Twitter, Iran, and the Face of Our Foe
Women at Haft-e Tir Square, Tehran, June 17, 2009. Credit: Hamed Saber
Riveting as the events in Iran have been, there is another story unfolding around it, virtually unnoticed and unremarked upon. It, too, is enabled by Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, spurred by the masses of volunteers who blog, IM, and pass reports and emails to propagate the Iranian folk message. This remarkable thing is the “un-Othering” of the Alien Other.
Our erstwhile enemy state, part of the “Axis of Evil” (we were told), whom we have come to identify iconically with its obnoxious leader(s) and its burgeoning threat of nuclear warfare: this place is no longer the place we thought it was. Its people are not solely the turbaned mullahs who we know hate Americans and still (presumably) celebrate their hostage-taking of diplomats 30 years ago. No, these people are unveiling themselves to be something quite different – quite radically and transgressively different – than we have been told, or they have been portrayed by our media and our own (also often obnoxious) political leaders.
And what is that radically different thing these people have revealed themselves to be? Why, it is quite simple. In the immortal words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Seeing Ourselves in Others
It is a profound truth, and an unsettling one. We have seen our could-be-enemy on the global political stage as a faceless, hostile mass – but now, via Twitter and Facebook, that mass is parsed into personalities and voices. They are approachable, engaging voices, even poignant and wrenching in their anger or desperation or grief. Via YouTube, they are recorded as people entire, a snippet of their lives captured for all to see, tangible energies we can identify with. Through the interwebs, we have fallen into immediate contact with people speaking to us as individuals. The mass has become humanized. We have suddenly discovered that Iran abounds with people like us. We could be them.
It is a startling insight, one we weren’t prepared for, en mass like this. We find that we empathize with them.
What a concept.
For a certain segment of our political population, of course, we know that “empathy” is a dirty word. Not only does it have no place on the judicial bench, it has no place in international relations, for to empathize with an enemy is to forgo much-vaunted “tough talk.” But you cannot continue endlessly rattling sabers if you truly grok the humanity of your neighbor, be they ever so far removed culturally or geographically from your own locus on the globe. And that is the magic, and the transformative gift, that Twitter and the interwebs are giving giving us right now.
The naive among us will say, “Of course Iranians are people too. We never said otherwise.” Au contraire: we, collectively in our mindless media mass, have said otherwise, implicitly or explicitly, many times, as rhetoricians and spin machines have ginned up ill-will towards Iran. This has happened off and on since 1979 and the hostage crisis of those days, and most earnestly since 2003, as certain elements have tried to create a pretext for eventual invasion of that country. No, we haven’t gone there yet, but the arguments to do so have been well laid out since the invasion of Iraq, and at their root they all require one thing: that Iran be cast as a faceless, implacable Enemy.
And this is why the Twittering of Iran has transformed our Enemy. Three steps were needed, and they have followed apace:
♦ We needed to see the humanity of our foe. We did this by hearing the story of individual Iranians. In this way, a feeling of personal human connection is fostered, and grows, and leads to empathy.
♦ We needed to empathize with their plight. A general feeling of empathy follows from the above, but here, we find a specific focus for it. In this case, the struggle for democratic freedom is a cultural touchstone for us, sure to resonate with American sensibilities – and so it has.
♦ We needed, if at all possible, to take constructive action. Even if we can’t help directly in Iran, we can at the very least “pay attention”, bearing witness to the events there exactly as so many Iranians specifically ask that we do. For those with the right skill sets or interests, it is possible to do more: a sea of volunteers is blogging, collecting messages, forwarding and sharing it elsewhere, translating Facebook pages, monitoring tweet streams, indexing YouTube videos – anything to share information, to spread the word, to create support.
The end result is that we have an outlet for our new-found fellow-feeling: either actively assisting, or at the very least, avidly watching, wishing well, projecting supportive energy. And in the case of Congress, passing vocal resolutions in support of people marching on the street. I would say this is an act not of common sense or diplomatic reason, but one born of this strange alchemy of humanity viscerally perceived, empathy engaged, and action taken.
We could have (and have had) far worse impetuses guiding our actions on the international stage in the past. Traditionally, too, we have relied on big media and political figures to shape and direct our collective attitudes on such topics as a foreign country’s internal affairs. But aggregated media and systems of power elites speak to us in symbols and sound bytes. They do not readily connect us to real people about real issues (though they will loudly defend the pretense that this is so.) By default such systems represent and interpret “the Truth” to us: they are not designed to lead us, individually and collectively, to find the Truth ourselves. The astounding connection and engagement we are experiencing with Iranians could only come at the grassroots level – and so it finally has.
Suddenly we care about people who in another era (not even a decade ago) would have received merely a passing nod in the evening news in a thirty-second filler segment. In June 2009, the events in Iran burst past the gatekeepers of traditional media and came to us unfiltered and unedited by media mouthpieces and politicians who would ordinarily prefer to interpret unfolding events for us. Bloggers and citizen journalists and proxy server admins and Facebook staff were and are facilitating the connections, and just plain folks are doing the connecting, on both sides of the globe. Their government, of course, we still have issues with – but the people, ah, there we have discovered a wellspring of fellow-feeling, and it has transformed how we thing of Iran and Iranians.
One can’t help but wonder how the Bosnia conflict might have unfolded differently if Just Folks there could have Twittered and Facebooked their experience and cries for help, from the very get-go.
This is the real gift of the Twittering of Iran. It is not they who have changed, but our perception of them. Let us remember this as we move into the future, and proceed accordingly.
© 2009 by Deborah Teramis Christian under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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