The folks at TED interviewed Clay Shirky on the Iran uprising yesterday, and the transcript is a great read. Seriously, you should go read the whole thing. There are a few snippets that I think are worth expanding on, too:

I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true.

It wasn’t quite true then, and it isn’t quite true now, but Clay makes a good point.

In 1968, television and satellite transmission of information were transforming media. What happened on America’s streets that summer was broadcast nationwide in real time, and the news didn’t stop at the water’s edge. Images of protests in Chicago appeared within hours in newspapers and on television screens in Paris. Images from Paris appeared in Mexico City. Images from Mexico City appeared in Tokyo, and so on. The whole world wasn’t watching, but more of the world was watching than ever before.

As it was in 1968, so it is in 2009. The whole world isn’t watching, but more of the world is watching than ever before, and as Clay went on to say, “people throughout the world are not only listening but responding.”

Asked which social media platforms have had the most impact on the Iranian uprising, Clay answers flatly:

It’s Twitter. … Twitter [is] so simple and so open that it’s easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I’m sure it wasn’t conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it’s had global consequences. Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook’s model prevents.

I’ve been thinking (and talking) a lot recently about the fact that Facebook has such a bigger buy-in among American student activists than Twitter does, and I think that though Facebook has a lot of strengths, Clay raises a point here that activists ignore at their peril. Twitter is easy and open and shareable, and because of that, a campaign that takes off on Twitter can get really big really fast. If you want to reach beyond your circle, you need to be on Twitter.

I have to head out for a while, but I’ll pick this up later with my thoughts on the rest of the interview.