This week we witnessed a surprising intersection of pop culture and history, with social networking tools and sites such as Twitter and Facebook becoming the principal means of getting news about the protests in Iran.
Let's face it, for most of us Twitter and Facebook represent a way to waste time or a way to promote something, whether a company, product, service or ourselves.
Now, they've become news media staffed by citizen journalists after the government in Tehran cracked down on foreign media's ability to report from within Iran.
Social networking is a pop culture phenomenon like comic books and television as much as it is a means of interpersonal communication like the telephone or e-mail. So it's getting its day in the sun as a means to get around repression, a tool for freedom.
The unrest in Iran over the charge that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the government rigged his re-election calls to mind a similar set of circumstances that occurred 20 years ago this very month: The unprecedentedly bloody suppression at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
The Communist Party government decided to shock and awe the protesters, using ammo and weapons suited to the battlefield rather than for crowd control of unarmed civilians. The army killed not just protesters, but also indiscriminately fired at ambulances and rescue personnel as well as buildings surrounding the protests.
The protests were silenced and Communist Party rule continues to this day, suppressing dissent not only by the threat of force, but also by controlling and censoring news and information outlets, including the Internet.
It's done with the complicity of Western companies - like Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft - who otherwise act like champions of information access. In return for access to the huge Chinese market (1.3 billion souls and rising), they sign a pact with the devil. They abide by China's rules that filter access to content the party doesn't want in people's hands and that call for the companies to provide information on users when the government demands it.
Take a look at this 2006 episode of Frontline. If you don't want to watch the whole show, click on Chapter 6 and wait for the performance of American information technology executives before a Senate committee. It reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) quote from Lenin or Marx that goes something like "when we hang the last capitalist, he'll sell us the rope."
So social networking may have had its day as a news outlet, but don't expect repressive regimes to keep their hands off for very long. In their efforts to control their people, they will find a means to control the flow of information in whatever form it takes and in whatever medium it flows.
The only good news is that people are endlessly innovative, and for a brief moment, something like Twitter can catch repressive rulers napping.
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