How Social Networking Changed The Course Of Modern History

13th June 2009 marked the beginning of the turmoil in Iran. The announcement of the results of the June 2009 presidential elections brought forth a melting pot of emotions to the Iranian people. For the first time after the 1979 revolution when the Shah of Iran was overthrown, people came outside, marched to the streets to join the Green Revolution, telling the whole world what they felt.

Students, men from all walks of life, and surprisingly the women, who in the past were always cast aside, came out carrying protest banners in green, expressing what the call the blatant assault on the very freedom Allah has given them. Protesters marched to the streets carrying nothing but their faith and the desire to let the voice of the people, their voices, be heard.

Suddenly BBC reported a strange static disturbance from the radio and television feeds from Iran. A news black out covered the whole nation disconnecting them from the rest of the world in an attempt of the government to quell the building tension and to pacify the surging crowd using force, intimidation and oppression.

Media men from international news organizations were arrested, their cameras and video footage confiscated and destroyed. Nothing about what’s going on in Iran can get out. Suddenly students taking refuge in libraries and schools found a way to get help, by using online social networks. They uploaded amateur videos taken using their camera phones to YouTube, giving the rest of the world a glimpse of the on going violence and atrocities to the Iranian people.

They Tweet 140 character, short messages to Iranians all over the world, re-Tweet it over and over again until it created a storm of sympathy and a call for the intervention of the United Nations. The United States government asked the social media networks to cancel their scheduled maintenance just to keep the updates coming in from Iran.

Unbelievably, news feeds to the Western media came from blogs, forums and videos. Once thought only as an innocent teenage diversion, online social networking now completely changed the face of human history. People stay connected and messages passed easily through online social networking. The people who tried to suppress the news underestimated the power of this ingenious yet highly effective media and failed miserably.

Iranians came out, calling for truth, justice and liberty. They came in droves, filling the streets of Tehran all with the help of online social networking. The same thing also happened in the Philippines with the help of SMS messages in the second EDSA revolution. In just minutes, thousands of people answered the call and went out to show their sympathies.

This is the very finest example of what truly is the full extent of the capacity of online social networking. If used in a positive way, its can surely arrive in a positive outcome.