The Revolution Will Be Twittered

The old Nike ad that was a take-off on the revolution will not be televised seems a little trite today.

The Revolution will be covered by Twitter. And social media. The media restrictions -- throwing out the legacy media, arresting old-school journalists -- have squeezed on the people of Iran, and the leadership -- being legacy themselves of a revolution of another generation, a generation that manipulated the broadcast media in particular in it's revolution -- is watching the people become the media.

The question of the day: Is Neda the Crispus Attucks of the 21st century, that most visible colonial American among the five killed at the Boston Massacre?

There were only wood cuttings and drawings to represent the encounter between British soldiers and colonial protesters. Today, we have cell phone video; terrible, terrible graphic video as we watch this young woman bleed out in front of eyes.

Short of cutting the connection to the outside world -- like North Korea -- this is the way the future will play out for some time to come.

The journalists are struggling to verify. To be honest, some of the western protesters look a bit, well, opportunistic. Picking up a book today for a bit at Borders, All the News Unfit to Print by Eric Burns, I'm reminded of how journalists covered for Stalin during the 1930s and pimped for Nationalist China in the 1940s. Theodore White and Time magazine's Henry Luce might have created the whole image of Chiang Kai-shek -- one that skewed American foreign policy for decades.

But this is different. Absent the most elaborate special effects -- the kind of work that makes the paranoid fantasies of the moon landing fakers child's play -- we are truly witnesses to history. Journalism can't even really play a role as referee. They're on the sidelines with us.

In the middle of the flailing efforts of the cable news networks to fill time and be relavent in a 24/7 story they can't get on the ground to cover, one really interesting demographic note was given -- the largest demographic in Iran being under 30; frankly, I can't remember the exact number but something like more than half the county's population. They live in a different world, and in a country that 30 years ago saw its youth turnover the establishment, why wouldn't we expect the same today.

I'm going to return to a familiar previous theme -- we must begin to teach media as a skill to all. Just like CPR. You don't know when you will become the media, society's representative to the events of the day. Never before has the eyewitness account become more on the front edge.

The last time I sat back and watched like this, it was Tienanmen Square. When the troops came, the cameras went black. The information stopped. And to this day, no one really knows if it was 20 or 200 or 2000 that died on the cobble stones that last summer served as a backdrop for the Olympic marathon.

Twenty years later, it is impossible to keep the supression under wraps.

No one imagined Facebook being more than a hook-up for kids.