Iran and the Blogosphere

The outcome of the Iranian elections has been a shock to the blogosphere.

BBC presents an excellent roundup of blogosphere comments and reports:

Iranian bloggers have been reacting to the landslide victory of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with a mixture of shock, anger, despair, cynicism and irony.

Some acknowledge Mr Ahmadinejad's success in reaching out to the country's poor, while others doubt that the vote could have made any difference to the country's future.

Iran's weblogs, which represent one of the largest web communities in the world, are seen as mainly the preserve of the urban middle class and liberal-leaning people both inside and outside the country.

Their voices are not heard by the mainstream conservative media and the blogs have become a popular forum for dissent. It is the first time that the Iranian blogs have had the chance to be involved in a presidential election campaign.

As an outsider, Mr Ahmadinejad had been virtually ignored by bloggers until he came second in the first round of voting a week ago.

Read the whole thing here.

This is one call that the blogosphere missed, and missed big.

The reason is that blogs link us to a small and to some extent alientated segment of Iranian society. Young, relatively well educated, fairly affluent, and receptive to western influences, the bloggers are far from representative of the Iranian electorate.

In previous communications with other bloggers I noted the major disconnect between reports in the MSM and those appearing on the blogs. I suggested that maybe we should be suspicious of bloggy information that contradicted that of the MSM. This result simply reinforces that judgment. Blogs are an important, even a vital, source of information, but we should not assume that they are always the best information.

Enthusiasm for bloggery can sometimes blind us to the fact that the much-maligned MSM is also an important, and sometimes a vastly superior, source of information.