New Media Reflections

The questions about the camera-phone videos from inside Iran have come up in some conversations recently. I spoke to a young Iranian woman from East LA. She happened to be in Iran at the time of the post-election turmoil for work. She’s an artist. She said she was worried that the Twitter and Facebook circuits were showing a sensationalized version of the events. She didn’t feel like the videos she saw online when back in the US reflected her experience of the events when she was there. The little things like the everyday forms of resistance that people had been engaging in for a long time were being overlooked because they would not captivate audiences in a short video clip. She was concerned that this version of events would not help people outside Iran come to a more nuanced understanding of the complex political climate inside Iran that led to the recent unrest.

I think op-ed columnist for NYT, Roger Cohen, made a similar point when he came to LA to speak about writing from Iran after the elections. He said there’s substitute for being there. We should remember that what we’re seeing is not the full picture even if it’s vivid and current, he basically said. We shouldn’t see new media as replacing the role of quality, trained journalism. I think that’s what a lot of us learned, as we started to become more discerning about the sources and the content after acclimatizing to the initial shock of the developments. I have the impression that new kinds of media literacy had to emerge during that time. One female Iranian student I spoke to disagreed, though.

She already knew which sites to trust and which not to, she said. She talked on the phone to her relatives back in Iran, like many others here, and followed the news both on mainstream and other (online) media agencies. Despite the floods of Twitter messages of this summer, and the steady stream that is still flowing, those I talk with relied heavily - and still do - on journalism that fulfills conventional standards and methods of information verification and presentation… at least those who were, indeed, relying on such sources before the Facebook and Twitter booms hit, that is. Those who weren't... well, there will always be people like that, I guess.