625076
research-article2016
CTP0010.1177/2057047315625076Communication and the PublicKhazraee and Losey
Original Research Article
Evolving repertoires: Digital media use in contentious politics
Communication and the Public 2016, Vol. 1(1) 39–55 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/2057047315625076 ctp.sagepub.com
Emad Khazraee Kent State University, USA
James Losey
Stockholm University, Sweden
Abstract The spread of the Internet coupled with knowledgeable users has led to the use of digital media as a tool for advocacy and activism. Building on theoretical foundations of eventful histories and digital formations, this article investigates the interrelated nature of contentious politics and digital technologies. Our analysis documents the eventful history of changing digital repertoires of contention in the context of messaging, blogging, and social networking sites in Iran. We argue that investigating single moments of protest offers only snapshots of how digital technologies are used in contentious politics, and entails the risk of focusing on a single platform rather than the mosaic of online and offline repertoires. We demonstrate that documenting event histories challenges the assumptions of the emancipatory nature of a specific technology by revealing the changing efficacy of repertoires during different moments of contention; therefore, we should avoid assigning stable causal relations between digital technologies and the democratization processes of societies.
Keywords Collective action, contentious politics, digital formation, digital repertoires, eventful history
Introduction During the 2000s, the Iranian blogosphere developed as a national and international platform for vibrant discussion and political dissent. “Blogestan,” as it is often called, emerged as a leading platform for contentious politics. Although this communicative space has declined in recent years, blogging is one of several platforms for challenging state power over information in Iran. For example, Blogestan offered a primary platform for contentious issues
such as feminism in Iran and discussions have dispersed and grown on other platforms such as Facebook (Faris & Rahimi, 2015; Novak & Khazraee, Corresponding author: Emad Khazraee, College of Communication and Information, Kent State University, 1125 Risman Drive, Kent, OH 44242, USA. Email:
[email protected]
40 2014). At the same time, while Twitter was not used as a major tool during the 2009 upheavals inside Iran, it was broadly used outside Iran to circulate news about the event. Four years later during the 2013 presidential election, supporters of reformist movements were dominant in the Persian Twitterverse, supporting the elected president Hasan Rouhani (Ma & Khazraee, 2014, September; Sanjari & Khazraee, 2014). A recent study of Iranian blogging activity documents compounding reasons for the decline of Blogestan including the impact of censorship as well as the emergence of social media use and other communications channels (Giacobino, Abadpour, Anderson, Petrossian, & Nellemann, 2014). Evolving practices due to the changing availability of communications tools and their efficacy in the face of government control present a need to reexamine digital media in contentious politics. A growing number of scholars highlight the role of digital media in facilitating networked collective action. Castells (2012) offers an optimistic framing of networked organizing, and individually brokered participation is described by Bennett and Segerberg (2013). Milan (2015) highlights the role of social media in the formation of collective identity. However, while scholars discuss the role of networked communications technology, research about collective action often focuses on single historical moments or single technologies. Howard and Hussain (2012) document the role of social media in national discourse linked with international advocacy in Egypt and Tunisia, and similarly, Bennett and Segerberg (2013) conduct a lateral review of technology by different groups in moments of time. Some scholars also highlight how the affordances of the Internet benefit not only activists but authorities as well, yet the focus of technology as a target of contention is underexplored (Pearce, 2015). Digital formations can be used as a lens through which to study technology as a target of contentious politics. Sassen (2005) defines digital formations as social logics that shape, and are shaped by, technologies. We argue that time is an important factor in understanding the trajectory of digital formation. How communications technologies are used changes over time. The framework of contentious politics—organized actors in opposition with elites
Communication and the Public 1(1) and authorities—evolves through changing tools and repertoires of action (Tarrow, 2011; Tilly & Tarrow, 2007). Akhavan (2013) documents how the communications landscape in Iran has evolved over the recent decade. Significantly, Giacobino et al. (2014) document how state censorship combined with the rise of new communications platforms have contributed to the decline of Blogestan. The growth and decline of Blogestan suggests two important elements of the use of digital media in contentious politics. First, a given communications medium exists within a sphere of additional and often complimentary communications channels. At the same time, while communication practices change over time, the sophistication of government restrictions on communications in Iran has also evolved. Second, this coevolution of communications practices by political organizers and efforts to centralize control of platforms by a government illustrate how digital communications platforms themselves can also be a point of contention. In this article, we outline a framework for understanding the interrelated nature of contentious politics and new technological developments. Our goal is to develop a theoretical explanation of the evolution of activists’ digital repertoires in response to authorities’ reactions and repressive measures through the study of three interrelated cases. This approach builds on existing research by investigating the use of the Internet in contentious politics in Iran since the beginning of the 21st century and analyzes the eventful histories of critical incidents in the ongoing tension between activists and authority forces (McAdam & Sewell, 2001; Sewell, 1996, 2005). In our analysis, we document changing digital repertoires of contention by activists. We argue that the interrelationship between digital technologies and contentious politics cannot be understood through teleological perspectives, which have already assigned an outcome to these complex sociotechnical processes. The volatile nature of such interactions can only be addressed through a relational perspective that considers the entangled and context-specific nature of social and technical logics. Our investigation into the digital repertoires of contention in Iran suggests that future development of repertoires depends on prior events within a
Khazraee and Losey specific context (Sewell, 2005, p. 102) and on the changing efficacy of tools. The efficacy of a given tool for a specific purpose changes in response to state reactions to collective behaviors of contentious actors. Therefore, we argue for greater nuance in comparing the use of technology in collective action between two different contexts. In the following sections, we first discuss the notions of contentious politics, eventful temporalities and digital formations, and subsequently present how they can be used and understood in the context of the contentious politics of messaging, blogging, and social network repertoires in Iran.
Coevolution of contention and technology Contentious politics describes actors organized in opposition to elites and authorities through tools and repertoires of action. From Marx to more contemporary scholars, a common thread in social movement and activism scholarship is the role of collective behavior. One pillar of social movements is identity formation among collective actors (Della Porta & Diani, 2006; Tarrow, 2011), but contentious politics also focuses on the discursive struggle of collective actors that may otherwise meet an academic’s definition of a social movement. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001) define contentious politics based on collective interaction: episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claim and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claim and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interest of at least one of the claimants. (p. 5)
Claim making performances, or repertoires, evolve with time, place, and available technologies (Tilly, 2006). This article seeks to investigate the contextual conditions of how specific tools are incorporated into repertoires of contention and how these practices adapt over time.
Eventful temporalities Temporality provides a historical perspective to contentious politics allowing for an understanding of the
41 conditions that motivate the evolution of repertoires (McAdam & Sewell, 2001). It also provides the understanding of why repertoires can differ according to their contexts. Sewell introduced the concept of eventful temporality to challenge the conceptualization of temporality in sociology as teleological or experimental. A teleological approach undermines both the role of the actions and reactions that constitute a historical happening and the conditions that form or constrain those actions and reactions. Rather, it assigns the cause of the happening to abstract transhistorical processes that lead one state to some future historical state (Sewell, 2005, p. 84). An eventful approach rejects the assumption of homogeneous development of human behavior in socioculturally different places, emphasizing instead the power of events in history, and sees “the course of history as determined by a succession of largely contingent events” (Sewell, 2005, p. 83). An eventful conception of temporality suggests that events—as sequences of occurrences—transform social and cultural structures (Sewell, 1996): “The eventful conception of temporality, then, assumes that social relations are characterized by path dependency, temporally heterogeneous causalities, and global contingency” (Sewell, 2005, p. 102). The core explanatory mode in this approach is that social actions reconfigure structures. An eventful concept of temporality suggests that events have the power to transform social causality, and that these transformations are temporally heterogeneous. In the context of the evolution of a repertoire of action, temporal heterogeneity suggests that similar social movements develop different repertoires of action and we should be cautious about casual comparisons without thorough investigation of a given context. Sewell (1996) describes how multiple overlapping and relatively autonomous structures govern social practices. Those structures are simultaneously composed of cultural schemas, the distribution of resources, and modes of power. He writes, Cultural schemas provide actors with meanings, motivations, and recipes for social action. Resources provide them (differentially) with the means and stakes of action. Modes of power regulate action by specifying what schemas are legitimate, by determining which persons and groups have access to which resources,
42 and by adjudicating conflicts that arise in the course of action. (Sewell, 1996, p. 842)
Della Porta (2008) extends the notion of eventful temporality to eventful protest, which has relational transformative impacts on the very movements that carry the eventful protest. She argues that “protest events […] constitute processes during which collective experiences develop in the interactions of different individual and collective actors, that with different roles and aims take part in it” (Della Porta, 2008, p. 30). In this context, events “become turning points in structural change, concentrated moments of political and cultural creativity when the logic of historical development is reconfigured by human action but by no means abolished” (McAdam & Sewell, 2001, p. 102). The emergence of pervasive information and communication technologies (ICTs) affected the temporal dimension of structural changes. Kaun (2015) discusses the consequences of temporal structuring by media technologies for protest movements under the influence of market ideology. She emphasizes that the shift of media practices from mechanical speed to digital immediacy entails a disjunction of temporal regimes suggested by accelerated information-based capitalism and the temporalities of participatory democracy. Therefore, we argue, that the temporality of eventful protest should be seen in conjunction with regimes of time dictated by ICTs. In order to better understand the coevolution of a repertoire of actions, we have to consider eventful history as a framework for analysis. From this perspective, we trace how different events in different contexts of contention followed various paths and why. Through this approach, “instead of a short-run generation of strain, followed by protests, we find a long-run transformation of the structures of power and collective action” (Tilly, 1975, p. 254).
Changing repertoires Tilly (2006) describes repertoires as the changing practices, both over time and between geographic settings, of contentious politics; he also describes how repertoires evolve with changing communications technologies. Scholars approach these differences with different foci. Some scholars have highlighted
Communication and the Public 1(1) the lowered cost for individual actions. For example, Bimber et al. (2012) describe how “the Internet’s endto-end structure is especially well suited to innovation and customization at the scale of the individual member” (p. 47). Bennett and Segerberg (2011) argue that digital media supports different organizing logics. Contrasted with traditional “organizationally brokered” movements, “digitally networked connective action … uses broadly inclusive, easily personalized action frames as a basis for technology-assisted networking” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2011, p. 771). Other scholars describe new performances and draw links between historical and contemporary organizing. In studies of the Occupy movement, Costanza-Chock (2012) describes “transmedia mobilization” in which actors communicate across platforms including online and offline means; similarly, Wolfson (2014) observes that BURN! and IndyMedia are built on media infrastructure rather than on a single platform such a Twitter or Facebook, where some scholars focus their work today. These practices build on past movements and adapt in relation to authority. IndyMedia incorporated practices from BURN! and ELZN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [The Zapatista Army of National Liberation]), constituting a paradigm of contentious politics developed from three generations of leftist movements in the United States (Wolfson, 2014). Costanza-Chock (2012) documents the adoption of the People’s Mic in Occupy camps, which “consists of one individual speaking in single sentences or sentence fragments, their words repeated after each pause by all those assembled,” as a practice borrowed from 1980s antinuclear rallies and the 1990s Global Justice Movement (p. 7). The latter approach better contextualizes the historical conditions of how a given tool is used within contentious politics. Sewell (1996) claims that social change occurs through clustered and relatively intense episodes rather than a smooth and linear process, and argues that “lumpiness, rather than smoothness, is the texture [of] historical temporality” (p. 843). Also, eventful temporality assumes that “events are normally path dependent, that is, that what has happened at an earlier point in time will affect the possible outcomes of a sequence of events occurring at a later point in time” (Sewell, 2005, p. 100).
Khazraee and Losey Tarrow (2011) argues that such eventful histories occur during cycles of contention: [A] phase of heightened conflict across the social system, with rapid diffusion of collective action from more mobilized to less mobilized sectors, a rapid pace of innovation in the forms of contention employed, the creation of new or transformed collective action frames, a combination of organized and unorganized participation, and sequences of intensified information flow and interaction between challengers and authorities. (p. 199)
Therefore, we argue that the eventful moments in the context of social movements can be recognized by their transformative nature, and by periods of increased innovation. Sewell (2005) argues that “societies or social formations or social systems are continually shaped and reshaped by the creativity and stubbornness of their human creators” (p. 112). We conclude that the innovation and creativity of the participants plays an important role during the intensified moments of events for the inception of digital formations.
Digital formation and the coevolution of repertoires A technology-centric perspective to studying social phenomena uses technology predominantly to explain contemporary social change and production. However, repertoires evolve both with changing technologies and in response to authority reaction. For example, the use of the People’s Mic within Occupy events emerged due to bans on the use of amplification (Costanza-Chock, 2012). To avoid such purely technological interpretation of social phenomena, Latham and Sassen (2005a) suggest that we have to recognize the socially embeddedness of technologies and the variability of their outcomes. Developments of digital technologies contributed to “sociodigitzation, the process whereby activities and their histories in a social domain are drawn up into digital codes, databases, images, and text” (Latham & Sassen, 2005a, p. 3). This process transforms the scale of many social processes affecting national information and communication regulations, as well as notions of territorial boundaries and cross-boundaries. Latham and Sassen (2005a) argue
43 that sociodigitization can be both transformative and constitutive in terms of social relationships. It means sociodigitization can reshape social relations or even produce new social domains. The concept of digital formations is suggested by Latham and Sassen to capture these transformations and productions (Latham & Sassen, 2005b; Sassen, 2005, 2012). This concept helps us to better understand information technology as a social force. Therefore, it considers information technology as a part of the process of social formation, rather than as a stable external causal force. Digital formation “emphasizes that form emerges through complex social processes and changing relationships” (Latham & Sassen, 2005a, p. 9). Latham and Sassen (2005a) describe three dimensions of formation: organization, interaction, and spatializing. Organization means the ordering of practices, content, and relations among actors, while interaction focuses on the flow of exchange and transmission among the actors. Spatializing concerns the digital staging (presentation) of content and social relations, that are involved in the process of digital formation. Latham and Sassen (2005a) suggest that we can understand the intersection of digital technologies and social logics by three types of analytic operations. In these three analytic operations, they suggest, we should respectively investigate digital/social imbrications, mediating practices and cultures, and key properties of digital networks that contribute to destabilizing existing power hierarchies (pp. 19–22). Sassen (2005) identifies three properties of digital networks: decentralized access/distributed outcomes, simultaneity, and interconnectivity. However, she argues that these properties can contribute to strikingly different outcomes. Yang (2006) used the lens of digital formation to discuss the coevolutionary dynamics of the Internet and civil society in China. He identifies two kinds of interactions between civil society and the Internet: first, those social interactions which are initiated in the real world and moved to Internet; second, interactions which are initiated on the Internet and then moved to social world. He argues that both types have transnational dimensions. He discusses how an environmental non-governmental organization
44 (NGO) initiated through social relations in offline environments then moved into the Internet realm as an example of the first type of interaction. A US-based Chinese language website (New Thread) is an example of Internet-originated interaction that extended to the realm of social action inside Chinese academia. He argues that these interactions lead to new digital formations in two major kinds: virtual public spheres and Web-based organizations. Both digital formations and eventful histories offer perspectives on the transformations of social structures. Together, these complimentary perspectives provide a framework for understanding how digital repertoires develop as a result of “sequences of occurrences that [result] in [the] transformation of structures” (Sewell, 1996, p. 843). This approach effectively documents the critical events and changing repertoires of communications technology in contentious politics in Iran.
Methods and data collection This article incorporates a case-oriented approach to challenge teleological arguments about the emancipatory role of digital media in contentious politics. Following Sewell (2005), we argue that the use of the Internet in contentious politics should be conceptualized in the context of eventful temporality emphasizing sociotechnical dynamics which temporally develop as path dependent, causally heterogeneous, and contingent. We also highlight the transformative nature of events that reconfigure structures. Within this framework, we argue that the contention over the resistance infrastructure cannot be discussed teleologically. Case studies have been an important part of social and political research and significantly contributed to our understanding of both disciplines (Vennesson, 2008). Case studies in social science have been the subject of debates, especially in the recent years (Davis, 2005; George & Bennett, 2005; Gerring, 2007; Trachtenberg, 2006). Following the literature on the definition of a case (Eckstein, 1975; George & Bennett, 2005; Jervis, 1990; Ragin & Becker, 1992), we define a case as a phenomenon which is selected and conceptualized by researchers in place of a broader class of phenomena to be analyzed
Communication and the Public 1(1) empirically to understand the interrelations of causes and effects. It is important to note that case is a theoretical category and the boundaries of cases depend on theoretical conceptualizations and choices of researchers. Therefore, cases can be from the past and multiple data collection strategies can be considered valid. Case study is a research strategy which focuses on the in-depth investigation of one or a small number of phenomena (or events) to identify the configuration of each of the cases in order to achieve a broader understanding of a larger set of similar phenomena through developing a theoretical explanation (Ragin, 2000). The goal of this article is to develop a theoretical explanation through studying three interrelated cases. Moreover, as Bennett (2004) mentions, “researchers use case studies to develop and evaluate theories, as well as to formulate hypotheses or explain particular phenomena by using theories and causal mechanisms” (p. 21). Because we are interested in fleshing out the causal mechanisms involved in the evolution of repertoires, we believe a case-oriented approach is justified. For this article, we identified three of the most contested digital technologies that were used as part of repertoires of contentious politics in Iran: short messaging system (SMS), blogs, and social networking sites (SNSs). Since our primary interest is to understand the role of events, we created a catalog of event data around the interruptions and transformations of these technologies. We used process-tracing (George & Bennett, 2005) and paid attention to the development of events in order to understand causal mechanisms in play for the evolution of repertoires. We traced processes that led to new digital formations, and those that made tools and performances ineffective. To collect event data, we used multiple sources such as newspapers, news websites, news wires, Internet sources, annual and periodical reports by public and private institutions such as Small Media,1 Measurement Lab,2 Freedom House,3 the Berkman Center for Internet and Society,4 and the OpenNet Initiative5 to construct our catalog of events. In the absence of systematic reports which monitor networked communication in Iran, especially for earlier years, we mostly relied on news sources. Since 2013, Small Media has released monthly Iranian Internet
45
Khazraee and Losey Infrastructure and Policy Reports. Additionally, network measurement tools such as those hosted by the Measurement Lab, the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI),6 and Renesys7 provide reports of network interruptions in Iran. These reports are valuable sources of information for creating a chronology of contention around ICTs. Earl et al. (2004) discuss two potential sources of bias associated with event data: selection and description. Selection bias means that not all events are covered by a given source, and description bias refers to how well and how objectively events are described by sources. We attempted to avoid these biases by diversifying our sources and having an inclusive approach to selecting the resources. To avoid description bias, we triangulated among different sources to get a more accurate image of events. Finally, to make sure that we have an inclusive catalog of events, we shared it with a group of experts who have been involved in monitoring networked communications in Iran in the past few years. After compiling our catalog of events, we used process-tracing (George & Bennett, 2005) for each case study to understand the possible causal mechanism and to identify the sociotechnical forces involved in the transformation of socio-cultural structures. Olzak (1989) argues that “the strategy of studying events uses more information about the dynamics of change in social movements than do strategies that treat movements as unitary phenomena” (p. 120). We created a chronological list of events/incidents for each case and filled the periods between and around each event with the records we found in our different sources of this study. Following the eventful temporality and digital formations lenses, we paid special attention to the critical moments in the trajectories of repertories and the transformation of social, technical, political, and cultural structures. We attempted to identify the pathdependency of each step in the evolution of repertoires. Finally, we summarized our findings in a table presented at the end of each case.
Case studies The cases selected represent significant event temporalities in the use of digital media in Iran and provide
an in-depth understanding of historical processes. This section examines the eventful development of three digital formations. First, we review the use of SMS in Iran and how it was used in the repertoire of collective action. We discuss how, during the eventful moment of the 2009 uprisings, the path of development of this formation changed. In the second case, we discuss the use of blogs for activists. Finally, we review changes in the use of SNSs in Iran.
Messaging repertoires The government-owned Telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI) launched the first mobile telephony service in Iran in 1992. Private sector networks first entered the market on a very limited scale in 2004 with Talia operator and in 2005 with Irancell in a partnership with MTN (one of the main carriers in the Middle East and Africa). Although Irancell gained a considerable share of the cellphone market in Iran, TCI remained the dominant carrier based on subscriptions (Keramati & Ardabili, 2011). Total cellphone subscriptions increased from below 20 million users in 2006 to over 60 million subscribers today (Google Public Data).8 In urban areas, the vast majority of residents have a mobile phone (Howard, 2010, p. 4), and texting via the SMS became a popular platform for informal communication and holiday greetings. The volume of holiday traffic—hundreds of millions of messages—became an important source of revenue for TCI.9 As urban penetration grew, SMS networks developed as a medium for politically sensitive content such as the circulation of political jokes in 2006 around the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Cullum, 2010). Following the election, SMS became a platform for political satire. The pervasive use of cellular phones led to the use of SMS by young Iranians campaigning for the 2009 presidential elections,10 and as a platform for informing personal networks about rallies and campaign developments. Additionally, one of the teams working for the Mousavi’s campaign, the candidate who was challenging the incumbent, utilized an SMSbased system for election monitoring and ad-hoc exit polling by mobile phones (Howard, 2010). The success of SMS as a platform for oppositional political
46 organization led to individual telecommunications services becoming a focal point of contention. On the election day, 8 hours before polling stations were scheduled to open on 12 June 2009, the government shutdown the SMS system throughout the country.11 As one reporter noted: “The text messaging that is the nervous system of the opposition was shut down, along with universities, web sites and newspapers the government regarded as hostile” (Worth & Fathi, 2009, as cited in Howard, 2010, p. 148). As noted by Howard (2010), one of the major motivations of disabling mobile phone services besides disrupting the communication of activists was to make it impossible to run independent exit polling, thus “discouraging any organized measurement of how rigged a contemporary election may be” (p. 5). Shortly after the disputed election, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Iranian government acquired advanced interception devices for monitoring mobile communication and SMS during the months before the election from Nokia and Siemens.12 Nokia confirmed that the company provided interception technologies for voice calls in Iran, but they denied the allegation that they provided deep packet inspection devices to the Iranian government.13 The news of Nokia’s cooperation with the Iranian government for surveilling telecommunications networks created a significant reaction inside and outside Iran. Iranian users responded by boycotting Nokia cellphones which at the time had a large cellular handset market share in Iran. Through pamphlets and emails, Green movement supporters encouraged other citizens to join the boycott movement, and later reports confirmed that the boycott movement resulted in reducing Nokia’s share of the cellphone market in Iran.14 Iranians also boycotted using SMS in Iran to reduce TCI revenue from SMS and ceased sending SMS holiday greetings. As The Guardian reported: “The SMS boycott, meanwhile, has apparently forced TCI into drastic price hikes. The cost of an SMS has doubled in recent days. Protesters view the move as a victory.”15 The two boycott movements had two separate outcomes. First, Western telecom companies became very cautious in selling communication monitoring and interception devices to Iran; however, Chinese companies
Communication and the Public 1(1) such as Huawei later filled the gap.16 Second, people reduced the use of SMS both to reduce TCI income and to protect themselves because it was clear their communication would be monitored. The Iranian government recognized the efficacy of SMS communications by protestors and poll observers and began increasing their control over the networks to combat opposition organizers. For example, the government would silence SMS services in areas where demonstrations were anticipated. By acquiring advanced monitoring technologies, the government began censoring specific texts. In 2014, during the period when Iran’s national currency dramatically lost its value, keywords such as “dollar” were filtered. Additionally, in combating the practice of political satire on SMS communications, keywords such as “Ahmadinejad” was censored.17 Geographic outages and selective censorship undermined the use of SMS as a tool for contentious politics. Users were unable to trust the networks as a viable means of political communication. The adoption of smartphones coincided with the emergence of new messaging repertoires with less government control and lower consumer costs. Individuals began using messaging services such as Viber, WhatsApp, LINE, Kik, and Telegram as alternatives to SMS. Furthermore, some of these apps offer enough encryption to increase the difficultly of government interception and censorship. Because these messaging services cannot be terminated without turning off mobile and Internet communication infrastructures, these apps are beyond the direct control of the Iranian government. Although communications blackouts are possible during brief periods of tension, continual Internet and mobile blackouts result in political, social, and economic costs. Furthermore, these apps are mostly free, and therefore are cheaper to use than regular SMS services in Iran while also incorporating new functionality such as the sharing of images and multimedia content. These peer-to-peer messaging applications have seen a surge of popularity in Iran, and Viber reports that Iranians are the top subscribers to its service. Individuals organize messaging groups to share specific types of information about a variety of topics from health care to political jokes.
47
Khazraee and Losey Table 1. Summary of messaging repertoires. Contentious use of SMS
Messaging repertoires
Authority response
Technological changes
•• Use of SMS as a mechanism to circulate information •• Political campaign •• Exit poll/poll monitoring
•• Terminate SMS service •• Monitor communications •• Censor keywords
•• Introduction of mobile telephony •• Availability of Short Message Service
Digital formation
Emergent repertoires
Authority response
Technological changes
•• Boycotting those who sold monitoring technologies •• Stopping use of SMS for unnecessary communication to reduce TCI revenue •• Moving alternative platforms such as WhatsApp, Viber, and Telegram
•• Temporary mobile blackouts •• Evaluate blocking services
•• Emergence of P2P messaging apps
SMS: short messaging system; TCI: Telecommunication Company of Iran.
This emergent digital formation—a messaging app creating a social environment for information sharing beyond current government control—introduces a new point of contention. The issue of filtering these new messaging apps is a major conflict between newly elected moderate president, Hasan Rouhani, and conservative leaders. Iran’s judiciary constantly pressured the ministry of telecommunication and information to filter WhatsApp and Viber,18 and the services were blocked for a short period until Rouhani himself intervened to remove the block.19 These messaging applications remain an ongoing point of contention between the moderate government and the hardliners in Iran.20 The eventful history of messaging repertoires, summarized in Table 1, illustrates how users adapt to a changing technological landscape. New messaging services and social logics of boycotting and reacting to SMS monitoring created a new space and organization logic to challenge the hierarchy of power. Iranian users, by shifting communications beyond the direct control of the government, attempted to challenge state power over the flow of information. The new communication space, which emerged as the result of this digital formation, formed multi-layer and largely unobservable networks of communication on multiple platforms. This made it harder for the Iranian government to win the cat and mouse game of disabling every new app for P2P communication.
Blogging repertoires In the early 2000s, Iranian dissidents discovered blogging as a platform for expression that was initially free from government control. Blogging emerged as a prominent Persian digital repertoire and is widely cited as a reaction of young progressive Iranians to the lack of the freedom of expression in Iran. Numerous reports, essays, videos, and books have documented the Persian blogosphere, Blogestan, as an important communications platform (Alavi, 2005; Giacobino et al., 2014; Kelly & Etling, 2008; Loewenstein, 2008; Sreberny & Khiabany, 2010). Blogging was not unique to voices of dissent, and communities such as “Cyber Officers of Soft War” and events such as the national festival of blogging were organized to increase the presence of pro-government groups in cyber space, and specifically in Blogestan. In fact, Kelly and Etling’s (2008) analysis of the political landscape observed that Blogestan was divided evenly between reformist and conservative bloggers. However, blogging platforms challenged the Iran government’s monopoly over the flow of information (Price, 2015), and the Iranian government instituted a series of controls. Expanding on past histories, this case study highlights critical event histories that influenced the evolution of blogging repertoires between 2002 and 2013. The first controls were technical and grew in scope over time. Similar to SMS, the Iranian government
48 implemented filtering as a mechanism to control content on blogs. The Iranian government began filtering blogs by blocking access to the specific URL of blogs that posted undesirable content.21 Iranian-based blogging services such as Persianblog and Blogfa were targeted services for Persian users, and hosted a larger portion of Persian blogs than the foreign-based platforms. The Iranian government pressured these and other Iranian-based hosts to remove content from users’ blogs. Subsequently, users moved to services outside of direct government control such as Blogspot and Wordpress. Escalating the censorship arms race, the Iranian government blocked those URLs, resulting in the censorship of the entire blog services, not just specific blogs, in Iran. In addition to technical controls, the Iranian government also increased the individual costs for bloggers through surveillance, risk of prosecution, and death. As discussed by Yang (2006), the Iranian government, in a way similar to the Chinese government, prosecuted some bloggers and punished them with severe penalties to create fear among those using blogs as a means of sociopolitical activism. By increasing the risk of blogging—in some cases arresting and killing the blogger—blogging became a less viable repertoire for those still based in Iran. However, members of the international Persian diaspora continued blogging. In addition to the evolution of blogging controls, the growth and demise of Google Reader influenced the efficacy of blogging. In late 2005, Google introduced Google Reader, a combined reader and social tool for blogs. During 2006 and 2007, Google Reader, nicknamed Gooder in Iran, gained popularity among Iranian users and played a unique role inside Iran (Akhavan, 2013). Although specific blog hosting platforms were blocked in Iran, Google services were not, and as a result Gooder offered a means of circumventing government censorship and the continued following of popular Persian blogs. Additionally, the social curation and recommendation mechanisms of Gooder allowed users to follow the most interesting blogposts in their social network. Gooder created a new space for information exchange for Iranian blogs and this new digital formation helped blogs to sustain their audience. As a tool, Gooder was integrated into the Persian blogging repertoire, and Google’s
Communication and the Public 1(1) announcement of Google Reader’s discontinuation in 2013 influenced users to move to new digital repertoires (Giacobino et al., 2014). Additionally, Giacobino et al. (2014) argues that the popularity of other SNSs and microblogging services also contributed to the decline of blogging in Iran because these platforms offer more efficient modes of interaction and activity. They add that “the flood of content produced by thousands of SNS users meant each bloggers’ unique social status was impacted, and their contributions more easily lost in a sea of other contributions” (Giacobino et al., 2014, p. 4). Table 2 demonstrates that blogging emerged as a new mechanism for sociopolitical activism in the beginning of the 21st century, but the restrictive measures implemented by authorities such as censorship and prosecuting bloggers decreased the efficacy of blogs as a platform for contention. Additionally, the discontinuation of Google Reader coupled with the growth of social networking services influenced new digital repertoires while contributing to the decline of blogging. Bennett and Segerberg (2013) and Bimber et al. (2012) highlight the role digital media plays in lowering costs for individual contributions to collective action; however, in the case of blogging in Iran, increased information controls, particularly the prosecution of bloggers based in Iran, increased the costs of blogging. Blogging repertoires evolved to adapt to information controls instituted by the Iranian government, and, like messaging repertoires, participants shifted to new platforms that remained a step or two ahead of the government’s information regime. But while messaging repertoires retain their form in new messaging services, the communicative form of blogging has transformed into new repertoires, as will be discussed in the next case.
Social networking repertoires SNSs emerged as a repertoire in Iran later than SMS and blogging, and faced similar contention with authorities coupled with companies opting to discontinue services. Orkut was among the first SNSs available in Iran after entering the market in 2004. Iranian became the third most common nationality after Brazilians and Americans with 300,000 users on Orkut (Rahmandad et al., 2006). Similar to other digital platforms, the reformist government
49
Khazraee and Losey Table 2. Summary of blogging repertoires. Contentious use of blogs
Blogging repertoires
Authority response
Technological changes
•• Use of blogs as a way to express dissent perspectives •• Localized blog hosting services •• Use of circumvention tools to access blogs
•• Filtering blog URLs •• Pressuring Iran-based hosting services to remove content •• Prosecuting bloggers and increase the cost of blogging
•• Blog hosting services tailored to Iran •• Non-Iran-based services •• Availability of Google Reader
Digital formation
Emergent repertoires
Authority response
Technological changes
•• Use of Google Reader as circumvention and social curation tool •• Shift discourse to alternative platforms such as Microblogging and SNSs
•• Encourage the presence of pro-government bloggers
•• Discontinuation of Google Reader •• Rise of SNSs
SNSs: social networking sites.
and the judiciary debated access to the service.22 Despite rapid initial growth, government filtering slowed the long-term efficacy of Orkut. As with Blogestan, conservative authorities embraced filtering as a mechanism to reaffirm the state monopoly on the flow of information and Iran began filtering Orkut in January 2005.23 Government filtering of Orkut effectively hampered the initial rapid growth of the service while creating an opportunity for competing networks, including Yahoo 360, in early 2005 (Rahmandad et al., 2006). From a user’s perspective, Yahoo 360 had some advantages over Orkut. Orkut featured public profiles and made users more vulnerable to state monitoring. Moreover, Yahoo 360 seamlessly integrated with the Yahoo ecosystem, which probably made it harder for authorities to block the service. Similar to the case of Google Reader, Yahoo shut down the service in 2008 due to the low global popularity of the service and the competition from more popular services like Facebook. A lapse in government censorship coupled with the demise of Yahoo 360 propelled Facebook as the key platform for social networking repertoires in Iran. Although initially filtered, in early 2009 the block on Facebook was briefly removed. This short period of open access allowed Facebook to rise in popularity both as a national platform and as a means to connect with overseas family. Howard (2010) describes how Facebook provided Iranians with the
means for connecting with cousins in other countries as well as local friends. As with SMS, Facebook became a platform of and for contention in the 2009 elections. Young Mousavi supporters heavily used Facebook to disseminate information about the campaign and share a sense of community (Akhavan, 2013; Faris & Rahimi, 2015; Howard, 2010). Howard (2010) explains: “Without access to broadcast media, savvy opposition campaigners turned social media applications like Facebook from minor pop culture fads into a major tool of political communication” (p. 5). During the 2009 presidential election campaigns, Facebook was filtered for 3 days—23–26 May 2009. Initially, Ahmadinejad requested that the filter of Facebook be removed,24 but a subsequent permanent block of the service started on 12 June 2009, the day of the presidential election. Although Facebook was officially blocked, the use of circumvention technology coupled with social networking repertoires meant that Facebook continued to be incorporated in contentious politics. During the post-election unrest, activists and younger demographics heavily used Facebook as a communication medium to circulate the news of the Green movement as well as images and videos taken by users (Howard, 2010). Users formed a sense of collective identity by changing their profile photos to a common image. However, using tools to circumvent
50 government censorship requires additional technical literacy and raises the individual costs of accessing websites like Facebook. The practice also emerges as contingent to other digital repertoires. A report from Iran’s Ministry of Youth and Sports found that 23.5 million youths use tools including proxies and virtual private networks (VPNs), demonstrating that the use of circumvention tools has emerged as a complimentary digital repertoire.25 The microblogging service, Twitter, received considerable media attention related to the 2009 protests despite a low user base and use within Iran (Christensen, 2011; Wojcieszak & Smith, 2014). As Christensen (2011) writes, “[t]he protests were labeled by some as a Twitter Revolution, despite the fact that there were just over 19,000 Twitter users in Iran out of a total population of just under 80 million” (p. 238). However, the vast majority of Twitter’s users were not based in Iran (Howard, 2010). As with Facebook, Twitter was blocked preceding the 2009 elections in Iran,26 and, aside from a brief reprieve in 2013, has remained blocked since. However, Twitter played a more important role as an international platform for disseminating news about the movement through the popularity of hashtags such as #IranElection than as a local platform for movement mobilization, especially in comparison to short messaging services (Howard, 2010). This pattern of Twitter use by activists and diaspora to disseminate information about the movement shares similarities with the use of Twitter by Chinese dissidents outside of China (Yang, 2013). After authorities began prosecuting Facebook users in an effort to deter use, 27 Facebook users adapted practices in order to make their social network profiles pseudonymous. These repertoires included changing their names, writing their names with different scripts that make it hard to search and identify them, and using unclear profile photos to make them unrecognizable. Following the post-election upheaval in 2009, authorities intensified controls over both internal and external communications, cracking down on social media and bloggers and increasing its filtering and blocking of websites deemed to promote social and political unrest. Despite the post-2009 ban, Facebook is still being used by Iranians and is still a controversial area
Communication and the Public 1(1) between conservatives on one side and activists and the recent moderate government on the other side. Some moderate politicians asked for the removal of filtering, prompting strong reactions from the judiciary and conservative parliament members.28 Political activism on SNSs is not tolerated by the state, but individuals are able to challenge other aspects of the Iranian information regime including discussing music, parties, and other cultural artifacts still officially considered illegal in Iran. As a result, these practices contribute to Facebook’s continued efficacy for social engagement in Iran. The Iran Minister of Culture, Ali Janati, estimated that 4.5 million Iranians still actively use Facebook in spite of the strong filtering attempts by the authorities.29 Currently, Instagram, another popular SNS, is still accessible in Iran. One of the reasons might be the limited capabilities of Instagram for sociopolitical activism in comparison to Facebook, making it appear less contentious. The development of social network repertoires in Iran coevolved with direct platform contention with authorities as well as through the changing technological landscape. Table 3 summarizes the evolution of social networking repertoires in Iran. As we have seen in the case of Google Reader and Yahoo 360, the introduction and later termination of a service has a direct impact on the efficacy of a platform. However, the specific features of a social network, including how profiles are presented and the type of content that can be shared, impacts the efficacy of the platform for specific actions. With direct government intervention, this efficacy changes over time. Khazraee and Unsworth (2012) follow the terminology of material semiotics and argue that while SNSs are mobile materialities, they do not form durable networks of resistance to challenge power hierarchies (Law, 1992). Similar to the initial shift from Orkut to Yahoo 360, pressure against using Facebook for political activism has moved these actions to other networks without public presence, including shifting to messaging services. For example, many activities and communications have moved to messaging apps such as Viber, WhatsApp, Kik, and Telegram. Iranian authorities have acknowledged roughly 10 million Iranians actively use Viber.30 According to Alexa
51
Khazraee and Losey Table 3. Summary of social networking repertories. Contentious use of social networking sites (SNSs)
Social networking repertoires
Authority response
Technological changes
•• Use of SNSs to share information (informal channel of information) •• Use of SNSs for political campaigning •• Sharing of images and video
•• Filtering SNSs •• Prosecuting SNS users and increasing the cost
•• Introduction of SNSs
Digital formation
Emergent repertoires
Authority response
Technological changes
•• De-identifying personal profiles (use of deceptive techniques) •• Moving to alternative platforms such as WhatsApp, Viber, and Telegram •• Diversifying the portfolio of communication tools, decreasing dependency on one platform
•• More sophisticated filtering techniques •• Tolerating non-political use of SNSs
•• Discontinuation of Yahoo 360 •• Emergence of P2P messaging apps
Internet31 web traffic statistics, Iran is the second country on the list of users who visited Viber.com, accounting for 10% of the total visits, and leads the world with visits to the cross-platform messaging application Telegram, with 20% of total visits. As Costanza-Chock (2012) describes with regard to transmedia organizing, discourse is not limited to a single platform but takes place across a mosaic of communications platforms. For example, as Wojcieszak and Smith (2014) found in a survey of Iranian Internet users, the Internet as a platform was the primary source of news while single platforms such as Twitter played a lesser role.
Conclusion The growth of the Internet and mobile communications in Iran has supported various forms of contentious action. This article analyzes digital repertoires of contentious politics of messaging services, blogging platforms, and SNSs. The functions of different platforms were complimentary and overlapped repertoires of transmedia organizing. The use of SMSs grew as a platform for holiday greetings and political satire, and gained a foothold as a political campaigning platform in 2009. The growth of Blogestan created a distinct Persian communicative sphere both within Iran and as a discursive space for the Persian diaspora. Social network repertoires shifted across different platforms including the use of Facebook
during the 2009 protests and as a networking platform since. Initially, the emergence of new services challenged the Iranian government’s monopoly over information. However the efficacy of specific platforms changed as a result of efforts by the Iranian government to reassert control over the flow of information as well as changes in technology and the termination of specific services. The Iranian government began filtering SMSs, terminating service during moments of unrest, and surveilling users to identify dissidents. As a result, users moved to new messaging applications that remained outside of government control. Blogging platforms and SNSs followed similar event histories, although termination of service by companies also influenced how digital repertoires evolved. After blogging repertoires were moved to non-Iranian hosts, Google Reader provided an easy social repertoire for reading and engaging with blogs. When Google discontinued Google Reader in 2013, blogs became less accessible at a time when SNSs were serving some of the social functions Google Reader provided. Social network repertoires evolved through multiple service—Orkut was blocked and Yahoo discontinued Yahoo 360—but Facebook gained a user base in part due to a momentary window of easy access and the success of the service for political campaigning in 2009. However, the privacy concerns of public social network profiles have influenced political
52 discussions of the private messaging applications that evolved from SMS messaging repertoires. Digital media tools in Iran serve as both tools and targets of contention. This article presents a framework for analyzing the interrelationship between the control of digital technologies and the repertoires of contentious politics. Documenting event histories limits the assumptions of the emancipatory nature of a specific technology by analyzing the changing efficacy of repertoires during different moments of contention. Using the notion of digital formation entails that social forms are in early stages and are contingent upon the development of events; therefore, they tend toward a developing and variable structure. Employing such an analytical lens suggests that our understanding of digital formations is nascent and subject to change; thus, we should avoid assigning stable causal relations between information and digital technologies and democratization processes of societies. The interrelationship between digital technologies and contentious politics in Iran is best understood through the entangled and context-specific nature of social and technical logics. Investigating specific moments of protest offers snapshots of how digital technologies are used in contentious politics in a balance of power between opposition and authority. By limiting themselves to the study of static moments of dynamic practices, scholars risk focusing on a single platform rather than documenting the mosaic of online and offline repertoires. The framework for analyzing digital repertoires presented in this article provides a foundation for complimentary case studies of the digital formations of contentious repertoires in additional contexts. We believe that applying this framework to the study of digital formations and contentious politics will provide valuable insights for investigating digital repertoires in other regimes and regions. For instance, documenting eventful histories of digital repertoires in China will help us to understand the dynamics of information control practices and technological developments, especially regarding the role of major domestic and international tech companies which provide platforms for blogging, social networking and messaging services. Investigating the coevolution of the restrictive practices of authorities
Communication and the Public 1(1) alongside the rapid shifts in the technological landscape at eventful moments offers a useful framework for understanding the interrelationships of information control, technological developments, and contentious politics in different political climates. Acknowledgements This article was started during the time we were both at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS) at the Annenberg School for Communication. We express our appreciation to Monroe Price and CGCS staff for their support. We are also grateful for the editors and anonymous reviewers’ feedback. We would like to thank Stefania Milan for her feedback on earlier version of this article and Ronald Deibert and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto for the opportunity to present this work and receive feedback. We also thank Laura Perrings for help in preparing the article.
Notes 1. http://www.smallmedia.org.uk/ 2. http://www.measurementlab.net/ 3. https://freedomhouse.org/ 4. https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ 5. https://opennet.net/ 6. https://ooni.torproject.org/ 7. http://research.dyn.com/ 8. Link to source: http://www.google.com/publicdata/ explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_#!ctype=l&strail=fal se&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=it_cel_sets&scale_ y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:IR N&ifdim=region&tstart=1145829600000&tend=136 6754400000&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false 9. “Iranian consumers boycott Nokia for ‘collaboration’” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/ jul/14/nokia-boycott-iran-election-protests 10. “SMS, internet campaigns prove controversial in Iran election” http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/05/27/ us-iran-election-internet-idUSTRE54Q2WS20090527 11. “Iran’s Mousavi says vote monitoring restricted: report” http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/06/12/us-iranelection-mousavi-sb-idUSTRE55A0ST20090612 and Cracking Down on Digital Communication and Political Organizing in Iran: https://opennet.net/ blog/2009/06/cracking-down-digital-communicationand-political-organizing-iran 12. Iran’s Web Spying Aided By Western Technology: European Gear Used in Vast Effort to Monitor Communications (22 June 2009): http://www.wsj. com/articles/SB124562668777335653
53
Khazraee and Losey 13. Nokia blog post (2009) on sale of mobile monitoring networks to Iran: https://blog.networks. nokia.com/corporate-responsibility/2009/06/22/ provision-of-lawful-intercept-capability-in-iran/ 14. (The Guardian): Iranian consumers boycott Nokia for “collaboration”: http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2009/jul/14/nokia-boycott-iran-election-protests; (Wired): Consumers Boycott Nokia, Siemens for Selling to Iran: http://www.wired.com/2009/06/ nokia-siemens-boycott/; Etemad-e-Melli a reformist News Paper wrote a piece in July 2009 about boycott, archived version available at: http://www. magiran.com/ppdf/nppdf/5061/p0506109650011. pdf 15. The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2009/jul/14/nokia-boycott-iran-election-protests 16. Chinese Tech Giant Aids Iran: http://www.wsj.com/ articles/SB100014240529702046445045766515035 77823210 17. Freedomhouse 2014 report mentioned that Short Messaging System (SMS) is filtered in 2014: https:// freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2014/iran and http://www.rferl.org/content/iran-internet-filteringelection-media/25013289.html 18. Iran judiciary gives order to shut down WhatsApp/ Viber: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/ 2014/09/iran-internet-communication-viber-whatsapp-judiciary.html 19. Rouhani intervenes in 2014 to keep WhatsApp and Viber accessible: http://www.bbc.com/news/ world-middle-east-27330745 20. Order to block WhatsApp, LINE, and Tango in 2015: http://pando.com/2015/01/08/irans-judiciary-ordersits-government-to-block-access-to-whatsapp-linetango/ 21. Open Network Initiative (ONI) ONI Report 2009. 22. http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/story/2005/01/ 050112_a_iran_orkut.shtml 23. http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/story/2005/01/ 050109_a_iran_weblog.shtml 24. See “Iran’s Facebook Access Restored,” BBC Persian, 26 May 2009. 25. https://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/09/16/nearly70-percent-of-young-iranians-use-illegal-internetcircumvention-tools/ 26. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= newsarchive&sid=anh.uW3gNZp4 27. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2012/11/121101_ l38_facebook_iran.shtml 28. See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2013/11/131123_ l45_facebook_filtering_majlis.shtml
29. See http://www.bbc.com/persian/iran/2015/02/150205 _nm_viber_facebook_janati 30. See Note 29. 31. Alexa.com
References Akhavan, N. (2013). Electronic Iran: The cultural politics of an online evolution. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Alavi, N. (2005). We are Iran: The Persian blogs. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press. Bennett, A. (2004). Case study methods: Design, use, and comparative advantages. In D. F. Sprinz & Y. Nahmias-Wolinsky (Eds.), Models, numbers and cases: Methods for studying international relations (pp. 19–55). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2011). Digital media and the personalization of collective action. Information, Communication & Society, 14, 770–799. doi:10.1080 /1369118X.2011.579141 Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2013). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Bimber, B. A., Flanagin, A. J., & Stohl, C. (2012). Collective action in organizations: Interaction and engagement in an era of technological change. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Castells, M. (2012). Networks of outrage and hope: Social movements in the Internet age. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Christensen, C. (2011). Discourses of technology and liberation: State aid to Net activists in an era of “Twitter revolutions.” The Communication Review, 14, 233– 253. doi:10.1080/10714421.2011.597263 Costanza-Chock, S. (2012). Mic check! Media cultures and the Occupy movement. Social Movement Studies, 11, 375–385. doi:10.1080/14742837.2012.710746 Cullum, B. (2010). Devices: The power of mobile phones. In M. Joyce (Ed.), Digital activism decoded: The new mechanics of change (pp. 47–70). New York, NY: International Debate Education Association. Davis, J. W. (2005). Terms of inquiry: On the theory and practice of political science. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Della Porta, D. (2008). Eventful protest, global conflicts. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), 27–56. doi:10.1080/1600910X.2008.9672963 Della Porta, D., & Diani, M. (2006). Social movements: An introduction (2nd ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
54 Earl, J., Martin, A., McCarthy, J. D., & Soule, S. A. (2004). The use of newspaper data in the study of collective action. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 65–80. Eckstein, H. (1975). Case study and theory in political science. In F. I. Greenstein & N. W. Polsby (Eds.), Handbook of political science (pp. 79–138). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Faris, D. M., & Rahimi, B. (Eds.). (2015). Social media in Iran: Politics and society after 2009. Albany: State University of New York Press. George, A. L., & Bennett, A. (2005). Case studies and theory development in the social sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gerring, J. (2007). Case study research: Principles and practices. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Giacobino, L., Abadpour, A., Anderson, C., Petrossian, F., & Nellemann, C. (2014). Whither Blogestan: Evaluating shifts in Persian cyberspace. Philadelphia: Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania. Howard, P. N. (2010). The digital origins of dictatorship and democracy: Information technology and political Islam. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Howard, P. N., & Hussain, M. M. (2012). Democracy’s fourth wave? Digital media and the Arab Spring. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Jervis, R. (1990). Models and cases in the study of international conflict. Journal of International Affairs, 44, 81–101. Kaun, A. (2015). Regimes of time: Media practices of the dispossessed. Time & Society, 24(2). doi:10.1177/09 61463X15577276 Kelly, J., & Etling, B. (2008). Mapping Iran’s online public: Politics and culture in the Persian blogosphere. Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Retrieved from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2008/ Mapping_Irans_Online_Public Keramati, A., & Ardabili, S. M. S. (2011). Churn analysis for an Iranian mobile operator. Telecommunications Policy, 35, 344–356. doi:10.1016/j.telpol.2011.02.009 Khazraee, E., & Unsworth, K. (2012). Social media: The new opiate of the masses? International Review of Information Ethics, 18, 49–59. Latham, R., & Sassen, S. (2005a). Digital formations: Constructing an object of study. In R. Latham & S. Sassen (Eds.), Digital formations IT and new architectures in the global realm (pp. 1–34). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Latham, R., & Sassen, S. (2005b). Digital formations IT and new architectures in the global realm. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Communication and the Public 1(1) Law, J. (1992). Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. Systems Practice, 5, 379–393. doi:10.1007/BF01059830 Loewenstein, A. (2008). The blogging revolution. Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Melbourne University Press. Ma, X., & Khazraee, E. (2014, September). Iranian political landscape seen from Iranian presidential election Tweets. Paper presented at the Social Media & Society International Conference, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. McAdam, D., & Sewell, W. H. (2001). It’s about time: Temporality in the study of social movements and revolutions. In R. Aminzade, J. Goldstone, D. McAdam, E. Perry, W. H. Sewell, S. Tarrow, & C. Tilly (Eds.), Silence and voice in the study of contentious politics (pp. 89–125). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., & Tilly, C. (2001). Dynamics of contention. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Milan, S. (2015). From social movements to cloud protesting: The evolution of collective identity. Information, Communication & Society, 18, 887–900. doi:10.1080 /1369118X.2015.1043135 Novak, A. N., & Khazraee, E. (2014). The stealthy protester: Risk and the female body in online social movements. Feminist Media Studies, 14, 1094–1095. doi:10.1080/14680777.2014.975438 Olzak, S. (1989). Analysis of events in the study of collective action. Annual Review of Sociology, 15, 119– 141. doi:10.1146/annurev.so.15.080189.001003 Pearce, K. E. (2015). Democratizing kompromat: The affordances of social media for state-sponsored harassment. Information, Communication & Society, 18, 1158–11747. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2015.1021705 Price, M. E. (2015). Free expression, globalism, and the new strategic communication. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Ragin, C. C. (2000). Fuzzy-set social science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ragin, C. C., & Becker, H. S. (Eds.). (1992). What is a case?: Exploring the foundations of social inquiry. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Rahmandad, H., Sarkhili, S., Hafezi, M., Mostashari, A., Parsinejhad, F., Saeidi, N., & Khademhosseini, A. (2006). Iranians on Orkut:Trends and characteristics. Cambridge, MA: Iranian Studies Group. Retrieved from http://isgmit.org/projects-storage/Orkut/updatedorkut_report_Mar07_06.pdf Sanjari, A., & Khazraee, E. (2014). Information diffusion on Twitter: The case of the 2013 Iranian presidential election. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM
55
Khazraee and Losey Conference on Web Science (pp. 277–278). New York, NY: ACM. doi:10.1145/2615569.2615668 Sassen, S. (2005). Electronic markets and activist networks: The weight of social logics in digital formations. In R. Latham & S. Sassen (Eds.), Digital formations IT and new architectures in the global realm (pp. 54– 88). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2012). Interactions of the technical and the social. Information, Communication & Society, 15, 455–478. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2012.667912 Sewell, W. H. (1996). Historical events as transformations of structures: Inventing revolution at the Bastille. Theory and Society, 25, 841–881. Sewell, W. H. (2005). Logics of history: Social theory and social transformation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sreberny, A., & Khiabany, G. (2010). Blogistan: The Internet and politics in Iran. New York, NY: I. B. Tauris. Tarrow, S. G. (2011). Power in movement: Social movements and contentious politics (Rev. & updated 3rd ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (1975). The rebellious century, 1830–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tilly, C. (2006). Regimes and repertoires. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tilly, C., & Tarrow, S. (2007). Contentious politics. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Trachtenberg, M. (2006). The craft of international history: A guide to method. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vennesson, P. (2008). Case studies and process tracing: Theories and practices. In D. Della Porta & M. Keating (Eds.), Approaches and methodologies in the social sciences: A pluralist perspective (pp. 223– 239). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Wojcieszak, M., & Smith, B. (2014). Will politics be tweeted? New media use by Iranian youth in 2011.
New Media & Society, 16(1), 91–109. doi: 10.1177/ 1461444813479594 Wolfson, T. (2014). Digital rebellion: The birth of the cyber left. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Yang, G. (2006). The Internet and civil society in China: Co-evolutionary dynamics and digital formations. In L. Dittmer & G. Liu (Eds.), China’s deep reform: Domestic politics in transition (pp. 303–318). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Yang, G. (2013). Power and transgression in the global media age: The strange case of Twitter in China. In M. Kraidy (Ed.), Orders and borders: Communication and power in the global era (pp. 166–183). New York, NY: Routledge.
Author biographies Emad Khazraee is a sociotechnical information scientist and assistant professor in the College of Communication and Information at Kent State University. He received his PhD in Information Studies from the College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University (2014). His research is formed around the interplay between social and technical phenomena. Currently, he is studying the relationship between digital technologies, new media, and social change. James Losey is a doctoral candidate with the School of International Studies and the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. From 2009 to 2013, James was a policy analyst and fellow at the New America’s Open Technology Institute working on public policies related to Internet freedom. Previously, James has been an affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Global Communication Studies, and a Google Policy Fellow with the Global Network Initiative.
