A Whole New Democratic Discussion Forum? From Neda Agha Soltan to the "Shooshoo Joon"s: Discussion is Safer in Blogs than in Streets

I met Neda the day bikers were leaving for New York. Throughout the time that speeches were given she was there, standing right in the middle of all the other people who were wearing green T-shirts and were singing at the height of their voice: "We have been all beaten up by repression and injustice". The sight of Neda Agha Soltan was shocking to me, not only because I had watched the video in which she bleeds to death over and over in the past couple of weeks. I was here in Toronto, thousands of kilometers away from Kargar Avenue, where a bullet hit her in the chest, and Neda was staring at me.

The horrific video became a worldwide hit. When a few days later a journalist asked me if I had seen the video, I was in fact enraged. "Who hasn't?" I groaned. It was Youtube that catapulted her bloody face to the focus of the world. The "Green Movement" was to get its fifteen minutes of fame when a bystander, someone who was not a journalist but a concerned citizen, pulled out his or her cell-phone and took the video which was soon to become the exhibition of our most serious concerns; that lives are at stake. Many Iranians celebrated the memory of Neda by renaming their Facebook profile to Neda Irani and by covering their faces with real-sized pictures of hers in the protests that followed. If you looked from afar you would have gotten the impression that hundreds of Neda’s were standing there.

Neda may be the queen of citizen journalism in Iran and her story may be the fruit of the Blogestan, as we tend to address the Iranian blogosphere among ourselves, but she is only the tip of the iceberg. The blogosphere has given a voice to hundreds of thousands of people, some of whom in fact consider Neda a propaganda object set up by the BBC. How a media outlet can manage to stage or fake an incident documented in that video is what would become the topic of discussion in the Blogestan itself for many weeks.

A while back, out of curiosity I decided to investigate the Persian blogosphere. Being both a programmer and a blogger I spent a few weeks assembling a robot. My gadget was to go on a voyage in the veins of the Persian blogosphere. KiBeKi, casually translated to "What's up", was a page scrapper which would spend the best of the next many weeks crawling into blogs maintained by Iranian bloggers in search of links, email addresses, Youtube videos, and more. It would then generate reports, such as "which email” service people most use, Yahoo or gmail?" or "which news sources are linked into more blogs, Fars News or BBC?" But more importantly I was looking for an answer to the question I have frequently been asked in the past couple of years by different journalists and researchers: Just how many Persian blogs are there? Knowing that the statistics range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, close to a million, I had all the reasons to order KiBeKi to dig deeper.

My friend is fascinated by a community of bloggers she tends to call the "Shooshoo Joon"s. The name can be translated to "My Beloved Husband" but I assure you that the Persian expression she uses is more than just a name it is a concept. The "Shoohoo Joon" is a group of Iranian girls, mostly married or on the verge of getting married, whose whole world seems to fall into one not very complicated, at least according to the rest of us, part of life, i.e. the very act of going through daily life. They go to restaurants with their husbands and quarrel with their mother in laws and then they blog about it. They envy their friend because she has gotten a better dishwasher as a wedding gift and then they put up a post in their blog. My friend never expresses it explicitly, but having been among the first Iranian female bloggers, I think she is not very delighted that the Blogestan also includes this outcast.

History tells us that in the early fifteen century the German Johannes Gutenberg was probably the only printer in the whole of Europe. It took only a few decades, however, for the printing trade to flourish. Soon, it was not only holy books that were printed. Medical books, diaries, easy readings, and at the same time theories about the world we live in, many of which did not exactly comply with the official standing of the time, came out of the printers. James Davis quotes a historian in his book "The Human Story" as:

He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of Movable Type was
disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating
a whole new democratic world.

Using the analogy of the advent of the print to the penetration of blogging in Iran, the repeated reference to Neda's story in the Blogestan is the equivalent of the publication of books which offered radical ideas regarding governance in a world where having a written constitution was a luxury many would not even dream about. Nevertheless, there are others, the bulk of the population, many of whom are whole-heartedly affected by Neda’s death, but for whom the core challenge in their life is the very simple fact of "well-being". These are the people who contemplate love, commitment, happiness, faith, and morality. They constitute the "Shooshoo Joon"s, among the others. These are not in any way less important than the others, if any ground for comparison exists at all.

I had to make numerous attempts to optimize KiBeKi to make it more agile. In the course of the adventure I also routinely had to work with Giga-byte-size databases. At the end, I came to the point that it is not within my capabilities to tally the Blogestan and I had to retire the robot. My conclusion was, the Persian blogosphere is vast and it is populous. In the course of acting as the Magellan of the Blogestan, however, I had my own revelations. There is a community of bloggers in every corner of this ocean, where people use the same language that all of us understand but have concerns, which might not even seem an issue worthy of time and effort for the residents of the next island.

Blogging has given the apparatus of discussion to a people who have needed it the most. It has made the inhabitants of the Persian blogosphere close enough so that they can talk but at the same time has drawn a fine glass wall between us so that we have to learn self-restraint, or make a fool of ourselves. Independent of what a blogger's perspective on affairs are, if he or she is a supporter or an opponent of the official way of living, the mere fact of being a blogger means that one has chosen "talk" over
"act". That means individuals like Neda do not have to voice their dissent in the streets and then get shot. Worst comes to worst we receive a handful of angry comments on a post, and that is often followed by an apology email from the commenter.

The filtering, the harsh treatment of the bloggers by the authorities, and the ever-present threats, these are all negligible side effects in the magnificent landslide in Iranian society manifested through blogging. We are all talking. That includes the people who post videos of the slain bodies of the "martyrs" of the Green Movement as well as the members of the "Shooshoo Joon" community who write:

Now, what happened yesterday!! I spent the whole day in the club dancing
around and doing steps!! Then Mommy and I went shopping for a fryer!!

The author wishes to thank Miss Katayoon Moghaddam for numerous
discussions.

Editor’s Profile:
Arash Kamangir is currently the preeminent Iranian blogger in the blogosphere.  He blogs in English at kamangir.net and in Persian at persian.kamangir.net. He is also a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Manitoba and also a researcher in TRLabs Winnipeg.'