Watching the world change in Iran

A few years ago, the photo editor of Vanity Fair magazine wrote a remarkable book about the photographic record of the September 11 attacks. As the events of that day were more widely observed and recorded than any others in human history, there was a lot of ground to cover. Anyone near a television will remember seeing certain iconic images dozens if not hundreds of times in the weeks that followed. In ‘Watching the World Change,’ David Friend also examined the vast archive of photographs and video that lay beyond these images. The range and depth of the material was extraordinary, as were the circumstances in which much of it was produced. By sheer coincidence, it seemed, a television crew making a routine local news report was on hand to film the first plane crashing into the North Tower; James Nachtwey, the leading war photographer of his generation, just happened to be close by with a good camera and a bag full of film; a French film crew making a documentary on firemen visited the towers themselves and shot footage inside one tower as the other collapsed. Crammed with high technology and a curious citizenry, New York was able to record its own bewilderment with a vivid, complex detachment which had no precedent.
Eight years later in Tehran something similar is happening. Protests over the disputed election are being reported worldwide by ‘citizen journalists’ with cellphones and video cameras. Twitter and Facebook, social networking software better known for communicating personal tastes and celebrity gossip, have been reinvented as miniature news sites. YouTube and Flickr were also used to post photographs and amateur video. So far, this incipient revolution has been a global affair. Iran’s ‘tweeters’ have continued to file reports from the front lines using open source software from Canada which hides their identity. Some now have audiences of more than 20,000  around the world following their dispatches. Their popularity has allowed them to subvert government propaganda so effectively that the authorities have  shut down Facebook periodically and tried to confuse the ‘twitterverse’ with false information – a tactic which backfired because readers could easily establish a source’s authenticity by checking earlier reports.
Understandably, the online community has been full of revolutionary hyperbole, puns about the ‘revolution will be tweeted’ and proclamations of a new age of free expression. Although some of this is undoubtedly true, it underestimates the new media’s symbiosis with older media, television networks in particular, without which it would be impossible to distribute the news to influential Western audiences. It also discounts the courage of thousands of Iranians who have taken to the streets at the risk of life and limb.
While the drama in Iran unfolds in cyberspace, it is hard not to remember how differently America handled its own contested election just nine years ago. Had there been similar public protests, would the American networks have seen a popular movement for justice, or a dangerous mob? Would the liberal Gore have prevailed, or the hardliner Bush? Watching from the safety of the West, thrilled by the thought that we are watching a revolution in ‘real time’ it is easier to project meanings onto Iran than to see what is actually there. In the last few years, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has become a symbol of the West’s worst fears about the radicalization of the Middle East, but that does not necessarily mean that he has stolen this election. Mousavi, on the other hand, is frequently presented as a ‘reformist,’ but in the Iranian context this is not as straightforward a label as it sounds. A former hardliner who held power during an expensive and bloody war, permitted the execution of thousands of citizens in the name of a Revolution, and helped start a secret nuclear weapons programme, Mousavi would hardly be a ‘reformist’ in most other countries. That he has become one in Western eyes, says more about our general ignorance of Iran’s labyrinthine political intrigues, and our distaste for the confrontational, Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad, than it does about Mousavi.
Until there is a decisive political settlement in Iran, outside analysis will remain a series of educated guesses. It may be worth remembering that the Khomeini revolution was popular among the Iranian middle-class too, until the clerics took over. Perhaps the people daring to come out for these latest protests will be somewhat more skeptical. Online coverage may assist the protesters, allow them to speak directly to the wider world and even precipitate action elsewhere, but it is too early to tell where Iran is heading. This time around, the revolution may indeed be televised but that does not mean that we will understand it any better.