Small Change - Why the revolution will not be tweeted.

[BridgeTheGap]

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.

“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.

“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.

The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.
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These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests—as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all#ixzz12o34GidI

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Clever piece of propoganda.

Look:

“It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.”

Anyone know who owns Foreign Policy Magazine?

the Wa. Post.

And who writes for Foreign Policy Magazine?

Neo-Conservatives, including many infamous former PNAC members:

Foreign Policy's contributors include: Pulitzer Prize-winning military reporter Tom Ricks, international bestseller Stephen Walt, veteran blogger Daniel W. Drezner, Christian Brose (Condoleezza Rice's longtime chief speechwriter), 9/11 Commission director Philip Zelikow, ex-senior White House aide Peter Feaver, top Pentagon official Dov Zakheim, John McCain's foreign policy adviser Steve Biegun, and Josh Rogin (a Washington journalist specializing in investigative reports on national security and foreign affairs).

Feel free to look it up in Wiki.

[BridgeTheGap]

2. Not that I disagree with you, but what do you think they're up to with this? Either twitter played

a large role or it didn't. I wouldn't think that would be terribly difficult to figure out. Are they trying to convince us to abandon the use of digital networking media as an organizing tool?