Ethnic Identity-Seeking in Cyberspace

Many scholars are on the belief that ethnicity, ethnocentrism, and nationalism are sensitive issues of countries. As a result of the growth of information capacities of the modern world in the last few decades, ethnic tensions have been increased and created new issues. Taking a content analysis approach, the present research aims to study the issue of ethnic identity-seeking in cyberspace. The statistical population included all the contents of the 29 websites active in the ethnic (i.e. Turk/Azeri) identityseeking affairsin May, 2012. In this paper, the concept of ‘ethnic identityseeking’ is studied on a scale from ethnocentrism, being the lowest grade, and ethnic cleansing, being the highest grade. The results showed that the majority of ethnic materials in cyberspace were related to ethnocentrism (54%). These materials are written with purpose of promoting thoughts such as enmity of Persians and Turks, colonization of Turks by the Persian government, and historical as well as geographical distortion of Azerbaijan. Separatist nationalism, beingmore radical than ethnocentrism, focuses on the necessity of separating from Iran land and the independence of Turkish regions of Iran. The majority of the materials related to ethnic identity-seeking are generated by the ‘ArazNews’, ‘Qirmiz’, and ‘Gunaz.TV’ websites. What is most blamed by these media includes the government of the Islamic Republic as well as some Turk activists.