Larvatus Prodeo

There’s been a ton of discussion about the role of social media in the protests ensuing on the Iranian election. Two notable posts are those by Rosanna Ryan at ABC Online and my QUT colleague Terry Flew at his eponymous blog. Flew writes:

1. The West is not behind these protests. Iranians are making their own judgements, and taking matters into their own hands. Barack Obama’s foreign policy strategy in the region was premised upon the idea that he would still be dealing with Ahmadinejad after the election, who was the devil they knew. The U.S and others like Britain are basically playing catch up, and decidedly unsure on whether to support the uprising;
2. Blogging, You Tube, Twitter and other social media have been central to getting the message out to the wider world. The idea that this is all apolitical fluff that is about following Ashton Kulcher around and “are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism [but] are directives from the Central Software Committee” (to quote a recent pooh-poohing manifesto from the land of Digital Media High Theory) is actually being exposed in a sharp light on the streets of Teheran right now;
3. The mainstream media are not a monolith in relation to these matters. Several people have commented on the appalling lack of coverage on the U.S. cable networks, the BBC has been great, as has The Guardian and the New York Times news blog The Lede. Moral: don’t write off media outlets that invest in serious coverage of international affairs. Bloggers are not filling this gap at this stage.

I’m not certain that anyone has been writing off the MSM coverage in toto. It’s very rare that Australian media organisations these days fund good foreign correspondents, but clearly the quality of the reporting from a number of media outlets, particularly some of the British ones, is very high. It seems to me a mistake on either side to reduce this sort of thing to a dichotomised opposition between journalists working in the media and citizen activists and those who mediate their contributions. I think also this sort of dichotomy tends to get confused and conflated in value judgements made about the respective validity of bloggers and citizen journalists in countries with repressive regimes and countries like this one. That’s the case both on the left – say, with Antony Lowenstein to some degree, and certainly on the right – as with David Burchell.

One of the cautions worth noting with this event is that while there is validity in the argument that blogs and social media can play a really positive role in countries with repressive regimes, we also tend to miss the fact that a lot of blogs (for example in Egypt) are full of misogynistic, violent and narrow minded ranting, which would be most distasteful to most Western readers. There’s a tendency to pick up on the ones written by educated middle class folk, particularly those that express themselves in English. It would be wise to exercise some prudence in extrapolating only from those blogs, or from the Twittersphere.

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