مجله جهانی رسانه - نسخه فارسی
پیاپی 6 (پاییز و زمستان 1387)

The main objective of this paper is to provide knowledge about the tendency of the youth in one of the remote provinces of Iran (Charmahal va Bakhtiari) regarding new media use with a special reference to their tendency towards internet use. This analysis will also engage in a causal analysis of the factors involved in explanation of this tendency. The results of this paper comes from a survey research project that was launched in 1385-1386 Iranian Calendar (2006-2007) regarding internet use among the young population of the province. The statistical population of this research includes the young population of the province provided their age falls between the range of 15 to 25 and that their place of residence is located in urban centers and who internet users were at the time of this study. The sample size based on a random sampling method amounted to 381. The primary results indicate that various objectives drives the Charmahali youth to use internet and that structural and no-structural factors are involved to drive the Charmahali youth to use internet. This type of knowledge has several contributions including adding up to the previous knowledge on patterns of internet use in Iran. Most importantly the results contribute to regional planning regarding organizing leisure time for the province’s young population and how their needs towards using new media should be met.

Education as a social process is under the influence of the society, its institutions and the environment that it operates in. Schools as a part of the social structure shape students both attitudes and behavior and reflect the society's values. Students’ socialization is heavily influenced by their family, neighborhoods, and schools including teachers and textbooks. School textbooks are an important source for socialization in the process of learning during the course of schooling for children aged between 6 to 18 years old. This age group is including population of over 15 million boys and girls in Iran. These are a reflection of the culture, knowledge and values considered important by authorities in society. Iran, like other Middle Eastern societies, is facing higher population and water resources shortage in the future. Therefore, the impact of environmental images or knowledge about the resources and predicted risk would worth to be studied. The purpose of this paper is to show the way school textbooks shape Iranian kids attitudes towards the word or concept of water in terms of natural resources or water consumption. This study analyzed the presentation of concept of water in Iranian school textbooks. Some 82 school textbooks were investigated by utilizing content analysis method. Content analyses of the 11 different subjects showed that there were significant differences among science, humanities and social science books in terms of structure and social values. The study examined school textbooks used in grades 1 through 11 published 1984 by the Ministry of Education. The study revealed an interesting finding that about two percent of total content devoted to water related issues under 20 different categories, but less than 0.05 percent related to the way of consumptions or quality of healthy water. The images of water portrayed here, show the richness of natural resources including sea, rivers and the level of rain or snow for different parts of the country or the world. In contrast, data from WRI indicate that in the next two decades sanitation, healthy water and drought would be the major challenge for the people who are living in some part of the world including the Middle East and Central Asian regions. Results implied important directions for educational administrators and policy makers in the preparation and use of right educational content to support the environmental cause.

Weblog is a personal medium in which bloggers can present their needs, believes, and values, free from the constraints of real world and social barriers that rule over other media. By usingqualitative content analysis and Schwartz’s value inventory, this research attempts to explore the kinds of values expressed in weblogs of Iranian bloggers. Findings indicate that bloggers mostly use blog-sphere to represent that part of their values which have been less represented in the real world and especially in other media. Based on the results, values such as Hedonism and Stimulation, which are collated into a larger group named “Openness to Change”, are expressed more than other dimensions and categories of values in weblogs. Gender differences in value representation are also explored.

This paper tends to reconstruct concepts such as agency, ideological understanding and commitment of the movie-maker and the movie audience. The subject of this study relates to Samuel Beckett’s exhibition that took place in Paris. During the exhibition, one of Beckett’s videos “Film” is played. “Video” and “Trial” along with “Film” constitute a narrative chain in this paper. The common characteristics of the genres to which these films allude is the ambiguity of the object and subjectivity. In other words, what are the effecting factors on political agency and the audience’s self-conscousness, as well as the audience’s sense of political responsibility? In his movie “Film”, Beckett makes use of Deleuze’s view on three types of images. Deleuze maintains there are three types of images, the perception-image, the affection-image, and the action-image, in cinema in which both character and audience are activated. Affection image is a good method for explaining the video titled “video” made by Canadian artist Stan Douglas. This work is in some repects a reconstructed version of Orson Welles’s movie “Trial” which was made based on Franz Kafka’s novel. There are many elements in “Video” that brings it to be similar to “Film” and this reflects a history of the two movies in two different time periods. On the other hand, Welles who works with visual media reconstructs Kafka’s hero and materialize it. While Beckett depersonalizes his movie’s character, Douglas’s support for Welles movie indicates his interest in exploring the relation between embodiment and character. In the meantime, these artists create a type of political skepticism about art. These works are some samples of political art which indicate how a political art may be able to detach itself from traps that tend to eliminate critiquing ideology. This means, an influencing art can loan the characteristic of an agency to its audience. Two of the works of moving images that are studied here are mute and wordless although in The Trial many dialogues are exchanged. In fact, the visual presentation of an interaction without words changes the role of language. The visual language of the works goes beyond being an exclusive tool of unilinearity and coherence for presenting the narrative.

In this article, we probe the issue of information and communication technology development in Iran in recent years by focusing on the country’s information and communication technology firms. We first provide an overview of the structural and institutional context of information technology development in the country. We then turn to a discussion of the current status of the information technology sector, including software and hardware production. In the last section before our concluding remarks we analyze the results of semi-structured interviews carried out with 30 companies in the sector representing various information technology sub-sectors. We generally conclude that despite public sector institutional and financial support as well as the existence of import barriers on the one hand and the recent numerical growth of information technology companies in recent years on the other, the sector remains underdeveloped. In particular, international sanctions against Iran have precluded the establishment of necessary international links while public sector financial support has not been provided in a capability-enhancing environment. Furthermore, the weakness of intellectual property rights has prevented the growth of the software industry whereas inexpensive and illegal foreign software have flooded the market. Also, formal hardware import barriers have resulted in the proliferation of illegal imports. Leveraging Iran’s significant pool of graduates in information and communication technology, we propose a change in the policy environment toward creating a capability-enhancing environment that gives attention to fostering technological and managerial capabilities, efficiency, and quality. Although Iran has a long way before it can export its hardware products, given such an environment, it is possible for Iranian firms to rapidly enhance their presence in the international software market.

This paper will examine the causal relationship between internet knowledge of the youth in Tehran and their tendency to use it for e-commerce of Bongah (B 2 C) purposes. The problematic of the research rests on revealing the socio-economic status of the youth that affects their tendencies towards actually using their knowledge of internet to apply to e-commerce activities. The paper uses digital gap theory which is a variant of knowledge gap theory to address this problem and find possible solutions. I have then operationalized this theory into measurement tools by identifying main variables and using them to build a questionnaire that is attached to the paper. I used the questionnaire among 150 samples in Tehran to collect my date. Some of the findings indicate there is a causal relationship between educational level of the respondents, their socio-economic status and their tendency to use e-commerce facilities. Also, there is a digital gap among the youth in Tehran and this is causing them have differential knowledge and this in turn is causing them to use e-commerce facilities offered by shoppers in a differential manner. The findings also indicate that there is lack of trust among the youth directed at internet-based shopping facilities causing them not to get involved in e-commerce.