Liberating Spaces

NOTE: This is an article I wrote in 2009 about Iran’s green revolution and the use of new technologies for Article 19’s Azad Tribune. I didn’t tweet about it or post it on my blog. But it is never late to do so.

On June 16 2009, the Washington Post titled an editorial with a simple “Iran’s Twitter Revolution.” It was a commentary on how the Internet and associated technologies were helping the Iranian people in circumventing the government’s strict control over telecommunications in the country to spread news, images and videos among themselves and to the outside. In a display of the wave of optimism that affected many of us during those intense days (I, for example, found myself passionately live blogging on my now-closed Blog of Change), the editor ends by saying that the people of Iran “are commanding the attention of a world that seeks to make deals with their oppressors. Iranians are telling us that they yearn to be free.” Four days later, a young girl named Neda was killed in broad daylight. A video of her dying in less than a minute in a pool of blood was posted not long after her fatal end on YouTube. In a matter of minutes, someone using the alias ‘Hamex Iranian’ shared the video on Facebook, and the YouTube link started to be twittered and retwittered incessantly. Another newspaper, the online version of the German Der Spiegel, encapsulated the online viral effects of the event with another simple title: “Neda Becomes a Symbol of the Protests.”

The protests around the election fraud in the 2009 presidential elections in Iran, the so-called ‘green revolution,’ will be forever linked to the innovative use of online social networks and web applications, like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and, especially, Twitter, to spread the word and image of a popular uprising against repressive powers. This was certainly not the first time that the link had been made. Some months earlier, Moldova had its own twitter revolution against fraud in the elections that kept the communists in power. The use of these technologies in the 2007 Burma’s saffron revolution, which brought Burmese students, opposition groups and monks together in protests against the government military junta, has been described in the Berkman Center’s case study “The Role of the Internet in Burma’s Saffron Revolution” as a “complex interaction between eyewitnesses within the country and a networked public sphere of bloggers, student activists, and governments around the globe.” And already in the 2004 Ukrainian orange revolution, the Internet and mobile phones “proved to be effective tools for pro-democracy activists”, according to Berkman Center’s Josh Goldstein. In all these cases, individuals and organized groups used new digital technologies to get information, to communicate among them, and to organize demonstrations and public gatherings sidestepping government restrictions on the flow of information.

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Do you know Beth Noveck? She is the xxxx in the Obama administration. She was also the director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy and New York Law School, one of the creators of Peer-to-Patent, and the writer of the book Wiki Government. It is because of the latter that I write this post.

In the book she says:

In devising these practices [open and collaborative consultation of experts online], we have to remain open to all forms of technology, even those that initially seem trivial or irrelevant. Potentially, ubiquitous social networking technologies like Facebook and MySpace, in which participants “friend” and “poke” those in their personal networks, can teach us more about the idiom of participation than the legalistic practices in which so few of us actually participate (page 143, stress added)

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The Internet may be facilitating the creation of echo chambers and the balkanisation of politics. This is what Cass R. Sunstein, now Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said in his book Republic and then repeated in Republic 2.0. It meant that because of the new possibilities of filtering our information as “Daily Me” we may be heading towards a world where people will only read, watch and hear what they want to. According to Sunstein, in a democracy it is essential to have public spaces where different opinions are contrasted and collide. The Internet may not only hinder the existence of these spaces, but actually it may facilitate the emergence of echo chambers where what we believe is repeated.

This morning I checked my twitter. Yesterday I checked my twitter. Until this weekend, most of the people I followed where in the US and other English-speaking countries. Basically it was mostly in English. After this weekend, after attending the PDFEU in Barcelona, I started to follow more people in Spain and, particularly, in Catalunya. Until now I was getting information about a variety of issues regarding internet, politics, culture… from the English world. Now I see information mainly from Spain and Catalunya. What happened? You will say that now I follow, in proportion, more people from there, but actually I don’t. What happened is that among all the new followed people there were US people and Spanish people, in more or less equal proportion. What happened is that I checked my twitter when the latter are awake and the former are sleeping. A time chamber is being created. It makes me think that geography/location is still very important on the Internet. Or even, location is becoming even more important than before, an apparent paradox, but it is not.