Updates on Iran

Most technologies have traditionally be used by those in power to maintain their positions of power.  However, new ICTs, particularly those associated with the Internet, such as Blogging and Twitter, have the potential dramatically to change existing power relationships.  The current situation in Iran provides a classic example of ways in which these technologies can be used to share information and to organise political action.

For just some of the many accounts of ongoing activities in Iran, for example, see:

• http://twitter.com/Daarush
• http://twitter.com/MariaManzoor
• http://twitter.com/Mry_
• http://twitter.com/jmguardia
• http://twitter.com/makelle
• http://twitter.com/yrsad
• http://twitter.com/oli2be
• http://twitter.com/absinthedisco

Other interesting material on Iran and Twitter includes the following:

• Craig Labovitz on Iranian traffic engineering from the Arbor Networks security blog – contains a great graph showing the flow of Internet traffic in Iran around the election period (17th June 2009)
• Christian Stöcker, Carolin Neumann and Thorsten Dörting on ‘Ahmadinejad’s fear of the Internet‘ in Spiegel Online International (18th June 2009)
• Bobbie Johnson in the Guardian (21st June 2009) on ‘Twitter: the tweet that shook the world‘