340 Mediated Publics
address usually form the main identity of the blogger in the virtual space
with which they are named, connected, referred, and linked. In many non-
Iranian weblogs, bloggers introduce themselves with their real identity.
Their weblog is part of their social, cultural and even economic capital.
n Iran, because of both the political situation and certain conven-I
tions and beliefs, there is an abundance of pseudonyms and fake iden-
tities, especially among women, youth and political and social bloggers.
Therefore, for many Iranian bloggers, weblog writing is not part of their
cultural capital in the real world. In spite of this, some weblogs with
fake identities and pseudonyms attain authority in the blogosphere. For
instance, bloggers who in their real lives are ordinary employees, students,
housewives, artists or journalists can become “famous” online, with many
regular readers and links. The example of Zeitun (Olive) is relevant here.
Zeitun, who has been writing her blog since 2002, is a presumably young
woman living in a suburb of Tehran.^37 She has a personal style of writ-
ing known in Weblogistan as the “Zeitun style” and consisting of multi-
part posts written in a casual but correct language. Despite the filtering
of her blog in Iran, it has been classified among the top forty best Iranian
blogs for years.^38 Nevertheless, she is one of the most “virtual” identities in
Weblogistan, and has never agreed to participate in a focus group or even
in a telephone interview. In one of my own focus groups, discussing the
virtual identity of bloggers, I asked participants to provide their opinions
about these unknown yet famous bloggers like Zeitun. The general feel-
ing was more or less suspicious because none of these bloggers has even
seen or talked to her. “She chats and sends email, she says that she was at
this or that gathering, but nobody has ever heard her voice or seen her, so
you don’t know who she is. Is she real? Is she a 25–26-year-old girl or a
40-year-old man? Nobody knows about her” (Feminist-Activist bloggers
in Focus Group 2005).
Despite this doubt cast on her identity, she remains one of the most
serious and famous “authorities” of Weblogistan, with over a thousand
readers per day. Typically, the identity of bloggers who use pseudonyms
is not revealed publicly by others, as part of an accepted online ethic and
due to the socio-cultural and political limitations in the Iranian blogo-
sphere. Thus, the pseudonym is generally accepted as an identity in
Weblogistan and this is not by itself a source of mistrust, as long as there