My sound bite is better than your sound bite: Friday quiz

If, like me, you are getting sick of the criticism of the criticism of the criticism of the role that new media and Twitter are playing in Iran, I’ve got some geeky distraction for you!

At the point of being even more hated by everyone who works both in tech and journalism, I decided to create a little quiz, where my beloved readers would need to guess who are the authors of the following sound bites. Since you can find answers to all of them online, the winner would need to send in the most outrageous quote they have found on their own. The winner will receive a ONE-YEAR SUBSCRIPTION TO FOREIGN POLICY MAGAZINE!

Comments are closed; send in your answers to my email (evgeny dot morozov at gmail dot com). You have 48 hours – that is until 7pm GMT, June 21/2009! Good luck. Hint: not all of them are pundits, some are politicians and practioners.

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GUESS THE PUNDIT: THE BATTLE OF SOUND BITES, ROUND I

Soundbite #1: "The very fact that Twitter itself is half-baked, coupled with its designers’ willingness to let anyone build on top of it to finish baking it … is what makes it so powerful".

Sound bite #2: "The Iranian government, by filtering the Internet for so long, has actually trained a cadre of people who really know who to get around censorship".

Sound bite #3: "In India people were actually watching news on television, not Twitter. In Iran … social media are the only things you have".

Sound bite # 4: "As a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think".

Sound bite #5: "Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House"

Sound bite #6: "Thinking that technology can only help pro-democracy protestors is naïve. Are Ahmedinejad’s supporters using technology to also mobilize? I’m sure of that."

Sound bite #7: "What the government has found over the last few days is that blocking Internet sites is not enough"

Sound bite #8: "You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken"

Sound bite #9: "New technologies tend to be less reliable and more easily disrupted than traditional forms of organizing – while they are surely becoming more important over time, I think it is fair to discount some of the more breathlessly enthusiastic reporting until the actual evidence comes in."

Sound bite #10: "Americans ignored the subversion of their democracy. When the Iranians stood up to secure theirs, I could not let them down. The revolution may not be televised, but it will be tweeted.

Sound bite #11: "This generation will not bypass existing institutions and methods: look at the record turnout in Iran and the massive mobilization of the young and minority vote in the US. But they will use technology to displace old modes and orders".

Sound bite #12: "As the technology has progressed so has the strength of people’s power. In Burma, we saw the internationalisation of a domestic protest through email and social networks."

Don’t forget to send in the sound bite that you found interesting/outrageous in order to be considered  for the prize!