Social Networking and the Making of a Civil Rights Movement
The widespread use of cell phones, SMS, Tweeter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, personal weblogs, political and cultural websites, and the Internet editions of leading reformist and conservative newspapers, skyrocketed in significant portions of the society in the two decades leading to the June 2009 presidential election. Mousavi was not initiating any cyberspace strategy. He was banking on it.
In a remarkable way the rise of computer literacy in the early part of the 21st century in Iran is comparable to the rise of newspapers and magazines early in the 19th century, when one of the first groups of Iranian students that were sent to Europe brought with them the first printing machine and with it founded the first periodicals, whereby expanding the spectrum of the public domain, of the collective consciousness of a society on the verge of monumental changes. Almost a century later, during the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911, the press had experienced such an organic growth that it played an instrumental role in the successful making of the most massive social uprising in the entire region, whereby an absolutist monarchy was forced to accept a constitution. By the time of the Constitutional Revolution, the press had helped expand, define, and circumscribe the boundaries of the public domain beyond anything achieved before it. The post-electoral crisis of the June 2009 presidential election echoed and expanded those momentous occasions early in the 19th and then again early in the 20th century.
What we have witnessed over the last two decades, however, which came to a dramatic crescendo in the course of the presidential crisis of 2009, is the steady and exponential expansion of the public domain into the cyberspace, to the point of having a catalytic, if not overwhelming, effect over the physical space. In this respect the question of the access to a personal computer or computer literacy is entirely irrelevant, just as regular literacy was irrelevant earlier in the 19th and 20th century, for all it took was just one person per family, or a few per neighborhood to cover the entire pubic domain. We have accounts of the early 20th century when newspapers were read on street corners to a gathering crowd; and I have vivid memories of my own childhood in the late 1950's and early 1960's in southern Iran where one television set would serve an entire neighborhood. Regular literacy early in the 19th century and computer literacy early in the 21st century may indeed be identical percentagewise--common to both remains their catalytic effect on the society at large, which is now globally wired.
The effective use of social networking in the course of the 2009 presidential campaign was predicated on the preceding three decades of the Islamic Republic, where an overwhelmingly young population was increasingly drawn into the electronically savvy age. When Mir Hossein Mousavi declared to his followers that har Irani yek setad/every Iranian [is] a campaign headquarter, he was banking on the resourcefulness of his young admirers.
Though it was in the offing long before the June 2009 presidential election, theIranian Civil Society/Jame'eh-yeh Madani rapidly extended into the cyberspace, with political protest as a modus operandi of civil society and civil protest.
Did the Facebook save the Iranian civil right movement or the Iranian civil rights movement save the Facebook--suddenly became a proverbial adage that tilted on the side of the Iranian users of the coffeehouse.
Almost a century before Facebook gave a new cyberspace meaning to the term "social networking," in his Web of Group Affiliations (1922), Georg Simmel (1958-1918) suggested that while social groups are composed of individuals, it is through those group affiliations that we become and are defined as social persona. Without seeing something in different contexts, it is difficult to define it for what it is. Simmel suggested that each new group that we join or with which we become affiliated defines us in what was potential but unrealized in us. Our individuality, or social persona, to be more exact, is born at the center of the different confluences that social situate and publicly affect and us. In the Iranian context, social networking has made people more social than insular; while the fear in North America and Western Europe is that the same social networking is providing a false and fictive sociability in lieu of the real thing.
Iranians have used the cyberspace to turn their politics of despair into a dramaturgy of hope.
-- Hamid Dabashi, Social Networking and the Making of a Civil Rights Movement. November 12, 2009
http://www.socialtextjournal.org/periscope/2009/11/social-networking-and-the-making-of-a-civil-rights-movement.php
