The fallout of the Iranian elections was a Twitter moment for me. As protestors took to the streets of Tehran, clashing with Basij on motorcycles, I followed the #iranelection hashtag. After a young woman’s death from a sniper’s bullet was seen around the world, her name became another search column I kept open in TweetDeck, another hashtag: #neda.
Through social media, I developed a simultaneous sense of deep involvement in the events in Iran and a complete feeling of helplessness as the crackdown began to suppress the protests. For a moment, it looked as though a genuine media revolution was at hand, but then it slipped away. But drawing conclusions about what the outcome might be is up to us, and it’s something that requires breaking out of our own cultural preconceptions.
A recent “Talk of the Town” piece for The New Yorker, marking the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, addressed the problem of preconception when looking at other countries. Author George Packer warns against the dangers of assuming historical situations can be replicated:
“A false lesson drawn from 1989 involves a kind of shallow eschatology of totalitarianism: this is how it always happens—the people rise up, the regime withers and dies, peace and democracy reign. The chaos that followed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was in part a consequence of this thinking. In planning the postwar period in Iraq, George W. Bush and some of his advisers had 1989 in mind—’like Eastern Europe with Arabs,’ as one official put it.”
Turning to Iran, Packer doesn’t address social media, but his broader point is well worth considering:
“Perhaps the closest contemporary analogy to the fall of Communism is the democratic movement that is challenging the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has deep social and intellectual roots, a growing mass following, and an enemy state with a hollowed-out ideology. But, unlike the East German soldiers and the Stasi agents, the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij militia are ready to kill. Behind President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, there is no restraining figure like Gorbachev. Iranians will have to find their own way to the fulfillment of their democratic desires.”
As we consider the possible role of social media in bringing change to the Iranian government, we have ample evidence that the power of open communication is real. But what the outcome will be when a population uses that power is not a forgone conclusion, and we risk being unpleasantly surprised when we assume a linear progression that goes from social media to open communication to adoption of democratic values as we understand them.
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