Assessing Iranian Collective Identity; Studying the Relation between Media Usage and Modern Identity in Border Towns of Iran

In the present age, the media play an important role in shaping the identities of individuals and communities, in addition to the visualizations, representations and highlights they generate for their audiences. The use of these media incorporates many of the indicators and principles of modern identity and makes it possible to transmit and construct their identities based on modern principles to other societies and humans. The issue of national identity, especially in the border towns of Iran, is of particular importance due to the hypothesis that there is a greater tendency towards ethnic and religious identities, cultural, political and economic deprivation as well as the identity gap of the citizens of these areas with the center. The main issue of this article is the study of the relationship between the development status of this identity among border townspeople with low data and their media consumption, mainly organized in a modern context of technology as well as emerging from modern principles and norms.
Therefore, following the discovery of an answer to the question of the relationship between media consumption and modern identity in the border cities of the country and based on the survey data carried out by the National Research Institute in 2017, a descriptive-analytical method is investigated. The results of this study show that: First, the citizens of border towns use social media in particular, and this consumption is partly related to their lifestyle, sense of belonging and, of course, their ethnic identity. Secondly, and on the other hand, their modern identity, although largely derived from their low media consumption, still plays a pivotal role in this regard, as well as the religious or indigenous identity that altogether organizes their traditional identity. Thirdly, given the inclusion of some modern identity indices among this group of borderline settlers, the future of their national and ethnic identities can be explored along with their globalization, as the data reviewed make this highly probable.