Negar Mottahedeh

#iranelection (eBook, ePUB)

Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The protests following Iran's fraudulent 2009 Presidential election took the world by storm. As the Green Revolution gained protestors in the Iranian streets, #iranelection became the first long-trending international hashtag. Texts, images, videos, audio recordings, and links connected protestors on the ground and netizens online, all simultaneously transmitting and living a shared international experience.

#iranelection follows the protest movement, on the ground and online, to investigate how emerging social media platforms developed international solidarity. The 2009 protests in Iran were the first revolts to be catapulted onto the global stage by social media, just as the 1979 Iranian Revolution was agitated by cassette tapes. And as the world turned to social media platforms to understand the events on the ground, social media platforms also adapted and developed to accommodate this global activism. Provocative and eye-opening, #iranelection reveals the new online ecology of social protest and offers a prehistory, of sorts, of the uses of hashtags and trending topics, selfies and avatar activism, and citizen journalism and YouTube mashups.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 152
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. Juli 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780804796736
• Artikelnr.: 48420276

Autorenporträt

Negar Mottahedeh is Associate Professor in Literature and Women's Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (2008) and Representing the Unpresentable: Historical Images of National Reform from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran (2007).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Hashtag
chapter abstract
The citizen journalist was born out of the glitchy screens of mainstream
reporting. On Twitter, the hashtag #CNNfail represented one of these
glitches. When netizens tweeted the hashtag #cnnfail alongside the hashtag
#iranelection in the first days of the uprising in Iran in 2009, it was to
emphasize CNN's failure to report a collective act of dissent, in favor of
corporate bankruptcy news in the US. Iran was jamming foreign satellite
broadcasts along the length of the satellite's footprint. State television
too was co-opted into covering up the people's uprising and was
broadcasting programming that would lull the citizenry. This called for a
response by those who were witnessing the unfolding events. From amidst the
masses in the boulevards and squares of the Iranian cityscapes Iranians
uploaded videos and images to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. This moment
marked the birth of the citizen journalist. The hashtag became its slogan.
2Meme
chapter abstract
In tracing the campaigns of the Iranian election uprising, this chapter
recalls how bodies and social media handles effectively became memes, viral
transmitters of sensory experiences and actions that in their simultaneous
expression around a long trending hashtag, fundamentally changed the
function and purpose of online media platforms as they transformed the
spaces they moved through. The Iranian post-election crisis was in many
ways a citation of the Iranian revolution and an attempt to reverse its
losses. The chapter thus also chronicles the related history of the 1978
Iranian Revolution and traces the technologies and slogans that were used
during its course. The chapter argues that the digital Web 2.0 technology
in the Iranian election crisis memed the ways that technology was used in
the Iranian Revolution, tethered this time, to horizontal networks of
many-to-many transmission that awakened the world to the possibilities of
collective action online.
3Selfie
chapter abstract
The Iranian crisis of 2009 "memed" the content and operations of other
uprisings in modern Iranian history: the demonstrations for the
nationalization of oil in 1951, the marches against the CIA coup in1953,
and the Iranian Revolution of 1978. Focusing on the role of women and the
visual representation of women bodies at the forefront of these uprisings,
the chapter discusses the gains and losses of the Iranian women's movement
following its participations in the Iranian Revolution of 1978. Studying
the role of the camera lens and its logics in relation to the
representation of women in revolt, the chapter suggests that the
solidarities configured by the lens and framing of the digital camera in
the context of contemporary networked protests are transmitters of a global
solidarity formed on the networks of the web and symptomatic of a
melancholic failure to reclaim the fundamental loss of human solidarity
under capitalism.