RSSDiscourses of Ideology and Identity: Social Media and the Iranian Election Protests
Feb 10
AUTHOR: Chris Featherman
TITLE: Discourses of Ideology and Identity
SUBTITLE: Social Media and the Iranian Election Protests
SERIES TITLE: Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Sibo Chen, Simon Fraser University
Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
As the latest volume of the Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse Series,
“discourse of ideology and identity” by Chris Featherman aims to explore the
ways in which ideologies and identities are discursively constructed during
social movements. Based on a case study of the opposition movement against the
2009 Iranian presidential election results, the book questions the master
narratives offered by Western legacy media on Iran and its 2009 post-election
crisis and argues that new media discourses such as Twitter tweets and Flickr
uploads by activists re-entextualize the crisis in a reticulated,
transnational public sphere. The book also examines how English, as a borrowed
language for many Iranian protesters, contributes to the construction of
transnational imaginaries by shaping the protesters’ online identifications.
The book consists of six chapters and two appendices, with Chapters Three,
Four and Five presenting the major research findings.
Chapter One “Opening: Protesting the Results”
Chapter One introduces the research’s general theoretical and socio-political
contexts and the book’s overall structure. The chapter begins by discussing
the increasing importance of social media in social movements, which leads to
two competing views within current academic debates on social media’s
democracy-promoting potential: cyber-utopianism and cyber-skepticism. Instead
of simply picking one side, the author argues that “at the nexus of these
(utopian or skeptic) discourses are, among other notions, ideology, identity,
and the ways in which social actors can generate both communication and
counter-power, particularly in relation to language and technology” (p. 3). In
other words, it is crucial for us to critically examine the contingent links
between knowledge and politics through the lens of discourse as the
connections between language and globalization become increasingly complex,
multifarious, and intrinsic. Another interesting point addressed in this
chapter is the author’s assessment of classic sociolinguistics’ analytical
foci on distinctions and biases. According to the author, such foci are no
longer able to capture how emerging new media discursive practices are infused
by global cultural flows. Thus, there is a need to construct a revised
sociolinguistic approach that frames linguistic analysis in terms of
transnational flows, networks, and social movements, especially during social
protests and conflicts when linguistic tactics are adopted and manipulated for
the purpose of promoting new ideas and new identities.
Chapter Two “’Down with Potatoes!’ Theory, Methods, Contexts”
Chapter Two continues to outline the macro-contexts of the 2009 post-election
crisis and discuss the research’s theoretical and methodological frameworks.
The chapter views the intensified atmosphere during the run-up to the 2009
Iranian presidential election and the protests following it as a result of
three important factors: (1) the Khatami-led cultural reforms during the late
1990s, which, with a vision for Islamic-Iranian modernity, ended up opening a
space for dissent within the Iranian public sphere; (2) the rise of the
Iranian youth population, who, under the growing influence of Western cultural
flows and information and communication technologies (ICTs), becomes the
leading force against the current Iranian governance; and (3) the development
of new media, which offers the information infrastructure for Iranian civil
groups and dissidents to circumvent Iran’s internal media censorship and
blockades against foreign journalists. Building from these insights, the
chapter further addresses how the post-election crisis in Iran demonstrates
that the control of information has become the fundamental struggle in
networked societies. Under this circumstance, discursive practices can
function as power of institutions as well as counter-power of individual
agency (Castells, 2009). In this regard, communication has become an essential
form of network power and, increasingly, communication power is contested in a
globalized context, with English being the dominant lingual-franca
facilitating transnational and transcultural interconnections. Based on the
above theoretical ground, the chapter ends by proposing critical discourse
analysis (CDA), as an appropriate venue to examine the complex theories and
phenomena employed in the networked and transnational discursive practices.
Specifically, the author discusses how the socio-cognitive approach (van Dijk,
2008) and corpus linguistics would address the weakness of the mainstream CDA
framework, especially in terms of traditional CDA’s questionable reliability
and overt political stance.
Chapter Three “Constructing the Protesters’ Identities in the U.S. Media”
Chapter Three examines the discursive construction of ideologies and
protesters’ identities during the 2009 Iranian post-election crisis by U.S.
legacy media. Following key theories on media discourse (e.g. ideology, news
framing, metaphor, etc.), the quantitative electronic analyses presented here
demonstrate how leading U.S. newspapers, through various discursive and
communicative strategies, framed the post-election crisis and the opposition
movement as a conflict between tradition and modernity, with “Iranian politics
as irrational” being a fundamental metaphor throughout the analyzed news
coverage. Another prominent news frame consistently presented by the analyzed
reports was the linkage between protesters and social media, which showed the
general cyber-utopian views currently held by news media. Overall, the shift
of news frames along with the prevailing of the post-election crisis not only
legitimized the U.S. public’s existing biases toward Iran and but also opened
the discursive space for discussing U.S.’s potential intervention in the
crisis. The author locates these findings in terms of the contentious
U.S.-Iranian relations since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and the key role
played by legacy media in maintaining the hegemonic institutional interests in
the government-media nexus (Entman, 2004).
Chapter Four “Borrowed Language: Reentextualizing Symbolic Resources and
Discursively Constructing Stance”
Chapter Four expands the analysis of Iranian activists’ discursive practices
on social media by focusing on the inter-textual and inter-discursive aspects
of these discourses and the ways in which the activists’ tactical use of
social media brought their voices across rhizomatic digital networks.
Specifically, the chapter examines three major discursive tactics by the
activists (i.e. retweeting, hyperlinking, and image re-entextualization) and
argues that these tactics not only facilitated communication coordination and
information dissemination among local protesters, but also sparked “networked
effervescence” that brought the opposition movement in Iran across global
networks and made it part of the transnational political public sphere.
Meanwhile, given English’s prestigious status as a global lingua franca and
its ideological connection to Western modernity in Iran, the Iranian
activists’ tactical borrowing of English in their new media discourses also
suggests the complex cultural politics bound up with English and how it could
function as symbolic resonance for the disempowered to generate counter
communicative power.
Chapter Five “Collective Action and Networked Identifications”
Chapter Five extends the arguments of the previous two chapters by further
discussing the various identifications made by Iranian protesters through
their discursive practices on social media, especially the use of collective
lexical forms and the building of connections between the Iranian opposition
movement and other ongoing social movements. The chapter argues that the
dynamic links within the traditional place-identity nexus (Dixon & Durrheim,
2000) have become increasingly complex due to the growing social media usage
and globalization. Accordingly, the traditional linkages between social
identities and culture, ethnicity, and place are being challenged by an
emerging call for transnational imaginaries and public spheres. English
functions as a transnational vernacular along this process of trans-local
identification. As shown in the new media discourses by Iranian activists, the
logic of collective agency and participation was a central aspect of these
activists’ collective identification and when such logic was echoed by
activists across the globe, the sense of “togetherness” and “global
solidarity” became evident, offering critiques against the nation-state
ideologies held by legacy media.
Chapter Six “Effervescence or Resonance? Closings”
Chapter Six concludes the book with an re-engagement of the key findings in
relation to the theoretical and methodological framework established in
Chapter One. The chapter revisits the key discussions in previous chapters,
such as Iran’s ambiguous attitudes toward Western modernity and technologies,
the compatibility between network theories and a socio-cognitive approach
toward CDA, the role of English in a globalized world, the logic of
participation and its key role in the generation of counter communicative
power, and so on. A profound question emerging from these discussions is the
question of belongingness: how do we define belongingness when meanings become
less embedded in their local contexts and new mobilities are created by
transnationalism and advancing ICTs? This question, among many others, points
out possible directions for future research on new media language and
globalization.
EVALUATION
Overall, this book effectively demonstrates the immense complexity of
discourses of ideology and identity and also reveals how English, as a global
language, is challenging the traditional place-identity nexus when the world
is gradually transformed into rhizomatic organizations. Indeed, discourse
offers us a valuable lens to examine the multiple layers of linguistic
practices and social organizations and the interesting case study on Iran
makes a strong argument or language’s critical role in contemporary social
movements.
The mixed-method adopted by the book is perhaps one of its strongest
attributes; it offers a valuable lesson for future CDA research since it
effectively aids the author in justifying the various findings’ validities and
trajectories. In particular, the discussion of “conceptual blending” in
Chapter Three will be interesting for researchers looking for corpus-based
research designs on news framing analysis.
Additionally, the book’s in-depth theoretical discussions on globalization,
language and identity, and ideology and media discourse provide a sound
theoretical framework addressing both historical and contemporary debates on
the complex interactions among language, media, and society. As such, the book
is most suited for upper-level graduate students and researchers with
backgrounds in sociolinguistics and a good grasp of critical social theories.
On the down side, the book falls short of providing a comprehensive reputation
of the cyber-skeptic arguments. Although the author managed to refute skeptic
arguments such as Morozov (2011) and Dean (2005) by emphasizing the
participatory aspect of discursive practices on social media, this
counter-argument is still not able to address the central concerns offered by
cyber-critics: how can social media be a true democratic tool when the
ideologies circulated through it tend to be biased toward Western modernity,
letting alone the fact that the communications on it are ultimately captured
for profit? Another potentially contentious point is the link established by
the author between the Iranian opposition movement and other social movements.
The question is: “what do they protest against?” If we view the 2009
post-election crisis in Iran as a call for modernity by the Iranian youth
population, then arguably it is fundamentally different from many other social
movements that are fighting against Western modernity.
To conclude, the book provides a good opportunity for those interested in new
media discourse to obtain a comprehensive reading of how discourse functions
as a crucial force shaping ideologies and identities in contemporary
societies. The book’s interdisciplinary orientation would make it interesting
reading for scholars both inside and outside linguistics.
REFERENCES
Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dean, J. (2005). Communicative capitalism: Circulation and the foreclosure of
politics. Cultural Politics, 1(1): 51-74.
Dixon, J., & Durrheim, K. (2000). Displacing place-identity: A discursive
approach to locating self and other. British Journal of Social Psychology, 39,
27-44.
Entman, R. (2004). Projections of power: Framing news, public opinion, and
U.S. foreign policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morozov, E. (2011). The net delusion: The dark side of Internet freedom. New
York: Public Affairs.
van Dijk, T. (2008). Discourse and context: A socio-cognitive approach.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sibo Chen is a PHD student in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser
University. He received his MA in Applied Linguistics from the Department of
Linguistics, University of Victoria, Canada. His major research interests are
language and communication, critical discourse analysis, and genre theories.
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