dying social

Living Social ad on Pandora offering an NYC "Bucket List" of things to do before you die, with the site of the Twin Towers perfectly framed in the background. #fail

truth in advertising

Spread in this week's New York Mag. On the left, article on NY's no-fault divorce law, and how NY couples often need to concoct tales of adultery just to split up, and how for hundreds of years it's been women more than men who file for divorce, even to their economic disadvantage. On the right, an ad for HBO's Hung, about a gigolo.

fifa in realtime web

from twitter

against twiumphalism

"... it is time to get Twitter's role in the events in Iran right," writes Golaz Esfandiari in Foreign Policy this week.

Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran. As Mehdi Yahyanejad, the manager of "Balatarin," one of the Internet's most popular Farsi-language websites, told the Washington Post last June, Twitter's impact inside Iran is nil. "Here [in the United States], there is lots of buzz," he said. "But once you look, you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves."

Cartoon by MARSDEN from a post by Eric Verlo.

This point bears repeating and retweeting. Why do we keep rushing to declare that the world has changed the moment there's evidence that a new model can make a difference? Twitter did not change the political landscape of Iran. Nor is it clear that Twitter did very much for the sense of personal power among the average Iranian voter. Yes, some information was exchanged by organizers and protesters in a medium that it was harder for the government to squelch than a radio station. Twitter helped bring the crisis in Teheran right to people's screens around the world in near-real time with more unmediated information than was possible during Tiananmen or Vietnam. And yes that's really significant.

But are we, as makers of media, so starved for a sense of our own relevance that we have to inflate moments of innovation into revolutions? And then conveniently wipe away our own fingerprints and forget that we were responding as much to our own hyperbole as to what might have been hype-worthy at the moment? Did we want so badly for Teheran to be a revolution that we were willing to settle for turning Twitter into a revolution?

Mobile guru yogini Katrin Verclas helped me relocate this study from the Web Ecology project, which found not only that the top 10% of the Iran tweeters they studied during June 2009 accounted for about 2/3 of all related tweets, but that fully 1 in 4 of all tweets about the events in Teheran were retweets, i.e., not new information.

And we should dig past the first hard lesson, that revolutions in information exchange are not revolutions in social or political power, to other equally important (and more actionable) lessons: When we gaze into the murky waters of change, the thing we'll always see first is ourselves. Look deeper. And similarly, not everybody has an iPhone, people. Media myopia leads us not just to see ourselves first in each story, but to imagine that the people we write about are like us: Wired, willing and with a belief that laptops and cellphones could be political tools.

Never mind that it's also turned out that twitter can help oppressors locate protestors, and launch counter-maneuvers. Evangerealist and perennial curmudgeon Evgeny Morozov has helped set the record straight in recent years about the harder realities of twitter and other digital media as tools to combat oppression.

what's an evangerealist?

Internet evangerealists don't talk at you about what's possible, they talk with you about what's needed. They don't work with products, they work with people. They don't have wireless headsets, they have conversations.

Evangerealists believe that there's nothing wrong with technology that people can't fix, not the other way around. They want you to learn to drive better, not put the engine in the driver's seat and ask it to get you home. They don't think the long tail should wag the old dog.

An evangerealist believes that your mission and the way you can operate best are more important than their PowerPoint presentation and their game-changing new models.

Technologies change quickly, people change at a moderate pace and institutions are slowest of all—like, glacially slow. Evangerealists r doing it right when they remind people about both new tools and age-old challenges.

There are lots of reasons to forget realism and breathlessly evangelize about the possibilities of the Internet revolution. Innovation is sexy. Organizations detest looking inward. People like to be told they're doing something wrong. Everyone loves a savior. Most of all, we are at the dawn of a new age and it is important that the whole world wakes up and smells the java.

But here are two reasons for Internet change-makers to enlist partners instead of converting customers: First, you'll double your chance of success, which sells better than any sales pitch. Second, you'll be providing help that will outlast your involvement. Don't you want to do that?