of analysis in the usual places Democracy Now, Al Jazeera, rabble.ca. Tonight Jeff Farias will be intervening Noam Chomsky at 7 pm ET online.
But what I want to talk about is the cultural revolution that is sweeping the globe combining a hunger for people’s power with new technologies and the way in which these new technologies are facilitating a people’s globalization.
It started with the Zapatistas at the turn of the twentieth century posting their ideas through Subcomandante Marcos to a North American and European youth movement hungry for a vision of a another world
On the one side is neoliberalism with all its repressive power and all its machinery of death: on the other side is the human being. In any place in the world, anytime, any man or woman who rebels to the point of tearing off the clothes that resignation has woven for them and cynicism has dyed grey. Any man or woman of whatever colour in whatever tongue speaks and says to himself, to herself: Enough is enough!—Ya Basta!
Then the Indymedia Centres started with the one in Seattle in 1999 reportin on protests actions against the institution of corporate globalization. These were the precursors to Web 2.0 and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Indymedia also really created the idea of the citizen journalist who reports on what is happening in text, photos and video where they are spreading their news across the globe that has allowed ChangeforIran to tweet to world about the demos on the streets of Tehran yesterday.
But even in countries where the technology is not accessible at all like Burma or for the Tamils trapped in the war zone in Sri Lanka. cell phone messages to family, friends and comrades around the world allow those in the disaspora to take the message to the peoples of the world and the media. Thus denying the dictators and oppressors of the world their monopoly on information.
Last week when Peru President Alan Garcia tried to convince the people of Peru and the world that Indigenous activists defending their land were terrorists, no-one believed him because of the network of alternative media spreading a different message and the international activists like Canada’s Ben Powless who were in Peru reporting from the ground about what was really happening.
As I say in Transforming Power, corporate globalization has created the seeds of its own destruction by creating not only the technologies that enable global citizen’s communication but also by creating common issues like free trade, and by forcing huge numbers of people off their land, out of their homes so that every major city in the still hegemonic global North is full of people who come from the Global South and are raising our consciousness about what is happening in their homeland.
I reckon you once said
“Twitter demonstrated that if you can say it in 140 characters or less, chances are it isn’t worth saying.”
Try telling that to the Iranian people.
#1. Posted by think-before-you-speak on June 17th 2009 at 6:10pm
Obviously I didn’t adhere to my own alias and posted on Judy’s post, not Brian’s.
My bad!!! Sorry Judy.
Delete comments? :P
#2. Posted by think-before-you-speak on June 17th 2009 at 6:11pm
This does give one hope. The fact that citizens can film events, and post these on the internet, is a blow struck for truth and justice. Nanaimo, B. C. Canada filmaker Paul Manly has created a great documentary called You, Me, and the SPP- Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule. In this film he has captured scenes of dozens of armed riot police who were on hand at the secret planning meeting for the so-called Security and Prosperity Plan, in Montebello, Quebec. The media were not invited to this event for the billionaires who are really pulling the strings of our lives now. Parliamentary process, and democracy, not to mention union and pollution regulations mean nothing to these greedy fat cats. The Bilderberg group they call themselves, and they include European Royalty. Paul got footage of some of the riot police who were disguised as protestors, and carrying rocks. When they were outed, they skittered back to their uniformed cronies. One of the peaceful protestors was Maud Barlow, of the council of Canadians. You can order the DVD of Paul’s Documentary from his website. I guarantee it will raise your consciousness, with it’s indisputable evidence about what is going on in Canada and the USA.
#3. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on June 23rd 2009 at 1:19am