OK Elana I'll yell at you...

GREAT POST!!!!!!

I agree with everything you said. A desire to be trendy motivates a lot of the protests that go on now days and that results in protests that are little more than, "hey everyone, I'm on the cool side."

OK cool. Who cares? What difference does it make? Most (meaning not all) of the protesting that goes on now days doesn't actually help anyone or change anything. This includes making your avatar green on Twitter...as if Ahmadinajad cares what color your avatar is. Do something useful, like encourage our gov. to impose sanctions on the current Iranian regime.

Great post Elana...

By the way Elana (and maybe you did this already), but you should have something on your Web page about the bidding that's going on for a critique from you on Cynthea Liu's page.

Quick question; if someone wins and you read the pages and they're awful, does that automatically mean you won't consider a query for the work? Or will the winner have a chance to make the changes and then submit afterwards?

Hey I tried to submit another comment previously and it didn't get picked up for some reason, thus the "by the way" of my previous post.

Anyway, I basically said that I totally agree with you about how protesting now days is usually motivated by a desire to be trendy and is therefore typically useless.

Hi Elana,
I tweeted you earlier, but I like full sentences, so I'm going to repeat (although not retweet) myself. I am not going green either for several reasons.

#1 The greened icons are hard to see (especially at night. I have old eyes). I can't tell one greenish blob from another, and I find I track the avatars to see who my tweeple are online.

#2 The application to "green up" was a 3rd party, some guy I've never met, and I didn't want to give him access to my twitter account. I'm old-fashioned that way.

#3 I, like you, question whether it does any good. I did change my location/time stamp to Tehran, Iran, because I like the idea of putting some sludge in the data stream. I'll undo that at some point soon--an arbitrary, "I'd like to be in Kentucky again" decision.

#4 When do we stop? When there's peace in the Middle East? When Iran is a free-voting democracy like (ahem) Iraq? Or do we just wait until the next cause comes around? I'm very involved with women's heart health issues--so should I go red instead?

My twitter avatar is a representation of my business presence on the web (regardless of how unprofessional many of my tweets are). I'll change it when and if it seems a wise business decision.

Thanks for freeing me from the bondage of 140 characters.

You are totally right about the charity critique...I will add something. I've been spacing out on promo lately...

If I read the pages and they are awful, I'm just going to give notes the way I would otherwise. People are always welcome to query me, even if I didn't like it, but of course a critique is never a guarantee that I'll sign anything. I just hope they'd take my notes into consideration before querying me!

I found your first reply in the spam filter...sorry about that. It grabs things like "great post!" because spammers use that a lot to get through.

...in my defense, my icon was green before all this started. It was cropped from the themed three-color art set that I also used in my background.

But yeah, I was talking to my fiance about this the other day. We were talking about the fact that Twitter's really turning into a strange tool of the revolution, with Iranians using it to get information past the government-enforced info blackout...but we both wondered what Americans thought they were doing. The spread of information was good, yes; there may have been people with family in Iran who could only find info through Twitter, so the further it spread, the better. But the green icons and such? Reminded me a little too much of a mob mentality of people who want to pat themselves on the back because they have a cause. A cause they can't be criticized for not doing anything for, because...well...they can't. American tweeters can't exactly storm Iran's borders and lead a revolution. So turn your icons green, and feel like you've helped a revolution.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who do it just because they really want to try to show some support, and they're helpless to do it any other way--or they want to draw international attention to the terrible things taking place in Iran, and for that the wave of green icons is a way to get people who don't know to say "Hey...what's up with this?" So...small things, I guess. But for the most part that support will never reach the Iranian people, so I think the fervor behind the green icons is a little misguided, no matter how well-intended.

Eventually it'll taper off, though. It always does. This actually reminds me of the LJ Strikethrough incident; the events in Iran have far greater impact on its people and on the global community, yet when LJ started deleting accounts for reasons people thought were associated with censorship and homophobia, the same sort of outcry poured forth, pointing fingers at injustice. People made special icons and shared them around. Everyone threatened to cancel paid accounts and move to another journal service. People started calling themselves LJ revolutionaries, yelling about freedom of speech, casting accusations left and right, demanding answers, talking about how LJ had betrayed its user base and had a long way to go to make up for it. You'd think they really were an oppressed nation, as they spent as much effort and indignation on LiveJournal as people are spending on the more justifiable and worthy cause of Iran.

And within two weeks of LJ's statement on the issue, most of those people had dropped their special icons, returned to paying for their accounts, stopped claiming to be repressed, and went back to telling all their BFFs about the hot guy they saw in the coffee shop, the fanfic they just read, and oh god, mom is so unfair.

It's unfortunate that issues of such vastly different import are treated with the same gravity and the same rabble-rousing mentality--and dropped with the same speed as interest moves on to the next trend. But...that's the internet.

And I didn't mean to ramble this long. This is why I rarely comment on blogs. I'll be over in the corner now, being inconspicuous and wondering where in that muddle of words I lost my point.

I only turned my icon green because I've been re-tweeting and involving myself in the conversation under #iranelection. There are a lot of people from Iran who are tweeting there, and the green avatar is my very small way of saying that I support the protesters.

It's also generated questions from some of my less informed friends, who don't follow international politics. They ask why the green, and I can tell them what's going on and discuss it with them.

Do I think a green twitter icon will change the world?

No.

But if it offers even slight encouragement, then it's worth it. And if it helps to stir debate/inform the uninformed, all the better.

I get what you're saying, though, and don't fault you for thinking that way. I'm not sure how much longer I'll keep the green icon. Probably until I stop using the #iranelection hashtag... which I haven't used in a little while now.

Thanks all for the well-developed thoughts! I'm not being critical of people's desire to support a cause...just the means they choose, I suppose.

I think the LiveJournal episode is closer to what I was saying about voting with your wallet. There was a realistic attainable goal.

Iran is not going to collapse because of green icons. Or #iranelection hashtags. I'm happy for the civil unrest and signs of change, but let's face it: this is going to take YEARS. Those young people who are protesting are not a majority. Ahmadinejad rigged an election he was going to win anyway.

So is Iran actually the issue that people are the most passionate about? Are the icons going to stay green until there is an actual revolution 5 years from now? Or is the truth that next week there will be a new cause to support because people finally catch on that Iran is in it for the long haul?

Turning my avatar green with the click of a button sounds nice, but is too easy to be helpful to oppressed peoples. I prefer donating money and my time to humanitarian groups and human rights organizations--putting my $ where my mouth is, rather than where my avatar pretends to be!

Oh, I'm glad you posted this, because I couldn't figure out how to answer in 140 characters.

I took a few days before I turned my icon green, because I DID want to know I was doing it for a reason and not simply because "everyone else's doing it."

My reasons for:
a) Since Twitter did seem to be a resource for protestors, I wanted to show that I believed in their cause in a visible way.
b) Raising awareness. No, turning my icon green doesn't directly help or support any of the protestors in Iran. But I hope that seeing it reminds people that this crisis is going on, and that, in turn, prompts them to go find and read the available news reports and support in the ways that they can.

I thought about un-greening myself earlier this week, when the most massive protests seemed to stop. But I didn't because I worry about the "on to the next trend" fade-out. Believing in the rights of a people to speak freely without fear of death or great injury, without suppression or oppression, *shouldn't* be a trend. It's something that should continue to be on our minds--certainly for more than a week.

I won't keep my icon green forever, because it'll lose its effectiveness soon, but for now . . . it's provoking questions and discussions, and that seems worth it to me.

I think there are so many causes in the world, there is no way to make a dent in all of them. I do believe I can make a dent in a few though. I do this through giving money and time. I think there are a lot of people out there who sign up on a lot of bandwagons, but don't take action. Awareness is a good step, but if that's where it stops what good did it do? Being aware does nothing if action of some sort doesn't follow it.

Yow, I thought I was the only one who felt that way. (Besides not trusting some anonymous software to turn my photo green, no doubt requiring my password to do so.)

Used to feel this way about walk-a-thons, too, 'cause WALKING isn't actually helping anyone (I thought they should be pick-up-trash-a-thons) but they raise so much money that I've mellowed.