Censorship, Freedom and Privacy
Today has been one of those days that came around far too quickly. My dissertation supervisor asked me a couple of months ago whether I would be interested in coming back to the University to guest spot in a lecture concerning censorship, freedom and privacy and today was to be the day it was done.
The general idea of the lecture was to present Iran as a case study, exploring how the Internet as an information system has developed in Iran as an information society. The most difficult aspect of preparing my lecture was to judge how much the class would need informing about Iran’s political climate, its history of self-censoring social norms and the segregation of public and private spaces, especially seen as I’d always tried to steer away from the political side of things whilst doing the actual research. Secondly, this particular subject is one of those that risks a lot of controversy. As an obvious non-Muslim talking about a Muslim country is something I always feel quite wary about as the last thing I’d intend to do is cause offense. But in getting too caught up in the political correctness of topics I think that more often than not this is what makes people lose interest in what it is you’re trying to say.
Anyway after overcoming the initial nerves I think it went OK. No-one likes the sound of their own voice after all, right? So it takes a bit of getting used to. I introduced my research by giving a general overview of Iranian culture as a ‘Culture of Paradoxes’ (yes, its another cliche but at least there’s a good deal of truth in it) and why Iran as an Islamic Republic makes for an interesting study. In being considered to have one of the most repressive Internet censorship regimes in the world Iran seemed like an obvious choice to me and with Persian now estimated to be the 3rd or 4th (depending on sources) most populous blogging languages I saw it as an opportunity to ‘break new ground’ in terms of academia and the fuss about Web 2.0. Justifying your motivations for choosing a research topic are always difficult to explain though aren’t they. You wouldn’t believe the amount of times people have asked me ‘Why Iran?’ Well… why the hell not? It meant I got to go on a nice holiday, make some incredible friends and do something that needed me to use my own initiative more so than picking a topic from a list of other people’s research interests would have. I also think in doing something I’m interested in it made me more enthusiastic about the research process and the laborious writing up of findings.
After a break to catch my breath I moved onto the idea of using the Internet as a platform of communication. I looked particularly at how access to web content has developed over the Internet’s short history in Iran and why initial enthusiasm for its development progressed into suspicion over the impact that western influence may (or may not) have on Iran’s interpretation of the moral codes of Islam. The web’s subversive potential was also discussed here in relation to theories suggesting the Internet is a driver for political change. My purpose here was to highlight the difficulty of refusing to fall into the trap of over generalising about the wider implications or the impact that Internet activity has in the real spaces of a country with a population of over 70 million when there are only really 7.5 million of those regularly accessing web content. I intended to cover a lot of ground during the lecture and so feel that maybe some of this was skipped over too quickly… maybe I could work on that. But nevertheless I think this worked well as it emphasised the importance of the research context and the development of understanding phenomenon not in isolation but rather as more than the sum of its parts.
That's me... Lex Rigby
