Without shutting down the entire country, Iranian authorities are powerless to stop the flow of election information via the new new media.
During the 2008 United States presidential election we experienced the first indication of a previously unknown political media ecology. Driven by social media such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and propagated via computer, cellphone and MP3 player, these elements of what Fordham University professor Paul Levinson has called the “New New Media,” changed our national political landscape and are now working globally to transform political balances around the world. At home, grassroots organizers for Barack Obama were able to bypass the mainstream media, speak directly to potential voters and to orchestrate small-cap fund raising drives on an unprecedented scale. Off-the-cuff comments from candidates captured by portable devices drove news cycles for weeks at a time and changed political fortunes. For example, one instance of George Allen’s career-ending “macaca” video has currently been viewed on YouTube almost 400,000 times. As Levinson notes in his upcoming book, The New New Media: “the true or fully empowered new new media user also has the option of producing content, and consuming content produced by hundreds of millions of other new new media consumer-producers.”…
Article comments
26 - roger nowosielski
An appeal to simplistic minds, you say?
27 - Baronius
I made the same point about that last paragraph. What is this right-wing violence? The anarchist who shot Tiller, the socialist at the Holocaust Museum, the Muslim outside the recruitment center, or the preacher complaining about Obama being controlled by the Jews?
28 - sYgnal
You'd think that Mr. Matthew T. Sussman would've been all over this considering his pro Twitter articles(it's not a bad thing).
29 - Baronius
I read Silver's analysis. I don't know if it is applicable to Iran, but it definitely is wrong for the US. The first wave of poll results are urban. Typically, that means they lean Democratic. You can make decent projections based on them, but those projections will have to weight the higher percentage of minority and upper-income voters. So while the projections may come in proportional to the overall vote (and they better be, if they're projections), the reporting will always be urban first, rural second.
Is that how the reporting waves worked in Iran? I don't know. Based on what I've heard, Mousavi's support was greater in the country than in the city. So if the city districts reported first, followed by the outlying areas, we should have seen a shift toward Mousavi as the tallies came in.
30 - Clavos
@ #29:
All of which is predicated on the assumption that the elections were as systematic and fraud-free as they are in only a handful of nations.
I rather doubt Iran is among the handful.
31 - Dr Dreadful
Based on what I've heard, Mousavi's support was greater in the country than in the city.
I've read the exact opposite. One of the fishiest aspects of the election is that Ahmadinejad won in Tehran, where he is unpopular even among the working poor who have until recently formed his support base.
Iranian politics also has a strong regional/ethnic slant to it, and the fourth-placed candidate Karroubi's failure to do well even in his home province is looking a bit dodgy to some observers.
32 - Dr Dreadful
Clav @ #30:
And Silver acknowledges this.
His point is that, based on an analysis of the published results alone, there is little appreciable difference between the Iranian election and the last US presidential election, which, presumably, was conducted by and large in a fair and above-board manner.
33 - Baronius
Dread, you're right and I'm wrong. I was thinking of Mousavi's support among the Azeris, who as far as I know are mainly rural.
34 - Ruvy
The real news here is not whether Mousavi or Ahmadinejad captured the vote. The news is that the all-powerful Council of Sages - or whatever they call themselves - was forced by Twitter to take a political act that has compromised its position in its own "universe" of dictatorship that it has created.
That in itself is a tremendous victory that bodes well for an internal revolution - and this is far better than an external agent taking extreme measures to insure its own survival.
I have pointed out elsewhere that the Persians view themselves as the inheritors of an empire and it matters little which regime comes to power - they will all want nuclear weapons, the current plaything of the modern day empire.
But a country that follows a more responsible policy as to the use of the weaponry is far preferable to the "Mahdi mullahs" who think they have to bring their version of Redemption to us.
While I certainly hope the regime is swept away, I doubt that it will be. And, unfortunately, an external agent will need to take extreme measures to insure its own survival.
And we in Israel DO HAVE THE RIGHT TO INSURE OUR OWN SURVIVAL, NO MATTER WHAT FOOLS IN AMERICA MAY SAY.
35 - Tan The Man
Let's not underestimate the strength and will of 85% voter turnout...
36 - Robert M. Barga
Ruvy,
we all agree that Israel has the right to defend itself