CULTURAL STUDIES & COMMUNICATION
Year:2007 | Volume:2 | Issue:7|Papers Count:16

This paper will examine the Iranian TV series, Narges that became one of the most successful Iranian TV series in 2006 as it gained the title of the most-seen TV series in 2006. This study is the result of an empirical research on the way of interpretation and decoding the series that took place by the audiences, especially women. The theoretical foundations of the study originate from cultural studies approach and are used here to explore television and its audience. This is an approach that combines Geramsci's and Hall's theory of hegemony and views TV program as an attempt for reproduction of hegemony and "organic ideology" of power bloc.Accordingly, TV programs are laden with values, meanings, and specific ideas but the audiences produce different readings form the preferred reading of the producers of the programs and this is because the audiences fill different positions in the social structure and access various discourses. To develop our argument we will first, employ semiotic and structuralism analysis, then the preferred or dominant reading of the program is explained, and finally the different readings of the audiences will be analyzed. The analysis presented by female audience indicates that those pay serious attention to their everyday life (like purchasing, mode, make up, entertainment, and so on) rarely accept the preferred reading and often sympathize with contradictions of Nasrin's identity. In contrast, those sympathizing "Narges", were seeking for condolence and emancipating from the contradictions.

This paper is an attempt to study the communicative rationality features in the contemporary Iranian society. Based on our preliminary assumption and based on Habermas's paradigm, the communicative rationality contributes to the development of public sphere and to the progress from the traditional life-world to the modem one.Hence, the Iranian life-world as an effective factor in the development process from tradition to modernity will be thoroughly studied. Our studies on the history of the Iranian social changes demonstrate that the life-world of the intellectuals has been the first one that caused the critical approach toward the public affairs to have appeared in Iran. Our approach that is based on the concept of communicative action attempts to show that obtaining a modem systematic life-world requires certain independent scholarly thoughts which enable society to bridge the gap between the tradition and modernity settings in Iran.This analysis also shows that the Iranian life-world can only belong to the Iranian society so that in order to pass the transition period it is necessary to investigate and examine the various related factors that concern obtaining modernity in accordance to the necessities of the Iranian type of life-world.

The contemporary developments in the field of communication have brought a number of questions in mind. Some of them include; can the existing media mechanism help us to manage a crisis? Is hard method of crisis management sufficient? Alternatively, communication and soft ones should also be used. Is it possible to establish all-encompassing plan for managing communication crises.In this paper, we will first offer a review of the existing body of literature on methods of managing communication crisis in various situations we well then explain that the role of communication has been underestimated. Practically, knowledge and science of communication is so important that it can sometimes prevent a crisis before its actual occurrence. The experiences of crisis management teams in various parts of the world have revealed that there are a certain common principles for most of crisis and so the crisis management team can design a general program for themselves by considering these principles.

Using Bourdieu's approach on literary production, this paper examines the state of producing drama as a literary genre of the 1960s Iran as well as the formation of its production field. The examination will begin by exploring the argument on products and producers of the 1960s which we claim to have been accompanied by application of Bourdieu's theory on the principle of field and placement of positions in polarization in terms of closeness and distance to other fields. In addition we have' used the positions in relation to a most important element that is "the field of power", in order to explain the polarization of the fields. The results indicate that in the pure pole of production, i.e., thinking theater, a range of producers can be identified as they occupy places in the various positions of this pole in terms of how they turn to Iranian or western drama forms as well as their mode of implication. Accordingly, not only the paper attempts to identify the field, but also it tries to show the formation of the literary field in the 1960s Iran.

Bourdieu's relational approach, beyond subjective and objective schemes called the third way, endeavors to analyze the social phenomena employing the relationship between subjective and objective elements. Therefore, this article aims to carry out a study, a field clarification (tabyine meidan), of influential writer Sadegh Hedayat, with regard to Bourdieus model as well as using his original concepts, such as field, habitues and taste. Due to Bourdieu's experiment this writer's lifestyle have been reconstructed based on the works done in Bourdieu's Difference using 22 essential factors derived from his interpretation of this concept. Also the writing style of this writer with regard to his most important work, i.e., The Blind Owl, has been analyzed using the 8 factors extracted from Roland Barthes.After reconstructing his lifestyle as well as writing style, the quality and quantity of the mentioned relationships have been analyzed on the basis of the pertinent factors and the circumstances of the literary production field in the time of publication of his book to answer and explain the questions.

This paper is an attempt to compare the culture of media with media policy in the context of the developed and less-developed societies. Because mass media, particularly TV carry the responsibility of providing their audience with entertaining and training materials for the society they have been considered as important means of socialization. However, because of their cultural policies, which tend to diffuse mediocre culture while benefiting from wide range of audiences, they have been criticized. Accordingly, this paper examines the dominant cultural policies of media as well as provides a description of visual perspectives of culture of media based on a qualitative and comparative analysis.

The presence of the internet users in the virtual space, particularly a constant and continuous presence as opposed to temporal presence, with professional and semi- professional motivation as opposed to with motivations instigated by entertainment purposes would have various and profound effects on various aspects of the users' identity as well as on their life style. Here we will focus on the Iranian users, especially the Iranian youth as they constitute the largest group of Iranian population who have shown to have been engaged in internet through the usage of the features, facilities and opportunities provided by internet. In fact, Iranian users regarding their objectives in the real world and also their kind and degree of the usage of the internet would receive different and broad changes gradually. In this paper, we argue that the social effect of presence of the Iranian youth in the virtual space and will explain how the various dimension of their identity and attitudes have changed.The findings have been gathered through qualitative method and some techniques such as in-depth interview, field research among 10 professional users as well as participatory observations and content analysis of a number weblogs. The results of this study reveal that constant use of the internet and especially interaction and exchange of information with other users will lead to construction of modem and reflexive identity among the users. Meanwhile, the rate, kind and mode of use and the management of the self by the Iranian users in virtual space will affect the quality and quantity of identity change of the users.

Mobile phone as the most applied form of interpersonal media compared to other means of communication not only has provided the users with their communicative needs, but also it has offered them other possibilities that this paper attempts to discover. The findings of our research indicate that the gratification that has resulted from owning a mobile phone not only is because of the omnipresence and accessibility of the mobile but also is because of the security and sense of free will that the users feel when they use it. This paper provides an argument on patterns of the uses and gratification of Iranian mobile phone users as they use this means of communication to establish interpersonal communication and to create or gain entertainment. The uses and gratifications include dialing, sending message, playing game etc.). This study has applied use and gratification theory and the sample was about 256.