Translating a Movement

A few days ago, blogger Omid Memarian told me a story about the day after the June elections this year. As someone who knows pretty much all the major news agencies’ Iran correspondents, he called one of these colleagues and started talking animatedly about his analysis of the events. The journalist on the other end sounded confused. He listened but didn’t have much to say. 48 hours passed. It was only then that the journalist friend started to feel he had grasped what had happened after the elections, how, and why, and called Omid back. Omid said his own lack of time-lag was due to his close embedding in the political context of Iran. He explained that blogs like his own, which provided immediate English language commentary on the events in Iran from a real insider’s perspective, fulfilled a unique role in the wake of the election turmoil. They were the translators.

Many young second generation Iranians I’ve been talking to are aware of this need for translation. And English language blogs and websites are where several of them look to find it. But it happens offline too. Nothing exemplified this for me more than when we rounded up a bunch of friends, first and second generation students, and went to watch Khamenei’s fateful post-election speech together in Westwood. The running commentary of the meanings behind the “leader’s” words was for the benefit of those second generation kids who were deeply interested – enough to be there that night till 3 in the morning – but would have been lost without translation.

The political actions and stances of these second generation kids show awareness of their own distance from the complexities of the developments in Iran. But this doesn’t mean they’re passive. Student organizers I spoke with were clear about their support for and solidarity with the demonstrators of the green movement in Iran. But they drew the line at some of the “claiming of the green movement” going on, often among regime-change groups, who were commonly seen as rooted within an older generation of “exiles.” This generation gap seems to reflect a political gap, too (a point that recently got some attention in the LA Times); a shift towards a different type of political involvement among the second generation when it comes relating to the Iran’s green movement from here in LA.

Globalizing the movement is one of the impacts Mahasti Afshar attributes to social media and the Internet at large in today’s Iran. This important new facet of online communication seems to rely heavily on the quality of political, cultural, and of course linguistic translations that are being shared between Iranians in Iran and the diaspora, both online and offline. Yes, the Internet makes access to various perspectives very accessible. But are Twitter and Facebook updates directly from individuals inside Iran the main source of info for the second generation? Or are there still other barriers despite the Internet’s connectivity? It seems the important links between them are sources closely entrenched in both the Iranian and diaspora contexts - the virtual bureaus and journalistic blogs of those first (and some 1.5) generation individuals who have gained status as translators for this movement.

New Media Reflections

The questions about the camera-phone videos from inside Iran have come up in some conversations recently. I spoke to a young Iranian woman from East LA. She happened to be in Iran at the time of the post-election turmoil for work. She’s an artist. She said she was worried that the Twitter and Facebook circuits were showing a sensationalized version of the events. She didn’t feel like the videos she saw online when back in the US reflected her experience of the events when she was there. The little things like the everyday forms of resistance that people had been engaging in for a long time were being overlooked because they would not captivate audiences in a short video clip. She was concerned that this version of events would not help people outside Iran come to a more nuanced understanding of the complex political climate inside Iran that led to the recent unrest.

I think op-ed columnist for NYT, Roger Cohen, made a similar point when he came to LA to speak about writing from Iran after the elections. He said there’s substitute for being there. We should remember that what we’re seeing is not the full picture even if it’s vivid and current, he basically said. We shouldn’t see new media as replacing the role of quality, trained journalism. I think that’s what a lot of us learned, as we started to become more discerning about the sources and the content after acclimatizing to the initial shock of the developments. I have the impression that new kinds of media literacy had to emerge during that time. One female Iranian student I spoke to disagreed, though.

She already knew which sites to trust and which not to, she said. She talked on the phone to her relatives back in Iran, like many others here, and followed the news both on mainstream and other (online) media agencies. Despite the floods of Twitter messages of this summer, and the steady stream that is still flowing, those I talk with relied heavily - and still do - on journalism that fulfills conventional standards and methods of information verification and presentation… at least those who were, indeed, relying on such sources before the Facebook and Twitter booms hit, that is. Those who weren't... well, there will always be people like that, I guess.

Alternative Online Art Networks

Sociarts is an online forum for artists started up by Bita Shafipour, who came over to the US from Iran when she was 19 to study here, and is now a filmmaker. Bita told me she saw the role of the Internet as a means of preserving the quality of the arts; the film industry has completely given in to profit motives to the detriment of artistic quality. But Sociarts is supposed to represent how artists who are socially conscious - not just into making money - can get their social message out with the help of the Internet.

Sociarts is still run as a business and therefore has to make money itself, but the idea is that this online network provides more than just connections to clients and between artists. Rather, the network itself is “alive,” according to Bita. It’s based around common goals and interests, engenders trust and cooperation, and resembles an international community of artists more than a utilitarian artist network. This idea of online community is interesting to me. And the optimism and good intent of the creator are impressive. I just wonder how the artists and clients feel about it.

I’ve met artists who feel excluded from the established networks of artists in LA and perhaps have a slightly different idea of what “social consciousness” is. These artists don’t relate to the Iranian art circuits that are rooted in the spaces of wealth and privilege in West LA. The few I’ve spoken to identify more closely with the struggle of less wealthy Iranians (including those who couldn’t afford to leave Iran), and different ethnic minority groups in other parts of LA. I can’t say the role of the Internet is taking any solid shape yet among the young Iranian American artists I've talked to(who all happen to be women, by the way). However, it’s beginning to become a space for them to share their art with others inside and outside of their regular audiences. They’re learning new things about the consequences of sharing their work online, the difficulties and advantages, and it seems to be something that’s developing.

The Iranian Internet Freedom Bandwagon

Those three months went by too fast. But now I’m back, to write about a jumble of things that have happened in the meantime, in no particular order, starting, this time, with international internet solidarity with the Iranian “green movement.” Austin Heap started Haystack, an anti-censorship program. A few months back Heap was seen on stages rallying for Iran and speaking at events. TOR has had a spike in users (approx 3000) from Iran starting after the elections. Pirate Bay also declared their support for online Iranians and their “green” agenda... It has certainly caught on.

Maybe I’m totally off, but it all reminded me a bit of Fred Turner’s description of the ideals that the Internet was set up with in its early days in his book Counterculture to Cyberculture. These utopian notions from the 60s and 70s saw the Internet as a harbinger of “virtual communities” and global connectedness that was going to democratize the world. But according to Turner, this ideal has since morphed into an ideology of deregulating the newly-networked marketplace, empowering a technologically enabled elite, and encouraging the building of new businesses.

It's not the initiatives that people are taking to technologically empower Iranians that remind me of these early cyber-cultural ideas, but the reception they've been getting in the mainstream media and general public. Listening to the celebratory and somewhat self-congratulatory tone of the speakers at the Internet's "40th birthday" event last week at UCLA, these ideas still seemed very much in full force. Apparently not much has changed in 40 years in that respect.

But I don’t know if this sounds like what Heap is doing today with Iran. He started basic with just himself and Daniel Colascione and has now set up a non-profit. It seems things are much less shady this way than when the US State Department funds your project like with TOR, or has influence over your maintenance hours like with Twitter. Shady is definitely the world that comes to mind when considering the way McCain (and others) also jumped on the Iranian Internet freedom bandwagon with the legislation he announced would ensure Internet access to social networking sites in Iran. Is it just me or has the line between those who work towards freedoms for Iranians and those who want war with Iran become very fine?