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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

THE IRANIAN ELECTION: FOLLOWING A CONVERSATION
OCT 5, 2009 - 10:18AM PST
Posted by Ali Fisher
All posts by this author

The response by individuals using Twitter to the Iranian election provides important perspectives for the scholarship and practice of Public Diplomacy. Since last June’s election in Iran, updates of developments have appeared on Twitter alongside messages of support for protesters and celebratory tweets when websites from one side or the other were taken down. This spawned a number of press articles focusing on Iran’s Twitter Revolution. More traditional news sources have been either struggling to keep pace with events or have been criticized for the slow speed with which particularly cable news began to cover the protests. As Brian Stelter reported, untold thousands used the label “#CNNfail” on Twitter to vent their frustrations about CNN’s failure to coverage the event as some viewers had expected. However, the reality of Twitter during the Iranian elections is not untold thousands but potentially quantifiable thousands. Recent studies published in First Monday or conducted at Harvard Business School have provided a demonstration of the potential of mapping in developing a greater understanding of interactions through social media. The ability to map and analyze the interaction between Twitter accounts can provide a greater understanding of the response to a specific event, in this case the Iranian election, in a way not possible in narrative accounts. This same technique of mapping tweets also provides the potential to understand opportunities in conducting and evaluating PD 2.0. Map of the #tags individual users adopted to identify Tweets about the Iranian election.* FULL TEXT
 
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