Amir-Ebrahimi 335in the U.S., Canada, France, England, Japan, Holland, Germany and
Australia. Many of these bloggers play an important role in demystifying
the “West” and life outside Iran for Iranians inside the country.
Togetherness and the birth of a new social movement
The interconnectedness of bloggers from around the world and from
different social positions can have an important impact on events in the
physical world. On several occasions, Iranian bloggers have shown soli-
darity and acted together to influence events on the national or interna-
tional scene.
course, with the immense variety in Weblogistan this together-Of
ness happens only in some networks, but depending on the issue it can
become more resonant in the corpus of the blogosphere. Perhaps the most
widespread and permanent actions of bloggers have been undertaken
against filtering and censorship. In Iran, censorship in cyberspace is very
much like that of general media regulation: it is based on religion, morals,
libel, national security, and anti-revolutionary activity.^29
n 2006, the Ahmadinejad government ordered bloggers to register I
their blogs. Two months later, after the deadline, only about one hundred
bloggers had registered. Most did not pay any attention to the order; some
even posted a banner on their blog that read, “I Will Not Register My
Website.” Faced with obvious failure, the government abandoned the proj-
ect. Bloggers claimed cyberspace as their own, and demanded the free-
dom to write whatever they want. Although this “freedom” is not trans-
parent in Iran and continually requires a degree of self-censorship, in the
virtual world, censorship is much more difficult. Following the example
of the “Spring of Freedom” and the publication of newspapers, a weblog
that is blocked is soon replaced by another with a different address, which
with the help of other bloggers is introduced to Weblogistan. Creating
blog-mirrors (where the same text is copied onto several blogs with differ-
ent addresses) is another way to escape filtering. A third way to circum-
vent filtering is to use anonymizers and anti-filtering software, which are
exchanged among Internet users by email or are published on weblogs
that specialize in Internet software. Even though every day many of