The new go-to public information medium is now the internet. That has happened because the truth about what was happening in Iran has been coming primarily through the internet.
For me, noticing the change was very direct. It was not the first such change I have experienced. In the 1940s and 1950s we waited for LIFE magazine to arrive to see pictures of the important events of the week before. Although we had two good newspapers in El Paso, Texas where I was then growing up, the news was largely local and the images were few and pretty grainy. LIFE’s broad, rich pages were the main medium for us to see our larger world. In the 1960s and 1970s, television brought us Walter Cronkite and the anchors who followed him to show and describe to us what was happening in the world. The role of TV as the go-to place for me when something was happening did not change again until this week.
The turning point for me was when I came across a tweet on #Iranelection that mentioned a woman having been shot in Tehran. I clicked through to YouTube and landed on the video of Neda’s death. I saw it — and watched it in horror — hours before it began to be mentioned in cable or television news, much less printed in a newspaper.
There are those who think our children should have what they learn pre-packaged in textbooks. I certainly appreciate having been able to learn from textbooks back in my schooldays — when books and magazines like LIFE were the only sources we had. That is no longer true. Children live in a world where the internet now dominates the dissemination of knowledge.
