Social Media in Iran is the first book to tell the complex story of how and why the Iranian people—including women, homosexuals, dissidents, artists, and even state actors—use social media technology, and in doing so create a contentious environment wherein new identities and realities are constructed. Drawing together emerging and established scholars in communication, culture, and media studies, this volume considers the role of social media in Iranian society, particularly the time during and after the controversial 2009 presidential election, a watershed moment in the postrevolutionary history of Iran. While regional specialists may find studies on specific themes useful, the aim of this volume is to provide broad narratives of actor-based conceptions of media technology, an approach that focuses on the experiential and social networking processes of digital practices in the information era extended beyond cultural specificities. Students and scholars of regional and media studies will find this volume rich with empirical and theoretical insights on the subject of how technologies shape political and everyday life.

Electronic Iran introduces the concept of the Iranian Internet, a framework that captures interlinked, transnational networks of virtual and offline spaces. Taking her cues from early Internet ethnographies that stress the importance of treating the Internet as both a site and product of cultural production, accounts in media studies that highlight the continuities between old and new media, and a range of works that have made critical interventions in the field of Iranian studies, Niki Akhavan traces key developments and confronts conventional wisdom about digital media in general, and contemporary Iranian culture and politics in particular. Akhavan focuses largely on the years between 1998 and 2012 to reveal a diverse and combative virtual landscape where both geographically and ideologically dispersed individuals and groups deployed Internet technologies to variously construct, defend, and challenge narratives of Iranian national identity, society, and politics. While it tempers celebratory claims that have dominated assessments of the Iranian Internet, Electronic Iran is ultimately optimistic in its outlook. As it exposes and assesses overlooked aspects of the Iranian Internet, the book sketches a more complete map of its dynamic landscape, and suggests that the transformative powers of digital media can only be developed and understood if attention is paid to both the specificities of new technologies as well as the local and transnational contexts in which they appear.

In this monograph, Chris Featherman adopts a discourse analytical approach to explore the ways in which social movement ideologies and identities are discursively constructed in new and old media. In the context of his argument, Featherman also considers current debates surrounding the role that technologies play in democracy-building and global activist networks. He engages these critical issues through a case study of the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests, looking at both US legacy media coverage of the protests as well as activists’ use of social media. Through qualitative analysis of a corpus of activists’ Twitter tweets and Flickr uploads, Featherman argues that activists’ social media discourses and protesters’ symbolic and tactical borrowing of global English contribute to micronarratives of globalization, while also calling into question master narratives about Iran commonly found in mainstream Western media accounts. This volume makes a timely contribution to discussions regarding the relationship between cyber-rhetoric and democracy, and provides new directions for researchers engaging with the influence of new media on globalized vernaculars of English.

The protests following Iran's fraudulent 2009 Presidential election took the world by storm. As the Green Revolution gained protestors in the Iranian streets, #iranelection became the first long-trending international hashtag. Texts, images, videos, audio recordings, and links connected protestors on the ground and netizens online, all simultaneously transmitting and living a shared international experience. #iranelection follows the protest movement, on the ground and online, to investigate how emerging social media platforms developed international solidarity. The 2009 protests in Iran were the first revolts to be catapulted onto the global stage by social media, just as the 1979 Iranian Revolution was agitated by cassette tapes. And as the world turned to social media platforms to understand the events on the ground, social media platforms also adapted and developed to accommodate this global activism. Provocative and eye-opening, #iranelection reveals the new online ecology of social protest and offers a prehistory, of sorts, of the uses of hashtags and trending topics, selfies and avatar activism, and citizen journalism and YouTube mashups.

A multi-level insider's look at the changes transforming contemporary Iran.

This book explores how the children of Iranian immigrants in the US utilize the internet and develop digital identities. Taking Los Angeles—the long-time media and cultural center of Iranian diaspora—as its ethnographic field site, it investigates how various web platforms are embedded within the everyday social, cultural, and political lives of second generation Iranian Americans. Donya Alinejad unpacks contemporary diasporic belonging through her discussion of the digital mediation of race, memory, and long-distance engagement in the historic Iranian Green Movement. The book argues that web media practices have become integral to Iranian American identity formation for this generation, and introduces the notion of second-generation “digital styles” to explain how specific web applications afford new stylings of diaspora culture.

First comprehensive account of how the Internet has impacted life in Iran. Social Media in Iran is the first book to tell the complex story of how and why the Iranian people—including women, homosexuals, dissidents, artists, and even state actors—use social media technology, and in doing so create a contentious environment wherein new identities and realities are constructed. Drawing together emerging and established scholars in communication, culture, and media studies, this volume considers the role of social media in Iranian society, particularly the time during and after the controversial 2009 presidential election, a watershed moment in the postrevolutionary history of Iran. While regional specialists may find studies on specific themes useful, the aim of this volume is to provide broad narratives of actor-based conceptions of media technology, an approach that focuses on the experiential and social networking processes of digital practices in the information era extended beyond cultural specificities. Students and scholars of regional and media studies will find this volume rich with empirical and theoretical insights on the subject of how technologies shape political and everyday life.

A scholarly and authoritative history of the emergence and growth of Islam in Iran during the early and later medieval periods. This book, by I. P. Petrushevsky, the foremost Soviet Iranologist, was originally published in Russia in 1966. After discussing the Arabian environment in which the faith of Islam arose, and the character—legal, social and doctrinal—of the new message, the author moves on to trace the peculiarly Iranian development of Islamic beliefs, the schisms which arose in its early history, and the eventual creation of a Sunni orthodoxy. Written from the Russian perspective, with Russia's long contact with Iranian and Turkish Muslim neighbors, it provides a stimulating and salutary balance to the study of the Islamic world.

“Lyrical, intelligent, and passionately written, Whisper Tapes reignites a long dormant conversation about the urgency of global feminism.” —Shilyh Warren, University of Texas at Dallas Kate Millett was already an icon of American feminism when she went to Iran in 1979. She arrived just weeks after the Iranian Revolution, to join Iranian women in marking International Women's Day. Intended as a day of celebration, the event turned into a week of protests. Millett, armed with film equipment and a cassette deck to record everything around her, found herself in the middle of demonstrations for women’s rights and against the mandatory veil. Listening to the revolutionary soundscape of Millett's audio tapes, Negar Mottahedeh offers a new interpretive guide to Revolutionary Iran, its slogans, habits, and women’s movement—a movement that, many claim, Millett never came to understand. Published with the fortieth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution and the women's protests that followed on its heels, Whisper Tapes re-introduces Millett's historic visit to Iran and lays out the nature of her encounter with the Iranian women's movement. “In offering a deeply contingent history, Negar Mottahedeh beautifully shows Kate Millett's simultaneous closeness to and distance from the events surrounding her.” —Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Princeton University “Lyrical in style and poetic in meaning, Whisper Tapes challenges readers to adopt an intersectional view of Iranian feminist movements while adding layers and dimensionality to Millett’s preexisting literature.” ––Aisha Jitan, The Middle East Journal “Mottahedeh's illuminating study complements Millett's work and offers a more nuanced reading of a historic moment.” —Lucy Popescu, Times Literary Supplement

Complete proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Social Media Porto Portugal Published by Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited