Social Networks: Media of Informal society in Iran

According to technological and theorethical tranitions in communication, the 1990s can be considered as the treshhold of the end of mass media. A break from the Television Era that was completed with the emergence of Web2 and virtual social networks in the first decade of the 21st century. The main question of this article is that considering the collapse of traditional mass media apparatus and disconnection of the dominant link between mass brodacasting media and the central state after the communication revolution, what is the sociological position of the social media and ite embedded social networks in Iran's social structure?PurposeTransition from Television era to Social Networks era can never be considered as a usual change in one of the differentiated sectors of the society. In the Television era there was a corresponding relationship between the cold-war view of the power of mass communication tools in shaping public opinion and socio-cultural engineering of a unified nation-state; and the pyramidal idea of power, hierarchical discipline and centralized social structure in Western societies. In the 21st century this dominant apparatus has been seriously challenged by the transformation in communication technology as such as many theorists talk about global transition from the mass society to the network society.One of the results of these changes is exploration of the new emergent relationship between society and media especially in the countries with historical lack of democratic institutions and live public sphere. Methodologically this new finding, requires a contextual historical-sociological understanding of communication technology which is completely absent from conventional technocratic view of media in the Television era. Of course, such reseach can’t have a general universal answer and need local historial detailed investigations in each national context.  In the case of Iran, this article is an effort to emplace the “Network Society” theory in the particular historical context of Iran, by getting assistance from theories in Iranian Studies which talk about traditional network society and social networks in advance. MethodologyConsidering the necessity of setting the insights of “Network Soceity” theory inside the framework of contemporary Iranian social theory, three prominent sociological researches have been chosen which each include great communicational capacity to being used in relation to the question of this article: Rafipour's theory of Iranian informal society (2013), Migdal's theory of Strong Societies -Weak States of the third world (Migdal, 1988) and Serberni-Mohammadi's theory of “Small Media, Big Revolution” about special characteristics of Iranian field of communication during the Islamic Revolution (Serberni & Mohammadi, 1994). Following Manuel Castells who uses “Grounded Theory” to "explaining the structure and dynamics of the communication process in the historical context" (Castells, 2016: 38), the method of this research is also grounded theory, in the sense that the most relevant texts appropriate to the research problem are purposefully selected and with the critical analysis of the texts in the context of the Iranian experience, a new articulation of the concepts is presented.FindingsRafi’poor, Migdal and Serberni-Mohammadi are talking about a dichotomy in Iranian socio-communicational structure: in front of thecentral, formal and hierarchical mass society that is under control and manipulationof the state, there is an informal social network in Iran which is historicallyacting as a powerful resistant force in spite of central tendency to unifyingthe nation-state. By re-articulating the concepts provided by the three stated theoretical frameworks, we can induce that Iranian informal society is a network society that shapes its own media and communication tools to communicate, mediate, express and develop the appropriate social conduct. In this sense, the confrontation between the state’s mass media with the ability of centralized widely broadcasting especially in television; and the small social network media with the capacity of self-communicating, have always been the main field of socio-communication conflicts in contemporary Iran. It is precisely on this basis that new virtual social networks have been welcomed by the Iranian society due to their high networking capabilities and spontaneous diffused communication. In fact, the old informal social network absorbs the new virtual social networks: a mutual socio-technical reinforcement of pre-modern and post-modern mediation.ConclusionPutting these three social theories of Iran together and re-articulating them using the method of grounded theory in order to examine the relationship between the social context and the communicational imperatives shows that the victory of small networked and scattered media over the great centralized state media in the Islamic Revolution was one of the most important manifestations of the power of the Iranian informal society. In fact, according to the theory of informal society, it can be said that Iran's society is traditionally a network society with its adapted spontaneous collective communication, and virtual space is only one of the new capacities in the new chapter of this dynamism. If television is the media of the Iranian formal society, social networks are the media of the Iranian informal society. Considering the network characteristics and self-motivated communication of the Iranian informal society, which along the technical and communicational capacities of cyber social networks is creating and sharing its contents and discontents especially in the resistance and conflict with the centralized mass media of the formal society, it would be clear that the research and policy discussion over social networks should be recognized as an important branch of "sociology of informal society" in Iran.Novelty“Network Society'' theory is talking about the global transformation in social structures as consequence of the Information and Communication Revolution. This article, trying to contextualize this theory historically and sociologically in the case of Iran, argues that this phenomenon shouldn't be considered as a totally new revolutionary change in social structure, but is a new chapter in an extensive historical conflict between formal and informal society in Iran. From a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective, this conclusion is a critical revised interpretation of technological determinism embedded in the network society theory. Furthermore, this article is an Interdisciplinary study that reveals the need to multi-dimensional approaches to study the social media in 21st century.