(no subject)
Tonight, I have been pretty much obsessively following the situation in Iran.
Long story short, for those who haven't kept up: Obama-level-popular reform candidate vs. Ahmedinejad (crazy guy I'm sure you've heard of), polls show a lead for reform candidate, election happens, Ahmedinejad is shown to win in a landslide with some very questionable results (such as winning the reform candidate's home city by a 3-to-1 margin), things rapidly get ugly.
The thing is, the US media's been pretty much useless for keeping up with this. Every so often CNN would run a five minute canned segment they'd taped earlier, but otherwise it was like trying to wring blood from a rock. But where the mainstream media fails, Twitter has stepped in.
The Iranian government shut down most of the social networks and indeed most of the internet and phone service in Iran, but for some reason they missed Twitter, and so not only have people been able to tweet in and out of Iran, but they've also been able to use it to organize demonstrations and pass information along. It's really kind of astonishing, and I've been obsessively F5-ing the #iranelection feed on Twitter to keep up with the latest.
At some point I'm going to need to sleep, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to.
Long story short, for those who haven't kept up: Obama-level-popular reform candidate vs. Ahmedinejad (crazy guy I'm sure you've heard of), polls show a lead for reform candidate, election happens, Ahmedinejad is shown to win in a landslide with some very questionable results (such as winning the reform candidate's home city by a 3-to-1 margin), things rapidly get ugly.
The thing is, the US media's been pretty much useless for keeping up with this. Every so often CNN would run a five minute canned segment they'd taped earlier, but otherwise it was like trying to wring blood from a rock. But where the mainstream media fails, Twitter has stepped in.
The Iranian government shut down most of the social networks and indeed most of the internet and phone service in Iran, but for some reason they missed Twitter, and so not only have people been able to tweet in and out of Iran, but they've also been able to use it to organize demonstrations and pass information along. It's really kind of astonishing, and I've been obsessively F5-ing the #iranelection feed on Twitter to keep up with the latest.
At some point I'm going to need to sleep, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to.