Internet
Neda's Cybercafe in Tehran
Far from Utopia
A "select elite" don't represent Iran's youth
By Ataollah Togha
December 29, 1998
The Iranian
"Cyber
clash" is the inappropriately chosen title of a well-written article
recently posted in The Iranian. The author does not seem to believe
in any clash whatsoever between the Western culture and what she calls
"the Iranian culture," which she clearly, if not quite explicitly,
distinguishes from anything Islamic. The author also refers the reader
to less than a dozen of Iranian young men living in Iran who, as she herself
is well aware, cannot represent the Iranian youth in any balanced way,
and time and again talks to us through "their" words, apparently
trying to employ a fallacious generalization to convince the reader of
the conclusions of her article, which seem to be, by and large, her own
convictions regardless of the flawed data briefly analyzed in her paper.
Unlike the author, I have little doubt that the ideal of the so-called
global village is much farther ahead than what we are usually tempted to
believe. The Information Superhighway, and in particular the interactive
chatrooms may only be a first step in a journey of a thousand miles towards
reconciling essentially different cultures, in case we assume that this
ideal has the potential to be realized.
Let's imagine we somehow manage to mix the people from all over the
world in a melting pot... Or let me be more specific. Imagine the hypothetical
situation in which a random sample of one million Iranians, from all walks
of life, are transferred and more or less uniformly dispersed in a Western
country of your choice -- we may call it Utopia here. The goal of this
sociological experiment would be to verify whether Iranian culture is in
any sort of conflict with Western culture, and whether these immigrants
will have identity problems to struggle with or not. Now, what do you think
the outcome of this experiment would be?
Incidentally, this experiment reminds us of a similar, if not identical,
event that has happened in our time! (It is not identical, not only because
we do not constitute exactly one million people, but also because the Iranians
living abroad are by no means from all walks of life; and probably for
other reasons, too. But I guess for practical purposes it is close enough
to the experiment we wanted to conduct. Although it is clear, but to emphasize
the non-randomness of our actual sample just compare the price of a one
way Tehran-Utopia City ticket to the income of an "average" Iranian.
But still a common mistake is that the Iranian expatriates can be a representative
sample of the Iranian population. This has become the source of many non-practical
theories about how to reform the Iranian society, for example how to lead
it towards democracy, etc.) Evidence is abundant (See, for example, instances
of "adabiyyaat-e zanjamoore" (the literature of lament) in the
'Expatriates' section of The Iranian), and to those who have had
the chance to experience dislocation it must be crystal clear that although
quite capable of co-existing in cultural circumstances which drastically
differ from that of their homeland, Iranians abroad have not been free
of inner conflicts and psychological traumas arising from the tremendous
difference between their Iranian mind set and an alien entity known as
"Western culture."
Unfortunately, the ideas concerning the "non-clashability"
(if I may term it this way) advocated in "Cyber
clash" are overly superficial, even if well-intended. Of course,
we all dream of the possibility of not only a cohabitation of people from
two cultures on the surface and on social level, but also a peaceful co-existence
of Iranian and Western ideas about all imporatnt aspects of life on the
level of our inner selves.
Given my background, I am not at all surprised to hear how well Iranian
post-revolutionary youth may think of the West, neither do I blame the
typical Iranian youth for having colorful images of the West in mind. The
fact of the matter is, despite the efforts of the media in the Islamic
Republic to present an unrealistically ugly image of Western societies
(or shall I rather say because of the very incredibility of this twisted
image?), the unrealistically beautiful image of the West present among
all layers of Iranian society -- which goes way back before the revolution
-- has continued to exist among many Iranians who have not lived abroad,
until they get to meet the realities of the West face to face. (At this
point, it is worth mentioning that many of us continue to live with and
rejoice in our pre-immigration misconceptions about the West long after
our arrival to the lands of our beautiful dreams.) Interestingly, the author
herself mentions that her interviewees have been "isolated" from
the outside world. Therefore it is far from clear to me why a "paper,"
written in a scholarly format, should base a research on biased data obtained
from a very non-random "microscopic sample" of misinformed youngsters.
I would like to emphasize why her sample of students or graduates, who
are "proficient or fluent in English" are but a select elite,
by quoting her own words: In order to afford to buy a computer in Iran,
one needs to be well-off enough to put aside "a year's salary of an
ordinary Iranian civil service worker," let alone the fact that one
must be one of those "smart young people [who could] have found creative
ways [?!] to dial-up and get online access."
Finally, as for the delicate issues of relationship/love/marriage and
also some other culturally problematic issues, and the painful confusions
born from conflicts and clashes between the fundamentally different attitudes
that the cultures of the West and the East -- which are not only simply
separated by geography, but more importantly, bifurcated long long time
ago in the history -- instill on one's personality, I would like to stress
that it is quite simple-minded to solely take the "revolutionary Islamic
authorities" responsible for the fact that Iranian youth (and I do
not mean just a bunch of smart wealthy computer freaks) do not engage in
the type of courtship and mating that the Western culture suggests. A culture
as a totality has its own mechanisms for self-preservation which even if
overlooked by negligent or biased researchers and not gaurded by governmental
forces, will not cease to operate on levels of both public and personal
conscience... (To be sure, there is much more to be said by experts on
these issues, but just as a warm-up let me refer you to a very interesting
series of articles published in The Iranian a while ago, starting
with "Loving
an Iranian man" which in my opinion very well reflects the common
confusions in this area.)
Reply from
the author of "Cyber clash" Dokhi Fassihian
Links
* Cyber
clash
Conversations with Iranians in cyberspace on the clash of civilizations
By Dokhi Fassihian
* Tehran's
first cybercafe: where East meets Web
AFP report, December 9, 1998
