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Today, over 53 million Iranian have access to the Internet through their mobile phone and this makes Iran ranks 12th in internet user growth in 2018. The situation of Iran related to accessing to prominent social network sits (SNSs) is different from other countries because SNSs like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are blocked since post-election protests in 2009. So that, the platform of Instagram is very popular in absence of other SNSs. It should be noted that, domestic social media were not successful to gain Iranian users attention due to different reasons.
First, these domestics SNSs are weak in terms of infrastructure and technology.
More importantly, these SNS are mostly belong to governmental sectors and people cannot trust them. All of these obstacles led Iranian online society to use Instagram in absence of alternative platforms. From a broader perspective, Instagram is popular social media worldwide. This platform is reported to have 1 billion monthly active Instagram users worldwide. In Iran, young generation are mainly use Instagram.
In 2018 more than 24 millions of Iranian were Instagram users which comprises almost 30 percent of population according to online statistics service Statista. It makes Iran ranked world’s 7th Instagram User.
Telegram, another mobile app has also 40 million users comprising half of the Iran population. However, Telegram has blocked during writhing of this dissertation. Instagram as a photo-sharing app enables its users to share their visual messages with public or private audiences. The ubiquitous of Internet in general and social network sites in particular have enabled Iranian to communicate not only with friends and family members but also with people they do not know or meet in their daily life.
The benefits that online commutation brings to people’s life are undeniable. However, there are several threats associated with online presence of in induvial whether old or young, educated or illiterate. One of the major concerns regarding online communication is related to privacy. This issue has sparked debates over how users’ privacy is in endanger.
This is an imperative problem that has been addressed by serval scholars from different disciplines such as e-commerce, sociology, media studies, psychology, etc. Rapid penetration and acceptance of SNS have highly affect the debates over online informational privacy. The notion of informational privacy refers to how citizens can manage to disclose their information to others. The control over disclosing personal information is affected by situational desires and social goals. Hence, the desired privacy is a relative concept and is highly related to social context and personal boundaries. In fact. SNS users are constantly involved in a decision-making process to create a balance between what they disclose online and what they withdraw.
To be more precise, citizens should employ two strategies of privacy control and self-disclosure behavior. However, Internet Users are not always rational or knowledge about the consequences of their online activities. There is no doubt that digital space inevitably has blurred the line between public and private. This entails online privacy as one of the most critical concerns of recent decades. The Information in user-generated sites can reach widespread audiences. In fact, the nature of SNS like Facebook, YouTube or Instagram encourage and motivate users to disclose emotions, feelings and experiences not only about themselves but about their friends and family members. A single piece of information which was created for personal purposes can be collected and misused by third parties, advertisement companies or even governments.
Boyd wrote, “With Facebook, participants have to consider how others might interpret their actions, knowing that any action will be broadcast to everyone with whom they consented to digital Friendship”. Although User-generated social media provide an opportunity for users to constantly generate personal information, they might consider as sours for invading digital privacy. For instance, Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., at the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in Brussels declare that: “Our own information, from the every day to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency…We shouldn't sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them”.
This clearly shows that our personal data is beneficial for certain group of sectors such as governments, private agencies and third parties. They collect, stole, manipulate and trade this information without our permission. Our digital footprint contains several information such as location and Internet Protocol address, search history, etc. In this context Van Dijk introduces the phenomenon of dataveillance which means “the monitoring of citizens on the basis of their online data—[which] differs from surveillance on at least one important account: whereas surveillance presumes monitoring for specific purposes, dataveillance entails the continuous tracking of (meta)data for unstated preset purposes”.
Colossal Growth of Internet Infrastructure In Iran. (2022, Jan 04). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/colossal-growth-of-internet-infrastructure-in-iran-essay
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