What does Iran and Twitter mean?
I guess the easiest interpretation of this (media) event is to examine Twitter as a tool of empowerment, a democratising force that utilises post-structural communication to organise protest like some sort of rhizomic organic democracy plant, growing under the ground of mainstream politics/ traditional political and media structures. Is this right?
But this seems to have been problematised a bit. Suggestions that Twitter's rescheduling of their downtime for maintenance was prompted/ requested/ directed by American/ western governmental intervention raise questions about the political/ ideological independence of Web2.0 sites. Are these sites (liable to be) part of the state apparatus after all?
(In my possible naivety) I'm not convinced by the ccuracy of the argument that the outage was rescheduled in response to govt intervention and feel it's a bit too Illuminatus, if that's not too inaccurate an anaology. However, I would argue that perhaps the western dominated Web2.0 phenomenon is inherently ideologically slanted and works as some sort of digital-age cultural imperialism which uses enlightenment concepts such as democracy and empowerment to legitimise the colonisation of online intellectual activity. Web2.0 thus becomes some sort of cultural hegemony, owned as it is (increasingly) by the powerful. Google's beanbags seem more ominous now.
OR maybe this can be interpreted differently. Maybe Twitter/ Web2.0 utilises and perpetuates the illusion of empowerment/ democratisation as a mode of offering a false-democracy. Rather than the politics of democracy, it is actually a politics of distraction.
Discuss, using pseudo-academic language that slips just out of reach of the meanings you originally intended but can not quite articulate.
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I think that Twitter was born out of commercial culture. It is designed to make money. I might be wrong and cynical!
ReplyDeleteLike many new media its intended use can be manipulated, even undermined. I think that any form of 'official' attempts to control output are probably unlikely. It is more about a slow encouragement of culture towards less and less powerful modes of communication.