shipperx | Iran and the Internet

Interesting article:

IDEA IN THE NEWS / June 16, 2009 -- Over the weekend, Iran hurtled into political upheaval, and America's 24-hour cable news networks hardly noticed. Mark Ambinder explains the role Twitter played in Iran. {...}

What I want to suggest is that events like this portend an interesting, largely unremarked upon change in American political discourse. Consider the two groups of friends I saw in Washington DC this weekend. Group 1 is largely composed of young DC journalists, most of them bloggers. These folks were well aware of events in Iran by Saturday afternoon, getting their updates from blog coverage via Google Reader, or Twitter, or both. {...} Group 2 is more diverse--really just a collection of friends and acquaintances--among them federal employees {...} This latter group knew almost nothing about the Iranian election, even Sunday night. One said she heard that Ahmadinejad won, but didn't yet realize the results were contested.

Yeah, it was the weekend. Who keeps up with the news outside the office? If CNN didn't bother to jump on the story, why would various white collar professionals who work outside journalism bother? And the folks I know who write or follow blogs have been ahead of the curve on news for some time now.

But I've never seen an information asymmetry quite like this...

Full article here