Did you notice it? You may not have, but today marked a turning point in our history as humans due to this link. We’ve been headed to this for a while, but two established ideas that we’ve held for a very long time were fundamentally changed today. In case you were living under a rock, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in a tightly contested race with Mir Hosein Moosavi. Moosavi ‘lost’ and widespread accusations of voter fraud took place. We could argue about the role of the president in a theocratic country like Iran, but that’s another story. At the end of the day there is good reason to believe that the election was rigged and alot of people are, essentially, revolting as a result.

I feel sufficently not worthy to discuss the runup to the revolution that is happening right now and to do so would negate the cause many people are giving their life for as we speak. I’ve heard said in the news, though, that this is a turning point for the country of Iran. My belief, though, is that is also a turning point for civilization as a whole because two long established ideas have been tossed out on their ear.

As a government seeks to supress information, traditionally the gameplan works itself out like this: expell journalists, take over the TV and kill dissidents. Due to twitter, though, information and video has poured out of iran faster than a water through a sieve. Twitter has become not only a vehicle for getting information out to the rest of the world but also a command and control mechanism for the revolutionaries within the country. What’s even more interesting is that the government shut down twitter only to find the rest of the world providing the means around the firewall; the tighter the grip, the more information came out and the more the dissidents were able to coordinate their movements even to the point of counteracting the state run TV station’s attempt at disinformation. Informal rules were setup in an effective way of defeating the state’s attempt at getting onto twitter to spread disinformation. At one point this week there was even a website setup identifying known disinformation sources on twitter and urging people to block them.

What this means is that idea of a tyranical government running media supression has failed and will likely be resigned to history. Any government stupid enough to try this in the future will find themselves with an even more difficult task ahead of them. I doubt the employees of twitter had thought of their site as having the ability to change human history, but what this means now is that the idea of a dictatorial regieme will fail if you’ve got people in your populace who dissent in their opinion.

The other mechanism that has changed as a result of this revolution is traditional media. Television, Newspapers, and the like found themselves getting their direct information from twitter and online sources as a result of this; tv and news were operating on a day by day basis and twitter was second by second. Journalism, I believe, has changed. It’s a nice idea, but the majority of information flowing out of the country now is coming direct from individual sources and there are enough of them that any attempt at manipulating that channel was quickly routed around. For example, a state run twitter account posted that today an explosion took place in downtown tehran and within minutes a hundred or so reports called that false; people that were physically within that space called it for what it was.

Today, though, was even more of a fundamental shift. The supreme leader of Iran announced yesterday that the rebelion had offically ended, that protests at this point were illegal and those protesting would be shot on site. Well…Moosavi called for a rally today that well over a hundred thousand people showed up for and the result was a great deal of bloodshed. Watching the stream today, you’ll find video, pictures, and accounts of extreme brutality to innocent people that is horrible and unjust and a desire to see justice done will well up inside you as you read the account of today. What you’ll also see is a country’s political structure demolished and rebuilt on the backs of the servers of twitter.com.