Local author…
Although Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1452, the true political impact of that technology was not really realized until 1517.
It was then that Martin Luther (pictured above) a disgruntled Monk from Wittenberg, Germany, began to publish his complaints about the Papacy.
There is the well-known story of Luther posting the 95 Theses on the doors of the Cathedral in Wittenberg, but what made Luther’s impact so politically powerful was that he married his complaints to the cutting-edge technology of the day- the printing press.
Luther published. And he published a lot, in lots of languages.
The result was that his ideas were disseminated across Northern Europe and found resonance in the population.
The result – the overthrow of the power of the Catholic Church in Rome.
Some 500 years later, the same marriage of cutting-edge communications technology to radical ideas that those in power would rather suppress manifests itself in Iran.
The protests in Iran (it would be premature to call it a Revolution) are being fed by websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Remarkably, yesterday the White House asked Twitter not to close down their service for maintenance so as to keep a lifeline open to the Iranian dissidents.
The government of Iran has taken all measures to clamp down on both news and web traffic, and yet Internet users still manage to find a way to get information out- and one must assume, between themselves.
The Ayatollahs in Tehran are no doubt shaken by this. And well they should be. Their own revolution in 1979 against the Shah was also largely driven by their own seizure of what was then cutting-edge technology: audio cassettes.
Ayatollah Khomeini, long an exile in Paris and banned and suppressed by the Pahlavi regime then in power, was able to communicate his ideas to his minions by use of recorded lectures and sermons circulated on audio cassettes. (Remember walkmen?).
It was the podcasting of its day, and it was enormously successful. So successful that when Khomenin, who had been in exile in France for 30 years, landed in Tehran, 3 million people turned out to greet him at the airport.
The Shah knew it was all over.
Now the green-clad dissidents have seized on the cutting edge technology in twitter and Facebook and are using that technology to communicate their own ideas.
The Ayatollahs are not doubt dismayed that they are seemingly losing control of their government and country through such a strange mechanism – particuarlarly when they control the TV, newspapers and the military. Of course, it isn’t over yet, but it is an indicator of the power of small yet game-changing technologies.
The Popes in Rome must have been equally astonished that a few slabs of metal type and a blotting of ink on paper could destroy their thousand year hold on all of Europe.
But it did.
