Just another dent in the damage…

…but like Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s modern dictator.

After the death of his brother, Basil in 1994 (first in line for Presidency), Bashar left the UK and his studies in ophthalmology to assume the mantle of President in waiting. Six years later his father Hafez al-Assad (in office 1971-2000) died and the new President arose.

Unlike Hafez, Bashar is a believer in the democraticisation of Syria and the liberalisation of its people, but to change a stagnant old-fashioned dictatorship is no easy task and with little (if any) leadership training is Bashar even capable of such a thing? Look at Barack Obama for example, has he actually met his promise of change yet? Hardly, to change anything means changing a system of doing things and we all know how bureaucratic these things can be. Change is difficult – even trying to change information on a webpage at work is complex enough for me. Changing the whole mentality of a nation is big and it’s probably why after a decade of Bashar we haven’t seen much happen.

It’s quite ironic that even the Internet, which Bashar himself introduced, is heavily restricted and is in itself an example of how to ‘deliberalise’ the people, limiting their freedom of expression. Learning about the decision making processes of Syrian politics came from reading his father’s meeting notes. And it was here where he learnt that ’unlike performing eye surgery, running a country like Syria requires a certain comfort with ambiguity’.

November’s edition of the National Geographic magazine featured an awesome piece about Syria and the Assads and is definitely worth taking the time to read.

Syria really is a beautiful country and the BEST place in the world to eat falafel… seriously. Aleppo’s citadel is breathtaking and if you happen to find this dude (on the left) in Damascus stop and have a chat, eat his patties – they’re awesome.

Have a look through this photo gallery too, the images are stunning.

When I began thinking about dissertation topics over two years ago I was met by one particular unenthusiastic criticism due to my lack of knowledge regarding the Persian language. I don’t think she ever really understood my subject or why it was important. it was either that or she was too busy playing around in Second Life to give it more than a second thought (maybe that’s another reason why I hate Second Life so much). But rather than let it drop I developed my ideas and took them elsewhere.

It was during the run up to dissertation proposals that I was becoming increasingly aware of Internet censorship in Iran and the growth of the Iranian blogosphere and decided that I’d like to explore this academically with the hope of encouraging further research or laying the foundations for a PhD later in life. I don’t necessarily think I ever achieved that or ever will, purely because I ran out of steam. It was my own doing. You know when you wrap yourself up in something so intensely for a long period of time that once it’s done you never want to look at it again? It was like that. I got my distinction and that was enough. But I’m beginning to realise that it wasn’t the end, it was only the beginning. The story continues and maybe I should be trying to tell it, in my own words?

I started with the concept of Internet censorship – how it was being censored, who was censoring it and why – and wanted to explore strategies being developed to smash down the system, to stick it to the man, to carry on regardless. But this was before Google Translate (although limited it seems to be serving a basic purpose right now) and with no Persian translator I was forced to restrict my exploration to a minority of weblogs written by Iranians in English. I specifically looked at weblogs because they were accessible and easy to document and analyse. All the data collection would be my own doing and analysed with my own criteria. But what exactly was I trying to find out? How would I use weblogs as an example of anti-censorship or more over a strategy to bypass censorship?

Having an idea about what you want your outcome to be always seems to cloud what you need to do to get there, to prove it let’s say. I wanted to look at the writing styles across a sample of Iranian weblogs to assess how people were saying things without really saying them – to look at the poetic metaphors Iranians so often use to describe all manners of life, love, feelings and even politics. To see whether the deep-rooted cultural norm of separating the private and public spheres applied to anonymous weblogs. But what would I compare these writing styles to? I decided that in order to assess how Internet filtering effects Iranian weblogs written inside Iran I’d need to sample Iranian weblogs written in the diaspora. Those written by the displaced, the deposed or even the die-hards who might be more likely to evade self-censorship given the lack of Internet filtering in the more moderate west.

And so I did and if you’re interested in actually reading the thing it’s available online. It’s called Looking for Freedom: An Exploration of the Iranian Blogosphere (and it’s also available in Google Scholar with a couple of spelling errors – doh). I also kept a wiki going whilst doing my research but I’m afraid my updates have lapsed a little. Some of the work I did here has come spilling back to me this week and become ever more relevant. given how Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, proxy services and weblogs are currently being used in the aftermath of Iran’s distuted election.

Google have been providing their useful Google Translate service for quite a while now but today seems to be a rather special day. They’ve finally released a support for Persian, something I think is much more appropriate than colouring the Google logo green for a day – simply because this is it far more useful to the current online ‘revolution’. It means I can not only translate useful sources such as BBC Persian but also all those Persian blogs I so wanted to read during my dissertation hell.

However, I think it’s important to say that this is a machine translation and of course it’s not perfect. But it’s a start and it means it can be developed and evolve into a practical solution for the spread of information. And, with respect to the theme of my dissertation it may in fact be used as another strategy to overcome online censorship, through enabling Iranians to translate English into Persian.

Facebook are also in on the action and the launch of Apple’s latest iPhone software has introduced support for the Persian script – Read more about this on Is This Ta’arof?.

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.

So it seems Google is ‘officially’ blocked in Iran. Sadly it means that not only will fellow Gmailers have trouble accessing their email accounts but also that Google Reader, which numerous Iranians rely upon to get round government restrictions on Persian weblogs, is also now a no go zone. I have no doubt that the authorities are assuming this to be a more successful strategy of Internet censorship than those previously used with regards to Google searches such as filtering search terms and key words but surely they’re going to realise that this is just taking it too far??

UPDATE – Wait, it seems they have acknowledged their mistake (hat tip: Boing Boing). Apparently the whole episode was made in ‘error’.