Say Anything Blog

Former Deputy National Security Advisor Mark Pfeile thinks it should happen per this segment on Fox News:

Bream: Let’s talk about the Administration’s so far. Has it been on point? What do we need to see next from the White House?

Pfeifle: They are walking a tightrope. That’s what they are doing. They do not want the U.S. or West to become the talking point for the Iranian regime, saying they are trying to do a coup by their public statements. What the reaction has been in the prayers yesterday by their supreme leader, he used it anyway and said the West is trying to do this. So, sometimes it doesn’t work. And you try and stay quiet and you try to stay mum or you say too much. The real winners in this and the people that have gotten the message out, even though the U.S. with some exceptions has been fairly quiet is Twitter, has been Facebook, Flickr, YouTube. It’s been all of those. If there’s anybody that should possibly get a Nobel Peace Prize in the next time around, it should be the founders of Twitter who delayed the tuning up of their system in order for an amazing amount of tweets to be sent out in the last week or so.

Bream: It’s been such a valuable source of information because, in the past the government there probably had a lot more control over the information disseminated inside the country and outside as well. So now that we have this additional information coming in, does it put the Administration in a different place as far as, you know, crediting some of this information - maybe not being able to credit all of it because it’s coming from unreliable sources?

Pfeifle: It’s difficult because it’s moving so quickly. We saw just on the 17th, 221,000 tweets sent about Iran, 3,000 videos were uploaded onto YouTube. It’s been really remarkable, you know, how the emerging media the social networking has taken over and has given a voice to a lot of people who have been silent.

It’s an interesting concept.  I actually spoke a little bit about this on the air with Scott Hennen this morning, and I likened Twitter and Facebook and blogs to the pamphleteers of earlier times.  During the English Civil War, for instance, protestant rebels (“roundheads”) were infamous for using children to distribute printed libels (then a word that referred to a written document attacking someone else, today the word’s definition has evolved to mean written slander) created by rebellious printing press owners.  In America’s own history, Thomas Paine is perhaps the world’s most famous pamphleteer.  These people were the forefathers of blogging and citizen journalism/punditry.  And blogging, in turn, was the predecessor for Twitter.

I’ll admit that though I use Twitter a bit, it’s never really been something I’ve taken to as others have.  But clearly the presence of Twitter is having an impact on the world around it greater than people giving their friends streaming updates about trips to the mall.