Iran, Twitter, and the Shifting Media Landscape

Protesters outside the Iranian embassy in London (Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images)

The Iran story continues to grip the world. A few days ago, I posted a bit about how Twitter was impacting the story, and then yesterday added my two cents to a great conversation begun by Jeff Trexler about how the protest movement was not social entrepreneurship.

With the reporting help of Change.org's very own Danny Moldovan, I wanted to share a few updates and additional angles to the story at the intersection of social media and social mobilization:

The State Department steps in. As we wrote last time, Twitter has been one of the only mass communications mediums not shut down by the government or stiffled by bandwidth, and has been a lifeline for internal organizing and sharing information with the outside world. On Tuesday, Twitter had planned to have a 90 minute scheduled maitenance time, but after a day of the #nomaitenance hashtag showing that users wanted the channels to remain open, and a call from the State Department urging Twitter to keep the service up, Twitter rescheduled the maintenance.

Greening the profile. Andrew Sullivan has been all over this story, including pointing out how people are using the green color of the protesters to signal solidarity across the social media sphere.

The shifting power of the media establishment. A huge amount has been written about the poor coverage of the uprising over the weekend, bookended by a #cnnfail trend on Twitter. But more recently, mainstream media journalists have been confined to their hotel rooms and one of the results has been even more attention being paid to the citizen journalists who are tweeting, sending photos and posting videos on YouTube. As I wrote a few days ago, platforms like Twitter dramatically accelerate and amplify messages.

Volume of the conversation. Mashable recapped some social media statistics provided by tracker tool Trendrr. Consistently there have been 50,000-100,000 tweets mentioning Iran per hour, with a peak of 221,744 yesterday. 2,250,000 blog posts have been written about Iran in the last 24 hours; 12% of the total blog posts about Iran, ever. 3,000 videos have been posted to YouTube.

Platform for change. In his incredible TED talk at the state department last week, Clay Shirky spoke about how the internet is changing media, saying: "Media is increasingly less just a source of information and increasingly more a site of coordination, because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well."

Yesterday, in a Q&A with the TED blog, Shirky shared his thoughts about Iran:

I'm always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that ... this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true ... and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants, they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can't immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.