Social Media's WOW moment is just underway for everyone of us to witness. Social media includes Web2.0 portals like blogs, social networking sites, file and photo sharing networks et cetera. Iranian presidential election triggered the present wow moment. When people took to the streets denouncing the incumbent Ahmedinejad's landslide, the Iranian government tried to gag the public protest by switching off mobile phone networks, kicking out journalists and blocking access to sites like Google, Facebook etc. The government sponsored information black-out failed miserably while the world continued to peep at Tehran's streets through the keyhole called Twitter. And how did all this happen..
The government's gag operation failed to take notice of a rather hip-hop microblogging site called the Twitter. Consequently Twitter emerged the epicenter of Iranian Election Reporting. Many of the agitated Iranians accessed their Twitter accounts to update about the events happening in ground zero. The reporting was almost real-time such that even before a reader could finish off one 140 keystroke update another thousand or two turned up for review. Iranian news broadcast on Twitter was simply overwhelming.Trendrr, a social media trend tracker puts that there were between 10000 and 50000 tweets any hour about Iran and this figure reached a peak of 221,774 on June 16, the day when Twitter was supposed go down for maintenance.
In fact blogs moved even quicker than Twitter with a host of Iranian bloggers coming up with excellent blog posts with live and real news snippets from across the streets of Tehran. Trenderr puts the number of blogposts discussing Iran in some fashion at 19 million. About 2.25 million posts are estimated to have been blogged on June 16 alone. Youtube and Flickr did their role to perfection. Thousands of protest videos and pictures were uploaded to these sites which enabled the world to get a glimpse of the democratic vibrancy of Iran. Trendrr estimates around that 184,500 videos have been uploaded on the Youtube. Many of the mainstream print and electronic media were happy to reproduce the citizen journalists' videos and images.
The highpoint in the story came when the US Department of State reportedly asked Twitter to reschedule its scheduled maintenance outage so that tweets from Iran may flow unhindered. Twitter's Biz Stone was quick to distance his company from this news. CNN's blog speculated that Twitter's executives could have themselves postponed the outage just to enable Iranian tweets. Nevertheless it has underscored an important idea that social media have definitely come of age. No longer can anyone dismiss them as frivolous and non-serious websites meant only for chit-chatting.
Social media score the brownie point for impartial reportage over organised mainstream media. Organised media houses always have the editorial control over the news they beam. So there is good chance that they may be cooking up public opinions by choosing or omitting certain news articles. On the otherhand social media have independent users recording their views. Though these bloggers and twitters may be biased and selective, a user would have unbridled access to all such bloggers and twitters. Thus the user can, at least theoretically, get to know all the prespectives of an issue.
One blogger posted saying ' when civil disobedience joins hands with social networking it means death to despotism '. This is particularly true with Iran. The top cleric of Iran has asked the government for a re-count of votes while the runner-up Mr.Mousavi's supporters take out a rally in the national capital. I do believe that democracy will soon see the light of the day in Tehran. When the triumphant day dawns surely Twitter and rest of the social media outfits would carry a sizeable share of credit for victory.
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