Abdul-Azim Mohammed was providing a play-by-play of the Iran Election early Sunday morning. Azim first reported that local police stations had been forced to burn ballot boxes filled with votes for Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidential challenger. A few minutes later, Azim declared that Internet access and phone lines had been cut off. Later, Azim's reports of people filling the streets of Tehran were verified with BBC footage showing legions of angry young Iranians chanting "Death to the Dictator" in the streets.
Azim was on a roll.
In less than two hours his Internet followers had grown from just a handful to more than 2,000 fans checking in for real-time updates of the growing tension caused by a widely suspected rigged presidential election in Iran. His report that his brother had seen riots breaking out in northeast Iran was as eerie as his report that the Iranian government was claiming that power failure and cell phone tower outages were caused by maintenance on the city's electrical grid. Then, reports of sirens in his neighborhood hindered the number of times Azim could give the world a glimpse into the electoral drama unfolding across Iran. Shortly after the sirens had passed his street, Azim told his audience that he was using an illegal satellite dish as his connection to the outside world and wrote one last post, "I have to shut down for a bit, the police are looking for satellites."
That was Saturday at 6:14 p.m. EST.
Abdul-Azim Mohammed is not a professional journalist. Azim is a 22-year-old college student living in Iran's capital city, and much like his western counterparts, he's a fan of the social messaging Web site Twitter, where for more than three hours early Sunday morning he sent out 31 tweets, or mini messages, about the state of Iran in the aftermath of its presidential election upset.
While it should be noted that Azim's identity cannot be verified, there are millions of young Iranians just like him taking to the streets across Iran protesting the supposed electoral landslide that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian Interior Department and the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are all claiming.
What the protestors are claiming is vastly different than a landslide for Ahmadinejad. Many believe fraud. Still, an anonymous female Iranian journalist in an interview with Radio Free Europe castigated outside observers who called the election a fraud. "There was no fraud; it was a coup," she told her interviewer.
Whether it is a coup or an unexpected election upset, none of the powers-that-be in Iran could have predicted the influence of the Millennial Generation. When their votes were discounted, the young Iranians showed up to polling places in record numbers. And when the government confiscated NBC and ABC cameras and yanked foreign visas, they never predicted the young Iranians would take to Web sites like Twitter and organize protests and mass exoduses to rooftops in the night to shout Allah Akbar, or God is Great. Interestingly enough, the last time such an ordeal happened was in 1979 when the Shah skipped town after another young generation of Iranians took to the streets.
As black smoke clouds the Tehran skyline and young Mousavi supporters organize more protests from Twitter and Facebook, one has to wonder if the mullahs and the Iranian old guard underestimated the power today's instant technological communications can play in democracies. Perhaps revolutions are, technically, generational.
Matthew Christ is a political science sophomore. His column appears weekly.
