Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran

by Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, Gholam Khiabany

The protests unleashed by Iran's disputed presidential election in June 2009 brought the Islamic Republic's vigorous cyber culture to the world's attention. Iran has an estimated 700,000 bloggers, and new media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were thought to have played a key role in spreading news of the protests. The internet is often celebrated as an agent of social change in countries like Iran, but most literature on the subject has struggled to grasp what this new phenomenon actually means. How is it different from print culture[unk] Is it really a new public sphere[unk] Will the Iranian blogosphere create a culture of dissidence, which eventually overpowers the Islamist regime[unk] In this groundbreaking work, the authors give a flavour of contemporary internet culture in Iran and analyse how this new form of communication is affecting the social and political life of the country. Although they warn against stereotyping bloggers as dissidents, they argue that the internet is changing things in ways which neither the government nor the democracy movement could have anticipated.
"Blogistan" offers both a new reading of Iranian politics and a new conceptual framework for understanding the politics of the internet, with implications for the wider Middle East, China and beyond.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Technology, Iran

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

I moved to SOAS as Visiting Professor from the University of Leicester in 2004. While based at Leicester, I was the Director of the Centre for Mass Communication Research from 1992-1999 and its only professor. I took up the first chair in Global Media and Communications at SOAS in 2006.

For the past two decades most of my research work has been in the area of International Communication, increasingly on Globalization, and with a strong feminist orientation. My empirical research has been supported by organizations such as UNESCO, the BBC, the Broadcasting Standards Commission and the ESRC. I have consulted for UNESCO, the British Council, Article 19, the EU and the Council of Europe.

I was elected President of IAMCR (www.iamcr.org) from July 2008 for four years. I am an Associate Member of the UNESCO ORBICOM Network (www.orbicom.uqam.ca). In 2002 I became an elected member of the Royal Society of Arts (www.rsa.org)

My interests include theories of globalization, particularly in relation to gender issues and the changing configurations of the public and private. I have focused on media and processes of socio-political change and democratization in the South, with particular emphasis on the Middle East and Iran. I lived in Iran before, during and after the revolution of 1978 and out of that experience became interested in the role of alternative 'small' media and then the Internet as tools of social movements. My work on Iran continued through an ESRC-funded project that allowed me to focus on the nature of Iranian community and media formations in London, work that lies at the centre of my interest in diasporic communities and transnational media. This connects to a more general focus on issues around race, ethnicity and the media and I have conducted funded research projects on both minority ethnic audiences and minority ethnic media production in the UK.

My interest in communications and social movements has had an international focus, with a specific focus on the dynamics of global feminist politics, solidarity and participation, which is increasingly centred on the Net. I have explored transnational women’s networking and feminist politics as the emergence of global civil society dynamics. I am now writing on the gendered elements of the WSIS process. My interest in the intersection of gender, politics and communication has also had a British focus, involving work on the representation of women politicians.

My recent work on Iran has examined the role of the press as part of an emergent civil society in Iran, the particular role that women play as journalists and editors within the Iranian press environment and the emergence of a dynamic Persian-language blogosphere.

I am part of a large AHRC-funded research project under its “Diasporas” research programme called ‘Tuning In” that focuses on the BBC World Service as a cultural contact zone; www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/

Reviews

[Kira · Rating 2 out of 5]

This covered a very interesting variety of topics, the politics of internet use in Iran, feminism and gender politics (which was super interesting, but a slight digression when done to this extent, considering it's not actually the topic of the book), intellectualism and a more broad approach to studying online culture, focusing less on the Western experience.

The latter was, however, the only one that I felt was really satisfyingly explored. Besides that aspect, it felt extremely repetitive, always referencing chapters that were yet to come, so that when you actually read them, nothing felt new due to the allusions made in earlier chapters, and the same resolutions were repeated a lot, always packaged as a new thought in each chapter. Because of that, you felt like the book was written quite jumpy and without considering the way and order the separate chapters were going to be read in.

I also got a bit annoyed by this book's tendency to list names, facts or quotes rather than pull conclusions from facts.
Footnotes, when not just indicating source material, were very confusing because they either gave random facts or background knowledge, parts of which were then given in the main text. Also, the inclusion of the author's daughter's blog in the research, while not a problem per se, was handled very weirdly and ended up by the author quoting herself in a footnote without acknowledging that she is, in fact, herself...

All in all a fascinating topic handled in a way I can't help to call mediocre.