On Location

A few days ago, blogger Omid Memarian told me a story about the day after the June elections this year. As someone who knows pretty much all the major news agencies’ Iran correspondents, he called one of these colleagues and started talking animatedly about his analysis of the events. The journalist on the other end sounded confused. He listened but didn’t have much to say. 48 hours passed. It was only then that the journalist friend started to feel he had grasped what had happened after the elections, how, and why, and called Omid back. Omid said his own lack of time-lag was due to his close embedding in the political context of Iran. He explained that blogs like his own, which provided immediate English language commentary on the events in Iran from a real insider’s perspective, fulfilled a unique role in the wake of the election turmoil. They were the translators.

Many young second generation Iranians I’ve been talking to are aware of this need for translation. And English language blogs and websites are where several of them look to find it. But it happens offline too. Nothing exemplified this for me more than when we rounded up a bunch of friends, first and second generation students, and went to watch Khamenei’s fateful post-election speech together in Westwood. The running commentary of the meanings behind the “leader’s” words was for the benefit of those second generation kids who were deeply interested – enough to be there that night till 3 in the morning – but would have been lost without translation.

The political actions and stances of these second generation kids show awareness of their own distance from the complexities of the developments in Iran. But this doesn’t mean they’re passive. Student organizers I spoke with were clear about their support for and solidarity with the demonstrators of the green movement in Iran. But they drew the line at some of the “claiming of the green movement” going on, often among regime-change groups, who were commonly seen as rooted within an older generation of “exiles.” This generation gap seems to reflect a political gap, too (a point that recently got some attention in the LA Times); a shift towards a different type of political involvement among the second generation when it comes relating to the Iran’s green movement from here in LA.

Globalizing the movement is one of the impacts Mahasti Afshar attributes to social media and the Internet at large in today’s Iran. This important new facet of online communication seems to rely heavily on the quality of political, cultural, and of course linguistic translations that are being shared between Iranians in Iran and the diaspora, both online and offline. Yes, the Internet makes access to various perspectives very accessible. But are Twitter and Facebook updates directly from individuals inside Iran the main source of info for the second generation? Or are there still other barriers despite the Internet’s connectivity? It seems the important links between them are sources closely entrenched in both the Iranian and diaspora contexts - the virtual bureaus and journalistic blogs of those first (and some 1.5) generation individuals who have gained status as translators for this movement.