This research article aims at applying Habermas’s approach on public sphere to political and social blogs in Iran. For such purpose, we purposefully selected and studies five blogs that we considered to be active blogs. We studied these blogs using a methodology of textual analysis. Some of the findings indicate that, although these blogs pave the way for easy access to information, but this is only quantitatively important. In other word, blogs have little qualitative effects on their audience. It can even be said that the information is fragmented in blogs. This means, everybody writes and speaks but no one reads or listens and much of blogs’ information is critically touched. Some other findings also show that posting comments in blogs has not facilitated dialogue as one of the public sphere goals and requirements. Nevertheless, if the critical view is considered as a public spheres' criteria, then and in that case, blogs have contributed to development of public sphere. We have witnessed that the legitimacy of the critical view is confirmed through the high range of filtering in blogs. In a way, it can be said that although blogs have the capacity to revive the public sphere, but in practice they are not able to fulfill their task.
Rabiee, A., Alikhani, Z., & Gholami, F. (2012). An Analysis of Social and Political Weblogs with Public Sphere Theory. Global Media Journal-Persian Edition, 7(2), -.
MLA
Ali Rabiee; Zohreh Alikhani; Farzad Gholami. "An Analysis of Social and Political Weblogs with Public Sphere Theory", Global Media Journal-Persian Edition, 7, 2, 2012, -.
HARVARD
Rabiee, A., Alikhani, Z., Gholami, F. (2012). 'An Analysis of Social and Political Weblogs with Public Sphere Theory', Global Media Journal-Persian Edition, 7(2), pp. -.
VANCOUVER
Rabiee, A., Alikhani, Z., Gholami, F. An Analysis of Social and Political Weblogs with Public Sphere Theory. Global Media Journal-Persian Edition, 2012; 7(2): -.
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