Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch The Iranian
Protests and the Mainstream Media  You Provide the Tweets, We’ll
Provide the Info War   We can all remember a moment when we
gazed up at the sky and used our imagination to make familiar
shapes out of the clouds.  In folk wisdom, seers practice
aeromancy, a form of divination that involves observing
atmospheric phenomena and nephomancy, the divination by studying
clouds).  What we are witnessing in the Iranian situation
resembles this practice, only now the clouds are made of
information. This infosphere is not the same as the old
chestnut, the “fog of war.” It’s more like what I call the fog-
machine of war, and its analysts are performing infomancy.
People are seeing their hopes, fears, and their shadows in this
data mist. One of these faith-based assertions is that more info
equals more democracy. It’s not just that observers consider the
anti-regime protests to be democratic, but they believe the use
of social media is inherently democratic (i