The Middle East: Social Media Revolution in Public and Private Communication

 

Ehsan Shahghasemi 

University of Tehran, shahghasemi@ut.ac.ir

Michael H. Prosser

University of Virginia, michaelhprosser@hotmail.com

ABSTRACT

Interculturally, social media’s impact has been twofold. Social media have provided unprecedented opportunities for members of different cultures to get to know each other directly and hence they have helped people to demystify their intercultural beliefs. At the same time social media have made poisonous hate speech and xenophobic comments communicated to other cultures which is followed by backfire from hated people. This causes a chain of increasing hate speech which eventually finds its way into practice.

The changes in the media landscape as they are related to intercultural communication are what Shutter (2014: p. 478) calls a new field of inquiry, labelled as “intercultural new media studies,” which consists of two fields: (1) new media and intercultural communication theory and (2) culture and new media. The study of social communities is extremely multidisciplinary, requiring expertise from communication, computer science, sociology, behavioral sciences, mathematics, and statistics

Those who have a relevant position in a social media platform organization have access to the most personal information one can conceive. They know what an individual looks like, how he or she lives, whom he or she loves or hates, where he or she goes, what he or she thinks. Doing research on social media gives us better accuracy, particularly in the case of sensitive issues of intercultural communication in the Middle East. In this article, we evaluate different aspects of social media in the Middle East, though with a critical view, the concept of “Middle East” is itself problematic. Middle East is middle east to another construct which is the West.

Fruitful study of social media in the Middle East necessarily includes considerations there of ethnicity and race, religion, identity and language, the economy, and history and wars in the region and elsewhere. 

Key words: Fundamentalism; Hate Speech; Historicity; Intercultural New Media Studies; Middle East; Social Media

Introduction

The so-called Web2 technologies have brought about a revolution in public and private communication. These technological changes could be predicted as the Internet was developing fast during the 1990s. There were many preliminary social networking tools like Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) which could be traced back to the early 1970s, but, it was the cultural, sociological, economic and political impact of these new technologies which proved to be unprecedented for politicians, businesses, academics, and others. Social media are powerful, but their power is not manifested in the conventional ways one could have predicted 20 years ago. Estimations show that by the year 2014, the number of people who were members of at least one social networking service had passed 2 billion and this number was increasing (Kemp, 2015). 

Social media have left a profound political impact. Things that now happen –particularly in the previously non-democratic societies- could hardly been imagined only two decades ago. As social media give individuals the power of online participation based on –with some reservations- equal opportunities, marginalized and isolated groups are no longer oppressed in silence and they can reach out to the wider society and even bring their plight before the global audience. Many of such instances include the massacre of Rohingya people in Myanmar, relocating, harassing and killing of Sampang Shia people in Indonesia and enslaving Izadi women and children in Iraq that raised global awareness and distaste and pushed the governments to simply “do something.” Social media also have provided a platform for election campaigns and polling surveys which can give the authorities better feedforward and help them make Read More . . .

The Pornography of Poverty: Celebrities’ Sexual Appeal at Service to the Poor?

 ABSTRACT

The mid-ninetieth century witnessed a dramatic rise in celebrity culture. Celebrities from all walks of life popped up everywhere in the industrialized world and -through media- flew to underdeveloped nations. As celebrity itself is a construct, smart publicists started to look for new ways of enhancing celebrities’ reputation. Among many ways, humanitarian work proved to have had a decisively positive effect on celebrities’ place in the public eyes. Henceforth, we have witnessed celebrities intervene in different spheres of professional work like relief, medicine, education, gender equality, public policy, etc., in which they have no expertise. This paper argues that celebrities’ engagements in different spheres of action is designed to serve celebrities themselves, and not those who are in need. As a result, we can increasingly see that some celebrities publish adds appealing followers to donate in exchange for nude photos of him/herself. Since celebrities work to serve themselves, they resort to images and image making, instead of dealing with the problem of poverty itself; this culminates in a situation in which we the audience concentrate on the celebrity, and not the problem he or she claims is trying to solve. I, therefore, call this pornography of poverty.  

 

Keywords: Pornography of Humanitarianism; Celebrity Culture; Pornography of poverty; Iconoclast

 

 

Introduction: The Image and the Pornography

We have been bombarded by images of all kinds for more than a century, but the past two decades have witnessed a big surge in image production and distribution. It is now too hard to avoid the influx of images, whether on the screen of our cellphones or the electronic billboards, big mal monitors, bus stop boards, or even taxi seat monitors. The more prosperous a country is, the more its citizen will have to deal with this influx of images. One recurring kind of image that we see these days, is celebrity images. Most brands now are well aware of the value celebrities have to us and therefore, on most ads, a celebrity is smiling at us and invites us to buy something -or some idea. 

Western philosophy, however, has been always pessimistic towards “the image.” In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato presents most of his major philosophical assumptions: his belief that the world revealed by our senses is not the real world but only a poor copy of it, and that the real world can only be apprehended intellectually:

And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavoring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice? (The Republic, 360 B.C.E, quoted in Jowett, 1991, 258).

 

In 330 B.C.E Alexander the Great took Persepolis and his soldiers burned this monumental city, but not before they made sure faces of most sculptures were destroyed. They might have known that in ancient Iran the king was in the likeness of God and hence a prince who had a scar on his face could not become a king (Shahghasemi and Tafazzoli, 2013). These incidents happened four centuries before Christ, but the pessimism towards the image remained even after the spread of Christianity. 

Icons (Greek eiko ̄n, ‘image’) were originally small paintings of Christian Read More . . . 

The Pornography of Networked Feminism: The Case of Iranian “Feminist” Instagramers

ABSTRACT

From the beginning, feminism was bent to shatter stereotypes and create a new vision of womanhood in the mainly male-dominated society. One important endeavor of feminism has been to oppose the objectification of the female body. In the male-dominated culture, femininity is mostly associated with young -and sexy- body of the female object. Surprisingly, in the past decade or so, we have witnessed a new wave of feminism which contradictorily tries to appeal to the old notion of the objectified young sexy female body in order to fight the very phenomena of oppression and objectification of the female body. In this study, I will have a review of four Iranian feminist pages on Instagram to show that femininity in these pages is mainly limited to young, beautiful, and sexy women. It seems older women (20% of female population) and even young women in bad living conditions who consist a majority of women in the society are systematically omitted from these pages just because this networked feminism perceives them not appealing to male audiences. 

 

Keywords: Pornography of Feminism; Feminism; Male Gaze; Critical Sociology; Iran; Instagram

 

 

Over the past decade, Iranians have shown a great deal of interest in different social networking sites and platforms. After Telegram was blocked by Iranian authorities in 2017, more than 40 million telegram users looked for an alternative, and many of them migrated to Instagram. Instagram was launched in October 2010 as an image-sharing service and has gained popularity ever since. In December 2014, Instagram had over 300 million users worldwide and, in September 2015, 400 million people in the world had a presence on Instagram and shared photos and videos (Russmann & Svensson, 2016). As of summer 2020, Instagram has a user base of more than 1 billion. As Instagram is currently not filtered in Iran, the number of Instagram users has always been on the rise in Iran. Now there are more than 24 million Iranian Instagram users -roughly 30% of Iran’s population. Maybe the Iranian authorities thought that the depoliticizing and consumerist nature of Instagram content will lead Iranian users to non-political spheres. 

It is true indeed, but only in the short run. As soon as the users adopt the logic of consumerism, they would come back with financial requests, which the country cannot satisfy as it is economically fragile and under the heaviest sanctions (see, for example, Shahghasemi (2017) and Shahghasemi and Prosser (2019)). This would lead to other social discontents that might harass the government and this is why I think their idea was not a good one. Moreover, Telegram is mainly a text-based platform while Instagram is image-based. This means a Telegram user should first translate written words into a “meaningful” code before consuming it, while an Instagram user directly consumes the image contents Instagram provides. Therefore, Instagram content frees the brain from the burden of continuous work and this is exactly why we like Instagram wandering more than book reading.

As a result, in the past two years, we have witnessed a lowering of public taste Read More . . .