I would like to start with a quotation from one of the articles I read:
"While rioters took to the underground paths of BlackBerry Messenger to organize, the highly spreadable mediums of Twitter and Facebook have shown to be the perfect platforms for mobilizing cleanup organizers and followers in the early aftermath of the rioting." Erica Swallow, writing for Mashable
I think this is a huge problem with with the way we think of both real and technological revolutions. From the beginning of her article, Swallow differentiates between the evils of BlackBerry Messenger which organized the riots and the goodness of Twitter and Facebook which are helping to rebuild London. Yay! Now, I’m on #teamiPhone, but was once the proud owner of a BlackBerry phone that I had to constantly defend to outsiders. This paragraph just reinforces how writers want to antiquate certain platforms while championing others, a confusion of the tool and the results of using the tool. BBM is old and led to an unsuccessful riot. Twitter is new(er) and is making the world a better place. Stale idea, Swallow. Stale.
The arguments made recently have had to do with Twitter’s involvement in many recent “revolutions” and uprisings, especially in the Middle Eastern and Arabic countries. At the start of these revolutions, many wanted to attribute them to social media, namely Twitter and Facebook. Quickly, many realize this argument was weak sauce.
In his essay “Iran: Downside to the ‘Twitter Revolution’”, Evgeny Morozov argues that the celebration of Twitter revolutions is misplaced. Using an argument that has stayed with me for quite some time he notes that many “in-touch” bloggers and tweeters were bilingual (Farsi and English), but often existing in the Iranian diaspora, not in Iran. If you are trying to succeed in revolution, why write in a language foreign to many in your country? In this case, it seems that many of these bloggers were citizen journalists, not organizing revolutionaries, but shedding light on them to the Western world.
