I never really used Twitter before. It never really made sense to me. Just to create another senseless way to share information no one needs with the world. I mean, who is actually interested to know that my train is five minutes behind scheduale? Exactly, no one. And to post when i’m updating my blog or stuff like that? I also have no use for that. So that is kind of how i saw and mostly also see Twitter till today.
Maybe you read it in my post from saturday, the heavy clashes in Iran happening right now are accompanied by a huge amount of posts through out the internet. Blogs, facebook, myspace and most impressingly twitter. Every few seconds there are around 50 new posts on Twitter about it and also youtube is becoming a news plattform with short cellphone flics from the action happening down there. But what should we do now with that? This unfiltered mass of information that is going around the globe every few seconds, what you can follow here at #IranElection? It is impressing for sure and it also gives us the feel to be right now right in it, to see history happening. We are used to that feeling, when we think about live pictures from the Gulf War. The huge difference is that now it’s created by ordinary people, that it’s not masterminded by any political leaders. But again: What do we do with the information? There are thousands of new posts every minute, way more than you could read. And also there are so many tweets which are just to support the people down there. It’s a huge mess up of information, without any filter and at the end with not much information in itself. ‘Is this the first global revolution?’ one guy asked in one of his tweets. At least it’s maybe the first global revolution we can watch in real time from the perspective of the ordinary people. But with the same not understanding in the moment as always because of all the chaos, what comes out in situations like that… Maybe it could create the awareness in the world that it will be featured in the news for a bit longer and creates more pressure on the iranian government to get the elections revised – and help the people to stay connected with each other.
UPDATE: Now i found some twitter-channels in Iran (thanx, Nils), which try to do exactly what i was missing: To filter the information and to create in that way good information channels for the people and get them connected. There are much of rumors and when you follow the twitterers, it is crazy to see how much pressure they must feel, having to shut it down very often. Twitter wanted to do overhauls last night, but as a reaction of th events in Iran put that on the waitingline. Here are some of the iranian twitterers: Mousavi1388, Persiankiwi, StopAhmadi. Also you should check this youtube-channel and the flickr account for frequent updates from the action down there.
