Media in the New Millennium

Posted by Melissa Vizcarra

The country of Iran held its presidential election last week and now is in a state of turmoil. The “theocratic republic” of Iran jammed text messages, cell phones, and Web sites. It shut down the Facebook page of its opposition, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister whose campaign hinged on Hope and Change, leaving its 5,000 fans without a communications resource.

Or, so they thought.

Because there was one platform that was able to withstand this hardline Islamic government’s crackdown: the increasingly popular Twitter. Throughout the upheaval and the chaos, Twitter was able to stay one step ahead of the government. As Iran’s new regime blocked one site, another hashtag would be created. And, the tweeting continues even today. As you read this post, it is likely that 10 new hashtags have been made. (For the newer Twitter users, hashtags act as a way to create categories, groups, or topics for tweets that others can use as well.)

Before the “Twitter revolution” began, Twitter was scheduled for a “critical network update,” Twitter would be down for ~90 minutes, but due to the breaking world news Twitter decided to reschedule their maintenance work; good move by Twitter! But, the battle wages on: because the Iranian government is more concerned with “cracking the code” than addressing the people’s voices, new proxies, clean IP address that forward a user to other websites so that they are hidden, are being created to divert them.

The median age in Iran is 27. It is great to see this country’s young population taking advantage of this new (internet usage in Iran is mostly still a phenomenon of the affluent, the young and city-dwellers) technology and still continuing Mir Hossein Mousavi’s ideology even if he ultimately “lost” the election (an outcome that is being heavily disputed). Grand Ayatollah Ali Kharmenei, who is the supreme ruler of Iran, has ordered an investigation into the election and hopefully some resolution will come to this country soon.

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