23.1393, Diss: Socioling/Persian/Iranian: Zare: 'Home and Away: Blogging emotions in a Persian virtual dowreh'

Mon Mar 19 19:08:48 UTC 2012

LINGUIST List: Vol-23-1393. Mon Mar 19 2012. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 23.1393, Diss: Socioling/Persian/Iranian: Zare: 'Home and Away: Blogging emotions in a Persian virtual dowreh'

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Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:08:22
From: samad zare [szare at ipc.ac.nz]
Subject: Home and Away: Blogging emotions in a Persian virtual dowreh

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Institution: Massey University 
Program: Linguistics and Second Language Teaching 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2011 

Author: Samad Zare

Dissertation Title: Home and Away: Blogging emotions in a Persian virtual dowreh 

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics

Subject Language(s): Persian, Iranian (pes)

Dissertation Director(s):
Martin Paviour-Smith
Cynthia White
Peter Petrucci

Dissertation Abstract:

This study explores the creation of a virtual dowreh (family/social circle)
via Persian language weblogs among a group of Iranian migrants in
Australia. The motivation and inspiration for this study arose from my own
experience as a migrant. I became interested in looking at how the new
generation of Iranian migrants use weblogs to form digital diasporas and
why they publish their emotional experiences online, thereby adding to the
understanding of a relatively under-researched community.

The study draws upon a sociocultural approach in order to bring to light
the role of weblogs in the context of the most recent Iranian migration and
the way Iranian migrants use them to replace dowrehs disrupted by the
migration experience where they could perform cultural identities and
express and share their emotions. Using a grounded theory approach and
discourse analysis to blog posts, the study investigates the expression of
emotional challenges, expectations, and cultural performances of a group of
Persian diasporic bloggers. 

The exploration of a diasporic virtual dowreh produced several interesting
results. The findings suggest the possibility of online community formation
via weblogs where Iranians could meet and perform cultural identities which
are not available to them in the host society. Two characteristics that
marked the virtual dowreh were the type of Persian language used and the
interaction between the bloggers and their audience. The analysis
demonstrated that interactions between the bloggers and their audience via
commenting functions were noticeably governed by Iranian notions of
politeness and other Persian rules of decorum and cultural practices. The
analysis also illustrated that the language used in the virtual dowreh was
a combination of written and spoken Persian, Internet jargon, weblog terms,
and concepts from the host society. Furthermore, the exploration of the
emotional challenges of the bloggers revealed that certain emotions such as
homesickness and self-conscious emotions were among the major sources of
emotion in the diaspora and indexed the bloggers' Iranian diasporic
identities online. The study concludes with the importance of weblogs for
Iranian migrants in creating virtual dowrehs where they could
practise/perform cultural identities and express and thereby share their
emotional experience. 

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