Outside It Appears Silent

Society is able to communicate more effectively than ever before from the convergence of technologies. Various examples in history have portrayed the advancements in communication from David Sarnoff receiving the news of the RMS Titanic in 1912 through telegraph, to present day, when the citizens of Iran complained about the election scandals through Twitter and Facebook in 2009. These two new, social engines were available for people to use in 2006 and currently have had dramatic integration in states, countries and the world as a whole.
On January 18, 2010, just six days after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Chile tweets from twitter arrived consistently every second. On this same day a vast amount of Facebook members joined a group entitled “Earthquake Haiti,” which contained over 265,000 members who received messages on the minute about the conditions in Haiti (AJR, March 2010, Vital but Complementary). Both Twitter and Facebook relayed information from the survivors containing all the elements for journalists to write here in the United States. This information arrived at a constant flow; surprisingly the media audience may believe the Haiti earthquake is forgotten from the current lack of coverage in the news and press.
The citizens of Iran were in a similar place of mind as the Haitians when they were silenced by their government after hundreds of thousand Iranians protested, pleading for democracy. During the election day of June 12, 2009, cellular devices had trouble sending and receiving messages in Tehran. Later on the BBC urged its viewers that their broadcast was affected by interference of “heavy electronic Jamming” (Horrocks, June 14, 2010, BBC). The people of Iran adapted to this lack of communication by going online to voice their opinions through Twitter and Facebook. Later, on May 23, the Iranian government shutdown Facebook within the country for three days proving that communication from these social engines can still create an effect among a society.
The similarity between Chile and Iran is the fact that the issues these countries face have been silenced from different structures but they have adapted by using other technologies. The devastation in Chile is being silenced by the press from the other stories that include more interest for the viewing audience. This maybe true, but from the use of integrated technologies it is proven that people can’t be held in silence against their will.
REFERENCES
Horrocks P. (2009). Stop the blocking now. BBC News.
Retrieved from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2009/06/stop_the_blocking_now.html
Palser B. (2010). Vital but Complementary. American Journalism Review.
Retrieved from: http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4864