In an ongoing effort to reinvent itself, Project: Carousel is launching a new monthly feature to acquaint its readers with interesting and important people/organizations working in the field of global media and cultural studies. These people/organizations have, through their work, made some kind of a difference to the lives of people around the world – a difference that has made a difference.

A great idea.
A new technological tool or invention.
A new way to perceive the world.
Something that, we believe, simply needs to be heard and seen.

The series called Mind.Medium.Message will consist of three-part exposes:

Part 1 will offer biographies and background information and explain why these people/organizations are interesting and important.

Part 2 will look at the more general influence and contribution these people/organizations have made to the field they work in – academically, theoretically, artistically, technologically, politically.

Part 3 will provide them with a voice, featuring interviews, guest writers and artists, and offering a platform for their work.

(However, please note: this will not be an exercise in idolatry. The perspectives we provide to our chosen ones will be as multifaceted and critical as the people/organizations we profile. We will provide a platform; not an altar.)

While the list of people/organizations we have lined up is as eclectic and diverse as the contributors to Project: Carousel we believe there is no better way to begin than with somebody who – technically – is still one of us. Iranian blogger Hossein ‘Hoder’ Derakshan pursued an MA in Global Media and Postnational Communication at SOAS and, as he has yet to submit his dissertation, technically remains a SOAS student.

Hossein, however, has been detained in Iran without charges and under uncertain conditions since late last year. Therefore, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of his imprisonment, we are launching our Mind.Medium.Message series with a profile of Hossein and the difference he has made. We want to use this launch as a platform to highlight issues around his confinement (as well as that of other prisoners) in Iran and to get SOAS students to pressure the SOAS administration to issue a formal statement on his behalf. (EDITORS NOTE: because of changes in circumstances regarding Hossein’s current status, we have withdrawn this part of our project.)

We encourage you to all get involved.  We will shortly tell you how.

**

Hossein ‘Hoder’ Derakhshan is a journalist, Internet activist, and blogger, nicknamed the Blogfather for spawning Iran’s spectacular blogging revolution. Since the mid-1990s, he has been advocating the use of the Internet as a means for social and political reform in Iran.

Born in Tehran in 1975, Hossein is the oldest of three siblings in a religious family. Hossein spent most of his primary and secondary school years at Nikan Institute, a private religious school whose strict dress code and lack of humanities surely irritated him: ‘I never do things I have to do. I’ve always resisted what’s forced on me. I’m a rebel.’ Hossein transferred from Nikan to a public school before his final year in 1992, trading religion classes for the pop culture of Tehran.

In 1995, his brother’s friend introduced him to the wonders of a computer connected to a modem. This may not have been the Internet (yet), but it was a fascinating new world with forums and chat rooms that supported Persian.

Hossein started out as a journalist writing about Internet and digital culture for a popular reformist newspaper, Asr-e Azadegan, in 1999. When his paper was closed down by conservative judicial authorities in 2000, Hossein moved to Canada and started working for the BBC Persian service in Toronto.

In September 2001, Hossein set up one of the first blogs in Persian, having, according to Wired, ‘figured out a way to combine Unicode and Blogger.com’s free tools to handle Persian characters’.

In response to a request from a reader, Hossein created a simple how-to-blog guide in Persian. As Nasrin Alavi writes in We Are Iran, ‘with the modest aim of giving other Iranians a voice, he set free an entire community’. In 2003, the Guardian wrote that Hossein’s ‘step-by-step guide to creating a Persian weblog should take much of the credit for inspiring thousands of Iranians to start their own blogs.’

And so the Blogfather was born.

For several years his blog, Editor: Myself, written both in Persian and English, was the most popular blog in Iran but in 2004 it was blocked as Hossein broke one of the iron rules of the Iranian press and criticized spiritual leader Khamenei.

By that time Hossein had immersed himself in the politics of Iran and the Internet: he had founded Stop censoring us, a blog to watch the situation of Internet censorship in Iran; he spoke repeatedly about Internet censorship, methods to get around filters, and the use of wikis to aid political reform and the growth of democracy.

It was breaking taboos like these that got Hossein in trouble with the Iranian police who detained and interrogated him when he visited Iran for the first time since emigrating in 2005. He was allowed to leave Iran only after being forced to sign an apology.

Hossein remained a passionate critic of (not only) Iranian politics and publicly broke yet another big taboo when he visited Israel, a country off limits to Iranians, in 2006 : ‘As a citizen journalist, I’m going to show my 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like and how people live there.’

In the fall of 2008 Hossein returned to Iran before completing his MA Global Media and Postnational Communication at SOAS in London and was arrested at his family’s home on 1 November 2008. It was not until late December 2008 that Iran confirmed that Hossein was in detention.

Today, one year after his arrest, official charges have yet to be laid, a trial date has yet to be set, and the conditions under which Hossein is being held remain uncertain.

Part 2 of this expose will look at the Blogfather’s controversial and turbulent career which has split the blogging community he has helped spawn right down the middle.

Part 3 of this expose will look at some of the controversies and conspiracy theories surrounding Hossein’s disappearance, highlight the Free Hoder campaign, and offer a platform to Hossein’s family, which has only very recently broken its public silence.

Stay tuned for more.

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