326 Mediated Publics
n Iran, after the Iranian Revolution and the official project of the I
Islamization of society, people (especially women and youth) had to adapt
their presence and their public representations according to the “must”
and “must not” of the controlling Islamic forces. At the same time, intel-
lectuals, journalists, and artists had to practice stronger self-censorship,
especially until 1997, when the reformist president Mohammad Khatami
came to power. With the arrival of the Internet in the lives of the urban
middle class in the late 1990s, and particularly with its expansion after
2001 when the Unicode system made typing in Persian possible, these
individuals could compensate for some of their privations, needs and
aspirations in the “free” space of the Internet. In early 2000, the first
Iranian news Web sites were created to circumvent state controls over tra-
ditional media sources, rendering the Internet an important information
resource in Iran.^2 For young people, their initial attraction to the Internet
was to overcome the restrictions on cross-gender interactions in physical
public spaces. Online, they could interact and find new friends and com-
munities through emails, instant messaging, chatrooms, and forums.
ver time, the Internet became cheaper and easier to use, making O
it more popular and accessible for different strata of urban middle-class
Iranians. With 32 million Internet users and 48 percent penetration as of
September 2009, Iran constitutes 56 percent of all Internet users in the
Middle East and has the fastest-growing concentration of Internet users
in the region.^3 Today, one of the most important environments in Iranian
cyberspace (politically, socially, culturally and personally) is the Iranian
blogosphere known as Weblogestan. The first Persian-language weblog
was created in September 2001 by Salman Jariri.^4 Two months later, with
the arrival of the Unicode system, Hossein Derakhshan,^5 a young Iranian
journalist, published the first online weblog guide in Persian, which moti-
vated other Iranians to blog. In less than a year, weblog writing exploded
in Iran; in 2003, Persian was the fourth most used language in the world’s
blogosphere after English, French and Portuguese.^6 With the expansion
of weblog writing throughout the globe, Persian today no longer has the
same rank in the world blogosphere. However, despite the Iranian gov-
ernment’s significant filtering, the Iranian blogosphere remains one of
the most important public spheres and popular environments in Iranian
cyberspace; people can express themselves, interact, exchange opinions,