[wordup] Blogs Opening Iranian Society?

[Adam Shand]

It's always hard to tell exactly what the ramifications of change are 
but this seems like a good thing.  This seems like what the internet was 
supposed to be all about.  I hope it is.

Adam.

From: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,58976,00.html

Blogs Opening Iranian Society?
By Michelle Delio
02:00 AM May. 28, 2003 PT

VIENNA, Austria -- A little more than two years ago, Hossein Derakhshan 
started blogging. Hundreds of other people probably launched their own 
blogs on that same December day, but few can claim they may have sparked 
a revolution.

Soon after Derakhshan's blog went live, he was flooded with requests 
from Iranians wanting to know how he managed to blog in Farsi, the 
Persian language spoken by Iranians. Most of the free blog-hosting 
services only support the ASCII Roman character set, which doesn't work 
for languages that use other scripts, like Farsi, Arabic, Cyrillic and 
Asian languages, among others.

So Derakhshan, a 28-year-old Iranian expatriate now living in Toronto, 
Canada, ported some basic blogging tools from ASCII to Unicode, enabling 
Iranians to blog in their own language.

Derakhshan's efforts are just one example of how Iranians are using the 
latest technology to modernize their society and adopt Western ways 
without giving up their heritage. There are now roughly 12,000 Farsi 
blogs created by Iranians, Derakhshan said, with more coming online 
every day.

"Until there is a free press in Iran again, weblogs will flourish. In 
the last few years about 90 (pro-democracy) newspapers in Iran have been 
shut down. So people have turned to the Internet to get news," 
Derakhshan said Friday during his presentation at BlogTalk, a two-day 
conference on weblogs at the Danube University Krems Center for New 
Media in Vienna.

The conference was designed for a European audience and is focused on 
personal and business uses of blogs.

Just as Westerners use blogs to make contact with others and share 
intimate thoughts, Iranians have adopted the medium to express 
themselves. But online honesty often requires anonymity in Iran, where 
the religious police have broad powers to arrest those too eager to 
embrace Western ways.

About 1 million Iranians have access to the Internet, which is largely 
uncensored but is monitored by the government.

"There have been great social changes in Iran since the 1979 Islamic 
revolution," Derakhshan said. "There are many popular reformists, but 
(they are) not particularly powerful. The real leaders are still hard-line."

According to "ElAheh," a 24-year-old female Iranian blogger who asked 
that her real name be withheld, the conservative faction of the Iranian 
government "doesn't understand the Internet," although some of the most 
fundamentalist mullahs have their own websites where they post religious 
teachings.

The more moderate faction of the government is more tech-savvy but turns 
a blind eye to personal Iranian blogs, some of which contain soft-core 
pornography or political criticism, according to Derakhshan.

But that tolerance may be coming to an end. On April 19, journalist Sina 
Motallebi was arrested in Tehran. His crime: blogging.

Motallebi was released from jail May 14 after posting a 300 million rial 
($36,675) bail, according to reports from the Islamic Republic News Agency.

Motallebi is now awaiting trial. According to the Islamic news agency, 
he has been charged with "undermining national security through cultural 
activities" for the content of his blog, as well as his other writings 
and interviews he gave to foreign media outlets. Motallebi wrote for 
Iran's reformist newspaper Hayat-e-No until it was closed by the 
government in January.

The Islamic news agency reported that Motallebi "accepted some of the 
charges, while rejecting others during interrogations in detention." His 
blog is now offline.

"Sina's arrest has brought much fear to bloggers here," ElAheh said in 
an e-mail. "People have stopped blogging, or have censored their blogs 
by removing any posts that might offend. Many blogs have become bland."

ElAheh particularly mourns the loss of other Iranian women's blogs with 
their previously open discussions about such sensitive topics as hejab, 
the Muslim code that specifies modest dress, and sexism in Muslim society.

"Some women believe hejab frees them from the Western repression to look 
good, to stay young -- that Western dress codes are the true 
repression," ElAheh said. "Others believe that hejab limits us. It was 
interesting to discuss this openly, and I was especially interested in 
reading the posts Iranian males left on females' blogs about such issues."

"Our blogs are one of the few, if not the only, places that Iranian men 
and women can discuss such issues with each other," ElAheh explained. 
"Some men assume that all women are happy to be dressing in hejab and 
want to stay home in a protected world. They are surprised to find some 
women would rather be free than safe."

Derakhshan said the popularity of blogs among young Iranians suggests 
that great changes have happened in Iranian society during the past two 
decades, at least among the younger, middle-class residents of big cities.

"(The blogs) show that they are carrying new values and promoting new 
lifestyles," he said. "Older generations try to hide their personal 
feelings and opinions from others. Individuality, self-expression and 
tolerance are new values which are quite obvious through a quick study 
of the content of Persian weblogs."