Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Iran & Twitter

I've been following the election gone bad in Iran. For a long time I've been reading about Iran's demographic changes. According to Wikipedia, 22% of the population is under 14 years old, and even more startling, the median age of the population is 26 years old. Contrast that with the median age of the United States at 35 years, and that is from the 2000 census. Iran is a very young country, and young people want change.

Over the last few days Twitter has become the communication system of choice for rallying people for protest inside the country and for keeping the world in the protest news flow. I've been following #IranElection but there are many more search terms that are aggregating 1st hand accounts from inside the country. It's reasonable to think that without Twitter, the protests would not have had the staying power and the powers that be would have retained control. Now, all bet's are off.

This is fascinating. Technology is accelerating social change like never before. We live in a very special time.