I’ve had a mental block about Twitter, to the point that I don’t use it, don’t track it, don’t really understand it — kind of like the derivative in Calculus. Thank the heavens that the people of Iran are more Twitter savvy than this ol’ Okie! The Anchoress writes in Twittering Liberty…and Hope.

Emily Dickinson wrote:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune–without the words
And never stops at all…

How appropriate then, that the communications tool most responsible for keeping hope alive in shattered Iran is “a thing” called “Twitter,” and that the 140-character dispatches being sent and received by people in desperate straits are called “tweets.”

People are “tweeting” for their lives, and their messages are bold, frightened, determined and unbelievably moving. Students are sending out: “They are trapped in the dorms,” and “I cannot remain; I must participate.” They head off, unsure whether they are headed to a peaceful rally or a massacre, and they are not heard from for 18 hours; and people around the world -strangers- pray and wonder.

Then, miraculously, they are back, tweeting news, stories of destruction, injury, damage, hope; they are passing messages.

{…}

It occurred to me over the weekend, while the MSM was, to their everlasting shame, not reporting on the Iranian uprising, that Twitter had become the pre-eminent tool for breaking news. Blogs immediately receded into the background and became secondary, and the big-time-professional news organizations were somnambulist non-players (perhaps they were unsure how to frame the thing until orders were received from “wherever”).

A CEO that I worked for in the ’90s would opine that the Internet was possibly the spawn of Satan. Tonight I would have said to him, “Perhaps, but in this moment, Twitter appears to be made up of legions of angels soaring high on thermals of the apocalypse.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 11:53 pm and is filed under A Future For Mankind?, Iran In Crisis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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