Table Of ContentSocial 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
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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 pro-
viding 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 effec-
tively 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, politi-
cal, 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
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