#Iranelections
On the 12 June 2009 the tenth presidential elections were held in Iran. After Iran’s official news agency the Islamic Republic News Agency, announced that the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the election. The European Union expressed “concerned about alleged irregularities” and the opposition party Presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi stated that he “won’t surrender to this manipulation.”. Mousavi believed strongly that the election was rigged and called for peaceful protests against the “manipulation”
What resulted from Mousavi’s call was hundreds of thousands of Iranians taking to the streets and a swift reaction by the Iranian government to stop these protests. In many cases the clashes between government forces and protestors turned violent. One of the actions the Iranian government took was to prevent news agencies (especially foreign news agencies) from reporting on what was taking place in the country.
Prior to the election the government had also banned access by the citizens to social networking sites such as Facebook, this can only be seen as an attempt to stifle opposing views.
With the ban on foreign media and the Iranian governments control over the local media local activists and ordinary citizens took to the internet to tell the world what was going on. The micro-blogging platform Twitter became a key avenue for Iranian citizens to communicate what was going on in their country. Twitters immediacy and accessibility (Iranian citizens were not only using the internet to access Twitter, they were using SMS to get messages onto Twitter). Pretty soon what started to emerge was that Iran was in a state of revolution.
Twitter was not the only Social Networking site to be used by the citizens in Iran. Flickr, Facebook, Youtube and others were used to communicate what was going on.
#Iranelection has highlighted again (#mumbai – the hashtag used on twitter during the Mumbai attacks) is that a) peoples ability to organise, communicate and improve their circumstances is greatly improved by technologies such as the Internet and Mobile phones and b) the traditional way of doing things is fast coming to an end. The big media houses were shown up again as being lumbering giants who are behind the times.
Social Media expert Robert Scoble at the 140 character conference (which ran between the 15/06/2009 until the 17/06/2009) asked from CNN at the 140conf “Where was CNN on that day, at that time?” (referring to the Iran revolution).
The response from the CNN representative Rick Sanchez “We had people in Iran watching the events unfold, live. Our people were tear-gassed. We were there.”
Scoble response e to Sanchez, “How would we know that? Why didn’t you share that side of the story with us as it was happening? You couldn’t because your show wasn’t on!”
The world exists around shows, people exist around shows. They (the world and people) do not wait for shows.
Progressive Governments can learn a great deal from #iranelection, they must learn that people will make use of open, transparent communication systems in attempting to improve their lives. Progressive Governments must start taking advantage of the high mobile phone penetration rates to create bi-directional communication channels that feed into their developmental programmes: COMMUNICATE.
In South Africa, Government love to spend millions on fancy, complicated, inefficient marketing and communications campaigns. Yet these campaigns are yet to show strong results in favour of the investment. These campaigns do not build communities that allow the citizen to constantly engage with Government or other citizens. #iranelection proves that citizen to citizen support is remarkable through open platforms such as Twitter.
Of course Governments need to be wary. Being open to public (not media) scrutiny does have it pitfalls. Look at the screenshot below, once again from Twitter. On the plus side it does keep government honest, Batho Pele is not a one way street.
Hopefully the people of Iran will get the government they deserve.
