Tweeting in Tehran

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

I admit it. I tweet.

Which is to say, I am a member of the online social network Twitter, and I post “tweets” of 140 characters or less which are then read by all 39 of my “followers.” I’m sure all 39 of those people really care that my air conditioning unit is making alarming noises, or that I sunburned my scalp reading in the park. I joke that a Twitter habit validates one’s existence, but the underlying need is to constantly proclaim, “Hello, I’m here too!”

So, how did all this pointless drivel become so important that the US Department of State requested that Twitter delay critical network maintenance so that the flow of information in Tehran would remain uninterrupted?

The tweets say:

• Twitter revolution in a nutshell: Anne Frank's diary. Live. Multiplied by millions
• Set your location to Tehran/time zone to GMT +3.30. Iranian security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches
• The basijis attacked a couple in Shiraz/ Maali abad Blv.in their house and stabbed them badly.
• Good Morning Tehran. Mousavi says people should continue demo against "fraud and lies"
• Confirmed: Reports from Evin prison describe conditions as horrendous. People being tortured. Phone lines to prison are cut off.
• Please Do Not Respond/Follow New Twitters. Iran Secret Police Is Cracking Down.
• Road blocks controlling movement of people from North to South Tehran to stop ppl joining Sea of Green #Iranelection
• Strike, do not go to work, office, shop, bazaar, drive or school
• This is not your average day in the Twittersphere.

Advice, scoops, rumors, links, information and misinformation: it all flows through hashtag tracking. #IranElection, #Neda and #Tehran have all been “trending,” or amongst the most used phrases on Twitter. Twitter members of all nationalities are turning their icon photos green, to show solidarity with the Iranian protesters.

There is something thrilling to be sorting through the raw information, the feed of history in real time. But, there is as much real information as there is mis-information.

Even the news networks are in on it. In some cases, the story is not the protests in Iran but the protesters' method of communication with the world. Even though anchors on CNN constantly say that all of this information is unverifiable and unconfirmed, they sell the information like it’s true eyewitness accounts. Which some of it may truly be. But there is doubt. On June 13, one day after the contested elections, there were reports of fake Twitter accountstrapping genuine protesters and sending out false information to the West.

When the Iranian Culture Ministry cut off journalist’s access to the streets of Tehran on June 16, they forced the flow of information underground. So, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, flickr and other social networking, video and photo sharing websites have become the eyes of the revolution. They bear witness when others cannot.

Twitter has an advantage for protesters because it is more of an online tool than a fully structured and comprehensive social networking site. Users can connect to Twitter and post information 140 characters at a time via text message, the Web and desktop widgets. This makes it harder for the Iranian government to censor. To shut down the tweets, the government would have to cut off a lot more than block the site behind its internet firewall.

The raw Twitter feeds about Iran are more like an abstract painting than a photograph. They take the emotional temperature and give the reader a vague idea of what’s happening now in Tehran. But the flow of tweets out of Iran, constantly repeated by others, has become an emblem of the power of information.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, June 24, 2009.

A little debate is a healthy thing

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

I believe that it is my dad’s greatest pleasure to say something so outrageous that all I can do in response is drop my jaw, sputter incoherently and gesture confusedly while he crows about his victory over me.

This has been happening since I was very young and began developing my own ideas about the world. When I was eight, it took little more than a few well-placed and decidedly un-PC remarks to get me to this state of disbelief. I might be able to laugh off his simpler incitements, but I am still game (or bait, whatever) for more complex political debate.

And here’s the kicker: no matter how right I know I am, no matter how well I think I’ve thought out my points, no matter how very wrong my father is, my dad backs me into a rhetorical corner and all is lost. There is no second place, only surrender, in our battlefield of world and political outlooks. My dad always wins.

Nothing frustrates me and my deeply competitive spirit more than the inevitable beat-down my arguments receive at the hands of my father. I hate losing.

I know that it’s good for me, for my opinions to be challenged so thoroughly and often. My dad and I make up our own marketplace of ideas, an open exchange where opinions compete like colas on the open economic market.

In 1919, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.”  Or, perhaps more simply put, testing our ideas in competition with one another is the best way to find truth.

Maybe comparing ideas to economics isn’t the most perfect metaphor. And when seeking answers to questions that don’t necessarily have one correct answer, finding the truth isn’t the point. But the open expression and competition of ideas is so essential to the development of a free society that just the debate is worthy of reverence.

Engaging in open and fierce debate sharpens wits and minds and broadens horizons.  This sentiment might sound like it’s straight out of a high school civics class, but it is one that we constantly ignore. It is so easy to tune out ideas that don’t fit into your worldview, simply because there are so many options, that the process of actually listening to the other side and having a useful discussion is lost.

To face a skillful adversary, to face ideas that are not your own, is a part of participating in a vibrant democracy. Even if the ideas you face come from a man who could give Rush Limbaugh a run for his money.

“Rush Limbaugh is a punk,” my dad says. “I’d kick his ass, intellectually and morally.”

For me, my dad is the loyal opposition, the person who keeps my ear to the ground.

I admit that exchanges between my dad and I have been known to resemble an episode of "Crossfire" more than constructive debate. But I listen, and I fume, and I think about every word he says. I plot counterarguments, I read up on the enemy’s side so I can poke holes.

I want to win someday.

But I know that even if I got a Ph.D. in Socratic rhetoric, I’d still be the incoherently sputtering and flabbergasted loser.

“When you grow up, you’ll see how the world really works, and find out that Pops was right,” my dad says.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism. Her father, John O’Neill, is a retired wastewater treatment technician who resides in Georgetown, Ky. 

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, June 17, 2009.

Show me the photos!

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

While the news cycle has moved on to President Barack Obama’s trip to Cairo and family vacation in Paris, the executive branch of our government stopped the release of photographs showing prisoner abuse by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan last month and the public has yet to see hide or hair of those photos.

In his speech at the National Archives in Washington on May 21, Obama said, “It was my judgment — informed by my national security team — that releasing these photos would inflame anti-American opinion and allow our enemies to paint U.S. troops with a broad, damning, and inaccurate brush, thereby endangering them in theaters of war.”  That’s a fine sentiment: We do have a national interest in protecting our military men and women serving in active combat duty. But I’m not so sure they’d thank us for this favor.

Considering the poor reputation that the United States has gained in our dalliances abroad in the past eight years, how could these particular photos make it any worse for our troops? It is a larger shame that our nation’s military asked the troops to perpetrate in such a way as to betray the moral high ground on which this nation was founded. As a nation we cannot truly understand and overcome the specter of prisoner abuses unless we face the images that those abuses created.

Seeing is believing, as the saying goes, and there is nothing like confronting photographs of atrocities to crystallize truth. The role of the photograph is to provide evidence of a moment in time and to challenge the status quo in ways worded documents fall short.

America faced a similar crisis in 2004, when photographs of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to light. Susan Sontag, the author and critic wrote in “Regarding the Pain of Others:” “The meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show.” Americans were quicker to condemn such actions in light of photographic evidence.

In the same May 21 speech, the president spoke of his decision to uphold the rule of law and release memos detailing the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (read: torture) used at Guantanamo Bay. Obama said: “There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world.” This highlights a dichotomy in the perception of media: Why are the memos acceptable for public discussion and debate, while photographs of prisoner abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan are not? How are the memos less dangerous to our troops than the photographs?

In the end, the danger of inflaming anti-American opinion abroad and increasing the danger of American military personnel already in perilous situations is more theoretical than imminent. It is far more dangerous to let the photographs of whatever happened at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan lie in darkness than to let them come to light.

“We uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right, but because it strengthens our country and it keeps us safe,” President Obama said. Attempting to hold back these photographs – these potentially damning photographs – from public scrutiny is a betrayal of America’s professed cherished values. To shield the public from knowledge that would increase understanding of a war that has been muddled from the beginning is a shame. Show us the photos, Mr. President, and we will be a better country for it.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Monday, June 10, 2009.

You can't say that on television

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

On the American Idol finale Wednesday night, about 10 seconds of the Black Eyed Peas performance was blocked out by the Idol logo. There was little doubt as to why: potential for indecent language or skin exposure sends networks running.

From Bono declaring winning a Grammy “F------ brilliant,” to Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” profanity and obscenity on the air have come a long way since George Carlin first joked about the Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television in 1973.  All content that airs on broadcast (not cable or satellite) television and radio between six in the morning and ten at night is subject to after-the-fact fines levied by the Federal Communications Commission.

Obsession over the cleanliness of the mouths and sartorial decisions of broadcast television characters is the domain of the FCC — a bureaucracy that has the power to make and enforce its own rules and regulations. In essence, the FCCis a law onto itself — a law that collides with the right to free speech. And the FCC is powerful; it can fine radio and television stations up to $325,000 per incidence of indecency.

The 2004 Super Bowl was the watershed for recent controversy. Yes, nine-sixteenths of a second of flashed female breast on live national television was worth a fine totaling $550,000 against CBS. The chilling effect on broadcasters was almost immediate. In one instance, 66 ABC affiliate stations declined to air “Saving Private Ryan” on Memorial Day in 2004 for fear of fines (the FCC later declared that the deluge of foul language in that film was not indecent). And in yet another incident, WABI radio in New York decided against airing a 50th anniversary reading of poet Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,”  which opens with: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked….” Ironically, “Howl” was subject to a 1957 obscenity trial, where it was ruled to be not obscene.

The problem is with the FCC’s definition of indecency, in which indecency is defined as: “language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities.” Lawyers, lawmakers and bureaucrats could parse this definition, world without end, and come up with indeterminable numbers of interpretations. What is patently offensive? Whose community standard? What is material?

This definition does not exactly give broadcasters a how-to guide for avoiding indecency fines; it’s not as simple as “seven words” that you can’t say or a certain amount of sexual innuendo that will be tolerated. The standard is that there is no standard, except what is complained about that day.

There are other issues too. The FCC can apply fines retroactively. In 2008, the FCC fined ABC stations $1.1 million for a partial nude buttocks shot in an “NYPD Blue” episode that aired in 2003.

This kind of confusion in the area of free speech is beyond problematic. It is not that obscenity and indecency should not be regulated on the air — there is merit to the argument that protecting children and unwilling adults is necessary and even just. Considering that even the most conscientious parents sometimes have language slips around their kids , is a celebrity at an awards ceremony really going to pollute a child’s mind?  

Tending toward major fines for minor slip-ups during live broadcasts is ludicrous. The damage to young minds is so potentially small, and the chilling effect on free speech so large, that any benefit we as a society are getting from this practice of censorship is not worth the damage to our first amendment rights.

Even more damaging is that the FCC is an administrative, and not legislative, body — one that can make its own regulation without any public input or legislative oversight and one that is without the checks and balances of the three branches of government. The FCC needs to re-write their definition of indecency to make it less vague and provide guidance for broadcasters. There should be no confusion when it comes to the first amendment.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Monday, June 1, 2009.