#Neda and the Power of the Viral Image

The 37-second amateur video that shows, in vivid and horrifying detail, a young woman named Neda dying of a gunshot wound on the streets of Tehran, has the capacity to change the political dynamic in Iran. It may already have done so.

I will not link to the video here. The decision to watch it should be made carefully, knowing it is sickening and likely to remain with you for the rest of your life. You can easily find it if you want.

I found it nearly overwhelming. I had to step away from the computer and gather myself. Afterward when describing it to my wife my voice was shaking and I couldn’t quite formulate my thoughts.

The morning after viewing it I can say this: I believe that 37 second clip can transform global opinion.

I liken it to the 1972 photograph of the young Vietnamese girl running naked through the streets, her skin seared by the chemical burn of napalm. Or the 1963 picture of police dogs attacking civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. Both, it is argued, played a key role in galvanizing public opinion on the political issues they represented.

For me, and I suspect many who view it, the Neda video says with absolute clarity: The violent crackdown on street protesters in Tehran must not stand. The perpetrators must be stopped or removed.

It removes any ambivalence or subtlety one might have about the situation there.

Last night I was actually wondering how a government responsible for Neda’s death–in an environment where cheap, instant, global, many-to-many communications has brought the phrase “the whole world is watching” closer to literal fact than it was in the 1960s–can possibly remain in power.

In the cool light of morning I realize that was dramatic hyperbole, heavily colored by emotion.

But still: That 37-second video has already become a singular, powerful fact driving  global opinion. Its impact will only accelerate and expand. It will have consequences.

Let me also predict that the mainstream media is going to miss the import of that video. Partly because they dare not show it, and thus it will not become part of their newsrooms’ collective consciousness–or conscience.

But also because they still tend to view amateur, viral “reporting” as marginal “bonus” material, incapable of driving public thought in the way their own professional reporting and opinionating can.

There is a #Neda hashtag on Twitter. It captures conversations about and inspired by the video.

Yet it is now being added as a hashtag to general Twitterizing on the election protests, as an  expression of commitment at least as powerful as the green avatars that hover like nauseated witnesses over the 140-character global thoughtstream.

Much is made about Twitter and its limited ability to drive change.

This isn’t about that.

It’s about the power of a single, brief incident captured on video–in an  environment where people share what moves them instantly with a global audience, without the assistance or approval of governments, media or any institution—to change others’ minds.

Change the world?

In the cool light of morning, I realize that’s foolish too.

But if you are feeling strong and brave and willing to have a horrifying image seared into your brain, view the video.

It will change you.

Election08: A Transparent Disaster?

One of the central concepts behind the social web is transparency: Instant networked communications allow virtually anybody see whatever they want.

This has not escaped the attention of the two Presidential campaigns. And tomorrow’s public exercise in democracy will become the first example of a massively transparent election.

Voter fraud, voter intimidation, poll conditions, wait times, machine failures, on-the-spot partisan interventions, even get-out-the-vote actions will all be recorded, uploaded and available for all to see.

I predict a paralyzing info hell as a rickety, distributed, incoherent, often incompetent, long-invisible voting system is exposed to the harsh light of Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FaceBook, iReports, youReports, themReports, cell photos, almost-real-time blog postings and whatever self-interested data-motes are broadcast by, um, legit journalists on the national networks on TV and online.

I predict legal intervention, litigation and a long postponement of official results.

Let me say I believe a transparent democratic process is the only kind worth having. Now that we have [primitive] tools to see behind the curtain [well, not behind that curtain] we must use them. And celebrate the moment they represent.

But the infrastructure to manage and adjudicate all this input does not exist. We are in for an unprecedented amount of citizen journalism in ten thousand “newsrooms” with no editors. This will result in massive incidents of unintended consequences. They will make hanging chads look like sweet, slightly comic anachronisms.

• How could any self-respecting partisan not collect and broadcast whatever scraps of voting data might help his or her cause?
• How can election officials possibly figure out which reports represent legit matters of concern and which are meaningless? How can they detect citizen reporting fraud?
• How on earth can anyone figure out what to do with it all?
• How can they do it in a timely fashion?
• How can the media responsibly resist broadcasting the most egregious examples of whatever plebiscitic sins they gather?
• How can election officials safely ignore it all in the name of expediency and subject themselves to charges that they are not upholding the integrity of a process they are sworn to defend?
• And how [therefore] can we avoid a real-time, life-or-death extended battle waged by the “losing” parties–not just for the Presidency, but for the Senate, the House, Governors and thousands of local elections across the country?

I’ll be watching results on election night–not just on John King’s Magic Map but across the social web. I won’t be able to keep up with it. I won’t have a clue how to feel about it other than baffled.

This will be an extraordinary moment in the history of democracy.

And it will be a freaking mess.

Final Words on the Election

Anu Garg’s long-tenured A.Word.A.Day website has exhumed four real words that carry an eerie resonance for this campaign season.

obambulate
bidentate
palinode
meeken

I should point out that these are not mere coinages by low-grade political yucksters. These are real English-language words that existed long before public discussions sought to distinguish between the change we need and change we can trust.

Click on the links above for more. But to cite just one example:

Palinode: noun: A poem in which the author retracts something said in an earlier poem.

As the Obambulator-in-Chief has been saying recently: You can’t make this stuff up.

[A tip o' the fez to the maddeningly consistent finder-of-cool-stuff Very Short List for bringing this to my attention.]

Exclusive Photo: Sarah Palin as a Goldwater Girl!

Let’s imagine the presumptuous VP nominee Sarah Palin was a teenage Goldwater Girl, an earnest young Republican back in the day when Sen. Barry Goldwater rocked the house at the 1964 RNC.

Here’s what she might have looked like as a candy striper at the 1964 Convention:

This wonderful bit of trickery comes to you thanks to www.yearbookyourself.com. It’s a tweaky tool that lets you upload a photo of yourself, mess around just a bit, and produce an image of what you might have looked like had your yearbook photo been snapped during various years from 1950 through 2000.

But: Here we go again, we eliteliberaleastcoastmediaestablishmentrunningdogs having sport with Palin rather than taking her seriously. Palin, 44, was born in 1964.

So to set the record straight, here is what she may indeed have looked like around the time she really graduated, 1981:

[A tip o' the fez to the always-ahead-of-the-pack Very Short List Web e-mail newsletter for the pointer to yearbookyourself.com.]

p.s. By popular demand, the author at his 1952 graduation.

Obama and McCain’s Blogs, Writ Large

A while ago I wrote about a very cool tool called Wordle. You stick a URL or feed into the tool and it produces a visualization–a word cloud–that demonstrates how often words are used in a particular document or blog feed.

Just for sport, I compared results from an official Obama blog and an official McCain blog.

Obama’s blog:

And here’s McCain’s:

Fun stuff: The candidates talk a lot about themselves. Obama’s focused on Ohio, McCain on Missouri. Obama’s often used words: “get” and “can.” McCain’s: “reform” and “America.” Both write more about Gustav than each other.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. The Obama blog I’ve Wordled is the campaign’s main one. McCain’s main blog doesn’t have a single RSS feed [the feeds are parsed by issue]. So I had to cut and paste text from a bunch of recent entries from McCain’s blog and let Wordle have at it.

As for McCain blogs that do have a single RSS feed, let’s look at what they’re talking about in the “McCain Report” blog, written by the trench-warfare-mustard-gas-tosser Michael Goldfarb.

That blog talks about Obama a lot.

Alas, no apples-to-apples there, either. Obama’s site doesn’t have a negative campaign blog.

Obama’s “Explicit” iPod Playlist

There’s been a lot of light-hearted coverage about the music playlists of the two presidential candidates. They’ve been reported in various places in various ways for months, so I no longer have faith that any is the “real” playlist endorsed by the candidate himself.

Still, I was surprised when I was playing around in the social community of Microsoft’s Zune and found Sen. Barack Obama’s playlist presented this way:

Barack, you naughty dude! “Explicit” lyrics on your playlist!

The work in question: Kayne West’s “Touch the Sky.” The song is properly described by Zune staff as full of “hope and inspiration,” telling the tale of West’s rising awareness that there’s more to life than wealth and fame.

But the song wins its bad boy badge with a few lyrics that might make Cindy McCain’s shiny blonde beehive spin like a tornado. Let’s take a listen.

[Note to anti-Obama bloggers, GOP chop-shop bottom-feeders and Swift Boat wanna-be's: Cut and paste below for maximum impact in your echo chamber.]

Back when Gucci was the sh*t to rock,
Back when Slick Rick got the sh*t to pop,
I’d do anything to say “I got it”.
Damn, them new loafers hurt my pocket.
Before anybody wanted K-West beats,
Me and my girl split the buffet at KFC.
Dog, I was having nervous breakdowns,
Like “Damn, these niggas that much better than me?”

Obama has met with rappers and the hip-hop community as part of his campaign to reach young people. For instance, read  Billboard’s brief on West’s performance at the DNC. Hip Hop News featured this June report about Obama and hi-hop music:

“I’ve met with Jay-Z; I’ve met with Kanye. And I’ve talked to other artists about how potentially to bridge that gap [between hip-hop and mainstream culture]. I think the potential for them to deliver a message of extraordinary power that gets people thinking (is massive),” Obama told Jeff Johnson during BET’s political special What’s In It For Us?.

Though he supports using Hip Hop as a catalyst for good, Obama is also aware of Hip Hop’s negative side too, acknowledging that messages of crime and misogyny overshadow the many positive aspects of rap music.

“There are times, even on the artists I’ve named, the artists that I love, that there is a message that’s sometimes degrading to women, uses the N-word a little too frequently. But also something that I’m really concerned about is (they’re) always talking about material things about how I can get something; more money, more cars.“

But the WayRight Machine will never be able to use Obama’s “endorsement” of “shameful” lyrics that “no child should hear” and that demonstrate “he is not ready for national leadership” [again, this is the cut-and-paste line for use in anti-Obama blogs].

If the right tries to run with this issue, they have some explaining to themselves of McCain’s musical favorites.

Suffice to say: “Dancing Machine” by Abba.

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