#iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life
Faculty Bookwatch Publication
Negar Mottahedeh
Literature
What lies "under the hood" of a scholarly book? In a special edition of Faculty Bookwatch on March 28, 2016, the Franklin Humanities Institute and Duke University Libraries featured three distinctive Duke faculty projects to explore the dynamic possibilities of humanities scholarship.
FEATURED BOOKS & PROJECTS
- Michèle Longino, Romance Studies
French Travel Writing in the Ottoman Empire: Marseilles to Constantinople, 1650-1700 (Routledge 2015)
Respondent: Herman Beck (Culture Studies, Tilburg University) - Negar Mottahedeh, Program in Literature
#iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life (Stanford 2015)
Respondent: Nicholas Mirzoeff (Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University) - Andrew Janiak, Philosophy
Project Vox
Respondent: Liz Milewicz, Digital Scholarship Services, Duke University Libraries
Book description:
The protests following Iran's fraudulent 2009 Presidential election took the world by storm. As the Green Revolution gained protestors in the Iranian streets, #iranelection became the first long-trending international hashtag. Texts, images, videos, audio recordings, and links connected protestors on the ground and netizens online, all simultaneously transmitting and living a shared international experience.
#iranelection follows the protest movement, on the ground and online, to investigate how emerging social media platforms developed international solidarity. The 2009 protests in Iran were the first revolts to be catapulted onto the global stage by social media, just as the 1979 Iranian Revolution was agitated by cassette tapes. And as the world turned to social media platforms to understand the events on the ground, social media platforms also adapted and developed to accommodate this global activism. Provocative and eye-opening, #iranelection reveals the new online ecology of social protest and offers a prehistory, of sorts, of the uses of hashtags and trending topics, selfies and avatar activism, and citizen journalism and YouTube mashups.
