The Iranian anti-government movement took an innovative step that revealed the capabilities and potentials of new media in social mobilization.  This new phase of movement began with Iranian men posting pictures of themselves on social networks such as Facebook wearing women’s headscarves as a political statement after the arrest of a student protester, Majid Tavakoli. The day after his arrest, an Iranian news agency (Fars), which is close to the Revolutionary Guard, published a picture of Tavakoli dressed in women clothing and a headscarf.  Fars reported that the man had been caught wearing an all-covering woman’s Islamic dress in an attempt to hide himself and avoid arrest.  The news agency concluded that such actions were a “permanent stain on the illegal student movement.”

Majid Tavakoli was arrested after his speech on December 7^th, a large student-led protests where he explicitly denounced Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, and urged students to reject his dictatorship.  In the Web campaigns calling for his release, Iranian oppositions have posted hundreds of photos online of men in women’s clothing to mock what they say was a government attempt to humiliate the activist and discredit the opposition.  Many of them accused authorities of forcing Tavakoli into women’s clothing and photographing him.  Others claimed that the pictures might have been digitally manipulated.

The online backlash underlined the power of an image in the cyber-based political participation.  Many of the published pictures were whimsical self-portraits.  Iranian men wore the similar scarf that they believed Mr. Tavakoli was forced to wear implying that there has been three decades that all women in Iran are forced to wear such clothing.  Needless to say that the green color that has become the opposition’s emblem appeared in the most of the pictures.

Such online campaigns captured a fundamental shift in Iran’s political culture.  Pictures were meant to be shameful and humiliating.  With eyes downcast, they were published by the state to portray that a protester afraid of his imprisonment simply denies his manhood.  However, it backfired when hundreds of Iranian men published the similar pictures of themselves with the statement that: “We are all Majid.”

Given a close relations between the news agency and the Revolutionary Guard that engineered the fraudulent presidential election in last summer, the news agency action is interpreted as an attempt by the authorities to prove to the public that the opposition leaders are “less than men” who are lacking courage and bravery.  This is an old practice by the government which goes back three decades, at that time the government published a picture of the first president of the Islamic republic, Abolhassan Banisadr in woman headscarf. Though the authenticity of the picture has never been proven, state media at the time used it as evidence that Banisadr attempted to escape the country in a gutless way after his ouster in 1981.  Fars agency juxtaposed the photos of Tavakoli alongside with Banisadr’s. However, this time with new generation of Iranians the decision was subject to fail.  Iranians updated their facebook status with a prevailing statement: “Majid is multiplied, not humiliated.”

Today Iranians from both genders have questioned many of the gender codes that firmly enforced by the authorities over the past 30 years.  The Islamic Republic within two years after the revolution began to restrict the public sphere and introduced a sexual morality policy in which women were forced to wear hijab. An official gender policy and culture were first instituted, symbolized by obligatory head covering for women.  Soon after, the Islamic government expanded gender segregation in public space and criminalized sexual contact outside marriage.

It is worth mentioning that it is not just Iranian new generation who has been questioning the government moral codes, the authorities have been violating their own law.  Very often when Iranians who are residents of other countries arrive at the Iran’s airports, they have to provide their facebook account logging username and password along with their passports.  In this respect, a security agent at the airport feels free to exempt himself from the state sexual morality codes, and gets access to account of the arriver including private photos.  This is the way that the Islamic regime maintains its security.

Here I provide a video from youtube that includes some images from the online campaign of “Majid is not humiliated, he is multiplied” along with a dialogue between two Iranian Columbia professors about the characteristics of the Green movement:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hcu5v3hxEg

Breaking the Silence is an organization run by veteran Israeli soldiers who have served in the occupied Palestinian territories over the past ten years.  The goal of the organization, with a staff of ten, is to “bridge the gap of information between what the soldiers see, experience, and participate in during their service, and what the Israeli public is aware of,” explains Avital Aboody, a current staff-member and New Israel Fund/Shatil Social Justice Fellow.  It doesn’t take much to realize that this organization probably does not have a ton of support in its home country, as a majority of Israelis have shifted to a more conservative political stance since the second Intifada began in 2001. 

The staff of Breaking the Silence claims that they are not particularly media savvy and not unique in any way with regard to utilizing social media tools.  According to Aboody, the “primary goal of using the website is reach as many people as possible and to enhance our ability to raise widespread awareness.”  While most non-profits prioritize raising funds through their websites, Breaking the Silence is not all that concerned about funds, which it receives from various foundations and donor governments.  The organization’s goals, instead, are “increased awareness and transparency between the public and the military,” says Aboody, and Facebook, in this light, has lately been a key to their success.

With a Facebook group and profile in place, Breaking the Silence has been able to “maximize our ability to communicate with our allies around the world,” says Aboody.  So far, she exclaims, joining Facebook “has been very very successful and has allowed us to attract a lot of new people to our events,” including tours of the occupied territories and lectures about the daily actions of the Israeli military.

As a politically active organization in a region of the world where tensions are deep and war has occurred every decade since the late 1940s, Breaking the Silence must rely heavily on its ability to find remote allies to strengthen its power base at home. Aboody explains how the organization has recently faced “efforts by the government and an NGO-monitoring organization to censor our information to keep us from ‘breaking our silence,’ but media tools have been helpful because we can quickly elicit the support of like-minded groups who are willing to stand behind us and vouch for our legitimacy.”  As they see it, they can’t be all over the world at all times with a staff of their size, but with Facebook they can easily make their message seen and heard by many more people than they were capable of reaching beforehand.      

It may sound like the days of “grassroots” advocacy (picketing for hours and staking out on the streets for days to get petitions signed) are just about over.  Do activists no longer see the value of face-to-face interactions, opting instead for YouTube, Facebook, or Blogspot to engage the public with their message?  Are they spending more of their time navigating the Web than they are actually changing the world?  While this might appear to be the case for Breaking the Silence, the organization’s staff-members do not report feeling like they spend more, or much, of their time for that matter navigating social media sites.  Because it’s so easy to keep up the Facebook group page and profile, and the website designer manages the website, most of the staff are spending the majority of their time continuing the one-on-one interactions with people on the ground.  They continue to take people on tours of the territories, hold lecture series, and interview veteran soldiers about their years in the Israeli Defense Forces. 

The internet is just part of the process of engaging with the public; it is not the process itself.  If anything, for the passionate employees of non-profit organizations who want to make the world a better place, social networking sites like Facebook are simply a more efficient and effective way of continuing the legacy of grassroots advocacy and inching that much closer to their desired goals, and they still get to find out this weekend’s party line-up and what their friend’s cousin ate for breakfast while they’re at it.

            In September of this year, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University held an on-campus panel event with four women professors who have widely followed and respected blogs (easternblot.net, Bitch Ph.D, Tenured Radical, and Oh! Industry).  The blog topics range from science to pop culture to politics and feminism. 

            The panel, entitled “A Blog of her Own,” was advertised as a dialogue about what it’s like to be and how to become a feminist blogger.  It seemed, then, natural to expect that the event would relay the key challenges and lessons learned when blogging about feminist causes.  The reality, however, was that the audience clearly had markedly different anxieties and they were eager to have their questions answered.

            After brief presentations from the bloggers, the question and answer session began.  As more and more questions were asked, I soon realized that the students in attendance were not at all concerned about the panel’s original subject.   Rather, they were very curious to know whether blogging has made it more difficult for professors to obtain tenure at their respective universities or not.  Over and over again the students asked if remaining anonymous on one’s blog is the best way to go about it if you want tenure.            

          Margaret Soltan, a professor at George Washington University and respected blogger (University Diaries) who was not on that day’s panel says that, when asked, “I generally discourage junior faculty from blogging if they feel at all uncertain about their tenure prospects…basically I’d say the thing to do is wait until you get tenure and then let it rip.”  Accordingly, it seems like blogging does have the potential to negatively impact your future in academia.

            The writer of Bitch Ph.D. explained that she had been anonymous for three years before revealing her identity to the public.  She still did not overtly reveal it on the site itself (which is why I will respect her privacy here) because she believes that the woman on the blog has her own persona.  Yet, even though she was relieved to have made her identity public, Bitch Ph.D. claimed that she has been more careful about writing about her private life since doing it, but that it was because she did not want to hurt people.  She also said that keeping the blog has had no negative repercussions on her personal life.

            Professor Claire Potter of Wesleyan University, who already has tenure and is the author of the three-year old blog Tenured Radical, said that she came out of the closet six months into blogging because “remaining anonymous led me to make unwanted ethical compromises.”  At the panel, she described herself as a contemporary historian without rules, which she claimed threatened the university.  However, the sentiments of the university, said Potter, were not a serious professional concern of hers.   Of course Potter’s contrarian sentiments make perfect sense coming from someone who already had tenure before she began her blog.  

            Some professors, however, like Alexandra Vasquez, an associate professor at Princeton University and co-author of Oh! Industry, do not have to rebel against the university system because their blogs are openly supported by their institutions.  Due to this, Vasquez, who has yet to obtain tenure, does not let her pursuit of it bar her from expressing her opinions about academia.  Vasquez believes that her blog is “a necessary outside” from matters like promotions and career.

            Another concern non-tenured bloggers may have is that their non-academic blogs will be perceived as trivial and unsuitable for a person trying to make their career in academia.  According to Soltan, “there will always be faculty who – even with the enormous success and even prestige of many blogs these days – see blogging as trivial, dumb, self-indulgent, non-serious, non-scholarly, a waste of time, weird, etc.”  She says that “some faculty, in other words, will just be hostile,” no matter what the blog is about or how it is presented.

            So what is the answer for blogging professors? All in all, the event panelists, each of whom had different blogging stories when it came to revealing their identities, all agreed that revealing themselves to the public has actually made things easier for them in the end.  They women agreed that each blogger must make their own decision as to how their relationship will be between their blog and their career. 

            The situation for bloggers in academia is only one example of the complex challenges we all face in today’s world, with our personal lives becoming increasingly exposed to the general public online.  And while we don’t want to constantly be monitoring our online profiles because our future employers might opt to check us out on there, we also don’t want to end up jobless for that reason either.  There is no real answer for any of us, academic or not.  The only truth is that we’re all still learning about the Internet’s power on our daily lives and we’ll just have to keep playing the cards until we get it right.

After hanging around for a few more minutes, one might notice the constant circulation of women who come in and out throughout the day.  The women sit down with the two staff-members, Executive Director Ana Moraga and Program Coordinator Wendy Rosales, spilling the recent news and gossip and chatting away about their lives.  They have ups and downs like any other woman I know.  They might bring up concerns about their children not attending school, or anxieties they’re having about their family members’ financial troubles.  So what’s special about this organization?  The women come from one of most marginalized groups of women in Guatemala (not to mention the rest of the world).  The women are sex workers.

MuJER, which stands for Mujeres por la Justicia, Educación, y Reconocimiento (Women for Justice, Education, and Awareness), is a small non-profit organization dedicated to assisting women sex workers in Guatemala City in empowering themselves through classes ranging from literacy courses to beauty certification courses.  MuJER also advocates for the human rights of sex workers.  Fundraising, as for many non-profit organizations, is a key ingredient in MuJER’s success.  But the serious challenges inherent in trying to raise donations with such a tiny full-time staff, a challenging and unique mission, and a clientele of low-income, and often socially rejected women are undeniable. 

The question, then, is how does such a small, under-resourced organization raise enough funds and make enough of an impression on potential donors to sustainably achieve its objectives and provide its services to the women?  The answer lies in the Internet. 

MuJER is merely four years old.  It has 501(c)3 status in the United States so that Americans can make tax-deductible donations to the organization.  One of MuJER’s main fundraising goals is to market itself to American donors, as there are many US donors who are interested in global human rights issues (not to mention that there are significantly larger numbers of donors ready and willing to donate to non-profit organizations in the US than there are in Guatemala).  But how would someone in the US even learn of MuJER?  And why would anyone from the US contribute to MuJER over other organizations? 

These were some of the important questions Ana Moraga, the co-founder and Executive Director of MuJER, had to grapple with over the past few years so that this past summer, when I arrived as an intern, the first task on my list was to assist in the redesigning of the website.  MuJER’s original website was not especially inviting, interactive, or informative.  Donating was not really possible through the site and there were no profiles of the women, very few pictures, and only a brief summary of how the organization was founded and what its goals were. 

Throughout the summer, the web-designer Walter Aguilar, Ana Moraga, and I set out to recreate MuJER as an internationally connected, socially networked, interactive, and trailblazing organization that would inspire donors to donate, volunteers to volunteer, and others to simply read, discover, and get to know the organization.  We completely redesigned the website (mujerguatemala.org) adding pictures, personal and inspirational stories from the women, information on the challenges facing sex workers in Guatemala, and an online store selling the jewelry the women make in their jewelry workshop (jewelry is bought through PayPal or Google Checkout).  The site was built on WordPress, a free, open source web design system that makes it easy for non-techies to contribute to changes on the site.  

“Through the website, people actually know about us in the States,” says Moraga.  “We just got a volunteer who is going to be with us for a year and she found out about us through the website,” she cheerfully remarks. 

With the new website up and running, we realized that MuJER could potentially connect with many more people if it diversified its use of social networking tools.  Thus, we created a facebook page and a twitter account and invited friends from near and far to join the group. 

While these are all important accomplishments for an organization like MuJER, there are countless more steps the organization can take to increase its online readership, self-advocacy, and fundraising potential.  When I left in August, I couldn’t help but feel anxious about the fate of the organization’s Internet connectedness.   I was leaving, Moraga was planning on moving to the States in October, and we were both concerned about who would keep the website, facebook page, and twitter account active and up to date. 

The problem many small non-profits face lies in the lack of staff time available to make full use of all of the good the Internet can bring to an organization.  Without updates, tweets, wall posts, and blog entries, potential supporters in the US might lose interest and forget about an organization as geographically distant and unknown to the US public as MuJER.  As a former intern, I have an immense amount of respect and appreciation for the incredible work MuJER has done and is still doing with and for sex workers in Guatemala, but I worry about it not accomplishing as much as it can if it doesn’t find a way to keep up with the pack.  Hopefully this won’t be the case.

The only thing I long for is a single piece of conscience in the world.

Humble as cirrus, I remain blossom.

Glory days shared.

That night was born in the mind

With the smell of memory, the moon light sheds as in a romantic tale. 

Life, lies as bleachers quietly,

as long as solitude, as short as happiness

 Before leaving, I regret that I cannot flip the time and I wish to have that life in eternity. 

A leaf falls from the window, quietly lies in my book. 

It is expecting to be found when I read the book again.

Between now and then, Is it raining? Is the sun rising and shining? 

Those cirrus, persevering and optimistic , 

smiling as time seasons.

leaving my footprint on every inch of the boulevard.

 When night falls, there is a place with love of sweat.