سید احمد عسکری

he Iranian users’ conception of the discursive system of sanctions. The question that follows is how the Iranian users in virtual space responded to the Nike’s sanction on Iran football team in 2018 World Cup by the language of picture and gave an unbiased reading of sanction system order. The sanction system is a discourse-based hegemonic system whose scope and influence goes beyond the military, security, political spheres and related fields such as nuclear technology and spreads also to the social and cultural life of citizens, and also affects the social identity-maker and integrity-maker aspects such as sport and health through the politicization of the various parts of the citizens’ life. Using visual semiotics, prioritizing non-linguistic factors in portraying the ideology of sanctions, this research investigated the activity of users on Instagram, Twitter and other social networks, and through semiotic analysis of related pictures in virtual space achieved the result that the importation of sanctions into social and cultural life of citizens is a kind of new disciplinary discourse and ‘symbolic violence’ that seeks to make citizens’ life an object of power. In the course of sanctions, the power and resistance and hegemony and anti- hegemony act simultaneously, so that the Iranian users, resorting to semiotic excess and the path of ‘semiotic resistance’, attains the enjoy of political affair leisurization. 

According to Foucault, discourse works through the law of penal systems. The sanctions regime is also a discourse order that advances its mechanism in a hegemonic and ideological context. The sanction system is a discourse-based hegemonic system whose scope and influence goes beyond the military, security, political spheres and related fields such as nuclear technology and spreads also to the social and cultural life of citizens, and also affects the social identity-maker and integrity-maker aspects such as sport and health through the politicization of the various parts of the citizens’ life. This article emphasizes that the embargo regime serves the hegemony of the neo-emperor by using discursive tools. One of the signs of the inhumanity and immorality of this new system of domination is not excluding the fields of medicine and health, sports, passenger airlines and other "non-political parts of daily life" that are directly linked to the health and psychological security of citizens' lives. By studying the visual reaction of Iranian users to the boycott of the Iranian football team by Nike in the 2018 World Cup under the pretext of international sanctions against the Iranian government, the present study deals with the visual signs of users' resistance to the sanctions system. The visual reaction of the Iranian people to the boycott of their country's football team by Nike is studied as politics as a form of popular culture. 

In our project, we employed a qualitative research method , it uses semiotics as a "qualitative interpretive" method to reread the images of users against the preferred meaning of the sanctions system. This case study analyzes the visual language of users in virtual space against the boycott of the Iranian football team by Nike in the World Cup. By viewing Instagram pages, Telegram messenger channels and Twitter pages during the 2018 World Cup with online search tools and targeted sampling techniques, this article has extracted images related to the sanction of the Iranian football team in 100 pages in these three virtual platforms.

The results of this study show that the  most important Binary opposition in coded image texts are "Iranian team against Spanish team", "Amiri against Pique", "Nike shoes against Adidas shoes", "Nike shoes against national shoes". For example, Iranian users have shown a kind of humorous reaction in contrasting images, referring to Pique who used Nike products. Nike's slogan, "Just do it" has a meaningful connection with the scene of Nutmeg to Pique by one of the players of the Iranian football team. Iranian users have described Nike's products as not suitable for "success" but for "disgusting" in order to criticize Nike's actions regarding the sanctions of Iran's football team. With semiotic resistance against the sanctions regime, Iranian users are trying to remove themselves from being a subject against the sanctions regime and are resisting the "action of calling" ideology and accepting the status of subject. Users of virtual networks not only resist preferred meanings with the help of conflicting coding, but also produce new and different texts themselves. One of the ways of users' resistance is " Semiotic excess" proposed by Fisk.

This article, in the context of cultural and media studies and with a critical view, has dealt with the dimension of resistance of Iranian cyberspace users in confronting the spread of the sanctions structure from the political sphere to the public sphere. "Sanction Regime" is a type of modern repression system that uses the structure of symbolic and hegemonic violence in contrast to the modern and democratic image it presents and clearly does not separates the political from the civil spheres such as sports, health and education. Nike's announcement that the Iranian football team's players are prohibited from using the company's shoes and other sports equipment in the 2018 World Cup in Russia due to the implementation of US sanctions against Iran is a proof of the sanctions regime spreading to non-political sectors such as sports and other categories of daily life. The research came to the conclusion that Iranian users, with semiotic resistance against the sanctions of their country's football team, actively use the language of images to resist it. As sanctions the sanctions regime acts in a hegemonic way, the audience also engages in anti-hegemonic behavior against this discourse order with its own opportunities and methods, and from the power of resistance and the possibility of "opposite decoding" In the face of sanctions.

The writers of this paper aiming to further understanding of the policy making of virtual space in Iran attempt to address this question: what are the social and political meanings consequences of the policy of substituting Telegram messenger by local messenger applications in Iran”? Our investigative results indicate that the policy of “requesting permission” that is originally adopted by the Iranian Press law, is also an ideal end from the viewpoint of the policy making system in Iran. Indeed, the policy of filtering and the aim of the exit of government issues, education, and business services from Telegram, and shifting these activities towards one local application, is something that is planned and implemented by the Iranian policy makers. In addition, supporting and developing local messenger applications, framed by detersive technical, institutional, infrastructural, franchised, and loan granting, in accordance with the policy of localizing virtual space applications, are preferred and followed by the policy makers in the area of virtual space. From the viewpoints of the Iranian virtual space policy makers, the execution of localizing virtual space applications, is faced by some negative consequences, including the prevalence of the usage of anti-filters, and some very important problems, such as institutional, technical, and social challenges of public trust, private sphere, information security, and government intrusion , considering the point that the importance of each challenge is not the same among all the Iranian virtual space policy makers.

IGTV and its capabilities have affected the communication space of today's Iranian society, creating many challenges and issues in the media policy, especially IRIB. This study, explains the opportunities and threats of IGTV for IRIB and bring up the existing and desirable policies and strategies facing this new media service. For this purpose, with a qualitative approach and expert interview technique, 12 semi-structured interviews with communication science and media management professionals were conducted, and the data were coded, categorized and analyzed by Nvivo 10 software. IGTV opportunities for IRIB include two categories of practical opportunities (use of user-generated content, talent identification, audience engagement and polling) and ultimate opportunities (helping to govern well, balancing formal and customary culture, diversifying Iran's media sphere and produce better productions). The threats posed by IGTV to the IRIB included creating more challenges for the IRIB monopoly position, reducing the audience, and reducing revenue from the advertisements. According to experts, the two main ways exist for IRIB. First, the continuation of current policies (filtering and popularization of domestic platforms) and second, appropriate policies for the new era (convergent policies). They suggested having a professional presence in the social media space and becoming a multi-platform media, working on their strengths, using IGTV to interact more with the audience and attracting them and gaining their trust as strategies for IRIB.

The health risk of high-risk groups is an issue that was considered by the media and social media users in Iran at the beginning of the outbreak of the Corona virus. Research with the hypothesis that public opinion views on health policy-making is that vulnerable groups, including the elderly, normally need more health psychological and social support. Of course, governments and the health care system are expected to take extra care of them. The purpose of this study is to achieve the approach of Iranian media and cyberspace towards the elderly as one of the high-risk groups in the Corona crisis and seeks to answer the question that the media and cyberspace users view the elderly in an epidemic in Iran and How is the West? The research has studied the print media, online and social networks to achieve the view of different Iranian media on the issue of corona and the elderly in Iran and the West. Research has used "big data" and "data mining" techniques to get the media to look at vulnerable groups in the Corona crisis.The results of the study show that the Iranian media and users with a positive, ethical and supportive approach to caring for the elderly in the Corona crisis and strongly react to internal and external behaviors that are regardless of their situation in the Corona crisis. In addition, some media and cyberspace users have compared the different attitudes of Iranians and Westerners towards the elderly in the Corona crisis, and with behaviors in cyberspace such as the hashtag "strong Iran", make Iran's social system more moral than the West. They have known.

The emergence of the “cyberspace” and the simultaneous expansion of information and communication industries have brought about huge changes in classical concepts and social and cultural structures. One of the works that has studied this subject and issues of cyberspace in Iran has been the book Cyberspace; The Society and Culture by Seyed Abolhassan Firouzabadi, who is the head of the Iranian National Center of Cyberspace and one of the key Iranian policymakers for the Internet in Iran. This article has endeavored to review and introduce this work and then tap into the fundamental discussions on the cyberspace, culture and power to re-review and re-read it and bring examples to show this book needs theoretical and methodological improvements. On the surface, the book lacks a complete content list and a final conclusion section; works cited are dated, and there are some word usages. The book also suffers from a lack of scrutiny, and structurally speaking, the book is fragmented and loosely.

Given the importance of media literacy, which has been considered in the field of policy-making in recent years, and given the multiplicity of decision-making institutions and policy-makers in this field in Iran, this is facing various challenges. The present study was conducted with the aim of analyzing the challenges and capacities of media literacy policy in Iran. While interviewing officials and experts in four effective institutions in this field (Supreme Council of Cyberspace, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and the Radio and Television Organization) through snowball interviews, seeks to answer the question that What policies have the media literacy institutions in Iran developed and implemented to promote media literacy in Iran?Findings show that due to the multiplicity of decision-making institutions in this field, there is no clear distinction between media literacy education and culture in this field and imbalances in planning lead to unsuccessful policies. Accordingly, it is necessary to designate a supra-institutional body (such as the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution) as a policy reference in this field and to make policy in all areas (including education and culture, etc.).

The concept of shopping in cultural studies has been changed by the spread of social media in the form of virtual markets and online shopping, as an identity-maker action. Examining the role of virtual social networks on Tehran people’s shopping experiences, this article aims to identify the differences between shopping experience in virtual and real spaces.To capture the meaning of the shopping experience in the first and second spaces, the present research uses the paradigm of dual spacization, and studying the pattern of shopping behavior in Instagram and Telegram channels, it intends to investigate this dual-spacization field using ethnographic and netnographic methods.Identifying and then explaining, the typology of virtual stimulating and limiting factors through online and offline shopping spaces observations, it turned out that Instagram and Telegram are more an advertising means for real market goods than a space for direct shopping. The research findings show that while shopping for the sake of spending leisure times and hanging around is common in both real and virtual markets, but contrary to the idea of Michel deCerteau and thinkers, who advocate resistance, leisure, pleasure and hanging around of the audience, involving actively in shopping malls and membership in virtual channels, the buyer is engaged in a"consumption cycle" so that consumer tactics have not been able to be used as an emancipating element in the strategy of consumer society.

Based on Ronald Robertson's global-localization theorem, the current research in the globalization paradigm examines the local and international advertisement appearances of popular Khanevadeh-y- Sabz Magazine. This research, contrary to the economic oriented studies of advertisement, deals with the cultural function of commercial advertising through cultural studies approach and analyzes the latent and overt cultural meanings of advertisement. The research uses quantitative content analysis methodology and qualitative methodology of semiotics to cover the gaps of each method. Quantitative and qualitative studies on the commercial advertisement of Khanevadeh Sabz magazines with the aim of representing local and international notions in advertizing texts show that the signs and codes of local culture and non-local cultures are collaborative and non-unilateral; a new identity that does not fully correspond to native culture, but is a product of ‘native-global’ culture.

The research investigated the issue of TV ads in the context of cultural studies and from the critical- cultural perspective. This study has focused on the family in order to read culture among the advertisements, so family from both the gender and generational relations has been analyzed. The main focus of the research is on the policy of representation of TV commercials across the country about couple bilateral relations and parent-child generational bilateral relations in Iranian families, in this way the power structure in the family can be understood. Using qualitative methods, this research has done based on the general principles of semiotics and followed the principles of “first order implications” that is centered mostly in syntagmatic axis and “second-order implications” assigned to Roland Barthes that has replaced in the axis of succession. This research shows that TV ads in “subjective aspect of power” with showing mental images consistent with male-dominated system, and in “objective aspect of power” with showing stereotypes that in the first step men (sexual) and in the second step parents (generational) make the final decision, leads to reproduction of power gap and inequality in family relationships.

Sayyid Ali Tajer Bayrami was a member of Shirazi Sayyids family who were all tradesmen serving as Vakil al-Ro’aya (Representative of the People) from generation to generation in southern Iran. He possessed a lucrative business company in Qajar-era Shiraz and purportedly maintained extensive political and commercial relations in southern Iran. Sayyid Ali once represented the Fars Trade Association. Correspondences relating to his domestic and overseas business are available in which he has been greeted as “Khair al- Haj Haji Sayyid Ali Tajer Bayrami.” Qajar and Indian coins and documents such as provincial orders, tax orders, contracts, bills, pay rolls, and drafts are amongst the documents left behind by his family. The publication of the said documents expands the knowledge on the economic life and trade relations in Qajar-era Iran. Wrong tax policies, unsafe roads, and general recession, particularly in southern Iran made the merchants gather in the Fars Trade Association in order to meet Sayyid Ali. A petition signed by 50 merchants in 1904 is a testimony to unsafe roads and the dangers the merchants faced in Qajar era. This petition files their bitter complaint to Sayyid Ali about the chaos and lack of economic security and their negative impacts on the market and social life. The author of this paper publishes unpublished trade documents in order to study an important period of southern Iran’s economic life in one of the most sensitive eras of Iranian history.