Kamangir (Archer)

A Facebook for Public Executions

Kamangir | October 24, 2007 | Category Human Rights, Iran, media

Two very good Winnipegger friends Julienne and Simon, and I chatted a few days ago in Tom Horton’s about Persian blogosphere. Some of the things we talked about is mentioned in the article “The power and pitfalls of ‘citizen journalism’“, by Julienne Isaacs, with files from Simon Charles, published in the University of Winnipeg Student Weekly.

Iran is a hotbed of active blogs. Impressively, Persian (Farsi) is the second-most common language of the blogosphere after English, tied only with French. Iranian youth connect online in ways that prove impossible in the country’s hard-line fundamentalist environment. They blog about politics, or to meet people of the opposite sex, or to speak out about what they see happening in the streets of their cities. Blogging is becoming so common in Iran that the mullahs, Iran’s religious leaders, have begun training bloggers in the Holy City of Qom, in an effort to keep the balance of voices in Iran from shifting too far from their agenda.

“Think of it this way,” Iranian blogger Arash Kamangir advised me in an interview last week. “Canadians use Facebook to talk about weddings. In Iran, people blog about public executions.”