The Internet Genie is Out of the Bottle

And there's no cramming it back in.

Link to June 18 pcmag.com post "Learning from Iran's Twitter Revolution", by Sascha Segan.

Excerpt: How did we have revolutions before Twitter? It seems like democracy is an inevitable result of Internet access, something that officials in Iran and China are now both fumbling with at their peril. As we watch both nations' ham-handed efforts at cramming the Internet genie back into the bottle, it's obvious that connected people are empowered people. If we consider democracy to be a priority in the U.S., we have to make connectivity a priority, too.

The most spectacular example of Internet empowerment at the moment is in Iran. Protesters against the recent election results have been organizing and publicizing themselves on Twitter, even as the Iranian government keeps trying to whack this democratic mole: first shutting down text messaging, then blocking some IP addresses, then trying to hunt down individual Tweeters.