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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.
Sunday night’s violent attack on students in a Tehran University dorm by police and religious militia members has exposed fault lines at the highest levels of Iranian government.
Yesterday, a group of parliamentarians visited the campus and spoke with students. After that visit, they called upon the government to release all those arrested and fire those responsible for the attack. In response, parliament speaker Ali Larijani, a longtime Ahmadinejad rival, announced the creation of an investigatory committee to investigate the incident.
Reports have circulated in the last 24 hours that as many as five students — three men and two women — were killed in the assault. The chancellor of the university has denied that any deaths occurred, but condemnation of the incident has been growing, as Speaker Larijani has publicly asked “What does it mean that in the middle of the night students are attacked in their dormitory?”
At the mass rally held yesterday, presidential candidate Ali Mousavi charged that the government had “attacked dormitories and brutally broken legs, heads, arms, [thrown] some of the students out of the windows, and arrested a lot of people.” Today, some eight hundred students are reported to have staged a sit-in at the university’s gates.
Iran is a young country, and its students have for decades stood at the forefront of political agitation. The Tehran University incident is not the only violent campus assault to occur since last Friday’s election, but it appears to be galvanizing — and polarizing — the country in a way that the others have not.
If the uprising now taking place in Iran does grow into a true rebellion, the Tehran University dormitory assault of June 14 will likely be seen as a turning point in the struggle.
3 pm update: The Chronicle of Higher Education has finally picked up the Tehran University story.
5 pm update: The chancellor of Shiraz University has resigned in protest over a similar attack there.
Members of the Iranian parliament are repudiating last night’s government attack on students in dormitories at Tehran University, and the parliament’s speaker has appointed a committee to investigate the event.
According to a report by INSA, the Iranian Students News Agency, a group of parliamentarians visited the university today, taking testimony from students who witnessed the previous night’s events.
After their trip to the campus the group made a statement calling “for the damages [to dormitory buildings] to be repaired … arrested students to be released and those who carried out [these] unfortunate events to be arrested.”
In response to the lawmakers’ call, parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani constituted the group as a formal committee charged with investigating the “unfortunate incidents.”
5 pm update: Larijani is a longtime rival of Ahmadinejad, but he conspicuously congratulated the president on his re-election over the weekend. His appointment of this committee may suggest that he believes the political winds are shifting.
10 pm update: The Guardian (UK) says it has received an unconfirmed report that five Tehran University students died in the dorm assault. It names the five students, and reports that they are believed to have been buried today. The Guardian also reports that seven people involved in a student protest are said to have been killed by riot police in Shiraz, and that students at Isfahan University may have been thrown from upper-story windows.
11 pm update: According to this site, two of the five students killed were women. The female students who were said to have died were Mobina Ehterami and Fatemeh Barati, and the men were Kasra Sharafi, Kambiz Shoaei, and Mohsen Imani.
Reports have been bubbling up on Twitter of a major government raid on dormitories at Tehran University last night. Photos and video posted online show destroyed doors, ransacked rooms, and students displaying their injuries.
Now the Guardian, a major UK newspaper, has posted an eyewitness report on last night’s events online:
The protests at a university in Tehran were bigger than on Saturday night. Students gathered in front of the dormitory, and they were throwing stones at bricks at the riot police and basijis [militiamen] who had attacked them with teargas.
At 1.30am riot police opened fire with teargas. We could hear the shots every minute. Three protestors were hit – one in the leg, one in his eye, and one in his neck – and then six more were hit, but nobody was allowed to go and help them.
They were screaming and the student who was hit in the eye was in a terrible condition, but the police didn’t let anyone help them. Then the police went into the dormitory complex.
They took over block number 23 and severely attacked the students there with plastic batons. The police set fire to the student’s belongings and their beds. Then special guards from the army entered the dorms carrying rifles.
At least 300 special guards and riot police on motorbikes joined the ones in the dorms, and they were firing more teargas. I was in dorm number 22 when they broke down the doors and entered the building, firing at least 10 teargas rounds.
We had nowhere to hide but the toilets and bathrooms, and they shouted “You traitors to the Islamic republic, you bastards, leave the building or we’ll shoot you all.” Many students were severely wounded in the attack – we could hear injured students groaning and shouting for help.
At 3am the special guards and riot police said on loudspeakers: “If you evacuate the building we won’t harm you. Otherwise you’ll all be injured or killed.”
Then all the students came out of the building in lines, with their hands on their heads. The police hit then with batons and some started to shout that they had conquered the dorms. Eventually they let us go back to our rooms, but at least ten had been shot, some appeared to have been killed, and hundreds were injured.
10 am update: Reuters reports that four hundred Tehran University students have staged a protest at a mosque on campus this morning, announcing plans for a sit-in tomorrow. One says more than a hundred students were arrested in last night’s militia assault on the dorms.
1:45 pm update: Many more photos of destruction of dorm rooms. Lots of broken doors, shattered glass, fire damage.
10 pm update: A report claims five students were killed in the dorm assault. A committee of the Iranian parliament will be conducting an investigation of the incident.
Reporting from Iran in the wake of the apparent theft of the presidential election is still extremely fragmentary, but it’s clear that there’s a tremendous amount of unrest, and that that unrest is in large part being led by students. Here’s what I’ve been able to glean about the situation so far this morning:
Hundreds of riot police have shut down the road to the dormitories at Tehran University, where student riots against the regime took place ten years ago. Violence has also been reported at Shahid Beheshti University. More than a hundred faculty members at Sharif University in Tehran have resigned in protest of the government’s actions regarding the election. University exams, scheduled for this weekend across Iran, have been postponed until next month.
Much of the most dramatic news on the Iranian situation is coming from Twitter. (English-language Twitter feeds from Iranian students include @change_for_iran and @tehranelection — I’ll add to this list as I can.) Many of these reports are unsourced and unverifiable, but a sample of results from a search on iranelection university gives a feel for what’s out there:
- @1luvfreedom Students at Univ of Tehran barricaded campus. Continue to hold the university against security forces’ violence. #iranelection
- @smileofcrash 180 teachers of Amir Kabir university resign for supporting people…Viva teachers:) #iranelection
- @Gita situation in tehran University is so worrisome. police have attacked to girls dormitory #tehran #iranelection
- @madyar: the students and people of ferdosiuniversity in mashhad have demonstration and they chant#IranElection #IranElections
studentactivism.net 
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