Hitler & Twitter

Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer…. (25)

New technologies carry enormous power with them.

Those who grasp what the new technologies mean, as opposed to applying them to old ways of working, will own the future.

What we are seeing in Iran, wherever it leads, is the expropriation of the power of twitter and social networks married to a political cause.

It’s a new approach.

When radio was invented in the 1920s, it was also seized upon by a handful of politicians who could see its power, and more significantly how it worked, and married it to their own political ends.

Radio was a game changer.

In the United States, radio was seized upon by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

He had a voice for radio, but also a body for one.

The 1930s were not an era of affirmative action or political correctness.  A politician crippled by polio and strapped to a wheelchair stood no chance of ever being elected President of the United States- unless he could reach the public through a medium which obviated appearances.

This radio did.

Through radio, Roosevelt was able to be ‘in’ people’s living rooms and homes, and leverage off his most potent an powerful tool, his strong words and patrician voice, and completely negate his physical handicap.

Prior to radio, Roosevelt would have been unelectable. Post radio, with the rise of television, equally so.

Across the Atlantic, another leader was also rising on the radio waves.

Hitler was the least Aryan looking German in Germany.

Dark, brooding, not partularly tall, brown-eyed, brown haired, he was the very antithesis of the Aryan God he extolled, the blonde beast.

As a radio personality, however, Hitler had found the medium for his strongest quality – his powerful rhetoric and his mesmerizing delivery.  Hitler was the product of the cutting edge technology of his day – radio.

Without radio, it is doubtful that Hitler could have conquered the German psyche.

With radio, his words were put into every German home – separated from his physical appearance.

Both the Democrat and the Dictator were the political products of a new technology.

Now, the new technology is twitter, the web and flipcams.

While conventional politicians may try, mostly in vain, to ‘capture and use’ these new technologies, their attempts are for the most part pathetic, or non-existent. The technology exists beyond their world. They are not products of that technology. Al Gore, who we mentioned before, may have 1 million followers on Twitter, and may have a valuable message to deliver, but so far, he has only generated 40-odd tweets.  Pretty remarkable for a man with so much to say, and so large a following.

But Al is not the product of Twitter or of social networks.

Television networks also try in vain to ‘seize’ the power of social networks.

Much like Al, they are never going to ‘get it’.

They are also architected against the very idea of a social network. Their model, like Al’s, is one message to many people.

But Twitter and Facebook and Youtube and what you see in Iran is built in a completely inverse model.

It is not one message to many, but rather many messages to many, all the time.

The Revolution in Iran (whenever it comes, and it will) will not come because there is one dynamic leader (Moussavi or otherwise), but rather because a great number of Iranians who are fed up with the Rule of the Mullahs will simply join together in one great movement, laced together by tweets and iPhone videos and emails and text and Facebook and simply move en-masse together.

Social movements don’t arise and then are ‘sold’ to a ready public.

Technologies arise and then spawn social or political movements as a consequence of the technology.

Radio gave us Hitler and Roosevelt.

Twitter and the web will give us something else entirely.