January 22, 2008
Iranians’ love-affair with texting
Excerpts from a very interesting and thorough article published on Middle East Online on how in Iran, SMS has become a way for people to circumvent authority.
"Young Iranians are texting each other with humorous, subversive or plain saucy messages while the religious conservatives who run their country are slumbering.
The SMS craze has reached epidemic proportions, creating an invisible but booming social network that is far more extensive than it might appear.
... Texting is now a potent way of distributing information, critical remarks and above all jokes about politics. With no censorship and no holds barred, it allows people to break taboos, criticise the authorities, have some fun or chat someone up.
A popular target is Iran’s stance in the nuclear dispute. At a time when all the official media were repeating the slogan “nuclear energy is our indisputable right” day and night, young Iranians were deliberately waking their friends with texts in the middle of the night. Anyone woken up by a phone beep would read, “Sorry I woke you up at this time of the night. It’s nothing special - I just wanted to say that the nuclear energy is our indisputable right.”
... “There is no need to conduct an opinion poll to keep a finger on the pulse of Iranian society. It’s enough to collect and analyse day-to-day text messages,” said Dr Babak Khabiri, an expert on social affairs".
Read full article.
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