ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that wide-scale employment of social media during Iran's crisis, reflecting what was happening inside Iran, augmented the public's and officials' awareness of the existence of social media and the potential of this technology. The way they were embraced by officials and grassroots actors reveals how new forms of social media can be incorporated into the activities of citizens in crisis and complicates formal practices, or re-shapes them. The chapter explores how this technology should be incorporated into formal responses. It provides lessons for future SNS (Social Network Sites) designers and suggests that the wide scale adaptation to social media by back-channels in a country with a perceived authoritarian regime acted as a catalyst for social media to enter a new phase of their history, and supplied the impetus for the official world to use the technology in a different manner.
