If journalism is the first draft of history, then social media is the half-lucid doodling in the margins of history's notebook.
And history is in the making these days, even for those among us who can't find Iran on a Google map. In fairness, staying current is always a struggle when a faraway country goes awry, because – let's face it – no matter how worldly we like to act, only a minority among us carry around world-book almanacs in our head. It's a big planet, and we have local concerns. They've stopped picking up trash here in Toronto, it's awfully hot out, and Steve Jobs just got a new liver.
Still, we try. Things haven't been helped by the fact that while the revolution might not have been televised, it was Twittered assiduously. In fact, I am informed that this is the “new media revolution.” There has been almost as much coverage of the way the revolution has been covered as there has been of the revolution itself. (This shouldn't be surprising, since Internet-age journalism has a distinct bias towards reporting that doesn't involve going anywhere.) The way some people talk about it, you'd think the entire event was staged as a technology demonstration.
The extent to which Twitter and its ilk actually facilitated the spread of the Iranian protests is hazy. A number of well-informed observers – among them Ethan Zuckerman, the co-founder of Global Voices Online, an excellent source of international perspective – suggest that new media has been less effective at spurring on the protests proper than it has at inflaming and engaging sentiment worldwide.
And it's certainly succeeded on that front. On Twitter, users turned their avatars green in solidarity and tuned into feeds that gushed out Iran-related snippets like little geysers. Users hurried to forward along (or “re-tweet,” in the parlance) messages that seemed especially pertinent.
There were Twitter rumours of mass killings, Twitter rumours of chemical agents being dropped. As the protests reached a crescendo, a particularly insistent rumour claimed that every embassy in Tehran except Canada's was open to wounded protesters. The ruckus that ensued was such that Jason Kenney, Canada's immigration minister, had to tweet out a denial, for all the good it did. It turns out that none of the other embassies were open either.
We've seen this show before. Gonzo information on the Internet, film at 11. It's a classic case of too much noise and too little filter. Nor is it incurable: various people and organizations have stepped into the breach to act as aggregators: bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and the staff of Global Voices Online spring to mind, as well as the New York Times and the Guardian, both of which have used running blogs to cobble the story together from its constituent parts and provide the context to make sense of it all.
But what distinguishes the Twitter phenomenon from the ones that came before it is that this one is all information, no verification. Yes, it's easy (and usually profoundly satisfying) to snicker at Wikipedia and the wooly world of blogs as resellers of dodgy information. But at their core, both are all about fact-checking. Wikipedia's editors and users argue endlessly over how best to represent the truth, or their current take on it. And blogging culture is heavily invested in the act of scrutinizing other reports with a cocked eyebrow and squinty regard.
