Let’s Beef Up and Meet Up

Blogger, writer, and researcher Hamid Tehrani challenges Iranian activists to continually challenge their ways of working in the virtual sphere. It’s time to come up with new concepts for using the digital world, he tells us.

Let’s Beef Up and Meet Up

by Hamid Tehrani

Sometimes I should credit the authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran with honesty when they continuously insist that they must confront this soft power that is social and political change.

The bitter reality is that while the protest movement used social networking and citizen media in a significant way in 2009 during the hot days of protest, at present, Iranian cyber activists are simply recycling the same virtual environment without any innovation or successful Western media innovation.

For the past few years, Iranian cyber activists have used Western sites such as Facebook, YouTube, WordPress and other blogging tools with enthusiasm and intelligence. They have also created their own platforms such as Balatarin, which is reminiscent of Digg, and Gooya, which predates blogging and was born as a kind of political yellow pages, expanding into news gathering and political discussions.

What have we invented or imitated successfully since the 2009 days of protest that has attracted the gaze of the world and the media?

Nothing.

A few sites imitated Balatarin but there was no breakthrough.

It is annoying to nag without offering any ideas. So yes. I have two proposals. The first one is to create a knowledge pool where Iranian nerds can engage in discussion, without falling prey to Haystack mania, and try, as business gurus say, to bring synergy to our collective talents and plans.

The second idea is more concrete. I was inspired by the French journal, Liberation’s match-making site. This site brings together people who share the same cultural tastes, such as a love for a writer or movie director.

The same story can be seen in Meetup.com. Meetup.com has become a portal for moving virtual connections into the physical world. Tens of thousands of groups from knitters to dog walkers to philosophers have been able to form using Meetup.com and then meet in cafes and parks all over the US.

How can we do it? Ali, Nasrin, and Ahmad would love to work on developing an art expo on the internet. They can come to an Iranian Meet Up and share their ideas, exchange experiences, and launch projects. It can work for art as well as for politics. For the Iranian version, we would be better off staying in the virtual world, rather than the physical one, because of the security concerns.

In Meetup, we can beef up.