Today’s guest post comes from David Almacy (@almacy), Senior Vice President, and Dave Levy(@levydr), Account Executive, both members of Edelman’s Digital Public Affairs team in Washington, D.C. The piece was first featured on PR Week Online as an Op-Ed, and is also available at the PR Week Web site (subscription required) For more of David and Dave, you can stay up with regular postings at Capital Gig and Most Likely to Die Alone, respectively.

From Moldova to Motrin Moms, Twitter has become the arena of coordinated, widespread revolution several times over the last year. Still, when we look back on how the microblogging platform has evolved into a low-barrier tool for grassroots organizing, these will only be footnotes to the events of the last few days in Tehran. As protesters took to the streets of Iran to voice their discontent with the 2009 presidential election results, people from around the world were attentively watching updates from the ground on Twitter long before hearing reports from any major news outlets.

"With the development of social networking sites, I've developed an interest in how people take simple or complex snapshots of themselves, post them to their page as a representation of who they are and what they want people to see. It is an interesting form of control and, in a way, self-preservation. However, there is a strong likelihood that many people who don't know you will see this photo representation and make passing judgments as to who you may or may not be, much in the same way we make passing judgments on people we see in our neighborhoods every day. Take a collection of these portraits and put them into the context of a gallery space or like setting, and you see a community of individuals - their likeness elevated and memorialized like the original commissioners of portrait painting; the rich and powerful – displayed as a portrait's original intent: expression of an individuals' character and moral quality."