ABSTRACT
The promotion of information technology (IT) and its integration into local public sectors became one of Iran’s most important national goals in the postwar era, especially from the 1990s onward. Iranian printed and broadcast media have been strongly regulated by the state since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Yet the expansion of telecommunication networks and proliferation of Internet infrastructure and online culture over the past two decades also entailed the emergence of an alternative media channel that contests once-impregnable state monopolies over access to information. The emergence of Blogistan, the Iranian cybersphere of online self-publishing journals, has posed various challenges to the Islamic Republic of Iran from the early 2000s. A decade after the formation of the first blog service providers, blogs continue to rank high on the list of the top ten most popular Web sites for browsing.
