#iranelection considers the role of social media in the 2009 post-election crisis in Iran and, in turn, the effect of the Iranian protests on the development and adoption of various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
The protests following Iran's fraudulent 2009 Presidential election took the world by storm. As the Green Revolution gained protestors in the Iranian streets, #iranelection became the first long-trending international hashtag. Texts, images, videos, audio recordings, and links connected protestors on the ground and netizens online, all simultaneously transmitting and living a shared international experience.
#iranelection follows the protest movement, on the ground and online, to investigate how emerging social media platforms developed international solidarity. The 2009 protests in Iran were the first revolts to be catapulted onto the global stage by social media, just as the 1979 Iranian Revolution was agitated by cassette tapes. And as the world turned to social media platforms to understand the events on the ground, social media platforms also adapted and developed to accommodate this global activism. Provocative and eye-opening, #iranelection reveals the new online ecology of social protest and offers a prehistory, of sorts, of the uses of hashtags and trending topics, selfies and avatar activism, and citizen journalism and YouTube mashups.
"Negar Mattahedeh's
#iranelection offers a gripping chronicle of human solidarity in the age of social media. Analyzing Iran's 'green wave' in 2009 as at once an online and on-the-ground event, she connects it with earlier media revolutions, from Algeria's radio-fuelled revolution against French colonial rule to the cassettes and phone calls of the 1979 Iranian revolution. In Mottahedeh's inspiring account, the people pick up where the state and official media institutions fail."
