Social Media in Iran

Politics and Society after 2009

David M. Faris, Babak Rahimi, David M. Faris, Babak Rahimi

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781438458847
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Part I

SOCIETAL

Chapter 1

Facebook Iran

Social Capital and the Iranian Social Media

Jari Eloranta, Hossein Kermani, and Babak Rahimi

In broad terms, social capital is a complex set of connections based on the resources of support and reciprocity that shape, what the late Charles Tilly called, “networks of trust.”1 The ways people interact and, accordingly, build to acquire resources, play a central role in the way trust and support is produced between diverse people, either through bonding based on internal relations, or “bridging” based on external relations (i.e., creating new connections with people outside of their known networks).2 Such bonds identify a dense network of relations that encourage participation in voluntary organizations and civic activism that play an integral role in realization of the common good.3 Yet social ties also include the element of risk or mistakes by members of an association, practices of persecution by rulers, as well as contentious politics of rumors and conspiracy discourses that can make a network unreliable or untrustworthy. Among these failures is the element of public apathy, caused by surplus work or leisure time, with the potential to fragment community and weaken civic engagement.

In his influential work, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam lamented the decline of social capital in the American public life, primarily because he considered information and entertainment technologies, such as television, to function in facilitating citizens to become passive, mere consuming subjects. Since active associations and the degree of collective norms gained from civic participation indicate the extent of social capital, the rise of television has introduced a level of disconnect, especially among young Americans, that entails an erosion of civic engagement and trust. Bowling Alone contemplated a society consisting of solitary individual activities rather than collective participation through civic associations.4 While civic and voluntary associations promote collective trust, in particular through face-to-face interaction, “passive” entertainment practices lower group solidarity and enhance fragmentation.

But contrary to Putnam’s study on television’s negative impact as detrimental to civic life, numerous other studies have also shown how information technologies, in particular digital media, can in fact supplement or enhance social capital by creating new modes of communication, sets of relations, and civic norms of involvement.5 With their distinct many-to-many communication features and reduced costs of usability, new technologies like the Internet can facilitate accessibility and increase in circulation of information for togetherness and solidarity, though its degree of social force remains contingent on specific contexts. The element of accessibility and enhanced circulation and communication implies that the Internet can make social action more efficient.6 As an embedded everyday aspect of social practice, Internet technology presents a complex set of communicative practices that include ways to arrange, organize, and reconfigure experiences on both individual and collective levels.

It is at the collective level, the social networks encompassing diverse people and activities, where social capital operates in the form of civic engagement. Despite the fact that many users engage in personal activities that can add up to considerable time spent surfing, chatting, or shopping online, as an inexpensive communication technology (even in many so-called developing countries) the Internet provides collective venues for support and social engagement, especially pertinent for politics in its dissident form. Such collective venues are described by Manuel Castells as “mass self-communication,” a horizontal form of communication that challenges hierarchical structures in the form of “counter-power.”7 The Internet disrupts, and in doing so decentralizes managerial authority in organizations. It also comprises the formation of informal ties and an increase in “weak ties,” allowing for new forms of economic and political contestation.8

Decentralization in its digital form in certain algorithmic contexts, however, could also produce a passive domain of closed privacy, in which norms of social performance, as shown by Eli Pariser, become filtered into a personalized social networking space, a subjective realm where politics is undermined as a collective and a dialogical space of interaction between competing views and interests.9 Zygmunt Bauman sees such a process in terms of increased privatization of cultural life with the convergence of identity and consumption that undermine political participation and civic ties for political participation.10 There is an ambivalent feature with the Internet as a form of communication that could both undermine and produce social capital. The key is to understand which networks individuals and groups construct, and through which formal and informal ties social capital is produced in sustaining civic and social movements in a global context.

As a case study, the following discussion examines how social media as social technology can generate trust and social support for coordinated activity in the context of Iranian social life. Although not all Iranian activities on the Internet are social, the rise of social media in the context of the development of the Internet in Iran since the 1990s has led to new ways for Iranians to connect, exchange, and build new associations and collectivities in the postrevolutionary period. The networking aspects of the Iranian social media can be associated with informal ties identified in the form of primarily casual publics that take shape in lived contexts of informal shared environments. Such causal or informal ties are influential in encouraging online discussions, information sharing, news dissemination, and mobilization of collective action through ubiquity of access, despite censorship limitations imposed by the Iranian state over the Internet. These networked publics can be identified as complex clusters and cleavages of informal associations, interconnected in a variety of ways through popular social media sites such as Facebook, popular in Iran, mostly among the younger generation.11

This chapter is therefore an analysis of emergent social networks that identify the larger Iranian social media online. While relying on research produced by Iran-based scholars, mostly unknown to Western academics, the study also provides a synthesis of empirical-based studies on Iranian online networks that are unavailable to non-Persian speaking scholars. The following discussion does not claim to be comprehensive but offers an analytical descriptive account of how sociability takes form on social media sites such as Facebook. In terms of definitions, by “Iranian online social media” we are referring to many-to-many interactive computer-mediated forms of communication through which Iranians of diverse backgrounds—in terms of class, ethnic, gender, race and sexuality, and based both in national and transnational localities—participate to circulate, exchange, share, (re)mix, and consume information, images, affects, and imaginaries of identities and sociability.12 The notion of “FacebookIran” implies the multiplicity of human affects and cognitive processes that underline the associations among intersecting networks, as well as cultural practices that turn resources into social capital.

In doing so, the Iranian Internet users as social actors build social capital, despite Internet surveillance and other filtering measures implemented by the state. Infrastructural and regulative practices can influence the distribution of resources and connections, but the effect of bonds shaped through Internet networks, however limited they might be in terms of pervasiveness, can produce effective resources through weak ties—that is, primarily among a network of loosely associated actors. In a significant way, while the formation of trust as social capital is not essentially linked to Internet regulation, political turmoil such as street protests could dramatically affect the degree and shape of connectivity in digital space with offline consequences.13

In this study, we focus on Facebook as a distinct social media network, built on the concept and practice of “friendship” connections. Iranian Facebook users, we argue, build relations with others through informal and weak ties that enhance social capital on various levels of digital connectivity. Although the impact of such social building, especially on offline domains, can vary based on gender, class, and other social factors, on Facebook the newly formed distant ties hold meaning for connections in terms of resources formed through sharing information that delineate new network publics specific to Iranian users of diverse backgrounds.

Divided into three parts, this study begins with a brief theoretical discussion of networks and social capital. The second section offers a sociohistorical account of social networks, and by extension social capital, in modern Iran. The study finally turns to empirical studies conducted by Iran-based scholars on social media and particularly Facebook as a way to expand on various social media processes in building trust and social solidarity formation, mostly through weak ties shaped online.

Conceptualizing Social Capital

The concept of social capital is not new, nor is it undisputed.14 Sociologists in different forms and contexts have used the term during the 20th century, perhaps most explicitly by Pierre Bourdieu, for whom resources were typically tied to a network and access to economic resources was offered by social capital.15 Francis Fukuyama has focused on the inseparable spheres of culture and economy to show how the cooperative dimension of social capital can promote civic actions in ways that ultimately bolster democratic rule.16 James Coleman, one of the key figures in the development of social capital as a concept, has emphasized the links between human and social capital, the importance of education in changing societies, as well as social structure and individuals’ functions within that structure.17 In recent decades, especially since the rise of new democracies in Eastern Europe with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence, the concept has become much more widely applied among different fields in the social sciences and the humanities.

The most famous recent scholar of social capital is the aforementioned Putnam, who has argued that social capital is found in the various networks that permeate people’s lives; he also distinguished between bridging (occurring among heterogeneous people and groups) and bonding (occurring among like-minded people and groups) forms of social capital. Putnam maintained that high levels of social capital correlate with lower crime rates and lead to higher levels of “happiness.” In a “civil society” (or “civic community”), individuals feel a greater sense of contentment, which can be eroded by increased secularism, greater amounts of time dedicated to watching TV, fewer communal activities, and lower political participation rates.18

Putnam’s version of social capital, and the concept itself, has been criticized from many different angles, as noted earlier. Some have objected to his emphasis on religious organizations, others to the causes and effects of political participation.1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Societal
• Part II. Politics
• Part III. Culture
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover