Survey results

Hi all. Just wanted to let you know that a paper outlining the results of my 2006 survey of Iranian blog-readers is now available online.

Thanks to the U.K.-based free-speech organization ‘Article 19,’ who were kind enough to provide the hosting, you can view the paper here,
along with an interview giving the basic gist, here.

A New Participant in This Forum

I’m Jonathan Lundqvist – and I’m honored to have been invited to participate in this forum. First let me introduce myself!

Currently I’m finishing up my masters thesis on Iranian blogs and their relationship to the civil society in general and democratization in particular. I was given the opportunity to fund a research trip, by a generous grant from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, to Iran where I spent six weeks around April 2006. My material is mainly lengthy interviews with bloggers that I met during my stay, and I’ve spent most of my time since analyzing them and working on completing the thesis.

I’m particularly interested in what Jordan touched in his previous post about blogging for political mobilization, and a preliminary result of my findings support his theory that bloggers are more likely to change the information landscape rather than create a revolution over night. This more realistic view is – to me – perhaps even preferable to revolutionary change, since it would give democracy a chance of developing within the community itself and thus, hopefully, create institutions that are able to maintain a more solid version of democracy. Well, I’m getting ahead of myself – I look forward to giving you more solid results as they progress.

Normally, I blog on j|turn where I’ve written some posts on Iran and other things on the global public sphere. Again, I’m happy to take part in this attempt to bring some people with similar interests together, and I hope I can contribute to the community.

(To the admin: I took the liberty to create an author for myself in the WordPress-system, to avoid over using the admin-account.)

New Look

Hi Folks! Kamangir is speaking. I just tried to make here look a bit nicer. Please feel free to change the template, but please, do not return to the default one!

Glad to be Here

Hello, my name is Christian and I am interested in the interplay between technology, identity and modernization as an ideological project. This past year I completed an undergraduate thesis on Iranian weblogs entitled “‘We Are Not This Free’: Weblogs, Reform and Modernization in Iran.” This project introduced me to Iranian society and the phenomenon of blogging. I have continued my interest in Iranian blogs since then, renewing my original thesisblog at clalexander.blogspot.com. I am excited to be a part of Sounds Iranian and look forward to collaborating with others interested in investigating these topics.

Just the beginning

Hi bacheha. My name’s Jordan – I’m the Canadian guy who did some recent online research on Iranian weblog readers (you can still view my now-defunct survey here). Since this is a fairly new area of research – floating somewhere between sociology, political science, international relations and media studies – I think any of us who are interested in the Iranian blogging-world can benefit from this new forum Hamid has been so kind to set up for us. Hopefully, we can use this space to define terms, pool findings, discuss trends, and even delve into a bit of theory. The fact that this is such uncharted territory makes it, in my humble opinion, all the more exciting (at least for a bookwormy cerebral type like me).

Anyway, I look forward to talking with all of you and beginning to trade ideas. Also, big thanks again to Hamid for putting this blog together. Without him, this simply would not have happened. ‘Mokhlessim’, Hamid! ; )

What is all about?

Sounds Iranian is a collective blog to make a dynamic bridge between all people doing research on Iranian blogs.They can exchange ideas,coordinate projects and even date each other…
I believe that this blog can become a model to develop projects.

ps:Arash Kamangir,Iranian blogger,proposed our blog’s name:Sounds Iranian