Opinion Beware of the tweet next door
Twenty years ago,the world was transfixed by an image a lone young man standing in the road before a column...
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Twenty years ago,the world was transfixed by an image a lone young man standing in the road before a column of Chinese army tanks moving into Tiananmen Square. Since Saturday,the global community has been similarly gripped by the tragic photos and video of Neda Agha-Soltan,the 26-year-old Iranian woman shot to death on the streets of Tehran.
The most famous of the photos of the Chinese hero was taken by Associated Press photographer Jeff Widener. In Iran,by contrast,we still dont know who took the stills,video and audio recordings of the dying young woman, because the images were collected on the cell phones of her fellow demonstrators and surreptitiously transmitted over the Internet.
In those differing attributions,we can begin to see the future of foreign news reporting.
Two things of immense consequence have occurred since the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square: For economic reasons,far fewer Western journalists are dispatched to cover international crises,like the June 12 Iranian election; at the same time,millions of people around the world and particularly in countries with large,well-educated young urban populations,like China and Iran have joined the new media revolution. The Internet,social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook,and cell phones with the ability to text-message and to record and transmit images have become interwoven with their daily lives.
The Iranian resistance is the first popular movement to present itself to the world,in significant part,through new media. But while its true that something new and unexpected is happening here,the process hasnt gone as either many traditional journalists or the Webs theoretical triumphalists ever foresaw.
As Mahmoud Ahmadinejads government has choked off the Western medias access to events,thousands of Iranians armed with cell phones and social network connections have taken the reporters and photographers place. Traditional news organisations have relied on lots of information from ordinary citizens and have been extremely transparent about how theyve done so,sorting it out right in front of their viewers. The hard work of verifying,analysing and fleshing out the facts has been left to the journalists on the scene. This hybrid journalism developed without plan and under the most intense pressure imaginable is the best and most workable glimpse of the Wests informational future weve yet seen.
This is bad news for authoritarian governments. In the future,theyll have to choose between underdevelopment denying their people social media,cell phones and the Internet and control. Tyrannys irreducible dilemma is that the Web is,in its chaotic essence,the product of an open society. You cant have its benefits without accepting the democratic baggage.
Los Angeles Times
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