Hamid Abdollahyan; Hossein Kermani
Abstract
This paper examines how the networked publics on Twitter are taking shape in Iran. While Twitter's role in political events has increased, the systematic study on this issue has not grown as expected. Accordingly, considering the importance of Twitter in Iran as well as the role of networking publics ...
Read More
This paper examines how the networked publics on Twitter are taking shape in Iran. While Twitter's role in political events has increased, the systematic study on this issue has not grown as expected. Accordingly, considering the importance of Twitter in Iran as well as the role of networking publics in Twitter, the first step in analyzing Twitter's role in politics in Iran is to identify and analyze the characteristics and structure of such network publics. The purpose of this research paper, therefore, is to identify and analyze the structure of networking publics on the Persian website. We collected the necessary data during the 25 days of the presidential election of 2017. To do such research, in addition to using the theoretical concept of the public, we have combined the methods of social network analysis and ethnographic content analysis. The modularity of clusters indicates that there are three main clusters in the retweet network as follows: 1- the reformists' cluster, 2- the fundamentalists' cluster, and 3- The immigrant cluster. To describe the features of these three, we identified active users of each one based on the PageRank index. The findings indicate that active users are often made up of journalists, the media, and ordinary citizens. There is also a significant gender gap in the network of publics. Most of the members' accounts of these publics remained active after the election, but the members of these three network publics are different from each other in terms of their true identity..
Mostafa Salehi; Hamid Abdollahyan; Alireza Eshaghpoor
Abstract
This paper offers an interdisciplinary study on mechanisms of homophily in virtual social network at Graduate University of Zanjan. Despite the significance of homophily, not many studies have been done on it. It is for this reason this paper sets its objective to study homophily in Iran and considers ...
Read More
This paper offers an interdisciplinary study on mechanisms of homophily in virtual social network at Graduate University of Zanjan. Despite the significance of homophily, not many studies have been done on it. It is for this reason this paper sets its objective to study homophily in Iran and considers its unit of analysis to be Graduate University of Zanjan. Theoretically the paper uses a theoretical synthesis based on what homophily means in the discipline of Network Science and Technology and combines it with the concept of homophily in Communication and Sociology. Methodologically, the paper collects its data from among students at Graduate University of Zanjan during a period of 2009 and 2014. We used some interviews and set up some face-to face interviews with questionnaires in addition to observations in order to complete the data gathering. Then we calculated the number of connections with similar characteristics of individuals and subtracted them from total connections expected in a random situation so to measure homophily. Here the paper has measured characteristics or variables such as gender, graduate degree level, discipline, city of residence, marital status, and year of entering university. Some of the results indicate that students, who use social network of Graduate University of Zanjan, select their friends based on the following characteristics and in the following order: similarity in gender, marital status, degree level, discipline, year of entering university, and city of residence. Our observations indicate that religious norms play a special role in communicating with opposite sex.
