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Such pronouncements—The Twitter Revolution! The End of the Media as We Know It!—could prove true: Twitter’s role in the election aftermath in Iran may well signal a shift in the power of the people to transform, like Rumplestiltskin with his strands of gold, emotion into action, and collective unrest into broad political change.
Or…not. We simply don’t know. We are, to repeat the obvious, still very much in the midst of the events in Iran—from the perspective of history, at any rate. Epic summations are really only viable when they’re retrospective in nature. It’s too soon to make definitive pronouncements about the media situation in Iran, particularly when the pronouncements we make skew toward the momentous. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
And that’s especially true when it comes to Twitter. The ever-more-ubiquitous platform lends itself particularly well, it seems, to the whole correlation/causation fallacy: Iranians are Twittering, and Iranians are protesting—it doesn’t follow, though, that the one caused (or even enabled) the other. And yet the many pronouncements about the weekend’s “Twitter Revolution” suggest just that: they assign to Twitter, and to the people who’ve been using it, a kind of epic agency. http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/remember_moldova.php
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