What I found to be equally interesting was the effect Twitter (and the themes created by watching it) had on the Western portrayal of the protests. For a newsma

What I found to be equally interesting was the effect Twitter (and the themes created by watching it) had on the Western portrayal of the protests. For a newsman, Tweeting Iranians were their perfect subject - people who were (by and large) young, computer-literate, English-speaking, active, social, and in large cities. That kind of person is the easiest one to base a story around, since everything is provided - no need for translation or going to visit some backwater Iranian town (which they weren't allowed to do, anyways) to get the story. So as the protests went on, you could see that the media was using these Iranians as the center of their stories (and in some cases, meta-stories about Twitter itself) since it was so damn easy. They could simply reports on Tweets that were communally agreed to be "right", get a few file photos and stills off Twitpic, and package it all up as an update. The problem, of course, is that Twitter is only embraced by a small subset of Iranians (much like it's only embraced by a smaller subset of Ameriancans). So as Twitter grew in prominence as a source, CNN (and many commentators on the Internet) started to see Iran through Tweet-colored glasses, to use a terrible phrase. They weren't getting much information about what older people were doing. They weren't getting much information about poorer people were doing. They weren't getting much information about what people outside of the main cities were doing. And as a result, they showed us a whole lot more "revolution" than there may have actually been.