When the first Internet boom hit in the ‘90s the world was buzzing with the possibilities of this new technology. Of course, the Internet bubble burst, and as we watched dozens of dot-com start-ups drown, we were left to ask ourselves what we really had. We would soon discover something much more than a glorified international shopping mall.
The Internet lowered the cost of information distribution to virtually zero, while personal computers lowered the cost of production significantly. For better or worse, we have set information free with the Internet.
This freedom of information has pushed us into a new world where secrets are hard to keep. Change can be hard, but accepting it can be liberating, or even empowering. The events in Iran over the recent weeks show us just how profound a world of free information can be.
Support rallies for the reformist candidate in the recent election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, were often coordinated using texting and social networking sites such as Twitter.
With the election now passed and many Iranians feeling disenfranchised by the shocking and seemingly impossible landslide victory of the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the freedom of information on the Internet has become both a tool of unity for Iranian protestors and a window through which the rest of the world may bear witness to their struggle first hand.
In a country where the media is tightly controlled by the state, the Internet’s power has given a global voice to individuals. The feed “iran_election” on Twitter, a service previously derided by some as lacking practical purpose, has posted continued updates regarding the protests, which followed the elections.
Even as the Iranian government slows Internet access in that country to a crawl, images, videos, and reports of peaceful protests and the brutality of the government’s Basij militia against unarmed protestors have continued to flow to the outside world.
The death of one protestor, Neda Agha-Soltan, was posted to the community video sharing site YouTube.com. The brief video spread quickly across the Internet and soon hit major media outlets throughout the world.
We are now living in a time where it is nearly, if not completely, impossible for the government of a modernized nation to truly control the media and hide the truth from the world or its own people.
We have all been given a great gift. Perhaps in this brave new world, in which we can be moved by the death of a stranger on the other side of the globe, we can learn to appreciate the humanity of everyone on this Earth, even those who seem far away because of something as trivial as physical distance.
Neda, the name of the killed Iranian protestor, is a Farsi word meaning “voice.” This so called Information Age has given each of us a voice, and we should be careful to appreciate that and to listen as well. A place we might have considered an enemy might speak up and reveal itself for what it really is; a people searching and fighting for a better life just like us.
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