7th
Como é a blogosfera do Irã
Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere
John Kelly and Bruce Etling
Abstract:
We used computational social network mapping in combination with human and automated content analysis to analyze the Iranian blogosphere. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that Iranian bloggers are mainly young democrats critical of the regime, we found a wide range of opinions representing religious conservative points of view as well as secular and reform-minded ones, and topics ranging from politics and
human rights to poetry, religion, and pop culture. Our research indicates that the Persian
blogosphere is indeed a large discussion space of approximately 60,000 routinely updated
blogs featuring a rich and varied mix of bloggers. Social network analysis reveals the
Iranian blogosphere to be dominated by four major network formations, or poles, with
identifiable sub-clusters of bloggers within those poles. We label the poles as 1)
Secular/Reformist, 2) Conservative/Religious, 3) Persian Poetry and Literature, and 4)
Mixed Networks. The secular/reformist pole contains both expatriates and Iranians
involved in a dialog about Iranian politics, among many other issues. The
conservative/religious pole contains three distinct sub-clusters, two focused principally
on religious issues and one on politics and current affairs. Given the repressive political
and media environment, and high profile arrests and harassment of bloggers, one might
not expect to find much political contestation in the blogosphere. However, we identified
a subset of the secular/reformist pole focused intently on politics and current affairs and
comprised mainly of bloggers living inside Iran, which is linked in contentious dialog
with the conservative political sub-cluster. Surprisingly, a minority of bloggers in the
secular/reformist pole appear to blog anonymously, even in the more politically-oriented
part of it; instead, it is more common for bloggers in the religious/conservative pole to
blog anonymously. Blocking of blogs by the government is less pervasive than we had
assumed. Most of the blogosphere network is visible inside Iran, although the most
frequently blocked blogs are clearly those in the secular/reformist pole. Given the
repressive media environment in Iran today, blogs may represent the most open public
communications platform for political discourse. The peer-to-peer architecture of the
blogosphere is more resistant to capture or control by the state than the older, hub and
spoke architecture of the mass media model.
