Global Internet Activism
Week#6 Closed Cinemas, A Filtered Internet, Kurastami,
Blogging about Sex and Music in Farsi: Social Media in Iran
last update: March 12, 2009
Trebor Scholz | LCST 4014 A | Spring 2009

Political Activism,
Advocacy, and Art Activism
week 2
week 1 Access, Censorship,
Social Media, and the
week 3
Alleged Democratization
Citizen Media: from
of Society
Seattle to South Korea
War and Social Media: Serbia
week 5
week 4
War and Social Media: Iraq, Gaza
week 6 Spring Break
week 7
War and Social Media: Counter-publics
Iran, Afghanistan in Iran
week 8 week 9
Cell phone-enabled
Citizen Media in China
week 12
activism: Philippines
Burma
week 11
week 10 Japan, Singapore
A Better World in Second Life?
week 14
One Laptop Per Child
week 13
Cyber Publics in India
week 15
Mobilization
Trebor Scholz | The New School University | LCST 4014 A | Spring 2009

Iran
week 6
March 3, 5
Required Reading:
Jon W. Anderson, \"Internet Islam: New Media of the Islamic Reformation,\" Donna Lee Bowen and Evelyn A. Early,
Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) 300-304.
Suggested Readings:
Hermida, Alfred. \"BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Web gives a voice to Iranian women.\" BBC NEWS | News Front Page.
17 June 2002. 14 Jan. 2009 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2044802.stm>.
Delio, Michelle. \"Blogs Opening Iranian Society?\" Wired News. 28 May 2003. 14 Jan. 2009 <http://www.wired.com/
culture/lifestyle/news/2003/05/58976>.
Trebor Scholz | LCST 4014 A | Spring 2009

Draw links between fragments from Iranian films, the history of that country, Michael Warner’s essay Publics and
Counterpublics, and RAWA (in Afghanistan).
In which way do Iranian state policies regarding the Internet echo attitudes toward previous, older media?
What are the at least three ways in which censorship of free speech is implemented in the Iranian Internet?
What does the term “publics” achieve?
What does it stand for?
What did you learn about the role of bloggers in Iran?
What are key issues of discussion in the Iranian blogosphere?
What's the difference between a mass audience and Warner’s “public”?
How can Iran prevent its youth from dating on Facebook?

IRAN
Iran (formerly known internationally as Persia until 1935)
Iran has a population of over seventy million.
It has large reserves of petroleum and natural gas.
Iran is home to one of the world's oldest continuous major civilizations,
with historical and urban settlements dating back to 7000 BC.
\"Persia's Constitutional Revolution\" established the nation's first parliament in 1906, within a constitutional monarchy.
Iran officially became an Islamic republic on 1 April 1979, after the Iranian 1979 Revolution.
The highest state authority is the Supreme Leader.
Shia Islam is the official religion and Persian is the official language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran

Reporters Without
Borders:
• Iran is the “biggest prison for
journalists in the Middle East”
• increasing number bloggers
post anonymously
• more than 70 percent of
Iranian are under 30 years old
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ae/CIAIranKarteOelGas.jpg
http://www.humanrights-geneva.info/IRAN-Much-More-Than-Beards-and,543

Growth
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22545778480

Film Excerpts

Iran: The Next Iraq? (2007)
20 mins

Jon W. Anderson, \"Internet Islam: New
Media of the Islamic Reformation,\" Donna
Lee Bowen and Evelyn A. Early, Everyday
Life in the Muslim Middle East
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2002) 300-304.
Babak Rahimi, \"The Politics of the Internet in Iran,\" Mehdi Semati, Media,
Culture and Society in Iran Living with globalization and the Islamic state
(London: Routledge, 2008) 36-56.

religious
community
online
a space for
alternative
interpretations
of the Koran
and for religious
community

Film Excerpts

Film Excerpts:
http://stfdocs.com/images/uploads/Iran.jpg
Iran: A Cinematographic
Revolution (2007)

discussion: taboos
Iran: A Cinematographic
Revolution (2007)

discussion: American influences
Iran: A Cinematographic
Revolution (2007)

discussion:
Iran: A Cinematographic
Revolution (2007)

discussion: closure of over 100 cinemas
Iran: A Cinematographic
Revolution (2007)

In November 2006, Iran was one of 13 countries
labeled \"enemies of the internet\" by activist group
Reporters Without Borders.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/dec/04/news.iran

discussion: director Abbas Kurastami
Iran: A Cinematographic
Revolution (2007)

Blogging

http://www.ahmadinejad.ir/

http://www.newsgroper.com/mahmoud-ahmadinejad

The Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenei, launched his own website, www.khamenei.ir, in May 2004.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Take on the Internet
Guest Blogger Hamid Tehrani, Global Voices Iran Editor
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/idblog/2009/01/08/irans-revolutionary-guards-take-on-the-internet/
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) at the end of 2008 made a historic announcement: a project to
launch 10,000 blogs for the paramilitary Basij forces. (1)

http://feeds.technorati.com/blogs/www.iraniansblogs.com http://www.iraniansblogs.com/ Blogs Opening Iranian Society?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Blogs http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2003/05/58976
Blogs started in 2000 in Iran. Out of an estimated total of 100 million worldwide, of which about 40,000-110,000 are active,
mostly written in Persian, the Iranian language.

While women are excluded
from coffee houses,
the Internet becomes a
social milieu where women
can speak.
http://iraniandoughter.blogspot.com/
http://iranian-girl.blogspot.com/

PersianBlog.ir and BlogSky, founded in 2002, were the first free blog services/blogware in Persian.
PersianBlog.ir
http://blogsky.com/Home.bs
“The Internet has grown faster in Iran than any other Middle Eastern country since 2000 and has
become an important medium, providing fairly independent news and an arena for vigorous political
discussion for more than three million users.”
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=10733

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fih_IoYOrt8

http://iwillnotregistermysite.googlepages.com/

Iran also has between 20 and 30 major political websites, most of them
(such as www.emrooz.ws, blocked from inside Iran since February 2003) close to the reformist.
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=10733

glacial speed of Internet makes downloading music or videos near impossible
“Owners of cybercafés, which are very popular with the young people, students and intellectuals,
especially in the capital, who are most of the country’s Internet users, ask customers to disconnect if
they catch them looking at ‘non-Islamic’ sites.”

http://www.takblog.ir/

Social Network of Iranian (Persian) Bloggers
http://www.jablogi.com/

Iran’s most popular blogs:
http://bamdad.blogspot.com/

Iran’s most popular blogs:
http://mehdi110.blogspot.com/

Iran’s most popular blogs:
www.khabgard.com (publishes books banned by the regime)

Arrests of Bloggers
The information ministry boasts that it currently blocks access to hundreds of thousands of websites, especially those dealing in
any way with sex but also those providing any kind of independent news. A score of bloggers were thrown in prison between
autumn 2004 and summer 2005.
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15613
Reporters without Borders 17.11.2005
Iran: Four Journalists Sentenced to Prison, Floggings
Four Years After Arrests, No Public Investigation of Abuse
Allegations
February 10, 2009
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/02/10/iran-four-journalists-sentenced-prison-floggings

According to the official charges, he was suspected of having insulted the
head of state of Iran (the Supreme Leader), of \"endangering national security\"
and of having \"insulted the prophets.\"
He was found guilty on the charge of having insulted the Supreme Leader
and sentenced to two years and ten months' imprisonment.
During his arrest, Saminejad has allegedly been held in solitary confinement
for 88 days and subjected to beatings and torture. After 21 months, on
September 13, 2006 he was released from prison.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojtaba_Saminejad

Access, Filtering

http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/projects/maps/

Filtering:
Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, and John Palfrey,
“2007 Circumvention Landscape Report:
Methods, Uses, and Tools”
<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/
2009/2007_Circumvention_Landscape_Report>

http://hoder.com/weblog/
So Derakhshan, a 28-year-old Iranian expatriate now living in Toronto, Canada, ported some basic blogging tools
from ASCII to Unicode, enabling Iranians to blog in their own language.
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2003/05/58976

http://www.sifry.com/alerts/Slide0013-tm.png
blogosphere: posts by language (2006)
http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2007/issue2/image002.gif
What is discussed on Iranian blogs?

discussion: ban of Salman Rushdie’s novel
... a Shi'a Muslim scholar, issued a fatwa calling
on all good Muslims to kill Rushdie and his
publishers, or to point him out to those who
can kill him if they cannot themselves
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/
february/14/newsid_2541000/2541149.stm
\"A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take
sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.\"
Source: Chapter 2, \"Mahound\"
\"Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final,
certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief. Doubt.\"
Source: Chapter 2, \"Mahound\"

“Something strange happened a few days ago:
YouTube and Facebook are not filtered anymore in Iran.”
Somayeh Tohidloo, Iranian blogger http://smto.ir/?p=1353
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/02/07/iran-you-tube-and-face-book-are-not-filtered-anymore/

http://www.facebook.com/s.php?q=iran&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sid=e0dbd43c86ef7f8cd1410ba469e85575#/group.php?sid=e0dbd43c86ef7f8cd1410ba469e85575&gid=13769030279

Web gives a voice to Iranian women

Web gives a voice to Iranian women
The web is providing a way for women in Iran to talk freely about taboo subjects such as sex and boyfriends.
\"I could talk very freely and very frankly about things I could never talk about in any other place, about subjects
that are banned\" said one of the first women to start a blog in Iran.
Perhaps surprisingly, few of the blogs focus on politics.
\"It is social issues mostly,\" said blogger Hossein
Derakhshan, an Iranian journalist living in Canada, \"the
underground lives that Iranian youth have these days.
Things like girlfriends, boyfriends, the music they listen
to, the films they see.\"
Women in Iran cannot speak out frankly because of our Eastern culture and
there are some taboos such as talking about sex.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2044802.stm

http://www.campaign4equality.info/english/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7wIXWZ1oWg&eurl=http://www.campaign4equality.info/english/
Change4equality

Iranians arrested for net dating
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2813953.stm
Dozens of young Iranians have been detained for \"unlawful actions\" after using
a website to arrange dates, officials say.
Internet chat rooms provide a way for youngsters to talk freely about taboo subjects such as
sex.
“Dating is also forbidden. But here too, the youth are finding ways around it. ‘I
spend most of my free time chasing girls! This is what my friends and I do all
the time. But again we do it secretly and not out in the open,’ said Amir.”
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/060620a.aspx
audio

Revolutionary Association of
the Women of Afghanistan
Parallels to RAWA:
Opposes all forms of religious fundamentalism
Founded 1977
Why did this group of Afghan women
decide to build a Website?
The main reason for having a Website is to make
people around the world aware of the untold
atrocities committed by Islamic fundamentalists in our
country. Since our site came into being it has been
warmly welcomed by a great many number of people.
A great number of people from the outside world
who did not know anything about the situation of
Afghanistan got their first glance of the ugly reality
through our Website.
Has the Internet really changed what RAWA has been able to do?
Without the www it would have been extremely difficult for us to make ourselves seen and heard by a great many people who are
interested but don't know where to look. The Website has greatly promoted the dissemination of information regarding RAWA's
stand and goals to people around the world. Now if you search something on Afghanistan through any search engine e.g. Yahoo or
AltaVista, our site jumps to the eye as the most interesting one amongst whatever number of others there may be. The www has in
effect and to a large extent had a 'liberating' effect on us. Now thanks to e-mail we are able to communicate with all the world much
faster and much cheaper than we were able to in the past. Our Website allows anyone interested to access the crux of our
publications in English, and Internet allows us well-nigh unrestricted scope for looking around, finding, contacting and getting to
know other women's organizations and sharing our aims and objectives.
http://www.rawa.org/aboutcom.htm

http://www.rawa.org/index.php

Texting in Iran

Iranians’ Love-Affair With Texting
‫؛ ﭘﺪﯾﺪﻫﺎﯼ ﲤﺎﻡ ﻋﯿﺎﺭ ﻭ ﻧﺎﺷﻨﺎﺧﺘﻪ‬SMS ‫ﺟﻨﺒﺶ‬
Parisa Dezfoulian | Tehran | 26 November 2007
20 million text messages are sent within the country every day.
http://www.payvand.com/news/08/nov/1242.html
http://www.mianeh.net/en/articles/?aid=86

We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs by Nasrin Alavi My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices
(Soft Skull Press /November 28, 2005) by Lila Azam Zanganeh

Trebor Scholz
scholzt@newschool.edu
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