History
Early 2001 was the beginning of emergence of a blogging culture, which rapidly developed. the Iranian government, which had strict controls in place for the print media and had shut down as many as 100 print newspapers. Iran has been listed consistently as among the bottom countries in violation of freedom of the press by Reporters without Borders. Yet the internet provided a new means for widespread readership which was,up until 2004, was mostly unregulated, providing an outlet for mostly youth to express themselves freely. In 2009, due to the contentious nature of the presidential elections, and the rise of the green party movement, internet crackdowns have become far more strict. Nonetheless, as of 2009, according to the CIA world factbook, 8.214 million internet users in Iran, ranked 35th in the world. Blogs range from updates on art and critiquing movies, to following injustices of political prisoners. Diasporic Persian and Iranian blogs have also become a trend as a means to be part of an international online community. Blogs may be used as a virtual means of social protest without assembly, such as when thousands of bloggers renamed their blogs Akbar Ganji for a week in 2005, in support of the arrested critic of the regime. Hossien Derakhshan, the unofficial “godfather” of the blogosphere, set his up in Canada in September 2001. He was later arrested. In 2011, Iranian Authorities have executed and imprisoned more journalists and bloggers than any other countries, more than 600 people in one year.
Read more about this topic: Blogging In Iran
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)