https://www.scds.ir/ Socio-Cultural Digital Studies en daily 1 Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0330 Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0330 https://www.scds.ir/article_546.html The aim of the present study is to examine how the body is represented on the Instagram pages of Iranian influencers with disabilities. Using netnography and thematic analysis, this study investigates the activities of ten Iranian influencers with disabilities over a six-month period. The data analysis yielded four main themes: my capable self, my beautiful body, my unique everyday life, and my happy family. These themes indicate that the influencers under study, drawing on the affordances of the Instagram platform, seek to create an alternative and inspirational narrative of their bodies and their everyday lived experience. Their published content contains elements of hope, manifested in notions such as acceptance, effort, purposiveness, perseverance, gratitude, sports, art, motivation, and success. The findings of the study show that through the deliberate representation of their bodies, these individuals attempt to redefine the social understanding of disability and ability. By simultaneously showcasing their capabilities and acknowledging their limitations, they construct a new image of the body and contribute to positive role-modeling in the public sphere, an endeavor that may lead to a deepened social understanding, shifts in attitudes, and improvements in the quality of life of persons with disabilities. https://www.scds.ir/article_514.html In postrevolutionary Iran, the politics of producing space was grounded in organizing space according to the requirements of the religious law. The transformation of the Iranian nation into the Shiite ummah through the 1979 Revolution generated the need to create religiously sanctioned spaces aimed at removing vice from the public sphere and promoting devout religious practice. A clear example of this is hijab, which women are required to observe in Islamic public space based on the dichotomy of mahram and non-mahram. However, with the emergence of the social network Instagram, it became possible to share visual situations in which women were unveiled, making the state of being without hijab in private space publicly visible. This led to the formation of a collective visual habit of seeing unveiled Iranian women and transformed this habit into a visual unconscious shaped by the entanglement of society with digital technology. Within the collective unconscious of Instagram users, seeing the unveiled body of Iranian women has become habitual, and at the very least, user profiles have contributed to normalizing such habituation. The primary aim of the present article is to examine this particular function of Instagram, which became radically activated during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. The theoretical framework employed in this article is grounded in posthumanism and is rhetoric-centered, with rhetoric conceived as critique. According to the findings, Instagram has created an expansive public sphere in which the private unveiled body has been transformed into a public unveiled body. The collective visual experience of the public unveiled body on Instagram has cultivated a visual unconscious of bodily transformation within Iranian culture. https://www.scds.ir/article_513.html Cyberfeminism is a novel theoretical approach that emphasizes the potential of the internet and social networks for women’s empowerment, directing theorization and research toward more fundamental layers of the relationship between femininity, technology, the structural transformation of the public and private spheres, and the resulting social changes. In Iran, women’s widespread engagement with social networks, particularly Instagram, in recent years indicates that studying the relationship between femininity and women’s spontaneous communication in these spaces requires deeper theoretical insight. Within this framework, the main research question of this study concerns “the types of patterns in the expression of Iranian women’s femininity on Instagram.” To address this, the theoretical formulation of the relationship between femininity and cyber technology from a cyberfeminist perspective was first examined. Then, through qualitative content analysis of sample Instagram pages, the components of feminine self-expression and the construction of femininity were analyzed. Ultimately, eight main patterns of cyber-mediated femininity on Iranian Instagram were identified: the Cybermother, Cyberactivist, Cybertourist, Cybercounselor, Cyberconsultant, Cyberstylist, Cyberentrepreneur, and Cyberathlete. https://www.scds.ir/article_553.html The keyword digital most often denotes technology, and among technologies it is used more frequently to refer to hardware (devices) than to software (systems). The term first emerged in relation to tools within engineering, and then in relation to business (i.e. products of  companies), which is circulated in other disciplines and social discourses, yet it remained a technical–economic term. The concept of digital transformations is likewise employed solely to denote technological change and is shaped by three tendencies: first, such transformations are configured primarily in technical–instrumental terms; second, they are framed as commodities in economic exchange and as managerial objects; and third, they are articulated through the reduction of the social to the technical. These discourses have also become widespread in academic texts and have entered the discourses of non-engineering fields such as management, education, information, and communication; therefore, instead of criticizing or analyzing the cultural–social antecedents or consequences of digital transformations, the same instrumentalist and economistic discourse is reproduced in these fields, representing and conceptualizing social transformations as effects of technical–economic transformations that are limited and conditionalized by them. In the texts which are studied in this paper, the concept of digital transformations is technologized, technologies are reduced to tools, the economic–managerial dimensions receive primary focus and emphasis, and the cultural–social dimensions are neglected or ignored. Thus, digital transformations are embedded within technical–economic relations, and economic relations are disembedded from social relations under capitalism, digital transformations are disembedded from social relations accordingly. The alternative approach is socio-cultural studies, which configure, articulate, and conceptualize the digital through its socio-cultural practices, processes, and contexts.  https://www.scds.ir/article_552.html This article aims to examine the cultural spread of pseudoscience in the context of the internet and, given the expanding power of science and technology in societies, seeks to conceptualize the reasons for the spread of pseudoscience as a cultural phenomenon from a cognitive-communicative perspective. The method used for this purpose is narrative review and theoretical synthesis. Since the scope of the study is propositional, the relevant domains were first identified. Subsequently, selected articles were reviewed, summarized, and integrated using the narrative review approach. Based on the findings, two categories of factors lead users to disseminate pseudoscience in virtual environments: characteristics of the message and users’ mental states or needs. However, the activation of cognitive alertness mechanisms can interrupt this process, such that a user, upon identifying content as pseudoscientific, refrains from sharing it or transfers it with a different function by attaching a counter-narrative to it. It should be noted that the latter case does not prevent the dissemination of pseudoscience. https://www.scds.ir/article_551.html The aim of this article is to provide a historical analysis of the evolution of video governance and policymaking in Iran, taking into account the transformations in the governance of mass broadcasting media over the past four decades, with particular emphasis on developments from the 2010s onward. In other words, by analyzing the institutions of radio, television, and video, along with their content policies and their regulatory and administrative practices, the article advances the claim that the policymaking and regulation of video have historically evolved in specific ways. This historical trajectory also explains why the dispute over the regulatory authority for video-on-demand platforms, and specifically the definition of widespread audio and video, has remained unresolved. The methodology of the article is primarily based on documentary analysis. Through a historical and critical examination of particular phases in the development and transformation of video and media policymaking from the perspectives of legislation, technological change, and conceptual contestation, the article seeks to identify the origins of the current conflict. Following the document analysis, five phases were identified: the ideological phase, the pragmatic phase, the libertarian phase, the technological phase, and the policymaking phase. Ultimately, despite media convergence and the increasing intermediality of media forms, video and video-on-demand platforms cannot be subsumed under television broadcasting. Therefore, the term widespread audio and video may encompass live streaming, IPTV, and online television-like services, but it does not apply to video-on-demand platforms. The governance and regulation of these platforms, in theoretical, legal, and historical terms, should remain under the authority of the country’s primary cultural governance institutions.