Pen mightier than Sword? Try Pixels vs Pistols
Thursday, June 25, 2009
THIS IS THE HYPERLINKED world we inhabit. In a news conference CNN's correspondent wants to know if the President of the United States has, like millions of other worldwide web-users, clicked on the video showing 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan’s death on a Tehran street. The President has indeed watched it, and says “It’s heartbreaking”.
As he visibly struggles against media and political pressure to shift from condemnation of Iran’s regime toward full-fledged action against it, he pauses. He grimaces. And says again: “It’s heartbreaking”.
But he does move along the scale a little, almost but not quite contradicting his June 15th statement, just three days after Iran's disputed elections, that “we respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran”.
This week in the White House Briefing Room he goes so far as to pronounce the US “appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings and imprisonments”... and to “strongly condemn these unjust actions” … ultimately turning to Martin Luther King-derived oratory, in the form of a prediction (or warning) that “we also know this – those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history”.
The global tsunami of pixilated images and urgent text surging out of Iran - which has continued via proxies and cunning digital work-arounds even when the determined and web-savvy Islamic authorities do their worst to block, repress and censor – is undeniably exerting a new form of power (or at least influence) in geo-politics. It has invigorated all those who are dedicated to the spread and deepening of democracy.
My colleagues at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, whom I am happy to meet at just about every forward-looking communications conference I attend, can hardly contain their glee. The Center’s co-founder John Palfrey, the lean and sharp law professor who authored Born Digital, last year's seminal book on the millennial generation’s web-use, is at the same time very measured in how he expresses his generally heartened assessment: “It’s almost impossible for the censor to win in an Internet world. But they are putting up a good fight”.
Amid all the western media's understandable enthusiasm (since after all media tools can now claim such a prominent, and for some observers an unexpected role in the cut-and-thrust of statecraft) I think it’s wise to mentally step out of the media world a tad, and consider this crisis more broadly.
I can’t help but share some reservations voiced by a member of the digirati who’s also a foreign policy adviser to Senator Edward Kennedy. He's Andrew Rosen of the Aagave consulting firm, who happens to be a term-member of the Council on Foreign Relations in addition to having (get this ...) done a lot of web-work for the MTV Networks. He has wisely raised again the question first posed when President Obama’s message for the Iranian feast of Nowruz and his Cairo speech to the Muslim world both “went viral” on screens throughout the greater Middle East. The question is: what if “YouTube Diplomacy”, as Rosen and others have labeled it, turns out to fail?
Rosen rightly declares: “We have no idea what happens when Web 2.0 confronts military power. It is still unclear, at this point in time, how the people empowered by the tools of the web fare against the real-world threats of brute force, violence and death”.
It’s an obvious truth, but one too easily overlooked, that people who use YouTube and Twitter are self-selecting, as well as well-educated and digitally-adept.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's supporters, for the most part, do not comprise that kind of motivated communicator.
The evocative scenes and pointed messaging we receive virally from Iran will, almost by definition, favor the opposition. We risk underestimating the strength of Ahmedinejad's following – and the fact that it contains at its core many who wholeheartedly approve the thuggish, murderous measures employed by his Basiji enforcers, for all that we may find them "heartbreaking".
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