Twitter revolution, facebook revolution, and citizen journalism…
These are concepts and phrases so familiar to those who have followed the recent events in Iran following the rigged elections.
Although Iranian regime has restricted the activity of national and foreign media, the protesters use digital cell-phones and cameras to take photos and also film the demonstrations and upload them on websites like youtube.Thus, the usage of new media by young people with the goal of both organizing the protests and also disseminating the photos and movies of the protests has become a topic of research and analysis.No one can question the importance of new digital technologies in empowering the citizens and providing them with the means to narrate their own story of the events. There are also discussions about the decrease in state’s control over information flow and content production.
However, although we talk about the citizen-empowering character of the new media, there is also a dark side of the story! In the case of Iran, the regime’s intelligence uses the digital cameras to film the protesters. By watching the movies they are able to follow the leaders among the protesters and arrest those who are super active during the demonstrations. In aftermath of one of the demonstrations, the intelligence’s action became more scary when they uploaded the photos of the protesters on their website and asked the people to send them information about the individuals specified in the photos.
Well, it is interesting to see how the digital media that helps people to make their voice heard, is being used by the government to suppress the same people! I was wondering if there is a need to create phrases like oppressive digital media? Or intelligence photojournalism instead of citizen journalism!
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god point, but I still think that the positive side of it, I mean the existance of citize journalism is a lot more efficient! especially when it comes to distribution! their market (protesters, oppositions) is as huge as the whole world..
ReplyDeleteso maybe the usage of digital media for the authorities could be called spy journalism instead:)
Very interesting and I think you're right this is where it's going and there is a need when describing these things to create phrases like "oppresive media" or "intelligence journalism". Last week I heard Iran was able to hack into and take Twitter offline for several hours. In this article they refered to something called Iran's growing "Cyber Army" and "Cyber-Ops".
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