Doctoral Research
How do people change in the process of creating? How does creativity take an inward direction to fashion an inner self? My doctoral dissertation examines these primordial questions through the prism of a particular creative site of material production—the Persian blogosphere. Blogging is an extremely popular means for producing self-centering narratives—i.e., written accounts centering around one’s lived experience—in Iran, making Persian one of the top 10 blogging languages. As it deploys ethnographic research to explore blogging, a medium enabled by the coming together of technology, language, and people, in a specific cultural context, my dissertation challenges the received ideas of what media, technological or otherwise, do; it challenges conventional ideas that center on symbolic representation instead of material creation. My research considers the Persian blogosphere not as a theater where bloggers stage already-formed inner selves, which is how it is commonly portrayed, but rather as a factory whereby bloggers’ selves are continually fashioned.
The neat, finished artifact conceals the messy operations, explorative experimentations, and accidental inventions that take place inside sites of material creation. My ethnography explores these oft-ignored operations inside the factory which is the Persian blogosphere. Blogposts, the neat products of blogging, obscure the actual intervening processes, material techniques, unintentional creations, and creative accidents that go into the making of blogposts and bloggers’ inner selves. In the Persian blogosphere, local traditions and understandings, including the long history of Sufism, inform these operations. For example, an interlocutor told me that he sometimes types words into the editor window of his blog without thinking about their meaning until the “sea of written words” on the computer display drowns him. When he is drowned, dead, and helpless the sea of words lifts him and takes him to an unplanned vantage point from where he sees things anew. He then writes the blogpost, a written account that comprehends things from that fresh vantage point. As it uncovers the processes through which people gain new understandings of the world, my ethnography also explores the haecceity of the internet in Iran: What happens when a universal technology arrives at a culturally singular field of forces? My dissertation examines not only the uniquely Iranian qualities or uses of the technology, but also how singularities in this specific field of cultural forces have led to the birth of these qualities and functions.
Blogging plays a crucial role in Iran’s political culture, not simply because it assists people in defying the government’s stranglehold on broadcasting, but because it moreover helps to craft autonomous individuals. It is why the Green Movement of 2009, which was characterized by its everyone-a-leader style reflected in its main slogan “You Are the Media,” cannot be fully understood unless it is viewed together with a blogging community whose best-known blog, created eight years prior to the movement, is called “Editor: Myself.” While most of studies of the Persian blogosphere have focused on the first half of the phrase, considering blogging as a form of citizen journalism challenging the government, my research emphasizes the second half of the phrase, by exploring how, in the context of contemporary Iran, writing blogs helps people become autonomous subjects, the heroes and heroines of stories centering around them, which in turn changes the dynamics of power in the country at a more micro level.
My research is not, however, either another anthropocentric account of self-fashioning of an autonomous subject acting as the sole source of its own authority, nor a representational study of the subject’s narrative. As it takes its scrutiny beyond the realm of meaning, narratives, stories, and ideas, where the already-constituted individual has an ontological privilege, my research shows that the seemingly autonomous selves, in their self-fashioning projects, depend upon the materiality of the technology and of written words. Although ultimately about identities crafted online, this ethnography therefore underlines an understanding of fashioning selves through a technological medium of writing that concerns itself, in seemingly counterintuitive ways, with the negotiation of alterities rather than the formation of identities. In its contributions to the anthropology of the self, media, technology, and writing, my research primarily pays attention to alterity (in its many forms, including that of the technological medium and its formal properties, and the materiality of written words) rather than identity (in the form of the identicality or equivalence of the blogger’s self with his or her accounts). This ethnographic research shows that the identities crafted through media are made possible because of those alterities. In line with its purpose to expose the messiness of operations inside the factory, my research therefore shows that the creation of genuine narratives, which in turn helps fashion autonomous selves, requires insincere accounts and includes individuals who depend on the medium, and on the paths and possibilities it provides towards an understanding of the self. My dissertation contributes to the anthropologically-informed understanding of technological media, by arguing that the medium works to help fashion human selves, indeed because it is the Other of the traditional image of what is human.
Though crafting of selves has always been political, emergent, and technological, blogging has vastly transformed this process in Iran. This research combines ethnographic research with a distinct cultural explanation rooted in the cultural context of contemporary Iran, coupled with the literary and narrative traditions that go back a thousand years or more, to explore the processes of mediated self-fashioning from Perso-Islamic mysticism to contemporary social media. I experience with the possibilities of ethnographic writing to foreground the singularities of the subject matter. The ethnographic evidence from fieldwork in the Persian blogosphere—which in and out of itself poses significant methodological questions—forms the basis of the dissertation’s arguments. As a way into the ethnographic data, anthropological, philosophical, technology studies, and media studies theories, synopses of the cultural history of Sufism, and fragments of Iran’s literacy and literary traditions, provide a line of communication throughout my dissertation. Although the participants in this line of communication may seem geographically distant, culturally distinct, and spread throughout the history of the country, the question of selves crafted in a technologically mediated setting maintains the dialogue.