Amirpouyan Shiva
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How do people change in the process of creating? How does creativity take an inward direction to fashion an inner self? My research examines these primordial questions through the prism of a particular creative site of material production—the Persian blogosphere. Blogging is an extremely popular means for producing self-centering narratives—i.e., written accounts centering around one’s lived experience—in Iran, making Persian one of the top 10 blogging languages. As it deploys ethnographic research to explore blogging, a medium enabled by the coming together of technology, language, and people, my research challenges the received ideas of what media, technological or otherwise, do. It challenges conventional ideas that center on symbolic representation instead of material creation. In my research, I consider the Persian blogosphere not as a theater where bloggers stage already-formed inner selves, which is how it is commonly portrayed, but rather as a factory whereby bloggers’ selves are continually fashioned.