Twitter ripped the veil off ‘the other’ – and we saw ourselves
New media allowed the world to connect with the Tehran rebels
By Andrew Sullivan
Times UK

June 21 2009

IT was not, to put it mildly, a new technology I found impressive. Twitter, the social networking website, allows for only a tiny number of characters to be broadcast in each “tweet”, or message, and much of the early tweeting was being done by bored teens or Hollywood celebrities: the illiterate speaking to the impatient.

When Ashton Kutcher, the film star and avid tweeter, opined the following in April, I couldn’t stop laughing: “Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs - because the creation of Twitter . . . is as significant and paradigm-shifting as the invention of Morse code, the telephone, radio, television or the personal computer.”

Well, the last laugh is on me. As I have spent the past week hunched over a laptop, channelling and broadcasting as much information, video and debate about the momentous events in Iran, nothing quite captured the mood and pace of events like the tweets coming from the people of Iran.

With internet speed deliberately slowed to a crawl by the Iranian authorities, brevity and simplicity were essential. To communicate, they tweeted. Within hours of the farcical election result, I tracked down a bunch of live Twitter feeds and started to edit and rebroadcast them as a stream of human consciousness on the verge of revolution.

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