The protests unleashed by Iran's disputed presidential election in June 2010 brought the Islamic Republic's vigorous cyber culture to the world's attention. Iran has an estimated 700,000 bloggers, and new i media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were thought to have played a key role in spreading news of the protests. The internet is often celebrated as an agent of social change in countries like Iran, but most literature on the subject has struggled to grasp what this new phenomenon actually means. In this work, the authors give a flavour of contemporary Internet culture in Iran and analyse how this new form of communication is affecting the social and political life of the country. Although they warn against stereotyping bloggers as dissidents, they argue that the internet is changing things in ways which neither the government nor the democracy movement could have anticipated. Blogistan offers both a new reading of Iranian politics and a new conceptual framework for understanding the politics of the internet, with implications for the wider Middle East, China and beyond. -- Book cover.

"Eli Noam provides a comprehensive and balanced survey of media concentration with a methodical, scientific approach. He assembles a wealth of data from the last 25 years about mass media such as radio, television, film, music, and print publishing, as well as the Internet, telecommunications, and media-related information technology." "Media Ownership and Concentration in America will be essential reading and a trove of information for scholars and students in media, telecommunications, IT, economics, and the history of business, as well as media industry professionals, business researchers, and policy makers around the world. Critics and defenders of media alike will find much that confirms and refutes their worldview."--BOOK JACKET.