Publics, Politics and Participation

Amir-Ebrahimi 333

e public sphere in Iran is therefore expanding in a non-Haberma-Th
sian way, within a controlling Islamic state, in physical and virtual spaces.
Public space in Iran is transient; or a “short-term society,” in Shahidi’s
words. The new public sphere in Iran could be described as what Negt and
Kluge call “new public spheres”; decentralized and multiple, they open “a
path of critique and possibly a new politics.”^20 Nilüfer Göle’s definition
of the non-Western public sphere offers another approach. Arguing that
public spheres are altered by the cultural meanings and social practices in
each culture, Göle suggests that we analyze the “public sphere as a social
imaginary” to illustrate the circulation of a universal code of modernity as
well as particular cultural significations and practices:

The public sphere in a non-Western context is neither iden-

tical with its counterparts in the West nor totally different,

but manifests asymmetrical differences as it is continuously

altered by a field of cultural meanings and social practices ...

Social imaginaries are embedded in the habitus of a popula-

tion or carried in implicit understandings that underlie and

make possible common practices ... As a social imaginary, the

public sphere works in a social field and penetrates and blends

into cultural significations.^21

wing on Mark Poster, who argues that “the age of the pub-Dra
lic sphere as face-to-face talk is clearly over,”^22 I argue that Weblogistan
offers a new social imaginary that allows for the formation of a virtual
public sphere. This virtual connectedness enables new networks and com-
munities where people with common socio-cultural tastes, interests and
backgrounds can gather, talk, and act together. As the next section dem-
onstrates, these new communities can become even more powerful than
traditional ones.^23 Today, three decades after the revolution, “small media”
such as weblogs, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube again play an impor-
tant role in the lives of middle class Iranians and social changes on the
horizon.^24