This from the London Guardian’s News Blog is really cool.
Iranian people turn digital smugglers in battle for information
Despite depleted phone and internet services, protesters are becoming more inventive in methods of spreading their message
In days gone by, crushing a revolution was a lot easier. There were no mobile phones to co-ordinate street action or relay what was happening to the outside world. Even more importantly, there wasn’t an internet. Now it is common to hear of “internet” or even “twitter revolutions” – as Andrew Sullivan on the Atlantic has already described the current protests in Iran.
It is precisely for that reason that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to have – temporarily at least – shut down Facebook, Twitter, mobile phone networks and unsympathetic websites. Nevertheless, Iranians are still managing to feed out information, embracing the technology that the moderate Mir Hossein Mousavi employed during his ultimately unsuccessful election campaign.
Protestors are uploading dramatic photos of confrontations with police on sites like Flickr.
When we see spontaneous and courageous communiques like this taking advantage of new media, it’s clear that the term “revolution” is correctly applied to what’s happening in digital communications. It’s also clear how digital communications facilitate democratic and human rights revolutions. Scenes like this will only encourage despotic societies like China to clamp down harder on the Internet, but the tide will prove irresistible. The more wired a country, the less tenacious tyrrany.
InfoMash 