Iran's Sea of Green

The response of the Iranian people to the election last week has been nothing short of extraordinary. And the impact of technology on the coverage of the protests of the election results is undeniable. I've watched the tweets at #iranelection and #gr88 spin by and been amazed.

In Tehran:

In Isfahan:

Andrew Sullivan and his team have done an extraordinary job from the outset in assembling many bits and pieces, straining out the repetitive, and posting them. And they did it again last night. Stayed up all night to assemble this set of tweets and images that start with reaction to Ayatollah Khamenei's speech yesterday and go back to the first comments and protests after the election "results" were announced.

Jeff Tietz wrote about twitter's impact, saying:

But in the middle of a revolution, Twitter's pretty amazing. This obviously isn't news, but in crisis the technology functions like telegraphy in the nineteenth century, the tightness of the dispatch pressing out superfluous information and leaving the immediate and vital. Again obviously, there's zero lag time, except when there are connectivity/censorship issues, which allows for a cool meta narrative: intrepid reporter eluding in various technologically clever ways the government's fat fist. ("I am accessing Twitter from 148.233.239.24 Port: 80 in tehran. you can avoid gov filters from here. spread to others.") Plus, there are pictures and video.

If you find a good reporter (perhaps an actual reporter using Twitter) who writes over a sustained period of time, the totality of his or her messages will be--brace for another obvious realization, arrived at probably several years after everyone else--an encompassing, startlingly granular account of a set of events.

He's asembled a chronology of @persiankiwi's tweets (who I hope and pray is still safe). It is powerful. Anther Iranian twitterer to follow is @Change_for_Iran,

The Twitter coverage combined with the images and short videos sent from a multitude of cellphones are an incredible challenge to government efforts to suppress information and dissent. The Persian/Farsi to English translation added to Google translate, the addition of Persian/Farsi to Facebook's language choices, the rescheduling of critical maintenance by Twitter's upline connection to the Internet to a 1:30 am Iranian time to reduce impact also acknowledge the impact of technology in allowing the world to understand what is happening in Iran when foreign reporters are banned or discouraged from covering the events that are happening. Even the State Department recognized the importance of Twitter's contribution.

Blogs have allowed voices to emerge that might not have been heard otherwise. ShadowSD posted an insightful diary the day after his father, who was there during the election, returned from Iran. Nulwee has posted a couple outstanding diaries on Iranian politics. Translations from Farsi news sites have been enlightening.

Via Andrew Sullivan comes this blog post from Brian's Coffeehouse which points out that this manipulation of election results in Iran has happened before.

This chart about the Iranian power structure has emerged.

Study of it reveals just how powerful the position of Supreme Leader is and how significant the emergency meeting of the Assembly of Experts is. Add to that Grand Ayatollah Montazeri's statement and Khamenei's position becomes more precarious.

Given Ayatollah Khamenei's hard-line response in his speech earlier today and the photos and reports of beatings, bloodshed, death, abduction, violent intimidation from so many sources within Iran, it appears that Iranian voters have a hard road ahead. Let's hope the sea of green does not become come stained with too much red blood.