Steven Houben Student Human-Computer Interaction

Iran Internet revolution

The Iranian revolution will go down in the history books as The Internet Revolution. As many of you probably already know there is an ongoing conflict about the latest elections.[1] I am not going to discuss the Election problems but I do want to talk about the role of Internet as communication source for protesters.

Iranian journalists aren't covering the protests (because of censorship) and Iran doesn't allow foreign journalist to film or report about the protest. Protesters aren't getting media attention and the cruel repression by authorities isn't recognised. So many protesters decided to use the Internet. As more then 50% of the people in Iran are under 25 years old they know the Internet well. They use it for 2 ways of communication:

1. They use social network website like twitter[2]  to communicate with each other. Today I was following these messages and I was shocked at what I was reading. It feels like you're in the middle of the war zone. They are talking about friends that died, places that are safe, locations they are at,... They even used Google maps to highlight embassies that where accepting injured people [3][4].( But there are also a lot of fake messages and random bullshit generated by irrelevant people that have nothing to do with the Iranian protest...)[interesting article]
2. Protesters are also using the Internet to reach the rest of the world. They are reporting the protests themselves and are generating more and more information every second. People are posting videos of the protest on YouTube [5] and other media, they are blogging live on different websites and social networks. This gulf of information is that large that nobody really knows how to deal with this. Western journalists are struggling to get confirmations,...[6]

The government is trying to block these website, as it is very well aware of the massive impact of this media, but is failing. This proves once again that we have left the information age and entered the global communication age.

To be continued....

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