Live-blogging from that awful day here. Money quote:
1.47 pm. A reader writes:
Has it occurred to you that all the unbelievable imagery of the protests is, pixel by pixel, etching itself in the memory of the world and of course now or later back through the satellite dishes and Internet connections into the brains of all Iranians, as an indelible revolutionary iconography that will, over time, supplant the revolutionary mythology of the Republic's founding, on which so much of the regime's legitimacy depends? The way I see it, that truly horrific footage of the conservatively dressed woman bleeding out will do more damage to Ahmadi and Khamenei than any military strike ever could. I think the old Revolutionary era is ending.
These are moments in history whose salience it is simply impossible to know as they happen. But today has already demonstrated both the total bankruptcy of the current Iranian regime and the immense bravery, humanity and genius of the Iranian people.
One of the readers most deeply involved in our June 2009 coverage writes today:
Wasn't Neda basically the first person to ever die that publicly on the Internet?
Certainly on YouTube, because though earlier that week videos had been left up on YouTube of violence where people had just been killed, or blurrily shot in the background – they were not like Neda that moment after she was shot. She dies so up close; you can look into her eyes as they go from life to nothing. And as soon as it was uploaded it was downloaded and reloaded more times then we will ever know. It was obviously a key moment in Internet history.
I know Nicholas Berg was beheaded online and lots of other terrible videos had appeared by then, but not like that on YouTube, not launched into the public consciousness like that. Nobody that obviously innocent had so vividly died online like she did. The entire Web-connected world watched it happen, and it felt like it was as live as any television broadcast, perhaps more so because it was so personal, so raw and reloadable – you could imagine the feelings of the people that recorded it with cell phone cameras just like the ones we had, and how they ran to upload them, to show the world what they had personally seen. The event was even recorded simultaneously by more than one amateur cameraman, who individually uploaded them, thus providing the kind of verification most of those videos from Iran never had.
You could be the President or Ayatollah, or somebody's grandparent in Nebraska, or a high school student in Indonesia and you watched the same one or two videos of Neda. It was a singular, universal online experience – completely unfiltered yet still absolutely and instantly understandable – and delivered to our Facebook and Twitter feeds without our permission, plastered across the blogs we already read. Neda's video made it OK to watch all those other videos that have come after it. It became normal to seek them out and watch them, just as it was normal to turn on the TV and flip to the news.
And I don't think we have been desensitized; in fact, I think we have been re-sensitized. We have learned how to witness the cruel realities of this world without feeling like perverts or voyeurs. We want to see because we know it's so important that we see. It was not just reality TV either, not a car chase on MSNBC – we didn't have to wait for the gatekeepers to tell us, we just had to click, to search. Go try to find a Nicholas Berg video and they are on fringe websites and messageboards which have the intention to shock. Neda is on YouTube with the Bieber tributes and sneezing kittens.
She'll be dying there forever. So will all the Egyptians, Yemenis, Libyans and others whose deaths have been uploaded since. Even a gravestone won't last that long.
The Dish 