Emerson Brooking | All a-Twitter for the wrong reasons

A year ago this week, two revolutionary movements swept the ultraconservative Muslim nation of Iran. The first, known as “The Persian Awakening,” saw tens of thousands of Iranian reformers rally their country to a virtual stand-still out of anger surrounding the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadjinejad. The second, christened the “Twitter Revolution,” saw the popular web client provide an important means of communication between protestors, showing that Twitter was good for more than celebrity imitators and Sarah Palin.

Guess which revolution garnered more excitement in the Western press.

By the peak of anti-Ahmadjinejad demonstrations, the word “Twitter” had become synonymous with Iranian electoral politics. According to some newscasts, half the Iranian population were registered and active tweeters, spreading democracy 140-characters at a time. While such visions were far from accurate, they quickly became the accepted truth. They also constituted a disturbing case in which Twitter – not the protest itself – became and remained a central focus of media attention. And although the Persian Awakening is now dead and buried, this lesson of misplaced priorities remains deeply relevant to our generation of tech-savvy young adults.

Twitter was never far from news of the ongoing crisis. Even watershed events like the death of a young protestor named Neda (“divine message”) were often couched in terms of their effect on the Twitterverse. Any attempts by the ruling regime to suppress sites like Twitter were given as much attention as the protests themselves. The Western narrative now saw tweeting and microupdates as the Iranian reformists’ ultimate weapon. As TIME Magazine boldly declared, “Tyranny … is a monologue. But as long as Twitter is up and running, there’s no such thing.”

The passage of time has afforded a more sober perspective on Twitter’s role in the reform movement. It is now suggested that there were less than 1,000 active Iranian users at any one time, and that the overwhelming majority of Iran-related tweets were actually broadcast by Westerners who changed their location to “Tehran.” Furthermore, the content of these messages remained chaotic and unverifiable. A tweet about an ongoing rally which claimed 700,000 participants, for instance, actually boasted less than 7,000.

To be fair, Twitter has its uses. It joined Facebook as another powerful tool for coordination and communication. Even if its vast sea of protest-based tweets were not all accurate, they served to confuse crackdowns by the ultraconservative government. The problem was not that reformers and sympathizers used Twitter; rather, our media’s fixation with the Twitter Revolution ended up marginalizing the real revolution.

One year ago, dozens of Iranians lost their lives fighting what they saw as a corrupt election and oppressive regime. Indeed, during a few days of what Al Jazeera English described as “the biggest unrest since the 1979 revolution,” Iran teetered on the edge of real democratic reform. Yet today, we likely remember the Iranian protests more for their vindication of the latest digital wonder fresh from Silicon Valley. Whether because of a burning desire to steep our latest toys in terms of their social benefit or just old-fashioned Western bias, our media memorialized the reform movement for all the wrong reasons. While this mistake was made, it does not have to be repeated.

Even over the course of a rising seniors’ time at Penn, services like Twitter and Facebook have evolved dramatically. Given that innovation shows no sign of slowing, we must take care to temper our enthusiasm for new technologies by staying aware of the reasons they are used in the first place. After all, as tens of thousands of beaten and forgotten Iranian reformers can attest, one Twitter Revolution was enough.

Emerson Brooking is a rising College senior from Turnerville, Ga., and a member of the Undergraduate Assembly. His e-mail address is brooking@sas.upenn.edu.

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