The Iranian connection
Reflecting online: Grad student Sanam Dolatshahi stays connected with her Iranian readers. (Photo by Andrea Morales)
Country’s first female
blogger stays plugged in
She wanted to write about sex but not from jail, so Iran’s first female blogger, Sanam Dolatshahi, used a pseudonym. “Lady Sun” wrote about clashing with her parents and boys.
“Because I was anonymous,” she said, “I was really comfortable to write about whatever I wanted.”
Today, Dolatshahi, a graduate student in UF’s joint mass communication-women’s studies program, can write without fearing arrest. She started her blog in 2001 in Iran after having a computer for four months. She learned about the Internet from Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan’s columns in a reformist newspaper. In her first entry, she wrote, “I don’t know what to write about.” Yet almost immediately, she began receiving e-mails from readers. Reza Ghassemi, an Iranian writer exiled in Paris, advised her to write about herself and the mind of Iranian women.
“Blogs don’t have a direct influence, but they influence people who influence other people,” said Prof. Mindy McAdams, Knight Chair in journalism technologies and the democratic process.
Dolatshahi writes two blogs: Farsi (http://khorshidkhanoom.com) and English (http://www.ladysun.net). Her Farsi blog receives 900-1,500 daily hits. Last month after a two-year hiatus, she restarted updating her English blog, in which she aims to give the world a better picture of Iranians.
In 2003, she wrote in her English blog: “People in Iran have never been silent. No fear has been able to shut them up forever. All through our history we have heroes fighting and getting killed for freedom. In many parts of our contemporary history of the movements and protests of Iran, the same dear Western authorities have interfered and blocked the whole movement, because Iran has oil and is rich in natural resources.”
An entry in her Farsi blog helped save a life. She wrote about an Iranian woman who killed a man who harassed and blackmailed her. Found guilty of murder, the woman faced capital punishment unless she paid $28,000 to her victim’s family.
“No matter what you think about her act,” Dolatshahi wrote in 2005, “please help us collect the money if you are against the death penalty.”
Bloggers spread the news and helped raise enough money to save the woman.
Such efforts make Dolatshahi and other bloggers resonate with a broad range of people, said 37-year-old Syamak Moattari, an Iranian environmental activist in Gainesville who’s been reading Dolatshahi’s Farsi blog for two years. “People like that she’s a regular lady,” he said. “[The blog is] popular among her audience because everyone can find his or her interest [in it].”
Dolatshahi updates her blog every day, sometimes about personal issues, other times about women’s rights or politics, including Iran’s controversial nuclear program. She opposes such weapons and said Iran shouldn’t have them even if other countries do. She writes she fears facing the same fate as Iraq.
“Our current [Iranian] president is a dangerous person,” she said, “not reliable to be in a position that might lead to access to nuclear weapons.”
A recent entry presents her frustration and disappointment at a series of events in Iran, including a bus drivers’ strike in which the strikers were suppressed and jailed, and the possible execution of a 20-year-old woman for publishing a satire comparing the government to HIV. She includes links to information about these occurrences and writes about how helpless she feels. “The point is it doesn’t matter if we write or we don’t,” she said. “We can’t do anything about it.”
She estimates half of her readers are in Iran and the rest are Iranians around the world, mostly in the U.S. and Canada. The digital divide limits her audience. Only six or seven million people out of 70 million in Iran have access to the Internet, she noted. And the government tries to block any Web site with “woman” in the title. Bloggers fight this by changing domain names when the government shuts down their sites, but they lose readers, she noted. “In Iran, freedom of speech is a joke.”
Dolatshahi edited Iran’s first e-zine, Cappuccino, and the
English section of Iran’s first women’s news Web site, Women
in Iran. She also has worked as a translator for Stop Censoring
Us, a blog against the
filtering of the Internet in Iran.
“She’s one of the best bloggers in my country,” Moattari said.
Dolatshahi plans to complete her schooling and work in the United States for a few years before possibly returning to Iran, she said. She wants to join an international human-rights organization in the press section and cover women’s-rights issues.
