With all of the hub-bub going on over in Iran right now, the role of Twitter (and Facebook, and YouTube, but mostly Twitter) has become amazingly important. When it comes to freedom, Iran is not so awesome. Information control has been essential to how things have been run there since the overthrow of the Shah, and the basic rights of people to assemble, to protest, to speak against domination – these rights have been largely non-existent in any meaningful way. Instead, the Iranian government just keeps repeating the notion that their people are in fact free – maybe they hope that by saying it enough, this will become true.

Twitter and Facebook take a lot of shit from old-timers who don’t like or want to understand the new ways in which people communicate. I once taught with a “senior” teacher who berated a seventh grader for wanting to go into the video game industry when he grew up. In her antiquated disgust, she blabbered about how the kids these days just waste their time with video games. No future, etc. Little did this old gas-bag know that the video game industry had already been growing faster than the film industry for a few years.

Technology is a language. It also defines the way the people of Earth look at and understand their surroundings. If we want to be able to communicate in ways other than speaking, yelling, whispering or singing to anyone close enough to hear, we need technology. A feather dipped in ink. A woodcut ink-press. A typewriter. A fax. A blog. And most recently, text messsages, Twitter, and social networks.

The guys who invent these cool internet gadgets must be pretty blown away. I’ll bet they never imagined that their ideas could affect the outcome of world events. Congrats to them.

Tags: facebook, twitter