The power of tweet

“Does Twitter dumb us down or simply reveal our innate goofiness?” asks Nick Carr this week at his blog, Rough Type. In partial answer he points us to Gideon Rachman’s column in the Financial Times. Mr. Rachman says, “Twitter is a compendium of banalities. But in Iran, the medium’s terseness and immediacy came into its own.”

To my knowledge, nobody has surfaced the very real and likely possibility that twitter, an intelligence service’s wet dream, was used in Iran for something nefarious. A brute force analysis of the data presented in the Web Ecology Project’s report, “The Iranian Election of Twitter” might reveal the existence of agents provocateur agitating and inciting opposition to the Persian leadership. Who benefits? There’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil oil in Iran.