A Critical Approach to The United States’ Virtual Colonialism: Internet Domination Policy

In the Name of God

A Critical Approach toThe United States’ Virtual Colonialism

Internet Domination Policy

Saied Reza AmeliProfessor of Communications and American Studies

University of Tehran

Islamic World Peace ForumFaculty of World Studies, University of Tehran

International Conference on Global Alliance Against Terrorism

2011/ 1390

Title: A Critical Approach to The United States’ Virtual Colonialism Internet Domination PolicyAuthor: Saied Reza AmeliPublisher: Islamic Word Peace ForamIBSN: 2-05626-964-978First Edition: 2011All rights reserved

سرشناسه: عاملی، سیدسعیدرضا، 1340 -عنوان قراردادی: مطالعات انتقادی استعمار مجازی آمریکا: قدرت نرم و امپراتوری های مجازی. انگلیسی

عنوان و نام پدیدآور:

مشخصات نشر: .مشخصات ظاهری: خ، 184ص.

شابک: 48000 ریال: وضعیت فهرست نویسی: فیپا

یادداشت: انگلیسییادداشت: کتابنامه: ص.161 - 166.

یادداشت: نمایه.موضوع: وب - - سایت ها - - ایاالت متحده

موضوع: اینترنت - - ایاالت متحده - - سیاست دولتموضوع: جنگ نرم

شناسه افزوده: کنفرانس بین المللی ائتالف جهانی علیه تروریسم برای صلح عادالنه )2011م=1390:تهران(شناسه افزوده:

شناسه افزوده: مجمع جهانی صلح اسالمیTK5105 /888/رده بندی کنگره: 1389 604952 م2ع

رده بندی دیویی: 004/6780973شماره کتابشناسی ملی: 2329872

Tehran:Islamic World Peace Forum,2011=1390

2-05626-964-978

International Conference on Global Alliance against Terrorism for a Just Peace(2011: Tehran)

A critical approach to United States’ Virtual Colonialism Domination Policy /Saied Reza Ameli; [for] International Conference on Global Alliance against Terrorism.

CONTENTS

List of Figures II

List of Tables III

Acknowledgements V

Introduction: A Critical Approach to American Virtual Colonialism 1

The Concept of Power 6

Soft and Hard Power 10

Soft Power and Virtual Space 14

Strategy and Instrument 15

Soft Power through Virtual Empires: Determinations in Free Frameworks 20

I: An Analysis of MSN 25

II: An Analysis of Facebook 45

III: An Analysis of Yahoo 57

IV: An Analysis of Wikipedia 79

V: An Analysis of YouTube 89

VI: An Analysis of Google 111

VII: Study of IMDb 127

VIII: Study of Tweeter 137

Conclusion: Soft Powers of Virtual Space and Structuring

through American Thoughts and Life 145

Glossary 161

Bibliography 167

Index 177

I

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: The Spectrum of Power 8

Figure 2: Statistics over the news appearing after the first news 72

Figure 3: Proportion of the news related to the USA on the first page of Yahoo 72

Figure 4: Proportion of the News related to the USA on other pages of Yahoo 73

Figure 5: Locations of Yahoo’s local portal 74

Figure 6: Development in Different Parts of Wikimedia Foundation 84

Figure 7: The Best Search Engines in the June 26th 2010 116

Figure 8: Requesting Google to gain access to users’ information 125

II

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Proportion of search engines from the search done in the U.S. 62

Table 2: List of acquisitions by Yahoo 66

Table 3: List of acquisitions by Google 118

III

Acknowledgement

Many thanks are due to those who have allowed me to make this book the hallmark of critical studies over vir-

tual colonialism. A number of people provided me with their generous support and fellowship without which no academic work can be published. I express my especial appreciation to Ali Asghar Sabbaghi for his significant contributions to this book. It is a great pleasure to work with a committed, assidu-ous Persian-English translator like him. I also express my great appreciation to Amin Mohseni who provided me with his gen-erous support to edit the book. I should never forget Ebrahim-Mohseni, Amir Abbas Taghipour for their contribution on de-signing and printing process. Special thanks to Dr. Ameri, who as the Secretary of Inter-national Conference on Global Alliance Against Terrorism for Just Peace. Without his enthusiasm and encouragement I would hardly prepare the book as it is. And finally, it is worthwhile to bestow my cordial gratitude to Dr Saed and Mr Bagheri for their commitment and best endeavors to coordi-nate the conference and any related tasks.

Saied Reza Ameli8th of May 2011

V

INTRODUCTIONA CRITICAL APPROACH TO AMERICAN

VIRTUAL COLONIALISM

Colonialism has experienced various phases. During the old colonialism, material world was in control through

territorial explorations, warfare, hard power, and use of tac-tics of political colonialism. The old colonialism rose in 15th century and expanded by the end of 20th century. Although colonial powers claim that colonialism is beneficial for the development of colonized nations, it has been mainly focus-ing upon meeting interests of colonialist as well as spoiling political, cultural, and economic sovereignty of the colonized territories. Steadily, management of colonies became a com-plex dilemma for European colonialists, particularly Britain. Raising public awareness played an important role in de-col-onization. In the next phase of colonialism, called neo-colo-nialism, culture and thoughts of the nations were targeted. Through this new wave of colonialism, the colonized nations were kept backward through specific political and economic policies. The new way of colonialism, which had begun after

A Critical Approach to United States’ Virtual Colonialism Internet Domination Policy2

the second World War, still works as a way of influence and hegemony. With the emergence of virtual space, new ways of dominance were established. With vast potentials this new wave of colonialism can be referred to as virtual colonialism.

Although the first colonialist countries were Portugal, Brit-ain, France, Spain and the Netherlands (the United States can also be considered a victim of European colonialism) the United States has since played the leading role in neo-colonialism as well as virtual colonialism. Since colonialism has primarily focused on intellectual metamorphosis of the societies and individuals, in virtual colonialism, which ap-plies soft power mechanisms, the ultimate goal is to divest a user ability to think independently, therefore making him/her as a member of American cultural society. Meticulous study of eight leading global portals, surprisingly all American and interactively engaged with American political and security organizations, reveals that virtual space, as a milieu for colo-nialism and divestment of users’ independence is being em-ployed to get the users to join into American culture.

Being aware of the great potentialities embedded in the virtual space, some institutions have managed to establish “virtual empires” through which they have managed to suc-cessfully exert their global cultural, political, and economic hegemony. Needless to say, this hegemony has provided the western countries, particularly the United States (as the lead-ing emperor), with enormous power. It is obvious that such observation, are often labeled as “conspiracy theories”, and authors of these thoughts are condemned as skeptics, exclu-sivists, and pessimists. The point that should be of utmost importance is the nature of power and hegemony. If we be-

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lieve that hegemony exists, we must agree that contemporary global power has achieved a dual-space capacity. Violent ap-paratus and armies act on the first space while in the second space (mind and virtual space), is being dominated by soft power that captures the thoughts of individuals and societies.

Only through critical analysis can one thoroughly compre-hend the covert and overt facet of virtual colonialism, which is seen as the ground for expansion of American hegemony through virtual empire. This school of thought, i.e. critical studies, deploys a painstaking method upon which intrinsic ongoing norms of a phenomenon are shattered. There have been variously different critical studies traditions. In the 1930s, the world had witnessed the rise of critical sociology in Germany, and consequently in Anglo-Saxon nations in the 1960s. Social, political, and economic changes in the West along with media empowerment and expansion of territory of soft power have prioritized necessity of applying critical studies to account for capital system and prevailing liberal-ism. Habermas (1984) has pointed to critical studies for in-formation analysis. Using genre, Bakhtin developed a speech classification that has surprisingly strengthened analysis of others’ speech (Paivarinta, 2001:212) and founded a novelty analytical model that Paivarinta calls “genre theory”. Accord-ing to this theory, typology of genres and interrelationship be-tween the genres will provide a base for information analysis. In Left tradition, critical studies seek for the flaw and short-comings of capitalism and, as a result, are consistent with postmodern theory that attacks principles of modern system (James, 2008). In critical realism, the existence of meaning in outside reality and moreover its comprehension through sci-

INTRODUCTION A CRITICAL APPROACH TO AMERICAN VIRTUAL COLONIALISM


entific inquiry is accepted (Easton, 2010). Therefore, in this approach, critical analysis is to decipher the meaning from the outside phenomena.

Critical analysis transcends beyond the commonplace trends and facts; it is an intellectual endeavor to see “trans-variables” in place of being immersed in immediate variables of an event, and to comprehend thoroughly existing social dynamics. Critical thought is aimed at anatomy of social, political and economic facts and moves beyond the current commonplace knowledge about these facts. Throughout this book, our critical analysis is focused on phenomena that re-quire us to have a free mind about the commonplace under-standing of them. This in turn entails a concentrated effort to analyze the long-term functions of these phenomena in a detailed manner.

Emergence of critical thinkers like Adorno, Ben-jamin, Horkhaeimer, Marcuse, and their next gen-eration such as Habermas indicates violation of current norms and attention to social obligations (kanerton, 2006).

Although critical thoughts, due to ideological links originated from materialistic thoughts, could not be sufficiently persuasive, it benefited from enormously destructive power. The power that is still visible among postmodern schools but it led to intellectual anarchy because of not being suc-cessful to develop an alternative. In fact, critical tradition is traced to Emanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Carl Marx (1818-1883) (Ingram, 1990:1). This school of thought has been evolved in various in-

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tellectual structures but the shared points of these schools are secularism and laicism. Interestingly, justice and freedom on the one hand, and pleasure on the other hand are the main concerns of this tra-dition (same, p: 275).

But the question arose here is whether justice, freedom and delight are possible without relation-ship with God and are the anarchy and inefficiency of the criticisms resulted from divine affiliations? The author strongly believes that the track record of Western thought has shown that diagnosis of the problem has not necessarily translated into solving the problem in those societies. It merely acted as an alarm for the status quos that it cannot create “sus-tainable pleasure”. In reality, sustainable pleasure and thorough justice without “divine and religious affiliation” can hardly materialize. Therefore, in order to accurately analyze the shortcomings and the flaws associated with the commonplace un-derstanding of all phenomena, one can devise a “critical divine analysis” which is mainly based on God’s vision for humanity.

As analyzed in this book, although these flaws can be ana-lyzed critically, hegemonic attitude is generally originated in polytheistic look which replaces God with individual, com-munity, ideology, race and ethnicity to dominate the world. This way of Godly approach to power is rooted in the weak-ness of human being, which has brought about injustice, corruption and prejudice. Critical analysis of eight virtual giant companies acting as the main internet portal and sub-



portals requires a detailed understanding of the concept of power and its various forms such as covert and overt power, soft and hard power, cultural and political power, and finally “far-ranging” and “close-ranging” power. In addition, in re-cent years the forms, potentials, and ranges of power have expanded tremendously through its dual-spatial nature. This makes it crucial for us to further analyze the dual-spatiality of power. Moreover, in analyzing the anatomy of virtual pow-ers it is inevitable to meticulously examine the position of Islamic Republic of Iran as well as the Iranian users vis-à-vis these powers.

The Concept of Power

In dictionaries, power is defined “as the ability to do some-thing… power stands for the ability to achieve what one seeks” (Nye, 2008:38). Consequently, leadership would be impossible in the absence of power. Those who possess more power, in any relation, have more opportunities to make or resist a change (Nye, 2008). In addition, power means the ability to influence others’ behavior in order to achieve desir-able results (Nye, 2008).

On the other hand, power might be construed as prolifera-tion of an idea. All processes orienting toward proliferation—at production, distribution, and consumption—reflect power. For instance, proliferation of liberal-democratic system along with French laic or English Protestantism or American mod-ernism features around the globe, points to the presence of the Western socio-politico-economic culture in non-western countries. Besides, proliferation of American and new Eu-ropean architecture and urban design system, and, further-

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more, western education system can be correctly conceived as the expansion of the power of the West relative to the East. Therefore, the concept of soft impact has gained precedence over the idea of hard power and confrontation.

The more the proliferation and acceptance of ideas and out-looks, the stronger and more comprehensive the hegemony of soft power would be.

Despite the fact that some argue that power is merely at-tainable through exerting force, there are clearly other ways to achieve ones’ desirable results.

First is to coerce someone to do something. Second and diametrically different from the first is to persuade people to do something through creating appropriate motivation and encouragement. Thus, the concept of power is divided into two parts: soft power (by implicitly luring people through influencing their values, culture, politics, and institutions, or-ganizing priorities) and hard power (through exerting explicit military and economic force) (Nye, 2008:43).

Thus, the common denominator between hard and soft power is their final goal of influencing others’ behavior and proliferation of a specific model, whereas their distinct fea-tures lies in the method and ways through which this final goal is materialized. In other words, there are two types of power: a. the command power or changing what one does by force and b. the co-optive power which translates into changing what people are willing to do themselves (Nye, 2008). In addition, some argue that power is about having potentialities and resources that could possibly determine the results.1 1- The defeat of the United States in Vietnam despite her resource as well as military superiority may create serious challenges for this definition of power.



Joseph Nye consider the following spectrum for power:

On this spectrum, soft power tends to the end of behavio-ral pole while hard power is positioned to the opposite end (Nye, 2008:47). In his key work, Power Rules, he mentions different genres of power including: power of ideas, power of leading, charismatic power, persuasive power, and power of values (Gleb,2009). In addition, this book addresses vari-ous definitions of power from different political schools. I view liberals as tending to define power in terms of mutual understanding, leading, communications, principles, values, persuasion and argument. They usually see coercing others as an extremist action and turn to it as the last resort.

On the other hand, American conservatives incline towards their personal interests rather than universal principles. Con-servatives also insist on coercion and force than persuasive initiatives. They believe that American way of life, politics, and economics is the most effective way and those opposing it are either in error or have evil intentions. In their opin-ion, to confront threats, military force and generation of fear work effectively. Unlike the liberals, they are hardly con-cerned about representing a brutal picture of themselves, and even moderate politicians possess a mix of different perspec-

1issuing order

2threat and

force

3economic incentives

4organizing priorities

5attraction

6persuation

Figure 1: The Spectrum of Power (Nye, 2008)

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tives and lack any coherent ideology. They have hardly made any significant progress in political discussions. Although this group has failed to develop any coherent strategy, they emphasize on rational pragmatism and truth. Their ideas are rarely welcomed by masses of people (Glebe, 2009). Exam-ining several American presidential campaigns, I will assert that force exertion is costly and futile whereas emphasis on values and dialogue has worked significantly, and that the be-havior of conservatives has significantly harmed the Ameri-can interest.

According to Glebe, “power is to force people to do some-thing which they are not willing to do. It is also resource and status management as to exert psycho-political pressure” (2009:28). Thus, power can be exerted through charisma, leading, values, persuasion, and similar methods since there are plenty of shared interest and values in international affairs among citizens of different nations. On the contrary, the na-ture of power becomes harsher, more explicit, and more com-plicated when dealing with governments, which possess the least commonalities amongst each other. In the international scene, leadership and attempts to persuade is hardly accepted and exerting force is often replied back by force itself. As a result, power behaves differently depending on the various relations and conditions it is applied.

Generally, western works on power are often ambiguous. One of the most important traditional definitions of power is what Robert Dahl, professor of political sciences at Yale University, develops. In his essay, The Concept of Power, he asserts: “A can influence B as long as it can drive B to do something which was never done in absence of exertion of



the force by A”. Here, A coerces B actively since B expects and fears pressure from A. The central point here is exertion of pressure so as to alter rather than persuade. Dahl also sees power as a mix of psycho-political leverage with superiority in use of opportunities and resources. He firmly believes that power holders need heed their reputations (Glebe, 2009:33).

Soft and Hard Power

The concept of soft power or “absorptive power” was first coined by Joseph Nye. Advantage of this kind of power is its power of influence which reduces the cost of remaining strong through convincing others “to like what we like”. Soft power is absorption of others through the mechanisms which are beyond physical force which highlights obligation rather than cooperation. This absorption is exerted through both tangible and intangible mechanisms. This does not mean that soft power will always employ non-violent methods of con-vincing when challenged by a hard power

. Instead, in such situations the soft power could turn into physical and explicit use of force.

Soft power is sort of social turning toward prevailing sys-tem’s expectations. Nye (2004, a&b) believes that soft power is the power to change the demands and expectation of a so-ciety towards the direction that is desired by the holder of the power and furthermore legitimize this change in direction.

In short, soft power is an influential mechanism on chang-ing the “social preferences”.

The very distinction between hard and soft pow-er lies in tangibility, physical destruction, visibility, and being fearful of the holder of the power. These

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are usually embedded in military power through use of force and military weapons or physical co-lonial presence. Unlike hard power, soft power does not possess visible components of influence and force: it lures, tempts, and looks desirable. Soft power diffuses its components in variously different ways and machines that are not explicit and do not act overtly. Through the assistance of hard power, soft power seeks macro and long-term goals. As a result, the virtual space has provided new grounds for both the creation and use of the soft power. This space has generated independ-ent capacities for soft power and its various links with the physical world. It includes some exclusive features like cohesion, decentralization, digitaliza-tion, and easy accessibility which have offered new capacities. Development of communication in the virtual space has tremendously increased interac-tions between nations and peoples and in fact the second wave of globalization has been occurring in this space.

As communication develops in this space—that is, “ever-present communication” or “instant communication” along with unauthorized accessibility in “other spaces”— time and physical space become irrelevant to users (Ameli,2004,a). Actually, the intrinsic potentialities of virtual space have made it possible for its users to always have widespread pre-sent at all times. Dualization of virtual and physical armies is seen as a new possibility that would stretch the reach of the armies of the superpowers to all individuals and places pos-



sible, creating a virtual empire. As it was mentioned earlier, soft power lies in absorption.

Since no one accepts to be manipulated, soft power works so covertly (Nye, 2008:43).

Soft power is the ability to get people to help us achieve our ultimate goals. Soft power is in never absolute and it firmly believes in efficiency of edu-cation, mutual understanding, and communications (Nye, 2008:99).

In fact, democratic powers are not concerned about power distribution but try to develop leading opportunities. They, however, are restricted to exert explicit power. As a result, even in cases of police exerting power, they try to create a per-suasive picture of the event in order to legitimize the action of the police for ordinary citizens and therefore convincing them into cooperation with the police force. Likewise, they create, promote, and manage the international free market and therefore control the world through the global economy (Nye, 2008:130). Virtual powers also take advantage of “par-ticipation of people in power generation and development for the powerful ones”, and increase the information might of the so-called superpowers through the attendance of millions of net users on google.msn, yahoo, Wikipedia, facebook, and YouTube.

In the contemporary world, individuals are simultaneous members of several communities. Therefore, they find it dif-ficult to make concrete decision. This is exactly the time actu-ally that preferences can be influenced and formed. In such times, revolutionary leaders like Gandhi, provoke a peoples of nation to act collectively in the public interest instead of

13

personal ones. On the contrary, opportunist leaders can create a situation mixed with fear and hope where individuals are encourage in seeking personal interests and therefore paving the way towards the personal interests and goals of such lead-ers (Nye, 2008:62-64).

According to Michael Mumford and Judi Van Dom, pragmatist leaders use both methods simultaneously (Nye, 2008:67). Later, Nye and Richard Armitage developed the concept of “smart power” which is a combination of hard and soft power (Gleb, 2009:69). This point indicates that those advocating soft power do not altogether refute use of military action. Rather, they believe in the integration of soft and hard power in order to maintain their control. In short, words and wars complement each other (Nye, 2008:142). In order to lead through soft power, three ingredients (skills) are required: emotional intelligence, communications, and wis-dom. Emotional intelligence is about self-control and disci-pline which makes a country or the leader popular for the people. By communication it is meant the ability of a country or leader to communicate effectively with others. Finally it is through wisdom that a country or a leader can create an appealing picture of a concept or an event that could attract others (Nye, 2008: 72-74).

On the other hand, hard power also has important tools such as organizing skill and political intelligence -- versus social intelligence-- which eventually will integrate into soft power in order to constitute smart power (Nye, 2008:83).

In Power Rules, Lezli Grebe argues that the gap between advocates of hard and soft power lies in Jefferson and Ham-ilton perspectives which could also be visible in Obama and



McCane presidential campaigns in 2008 (Grebe, 2009:68). In general the countries that are successful in creating and exert-ing soft power at the global scene are:

1. The countries whose prevailing culture and customs are closer to universal norms.2. The countries that are linked to more communicational channels.3. The countries that have gained strong reputation because of their effectiveness in both domestic and international affairs.

Soft Power and Virtual SpaceVirtual space acts as a tool for soft power and soft power

is the reference for generating virtual space. “The end of the cold war is the start of the soft war”, in which the war has become tremendously equipped both in the physical and the virtual worlds. Soft power acts in a field of colonialism and fermentation, where “countless users’ are the main generators of power for “the enemies of humanity”. In recent decades, the world has witnessed ever-increasing technological ad-vancements, particularly in communication. From invention of radio and television to the rise of 24-hour news networks broadcasting the latest news live and across the globe, all have been making the world a small place by reducing distances. As information technology advanced we have been experiencing “virtual feudalism” in which overlapping communities con-stitute multilayered identity and citizenships. Whereas once knowledge used to generate power, today the “virtual feu-dalism” based on information flow among various networks is the main producer of power. Information flow has soared citizens’ participation in social management in democratic

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societies and has made management to be more participative in nature and less command oriented (Nye, 2002). Therefore, the more people are exposed to information flow, the more separate cultural link to each other. Furthermore, various sphere of social life such as household affairs, work, recrea-tion, education, reality, and fiction are all included in domain of influence of global information flow (Adrian, 2007:12). These connections have not led to a centralized world. Rather it has caused decentralization. Joseph Nye enumerates three features for information: the flow, the competition, and the strategic importance. Of course, the flow of information is in-fluenced heavily by the source of information. Furthermore, one who distributes information faster and with more credi-bility, may gain and exert more power. Governments also use information and its flow to acquire credibility and power and at the same time undermine their oppositions (Nye, 2002:68). The literature concerning the relationship between soft pow-er and virtual space and how various internet networks can work to exert power, is meager. Because of the significant im-pacts of these networks on societies, and furthermore because of some recent major events, such as the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 presidential elections, it is highly crucial for researchers to examine the dynamic and potentialities of soft power and virtual space within which it operates.

Strategy and InstrumentIn Superpowers of Soft Powers, Yasushi & McConnel

(2008) has compiled some articles which address different aspects of soft power in the United State and Japan. Higher education, high culture, public culture, public diplomacy, and



civil society are instruments, which their role in soft power has been examined in this book.

In the chapter on higher education, the book outlines how foreign students’ perspective and thoughts are enormously influenced by American universities (2008:42). Upon return-ing home, these students incline to establish organizations and institutions identical to those experienced in the United States, particularly in educational and academic fields. Their relationship with American way of thinking is kept through graduate students societies, academic conferences, and un-official academic groups (Yasushi and McConnel, 2008:43). Today, social virtual networks have made it easier for such links and relationships to be maintained.

The establishment of Association of International Educa-tors or NAFSA in the United States in order to exchange pro-fessors and students between American universities and other universities around the world indicates the significance of this issue for the United States. American people are primarily exposed to other nations’ soft power. In another article, the role of Japanese animations, children programmers, comput-er games and some other cultural products on American chil-dren and teenagers has been explored. These products have occasionally motiavated American youth to learn Japanese language and travel to the country. In fact, during previous decades there has never been such an enthusiasm. Further-more, Japanese products that are seeking success in Ameri-can market often need to conceal their Japanese identity and be “Americanized” (same,101). At the end, globalization of Japanese public culture does not translated into Japans’ soft power because it does not link the Japanese public culture

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to other aspect of Japanese society so as to generate interest towards the country itself (same, 105). In reality, of three ingredients the Nye sees necessary for the establishment and maintenance of soft power-- that is, culture, political values and foreign policy (same, 102), Japan only enjoys the first one.

Non-governmental organizations can be seen as one of the most robust instruments of exerting soft power. Their soft power usually is not limited to geographical borders, but is international. In spite of the fact that these bodies introduce themselves as independent from governments, in practice they act in favor of some governments. Katsuji & Kaori di-vide NGOs into religious, Donontisti, and Wilsonist groups. The prominent feature of the third group is that it sees its phil-anthropic purposes consistent with American foreign policy, and majority of American NGOs are classified as such (same, 265-266). Most of these NGOs possess considerably large budgets and occasionally receive financial aids from govern-ments. Information technology advancements contribute to the expansion of these organizations around the world. But some networks have emerged which are not sub-divisions of NGOs but work actively and are able to draw a considerable range of people from a very wide geographical area. Some of these networks basically act in virtual space. It is hard to un-derstand the main motives and interest of NGOs (same, 268).

Virtual social networks are important tools to exert soft power. In an article addressing the role twitter in Iranian post-elections events in 2009, the impact of twitter has been evaluated as strong as that of CNN during Persian Gulf War. Further-



more, it may be correctly hypothesized that the re-quest of U.S. Department of State from Twitter to postpone their regular maintenance during Iranian events, is entirely in agreement with the purpose of toppling Iranian government, which had also been sought after by previous Neo-conservative gov-ernment. Furthermore, it is not far from truth that U.S. Department of State used the communications on Twitter as a source of intelligence on events in Iran (Burns & eltham, 2009: 305). In fact, Twit-ter is an efficient alternative to radio and television networks which were previously used to carry out the plans of the United States in other countries. Twitter and similar social virtual networks have yet another advantage: through the volunteer role of people in such networks, these networks cannot anymore be accused of propaganda machinery of the United States.

Explaining some methods to which twitter users resorted in order to advocate protests in Iran, Burns and Eltham (2009) argue that this method was not successful to change the Ira-nian government and even alter the result of election since it hardly overcame the governments’ apparatus. The United States did not show enough enthusiasm to support Iranian protesters with military assistance or providing weapons be-cause it was not willing to leave public diplomacy in favor of covert operation. It is moreover possible that the United States government which has been working to advance its intelligence operations in Iran has viewed the role of Twitter in organizing protesters in the aftermath of Iranian presiden-

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tial elections in 2009 as an interesting case study that needs to be examined in more details. Examining the Iranian case in detail, Burns and Eltham point out the inefficiency of soft power and social media technologies to compete with hard power (same, 306). In fact, this example reveals apparently the complementary role of soft and hard power and that is why both genres of power need to be deployed simultane-ously in order to achieve the desired objective. In short, close study of Twitter’s role in Iranian presidential post-election unrests, underlines inefficiency of sheer use of soft power (Burns & Eltham, 2009:306). In reality, soft power facilitates the ground for using hard power in order to enhance its ef-ficiency as decreasing the severity of its application.

Virtual games are of other methods that soft power can be exerted throughout the virtual space. Capacities of online games, or Massively Multiplayer Online Games, along with numerous online participants is seen as a rich ground to ex-ert soft power. Adrian believes that these games are effective through three ways:

1. “one-to-many-player network” or designer’s influence on the players. In fact, designers’ opinions and values are exerted in the design of the game and are conveyed to the players.2. “Many-to-many- player network” which includes inter-actions between players through chartroom, email, person-al and public messages, and other platforms.3. “one-to-many player network” or player’s relation with the community of players in which a player can express his/her own values and ideas through different methods such as determining personal features of appearance in the



game environment such as the Avatar(Adrian, 2007:15).Virtual world of the games have offered a milieu for exer-

tion of soft power as well as public diplomacy in which con-cepts such as war, peace and so on can be conveyed.

Soft Power through Virtual Empires: Determinations in Free Frameworks

Latest statistics reveal that more than 206 million internet websites are active (Netcarft, 2010). This number indicates the existence of extremely mas-sive amount of data in virtual space. Despite the free appearance of virtual space, it does not denote equal access to the data for the users because users have to choose a few specific websites among the extremely many websites available to them. This fact leads to promotion of the status of the search engines like Google, yahoo, binge (msn) because it is the search engines that offer you a limited num-ber of websites among the millions available, with certain ranking and pre-programmed algorithms which determine the ranking rules. This can be in-ferred as “soft filtering of power” or determination within the free frameworks of information.

Although the engines never prohibit you from entering any other websites, they automatically create a virtual distance between you and some websites ─and make you closer to those having higher ranks─ through their ranking algorithm. Nye believes that power does not merely belongs to informa-tion generators, but the central power is held by those editing the gigantic amount of information and creating a distinc-

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tion between credible and non-credible information (Nye, 2002). The huge amount of current information in the space as made it to difficult judge over information credibility. The most valuable capital of these search engines lie in their legit-imacy because users select their desirable engines with their confidence to them which is largely based on their neutrality, speed, efficiency, comprehensiveness and etcetera. In reality, the engines act as users’ agents in the virtual space. Thus, “le-gitimacy” is seen as central component of the rise and fall of virtual empires in the near future. It is through legitimacy that these search engines gain tremendous degree of soft power over their users because they can direct the flow of informa-tion on various issues such as politics, economy, and culture. Therefore, despite the free nature of virtual space, the search engines can covertly lead their users toward the discourses that are consistent with various predefined objectives of the search engines.

Successful social network sites are other central com-ponents of virtual space. These empires like facebook, my space, and twitter intend to form social communities whose citizens are users from all over the world with various nation-alities. Surprisingly, the Facebook empire possesses over 500 million members. These virtual communities have various cultural, social, and political values. Facebook has managed to redefine the concepts such as “friend”, “relationship”, and “family”, as well as the culture of routine daily activities such as greeting. Although users make significant contribution to create these communities, the principles and discourses dom-inating these virtual communities influence their members in creating their own identity.



In the mean time, private companies and enterprises are vastly superior to their governmental counterparts. Govern-mental companies may be easily accused of prejudice and hegemony, whereas private companies, seemingly, do not show any ideological tendencies and instead, pretend seek-ing transmission of cultural and political values for economic profit. Besides, private sector benefits from mechanisms that attract audiences and influence their preferences. As men-tioned earlier, these features are highly helpful n absorbing users and acquiring legitimacy. Its superiority in terms of soft power also continues in real world. Mathew Freezer, in the tenth chapter of “superpowers of soft power”, points to sev-eral failures of U.S public diplomacy in Middle East unlike Hollywood, as a notable private sector. Private sectors’ ad-vantages over its governmental counterpart in virtual space is far more than what Freezer stated about the real world be-cause bias and invidious in virtual space, which intrinsically must be free and accessible, is rarely tolerated. So majority of virtual empires are owned by private sectors, and are seem-ingly free and neutral.

Many virtual empires like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, and so on belong to the private sectors of the Unit-ed States and seemingly there is no relation between them and the government, although it sometimes happens that some news on governmental interference on their poli-cies are leaked. Sometimes, even some of these empires act against current U.S. policies. However, too much atten-tion to comprehend to their relationship with the U.S gov-ernment will lead to overlook more important point. These empires play the key role in transmission of fundamental

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Anglo-Saxon culture such as “liberalism”, “democracy”, “ freedom”, “human rights”, pluralism”, individualism”, “free trade market”, and so on and they never need any finan-cial assistance from the United States government. Moreover, some of the empires like MSN and Amazon transmit the U.S. popular culture to the users through advertisements and in-forming over cinema, music, sport, literature, and even how to cook various American dishes.

Nowadays, some values like “democracy”, “freedom”, “human rights”, “and “pluralism” have all become universal. This indicates that the United States has been relatively suc-cessful in soft power absorption through both real and virtual spaces. As argued earlier, this soft power takes complemen-tary role for the U.S. hard power to meet its goal. In order to comprehend the nature of the U.S. virtual dominance which is mainly soft in nature and managed by private companies, a detailed analysis of U.S. virtual empires is required, which is carried out below.


CHAPTER I

AN ANALYSIS OF MSN THROUGH THE LENS OF SOFT POWER

Evolutionary trend of MSN, which belongs to Microsoft, is started from the being an internet service provider which

can be considered as the twin of Windows 95. This internet service provider was able to rapidly open its way to World Wide Web due to market’s demand. Before long it was ca-pable of being a complete and multi-purpose internet portal. According Nielsen statistic, Microsoft is the most successful company in attracting users after Google. In February 2010, Microsoft portals had 319 million unique users.

In this study MSN, as a dial-up internet service provider, a browser, and in the form of miscellaneous programs & links in MSN.com, is examined in details. But what is really im-portant is that MSN has been successful in transmitting spe-cific ideology and socio-cultural codes to its users.

During 1995-98, MSN.com was mainly an internet service provider. At the time, MSN had an ordinary home page and links to some other sites. But the main website of Microsoft was Microsoft Internet Start, home page in home.micro-soft.com. This website was providing basic information like weather forecast, news, sport, stock market, entertaining re-


ports, linking to other websites, published articles by Micro-soft members, and up-dated software. It should be mentioned that MSN news website, MSNbc.com, which started in 1996 was an inseparable part of Microsoft internet start (MSN, March 3, 2010).

In 1998, MSN.com became an umbrella portal for a fam-ily of sites designed by Microsoft interactive media group. This new site had MSN compete directly with Yahoo and Go network. Since the new format of the site offered its services freely to numerous international users, internet service pro-vider and Microsoft register service were renamed as “Msn Internet Access” (MSN Works to Find its Focus, 25th Febru-ary, 2010).

As said earlier, new site of MSN.com includes a set of sites. Materials offered in these sites are as: main content produced in Microsoft, channels for watching web in form of MSN2.0, and other features and new programs which added rapidly to MSN. In fact, MSN.com acted as substitute for former first page of internet website so that “Microsoft internet start” website integrated into MSN.com (same).

At the end of 1990 Microsoft deployed its several depart-ments and experts to promote its services. Of these programs Microsoft ad Center, MSN internet shopping, and MSN En-carta encyclopedia with different information access level. Since then, MSN.com changed as a popular and rich web portal which offers new services. Services of hotmail and MSN messenger were introduced through MSN.com and this site became the center for releasing all contents and programs of MSN. MSN search engine was developed in 1999. Also, MSN registration service, Microsoft Passport (now Windows

29

Live ID) developed at 1999 along with other services. Msn.com and its linked services under the rubric of “MSN” still work a decade later.

Msn search, MSN search engine, developed in 1999. Also, MSN registration service, Microsoft Passport (now Windows Live ID) developed at 1999 along with other services. In 2009 Microsoft previewed its new homepage and logo which had 100 million visitors only in the United States; surpris-ingly, in early picture of MSN homepage a photo related to Iranian presidential post-election unrests in 2009 was seen (Revamped Msn Wants to Be Your Homepage, 2009).

In this study, MSN is seen as an independent ideology with independent discourse. Through its miscellaneous layers and with constant flow of specific information through various links and sub-links, it tries to make the users assume that the values presented by MSN are universal in nature.

MSN and other new versions of websites of Microsoft named Binge and live.com are one of the most visited sites globally. What is really apparent is that flow of American values is visible in its links and programs, so that over the course of everyday usage of MSN as homepage and/or other services by users these values become normalized. Of course, in spite of different theories about U.S. cultural imperialism, the present study does not view the transmission of culture as a one-way flow. Even if it happens that prevailing cultural components of American discourse is indeed in the websites, according to Alexander Stephen, no critic can prove that an American homogenous culture is dominant in Microsoft or AOL. Furthermore, no one can claim that diffusion of Ameri-can culture worldwide and cultivation of non-American us-

AN ANALYSIS OF MSN


ers’ mind has always been a fantasy of companies similar to Microsoft and AOL (Stephen,2007:190).

MSN is a universal website which is included as one among thousands of products of Microsoft Corporation with its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. MSN is the ninth most visited website globally whereas it has ranking of 13 in the United States. Moreover, if we consider new and mis-cellaneous versions of programs of Microsoft introduced by this website and their numerous visitors or users, it reveals that study of MSN as a gigantic search engine and a highly trafficked website is valuable. If MSN is considered as an information highway, MSN.com is the entrance of this high-way, so that on the one hand with the symbol of its colorful butterfly, and on the other hand with Binge search, guides users to huge amounts of information and links. Therefore, in this survey, MSN is examined as an independent agent that possesses a dominant discourse, where its discursive compo-nents are addressed in overt layers of homepages and more covert layers, among links and various services.

The default version of MSN has been developed in English and for an American user, whereas MSN services are avail-able in Africa, Asia, North, South and Central America, Aus-tralia, Europe and Middle East in more than 50 countries and through 35 different languages. Also, in some countries in which two prevailing languages are spoken, like Canada and the United States, MSN is introduced in English and French. In the United States MSN is presented in English and Span-ish. Thus, the discourse of MSN is inclusive where users re-ceive news and local information in their language. Put dif-ferently, they experience “their own MSN” with “their own

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language”. Although MSN lets its user freely to choose the place and genre of information they are seeking, the study reveals that there are a number of prevailing discursive com-ponents in MSN homepage which makes the quality, genre and arrangement of information in MSN significant.

When users enter MSN website and search in MSN.com, the white homepage of MSN appears and menu of its main links with warm and attractive colors along with blue and green creates a very charming composition which draws au-diences with variously different taste. The menu, as men-tioned earlier, contains news, sport, money, life style, and some other icons. Surprisingly, despite the fact that MSN enjoys English language and American socio-cultural codes and factors, in some countries like Mexico, Colombia, Ven-ezuela, chili, Canada, Belgium, Algeria, France, Peru, Spain, Argentina, Pakistan, Portugal, Singapore, Malaysia, Thai-land, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, brazil, and Sweden it is one of the most visited and referred websites. As a result, so-cio-cultural codes produced and represented by MSN could easily influence the taste and thinking of users in the coun-tries which have strategic relationship with Iran. For example Saudi Arabian citizens living in the heartland of the Islamic world virtually breathe in the contents that MSN has created and become informed of the ideas and outlooks that MSN wants to present about world events. This point, underlines importance of our analysis about prevailing policies and val-ues promoted by the MSN.

In this chapter the study is to analyze prevailing discourse of MSN. The fundamental question is whether MSN, as a huge American website, covertly follows the strategy of

AN ANALYSIS OF MSN


Americanization of its users’ identity or democratically and neutrally offers news and information to its users. To examine the issue thoroughly, MSN homepage is studied from March to May, 2010.

One who steps into virtual world get acquaintance with a new language that creates for him/her a new world. In this language, and as a result in the new world, “cultural objects” (like concepts of human, customer, and so on) and “human relationship” (like family relationship, market, and so on) change and come to exist in a new form (Zwick & et. al, 2004).

Featherstone, a professor at Nottingham University, be-lieves that one of the most prominent features of the new era is domination of consumer culture. According to him, con-sumer culture is the outcome of modern society wehre a range of goods are created with emphasis on creativity, innovation in technology, and amazement. He puts on the prominent fea-ture of consumer culture as: “representations (both images and signs) and global contemporary values have changed based on consumerism: purchasing and taking pleasure so as to construct different types of life styles” (Featherstone, 2001). When dominant discourse of MSN is reviewed, con-sumerism is comprehended from two distinct aspects. First, at a visible level, advertising and enhancing consumer cul-ture as an American ─also global─ cultural code. Second, at covert level, MSN can be seen as a shop in which users are its immediate customers and their mutual relationship is noteworthy of analysis.

From the first aspect, while Microsoft firmly adheres to the principle of competition in the market. It looks at market

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links for creating everlasting diversity in supply as well as making connection between seller and customer. Therefore, MSN is a rich field for these links.

Consumerism is an inevitable response to our complicated and impersonal society. But by being vigilant over the point that MSN is a website derived from U.S. society which is identified by cultural codes of “consumerism”, it can be in-ferred that expanding the consumerism is covertly advertised in MSN‘s different layers. Different facets of consumerism have always drawn human science scholars’ attention; many assert that consumerism is repercussion of industrialization and overpopulation (Miles, 1998, 8). Sigmund Bauman ac-counts for consumerism in the heart of capitalism as both ul-timate and engine (Bauman, 2002: 183).

According to Boudrillard, in consumer society both ex-change and commodity values are replaced with sign value because commodities are not exchanged for being consumed but conveyance symbolic meaning (Barker, 2004, 29). There-fore, traditional definition of consumption has been entirely converted. Now, consumption includes a range of practices (Edgeell, &et al, 1996:1) including: purchasing, sightseeing a museum, or using MSN as homepage. So, bringing up some useful consumers, or according to Sleeter “hero of moder-nity”, matters. Consumers, who “never have a chance to quit the dream of consumption; Therefore, commodity advertisers have to work hard to deliver their message to the customers” (Bauman, 2002:184).

In agreement with this policy, MSN homepage includes some independent icons titled as shopping and advertisement directing users to consume anything from a range of different

AN ANALYSIS OF MSN


trade mark, quality, and price. Moreover, people are allowed to advertise and sell whatever they want.

In MSN, money comes as an independent link. Its view to money is originated form materialistic perspective of capital-ism in which money is called “sacred”. Different icons could have been in the menu of MSN homepage, but despite the existence of several icons related to money such as shopping and several advertisements, the icon for money is presented as an independent main icon. Under the money page, there is a link for “real properties”, appears which mostly describes issues such as real estate or different bank loans, mortgages, and investments. In these pages western, particularly Ameri-can, cultures dominate since they reproduce the given eco-nomic and cultural models. For example, in this page you are taught how to build a garden in which your dog feels com-fortable; or different type of bank loans and investments are advertised with western banking systems while Islamic bank-ing and life style, in advance, don’t deserve to be introduced.

MSN defines life style in sub-links like beauty and fashion, decoration and organization, cooking and so on. Here, the newest tools and models are depicted in a way that all aspects of personal life, office, and spaces in which people experi-ence social life. In a free consumerism context, particularly with emphasis on human cultural encounter with each other in virtual space, unstable interactions and frequent changes in subjects always occur. Also the process of multi-dimen-sionization of culture has totally evolved essentialist cultural and identity standards and borders, and developed a novelty definition so that it affects hegemonic and normative identity constructs (Malek & et.al, 2006:22). Kalantzis and Bill Cope,

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at human sciences international conference in 2005, explain three phases of globalizations from the time human came to exist, and they see us in the third phase, where a layer of dif-ference stands on the other layers of differences.These lay-ers have been added due to new media and the internet; he argues that we are returning to multi-linguality, divergence, and deep and sustainable diversity (Kalantzis &et.al, 2006).

Understanding such initiative power from a technology owner in contemporary age is of paramount importance. Given that internet portals such as MSN and, in the general, miscellaneous services offered by Microsoft, are all diffused from the United States which covers 35 languages and thus culture, is of critical importance. Creating a milieu in which people from various cultures and don’t assume themselves as stranger leads them to replace their normative identity con-structs —due largely to uneven diffusion of power in the new milieu— with American identity. Such features are seen in different parts of MSN, for example recipe of different dishes from different cultures are available in cooking part. In beauty and fashion part using colored-skin mannequin and even lo-cal clothes from different nations is common. But it does not mean that all of them enjoy equal space and are represented originally. For example Italian, Mexican and Chinese dishes that are highly popular in the U.S receive privilege in menu of the dishes. Colored-skin models with the help of cosmetic surgery and make-up, are hardly original representative of many of the users’ culture, but are metamorphosed symbols that have been accepted in MSN due mainly to exertion of beauty codes that are legitimate in Caucasian discourse.

More considerably, in the second form of representation of

AN ANALYSIS OF MSN


consumer society in MSN, user is understood as customer en-joying plenty of alternatives and can pick up whatever she/he prefers. The first impact of MSN is that it gets the user to face identity challenges. First, it alienates the user and then pro-vides him with opportunity to express the real self, whereas this new self, unconsciously, is constructed in discursive mi-lieu of MSN. MSN offers an atmosphere in which any user, despite any gender, age, social class, race, and ethnicity, ap-pears and plays his/her own role.

At this level, MSN drives users towards uniquely individu-alized identity. In fact, MSN provides the user with the abil-ity to narrate him/herself beyond real identity in the material world. Therefore, as the huge websites like Google, Yahoo, and MSN have been created into consumer society they cause the society to be reproduced. Richard Bartelle argues that the virtual world offers people a mirror that as much as the por-trait in the mirror is consistent with the user’s real or ideal self, he/she makes better relation with it. In fact, secret of their success in absorbing the user is that the user can see him/herself in the mirror. Thus, the very problem of identity in virtual world is to what extent the user likes the picture in the mirror (Bartelle, 2004:164).

It was assumed that people’s identity in virtual worlds is unknown and disintegrated but now users follow a continu-ity of their defined identity in virtual world offline, or usu-ally define new names and titles to get similar to it. Then, prior identity formulation in virtual space has changed (Ken-nedy, 2006). Therefore, redefinition of individual and social identity in virtual space should be addressed. According to Stephen Katz, convergence of consumer society and profes-

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sionalism of producers and businessmen have led to recreat-ing such concepts as maturity, age, different phases of life, and even old citizen and retired one (Katz & et.al, 2002). MSN has generated and reproduced a new language which has great discursive impact on the users. That how people get familiar with the language and their ideology is constructed has an obvious answer; normalization of dominant discur-sive components of MSN for the users. A user, who chooses MSN.com as homepage and is exposed to it every day, after a while, defines his/her different aspects of identity in terms of this daily interaction. It may come surprising that such hu-man biologic concepts like maturity is defined differently in virtual world but the root of alienation of these concepts is resulted from impressive effects of virtual space on the users’ thinking style.

As Bartelle points out “identity is the result of thought which emerges in the various forms (in practice or by words)” (Bartelle, 2004:162), and due to development of human vir-tual world this truth is undeniable that virtual space is interac-tively related to the users and it affects the way he/she thinks. Also it offers them a broad field in which the users express themselves in terms of their own preferences. In other words, today, the virtual space is not merely a mirror of its users, but it also influences their characteristics.

To build identity, MSN stresses on some central compo-nents including body, beauty, health, gender, age, nutrition, fame, happiness and so on. The way MSN follows is to nor-malize its dominant definition of these concepts. It seems that commercialization of human identity is the major articulation of MSN’s discourse. In other words, MSN alters definition of

AN ANALYSIS OF MSN


concepts of human life, and instead develops some fantasy, ideal and commercial alternatives. If competing discourses, like other competing websites, develop some different defini-tions, MSN attempts to narrow down the diversity in defini-tion and gets the users to accept what it exclusively offers.

In the past, critics such as Sallie Tisdale believed that vir-tual space as a field which has been constructed by technical engineers rather than cultural ones, “lacks of narration” (Bell &et.al, 2000:496). But today virtual life is so extremely in-tegrated with human life and identity that not only numerous narrations are comprehensible but these narrations overtake real worlds’ narrations. This is similar to what Budrillard says about virtual hyper-reality. According to Adrian, as electron-ic trade is not separate from the real world trade, electron-ic identities in virtual space are not recognizable from real world identity (Adrian, 2008:366).

First, we redefine biologic and physiologic of human iden-tity in MSN. Gender, age, form of body, complexion, and so on are of basic physical elements by which an individual understand him/her self and then determines his/her distance with others based on them.

Everyday study of MSN during April and May, 2010, re-veals that the exemplary human are usually presented as ce-lebrities —and often American—such as actors and actresses, athletes, dancers, models, music players, singers, politicians and so on, and usually they are tall, slim and Caucasians. The number of sub-links showing these famous people MSN homepage is interesting. Almost always, one or more of the five pictures and news links that appear at the top of the MSN homepage which are visibly larger than other pictures are re-

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lated to news about personal and occupational life of these celebrities. In entertainment link, the first sub-link is “celeb-rities” and then others like “Entertainment News”, “movie”, “music”, and “television” are presented which provide even more pictures and news related to the celebrities. Besides, in sub-link of “sport”, popular athlete and in sub-link of “beauty and fashion” actors and actresses along with models, mostly females, are represented attractively so that the user can see his/her ideal model in any main link. Color photos in bright background, smiling face, professionally dressed up ensure that the user will simulate the ideal situation for him/herself.

In the other part of MSN homepage with the help of sec-ondary links like “Celebs & Gossip” and “advertisement”, the given images and concepts are strengthened and the meaning of gender ─for both man and woman─ and ideal version of body and clothes are constructed through these links.

These popular figures in western and American cultures do not appear to be viewed by the users ─from the other races, nations and local discourses─ as outsiders of dominant dis-course. In “beauty and fashion” part, for example, colored-skin and dark-skinned models are dressed in local clothes and make-up. But these people frequently through cosmetic surgery and fitness and bodybuilding exercises demonstrate their similar Caucasian counterparts’ body. With the addition of color contact lenses and their pictures in modern western buildings along with American& European consumed brands, these colored models often promote the myth of “Superiority of Caucasians”.

Biologic concepts as maturity, health, youth and age are defined among the layers of MSN. Introducing popular fig-

AN ANALYSIS OF MSN


ures and models for body shape, clothing, and so on are not exclusively limited to young and middle aged people. MSN offers some “celebrities” for children and teenagers who have entered into the art, fashion, sport field; and identical space associated for young adults, leads children and teenag-ers to early maturity under the title of “young celebrities”, and brings them into the field of using cosmetic surgery and make-up substances.

Upon studying the dominant discourse of MSN, it should be noted that human identity might change regarding the con-text; that is, identity might be described as a situational, di-versified and participative phenomenon. Human identity is not predetermined but is a ever evolving and users of MSN is influenced by it due to constant exposure to certain messages on daily basis (Malek & et.al, 2006:22).

The evolving process of identity is not only taking place at individual levels but also at social level. The concepts of vari-ous social institutions such as family are of particular impor-tance in this evolution process. MSN greatly influence its us-ers’ social relationships, mating, and marriage. MSN, under the icon of “life style”, among 10 sub-links, has allocated two sub- links to “love and relations” and “online appointment”. In “love and relationships”, there is a space available which contains various genres of personal and psychological mat-ters over love, friendship, marriage and its problems. A user may access the online videos and have the chance to express his/her own sweet and bitter family memories and experienc-es. In this part, at first layer, spouses are usually represented from the same –or at most two different—race(s) whose main theme of their relationships is love. At the second layer, a

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new definition from family and sexual relations, named as “men and women homosexuals”, appears in which pictures of gays are represented with the theme of love ─the same as heterosexual couples─ and the opportunity for meeting new people and dating through MSN is made available. In this layer, a new version of family is developed and normalized. In essence, the world of MSN is not separate from American social world and life style. MSN world is a virtual ground for “giving opportunity to American culture” worldwide that distribute corruption under the shadow of “freedom”.

In the third layer, the old version of American family named baby boomers which came to exist after the Second World War is represented; a family with accepted norms who have experienced more than 50-years of romantic life. Thus, locat-ing homosexuals among two-legitimate types of households builds a bridge. Therefore, over time and based on individual preferences of users, it is perfectly legitimate to cross over this bridge.

In addition to the above and in agreement with introducing an ideal life style, MSN offers an opportunity in its popu-lar Match.com by which it enables the user to seek his/her ideal partner based on ideal views of personality, age, sex, location and so on. This part of MSN is of critically impor-tance because over 20,000 users visit it per day. Moreover, online dating enjoy some unique features; for example, talks and meeting arrangements for which months are allocated in the physical world, are made possible only in a few days or week and both sides rarely turn to censor their emotions (Rozen & et.al, 2008). Of the most important functions of “online dating” is that it introduces an opportunity for those

AN ANALYSIS OF MSN


with homosexual inclinations to find their desired partners with no feelings of shame that may be associated with such activities in the real world. Homosexual men and women as well as bisexuals enjoy the computer-mediated relationships to articulate their identity and communicate with each other (woodland, 1999).

This space is a ground for “de-normalized” social context which even does not adhere to morally corrupt public norms of American society. It is a context that offers more com-prehensive field for worldly evils. In general, MSN makes understandable its dominant discourse, which has been ar-ticulated with American values, at two levels. At first level, it intends the user to enjoy unique and adjustable website consistent with her/his preferences. Some examples have al-ready been addressed. These individual approaches, in which the user attends there alone, can be easily comprehended. As soft power was called “attractive power” in the introduc-tion, the most fundamental features of websites like MSN, Yahoo, Google and so on is the ability to draw in and keep the users over the course of time. Here, the question arises how MSN, as a number one American website, articulates a discourse which is able to draw the attention of different people from different geographical locations, various races and ethnicities, and languages. In Nye’s argument, the more consistent your culture and ideals with global culture and the easier your access to channels of communication is, the more successful you would be in exerting soft power. MSN is a channel of communication and to eventually be viewed as a dominant discourse, it has to persuade its users that its norms are universal in nature. To do so, MSN focuses on human

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physical nature which is the most common aspect of people. MSN views consumer society as the axis of discursive ar-ticulation. In other words, MSN teaches the users, through impressive and colorful models how to consume their body: how to make it, how dress it, how to feed it, and how to have sexual relations.

MSN brings up its user and constructs their identity. It even teaches its user how to have fun in leisure time, and what music should be listened, under what conditions they should play, and even how to consume money. Perhaps several meth-ods can be assumed to teach whatever to people with differ-ent ages and cultural backgrounds. But what really encour-aged us to study MSN through the lens of soft power is that MSN manipulates the user’s mind so as to follow MSN for reaching more prosperous life and higher life style. Human being loves to be beautiful, loves to dwell in a nice place, and also wants to be loved by others. Then he/she desperately seeks for the ideal one to simulate him/her; and the answer of MSN is always the same: popular American models, popu-lar American actors and actresses, popular American athlete, popular American billionaire, and some other popular celeb-rities. Amongst all mentioned, being American is the shared point. Therefore, the user gets to know universal norms which, surprisingly, are bolstered by the users —in a sense, being American. In such discourse, there is no difference whether you are Iranian Muslim, Persian, Tajik, Arab, and or Afghan; your world, culture, and language are all American. This view can be associated with president Obama’s word: “We, all, are American.” and Microsoft “global citizen” is used as one of the ways to construct everyone as American. At the end, it is

AN ANALYSIS OF MSN


worthwhile to clarify that, as previously mentioned, transmis-sion of culture is not assumed as one-way relationship, and globalization of identity is not seen as sheer Americanization of human beings. The opportunity to penetrate MSN or any other virtual space is also open to some degree for other cul-tures and any other country is capable to manage this space, even if it is owned by American companies.

CHAPTER II

AN ANALYSIS OF FACE-BOOK THROUGH THE AP-PROACH OF SOFT POWER

Facebook was established by Mark Zuckerberg, sopho-more student at Harvard University, in October 28, 2003,

and it was early named as Facemash. Just four hours after its running, this website had 450 visitors and 22,000 students visited its photos. Zuckerberg accessed the photos and the data by hacking into Harvard’s computer network. Now, Fa-cebook contains 1,200 staffs and more than 400 million active users all around the world. As a company, Facebook owns different offices in Paulo alto California, Atlanta, Birming-ham, Michigan, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, new York, Venis California, Washington DC, and its international offices are located in Dublin, London, Milan, Paris, Stockholm, Sydney, and Toronto. Facebook has become the most colossal social network in virtual space. According to Nielsen website, Face-book has the fourth ranking after Yahoo amongst top ten ma-jor global portals. Below are some statistic about Facebook:

More than 400 million users; 50% of its active users visit it every day; More than 35 million update their status; More than 3 billion photos are uploaded each month;


More than 5 billion contents (including web links, news, post blog, comment, photos and so on) are shared per month;

More than 3.5 million events occur per month. Our understanding from ourselves constructs our individu-

al identity, whereas understanding from others’ identity con-structs social identity. In fact, important part of individuals’ identity is in the perception which people have from them-selves. Individual’s perception from his/her owns “self” is the combination of thoughts and emotions which addresses to his/her “self” (Rosenberg, 1986). The other part of iden-tity is “with what people recognize us” (Alteedo, 2000: 2). Therefore, identity construction is a public trend which is re-quired “identity expression” by an individual and “identity placement” by the others. Identity of people comes true when there is consistency with expressed identity by an individual and identity placement by the community. In face-to-face communications individual identity is constructed regard-ing restrictions. For example they are able to attribute some physical features like gender, race, appearance which is not true, or claim some social status that they really don’t possess in order to influence the others. However, the internet has totally changed traditional conditions of construction of iden-tity. Since people don’t really attend in the virtual world it is possible for them to create an identity through the new world which differs from their real identity. The internet’s impact on constructing identity has been surveyed for more than a decade but most of these surveys have been carried out in virtual space in which participants are anonymous (such as in chartrooms). According to the surveys, people who interact

49

with each other in the virtual spaces, because of anonymous nature of these spaces, intend to play the role of the other one or show some abnormal behaviors. Research suggests that people behave differently once they act in a context with their real identity. The significance of these findings is to show how heterogeneous virtual space is and how it could gener-ate different behavior. Facebook was established in February, 2004, and according to its co-founders, it is a social program and device which enables people to communicate with their friends, relatives and colleagues efficiently. This company has developed a sort of technology that facilitates commu-nication and information participation through social graph, which is sort of digital cartography from individuals’ social communications. Anyone could join Facebook ─which as it claims is a secured website─ and communicate with those he/she knows. Facebook is one of the most prominent websites in the virtual space and it is highly significant because people frequently use their real name in it.

The other key point over Facebook is that this website has successfully gained its members’ confidence mainly due to providing various services particularly related to privacy so that most of the members feel its environment as healthy, safe, and free. This view is also right when it comes to religious and political attitudes and many users assert that Facebook has prepared an equal atmosphere for all of its members. For example, in Facebook some pages are available to deny holo-caust, or to express view about anti-semiticism. It seems that activity of these groups in Facebook has caused the users to believe Facebook as a really different space than the other competing spaces. It seems that Facebook has generated

AN ANALYSIS OF MSN


uniquely irreplaceable status in its member’s mind. Sudden development of Facebook caused it to be a place in which the users can display their real identity.

Websites like Facebook has been designed in a way that personal information of the members such as gender, age, place, and occupation is shared with other members. That is why it seems that “real self” of the individuals is rarely dif-ferent from their “ideal self” (Elison et.al, 2006). Some, how-ever, assume that what people represent in Facebook is their ideal identity not real one; That is, the users underline their own positive traits which are more socially ─or amongst their friends─ accepted. And also, it seems that people equally try to conceal what is not socially ─or amongst their friends─ unaccepted. Thus, Facebook could be seen as a new opportu-nity for people to manifest their identity selectively. Another feature of Facebook, which could distinct it from the other virtual spaces like chat rooms, is that people can communi-cate not only with new people but also with their in-contact friends in the virtual space. In fact, one of the main functions of Facebook is communicating with those who the user knows in advance. Due to this double-functionality (communication with familiar and non-familiar members), Facebook offers its members a possibility to share their own information with other members in a classified manner. It enables people to introduce themselves in a different way. They can hide some specific information from the view of some of their audiences while other audiences can access it. Therefore, the user can alter his/her privacy in terms of his/her personal preferences.

Another phenomenon which occurs in Facebook is “identity statement” (walker, 2000) which does not usually happen in

51

real space. Identity statement is a public statement of an indi-vidual from his/her identity which could be stated directly or indirectly.

Direct way of identity statement is more like biography which is used by the users whereas indirect one is the effects that the user displays. For example, introduction of a selec-tive list of communication with certain community, activity or entertainment is completely obvious. This stated identity displayed to all gives the users an opportunity to express a set of personal features that are more interested. The most direct way to state identity is the visual way which appears in form of uploading photos of the user or friends; and also the photos which the user uses as the wall picture about which people can talk. People also can create an album and put their fa-vorite pictures in there. Surprisingly, the photos displayed for publicly are usually from the users’ profile and other photos can be seen by the friends or friends of the friends only when the user decides to show the profile picture publicly. Unlike the spaces such as chat rooms, which are anonymous, website varies in face-to-face relationship and representation. For in-stance, in the website the users display those personal photos which conceal their extra weight or their shortness.

The users, however, state their identity directly through which express their own preferences and tastes. For example, users in the part assigned to personal interests and amuse-ments can write down their own favorite activities, quota-tions, film, music, book, and the series. One of the ways ─perhaps the most direct one─ to state their identity directly is “about me” in which the user introduce him/herself to the others. This written self-description allows those who are not

AN ANALYSIS OF MSN


sociable enough to hide their stress in encountering with peo-ple. Moreover, this communication provides them a chance to depict a very attractive picture of themselves (Gibse, 2006). Several academic essays have been written over the way of self-representation in Facebook which suggest different at-titude over the issue. On the one hand, some believe that cre-ated profiles in Facebook produce their ideal “self” for other users. According to this assumption, the users display those personal features which do not really reflect their real per-sonality. On the other hand, a competing assumption asserts that stated identities in the website are to a great extent real (skronrski). The reason behind this fact is that certainty of the user’s name and identity and high possibility of their re-lationship with the other users and friends in the real world, because they do not intend to get confused by exaggerating or lying (Elison et.al, 2006).

Some criticisms have been taken to Facebook over the is-sues like violation of privacy, using advertisement, eliciting information and so on. Content of some users’ page have been criticized due to dealing with controversial topics as Holo-caust. One of the issues concerning violation of privacy was that in August 2007, Facebook displayed publicly a program which was used for creation of page and search. This incident was because of an error in its server which caused to display P.H.P instead of the webpage. It raised some serious concerns about security of information in the website. In November 2007, Facebook developed a system named bacon which al-lowed other websites to use Facebook’s script in their webs. This system transferred the information of Facebook’s users to other websites. It raised concerns over the matter of users’

53

privacy. In November 29, 2007, Facebook decided not release any personal information unless it has the user’s permission.

Some organizations and institute have also filed complaints against Facebook. For example, on May 31st 2008, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) filed a lawsuit against Facebook on the grounds that Facebook has violated Canadian Personal Information Protection and Elec-tronic Documents Act. The allegation was again about viola-tion of privacy. Facebook objected it and claimed that its us-ers provide their information consciously. In return CIPPIC accused Facebook of not informing the users about the ways Facebook uses their information and or has not tried to have their permission. Besides, some concerns were raised about abusing Facebook to collect and monitor personal informa-tion. To react wisely to such concerns, Facebook changed some parts of its privacy policy. For example, there used to be a law in Facebook by which “Facebook is entitled to use information collected from newspaper, weblogs, messenger services, or other Facebook users to complete the profile”. Now, it is completely obsolete. However, there is a possibil-ity for those who are not the member of Facebook to gain illegal access to information in Facebook. For example, in December, 2005, two MIT students downloaded 70,000 pro-files from Facebook by using an automatic script for their term project. New York Times, in February, 2008, in an ar-ticle asserted that Facebook has not developed any mecha-nism for the users to close their account which raises concern over users’ information remaining on the server indefinitely. These criticisms caused Facebook to offer its users an option so as to close their account forever. In 2009, Facebook was

AN ANALYSIS OF MSN


accused of providing space for those denying holocaust. In response to the charge, Barry Schmitt, one of the spokesmen of Facebook, said: “We want Facebook to be a place where ideas, even controversial ideas, can be discussed”. He also added Facebook does not guarantee to be free from any pejo-rative language.

Many also complain about abusing Facebook as an instru-ment for the internet crimes. In their opinion some anony-mous profiles commit internet bullying. For example, once a teenager alleged Facebook and some former classmates be-cause of creating a username supported by Facebook groups enabling them to humiliate him. In 21st of August, 2009, klay hauton, 18, was sentenced to 3 month imprisonment for bul-lying through Facebook. It was the first time in Britain that someone was jailed due to the internet harassment. Another issue is the use of this website by criminals. According to a report in 2009 titled “digital criminals”, 38% of social net-work’s users release some details about their vacations and since some users provide their addresses in their profiles, this sort of information would encourage robbers to burgle their place.

Furthermore, some controversies arose over content cen-sorship in Facebook. It is not possible for the users to find each other based on sexual tendencies since spring, 2009. Therefore, homosexuals cannot search for each other or form a community. One of the examples of censor is about moth-ers uploading their photos when breast-feeding the babies. These photos were removed by Facebook and the accounts were closed. Another content which mounted harsh criticism was on removing the photos related to Saddam’s Chemical

55

attack to Halabche. Besides, Kurdistan is the term for which the page is forbidden to be opened.

It seems that Facebook tries, in both declaring principles and values and milieu of practice, to represent a free environ-ment for the users to “feel freedom”. It is obvious that such an environment is developing “self-statement”; as a result, self-statement in any environment is a “powerful opportu-nity” for the founders. However, the indoctrinated sense of freedom exists as long as the user does not violate the giv-en norms (which are not necessarily ethical but political). In fact, it seems that Facebook has been tremendously suc-cessful in exerting soft power because, as argued earlier, soft power influences the audience intangibly. For example, when Facebook allows some pages like Holocaust to be created, it intends to indoctrinate its users to believe that the issues like Holocaust which are taboo in the West are allowed to be discussed in Facebook. As a result, this website adapts dif-ferent stance against them. When it comes to issue related to Muslims, Facebook does not take neutral stance but is rather full of double standards. Perhaps Facebook’s emphasis on re-specting privacy and moral issues, alongside its restrictions and prejudice in some critical issues, gets the users to uncon-sciously judge that if Facebook takes tough stance against some particular topics there is certainly a good will behind this decision and that it is beneficial to Facebook users. Sur-prisingly, popular audiences are hardly aware of these restric-tions by Facebook since, as argued earlier, many users use the website to communicate with their friends. But those with political attitudes have repeatedly faced the prejudice. Thus, it seems that by indoctrinating a sense of freedom over minor

AN ANALYSIS OF MSN


issues ─which does not jeopardize its fundamental policies─ prepares the context for exerting restrictions and prejudice in far more critical matters. Facebook not only intangibly exerts its values on the users and displays them as attractive but also tries to introduce values that are in contradiction with its set of predefined norms against freedom.

Similar to any other websites, Facebook enjoys different users and as a result, different usages. It could range from innocent and simple attitudes such as communication with current friends, searching for old friends, and curiosity about people to political, social, economic, and cultural incentives. Facebook as an American or western space with diverse and broad functions is a context in which “being” in modern world is preferred to “being” in developing world, such as in Iran.

In general, it can be concluded that Facebook is a real sym-bol of soft power whose appearance is attractive and liberal while in practice it seeks for collecting comprehensive in-formation related to global public culture through its active users. Facebook is a venue for receiving and analyzing in-formation through a highly economical mechanism. It is a multinational capacity which provides the best possibilities for information dominance of the great powers especially the United States. Facebook is the continuation of monopolistic policies of the global hegemony which invites every nation to follow its model in spite of diversity and plurality.

CHAPTER III

AN ANALYSIS OF YAHOO THROUGH THE APPROACH OF SOFT POWER

Yahoo was developed in February 1994 by two PhD students in electronic engineering from Stanford University named

Jerry Yang and David Fellow, who were writing computer pro-gram in their leisure time. Of course, it first started as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” but a few months later changed into Yahoo which is the abbreviation of “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. Yahoo was able to attract numer-ous users during the relatively short period of time. By the end of fall of 1994, it passed one million hits from the time of its incep-tion (history of Yahoo, how everything began, 2005).

Yang and Fellow registered Yahoo in March 1st 1995, and it has been in business since then. A month later in April, 1995, Se-quoia Capital, which is one of the leading companies in informa-tion technology, invested 2 million dollars in Yahoo which was a very serious start for a newly-born company such as Yahoo and a year later the company hired 49 permanent staffs (the same).

In June 2000, Yahoo reached an agreement with Google to use this company as its search engine. In February, 2004, Yahoo company changed its mind about using Google as search engine, which was seen a serious competitor, and developed its propri-


etary search engine.It is worthwhile to be aware that the purpose of a virtual super-

power, like Yahoo, is not necessarily launching a set of services and programs, and even material purposes, to meet exceedingly large amount of virtual products. Many people conceive the in-ternet as a free world in which all have a chance to access any pages for free and even create their own website. As a result, the internet is a world in which supply and reception of infor-mation takes place freely. In this regard, the internet lacks any central sovereignty and democracy and the user’s will is domi-nant. In fact, the internet has more than 200 million websites and is continuously growing (Netcraft, 2010). Classification of these massively numerous websites is impossible for any user. There-fore the important role of search engines comes into play. These search engines work as an agent for the users. Today, over 85% of the internet users access information through the search engines and it is estimated that this percentage will be increased due to the expansion of virtual space (Witten, Gori, and Numerico, 2007).

In appearance it seems that the search engines work without any ideological tendencies and interest, and they only provides services for free and without any bias. According to the two ma-jor portals of Google and Bing, their search engines have been set on mathematical algorithm which is highly confidential. Plenty of surveys have been carried out to figure out the algo-rithm and many papers, books and websites have been created (Cheneni (2007); Witten, Gori, Anaumerico (2007)). The main reason for the study is economic interest because if one is aware of the procedures of search engines they will design and/or revise their own websites in a way so that it would gain higher ranking in the result of the search engines. This outstanding endeavor to

61

discover the algorithms indicates its invaluable status because it is these algorithms that cause a website to be more or less vis-ited. As mentioned earlier, the search engines work as an agent for the user in virtual space and choose only a few websites in their results. Those websites which are not chosen by them and or ranked lower are hardly visited by the users. Therefore, it can be inferred that the internet space is not that equal and fair but it works based on unfair and hegemonic rules. There is no equality in this world because a website like Yahoo enjoys over hundreds of million visitors per month whereas many websites have only a few visitors. Websites like Google makes hundreds of millions of dollars, while many are run by personal investment. Of course, this is entirely common that services of different virtual websites are not comparable qualitatively and quantitatively, but the criti-cal point here is the absence of just mechanism in determining the true value of any website. Here the search engines play the role of a judge evaluating the rank of every website. It has caused a few websites ─such as virtual empires─ to occupy a considerable amount of this space whereas millions of other websites occupy a negligible space. According to Barabasi, one of the leading ex-perts of virtual space “one of the greatest results of our cartog-raphy from web space was that this space completely lack any values like democracy, justice and equality. We figured out web topology results in visiting finite amount of information among billion materials and neglect the rest” (Barabasi, 2002).

Now, Google search engine and Bing ─which is the search en-gine of MSN and has been the search engine of Yahoo since July, 2009 over a 10-year contract with MSN─ are two leading search engines.

Respectively servicing 65.5 % and 25.6% of search request by

AN ANALYSIS OF YAHOO


Table 1: Proportion of search engines from the search done in the U.S.

American users, Google and Bing (13.4 % for Yahoo plus 12.2 % MSN) service 91.3 % of total searches in Americans virtual space.

Control of this highly important power by only two private companies is a clear violation of democratic concepts and the free flow of information in virtual space. Even if one assumes that the three companies which manage these two search en-gines do not take advantage of this power (the contrary of which is shown in this study), such an oligopoly in search engine market raises serious concerns because if they decide to exert their influence, they can take advantage of this power in the future in favor of their personal gains and interests. In its March 2010 report, Nielson institute which regularly re-views American users’ search request, reports the proportion of each search engine as being:

rank Name of search engine Proportion Numbers of search

1 Google 65.7% 6,387,932,000

2 Yahoo 13.4% 1,304,427,000

3 (Msn (Bing 12.2% 1,183,268,000

4 A.O.L 2.5% 245,810,000

5 Ask.com 1.9% 183,975,000

6 My web 1.2% 120,713,000

7 Comcast 0.5% 52,011,000

8 Whitepages 0.3% 29,868,000

9 Nextag 0.3% 28,633,000

10 Yellowpages 0.2% 23,857,000

Total search in the U.S 100% 9,716,488,000

63

Bing, Yahoo’s search engine, like Google, offers only 1,000 links out of literally million results for a user’s search request. For example, by writing the term “Iran” this search engine finds 882 million results but only 1,000 results are available for the users (100 pages with 10 re-sults per page). In fact, Yahoo censors the rest of the re-sults related to Iran in virtual space. Surprisingly, although Yahoo offers some flexibility to its users when perform-ing searches ─such filtering immoral materials, constant search from Wikipedia, Facebook, and so on─ there is no mechanism for the user to increase the number of websites outputted in the results. This filtering is an apparent sym-bol of prejudice and authoritarianism in the web because those websites not shown by the search engines are hardly visited by the users. In addition to offering merely 1,000 results, search engine of Yahoo makes decision for the user in another way. One of the new services of Yahoo is Search Assist. As the user types a word the search engine offers him/her some other words through with this ser-vice. For example, with typing laptop, the search engine offers to search words like “computer laptop, Toshiba lap-top, inexpensive laptop, Sony laptop, and so on”. Despite the fact that it can really make users’ search easier, it may lead them towards a predefined direction. In this example the users may be led towards Toshiba and Sony laptop and not other brands that are not suggested by Yahoo. In con-clusion, search engines, particularly Google and Bing, act as an agent for the user in the virtual space to distinguish between credible and non-credible, weak and strong, mor-al and immoral, correct and incorrect, and etcetera. The



two engines are run by American private corporate with financial interest ─just like any other company─ and their own view, objectives, values in cultural, social, political fronts. Above, what has been pointed out about Yahoo’ soft power is its ability in selectively forming access to information in virtual space and therefore eventually in-fluencing users’ tastes and interests. Moreover, search en-gines bring some other opportunities to these companies. These search engines are able to save your search and after a while are made aware of your preferences, inter-ests, and personal information. Such information could result into significant marketing benefits for the search engines. It could also have major security consequences because search engines have key information of the user’s personal life. Search engine can also save the information related to the search and realize the prevailing discourses and trends in a given country. For example, it can col-lect a very comprehensive set of information over Iranian preferences and interests in virtual space. It is even ca-pable of following the trend of news highlight about Ira-nian domestic affairs. In sum, search engines are banks of information for their owners. This is true about Yahoo emails, as Yahoo can access all personal emails and could potentially spy on individuals and sell such information to other entities. Search engines can result into other forms of powers for their managers. As it said earlier, the inter-net is a huge bank of knowledge and information. Experts believe that archiving information in virtual space will lead the web as the greatest source of history writing. His-tory is written by available information. Since search en-

65

gines can determine the level of the access as well as the value and credibility of information in virtual space, they can potentially both highlight and fade some historical narrations. Over the course of time the faded narrations disappear whereas the highlighted ones become the histo-ry (Witten, Gori, Numerico, 2007). In this regard, search engines bring their owners huge amount of power which will be increased with expansion of virtual space in all aspects of human life. This power brings the operators of search engines who may have certain national interest, fi-nancial interests, values, and objectives, serious account-ability, even if the ordinary users of these engines are not aware of such power.

Also a search in acquisitions by Yahoo shows other as-pects of economical domination on the web. Yahoo’s first acquisition was the purchase of Net Controls, a web search engine company, in September 1997 for US$1.4 million. As of April 2008, the company’s largest acquisition is the purchase of Broadcast.com, an Internet radio company, for $5.7 billion, making Broadcast.com co-founder Mark Cuban a billionaire. Most of the companies acquired by Yahoo! are based in the United States; 47 of the com-panies are from the United States, and 8 are based in a foreign country. As of April 2011, Yahoo! has acquired 63 companies (Wikipedia, 2011).



No

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21 22

23

Acquisiti on date

September 1997

October 8, 1997

March 31, 1998

April 29, 1998

June 8, 1998

July 17, 1998

October 12, 1998

December 1998

January 15, 1999

April 1, 1999

May 27, 1999

May 28, 1999

June 2, 1999

March 23, 2000

April 5, 2000 August 31, 2000

November 9, 2000

February 14, 2001

June 28, 2001 January 11, 2002 December 23, 2002

June 14, 2003 January 2004

Company

Net Controls

Four11

Classic Games

Sportasy

Viaweb

Webcal

Yoyodyne

Hyperparallel

LogMeIn

Broadcast.com

Encompass

GeoCities

Online Any-whereArthas.com

MyQuest

eGroups

Kimo

Sold.com

LAUNCH Media

Hotjobs.com

Inktomi CorporationOverture Services, Inc.3721 Internet Assistant

Business

Web search engine

Web-based email

Online game

Fantasy sport

Web application

Calendaring softwareDirect marketing

Data analysis

Digital identity

Internet radio

Internet service providerWeb hosting serviceContent delivery networkE-commerce payment systemsInternet service providerElectronic mailing listWeb portal

Online auction tools

Online music store

Job search engine

Internet service providerSearch engine marketingBrowser Helper Object

Country

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

TWN

AUS

USA

USA

USA

USA

CHN

Value (USD)

$1,400,000

$92,000,000

—

—

$49,000,000 $21,000,000

$29,600,000

$8,000,000

$10,000,000

$5,700,000,000

$130,000,000

$3,600,000,000

$80,000,000

—

—

$432,000,000

$145,000,000

$30,000,000

$12,000,000

$436,000,000

$235,000,000

$1,630,000,000

$120,000,000

Derived products

Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Games

Yahoo! Fantasy Sports

Yahoo! Store

Yahoo Calendar

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search

Yahoo!

LAUNCHcast

Yahoo!

Yahoo! GeoCitiesYahoo! TV

Yahoo! Store

Yahoo!

Yahoo! GroupsYahoo!

Yahoo! Shopping

Yahoo! Music

Yahoo! HotJobs

Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search MarketingYahoo! Assistant

67

Acquisiti on date

March 26, 2004

July 12, 2004

September 14, 2004

October 2, 2004

October 22, 2004 December 7, 2004

February 11, 2005

March 4, 2005

March 20, 2005

April 12, 2005

June 14, 2005

June 14, 2005

July 25, 2005 October 4, 2005

October 18, 2005

December 12, 2005

January 9, 2006

January 17, 2006

April 18, 2006

September 27, 2006

October 17, 2006

November 16, 2006

November 17, 2006

December 2006

Company

Kelkoo

Oddpost

Musicmatch JukeboxThe All Seeing EyeStata Labs

WUF Networks

Verdisoft

Stadeon

Ludicorp

TeRespondo

Dialpad

blo.gs

Konfabulator

Upcoming.org

Whereonearth

del.icio.us

Webjay

SearchFox

Meedio

Jumpcut.com

AdInterax

Bix.com

Kenet Works

Wretch

Business

Price compari-son serviceWeb-based email

Audio player

Game server browserWeb-based email

Mobile media

Computer software

Online game

Image hosting serviceAdvertising networkVoice over Inter-net ProtocolWeblog software

Widget engine

Calendaring softwareWeb mapping

Social book-markingOnline music store

Web search engine

Digital video recorderOnline video editingOnline advertising

Social media

Mobile software

Virtual community

Country

FRA

USA

USA

FIN

USA

USA

USA

USA

CAN

BRA

USA

USA

USA

USA

UK

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

SWE

TWN

(Value (USD

$579,000,000

$30,000,000

$160,000,000

—

—

—

$58,000,000

—

$40,000,000

—

—

—

—

—

—

$20,000,000

—

—

—

—

—

—

$25,000,000

$22,000,000

Derived products

Kelkoo

Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Music

Yahoo! Games

Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Mobile

Yahoo! Mobile

Yahoo! Games

Flickr

Yahoo! Search MarketingYahoo! Voice

Yahoo! 360°

Yahoo! Widgets

Yahoo! Local

Yahoo! Search Marketingdel.icio.us

Yahoo! Music

Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Go

Yahoo! Video

Yahoo! Search MarketingBix

Yahoo! Mobile

Wretch

No

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47



On the other hand, Yahoo website includes different miscel-laneous cultural and social parts like: groups of Yahoo, Yahoo film, Yahoo music, Yahoo brightness (for women) and Yahoo private (for friend and friend finding). First we look at groups of Yahoo and then its dominant discourse in other parts.

The number of the Yahoo groups (list serves) in different issues is as:

Acquisiti on date

January 8, 2007

April 29, 2007

June 20, 2007

September 4, 2007

September 14, 2007

September 17, 2007

February 5, 2008

February 12, 2008

May 9, 2008

July 22, 2009

August 25, 2009

March 17, 2010

May 18, 2010

May 25, 2010

October 4, 2010

April 25, 2011

Company

MyBlogLog

Right Media

Rivals.com

BlueLithium

BuzzTracker

Zimbra

FoxyTunes

Maven Networks

Inquisitor

Xoopit

Maktoob.com

citizensports.com

Associated ContentKoprol

Dapper

IntoNow

Business

Social network serviceOnline advertising

College sports

Advertising networkNews site

Collaborative softwareBrowser extension

Video on demand

Browser extension

Webmail applicationsSocial media

Sports Social mediaContent Generation

Geosocial network

SmartAds

IntoNow

Country

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

Jordan

USA

USA

INA

USA

(Value (USD

—

$680,000,000

—

$300,000,000

—

$350,000,000

—

$160,000,000

—

$20,000,000

$165,000,000

—

—

—

—

$20,000,000

Derived products

MyBlogLog

Yahoo! Search MarketingYahoo! Sports

Yahoo! Search MarketingYahoo! News

Zimbra

FoxyTunes

Yahoo! Video

Inquisitor

Yahoo! Mail

Maktoob.com

citizensports.comAssociated ContentKoprol

Dapper

IntoNow

No

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63Table 2: List of acquisitions by Yahoo (Wikipeda, 2011)

69

Education and schools: 1,422,151 Computer and the internet: 546,539 Culture and society: 480,461 Arts and entertainment: 462,632 Family and home: 434,943 Love and relationship: 380,577 Music: 326,082 Handicrafts: 236,044 Government and politics: 209,399 Game: 206,480 Religion and believes: 195,015 Sport: 181,282 Business and economy: 168,076 Science: 125,761 Health: 56,382

Besides, in groups of Yahoo there are more than 700,000 groups related to pornography and immoral subjects which if they are included in the list above they will be ranked as the second group after the subjects of education and schools. It must be mentioned that the main reason behind one million groups (list serves) in education and schools part is that in any school or university more than one group exists. Yahoo news is one of the oldest and most favorite parts of the website in virtual space. Statistics from 2009 shows that it was the third highly visited news website in the world which could over-take Fox News, as a leading news website (Nielson, MSN, NBC, CNN the top news websites in March, 2009).

Yahoo news usually follows dominant approaches of Amer-ican and British media. The fact behind Yahoo news is that



unlike CNN and other media and news agencies, Yahoo does not produce news but collects and organizes the news from the other new agencies.

Since all news of Yahoo are collected from American and British news agencies ─mostly from the former one─ Yahoo news strengthens American dominant discourse in news. Perhaps it can be claimed that the most influen-tial part of Yahoo’s webpage is its front page. Hundreds of millions of people visit this page per month. This website , according to Elexa, is the fourth highly visited website on the internet.

In the United States this is the third highly visited while in Iran is the second highly visited one. For many users, the homepage of Yahoo is the default page of their Internet browser. What is really important about Yahoo’s homepage is that in addition to the menu of Yahoo services some selected news along with a photo related only to one news story is vis-ible on the page. In fact, the news is offered to the users with no real demand by them.

In the meantime the news pieces that appear on the first page of Yahoo are of paramount important since millions of users visit this page on daily basis. An analysis of cultural, political, and economic impacts of Yahoo Empire is without any doubt inaccurate if its first page is not analyzed in details. To do so, in this survey which lasted for two months (from mid-March to 10th of May, 2010) some first pages of Yahoo were saved on daily basis to be analyzed. To analyze the dis-courses presented on the first page of Yahoo, 7 samples in March, 18 samples in April, and 5 samples in May (a total of 30 first pages) were collected.

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These samples were chosen randomly and in random dates from Yahoo’s first page.

Interesting and entertaining news from the United States had the highest frequency (with 7 out of 30) and news about domestic issues including political and economic news as well as celebrity news fill the second and third ranking re-spectively. The fourth position belongs to sport leagues and American athletes.

Therefore, the first top four subjects dealt with by Yahoo’s first page are all about the United States. In figure 3, Ameri-canization of the photos and news on first page of Yahoo is depicted. Of the most prominent point shown in the figure is the considerable volume of art, sport and entertainment news. In a sense, among 30 samples, 20 samples of the top news (66% of total) belonged to these topics and only 10 samples addressing American and global political, economic and sci-entific news.

In fact it can be inferred that Yahoo is the advertiser of pop-ular culture versus high culture and the advertised pop culture is mainly American pop culture. As it will be explained later, the news coming after the top news piece on the page follows the same model.

Amongst the news appearing after the top news of the page sport, domestic and celebrity news have the highest frequen-cy although their order have changed. In the figure above 63 news (72%) are addressing art, entertainment and sport news whereas only 25 news (28%) are dealing with the United States and global political, economic, scientific and health news. Moreover, the findings prove Americanization of the first page of Yahoo.



Figure 3: Proportion of the news related to the United States on the first page of Yahoo

The figures below display the proportion of news related to the United States to all of the news that appears on the first page and other pages of Yahoo.

73%

20%

7%

The USA news Miscellaneus news The other countries news

Figure 2: Statistics over the news appearing after the first news

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As it is clearly seen from this figure 73% of news in Ya-hoo’s first page belongs to the United States. Merely 7% of the news is about other countries.

Moreover, 20% of the news is not about any particular country but is on romantic relations, technology and so on. Similar pattern is also visible for the news that is reported besides the first or top news pieces.

Marketing American culture particularly American pop culture is seen as one of the symbols of the U.S. soft pow-er in the virtual space. Soft power means that other so-cieties would willingly want what you want. Therefore, they accept your policies and perspectives with minimum resistance.

The first page of Yahoo as it said earlier is visited by hun-dreds of millions each month and this number is on the rise.

As mentioned earlier for many internet users, the first page of Yahoo is the default page on their Internet browsers. So anytime the user attempts to enter the internet he/she sees the

67%

Figure 4: Proportion of the news related to the United States on other pages of Yahoo

24%

9%

The USA news Miscellaneus news The other countries news



first page of Yahoo, and he/she will be exposed to news and different photos that Yahoo is offering him/her without her explicit request for such material. As said earlier, major parts of the news are about American pop culture. For example news and photos of American actors and actresses are dis-played constantly on the page. This is true about other parts of Yahoo like section in which American pop culture and sex-ual freedom stand out. In addition, such favorite parts as film and music that are completely assigned to American film and music. Yahoo includes 40 local relating portals which cover most of the great countries in the world, although it does not have a local portal, specifically for Iran. Their local portals in the world are as listed below: North and South America: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, chili, Columbia, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Qubek, and Yahoo spaniel.

Europe: Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Irland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Swit-zerland, Turkey, England. Asia and Australasia: Yahoo Asia, Australia, China, Hong Kong, India,Indonisia,japan, korea, Ma-laysia, Newsland, the Filipines, singapoore, tiwan, Thailand, Vietnam.

In the picture below those locations which have relating

Figure 5: Locations of

Yahoo’s local portal

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portals in Yahoo are shown. In the past, many of these portals were an independent

website and their address was Yahoo.conuntries (such as Ya-hoo. Ca for Canada or Yahoo.fr for France). But now, all of them are sub-portals. For example, sub-portal for France is fr.Yahoo.com. When users write the previous address in their browser they are guided to the new portal. Local Yahoo por-tals have been designed based on their own language, for ex-ample Yahoo China has been designed in Chinese and Yahoo Vietnam in Vietnamese. Furthermore, the materials offered in the sub-portals are designed to address the preferences and interests of the target countries. Also miscellaneous services of Yahoo are specific to the target country, for example, for England in Yahoo car, those cars used in the country are criti-cized. And in the shopping part, those cars which are for sale are introduced to the users. Or in the sports section, the given sport played in the country is offered. In this regard, Yahoo was highly successful in localization of its services.

As said earlier, Yahoo has redefined its services respecting the target countries’ tastes and interests, but in the meantime, American services of the main portal of Yahoo is still intro-duced to the sub-portals’ users, although they could not be as thorough as the main portal. For example, the part of film in French portal, a country with a bright history in film, a mix of French as well as American films are reviewed, although American ones overshadow those of French. But it should be noted that the state is different in sub-portals and their vari-ous parts.

In addition to different parts of sub-portals, their first page is also different from the main Yahoo portal’s page; that is;



first news and photos are offered and the news usually cov-ers local events. However, American related news is injected among the local news so meticulously so that the user does not feel that he/she is being imposed to read news that are related to the United States. For example, American domestic news is not offered to the users.

The sub-portals lack some services and parts of the main portal, so the users should refer to the main portal to access them. The number of services is different from sub-portal to another one, but in most of them is being developed. One of the interesting points about the sub-portals is their first page’s different design. For instance, first page of Yahoo China is busier and bigger than other sub-portals which is seemingly due to the given country users’ tastes and interests. Yahoo’s main portal recognizes the location of the user through the IP address and guides him/her to the related sub-portal.

Power of Yahoo portal at influencing users of virtual spaces has generated soft power for America because as explained earlier, different parts of Yahoo include obvious Anglo-Sax-on cultural, political, and economic discourse. Since a great deal of materials offered by Yahoo contains news and photos on American news, music, film and groups, it absorbs the us-ers to American values and culture, while it is not tangible for the users. As explained earlier, soft power affects users through intangible ways. This particularly has been proved about the first page of Yahoo which is visited by hundreds of millions per month. As the survey showed, 73% of news of the first page is about the U.S. whereas only 7% is covering the matters related to other countries and 20% is about other miscellaneous topics. Besides, of 30 samples surveyed, in 20

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cases (66%) the top news of the first page are about art, en-tertainment and sport news, while only 10 cases (33%) of the top news of the first page is dealing with American or global economic, political, and scientific news.

In sum, Yahoo could be seen as the marketer of pop cul-ture ─versus high culture─ particularly the American ver-sion. Presence of this culture in the other parts and services of Yahoo is entirely visible. Attracting other societies to your pop and high culture, as mentioned before, is one of the main mechanisms to acquire soft power and in this regard Yahoo has bestowed tremendous soft power for the United States.


CHAPTER IV

AN ANALYSIS OF WIKIPEDIA THROUGH THE APPROACH OF SOFT POWER

Wikimedia Foundation was established from merging Wikipedia and Nupedia in June 23, 2003. Wikimedia

foundation is a non-profit charity organization which came to exist in Saint Petersburg, Florida, and its central office is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Jimmy Wales is the president and Sue Gardner is the managing director of the foundation. Its sub-projects include Wikipedia (as the most important project of the foundation), Wikipedia,Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource,Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, Wikimedia Incubator, Meta-Wiki, and Wikimedia Commons.

The purpose of Wikimedia is development of open content pro-jects based on wiki technology and providing these contents for free for people. This foundation has been introduced by Ameri-can Internal Revenue Code as public charity. According to Niel-son institute Wikimedia is the sixth highly visited web portal in the world. In February, 2010, Wikimedia had over 154 million distinct users. According to mission statement of the foundation, its central principle is neutrality and omitting personal opinions. This principle has tremendously increased the credibility of the foundation. As a result, those who enter the website with the in-


tention of exerting their personal or party opinions know that it can only be done intangibly. The users are aware that they have to avoid using any controversial and sensitive sentences or phrases in Wikimedia society.

One of the most important fields of soft power is the field of information and knowledge. If a group or country is able to release science and knowledge as it desires, it will be suc-cessful at transmission of its worldview and eventually will have others accept it wishes (Nye, 2002). This is the soft power. Now, thanks to tremendous advances in information technology, people access to wide range of information and news which are gained through various ways like print media, TV channels and satellite, the internet and so on. As a result, classification and selecting the information is of paramount importance for those who want to gain and exert soft power. According to Yasushi and Mc Connel “soft power depends on credibility , so when governments are seen as interfering power and information is used as propaganda, this credibil-ity is ruined” (XIV:2009). Therefore, the more independent, neutral, and public-run the classifying source, the more suc-cessful it will be in exertion of power.

Then, to survey Wikimedia and its most important group, Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia, these insights are consid-ered. To carry out this analysis, issues such as the purpose of the foundation, financial supporters, communication of the foundation’s officials with other countries and politicians, and active users are taken into account. In this effort, discourse analysis is the preferable methodology that is employed to survey the topics presented in this virtual space.

Most of the users who come to Wikimedia want to use the

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material in it rather than correcting them. Today, everyone who intends to gain some general information over a given topic or to get familiar with a topic about which he/she does not knows anything, often refers to Wikipedia. If they don’t refer directly to Wikipedia and instead go to Google, they will probably gain the information from Wikipedia since the Wikipedia is often among the first search results that are pro-vided by Google.

But being active as creating new material and correcting the information in different parts of Wikimedia is rarely common among ordinary internet users ─perhaps due to lack of enough time and computer knowledge─ and for Iranians this activity is far less than people from other countries. In fact the number of people spending their time in virtual spaces such as Facebook are far more than those surfing in Wikimedia, but the significance of this website is that people can legitimately and neutrally distrib-ute their viewpoints and perspectives as information(in Wikipe-dia) and news (wikinews) to millions of users around the globe. Most of the people in Wikimedia work with their internet nick names and the only way to communicate with them is through the email that they had provided when registering their Wikipedia account. Therefore, in this survey we used email addresses of the Wikipedia’s managers to send our questionnaire. Of 14 manag-ers of Persian Wikipedia there were 10 addresses available from which only 4 managers answered our questionnaire. The purpose of the questionnaire was not gathering data rather getting familiar with their opinions and objectives in order to guide our survey to correct direction.

Many financial supporters of the foundation are non-gov-ernmental organizations whose objective is to promote de-

AN ANALYSIS OF WIKIPEDIA


mocracy. These supporters can be conceived as wilsonist organizations; the organizations that assist governments to develop their objectives (Yasushi & Mc Connel, 2008:266) and can be seen as the apparatus of exerting soft power. Of course these organizations or institutes do not request any re-turns for their financial support but what is obvious is that these centers will allocate parts of their budget to a website like Wikipedia on the condition that the site is a valuable po-tential to meet their goals. Then, financially supported foun-dations such as Wikipedia, try to make their plans consistent with the supporting centers if they would like to be consid-ered for their constant aids.

In American society, foundations are based on funding from wealthy families and individuals who desire to influ-ence national and foreign policies. They and other institu-tions such as universities and media shape the policies and public opinion (Dolbeare, Edelman, Medcalf, 1985). The ap-

Figure 6: Development in Different Parts

of Wikimedia Foundation

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proach of these foundations to financially support Wikipedia indicates that this website can be employed as an apparatus to influence public opinions as well as policymaking circles within governments.

Perhaps introducing Wikipedia as the most visited refer-ence for finding specific information in certain issues is of the most important acheivement of Wikimedia. As said earlier, Wikipedia has recieved the 6th ranking in terms of traffic and no other online enciclopedia has been able to compete with it. One of the main reasons for this high ranking is that in almost all searchs done through Google, Wikipedia is among the first ten results that are shown. Despite the fact that wikipedia is extremely used by internet user, particularly the students, changabilty by the users which is the cornerstone of the web-site, has called into question credibilty of its essays. In fact they are not academically approved essays. On the one hand, this editorial feature of wikipedia is its main enginer to de-velop, and on the other hand, it is the main culprit of its faults. Arguments over wikipedia arose when on the page about biography of John Seigenthaler, former assistant of Robert Kennedy, he was accused of murder of Robert and John F. Kennedy. Surprisingly, this information was taken from some websites like reference.com before being corrected (Longluis Elmer, 2009:75).

A survey carried out on students at one of American public universities suggests that one in three students use Wikipedia for their academic purposes. In spite the fact that they had a positive experience of using Wikipedia, they ordinarily show confidence and refer to the website only to check out infor-mation and acquiring general information. The survey con-



cludes that although Wikipedia is worthwhile for acquiring knowledge, students use it cautiously. It seems that profes-sors ought to offer their students to more helpful sources rath-er than preventing them from using Wikipedia (Leam, 2009).

However, mass media (such as newspaper) references to Wikipedia are on the rise which makes the internet users to use Wikipedia even more (Anthony, smith, Williamson, 2009). Nature magazine verified Wikipedia’s credibility by comparing its level of accuracy with Encyclopedia Britan-nica. According to a survey conducted in 2005, among 42 scientific materials which were randomly selected, Wikipedia had 162 mistakes and Britannica had 123 mistakes (royal and capila, 2009:139). Of course, it seems that the problem of credibility and accuracy of the materials is about biographies and socio-historical issues in which the perspectives are ex-tremely different and that this problem is minute for empiri-cal and natural sciences.

Another criticism to Wikipedia is about its comprehensive-ness; that is, all issues and topics have not been addressed equally.

Sometimes a minor issue is described more thoroughly in comparison to another key issue. Royal & Capila suggest that chronological order, population, and size of a country are of importance factor in addressing an issue in Wikipedia. For example the page about a film produced in 2005 is more com-prehensive than that produced a decade earlier.

Wikimedia foundation has always underlined impartiality as its cornerstone and views its projects as an opportunity to fairly study an issue. Wikimedia believes that a high level of participation from various communities and backgrounds is

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the only way to meet this objective. But in some cases, its cofounders’ trips to some specific countries as well as their attendance in some conferences and programs bring their im-partiality into question. Some issues have always been con-troversial in Wikimedia due to their sensitivity, particularly in Wikipedia. One of the issues is Israel, Jews, and Holo-caust and Arab-Israeli tensions. Wikipedia has always been accused of partiality for the other side of conflict. Map of the presence of information and users of Wiki indicates “global information colonialism” of Wikimedia in general, and Wiki-pedia in specific. Therefore, Wikipedia can be titled as “virtu-al information empire”. Although according to foundation’s objectives Wikimedia firmly insists on impartiality and omit-ting personal opinions, information generation in the milieu of an american company can be correctly viewed as expan-sion of American information power.

Wikimedia has been designed to encourage global society to generate information creatively. It tries to depict an impar-tial stance but the reality is that it is yet another one of the virtual territory of the United States. Wikimedia is considered to be far ahead of its competitors. Considering its literally infinite labor source and its increasing credibility and finan-cial power, there is no competitor that could one day replace Wikimedia. Finally, it is inferred that Wikimedia has acquired this leading and unique position in virtual space in response to two questions which are rooted in logic of human nature. The first question refers to this point that “how fast thorough information about social and individual layers as well as di-verse political, cultural, economic, and security aspects of the world can be acquired”? The answer is encouraging people



to create information. If all those able to produce informa-tion it will tremendously affect information production. The second question is that how is it possible to motivate people to produce information? The answer is creating sense of pres-ence in free and humanitarian world and also credibility and sense of fame for represented information about individuals, institutions and so on. Wikimedia with wide range of models and languages reflects the importance of responding to the questions above.

CHAPTER V

AN ANALYSIS OF YOUTUBE THROUGH THE APPROACH OF SOFT POWER

YouTube is a user-based website allowing its worldwide users to share videos with each other. It is a platform

which links people to each other through videos. At the same time YouTube could be considered a product of com-munication between thoughts. Its cofounders are Steve Chen (Taiwanese-American), Chod Hordley (American) and Javid Karim (Bangladeshi-German) (YouTube, 2010). YouTube started its operations in 2005 (Hopckins, 2006) but it was sold to Google for 1.65 billion dollars in October 2006 (La-monica, 2006), making YouTube a part of this huge internet company. The central office was at first located in San Mat-thew but now located in San Bruno, California.

The following pages will study different aspects of You-Tube as a leading and frequently visited social media (cur-rently it is ranked number three in the world). The role of YouTube as channel through which U.S. soft power is ex-erted is also analyzed.

YouTube is a website with features of a social media de-spite its unique qualities. This website has provided a milieu in which users from different locations, classes, genders, and


ideologies feel comfortable and secured, and are active on the website through the practices of uploading videos, reviewing videos uploaded by others, and leaving comments.

YouTube as a very modern tool originated from American society, encompasses thoroughly American values and trans-mit them to its users. YouTube has emerged as a platform containing democracy and its sub-values like freedom of speech, religious freedom, pluralism, and so on. Therefore, it has professionally drawn the attention of millions of its users towards its values.

Active users in this website enjoy personal channel and if they desire they can upgrade their account to a Partner Ac-count and Standard Account. Their videos also are on a very dynamic path and can compete with other videos for ranking. But the main question of the following study is whether every global citizen benefits equally from the opportunities of ex-pressing ideas, transmitting knowledge, and exerting power in this forum or are there some factors that may strengthen certain centers of ideology and powers in YouTube.

It is hypothesized here that YouTube, due to its flexible, open, and active environment, similar to other American so-cial media platforms, is a context for exerting American soft power. It has defused and normalized American values as an acceptable and universal norm among its global users, mak-ing any deviation from these norms worthy of castigation. There are plenty of evidence showing that YouTube removed some videos without any explanation, but this study assumes that every user from anywhere in the world enjoys freedom of speech and thought in this website and therefore could up-load its material freely. Therefore, the target people of this

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study are those who are active in YouTube as viewers and not contributors.

According to theoretical framework of Fair Clough for text production in social and discursive context and its combina-tion with Stuart Hall representation theory, YouTube is seen as a discourse that is grown in American liberal democracy context, and is therefore Americanizing its users through its publically available videos.

Regarding the dominant international discourse, such con-cepts as democracy, human rights, and terrorism have been examined in YouTube. There are some key points that arise from this examination:

YouTube displays the videos on the first page—includ-ing 22 videos—which are not necessarily the newest or the most visited ones. Many of these videos have ordi-nary quality. And their captions have a lot in common with other videos which are not available on the first page. Therefore, videos which are more available than others are not based on specific guidelines in any sense of the word.

Examination of videos in YouTube that are representa-tion of democracy and human right reveals the fact that the version of American liberal democracy and human rights which are consistent with international discourse has been used by YouTube. Concepts like respecting individual rights, mutual relationship between people and government, responsible government, freedom of speech, religious freedom, pluralism, and cultural toler-ance are represented and generally encouraged as posi-tive traits in the videos that are available YouTube.



YouTube not only constructs concepts of democracy and human rights with details but also cautions the users against violating the dominant discourse. Of the most important outcomes is representation of rise of terrorism in countries whose system does not correspond with the interest of great powers particularly American system.

Not only YouTube constructs fundamental concepts for the users’ thinking framework, but it also represents specific ex-ample from the outside world that are consistent or inconsist-ent with such concepts. For example, Islam and Iran are two concepts that are introduced in YouTube videos frequently. Islam as a religion with political ideology is a transnational religion, beyond nation-state, and a potential threat for lib-eral democracy discourse as the dominant global discourse. Therefore, Islam is represented in the form of videos which underline issues like sexual prejudice, non-humanitarian ju-diciary verdicts, and moreover as a religion that encourages people to engage in acts of violence and terrorism.

Furthermore, Iran is humiliated at two levels. First, Iran has not corresponded with secular system of liberal democ-racy. Besides, Iran is a Muslim country with Islamic govern-ment which is the heart of Islamic resistance. Thus, Iran is described as the cradle of separation of nation from the state and is depicted as a country with autocrat rule which is cruel and repressing toward people who have little political and social freedom.

In this study YouTube is viewed as a social media playing a key role in shaping global public opinion. A social media similar to YouTube is significant because through low cost and high level of transmitting message, it enables the users

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to link to the world instantly and represent their own desir-able picture and even form “media circles” in terms of their commonalities. The cornerstone of YouTube is its interactive environment which seems neutral, open and infinite, decen-tralized and democratic. A user thinks that he/she can register in the website, regardless of his/her location and nationality and upload his/her videos or search for his/her desirable vid-eos to watch.

But what we seek in YouTube is if all videos in YouTube have the same chance to be uploaded and viewed or if there is a clandestine algorithm in the website that filters and ranks videos based on certain factors. In other words, despite the facts that YouTube is a user-based website, the question is whether there is a certain dominant discourse that is seeking certain objectives and outcomes. In sum, can we trace “twit-ter effect” and “CNN effect” in “YouTube effect”? To address these questions, we use a combination of theories.

On the one hand, the released videos in YouTube, like any communication, are produced and consumed in a pro-cess called by Fairclough as discursive practice where these practices are formed in the context of social practices. Users of YouTube produce and release their videos influenced by national and international socio-political and cultural trends. But their narrations about events are influenced by certain dis-cursive environment. It seems that the release of these videos is not exclusively done due to the users’ will, but rather they are released under the certain discursive conditions which are influenced by dominant discursive environment.

On the other hand, this question also appears if videos up-loaded on YouTube reflect the reality or merely represent



part of them from certain perspective. Stuart hall points out three genres of representations: reflective, intentional, con-structionist. According to reflective approach, representation is conceived as transmission of what really occurred; that is, “one-to-one correspondence between language and the real world”, whereas by intentional representation he means that it is the text producer who imposes his/her thought through language to the world. In third approach or structuralism ap-proach, which is used in this study, representation means “significance-generation through combining three different orders of things: what we call the world of things, people, events, and experiences; the conceptual world and subjective concepts with which we are dealing with; and the signs which form the language and make it possible for meaning of vari-ous concepts to be communicated”.

Significance-generation depends upon “the ways of repre-sentation” (Hall, 1980). To do so, various strategies can be employed. He suggests the active encoding so that “we sus-pense interpretation” (Hall, 1980). But generation and inter-pretation of significance are dynamic and unstable processes; therefore suspension could be interrupted.

Suppose that a message is going to be transmitted to audi-ences through videos or any text by representation. Specifi-cally, suppose that a concept from a specific cultural environ-ment and norm system is transmitted to other culture(s), and eventually, is decoded. For this transmission to take place, even for a short instance of time, it requires translation of concepts from one to the other.

Concepts and cultural classifications which we own inter-pret the world around and enable us to think what is absent

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or present, and what is real or virtual. Therefore, the closer the concepts and cultural classifications are, the more united procedure we will have to interpret the world around us.

Creation of this united procedure and decoding the repre-sented massages is never an easy task since codes are like “so-cial contracts” which are flexible and changeable. The same way words and meanings could change; cultural codes could also change intangibly. Any discourse which articulates con-cepts and cultural classifications more thoroughly and more inclusively is more successful to shape people’s thoughts.

The dominant discourse, through employing active rep-resentation, teaches the audiences the necessary codes. Af-ter a while, the audience interprets the world unconsciously through the codes that have been taught to him/her. As a re-sult, structural representation develops as much as to embed imperial or professional representation.

The link between structural and imperial representation is the cornerstone which Joseph Nye argues for soft power. He argues that those countries are successful in soft war whose prevailing culture and ideas are closer to globally accepted norms; Therefore, they are the countries that have the highest access to channels of communication (Nye, 2004:70), as they influence the global norms through these channels. It means that the successful countries in terms of soft power are those enjoying the tools of active representation as well as the tools of generating culture.

YouTube is one of the central fields of virtual globalization. It claims that it enables its users to “release themselves” and enter into the “ever-present communication field”.

This website kicks the ball in the users’ court and claims



that what is represented in YouTube is exactly how really people think all around the world, but the important and yet the missing point is that, YouTube is trying to transfer the laws of thinking to its users’ minds and tries to teaches them how to think about different issues.

The users of YouTube never think that YouTube is simi-lar to radio and television networks that are often accused of propaganda. Therefore, the credibility of providing a demo-cratic and all inclusive space has caused the YouTube users to firmly believe in its messages and don’t challenge its dis-courses. If the user finds the representation paradoxical he/she will approve it in the course of time because the presup-position is that a global citizen must think and act in the same way. Whereas YouTube is a source of producing public cul-ture and power exertion is done by its executives. Its persua-sive power is so unbelievable that it can attract millions of the users per day to the website.

Since YouTube is a potential ground for soft power exer-tion and also enjoys high capacity for conceptualization and discourse-making, for the purpose of this study, some key words regarding the international states and geopolitics of Iran are searched in the website. In addition, the ways of its influence on the audiences are analyzed. It should be noted that discursive analysis of YouTube is only one aspect of the survey while the other aspect is Iranian view to this social media, which will be carried out through interviews with stu-dents from Tehran University.

Nowadays, media are of paramount importance in repre-sentation, and in current age, which politics based on ideol-ogy has been replaced with politics based on media domi-

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nance, the role of media representation has become highly important (Simons, 2000).

YouTube is a website that enjoys global users which started in on February 15th, 2005, and is included as the websites directed from California. Because of autonomy which this social media gives to its users, it has attracted millions of people from all over the world to participate in it. Since the website has been penetrating in the layers of individual and social life of the internet users as well as its high ranking among the most visited websites of the world, it is surveyed in this study. This website, according to Alexa is the third most visited website in the world and the fourth one in the United States. Surprisingly, the number of visits from You-Tube in countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Algeria, and Egypt is more than the United States which is the origin of YouTube.

As said earlier, YouTube is a social media, a term which has spread rapidly in media literature. Social media has been defined in different ways. David Myrman Scot describes the distinction between social media and mainstream media: “Social media offers an opportunity for the people to commu-nicate with each other online and exchange their ideas, con-tent, and thoughts. This differs from mainstream media be-cause any one is able to create content, give opinion, and add new information in it. Social media may come in text, voice, picture, image, and communities” (Scot, 2010:38). They use online technologies for the users to share their ideas, experi-ences, and opinions (Cangiatosi, 2007). The users of these media enjoy certain advantages of management of the web-site by themselves and the number of the users is increasing



exponentially (Brown, 2008: 21).To link numerous numbers of the users from different loca-

tions and identities, and even sometimes from opposite ends of a spectrum, is the very art of this website. This massive network making has brought different functions for YouTube; education and assistance to cancerous patients, education for preventing AIDS and accepting socially AIDS-infected pa-tients, education about environment are only few of the many services that YouTube offers.

In addition to creating robust social network and getting the users to get involved with global issues, YouTube some-times becomes a very safe and personal place in which it displays some issues that even the closest members of the family of the user are not aware of or not able to understand. This issues are so complicated that sometimes professional researchers are not capable of explaining such behavior, but they are readily available in YouTube.

For example, the use of Salvia has been popular with American teenagers. Experts have been attempting to con-duct some research to understand the outcomes of the use of this plant. But YouTube has received plenty of videos in which people are requesting Salvia or those who have filmed their mood change after using Salvia. Although this issue as-sists the experts to carry out their research, it also proves soft and intangible penetration of YouTube in the most personal aspects of the users (Leng & et.al, 2009). Therefore, YouTube must have an ability by which it can absorb different users from different places and create confidence amongst them so that they are willing to express their personal matters. Nis-senbaum points out these scenarios as “contextual integrity”;

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that is, a person enters to an interactive environment with a certain level of expectation and always assesses whether he/she has acquired the information expected (Nissenbaum, 2004). In regard to YouTube, many of people also enter into the interactive environment with their various genres and lev-els of expectations. Given that plenty of users with various identities use YouTube on daily basis shows its considerable contextual integrity.

Different causes may be behind the high level of contextual integrity in YouTube. First it seems that entering into virtual space and getting online is generally encouraging. This at-traction is largely due to multi-layer and flexible space of the internet so that those who feel net-phobia or technophobia at first, as they enter the internet, feel comfortable with its logic and can perform their intended objectives. This feeling in the spaces which are user-based, like chat rooms or a website as YouTube, is accompanied by some other senses like sym-pathy, protection, and encouragement. But in the real world, many long years are needed to create such feeling among the numerous people with widely different cultural backgrounds.

In virtual space, communication occurs as fast as chrono-logical divisions are passed and people from different geo-graphical regions are linked to each other. Even, when the user does not think of finding friend or company, he/she can release his/her emotions and excitement. Many users believe that, being in virtual space helps them avoid horror movies or similar experiences to release their excitements (Yang, 2008: 124).

In YouTube, in addition to excitement and attractiveness of being in cyber space, the user faces a very robust interac-



tive milieu. Besides, it allows the user to create information in order to help other users in their quests. In this milieu with abundant information, competition also plays as an exciting factor. Users in YouTube do not face one type of video or group of videos but rather they can compete with other us-ers to make their own videos available to as many users as possible, in order to increase their popularity and therefore increase their chances of making more money. The evolution of a video clip from being an ordinary and unknown one to a popular, highly visited, and prominent one is worthy of think-ing. Any user has a personal page/personal channel. He/she can compete for being watched and being popular with other 129 million users. Actually all YouTube’s users are like a mar-keter to draw the attention of other users to their own products (videos). In this market, like any market, consumption is a central principle and brand of any products works as identity and social status rather than the symbol of quality. Therefore, in this market exchange in YouTube, according to Budrillard, symbolic exchange occurs and customers of videos receive symbolic values and in return introduce new symbolic de-mands which are the motivations for producing and sharing new videos. In fact, Budrillard argues that in virtual space as a wide electronic field, symbolic exchange has been reduced to “receiving a response” (Budrillard, 1993:65). The user in YouTube tries to create a brand for its product (for example introducing the video among outstanding ones) in order to receive a response from other users/customers and eventu-ally understand the new demands. YouTube as an American website puts the user in a symbolic milieu to experience capi-talism and its instruments voluntarily in a desirable environ-

103

ment. In reality, capitalism is reproduced in capitalism.Another quality of YouTube which makes the users feel

satisfied with this website is that it allows them to manage their personal and public affairs. Patrichia Lange, professor at California university, points to two factors that how much a video in YouTube is public; a) to what extent the user express his/her real identity, and b) to what extent others understand the information in that videos (Lange, 2007).

Those who feel shy to socialize with others or try to conceal parts of their identity due to psychological and social reasons can use social networks like YouTube and decide which peo-ple and classes can access their personal information.

More important point is that in YouTube similar to many social networks, an opportunity has been made in which the users tends to form “media circuit” instead of only acquiring information. In these circuits, users take advantage of media to strengthen their inner group decision. In reality, in these types of websites people are seeking for intimacy than ac-quiring information; an intimacy which is about “feeling inti-macy” among people who experience “some sort of freedom in their interactions with others” (Naderi. 2005, 92).

In general, social network websites are those that allow their participators to create a profile and communicate with others formally (Ellison, 2007). Therefore, YouTube can be examined for friendly activities, video sharing, and leaving comments (Lunge, 2007). The quality of comprehensiveness and all-inclusiveness of YouTube as the most important se-cret of the websites’ success lies in its ambiguous and disin-tegrated state. That a wide range of people from unsociable to sociable, information seeker to those seeking for friends



and entertainment, use YouTube, are all indicative that You-Tube’s success is in its ambiguity. Waldfugel asserts that social media like YouTube places more value on ambiguity than assurance (Waldfogel, 2009). In social media, the more active, attractive and humble (and also amateur and honest) the creator of information creator, the more credible he/she is (Kaplan & et.al, 2009). Ambiguity and disintegration offers the user feelings of freedom and separation from any source and control apparatus.

He/she depicts his/her given values and those concepts against his/her values on YouTube, which is seen and com-mented by others. This possibility in YouTube or other so-cial media has led to new phenomenon such as “embedded journalism” which discloses the truth for the cyber users; the truth which never had a chance to be released by mainstream media. For example, the photos and films of wars in Afghani-stan and Iraq, which were released by soldiers on YouTube have disclosed parts of the realities of these wars.

YouTube has made so much progress that any citizen in any corner of the world could be reporter or narrator. YouTube has launched a weblog named Citizen Tube or tube of citizen which covers various aspects of civil life of the users so that any user can upload exclusive and interesting news of his/her localities and cities.

Of the most critical functions of social media is that public culture is generated from this media. Along with technologi-cal advances of social media, meeting the exceeding demand of humans to access and share information in the contempo-rary world is of strengths of social media (Cangiatosi, 2007). But ambiguity and disintegration has also some other fac-

105

ets. When a user searches for the given videos, he/she hardly thinks about who produced the video and/or under what con-dition and discourses the video was created. Rather, the user only evaluates the produced video without paying attention to these fundamental factors.

In social media, text, photo, and video producer are anony-mous; the sources are unknown, and personal opinions and tastes are introduced as truth. That is why websites like You-Tube, Facebook, and Twitter are rapidly viewed as sources of information. Thanks to its low cost, high speed of transmit-ting information among numerous communities, and also the excitement for the users to transfer their ideas and receive reactions from others, YouTube has created an outstanding space for exchange of information (Vans & et.al, 2009). But YouTube does not guarantee that the available volume of in-formation is constructive and beneficial. Furthermore, You-Tube does not guarantee great powers or some powerful in-terest groups don’t take advantage of this space to promote their own agendas.

This threat cautions us against a phenomenon that Budril-lard refers to as “hyperreality”. To search for a word, YouTube lists many videos in terms of its algorithm. The representa-tion of that reality shows that there has been always some doubts whether the represented picture is the reality occurred in the real world or is the fabricated and distorted imitation of the reality. When one asks about some deleted videos in YouTube and or when there is no clear answer how a video is highlighted, skepticism over construction of hyperreality is enhanced. The cornerstone of YouTube is like what Kondra calls historical triumph of imageology over ideology and that



“imageology is far more robust than ideology” (Kondra, Mo-hammad, 2005:191).

The significant point here is that representation of hyper-reality does not occur merely in representing an event, a per-son, or a thing. Introducing hyperreality in place of the real-ity is more dangerous when subjective concepts and cultural classes are simulated in this space. Graham Samner in his book entitled War and other Articles in 1970 has a precise statement: “if you are to start a war, invent a doctrine. Doc-trines are the most horrible oppressor by which human has ever been oppressed. Because doctrines penetrate into the hu-man mind and have him/her treason against him/herself. Civ-ilized human being has caused the most vicious wars in favor of his own doctrines” (Somner, 1970:36). Doctrines consist of concepts, and when a doctrine is going to be created, first its related concepts have to be constructed. When these con-cepts are not rooted in reality, they could be very dangerous to humanity.

Using representation, great powers that run media, produce and reproduce various concepts in the form of hyperrealities so that the users of the media are not able to distinct what is simulated from what is real. In YouTube, this deviation is significant, due to using videos as an influential tool for rep-resentation.

In this survey some of the qualities of YouTube, as an influ-ential media, have been studied including: high level of con-textual integrity; encouraging and exciting interactive milieu; socially and individually safe and reliable for different users; potentiality of social network-making or creation of media circuits; ambiguity and disintegration for representation of

107

reality or hyperreality.But the key point is that the very art of YouTube is creation

of a scene in which plurality in ideas and ideologies is domi-nant and the users express themselves freely. This quality of YouTube is critical because it introduce YouTube as a symbol of modern field. As Sara Harding asserts, “knowledge which virtual space is its result has been generated in modernist epis-temological milieu (quoted by Flangan & et.al, 2002:449). In this modern milieu it is natural that modern parameters are determining and pluralism as “the model for modern indus-trial social order” (Garvich, 2006:56) or as “plurality in ideas and life style” (Fritche, 1999:2) are of the most important elements in modern discourse.

Behind the plural and liberal environment of a modern dis-course like YouTube, there are some critical points as well. Diversity of values, perspectives, ideas, interests, knowledge, and expectations can be a source of inconsistency and con-flict. It seems that human networks with different purposes and interests— and enjoying temporary alliance based on the issues – never reach a sustainable consensus. A system which includes plural and heterogeneous phenomena will be at the edge of anarchy despite the fact that it enjoys features like creativity, flexibility and adaptability. Systems which experi-ence creativity and innovation in their milieu always face di-lemma. If they tend to converge they lose their intrinsic cause of existence whereas if they keep being creative and diverse they will inevitably face conflicts (kolok, 2002:137). It seems that this state of plurality is seen in YouTube. Israel and Pal-estine, religious, atheist, and secular, poor and rich, American and African, communist and capitalist can attend this envi-



ronment simultaneously. This indicates efficient management of these discrepancies, but do all groups and ideas benefit from the equal space and power to express themselves or not? It is worthwhile to state that the question is to what extent ex-isting plurality of ideas and numerous cultural classifications in uploaded videos in YouTube is comprehensible by the au-diences, and drives other users to participate through leaving comments or uploading new videos.

Pluralist systems are far more complicated than binary sys-tems where one idea has to be chosen. This plural system tries to compromise and reach consensus through exchange and consultation. In sum, effectiveness of a social system de-pends upon its diversity, strategy, and competency in conflict management (kolok, 2002:137).

So we consider YouTube as a modern and plural field which not only should adhere to the features above but should main-tain the stability of its environment. YouTube ought to talk to different users through a language to create common de-nominator and lead into results that create social networks and participation-- instead of conflict. The assumption in this survey is that YouTube—through active use of uploaded rep-resentations in videos-- has succeeded in constructing a dom-inant discourse with certain arrangement of videos in which concepts and cultural classifications are particularly defined. The users of YouTube also decode the videos using the con-cepts and classifications. In fact, YouTube is a social media in which structuralist representation has succeeded to form a certain language and figure out the representation imperially or professionally.

Of course, it should be noted that encoding and decoding

109

processes in YouTube is not a static process but rather depend on YouTube managers’ arrangement of the videos through their algorithms to exert power. As argued earlier, if a media aims to link people from different worlds, it should encode so professionally that it postpones its interpretation; and or, it should define all the concepts needed for decoding. This is the juncture that the discourse is embedded and prevailed. In fact, this is the juncture a discourse can exert its soft power because people interpret the world as the dominant discourse represents; and friends and enemy, insider and outsider all are comprehended through the dominant discursive representa-tion.

If the assumption is proved that, YouTube endeavors to dominate its predefined discourse through significance-gen-eration and common concepts, another question arises. The question is that what qualities the dominant discourse pos-sesses. It is assumed that YouTube like other social media is produced in the context of American society. Therefore the values associated with liberal democracy as a prevailing American and also global discourse are reproduced in it.

To examine YouTube for its active use of representation in significance-generation, we analyze the website from June 1st to June 22nd, 2010. This search can be done at two levels: referring to various classification of YouTube which includes videos related to our search; or searching for certain words and studying their representation in YouTube.

In regards to videos in the classification: Videos in the clas-sifications are the latest videos, as YouTube claims, which are the most visited or popular ones. YouTube is the product of the internet and virtual space which has been emerged from



American, therefore the early features and rules of games are American. Its main language is English and if a video is sent to YouTube in other language, it should be at least subtitled with English language. This website tries to be the leading website in using the latest and most qualified file sharing and displaying technologies. On the other hand, it encour-ages its users to be forerunners and their videos be “the lat-est”, “the most popular, visited, supported, and outstanding” ones. The huge numbers of western videos in YouTube has led for Western defined signifiers and signified to dominate YouTube. For example in part of politics and news, they are mostly the president, leaders, representative of the parties, governmental officials, and think tanks of the United States and European Union analysts whose videos feed the web-site while other views are in minority. The news sources are also from television networks as Aljazeera English network mainly about Middle East news, CNN, Fox news, CBS, ABC, and BBC. Therefore, YouTube as an American social media adheres to soft conceptualization through active representa-tion. The most critical feature of YouTube is that it represents the given concept, like American democracy, through struc-turalist approach. On the other hand, it introduces its milieu as neutral one as it claims it is 100% user-based; whatever is represented is just because it is what global citizens think about and are interested in. Thus, YouTube has succeeded to reduce the users’ resistance against the possibility that web-site might specific outlooks. According to Joseph Nye, ex-ertion of soft power of a country highly depends on the fact that others must believe that the concepts presented by that country is closer to universal norms.

CHAPTER VI

AN ANALYSIS OF GOOGLE THROUGH THE APPROACH OF SOFT POWER

Although Google is mainly known as search engine, its executives have adhered to a new approach which

changed it to an online service space; a space which is not that new because there have been already the websites which provided the same services. The main point is that Google shows a new and creative perspective to virtual space.

Google at first began as a research project in 1996 by Lar-ry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford PhD students. They assumed that a search engine which analyzes the relations between the websites, reaches to better results than the exist-ing methods which primarily search the results based on the number of searched words and phrases on the page. Google was the first search engine which put its search results on the webpage (Finin & Ding, 2006). Mission of Google is to organize the world of information and access to it at a global level. Google has managed to develop its basic search to new services like Web-based email, online mapping, office pro-ductivity, and video sharing. Bnaibrith.org/magazines, offi-cial organ for one of the most powerful Jewish organizations, in Spring 2006, in an article titled “The Searchmasters”, states


that “…. Larry Page whose mother is a Jew” and continues that “ancestor of Larry’s mother followed a different path. He was one of the first immigrants to Israel who settled in Arad city”. In 2007, Forbs magazine in its ranking of the richest of the world, estimates Brin’s wealth as 16.6 billion dollars. The first investor in Google was a Jewish man named Andy Bech-tolsheim who invested 100,000 dollars as a starting capital to Google Company which did not really exist at the time.

Not only cofounders of Google are Jewish, but also many of their main staffs are Jewish. The first staff hired by Google was Craig Silverstein. Moreover, Susan Wojcicki was also Jewish who was employed as deputy of management of prod-ucts. After some month, in 2007, her sister, Annah Wojcicki who was an expert at biotechnology married Sergey Brin, in a traditional Jewish wedding. Now Annah is working on Jew-ish projects and is the board member of “Reboot” which is and investing company that tries to make Jews involved in their culture.

Udi Manber, deputy of engineering division in Google, is Israeli Jewish who has graduated from Teknion Haifa. He was senior scientist in Yahoo. In 2002 he joined to Amazon.com in which he was the head of algorithm and deputy of the website. After a while, he became managing directing of a subgroup of Amazon named A9 (Innovations in Search Technologies). In 2006, he was hired by Google as a deputy of engineering division. In 2007 he introduced a “null” pro-ject which was Google’s new project for creating archive of knowledge.

On January 4th, 2008, Jewish Daily, Haaretz, declared that “Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg founder of Facebook,

115

and Susan Decker, president of Yahoo are going to attend in the panel of the Israeli president in Jerusalem International Congress Centers in honor of emergence of occupying Israe-li regime. This seminar which was held at the beginning of Perez’s presidency hosted different politicians, religious, and financial Israeli leaders who were discussing different issue with other scientific and cultural figures. The main topics ad-dressed in the seminar contained how to encounter and use technology at the present and future and its impact on Israel and Judaism. Some known figures attended in the seminar were Tony Blair, Bernard Kouchner, Henry Kissinger, vaclav Havel, and Mikheil Saakashvili.

Roots of Judaism in Google, as I mentioned earlier, can be traced in ten core principles. Even the using the title of “10 Things” is derived from the Ten Commandments of Moses. Although some Jews by race may not believe in Judaism as a religion, they firmly defend their race based on their ortho-dox teachings. It is clearly seen that when the senior execu-tives of the company are Jewish, therefore they may provide particular opportunities for the Zionists. Google has recently shared some information with its users in which it outlines the demands of some countries to gain access to data of their citizens. Also, some countries have demanded the removal of some information from Google’s search engine. Google says that “like many technology and communication companies we always receive requests from governmental organizations from all over the world to remove some content or provide some information over our users to them”.

Finding online information with using search engine is part of our everyday life (Fan, Gordon, Pathak, 2006). Now Goog-

AN ANALYSIS OF YOUTUBE


le is the greatest search engine. In 2007 the statistic about Google was about 25 billion pages and 250 million searches per day.

Now, in 2010, Google includes 71.65 percent of internet search. The figure below suggests that search engines have been ranked on terms of their search. This classification is for the four weeks leading to June 26th, 2010.

In the other hand, Google has acquired over 90 companies with its largest acquisition being the purchase of DoubleClick, an online advertising company, for US$3.1 billion. Because of the size of the acquisition, United States antitrust regulators took nearly a year to investigate the deal and clear it for approval. Most of the firms acquired by Google are based in the United States, and in turn, most of these are based in or around the San Francisco Bay Area. Each acquisition listed is for the respective company in its entirety, unless otherwise specified. The acquisi-tion date listed is the date of the agreement between Google and the acquisition subject. The value of each acquisition is listed in US dollars because Google is headquartered in the United States. If the value of an acquisition is unlisted, then it is undisclosed. If the Google service that is derived from the acquired company is known, then it is also listed here (Wikipedia, 2011)

Figure 7: The Best Search Engines in the 4 Weeks Leading to June 26th 2010

117

No

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

Acquisiti on date

February 12, 2001

September 20, 2001

February 2003

April 2003

April 2003September 30, 2003

October 2003

October 2003

May 10, 2004

July 13, 2004

September 2004

October 2004

October 27, 2004

March 28, 2005

May 12, 2005

July 2005

July 7, 2005

August 17, 2005

November 2005

November 17, 2005

December 20, 2005

December 27, 2005

December 31, 2005

December 31, 2005

Company

Deja

Outride

Pyra LabsNeotonic Software

Applied Semantics

Kaltix

Sprinks

Genius Labs

Ignite Logic

Picasa

ZipDash

Where2

Keyhole, Inc

Urchin Software Corporation

Dodgeball

Reqwireless

Current Commu-nications Group

Android

Skia

Akwan Informa-tion TechnologiesAOLB

Phatbits

allPAY GmbH

bruNET GmbH

Business

Usenet

Web search engineWeblog softwareCustomer relation-ship management

Online advertisingWeb search engine

Online advertising

Blogging

HTML editor

Image organizer

Traffic analysis

Map analysis

Map analysis

Web analytics

Social network-ing serviceMobile browser

Broadband internet accessMobile software

Graphics software

Search Engines

Broadband internet accessWidget engine

Mobile software

Mobile software

Country

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

AUS

USA

USA

USA

CAN

USA

USA

USA

BRA

USA

USA

GER

GER

Value (USD)

$102,000,000

$100,000,000

$1,000,000,000

Used as integrated with

Google Groups

Google Personalized Search (iGoogle)

Blogger

Google Groups, GmailAdSense, Ad-Words

iGoogle

AdSense, AdWords

Blogger

Google Sites

Picasa, Blogger

Google Maps for Mobile

Google Maps

Google Maps, Google Earth

Google Analytics

Google Latitude

Google Mobile

Internet backbone

Android

Android, Google Chrome

Internet backbone

Google Desktop

Google Mobile

Google Mobile



No

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

Acquisiti on date

January 17, 2006

February 14, 2006

March 9, 2006

March 14, 2006

April 9, 2006

June 1, 2006

August 15, 2006

October 9, 2006

October 31, 2006

December 18, 2006

January 4, 2007

February 16, 2007

March 16, 2007

April 17, 2007

April 19, 2007

April 13, 2007

May 11, 2007

June 1, 2007

June 3, 2007

June 5, 2007

June 19, 2007

July 2, 2007

July 20, 2007

Company

dMarc Broad-casting

Measure Map

Upstartle

@Last Software

Orion

2Web Tech-nologiesNeven Vision Germany GmbH

YouTube

JotSpot

Endoxon

XunleiC

Adscape

Trendalyzer

Tonic Systems

Marratech

DoubleClick

GreenBorder

Panoramio

FeedBurner

PeakStream

Zenter

GrandCentral

Image America

Business

Advertising

Weblog software

Word processor

3D modeling softwareWeb search engineOnline spread-sheetsComputer vision (Face detection, Face recognition)

Video sharing

Web application

Mapping

File sharing

In-game advertising

Statistical software

Presentation program

Videoconferencing

Online advertising

Computer security

Photo sharing

Web feed

Parallel processing

Presentation program

Voice over Internet Protocol

Aerial photography

Country

USA

USA

USA

USA

AUS

USA

GER

USA

USA

CHE

CHN

USA

SWE

USA

SWE

USA

USA

ESP

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

Value (USD)

$102,000,000

$1,650,000,000

$28,000,000

$5,000,000

$23,000,000

$15,000,000

$3,100,000,000

$100,000,000

$45,000,000


AdSense

Google Analytics

Google Docu-ments

Google Sketchup

Google Search

Google Spread-sheet

Picasa & Google Goggles

YouTube

Google Sites

Google Maps

AdSense

Google Analytics

Google Docs

Google Talk

AdSense

Google Chrome

Panoramio

FeedBurner

Server (computing)

Google Docs

Google Voice

Google Maps

119

No

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

Acquisiti on date

July 9, 2007

September 27, 2007

October 9, 2007

July 30, 2008

September 12, 2008

August 5, 2009

September 16, 2009

November 9, 2009

November 9, 2009

November 23, 2009

December 4, 2009

February 12, 2010

February 17, 2010

March 1, 2010

March 5, 2010

April 2, 2010

April 12, 2010

April 20, 2010

April 27, 2010

April 30, 2010

May 20, 2010

Company

Postini

Zingku

Jaiku

Omnisio

TNC (Tatter and Company)

On2

reCAPTCHA

AdMob

Gizmo5

Teracent

AppJet (EtherPad)

Aardvark

reMail

Picnik

DocVerse

Episodic

PlinkArt

Agnilux

LabPixies

BumpTop

Simplify Media

Business

Communica-tions securitySocial network service

Micro-blogging

Online video

Weblog software

Video compression

Security

Mobile advertising

VoIP

Online Adver-tising

Collaborative real-time editor

Social Search

Email Search

Photo Editing

Microsoft Office files sharing siteOnline video platform start-upVisual Search Engine Mobile start-up

Server technol-ogy start-up

Gadgets

Desktop envi-ronment

Music syncing

Country

USA

USA

FIN

USA

KOR

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

UK

USA

ISR

CAN

UK

Value (USD)

$625,000,000

$15,000,000

$106,600,000

$750,000,000

$30,000,000

$50,000,000

$5,000,000

$25,000,000

$30,000,000


Gmail

Google Mobile

Google Mobile

YouTube

Blogger

WebM & YouTube

Google Voice

Adsense

Google Wave, Google Docs

Aardvark

Gmail

Picasa

Google Docs

YouTube

Google Goggles

Android

Android



No

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

Acquisiti on date

May 21, 2010

June 3, 2010

July 1, 2010

July 16, 2010

August 2010

August 4, 2010

August 5, 2010

August 10, 2010

August 15, 2010

August 30, 2010

August 30, 2010

September 13, 2010

September 28, 2010

October 1, 2010

December 3, 2010

December 3, 2010

January 13, 2011

January 25, 2011

January 26, 2011

March 1, 2011

March 7, 2011

March 7, 2011

March 16, 2011

April 8, 2011

April 26, 2011

Company

Ruba.comInvite Media

ITA Software

Metaweb

Zetawire

Instantiations

Slide.com

Jambool

Like.com

Angstro

SocialDeck, Inc.

Quiksee

Plannr

BlindType

Phonetic Arts

Widevine Tecnologies

eBook Tech-nologies

SayNow

fflick

Zynamics

BeatT-hatQuote.comNext New Networks

Green Parrot Pictures

PushLife

TalkBin

Business

Travel

Advertising

Travel technology

Semantic Search

Mobile pay-ment, NFCJava/Eclipse/AJAX Developer ToolsSocial gaming

Social Gold payment

Visual Search EngineSocial networking service

Social gaming

Online video

Schedule ManagementTouch Typing

Speech syn-thesis

DRM

eBook

Voice Recognition

Social network service

Security

Price compari-son service

Online video

Digital video

Service provider

Mobile software

Country

USA

USA

USA

USA

CAN

USA

USA

USA

USA

USA

CAN

ISR

USA

GRE

UK

USA

USA

USA

USA

GER

UK

USA

IRL

CAN

USA

Value (USD)

$81,000,000

$700,000,000

$182,000,000

$70,000,000

$100,000,000

$10,000,000

$10,000,000

£37,700,000

$25,000,000

Used as integrated withGoogle

DoubleClick

Android

Google Web Toolkit

boutiques.com

Google Maps

Android

Google Voice, Google Translate

Google TV

Google Books

Google Voice

YouTube

YouTube

YouTube

Android

Table 3: List of acquisitions by Google (wikipedia, 2011)

121

Also, logos of Google are the ground for transmitting con-cepts and theories which are behind the scene of the website. Google seeks for two major purposes by offering occasional logos. First, it can absorb other nations’ users to the website due to representation of their cultural, historical, and nation-al elements. Also, it presents Western-American concepts, thoughts, history and culture to its numerous users as a uni-versal and global culture.

In Google, local logos are only visible to users from a local area. In fact, users from outside a local area or country cannot see the local logo designed for a specific area or country. On the other hand, daily and global logos of Google are available for everybody in the world. These logos definitely convey some meanings which should be analyzed separately.

At the beginning of its occasional projects for it logos, Google used to release these logos on its first page without considerations to localities (Barksdale & Teeter, 2008, 2009). But before long it changed its mind and local logos for a cer-tain country was designed only for that country. But there are some examples which were offered to global users as logos of Google.

Now, instead of its main domain of website, Google pos-sesses 181 domain of local website in the world. This proves another aspect of Google’s endeavors for localization and normalization of Western-American identity of Google in different part of the world. Although users use Google as lo-calized website but they use all services offered by Google—as a very integrated virtual institution.

Soft power is the outcome of positive representation and obtaining credibility which affects indirectly the preferences



and behaviors of other countries interests through influenc-ing their culture, proud history, and human aspirations. Thus, when compared to other tools of foreign policy, soft power is a social and environmental phenomenon which is influenced more by components of national identity (Hersig & Toiserka-ni, 2010). Soft power is primarily based on forming others’ preferences which usually is related to intangible categories of cultural and personal preferences, values, political institu-tions, and luring policies (Nye, 2004b; quoted by Hersig & Toiserkani, 2010).

Their findings reveal that “Islamic Republic of Iran has exerted the most components of soft power among Central Asia (28.76) and the least ones among Latin American (69.3). Moreover, it has been clear that the highest rate of exertion of soft power of Iran is seen in the area where people are more related to Persian. In addition, Islamic republic of Iran has been highly successful at using different components of soft power through Iranian Study Institutes. Today, diplomacy and foreign policy of the countries have been affected by evolu-tions in communication. “Media diplomacy” as one of the major activities of the diplomacy system has gained a great deal of importance in public diplomacy of various countries and especially that of the powerful nations (Rezaeian, 2008).

The importance and power of soft power depends highly on its sources (Mohammadi, 2008, 27) and unlike hard power, many of its basic sources are out of government’s hands and their impact considerably depends on acceptance by audienc-es (Nye, 2004b, 106).

However, hard power is independent from environmen-tal components whereas soft power is a social phenomenon

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which is extremely related to environmental components. While hard power relies on material capital of player soft power depends on social capital (Eftekhari, 2008: 21-29). Therefore, it can be inferred that, in comparison to other tools of foreign policy, soft power is influenced by components of national identity (Hersig & Toiserkani, 2010).

At macro level, power denotes having impact on others’ behaviors to meet desirable result. There are several ways to influence others’ behavior: they can be forced to do some-thing through threat and coercion; they can be forced to obey by using economic resources; and or it may happen to con-vince them through using software components of power (Nye, 2004, a, quoted from Hersig & Toiserkani, 2010).

Software aspect or softwarism is an expression which accord-ing to Nye has been elicited from the requirement of using soft power by the United States. Concept of soft power can be traced in Hans J. Morgenthau Klaus Knorr, Ray Cline (Gill & huang, 2006:18). But as Nye summarized it, soft power is meeting your goal through luring and seduction. This power results from at-tracting and therefore influencing culture, political aspiration, and policies of a country. According to Nye, soft power contains marketing but is far more comprehensive than that; it is beyond an schema, public relations and interim popularity; it is a genu-ine power—power of achieving the objectives.

Soft power of each country at first are originated from three resources. Culture: the parts which are attractive for the people. Political values: when it is consistent with domestic and foreign public opinions. And foreign policies: when it is legitimate and ethical (Nye, 2005:12,Hersig & Toiserkani, 2010). Resources of soft power are diverse which are used



by the state and the context of the country is hired (Hersig & Toiserkani, 2010).

Eyvazi (2008) in an essay, where he examines crisis, its dif-ferent genres, and the way of its formation through a sort of media autocracy and selecting news and information, states that “modern media wars begin with simultaneous use of me-dia and highly sophisticated weapons. At first, psychological war starts. During and after military actions, the psychologi-cal war continues intelligently. Rise of advanced media along with awareness over its effects have increased the role of me-dia in creating, reducing, or expanding crisis. As a result the form of influence is totally different from the past. Therefore, many believe that media is often serving the objectives of global crises and war rather than trying to reduce them or create peace”. But in virtual space and Soft War, media war actually takes place over the thoughts of people who are in-capable strategizing or envisioning a life without the virtual space.

According to Picture 2, Brazil is at the top of the list of the countries that requested Google for users’ data in Brazil, while ocupping regime of Israel is located at the end of the list with 30 requests. Although statistic are ambiguous and questionable, they reveal that all countries are aware of the real power of Google. All know that Google is the gateway to internet and web. Whatever they want to hide some informa-tion from the users or to obtain any kind of information about their users, governments need to ask Google.

Even if there is no ample evidence over the bias and par-tiality of the superpowers of virtual spaces like Google, and even if one assume that all of capacities in virtual space are

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attributed to neutral, we can not ignore the potentials and powers of these websites in attracting the users and eventu-ally having the users be dependent on these websites.

Figure 8: Countries requesting Google to gain access to users’ personal information


CHAPTER VII

AN ANALYSIS OF IMDB THROUGH THE APPROACH OF SOFT POWER

Internet Movie Database or IMDb is one of the largest in-ternet-based information database about movies, television

programs, video programs, and computer games which are traced back to before the rise of World Wide Web. Col Need-ham is known as the founder of the website. The website at first was usenet which used to be managed by some movie lovers who operate under the name rec.arts.movies.

This website includes the profile of actors and actresses, directors, and also dead directors named as “The dead list”. October 17th, 1990, which is known as the operating year of IMDb, is a day search option was added to the existing lists of services. On the date this set contained 23,000 topics about 10,000 films and series. Before long individuals like authors, composers, and cameramen were added to the lists and the users were enabled to vote for the films. In September 1993, the existing lists was turned into a website—as the first dedi-cated internet website for films.

Now, IMDb is of the most referred sources for those seek-ing for precise and comprehensive information about film and cinema. In Google, when then name of a film or an actor is


searched, an IMDb link appears is usually the first or among the first ten results and sometimes the IMDb page related to the film opens in IMDb website which is highly effective in increasing the number of visitors of this website. Compre-hensiveness and referrabilty are the factors which promote the status of a website and eventually change it to a virtual empire.

Second field of IMDb’s activity is the professional field of cinema; specifically it acts as a link between active artists and movie companies. The attendance of famous actors/actoreses an movie companies in this website indicates that it has been successful in its activities.

Although it is not clear that how american pop culture in-fluences other countries and there is no certain method to measure the impact, it is obvious that this culture causes to transmit

“values of individualism and freedom of speech”(Yashushi & Mc Connel, 2008:173) and other American values. In some cases it could lead to mass movement and as a result into social and political movements (Yashushi & Mc Connel, 2008:173). Since pop culture is a symbol of culture and val-ues of a nation, it is one of the most important tools of crea-tion of soft power. Nye sees culture and values as the sources of generating soft power for a nation provided that they are attractive to the people.

In the meantime, cinema and television are of the most critical elements of the popular culture because they simulta-neously engage both the hearing and vision and hardly give audiences the chance for creativity and independent thinking througout the program. So they constitute the most influential

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aspects of pop culture.Cinema and television can simultaneously shape the

knowledge and behavior their audiences over various issues – such as other cultures, history, and science and so on. Impact on people is generally done through imitating of dresses and behaviors of movie and TV stars by audiences. Sometimes, fans are so passionate towards an artist that every detail about the personal affairs of the artist becomes more important than their own ones.

A website like IMDb can be examined using the approach of soft power because it collects and supply information over films and cinema in the world which are mainly Hollywoodian films and American television programs. As a result, IMDb is spreading American pop culture and cinema to the world and is therefore transmitting American values to the globe. IMDb is still the most visited film website, despite the fact that other competing websites, like “all movie”, collects and supplies the information about movies and television programs.

Another point is that IMDb has significant visual attractive-ness as there are always various pictures of the actors and actresses under the title of “news”, “ born of the day”, and so on while in the website like “all movie” there is no similar services. As said earlier, because IMDb appears as the first or amog the first results of google searches for films and fim stars, it is one of the most visited website of the world.

Prior to rise of the internet, IMDb started as a body collect-ing cinema information and it was created by some movie fans, exclusively for personal use and entertainment. At first they collected the photos and information over their favorite actresses. In the course of time and in agreement with virtual

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world advances IMDb also tried to adapt with the evolutions. Today, IMDb has been changed from a non-commercial in-

formation collection to a very profitable subdivision Amazon website. Although it receives information from ordinary us-ers which are then released if credible, it is not a volunteer based organization and it has some staffs.

It can be claimed that Col Needham and other executives of IMDb have welcomed sugesstion about how to manage IMDb with open arms an this can guarantee IMDb’s long age and sucess. Moreover, Amazon has made the least changes after buying it to maintain its former functions and as a result not to lose its previous users.

While its success and thoroghness is to a great extent due to volunteer activity of its users, IMDb has been a private website and its managers never believed that it belongs to the users who provide beneficial information. IMDb has never released any financial information over its activities yet, even after being bought by Amazon. Websites similar to IMDb, through creating some incentives for its users to voluntarily participate in updating its information, not only benefits from users’ volunteer work but also influnce them through its pre-defined programs.

Perhaps Marketing the pop culture and particularly Holly-wod’s culture and values is the most important cultural func-tion of IMDb. If pop culture and Hollywood are considered as the most effective tools of exerting soft power, this cultural function of IMDb can also act in political domains as well. Therefore, it is worthwhile to point to the significance of cin-ema and televiision in shaping public behaviors and opinions. IMDb is of paramount important since it deals with an influ-

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ential art like cinema and links virtual space to real space. Paucity of information about non-american movies and art-

ists even in non-english IMDbs and also equivalating cin-ema as only Hollywood, has intensified IMDb’s soft power in spreading American ideals. Surprisingly, no measure has been taken by the exectives of IMDb to solve this problem; and there is plans to encourage users in providing informa-tion about non-american films. As a result, lack of diversity of information is still the major shortcoming of this website.

American pop culture is one of the most powerful and long-range weapons of American soft power. This weapon,unlike higher education and NGOs does not target specific groups of people but rather masses of the people. It is a well know fact that exciting American movies are successful in attracting the attention of their viewers. There is no doubt that cinema has always taken steps towards diffusion of American values and interests. According to Fraser “since the rise of moving pic-tures, Hollywood has been a strong lever for American for-eign policy… and before long cinema has become a legend-making continuity of global ambitions of the united states (2005:35). He also adds : “we stress that American soft pow-er—cinema, television, pop music, soft power—advances values and ideas which eventually are useful for the world, inspite of being paradoxical. American entertainment/amuse-ments—Hollywood, Disneyland, CNN,MTV, Meddona—all transmit values which transcended the United States; values like strong believe in democracy, free trade competition, and individual freedoms” (the same, 260).

Fraser asserts that american pop culture and its related values are able to penetrate the most resistant societies, and

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that technological advancements in information technologies have been really effective and other “resistant regime lack the power to build an electronic berlin wall against foreing power” (The same, 261).

Regs Dibri, a French leftist, has highlighted importance of soft power and role of pop culture and Hollywood, and even claims that Hollywood’s effects is far more robust than Pen-tagon or CIA (Gregori & Terorton, 2005:9). However, some believe that popularity of American pop culture in the world and attractiveness of American films for global audiences does not necessarily contribute to expansion of United States’ objectives. The best example is Saddam’s and Kim Jung’s enthusiasm to American pop culture and values (Cooper, 2004:4). Cooper believes that although McDonald and Hol-lywood have affected culturally the other countries, it does not necessarily lead to power. In other words, the fact that the United States makes professional and attractive films, will at most contribute to her image in the world just as manufactur-ing high quality cars leads other nations to think positively about Germany (Cooper, 2004:5).

Despite the skepticism over the level and the kind of effect of Hollywood among thinkers, the outstanding impact which film and cinema have on changing moral codes, particularly in Muslim countries and changing their customs, believes, and rituals, is undeniable. A society where American norms like nudity and voluptuousness have been popular, would easily adapt to American plans and objectives rather than a society that still adheres to its national and religious values. It seems that pop culture can act as a soft power and alter des-tiny of a nation when it affects its public, particularly women

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and young generation.Besides, IMDb enjoys a strong Anglo-Saxon position; that

is, although the users from other countries like Iran are al-lowed to add information over their national cinema in this database, the information added by the executives to the web-site like photos and information on the main page, news, on-line videos, and so on are all about Hollywood. This steadily gets the global users to believe that cinema and Hollywood are equivalents and other nations’ film industries do not deserve to be acknowledged. This stance is not seen merely about movies but several photos of Anglo-Saxon film stars and de-tails about their personal and professional lives contributes tremendously to their popularity as ideal role models for the younger generations. Therefore, appearance and dressing style of so-called stars determines beauty and mode for the users. Of course it will be an exaggeration if one claims that IMDb is introducing and creating models in the Anglo-Sax-on tradition, because this website complements the role of a wide range of media and mass communications like satel-lites, magazines, and other websites. But the main difference is that IMDb could significantly increase the popularity of professional and popular personalities in the field of cinema and also has become the main reference of academic and film experts as well as amateurs.

In western culture visual works like film along with printed ones like books are used as the educational tools and refer-ences. Consequently, IMDb, as the most comprehensive col-lection of information over film and television programs, has been used by students and sometimes the information in IMDb are the results of students’ research and education ac-

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tivities. For example, in the part of users’ criticism, a user named Ryan Spaeth states that he was told to watch Moham-mad Rassulolla, and he believes that that is “an educational masterpiece”.

In addition to cultural, political and educational functions, IMDb enjoys economic objectives. Being purchased by Amazon suggests the continuity and empowerment of economic factors in IMDb and finding new approaches for increasing revenue. IM-Dbpro and marketing are the most important financial source of this website. IMDbpro not only makes revenue for the website but also bolsters the movie industry through linking those who are active in this filed like actors and actresses and film compa-nies. Since IMDb is highly visited and is a comprehensive web-site it has been able to attract more advertisements with higher price; therefore, there is a direct relationship between content and revenue (i.e. between quality and quantity).

IMDb is one of the most referred websites for people seek-ing for precise and thorough information about films and cin-ema. Once searching in Google the name of film or the film star, the first result—or one among top ten results-- usually belongs to IMDb’s which considerably contributes to increase the number of the visitors. Thoroughness and acting as a ref-erence are two qualities which help a website in becoming more powerful and eventually a virtual empire.

Despite the fact that other websites which collect and sup-ply information over film and cinema like “allmovie”, IMDb is still the most referred webite. Therefore, IMDb, as the most visited website related to the “film industry”, is seen as a “ virtual superpower” for film review and citique and comple-ment circuits of American virtual empires.

CHAPTER VIII

AN ANALYSIS OF TWEETER THROUGH THE APPROACH OF SOFT POWER

Tweeter is a social network which allows its users to send and receive messages called Tweets to each other. Tweets

are texts which can contain 140 letters and be displayed on a profile page. The created Tweets are sent to the shared mem-bers of text writer and followers. Message senders can send the message to both the circle of their friends or all Tweeter members.

All members of Tweeter are able to send and receive their Tweets through Tweeter website, SMS, or other applications – developed by smart cell phones. Using the services of the website is free of charge but using Tweeter on cell phone will cost the user. This website which began in 2006 currently has than 100 million users.

What really should be taken into account concerning this website is its unique role in the days after the 10th presiden-tial elections in Iran, when the Western media propagandized for their broad international audiences and also their Iranian ones that they are the only credible news source about the event taking place in Iran. Since then, using cultural and ide-ological attractivness, Tweeter has tried to increase its credi-


bilty. Western media introduced Tweeter as the emancipator of Iranian people and considered the culture and ideas that they present to also be desired by Iranians. The argued that “without Tweeter Iranian people did not have sufficient pow-er and self-confidence for freedom and democracy”. After a year, it is clear now that most of the news of the website about the postelection events were basically false and also in some cases its reliable source were those who did not reside in Iran at the time and fabricated the news while residing in other countries. In fact plenty of news released by this website and key figures—three of them mentioned in this study—were in English. Therefore, if Iranians had seen and read these news pieces, they would have rejected their credibility because of their many paradoxical and non-credible sources. While Tweeter tried to propagandize itself as a tool for expansion of democracy and human rights in Iran, what was clearly seen from what happened in Iran was the hegemony of Western values.

In general the internet, particuularly social media as Tweet-er, creates a system which are far more powerful than tra-ditional media like television and newspaper. The internet message is sent to the world so rapidly and it can hardly be controled.

Tweeter inteded to show itself as the hero of campaign for liberal democracy and conveince the users that it mere-ly strives for moral and humanitarian values and aginst the objectives of Islamic Republic of Iran. Dominant language, even for iranians users, in Tweeter was English. Surprising-ly, it desparately tried to show the news sources as reliable which were in reality originatd from outside of Iran.

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One of Faucoult’s intellectual acheivement, which could be considered as most critical one, is the analysis of relation be-tween knowledge and power. According to Faucoult, knowl-edge does not contain a number of statements; but rather it includes purposes, apparatus , practices, research programs, skills, social relations networks, and institutions. In this epistomological field each element interactively strengthen one another and become expanded, reproduced and shared in other fields. Thus, a statement, technique, skill, practice, or apparatus is not conceived knowledge itself; but its sig-nificance is in the way they are used. Then, if it intends to be valued epistomologically, it has to constantly interact with other elements (Ross, 1996:112-115).

Understanding Faucoult’s thought is required to conceive the concept of discourse in his works. In other words, under-standing the relation between knowledge and power is im-possible without his discourse theory. For him, “speech” is of paramount importance. Speech dominates text and language, and is the juncture of power and knowledge. Each descipline of knowledge possesses a set of positive and negative rules which determine what must be discussed and what must not be.

He also evaluates discourses related to knowledge and power. Discourses do not express ideological class status or idealist thoughts but rather are part of structure of power in the society and manifest the game of power in its certain sta-tus, and are embedded in a materialist framework. They are practices of power which shape the life of the people. So dis-courses should be viewed in terms of constructing relations of power. Thinking about outer dimensions of discourse, Fou-

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cault seeks for a condition in which discourse lives (Azadan-lou, 2001: 59-60).

In other words, there is a mutual relation between knowl-edge and power in which knowledge is not neutral or inde-pendent but rather affected by power, and its borders and correctness are determined by discourse. Relation between knowledge and power eventually leads to construction of dis-course and its embedment so that it becomes the criteria for measuring the accuracy of concepts.

Since the west is powerful in media space, whatever it produces is usually welcomed with open arms as reliable news. In these media the west and western governments are represented as the symbol of freedom and human rights whereas the third world and Muslim countries are the symbol of autocracy and vicious states which are in desperate need of the West to achieve the so-called Western democracy. In their move towards spreading Western-Style democracy, Western countries both use soft and hard power. In April, 2009, FBI police arrested a man named Daniel Knight Hyden on the charges of sending Tweets which endorsed violent acts in a trade union mass.

Use of Tweeter in education: A college in Shanghai uni-versity used Tweeter for teaching cultural and communica-tion abilities in English. In Austria professors at Vienna Uni-versity used Tweeter to receive their students’ feedback. At Texas University Tweeter was used for teaching history and exchanging ideas between students. In the professors point of view 140- word limitation for Tweeter users drives them to go directly to the point. In some British primary schools use of Tweeter, email, and SMS are seen as necessities of using

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technology. During a survey released by New Science Journal in 2008,

use of Tweeter, as a fast information sending system, is far more efficient than traditional ways like mass communica-tion. According to the survey, use of Tweeter in fire of Cali-fornia, in October 2007, caused followers of Tweeters who were mostly friends and neighbors prepare instant report from their conditions or the place of fire for each other.

During terrorist attack in Bumbai, witnesses sent 80 Tweets per 5 seconds. In addition, the users sent vital information like emergency telephone and location of hospitals for blood donation. In January, 2009, Tweeter emerged as the fastest method of exchanging informtion. In the crash of an Ameri-can Ariliner in in Hudson river in New York, Tweeter’s ser-vice was used as the major news source. Also, in canada and australia Tweeter is used for opinion poll. In presidential election campaign in the United States, Barak Obama, demo-crat candidate, used Tweeter for his advertisements. The use of advertisement during the day of election increased by 43 percent. In 2008, Tweeter worked alongside Facebook and CNN to absorb the muted votes in favor of Obama.

One of the mechanism of the united states for interfering in other countries political affairs is the project of “The National Endowment for Democracy” which is a semi state-run foun-dation allocating a certain budget to congressmen or people in order to donate financial aid to those endeavor for Ameri-can interests and purposes. Website of this foundation states that the purpose of the institute is to help democratic endeav-ors in other countries; the endeavors that have mutual interest for the United States and the target nation (Lowe, 2010). This

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website also declares that most of programs which were con-duct by CIA now are done by the foundation (Bloom, 2000, 180). The activity of this institute in Iran includes allocating hundreds of thousands of dollars to some opposition groups and institutions that reside out their homeland. For example from 2005 to 2007 this foundation has assigned $345,000 dollars to foundation of Abdol-Rahman Buroumand (The National Endowment for Democracy, 2005). Although this group claims that it does not have any political tendencies, its title is the name of the founder of “national resistance move-ment” which was one the opposition groups of Iranian regime and his daughter repeatedly declared in VOA that her purpose is to assist the development of human rights in Iran. Joseph Nye in an essay titled “Information Revolution and American Soft Power (Nye, 2002) asserts that: “Today, invadors to the teritory of the countries can be governments, groups, and or mix of both. Some of them could be anonymous and far from the country.” Interestingly, all of the points mentioned can be applied to Tweeter and its users.

CONCLUSION

SOFT POWERS OF VIRTUAL SPACE AND STRUCTUR-ING THROUGH AMERICAN THOUGHTS AND LIFE

As virtual space emerged, the best opportunity for struc-tural development of American lifestyle which is based on laic, liberal, and secular thoughts—and in some cases from sectarian perspectives of Zionism – was prepared. In struc-tures like YouTube, Tweeter, Facebook, and even IMDb and Google, free production of corruption has become possible. The word “freedom” refers to a capacity through which an individual feels a “sense of free will in his/her selection”. But if the decision made by an individual frequently leads him/her to an evil act or thought, the user is actually free to only choose from amongst various wicked options in a corrupt en-vironment.

Therefore, it can be concluded that the culture of unbound-ed relationship between girls and boys and their illegitimate sexual relationships, or exchanging thoughts in a milieu in which American materialistic values dominate, are all of a mechanism for expansion and diffusion of American culture in the world. In the past this was done through Hollywood media industry, architecture, urban design, food and cloth-ing. Today this is made possible through various structures in


the virtual space which are reproducing and transferring the American ideology and culture to the globe.

On the other hand, the information collecting industries in-cluding text, audio and video, have offered a broad possibility for collecting information through “user-motivated produc-tion” all over the world. Therefore, the users with different nationalities, languages, and religions generate information in American information centers that are displayed through Wikipedia, YouTube, Tweeter, Yahoo, and so on. Google is the industry for collecting any information in the world that is available in the virtual space.

This trend is a source of concern for tactless attendance in the space. Therefore strategies must be devised for Iran and the Muslim World in general, and particularly Islamic Repub-lic of Iran. In this work eight virtual empires of MSN, IMDb, Facebook, Yahoo, Wikimedia (Wikipedia), Google, Tweeter, and YuoTube, were analyzed. These are all American compa-nies, therefore bringing the United States considerable levels of soft power. These eight websites which are of the most popular ones in the virtual space have succeeded in attracting users in terms of their own ideology.

According to Joseph Nye soft power is convincing others “to like what we like.” Soft power unlike hard power relies on cooperation and not coercion, on intangible tools and not tangible ones. Private sector is involved in soft power and the creation of soft power is mutual and interactive. More impor-tantly soft power is based on attraction and not aggression. In this regard, these virtual empires have succeeded in affecting intangibly their users by meeting the users’ demands because as it was argued in the work, despite their claims, these em-

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pires are not impartial.Unlike the slogan of freedom and pluralism, the YuoTube

Empire, as the third highly visited website and also the main website for video clips in virtual space, actually works as a forum for marketing American values such as liberal democ-racy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, pluralism, and accountability of government to people, human rights, and civil values. The key point here is that these values are of-fered to the users in form of their American interpretation and in YouTube other interpretations of and opinions about these values are rarely present. There is ample evidence of YouTube removing some videos in terms of its interests and viewpoints without any valid justificaiton. Besides, this website usually denounces Islam and tries to represent Islamic Iran as a po-tential threat to the world. Furthermore, the Search engine of this website sometimes arranges some rarely-visited clips which are in agreement with their interests and objectives.

Thanks to its unique services and divisions, today the IMDb Empire is seen as the most important portal for acquir-ing information about film and cinema in the virtual space. Also, IMDbpro works to bridge the active artists and movie companies. The most central political and cultural function of IMDb is spreading American pop culture through heav-ily marketing Hollywood products so much that information about non-American films and artists are little and hard to find. Although IMDb possesses five local websites in lo-cal languages of German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, even these websites deal heavily with Hollywood. This is surprising in the face of the fact that Italy and France have had a strong and successful cinema industry for a long

CONCLUSION


time.In fact, comparing cinema industry in general with Ameri-

can cinema, it becomes clear that IMDb promotes American soft power through marketing Hollywood alongside its cul-tural and political impacts.

On the other hand, the Tweeter Empire, through which the users can send short massages called “tweets” to their friends and other virtual users, is one of the main unofficial news sources in the virtual space. Since identity of tweets and the resource are unknown it has been seen that tweeter is used for spreading rumors in the countries and creating a certain conditions –like after iranian presidential postelection events in 2009. In “information revolution and american soft power” asserts that “today, invadors to political teritory of countries might be governments, groups and individuals and/or mix of all. Some of them could be anonymous” (Nye, 2002). These are all to a great extent true about tweeter and its active users

Google as the most visited website in virtual space is the most important virtual empire surveyed in this study because it has an undeniable role in articulating the dominant dis-course in virtual space. As said earlier, Google has recently released incomplete list of requests by the countries to access the users’ data and or removing some data from the result of search engine. Our examination reveals that Google has censored some search results from citizens of Germany, Tur-key, India, Thailand, and France, because the governments of these countries requested Google to do so. Also Google censors some services, for example some videos in YouTube, which is one of Google subsidiary companies. Some of these videos are related to humiliating Ataturk, the founder of the

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new Turkey and Adeliadj, current king of Thailand, which are completely censored for the users from these two countries (Grinberg, 2010).

In realty, Goggle and Bing – Search Engine of Microsoft—work as the agent for users and make decision for users in virtual space without their consultation. For example, Google only displays 1,000 results of a search request and there is no way to access the entire results for a search. For instance 108 million results are declared when the world “Islam” is search for in Google but only 1,000 of them are displayed. As a re-sult websites that are not among the top 1,000 websites may never be visited. In this regard Google holds a huge power through which it distinguishes “credible” from “non-credi-ble” websites as defined by Google’s objectives and ideol-ogy. Therefore, Google and other search engine play the role of referee as Google similar to any other empire has its own views and values which guide its operations.

As said earlier about soft power, it relies on persuasion and attraction. The Google Empire has obtained the users’ confi-dence to introduce itself as a non-ideological and fair web-site, while most of its users are not aware of its power and influence in shaping their thoughts and virtual activities. In fact, Google as the most favorite website and the entrance gate for the internet has a strong and established relationship with Zionist groups and Occupying Regime of Israel. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as the cofounders of Google, are both Jewish with Zionist inclinations. They had a key role in hir-ing Jewish Zionist staffs for Google. Today Zionist Jews play a critical role in virtual space so that many of key positions in these empires are held by them. In addition to Google found-

CONCLUSION


ers, we can mention some other Jews with Zionist inclina-tions such as mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and the main owner of the Facebook company, Jimi Wales president and founder of Wikimedia—and the owner of Wikipedia--, and Sue Gardner, managing director of Yahoo from 2001 to 2007, and Isaac Stone , of founders of Tweeter. These indi-viduals, in addition to absorbing Jewish engineers into their companies, have had strong relations with and have provided many important consultations to Zionist regime. In fact most of these figures have travelled to occupied Palestine and vis-ited Israeli officials (2009).

Additionally, virtual empires have a major role in shaping cultural and political discourse. As addressed in this work in details, dominant discourse in these empires is Anglo-Sax-on discourse that includes political and cultural values. For example, Google news acquires all of its news from Anglo-Saxon news agencies such as Associated Press, Reuters, Fax news, CNN, New York Times, and ABC and so on. As a re-sult, it strengthens American news discourse. This fact gains extra significance when sensitive topics such as Iran, Islam, and terrorism are being discussed in the news.

One of the most important methods of persuasions of peo-ple is absorbing the general public to high and popular cul-ture. According to Nye those countries are successful in exer-tion of power which features following qualities:

Countries whose culture and ideas are closer to global norms.

Countries which own and are connected to more chan-nels of communications.

Countries that have high levels of credibility in terms

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of their domestic and foreign function (Nye, 2002: 70). According to the above criteria, it can be inferred that the

United States has gained significant power in shaping public opinions and global culture through the virtual empires that are headquartered in America, and has in fact influenced the global norms to be more consistent with American norms. This in turn has caused increasing attractiveness for Ameri-can soft actions in real world such as scientific exchanges, scholarships, film and music, television and satellite network, conferences and so on. On the other hand, the increasing role of the U.S. in creating an American global culture and system of values has increased the power of these virtual empires.

As said earlier most of these activities are carried out by private sectors and who are motivated by profit. Therefore, the users unconsciously get immersed in the thoughts, values, cultures, language, and other affairs of these empires, con-stantly increasing their power and influence in virtual space. Many users see the internet as a free world in which every-body can freely access any webpage and can create his/her site(s). Therefore, these users consider internet as a world in which supply and demand of information are offered freely and without any central authority. As a result, these users are lured into thinking that true democracy is prevailed in inter-net.

In fact, as said earlier, the reality is completely different. Over 200 million people are active everyday on the net and it is now increasing. Classification and distinction between these huge amounts of information is impossible. Here, the role of virtual empires in attracting numerous users of the internet and directing them by shaping a prevailing discourse

CONCLUSION


is highly important. This becomes more important when we see that a great

proportion of internet search is done by Google, Yahoo, and MSN empires. In fact, these empires not only absorb the us-ers, but also make the users refer to other websites. For ex-ample, in the United States, over 91% of all searches are done by them. Considering the massive amount of expansion of virtual space, the role of search engines becomes important more and more (Nielson, February 2010).

Nowadays, over 85% of the internet users find their de-sired information through search engines and it is estimated this figure will be increasing as the virtual space expands ever more rapidly. Since Yahoo services its searches requests through Bing—the MSN search engine— thus Google and Bing play the role of agents for the users.

Controlling the huge amount of information and data in the hands of only two private companies is definitely against de-mocracy in virtual space because even if we assume that these companies do not take advantages of this power in favor of their interests (which was proved otherwise) ruling over the virtual space by two American companies is a serious con-cern.

Search engines as agents of the users find the best, most credible and relevant websites for users. These search en-gines merely select limited numbers of websites among mil-lions and offer them to the users. The websites which are not selected in the search result or receive the lowest ranking have little chance to be seen by users. As mentioned before, Google and Bing (Yahoo and MSN) search engines offer only 1,000 results. For example when searching for the word Iran

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in English over 882 million results are found, but only 1,000 of them are visible to the user and there is no other possi-bility to see the rest of the search result. Thus, these search engines censor all information about Iran in virtual spaces except those 1,000 results. Most of the information and news in these major websites are about Iranian nuclear program, violating human rights, Iranian post-elections events and some other disturbing news about Iran. They rarely release any positive political news —even news related to cultural and art— in their websites. Also, Tweeter as one of the major sources of unofficial news in virtual space has played a key role in spread of violent protests in the aftermath of Iranian presidential election in 2009. Having the permission of the users to act as their agents, the power of censorship and clas-sification of information in virtual space by only Two Ameri-can search engines has resulted into considerable amounts of soft power to the United States.

As the owners and executives of the websites are Ameri-can as a result in cultural issues, their dominant cultural dis-course is consistent with American culture. As seen in re-ports about Yahoo, IMDb, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, Tweeter, and MSN these eight websites have appar-ently American approach to cultural issues, and its different components like music, entertainment, and recreation are all about American artists’ and singers’ information.

For example conducted research shows that 73% of the news on Yahoo’s first page is about different American news and only 7% of the news contains other parts of the world while 20% miscellaneous news. Also, of 30 samples of Ya-hoo’s first page in 22 cases (66%) the first news are about

CONCLUSION


art, recreation, and sport and only in 10 cases (33%) the first news was about political, economic, and scientific issues of the United States and the rest of the world. In fact, it can be inferred that these empires market American pop culture versus high culture. Marketed culture in these empires dif-fers from cultures of countries like Iran in some issues, and sometimes unlike our culture and religion. For example Ya-hoo portal has an especial division for homosexuals, a divi-sion named “honor”, because as homosexuals claim they feel proud of their ways.

Also Wikipedia portal and its related websites are increas-ingly becoming a database for human being in virtual space. The assiduous attempts of certain people along with the class structure of its users have led to bias, false and paradoxical information in Wikipedia. This matter is clearly seen in con-troversial topics.

On the other hand, YouYube as the main source of video clips and also the third most visited website in virtual space works as the forum for marketing and spreading American values –like liberal democracy. Additionaly, this website usu-ally tries to denounce Islam and represent Islamic Iran as a potential threat to the world. Search engine of the website sometimes arranges some less visited and unpopular videos on top of its results.

The purpose of this book is not to defame these empires since it has mentioned various other beneficial services they offer, but the main concern is to underline their outstanding power in shaping dominant political, cultural, and economic atmosphere in virtual space.

These eight empires are all American. Therefore, they natu-

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rally promote prevailing American thoughts in their websites. Although it sometimes happens to hear some news over in-terfering of government in these websites but it is rarely the case because they are private companies. High concentration over the relationship between American empires and these portals will lead to neglect some major points. These empires plays the key role in transmitting fundamental Anglo-Saxon political, cultural, and economic values like “ liberalism”, “ democracy”, “ freedom”, “ human rights”, “ pluralism “, “in-dividualism” , “ free trade” , and so on .

Then it does not need the White House’s interference or aid, since the designer and executives of the websites are Ameri-can citizens and believe in these values and, consciously or unconsciously, spread these ideas and norms to their users. As said in the theoretical section of this work, soft power is to persuade others “to like what we like”. Soft power relies on at-traction, and since no one likes to see his/her thoughts are being manipulated, it works intangibly and as a result will reduce the cost of remaining in power. These websites are usually run by private sector and seek primarily economic profit. Therefore, the users get attracted to their thoughts, values, culture, language, and so on.

Virtual space, because of creating new and exponentially expanding space, ever-present and instant communication, and also its free and easy access to “other spaces” has lost its space and time relevance (ameli, 2004a). This new area, when compared with the real world, could have much more potentials in influencing other societies. Powerful countries by using the potentialities of this space have gained soft power over the globe and as a result cultural, political, and

CONCLUSION


economic hegemony. On the other hand, if countries such as Iran don’t have serious and efficient presence in this space, they not only will miss the opportunity of having impact, but they will also be jeopardized by the new intangible forms of colonialism.

The exercise carried out in this book underlines the follow-ing facts:

Virtual world should be taken seriously because it is a new world that exists in parallel with the material world. Also, the virtual world contains far more potentialities than the real world.

Alongside the many corrupt sources of power, we should try to increase the sources of goodness and piety in this world. This will not be possible unless we generate of good-ness in comprehensive manner and through various services. We should prepare a space which is rich of diverse services and benevolent ideas.

On the other hand, it should be noted that today, the possibil-ity of globalization of goodness and evil is far more than any time in the history. Production, distribution and consumption of both evil and good have increased as fast as the growth of the virtual world. We should avoid mixing goodness and evil and focus merely on generating goodness. Some believe that we should balance between goodness and evil, Western and Eastern culture, Islamic and non-islamic values. This per-spective will lead us to eclecticism which will never bring us salvation.

I firmly believe that we do need to create virtual power and empire with benevolent capacity. Power should be at the service of generating benevolence and goodness for society

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and it should never be a tool for hegemonic visions. There is a big difference between creating capacity to consciously choose goodness and using good values for hegemony and dominance. In other words, the ground for choosing good-ness and evil should be developed in virtual space.

The society, particularly young generation, has entered un-consciously and unintentionally into virtual world in which most of its values and behaviors are not necessarily consist-ent with Islamic values. It is of paramount importance, that at the same time that we offer services and good opportunities in this space, we also introduce the risks and threats about its hegemonic potentialities in order to raise the awareness of the society about this issue.

It is necessary to configure a different logic for the relation-ship between the virtual space and physical environment, so that differences between these space and relevant policies are analyzed and designed more accurately.

CONCLUSION

GLOSSARY

163

Application:Any program or website which access to platforms or uses it; and also everything which receives data.Avatar: electronic representation of a person for chat or online game which is derived from an Hindu de-noting a god in human form.

Bing:Microsoft’s search engine which is upgraded version of windows lives and MSN explorer

Content:whatever a user leaves on facebook.Dominant discourse: a dominant discourse can pre-vail its language through reduction of significance of the words in and reproduces its hegemony among other competing discourses. Edit and Editors: in Wikipedia space, the users’ par-ticipations which are generally for revising and/ or creating content is called edit; and the participators are named editors. Featured video: the most prominent videos are se-lected among the videos of YouTube in terms of the website’s certain algorithm. Some of these videos come automatically to the first page. These videos are changed or replaced during a day.

Unique users:The number of reference to a website including the

GLOSSARY


reference by the same persons.Hotmail: it is web-based post electronic service which inaugurated on July 4th, 1996, coincided with Inde-pendence Day of the United States, and according to USA TODAY in April, 2008 enjoys 256 million users

Msn:this is the abbreviation of Microsoft networking. Evo-lutionary trend of MSN can be seen as internet ser-vice and portal.

Msn Explorer:it is an internet browser which has gathered msn mes-senger and hotmail in single software. Msn explorer with its first page option links the user to msn.com. Therefore, it is possible for the user to use all options in the website. Open content: unlike copyright, it is attributed to products which everyone can use or revise it and there is no monopoly right any person, company or governmental organization. All information in Wiki-pedia and Wikimedia foundation is open content.

Open source: it is attributed to the software which their program writ-ing codes are editable. The advantage of this soft ware lies in editing the codes by the users for their promotion.

Profile: profile is a page on tweeter on which users’ informa-tion as well as all tweets the user have on his account

165

are available. Search option: when a user search for a word in You-Tube, list of videos related to the “search item” are prepared for him/her. According to YouTube, the search engine of the website, like Google’s search en-gine, uses text corresponding software and find the most relevant videos.

Social graph: a social structure consisting of individuals and organ-izations interrelated to each other due to one or more reasons. The reason could be friendship, relativity, or common interest.

Social networking:it is the result of virtual individual identity in which an individual sees her/himself among the others and deliberately decides to create a network of relations with them and share what she/ he likes. Soft power: according to Joseph Nye, the leading fig-ure in soft power, it is the ability of persuasion and exertion of power so that you can convince others “to like what you like”.

Unique users: the number of unique users of a website is counted through removing repeated reference to it—unlike hit—and in this way the exact number of the people referring at least once a day to the website is calcu-lated.

GLOSSARY


Virtual identity: according to Ben Well virtual iden-tity is constructed through online activities and is the result of our online life.

Wall: it is a space on the user’s profile which enables the friends to send message to the owner of the profile.Wiki: a website which allows the users to revise or create new materials and information. Wiki website is supported by wiki software. The first software of wiki named wikiwikiweb introduced by coninghum in 1995. This word traces back to Hawaiian language.

YouTube: it is user-based website which has enabled its users to find their favorite videos and share with others.

YouTube marketer: sending and saving a video on the first page or pages of youtube has become a hot business and those who masters the skill or consult others are known as you-tube marketer.

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AABC, 110, 152Adorno,4Adrian,15, 19, 20, 38, 169Algeria, 24, 80Alteedo, 38Ameli, 11, 157, 169American Culture, 2, 28, 39, 41, 73,147, 155Americanized, 13Anglo-Saxon, 3, 18, 64, 110, 123, 127Anthony, 69, 135Application, 19, 66, 68,118, 139, 163Argentina, 24, 62Asia, 24, 62, 101, 141Austria, 62, 116Avatar, 16, 131

BBakhtin, 3Barabasi, 49Barker, 26Bartelle, 28, 29Bauman, 26, 136BBC, 110, 170, 171

Belgium, 24Bell, 30, 136Benjamin, 3Bing, 36, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 151, 152, 154, 155, 163Boudrillard, 26Brazil, 31, 74, 124Britain,1, 2, 54Brown, 99, 170Burns, 99, 170CCanada 30, 31, 74, 75, 179Capila, 86Capitalism, 3, 33, 34, 103

CBS, 110Cheneni, 60China, 74, 75, 76Cinema, 23, 129, 130, 131, 132 133, 134, 135, 136, 150CNN, 17, 69, 70, 95, 110, 133, 143, 152, 172, 173Colombia, 31Communication, 3, 8,11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 42, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 91,95, 97, 110, 115, 117, 122, 135,137,139, 152, 157, 169, 170, 171, 173Consumer, 32, 33, 34, 36, 43, 172, 173, 176Content, 28, 31, 48, 52, 54, 66, 68, 81, 99, 115, 136, 163, 164

Control, 1, 12, 13, 62, 65, 66, 104, 140, 140, 154, 176Critical analysis, 3, 4, 6Critical realism, 4, 170

DDatabase 129, 179

Democratic society,????Denmark, 74Development, III, 1, 11, 12, 37, 50, 81, 84, 144, 147, 174Digitalization, 11Dolbeare, 85, 170Dominant discourse, 1, 30, 32, 39, 40, 42, 68, 70, 94, 97, 108, 109, 150, 152, 163Donontisti, 17Dualization, 11

EEast 7, 22, 30, 110, 176, 179Easton, 4, 170Edelman, 85, 170Edgeell, 33Editor, 118, 117, 163

INDEX


Education, 7, 12, 15, 16, 69, 100, 142, 133, 135, 136Elison, 50, 52Eltham, 18, 19. 170Entertainment News, 39, 71European, 1, 2, 7, 39, 110

FFacebook 5, 21, 22, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 63, 83, 105, 114, 143, 147, 148, 152, 155, 180Featherstone, 32, 171Featured video, 163Filipines, 74Finland, 74Flangan, 107Fox News, 69, 110France, 2, 31, 74, 75, 149, 150Freedom, 5, 23, 41, 55, 56, 74, 92, 93, 94, 103, 104, 130, 133, 140, 142, 147, 149, 157, 171Fritche, 107

GGarvich, 86Germany, 2, 62, 96, 109, 122Gibse, 41Google, I, III, V, 16, 18, 21, 28, 33, 47, 48, 49, 50, 66, 68, 73, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 111, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 132, 135, 136, 138, 139, 143Gori, 4 180Government, 9, 15, 17, 18, 22, 23, 69, 82, 84, 85, 93, 94, 110, 115, 122, 124, 142, 144, 149, 150, 157, 164Grebe, 13Gulf War, 17

HHabermas, 3Hall, 74, 77, 138

Hard Power, I, 8, 136Hit, 131Holocaust, 41, 43, 70Hong Kong, 62Hopckins, 73Horkhaeimer, 3Hotmail, 131Human relationship, 32, 34, 141 180

IIdea 173, 180Identity, 14, 16, 21, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 66, 50, 51, 52, 66, 102, 103, 121, 122, 123, 150, 165, 166, 169, 172, 175IMDb, I, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 147, 148, 149, 150, 155India, 74, 150Individualism, 23, 130, 157Indonisia, 74Ingram, 5Internet, 6, 15, 20, 27, 35, 48, 53, 54, 60, 61, 64, 65, 69, 70, 73, 66, 67, 82, 83, 86, 91, 99, 101, 109,116, 117, 118, 124, 129, 131, 151, 153, 154, 140, 164, 171, 174, 175, 176Iranian Persian, 5, 12, 14, 15, 24, 44, 50, 58, 62, 75, 76, 79, 101, 110, 113, 114, 117, 120, 121, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 136, 138, 140, 141Irland, 74Islamic government, 94Islamic Republic, 6, 122, 140, 172, 173Islamic resistance, 94Italy, 74, 149

JIdea 173

181

Japan, 15, 16, 17, 74, 176Judaism,115

KKalantzis, 34, 35, 172Kant, 5Kaplan, 104, 172Katz, 36, 37, 172Kennedy, 36, 85, 170, 172, 174Knowledge, I, IV, 4, 14, 64, 82, 83, 86, 92, 107, 114, 131, 135 141, 142, 171, 172, 175Kondra, 85

LLamonica, 73Leam, 69Longluis, 69Lunge, 83 181

MMalaysia, 24, 62Malek, 27, 32Marcuse, 3Marx, 4Mc Cane, 11Mc Connel, 12, 13Medcalf, 68, 137Media circle, 53, 56, 99, 102, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143Media diplomacy, 102Meta-Wiki, 65Mexico, 24, 62Microsoft, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 35, 98, 122, 181Miles, 33, 173Mohammad, 106, 122, 136, 173Movie, 39, 101, 128, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 149MSN, I, 12, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 62, 62, 64, 148, 154, 155, 163, 164, 172, 173, 174

Music, 23, 38, 39, 43, 51, 66, 67, 69, 74, 76, 118, 133, 153, 155Muslims, 55

NNAFSA, 13NBC, 58Netcarft, 16, 140Netherlands, 1, 24, 62News, 31, 56, 140, 142Newsland, 62Nielson, 49, 58, 65, 125, 140Nissenbaum, 81Norway, 62Numerico, 48, 52, 143Nupedia, 65Nye, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17,34, 66, 78, 89, 101, 102, 103, 10 181

OObama, 11, 34, 116Old Colonialism, 1Online, 15, 52, 53, 55, 56, 66, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 135, 141, 142Organization, 141, 143

PPakistan, 31, 99Peru, 31, 74Policy, 17, 33, 53, 85, 122, 123, 133, 170, 171, 176Politics, 7, 8, 21, 69, 68, 110, 170, 172, 174, 175Portugal, 2, 31power of ideas, 8Power 181\Pakistan, 24, 80Peru, 24, 62Policy, 1, 3, 42, 136, 138, 143Politics, 141, 142Portugal, 1, 24power of ideas, 6Power of values, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,

INDEX


8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 27, 33, 34, 43, 44, 49, 51, 61, 64, 66, 67, 70, 73, 74, 78, 79, 87, 89, 101, 102, 103, 106, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 115, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138, 142, 143Power Rules, 6, 11, 138Profile, 132

RRadio, 138Rosenberg, 38, 142Royal, 69, 142Rozen, 33Russia, 62 181

SSaudi Arabia, 24, 80Saudi Arabian, 24Search Engine, Search Option, III, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 121, 122, 125, 127, 132, 137, 140, 143Security, 98, 100, 135Server, 97, 98, 140Simons, 79, 142Singapore, 24Smith, 135\Social 182

Social network, 56, 95, 97, 99, 100, 132, 137Social Networking, 140Society, 135, 136, 138, 139Soft Power, I, 11, 12, 16, 21, 37, 47, 65, 73, 91, 105, 113, 117, 119, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141Software, 94, 95, 96, 99, 102Somner, 85Spain, 1, 24, 62Sport, 58Stephen, 23, 29, 142Superpower, 136

Sweden, 24, 62Switzerland, 62

TThailand, 24, 62, 122Turkey, 62, 122TV, 143Tweeter, I, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 126 182

UUnited State, III, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 131, 138

VVans, 84Venezuela, 24, 62Vietnam, 6, 62, 63Violence, 2Virtual Colonialism, 1, 3, I, 1Virtual social network, 14Virtual Space, I, 11, 119Virtuality, 1, 3, I, 1, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 56, 119, 127, 128, 133, 135, 136 182

YYahoo, I, III, V, 18, 22, 28, 33, 37, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 92, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 143Yang, 47, 82Yasushi, 12, 13, 66, 67, 143YouTube, I, 10, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88 182

ZZionist, 123Zwick, 25, 143 182

A Critical Approach to The United States’ Virtual Colonialism: Internet Domination Policy

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