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Posted
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 9:42 AM
| By
Kerry Howley
According to the social media analytics company Sysomos, there were 19,235 Twitter users in Iran on Sunday;
this in a country of 70 million. Some 93 percent of those accounts were
in Tehran. Presumably those users are young, wealthy, and worldly. As
Elizabeth Lazar implies in her solid Double X piece on Guatemala, reading the world off Twitter is like peeking into a Connecticut prep school and claiming to have seen America.
I happen to be in Guatemala at the moment, so it’s pretty easy for
me to imagine a place in which the vast majority of people live lives
untouched by Google or Facebook. But in general it's pretty hard to
imagine one’s way into a different social and technological context;
far easier to conjure the college kid texting from Tehran than the
family of Ahmadinejad supporters who lack indoor plumbing. From here
the discussion over the Twitter Revolution, and the perhaps more
fervent discussion over the fact that there is no such thing as the
Twitter Revolution, looks to have little to do with actual events in
Iran. (Add this post to that pile, I suppose.) Yet even those who
acknowledge the conversation to be insular... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)