More and more we are getting our updates from the Web and not the TV. Early on, one had to remember to visit saved links once in a while, but now with RSS and news readers, the news comes to you.
This past year I have been gathering RSS feeds for material I am interested in. Eventually, couple of days ago it was time to collect some material on iranian subject maters I am interested in.
With western material it was so easy. You would just go to the official site of the artist and you are done. But, my goodness how difficult or impossible it is with iranian topics !!
The initial task was to get updates, including concert schedules for Siavash Ghomayshi. His official site didn’t work. So I tried Facebook, myspace and the sort. My goodness 20 pages show up and all of them have the word official in them. And after a look at them it is clear that NON of them is monitored by him or his management and therefore are not official.
Why do iranians have so much trouble with the word “official”? Official site is one managed by the artists or their management. It looks like this issue of fans going and creating sites and then putting the word official to their titles, is mainly an iranian problem. I don’t see this problem happening much outside the persian speaking world. Does the word official have a different meaning in farsi that fans take such liberty?
Then there are these people that create sites for dead people and then go around calling them “official”. Here is an example:
He has created a site for Giti, a singer that died long ago, and has called it the official site. Did she come out of the grave to baptize the site as her “official” site? So funny and careless!!
In my quest to be updated on artists I liked, apart from the problem of the use of the word official, I also found the problem of pseudo names.
For example, I would like to recieve news about the projects of the video director known as Ravi. I couldnt find a site. After much search, I figured his name was Mehran Ravi, but still no site.
Similar problem trying to be updated about the music producer, arranger “Roma K”. Try typping that in google. You’ll get a map or Rome Italy. Why do people put such names on them selves? What sort of name is “Roma K”? With this guy, I couldn’t even figure out his last name after half an hour search.
So at the end of the day, I got zero “official”, meaning from their own mouth, information on all three !!!
