What’s happening in Iran?

BusinessWeek isn’t buying the story that Twitter is the essential organizing tool for the protests in Iran over suspicious election results:

“I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect,” says Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 WebTech, a company that analyzes the effects of social media. “The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size.”

Their assessment is that people are organizing the old-fashioned way, by word-of-mouth and SMS. Ancient technology, that SMS. But it is a great story, either way.

3 thoughts on “What’s happening in Iran?”

  1. You know, I was walking to lunch today, and I realized that I had never met a person who was able to make a fortune from following trends and advice in Business Week.

    It’s an corollary of “being on the cover of the Economist is a contrarian indicator.”

    Anyway, Business week didn’t hear of the stats I read here:

    From 2005 to 2008, mobile phone subscriptions in Iran grew by more than 375 percent. By 2008, six of every 10 Iranians were mobile subscribers. Most of these phones have Internet access. This creates an alternative media channel that the government cannot control.

    Tripled penetration rate in 3 years.

    Impressive.

    Now it’s true they don’t have smartphones by and by, but they did have SMS.

    The real story here is bloggers are several hours ahead of the major media.

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