Like a LOT of you out there, I've been absolutely astonished by the way Iranians have been using computers and smart phones to organize a moderate opposition to the government in Iran. I have to admit that while I have done more than my share of Tweeting on Twitter, it wasn't until the weekend when I started to hear that Twitter had become the main method of communicating within the Opposition, that I did 180 degrees on the importance of a method of communication which had seemed to me to be better suited to a classroom full of ADHD kids, and not the leaders of a revolution in the making.
Hence the film below. I wasn't at all sure that there were any iPhones in Iran when I started to write the film (there are I have since discovered,) but the use of the commercial parody seemed to me too good to pass up. Since the unveiling of Apple's first 3G iPhone a year ago, the importance of these new smart phones (and there ability to push the other smart phone makers to play catch up) has been truly breathtaking. They're allowing us to communicate and share date of all sorts with a speed and nearly limitlessness reach which is starting to make the notion of a closed society more a subject for science fiction than these phones once were.
Sure North Korean still keeps its people locked in an iron fist-- but at what cost? What other nation would be willing or able to maintain this communication genie within its bottle? Even the most fundamentalist of movements don't want to cut themselves off from this communication technology and run the risk of having rings run around them by the West. Thomas Friedman refers in his book, "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," to a whole new breed of "super-empowered angry men," who take the tools of our high tech societies and turn them against those that see as their enemies. How ironic that at long last some super-empowered good men are now using those same powers to fight back against those who would oppress them.
http://www.britethorn.com