Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Signs of a Fail Revolution.

Twittering class is isolated. Revolution has not spread to other classes.

"Amid the breathless reporting on the demonstrations, reporters failed to notice that the uprising was not spreading to other classes and to other areas. In constantly interviewing English-speaking demonstrators, they failed to note just how many of the demonstrators spoke English and had smartphones. The media thus did not recognize these as the signs of a failing revolution. Later, when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke Friday and called out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they failed to understand that the troops — definitely not drawn from what we might call the “Twittering classes,” would remain loyal to the regime for ideological and social reasons." Stratfor

And adding insult to injury- this post from Five Thirty Eight:

Nevertheless, it does seem to underscore the point that so many other commentators have been making: the protests are being facilitated to a large degree by the Internet. We've heard very little about protests outside of Tehran, even though there are some other fairly large cities -- Tabriz, Zahedan, Ardabil, Yazd -- where Ahmadinejad (ostensibly) received 50 percent or less of the vote. But we're seeing hardly any visitors from those other cities, except for Yazd from which we've gotten quite a few. If our traffic is even a loose proxy for the Internet situation in Iran in general, these people aren't Tweeting, and they certainly aren't reading the New York Times or the BBC. And they also, apparently, aren't protesting in great numbers.

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