June 20th, 2009
Looking for Freedom – again
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.
