Table Of Content

Social Media in Iran Social Media in Iran Politics and Society after 2009 Edited by David M. Faris and Babak Rahimi Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2015 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Jenn Bennett Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Social media in Iran : politics and society after 2009 / edited by David M. Faris and Babak Rahimi. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-5883-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4384-5884-7 (e-book) 1. Social media—Iran. 2. Social media—Political aspects—Iran. 3. Facebook (Electronic resource) I. Faris, David M. II. Rahimi, Babak. HM1206.S65423 2015 302.23'1—dc23 2015001354 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 David M. Faris and Babak Rahimi PART I. SOCIETAL 1. Facebook Iran: Social Capital and the Iranian Social Media 19 Jari Eloranta, Hossein Kermani, and Babak Rahimi 2. Gender Roles in the Social Media World of Iranian Women 41 Elham Gheytanchi 3. The Role of Social Media in the Lives of Gay Iranians 57 Abouzar Nasirzadeh 4. Disabled Iranians on Social Media: Reflections on the Empowering Experiences of the Iranian PWDs in the Blogosphere 76 Kobra Elahifar PART II. POLITICS 5. The Politics of Online Journalism in Iran 101 Marcus Michaelsen 6. The Persian Blogosphere in Dissent 123 Arash Falasiri and Nazanin Ghanavizi vi Contents 7. The Politics and Anti-Politics of Facebook in Context of the Iranian 2009 Presidential Elections and Beyond 137 Mohammad Sadeghi Esfahlani 8. Trans-spatial Public Action: The Geography of Iranian Post-Election Protests in the Age of Web 2.0 165 Reza Masoudi Nejad 9. Balatarin: Gatekeepers and the Politics of a Persian Social Media Site 183 Babak Rahimi and Nima Rassooli 10. Architectures of Control and Mobilization in Egypt and Iran 199 David M. Faris 11. Social Media and the Islamic Republic 213 Niki Akhavan 12. Political Memory and Social Media: The Case of Neda 231 Samira Rajabi PART III. CULTURE 13. Iranian Cinema and Social Media 251 Michelle Langford 14. The Online Avant-Garde: Iranian Video Art and Its Technological Rebellion 271 Staci Gem Scheiwiller Bibliography 287 Contributors 313 Index 319 Acknowledgments The idea of this volume was initially conceived at a workshop titled “Face- book and Iran” at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, in winter of 2012. Some chapters in this book were originally presented as papers at the workshop, later updated, and have since been rewritten, but most of the contributors were invited to submit a study on an aspect of social media in its Iranian context. In soliciting contributions, we aimed at a wide empirical and theoretical spectrum. The papers in this study have been chosen not because they display a certain degree of unity in approach, but because they all represent an original study on the impact of the Internet on Iran and beyond. We hope that the present volume will contribute to the general knowledge on the role of social media in contemporary Iranian society and also examine some conceptual themes in the general study of society and information communication technologies. In attempting to rise to this challenge, we owe much to the critical commentary, assistance, and support of numerous colleagues and friends. Our main thanks go to the Annenberg School for Communication, Univer- sity of Pennsylvania, for providing us the opportunity to host the workshop. Special thanks to Professor Monroe Price, director of the Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS), whose commitment and generosity to this volume is matched only by his outstanding scholarly contribution to the field of media and society. This volume also benefited from the insights and support of Briar Smith, associate director of CGCS at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, who provided us with much assistance, including organizing the workshop and introducing us to some of the contributors. During the duration of the workshop and beyond, we benefited from the advice, assistance, and support of Kevin Anderson, Drew Cahan, Mahmood Enayat, Libby Morgan, Laura Schwartz- Henderson, and Mehdi Yahyanejad. We thank them for their help at the workshop and after. We would like to express our gratitude to Nadine Wassef, who took the time to review and provide critical commentary on some chapters in the vii viii Acknowledgments volume. We wish to acknowledge the assistance of Krittika Patil, who helped locate numerous sources for the volume. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for the State University of New York Press for their thoughtful comments, which improved the arguments of the chapters. We also thank the individual contributors to this volume for their hard work and patience during the editorial process. Finally, we are grateful to Said Arjomand, who played an instrumental role in the publication of this volume. In particular, we express our gratitude to the State University of New York Press for providing a venue to publish works written mostly by emerging young scholars, whose unique perspectives, we believe, can have an impact on how scholars approach the relationship between media technology and society. The system of transliteration used here is loosely based on the Inter- national Journal of Middle East Studies. Vowels that appear in transliteration approximate modern Persian pronunciation. For the sake of simplicity for the general audience, we have avoided the use of diacritical marks and technical terms. David M. Faris, 2014 Chicago Babak Rahimi, 2014 San Diego Introduction David M. Faris and Babak Rahimi What has been the effect of the diffusion of social media technologies in the Islamic Republic of Iran? Do applications like Facebook, Flickr, and Vine undermine the grip of the country’s authoritarian elite, or does Iran’s strategy of creating a system of increasing censorship and surveillance effectively prevent the kind of online organization that threatened regimes across the region during the events of the Arab Spring? To answer this question properly requires a multidisciplinary effort, one that seeks answers beyond elite political struggles that are visible to nearly all observers, and that seeks to situate the study of social media in the particular cultural, social, political, religious, and generational contexts of the Islamic Republic, a country whose place in Western public discourse nearly always exceeds granular knowledge about its people, internal dynamics, and structures. It requires us to see social change and dissent in arenas beyond high politics and to understand Iran not as a closed system of political inputs flowing from top to bottom, but as an arena for digital contestation in venues as diverse as popular films, lifestyle blogs, and social networking sites, and around issues that go far beyond the political structures of the state to include gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and religion. In this volume, we have brought together a diverse group of scholars with specialized knowledge about the use of social media in Iran in all of its many applications and fields. This is because one of the most persistent problems in seeking to study the impact of the Internet on authoritarian societies is the cordoning off of knowledge in various disciplines from one another. What should be a strength—that sociologists, anthropologists, communications specialists, and political scientists are all working on what is effectively the same set of 1