Twitter: so close to history, so far from truth

Thanks to the Iranian government policy of closing the country to all foreign media, Twitter now is the only media that transmitting information out of that country. Therefore, making it not only a source of news, but a source of power. Whether or not this new communication pattern is a real representative of the Iranian civil society is not a question for the American mainstream media, cause what they want is news or more specifically proof of evil, and non mistakenly they got what they came for.

With powerful systems like Twitter, what's happening and what's showing are only distinguished by the speed of light. Thus, history was never so close to its original meaning: a multi-perspective accumulation of the event. This raw and live history is full of glances, snatches, comments, opinions and feelings, which synchronize the hearts of the world with the happenings inside Iran. Twitter became the enhanced form of embedded journalism and erected sensors everywhere for viewers anywhere. But are we closer to the truth?

Once you jump in the network, a centerless spiderweb, you are lost in a meaningless, contextless world of sliced information flood. The closer you are to the events, the further you are from the truth. These pieces require the individual reciever to assign meanings to them. However, the lack of background kowledge diasbled the audience from fully understanding and comprehending such meaning. As a result, incomings are put into simplified categories to make basic sense, and whose categories are easily provided by mainstream media and widely circulated social discourses. The outcome is not truth, but merely a set of reinforced opinions, intensified feelings, and impuse for actions.

Taken Iran as an example, for over a week, the media is waiting for bloodshed and explosive footage from the internet. And yet, no one, perhaps exclude PBS, bothers to explain the background of these events, the reality of lives in Iran and the real dispute between the conflicting sides. In order to reach the conclusion before anything even happens, the media quickly declared a TAM (China, 1989) second regardless the vast cultural and political differences between the two events. The broad western labelling or branding of events gives little room for the nuance of understanding and exacerbates the situation by pushing international interventions.

Follow Up:

There is one similarity between the current event and many other riots around the world: inflation. Though the cause of that is not entirely clear, inflation is quite a common problem in developing countries due to their inability to balance the budgets. Petrodollar, government speding aimed at gaining popular support, central bank's capacity to reign in inflation, and global economic situation are all connected with the problem. Needless to say, both Iran's contentious foreign policy and populous domestic policy are all deeply disturbing to the urban (more liberal) Iranians. The failure in Iran to develop a viable political economy foreshadows (maybe has been proved) all resource rich authoritarian countries, such as Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Unfortunately, neither Obama nor Moussavi could change the systemic problem, but to have them is better than without them for the people of now.

For a good understanding of Iran's politics and Iran-U.S. relations see "Iran is not the problem" a documentary.