Publicly intimate online: Iranian web logs in southern California

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 134-145

  Alexanian, Janet A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY; WORLD WIDE WEB;

CALIFORNIA; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 33745726542     PISSN: 1089201X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/1089201x-2005-015     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. A blog is a Web page with minimal to no external editing, providing online commentary, periodically updated, and presented in reverse chronological order, with hyperlinks to other online sources. Blogs are generally written in an informal and personal style and published by individuals. (For more information on blogs, see huminf.uib.no/~jill/ archives/blog_theorising/final_version_of_weblog_definition.html.) Tools for making blogs appeared in 1999, and the vast community of blogs - well over 2 million - is often referred to as the "blogosphere." According to BlogCensus.net (www.blogcensus.net/ weblog), based on a random sample of half a million English-language blogs conducted in 2003, blogging is split evenly among men and women. However, it found that "personal diary" blogs (journal-style blogs dedicated to recording the events of a blogger's life) were more popular among women, while "political blogs" (blogs primarily devoted to politics) were most popular among men by a ratio of 2 to 1. Although these blogs provide interesting data on the study of Web logs more generally, the extent to which they apply to Iranian blogs is yet to be examined and will surely be a rich area for investigation.
2. For studies of cybersociality, see Victoria Bernal, "Eritrea Goes Global: Reflections on Nationalism in a Transnational Era," Cultural Anthropology 19 (2004): 3-25;
3. Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, Love Online: Emotions on the Internet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
4. Daniel Miller and Don Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (New York: Berg, 2000);
5. and in David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, eds., The Cybercultures Reader (London: Routledge, 2000),
6. see Lisa Nakamura, "Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet," 712-20,
7. and Susan Stryker, "Transexuality: The Postmodern Body and/as Technology," 588-97.
8. Arturo Escobar uses the term technosociality to emphasize the productive features of cybercultures in his significant contribution to cyberstudies, "Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture," Current Anthropology 34 (1994): 211-31.
9. According to Michael M. J. Fischer, "Emergent forms of life' acknowledges an ethnographic datum, a social theoretic heuristic, and a philosophical stance regarding ethics. The ethnographic datum is the pervasive claim (or native models) by practitioners in many contemporary arenas of life (law, the sciences, political economy, computer technologies, etc.) that traditional concepts and ways of doing things no longer work, that life is outrunning the pedagogies in which we have been trained" (Michael M.J. Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003], 37).
10. The empirical data presented here were collected over a period of six months during 2004-5 in Orange County, California, through one-on-one qualitative interviews, best defined as "life histories," a form of formal interviewing that is generally unstructured but includes elements of semistructured interviewing techniques (see R. Bernard, Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology [Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002]). Generalizing the analysis to a large number of individuals is not the aim of this study. As such no attempt was made to make the selection framework a representative sample of the Iranian immigrant population in California. The participants were selected using a social network method by following connections between a group of bloggers. I had a particular interest in these connections, as many bloggers are part of a blogging community - that is, an informal group of people who regularly visit and comment on each other's blogs. As was the case with the informants in this study, it is not uncommon for blogging communities to meet in the offline world and develop friendships. Many of the informants were also known to me through various Orange County "meet-ups" (a meet-up is a meeting in the offline world of Internet users, usually users who are part of a community or online group, for example, by region, interest, or ethnicity). My basic criterion was that the population focus on a particular age group in order to increase the possibility that similar kinds of experiences would be discussed by informants and that the blogs were primarily journal-style blogs (as opposed to political blogs). All seven informants interviewed in this study were born in Iran and moved to California from Iran between two and five years ago to pursue graduate studies. Three informants are women, and all but one were graduate students at the time of the interviews. The informant who was not a student had already completed graduate school in California. All seven respondents were born and/or raised in Tehran and graduated from Polytechnic, the University of Tehran, or Sharif University. At the time of the interviews, all informants were either employed or full-time students. All informants were children under the Islamic Republic. This particular generation of immigrants shares many experiences, from growing up in postrevolutionary Iran, to attending a top-ranked school, to having families who could support their migration abroad for further study. In addition to participating in focus-group format meet-ups and conducting interviews, I read all entries on all seven of my informants' blogs. I was able to access the earliest entries through the "archive" feature, which, in the case of one blog, went back three years. All seven blogs were written in Persian and ranged from one to three years old. They all seemed to follow a general frequency pattern for both entries and comments; comments on the blogs seemed to have peaked in the middle of the first year, and entries generally decreased over time. Two respondents even wrote multiple entries during the first few months of their blog. Only one of the blogs was started while in Iran. Entries generally described personal opinions about events in the blogger's life, relationships, work, friendships, loneliness, adapting to America, and the meaning of life more generally. The blogs were written in a broadly defined, poetic style, with a common use of metaphors, analogies, and ambiguous stories. Emotions were usually described indirectly, and when friends were mentioned, their identities were not revealed.
11. NITLE Census News, www.blogcensus.net/webloga(accessed 20 May 2005).
12. Nassrin Alavi, We Are Iran (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull, 2005).
13. See Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi, "Performance in Everyday Life and the Rediscovery of the 'Self' in Iranian Weblogs," in Badjens Iranian Feminist Newsletter, 7th ed., September 2003, www.badjens.com/ rediscovery.html;
14. Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, "A Case Study of Iranian English Language Weblogs, inside and outside of the Islamic Republic of Iran" (master's thesis, Oslo University, 2004);
15. Khodadad Rezakhani, "Editorials without Editors: How Weblogs Are Changing the Iranian Youth Community in the Web," 2003, www.iranologie.com/ewe.htm;
16. Alfred Hermida, "Web Gives a Voice to Iranian Women," BBC Online News, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2044802.stm (accessed 18 June 2005);
17. Mehdi Jami, "Iranian Blogs Take on the Election," BBC News, 17 June 2005, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4099380.stm.
18. A recent BBC article, "Web Gives a Voice to Iranian Women," describes the taboo nature of subjects such as sex and dating and interviews a young Iranian women who explains, "Women in Iran cannot speak out frankly because of our Eastern culture and there are some taboos just for women, such as talking about sex or the right to choose your partner. I have the opportunity to talk about these things and share my experiences with others [through a blog]" (Hermida, "Web Gives a Voice to Iranian Women").
19. N. Siamdoust, "Iranian Blogger Returns from Exile for Vote," Los Angeles Times, 23 June 2005.
20. Ibid.
21. Reconceptualizations of "the subject" are tied to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the events of 1968, feminism, renewed interest in psychoanalysis, and theoretical interests from the 1960s and 1970s in language, discourse, and representation (Stuart Hall, "The Meaning of New Times," in New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, ed. S. Hall and M. Jacques [London: Verso, 1990], 116-33).
22. In particular, these reconceptualizations challenged the transcendental Subject or human essence addressed by Enlightenment and Western philosophical traditions, arguing against the conception of the individual as a whole, unitary, stable, autonomous, rational self. In particular, these critiques enabled a conception of the self that is fragmented, incomplete, multiple, and in process. As such, one can examine how the subject is differently positioned by discourses and practice. See, e.g., Louis Althusser, "Ideology and ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," in his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971);
23. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977);
24. and Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993).
25. Mohsen Kadivar explains that Abrahamic religious traditions have been an influential cultural factor in Western liberal ideas of the public and private, as they have emphasized human identity and individuality through the sanctioning of private life. Mohsen Kadivar, "An Introduction to the Public and Private Debate in Islam," Social Research 70 (2003): 659-80.
26. See, e.g., Mohsen Kadivar, "An Introduction to the Public and Private Debate in Islam," Social Research 70 (2003): 659-80;
27. Mehrangiz Kar, "The Invasion of the Private Sphere in Iran," Social Research 70 (2003): 829-36;
28. and Hamid Dabashi, "In the Absence of Face," Social Research 67 (2000): 475-518.
29. References made to Hezbollah in the comments of the informants in this article generally use the term to refer to a radical, militant follower of islam as opposed to a specific reference to membership in the actual Hezbollah party (although this may at times be true, it is not necessarily the case).
30. All names have been replaced with pseudonyms.
31. Compared with native-born Americans, or other high-achieving immigrants, Iranians have unusually high levels of income, education, and professional skills. See Mehdi Bozorgmehr and Georges Sabagh, "Iranian Exiles and Immigrants in Los Angeles," In Iranian Exiles and Refugees since Khomeini, ed. Asghar Fathi (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1991), 121-44.
32. While these regulations do not seem to apply in the same way today,the risk of being arrested or punished for "morally inappropriate" behavior was clearly a concern for informants while in Iran. For example, one informant, Shahram, describes the importance of recognizing different political/religious orientations among fellow classmates. He explains that parties must remain secretive affairs and that it was important to maintain a certain level of privacy in order to ensure that such gatherings do not become public. One way to ensure this is to invite selected people who are perceived as trustworthy and interested in the party. Shahram describes how such guests are chosen: "You see ... people's 'types' are generally obvious... when you first meet someone ... you see someone two, three times, out with friends, etc., you see whether a person is 'reasonable' or not and only then do you decide whether to invite them to your house. In any case, with most people, you could tell even from the first look what kind of person s/he is. Whether this is a person you can trust or not."
33. Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi, an urban sociologist working in Iran, argues that because of the increased regulation of public spaces and institutions in Iran individuals are restricted in their daily performances of identity (from Erving Goffman), and, as a result, they negotiate strategies of invisibility or "multiple identities" in order to avoid or adhere to the moral monitoring imposed in the postrevolutionary era. See Amir-Ebrahimi, "Performance in Everyday Life."
34. Farzaneh Milani, "On Walls, Veils, and Silences: Writing Lives in Iran," Southern Review 38 (2002): 623-24.
35. According to Hamid Naficy, since 1981, more than eighty regularly scheduled programs have been broadcast in Los Angeles, and currently over two dozen shows air per week. A twenty-four-hour commercial satellite television station began in 2000, with the aim of connecting Iranians around the globe. See Hamid Naficy, "Identity Politics and Iranian Exile Music Videos, "Iranian Studies 31(1998): 229-47.
36. For more on Iranian broadcasting in Los Angeles, see Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
37. Mehdi Bozorgmehr and Georges Sabagh, "Iranian Exiles and Immigrants in Los Angeles," Working Paper No. 6 (Los Angeles: University of California, Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies, 1991).
38. Ibid.
39. Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures.
40. Taroff implies a social form of politeness in interaction, often involving exaggerated displays of generosity and humility.
41. Orkut is an online "friend community" that allows individuals to present a profile of their interests or occupation, join subcommunities, write messages to each other, display photographs, and list the names and locations of their friends around the world. Currently, people identifying as Iranian or Persian are the third largest group on the site, following Brazilians and Americans. At present, there are more than 2 million members on the site.
42. Aihwa Ong provides a useful model for accounting for the various forces contributing to memories and narratives of informants. In tracing the flight of Cambodians from the Pol Pot regime and their constitution as refugee subjects, she situates the formation of these subjectivities and the narratives of these subjects within a broader historical legacy of biopower in the American context (which includes, among other things, the stigmatization and regulation of African Americans and Latin Americans) and hegemonic discourses of American citizenship. For example, when discussing informants' descriptions of gender relations in Cambodia as being patriarchal and unequal, she explains that "statements of this kind were always made in the context of Cambodian refugees' awareness that women and men are considered equal in America - a message drummed into them by social workers" (Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizens, and the New America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003], 85-86).