It was big news this spring when Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter followers reached 1,000,000, and now the number of subscribers to his Twitter feed is 2,198,739. Ashton Kutcher is a mediocre, Ronald Reagan-class actor much beloved by dumb teenaged girls.
Britney Spears has 1,848,580 followers who await updates like this:
Check out the view from the front door of my hotel in London. I am truly blessed to have fans like you. Lov …
Al Mohler, 4925 followers, arrests each day the attention of Southern Seminary students with a half-dozen or more updates like this:
Picking out a birthday card for my beautiful, sweet, wonderful wife. I am horrible at this. Pray for me.
Even Ann Coulter has a Twitter account, with 4299 subscribers awaiting her Olympian pronunciamentos, though her last and only update was July 10th, 2007, when she issued this alert:
Just signed up for twitter. Looks like a good place where I can bash Edwards and the fags without being caught. Horray [sic] for the internet.
So here in the U.S. Twitter is a sort of toy or, at best, a publicity tool for the relentlessly self-aggrandizing in a country where noise and media exposure, any kind of noise and any kind of exposure, is the sine qua non of celebrity and importance.
But Twitter changed the world this past weekend, getting the story of the reaction of Iranians to the theft of last week’s election out to a world whose old media titans yawned — and then got buried.
Iranians turned-out to vote in record numbers because they were sick of the mullahs, sick of Ahmadinejad, sick of their isolation — and they knew the election had been stolen when Ahmadinejad was declared the victor by an almost 2:1 ratio.
The thugs that run the place were ready for the inevitable protests. Foreign television and shortwave broadcasts were jammed. (VOA, to its imperishable credit, end-ran the jamming by switching to another frequency and continued beaming-in.) Cell phone service was cut. Foreign journalists were confronted by Iranian police and ordered away from the demonstrations, some were arrested and beaten.
But humble Twitter, with its scanty 140-character limit, was overlooked — and that’s how the stories of the gigantic demonstrations, the beatings, the tear gas, the shootings, got out. Not CNN, not FOX, not the cable biggies … regular folk with these amazing cell phones with onboard cameras and video recorders, building a deluge of information one infinitesimally small drop at a time.
Some of the tweets have already been debunked as re-transmissions of rumors. Verification is still sought for others. But nobody could objectively discount thousands, then tens of thousands, and by now perhaps hundreds of thousands, of similar reports of mayhem all across Iran as anything but evidence of something gone wildly wrong and careering toward chaos.
There are no secrets any more. No government anywhere on earth can expect it to go unknown and unremarked if it does business like thugs. Transparency and a modicum of decency are the emerging defaults, because there is no choice.
The old media aren’t very important any more. They are useful as aggregators, but they cannot track all the inbound information or much influence at all any longer either the gathering or the dissemination of information. About all they’re really good for is helping to separate the wheat from the chaff, the solid facts from the hysterical rumors. That’s not unimportant. A month or so after Hurricane Floyd whacked North Carolina, I was commissioned by Monitoring Times magazine to write a piece about the work of HAM radio operators during the storm and infrastructure collapse that followed. I spoke with half-a-dozen HAMS who had been in the thick of it, surrounded by flood waters, relaying messages and frantically alerting rescuers to victims’ whereabouts — and every single one of them was certain that the death toll was in the hundreds. In fact, it was around 50.
Even so, and however great the risk of rumors assuming exaggerated importance, humble, low-level peer-to-peer communications are the new default media.
Expect propagandists of all stripes to start looking for ways to exploit that, cynically and systematically. Hell, right now I’ll bet, tinpot dictators and corrupt executives are detailing staff whose job during the next civil or business crisis will be to bury Twitter and its inevitable clones in happy talk.
I’m not a good liar so it wouldn’t work for me, but it might be a great business opportunity for real estate brokers, or some of Wall Street’s laid-off money managers and the accountants who sustained all their lies.
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