The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [6]
It didn’t take long for Sullivan’s version of events to gain hold elsewhere in the blogosphere—and soon enough, in the traditional media as well. Michelle Malkin, the right-wing blogging diva, suggested that “in the hands of freedom-loving dissidents, the micro-blogging social network is a revolutionary samizdat—undermining the mullah-cracy’s information blockades one Tweet at a time.” Marc Ambinder, Sullivan’s colleague at the Atlantic, jumped on the bandwagon, too; for him, Twitter was so important that he had to invent a new word, “protagonal,” to describe it. “When histories of the Iranian election are written, Twitter will doubtless be cast a protagonal technology that enabled the powerless to survive a brutal crackdown,” wrote Ambinder on his blog. The Wall Street Journal’s Yochi Dreazen proclaimed that “this [revolution] would not happen without Twitter,” while National Public Radio’s Daniel Schorr announced that “in Iran, tyranny has run afoul of technology in the form of the Internet, turning a protest into a movement.” When Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times asserted that in “the quintessential 21st-century conflict ... on one side are government thugs firing bullets ... [and] on the other side are young protesters firing ‘tweets,’” he was simply registering the zeitgeist.
Soon technology pundits, excited that their favorite tool was all over the media, were on the case as well. “This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media,” proclaimed New York University’s Clay Shirky in an interview with TED.com. Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard academic and the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, alleged that “Twitter, in particular, has proven particularly adept at organizing people and information.” John Gapper, a business columnist for the Financial Times, opined that Twitter was “the tinderbox that fanned the spark of revolt among supporters of Mir-Hossein Moussavi.” Even the usually sober Christian Science Monitor joined in the cyber-celebrations, noting that “the government’s tight control of the Internet has spawned a generation adept at circumventing cyber road blocks, making the country ripe for a technology-driven protest movement.”1
Twitter seemed omnipotent—certainly more so than the Iranian police, the United Nations, the U.S. government, and the European Union. Not only would it help to rid Iran of its despicable leader but also convince ordinary Iranians, most of whom vehemently support the government’s aggressive pursuit of nuclear enrichment, that they should stop their perpetual fretting about Israel and simply go back to being their usual peaceful selves. A column in the right-wing Human Events declared that Twitter had accomplished “what neither the U.N. nor the European Union have [sic] been able to do,” calling it “a huge threat to the Iranian regime—a pro-liberty movement being fomented and organized in short sentences.” Likewise, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal argued that “the Twitter-powered ‘Green Revolution’ in Iran ... has used social-networking technology to do more for regime change in the Islamic Republic than years of sanctions, threats and Geneva-based haggling put together.” It seemed that Twitter was improving not only democracy but diplomacy as well.
Soon enough, pundits began using the profusion of Iranian tweets as something of an