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By Root 1741 0

excuse to draw far-reaching conclusions about the future of the world in general. To many, Iran’s Twitter-inspired protests clearly indicated that authoritarianism was doomed everywhere. In a column modestly entitled “Tyranny’s New Nightmare: Twitter,” Los Angeles Times writer Tim Rutten declared that “as new media spreads its Web worldwide, authoritarians like those in Iran will have a difficult time maintaining absolute control in the face of the technology’s chaotic democracy.” That the Green Movement was quickly disintegrating and was unable to mount a serious challenge to Ahmadinejad didn’t prevent the editorial page of the Baltimore Sun from concluding that the Internet was making the world safer and more democratic: “The belief that activists are blogging their lives away while governments and corporations take greater control of the world is being proven false with every tweet, every blog comment, every protest planned on Facebook.”

Inspired by similar logic, Mark Pfeifle, former deputy national security advisor in the George W. Bush administration, launched a public campaign to nominate Twitter for the Nobel Peace Prize, arguing that “without Twitter, the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy.” The Webby Awards, the Internet’s equivalent of the Oscars, hailed the Iranian protests as “one of the top ten Internet moments of the decade.” (The Iranian youths—or, rather, their smartphones—were in good company: The expansion of Craigslist beyond San Francisco in 2000 and the launch of Google AdWords in 2004 were among other honorees.)

But it was Gordon Brown, then the prime minister of the United Kingdom, who drew the most ridiculous conclusion from the events in Iran. “You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken,” he argued. “This week’s events in Iran are a reminder of the way that people are using new technology to come together in new ways to make their views known.” On Brown’s logic, the millions who poured into the streets of London, New York, Rome, and other cities on February 15, 2003, to protest the impending onset of the Iraq War made one silly mistake: They didn’t blog enough about it. That would have definitely prevented the bloodbath.

Hail the Google Doctrine

Iran’s seemed like a revolution that the whole world was not just watching but also blogging, tweeting, Googling, and YouTubing. It only took a few clicks to get bombarded by links that seemed to shed more light on events in Iran—quantitatively, if not qualitatively—than anything carried by what technologists like to condescendingly call “legacy media.” While the latter, at least in their rare punditry-free moments of serenity, were still trying to provide some minimal context to the Iranian protests, many Internet users preferred to simply get the raw deal on Twitter, gorging on as many videos, photos, and tweets as they could stomach. Such virtual proximity to events in Tehran, abetted by access to the highly emotional photos and videos shot by protesters themselves, led to unprecedented levels of global empathy with the cause of the Green Movement. But in doing so, such networked intimacy may have also greatly inflated popular expectations of what it could actually achieve.

As the Green Movement lost much of its momentum in the months following the election, it became clear that the Twitter Revolution so many in the West were quick to inaugurate was nothing more than a wild fantasy. And yet it still can boast of at least one unambiguous accomplishment: If anything, Iran’s Twitter Revolution revealed the intense Western longing for a world where information technology is the liberator rather than the oppressor, a world where technology could be harvested to spread democracy around the globe rather than entrench existing autocracies. The irrational exuberance that marked the Western interpretation of what was happening in Iran suggests