Iran: Reading Galactic Signs in the Blogosphere
John Kelly of Columbia, Harvard, and Morningside Analytics has been mapping the Farsi-speaking blogosphere, and if you check out his diagram of technicolor results--visually the gaudiest in cyberspace, but that's another story--you'll see his findings are auspicious on the brink of the election. Turns out that Iranian blogs that link to Ahmadinejad (emtedadmehr.com) are concentrated in a cluster that's normally devoted to Conservative Politics, while the blogs that link to Moussavi (mirhussein.com) "come from all over the map, not just the reformist politics group." In other words, Ahmadinejad's support in the cybersphere is self-limiting.
It must immediately be added that, of course, you would expect proportionately fewer of Ahmadinejad's rural poor to be online than Moussavi's urbanites. Still, if you don't mind having your expectations raised today, this is nice news.
Something else very striking is how many [Farsi-speaking] bloggers are talking about President Obama. The Map [here] shows bloggers who have mentioned "Obama" in the last month. It is not only Reformist or secular bloggers who are talking about the US president, but a swath of conservative and religious bloggers as well. In fact the only Iranian bloggers not talking about him appear to be the poets, who are usually focused on verses about love and loss anyway.
If you want to see how Kelly derives and crunches his numbers, check out these sites while you're whiling away the hours waiting for the vote count.
Between this and the election results in Lebanon it looks like we're starting to see the answer to all the neocons who kept asking during the Bush years why we should care what the Muslim world thinks of us.
June 12, 2009 9:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's important not to count our chickens before they're hatched. Commentators on Lebanon thought the resulted were headed towards Hezbollah prior to the election itself.
That said, 'hope' seems to be defining our era.
June 12, 2009 10:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, they did win the popular vote
And here's on of your "good guys,"
a Bin Ladinite.
In Iran the divide is between urban sophisticates and rural poor. But Ahmadinejad supports funding and the liberals are the ones who complain about "welfare queens." Ahmadinejad was elected in a popular backlash response against corruption. Ex-hardliner Rafsanjani got rich as a reformer.
And I don't say any of this as a supporter of Ahmadinejad, because I'm not one. But Iran is not the destabilizing force in the mideast, Israel and the US are. If Khamenei ruled like Mubarak the US and Israel would be happy.
How much coverage of the (fake) Egyptian elections was there on this site?
June 12, 2009 6:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
We really got out hopes up. There are more rural poor than young college students and urban professionals in Iran.
Our focus on Tehran, instead of on Iran, was an error. As if you could predict an election in Kansas by a poll in Manhattan.
June 13, 2009 3:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't have a big screen TV or High Def, but I swear I saw Katherine Harris in a burkah, smirking behind the Ayatollah.
June 14, 2009 3:51 PM | Reply | Permalink