A reader writes:
I object to the notion that there was no twitter revolution last year. There may not have been one in Iran, but there was certainly one ABOUT Iran. These were tweets being put out in English, predominantly by people in the West, anyone seriously paying attention knew they were a fairly troublesome gauge of what was going on.
The Real Twitter Revolution occurred mostly in the Anglophone West, in New York and London, in Vancouver and Auckland. It was not in the streets but rather in dorms and living rooms, offices and internet cafes. It was a revolution in media by which countless people, myself included, finally saw the man behind the curtain of the mainstream media. My faith in the Mainstream media, particularly in the lauded 24 hour news channels (and CNN above all) had been slipping for years, mostly I suspect due to Jon Stewart, but it was Iran and Twitter that took a hammer to it.
If it weren't for twitter, for blogs (if it hadn't been for the events in Iran, I'd have never found the dish!) and for all the rest of new media, we wouldn't have had any idea what was going on in Iran last year. The traditional media waffled, avoided the matter, and when they finally decided the story was worth covering after all, seemed mostly to read tweets on air. As I watched CNN drop the Iran story as if it had never been to focus on the physical death of a man whose career had died over a decade earlier, a revolution took place in the heart of my consciousness. That the mainstream media lies, that it ignores, and that it is woefully incapable of doing its job.
I haven't been quite the same since.