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Original Article | Open Access | Asian J. Soc. Sci. Leg. Stud., 2024; 6(1), 1-18 | doi: 10.34104/ajssls.024.01018

Urban Themes Constructed in the Persian Twitter

Maryam Peimani * Mail Img Orcid Img ,
Abdolhossein Kalantari Mail Img

Abstract

This study was conducted to investigate Persian tweets with urban content on Twitter. The main attention of this research is 22 city-related words applied to the tweets. The method of this research is to mine big data extracted from Twitter over the course of four weeks. The basis for analyzing is the text of tweets. The applied concepts and theories are borrowed from Habermass public sphere theory, Lefebvres spatial dialectic, and Manuel Castles space of flows. The results obtained from the analysis of tweets suggest that Persian Twitter users emphasize the central cities of Tehran and Isfahan when discussing the city. The space of flow theory is also visible without it contradicting the spatial dialectic of Lefebvre due to the spatial structure of Twitter, as users go back and forth between the urban space and the online space in an attempt to have a conversation with each other about urban issues. In Persian Twitter without historical and spatial logic, users write about the city and communicate with each other. Finally, despite the centrism mentality in Persian Twitter, it has challenged the possibility of forming a dialogue space for citizens.

INTRODUCTION

With the structural transformation of the public sphere in the view of the Habermas, cities became public domain. urbanization means the separation of social life into two spheres, public and private, in which there is a mutual relationship between these two spheres the diminution of the private sphere to the nuclear family made it possible for individuals to enter the public sphere without the support of an institutional private sphere in their leisure time or at the time of employ-ment this segregation attempts to fill the void of the bourgeois public sphere (Habermas, 1999). In fact, modern urbanization shapes the new structure of the public sphere. This public sphere consists of government intervention and the private capitalist who control it or operate in it. Todays cities and the metropolises is the arena of activity for the general public. Those who travel in it every day and, according to Lefebvre, form various spatial actions in it. These actions are by the mass of the people or the establishment of law and power by the government and quasi-governmental institutions. Representations of urban spaces are in the hands of engineers and employers who carry out urban modifications and the constructions according to the rules and profitability of capital. Roads, public buildings or private municipal elements, parks, warehouses and shops, etc. All are in the hands of state or non-state power. Ultimately, only in them do citizens arrange their daily actions or, in their art and writing, blend spaces of the representation with imagination and produce artistic and writing productions. The social construction of reality takes place in the everyday affairs. Language shows the coordinates of the lives of individuals in society and this life is replete with meaningful topics. What is presented to a person in everyday life here and now‎ is the reality of his consciousness, in this way each person experiences everyday life based on his place and time, and his attention to the world around him is what it is to do anyway. So, the objective reality of society and its persistence in everyday life constitute each persons perception of the world around him and this perception in the social context makes‎ play a role. And these realities are all constructed and dealt with in society (Berger, 1399). Now we are faced with the fact that in todays cities, in the transformation of the structure of the public sphere, social reality is built in such a way that not all interactions and actions of individuals take place in the geographical space of the city, but many communications and actions of citizens in the Internet arena. 

Today, many people use the Internet to procure consumable items, to carry out office and leisure activities, and to conduct friendly gatherings. This new space, despite the existence of social networks, has allowed the range of the citizen communication and interactions to go beyond the neighborhood level, with anyone anywhere expressing their thoughts on urban topics and the urban public sphere in it and others who may never have met having interactions with him. It is in this way that the importance of refining Twitters space as a social network becomes clear. 

We need to see what the citizens who show up in the cities every day say about cities? Watch the high volume of Persian Twitter productions about the city, to know what points do we have about the cities of our lives when the participation of citizens is very low, what are their contributions on Twitter from time to time? Social interactions in the city, as Mahdavian mentioned in his dissertation, in the city of Tehran have caused the possibility of interactions in the city to be greatly reduced due to the commodification of the urban space. (Mahdavian, 2017) In the context that the possibility of urban interactions in geographical space seems difficult & sometimes impossible, the existence of Internet space in social networks is a kind of the alternative to building urban public space.‎ That is why it is important to understand how and what communication is about in this space, even if this space is not a mirror of the whole social facade, because not all citizens are present in it, but again, due to the many interactions in this space, one can observe the space of flows in it.

Representation spaces and the conversations that form around them are important to our research since by using features such as hashtags and how many retweets from a tweet, this space will be a dominant space among individuals, and this makes it possible to have a magnified image of this space because in a public space a dominant discourse is important. By contrast, those tweets that dont get much reaction are emblematic of marginal discourse about the city. On the other hand, representations of space in the city cause citizens to have various space actions, and these actions are sometimes suppressed due to laws or the social contracts. For example, one of the space activities is cycling, which is carried out in the streets and alleys of the city, but this same space action may be difficult because of the laws in Iran for women and they cannot use bicycles in the city. When this space action is banned, there is no possibility to talk, protest and complain about it in a geographical location but Twitter allows citizens to continue using their tweets. Have a space action on Twitter. Because of its availability in all places, the internet has this privilege over other public spaces that do not require city-level relocation to establish urban interactions, but it has the same point on the other. Citizens need to relocate to gain access to geographic locations and access urban amenities. 

Therefore, on Twitter, it is not spatial action, but the sound of actions. Different voices in Persian Twitter can tell us if there is a conversation and discussion about a space action that has taken place in a particular geographical location, what representations of space do these conversations have? How do they describe it, and what do they feel about it?  The entry of the masses into the public sphere caused more government involvement in the public sphere, whereas the sphere was supposed to be for distance from its power and control. Laws are passed in parliament and then enforced by the government without it any longer caring what the public thinks. Only at the time of polls are propaganda techniques used to attract citizens votes by parties. Public opinion in this position means the political demands being said by parliament and the parties. For this reason, when public opinion is refined by opinion polling bases, it must be considered that public opinion is reflected in the form of legal reality present in the effect of socialization and social control. On this basis, the official opinion that is highlighted in the media and in advertising is reflected in the public, and informal thoughts become entangled in the islands of peoples personal lives (Habermas, 1399; Fairooz et al., 2023).

A political society with a government and the legal institutions must rely on the rule of the law. Citizens should also be able to separate objective and subjective attitudes in their everyday actions and thus in communicative action be able to use the critical capacity of speech because in a place of the lifeworld where social connectedness is dimmed, media and propaganda try to intervene in it by reproducing pre-conceptions and make systemic linkage with technology sit in its place. In this sense, the application of the concept of the public sphere is, in fact, the trans-formative public sphere, extended in all dimensions of social life and realized through the communicative action between the actors of society. Its the public sphere in the tug of state power and the power of the rich, which is why its important to find different informal voices in it (Habermas, 1392, 524-525). 

Regarding the right to the city, Harvey argues that the right to the city should be taken to mean the right to rule over the entire process of urbanism, which was increasingly pervading rural areas through phenomena ranging from agricultural business to second homes and rural tourism. He goes on to state that urban social movements, which are numerous throughout the world, are in fact often unrelated to each other. What should be their desire if these were to be joined in some way: greater democratization control over the production and use of surpluses because the establishment of the city using the surplus has been made possible (Harvi, 1392, 53). The space of flows is the material organization of social functioning that have temporal subscripts and act through flows (ibid., 477). Flows are a series of interactions between actors that are not physically connected to each other, and the space of flows is the material support of the dominant functions in the information society; the first layer is electronic stimuli, this layer is a form of space like city. The second layer is nodes and axes, which determines the main data base. The third layer refers to the spatial organization of the dominant managerial elite. People are local but elites are cosmopolitan, which is why the more a social organization rests on non-historical currents, the logic of world power escapes the social shackles of local communities. Elites are also indispensable to distinguish themselves from the mass of people who draw the line between insider and noninsider. Stream-space architecture is a postmodern architecture that pretends to say nothing and silence is its message (Castelles, 1389, 477-488). 

An important question about these spaces is who has the right to live in the image that exists of cities? Social groups compete with each other for access to important city outposts, and city power means the power to exert a particular image of the city. The power of the image they try to impose by preferring one representation to another representation. Homeless people and addicts, for example, are driven from areas of the city where they have a greater presence. These dominant images are the result of the marketing of cities and are usually oriented to the power structure. Thats why theyre more interested in attracting imaginary consumers. The two most important images in this theme are promenades and passageways (Castells, 239-307). Cyberspace is an urban space that no longer takes root in a specific location on Earth, limitations on connectivity and bandwidths have more impact on the formation of these cities than accessibility and land value. Their operations are carried out in an asynchronous manner, and the subjects have occupied these cities, which are undeveloped and the separate incarnations of each other and exist in the form of collections of users and pseudonyms. The locations and headquarters of these cities are built virtually and with software not with physical mate-rials and also instead of city passes, computer logic links connect these places. From this perspective, urban design is as related to computer programming as it is to the‎ composition of the public spaces (ibid., 452). A place is a site which is self-sufficient by the form of function and meaning within the boundaries of physical proximity. For example, a city always remains a city, but different people commute in it. But the atmosphere of flows implies a rapid and widespread arrival and departure of people in a place that is not subject to local rules. People still live in places but function and power are achieved through the space of streams. Space of flows tries to impose its non-historical, networked logic on fragmented places (ibid, 494). 

After the Egyptian revolution, the question arises in abundance as to whether the role of Facebook and twitter is decisive in this regard? After the Egyptian revolution, there were various headlines in newspapers and magazines calling this revolution the Facebook and twitter revolution. But then doubts were raised such as whether there was no possibility of a popular uprising without these social networks? People who were present in Tahrir Square were asked how much face-to-face communication and how much they used mobile communications to coordinate the dissemination of‎ information. They concluded that only 13% of people have benefited from contacts such as Twitter and 98% of people from face-to-face communication. They have used the face-to-face communication as a source of information and coordination. So, this revolution wasnt really an internet revolution but the possibilities that mass and social media gave it, made it take on a different show from past upstarts. 

A study was conducted on the Wall Street movement that occurred shortly after in the United States, and yet again, even though people had 30 percent more Internet access in the United States than Egypt, the importance of face-to-face communication was much greater. Thats why the Twitter revolution and the Twitter uprising is just a myth that is being debunked more and more by governments every day. But it should not be forgotten that in this current atmosphere and with the same possibilities, it has been possible to have different activism and to create a space in which to engage in dialogue at certain points in time, such as the release of the WikiLeaks documents and the disclosure of information by Snowden (Fush, 2014, 181-200).

METHODOLOGY

to collect data at the right time, the one-month interval of the protests of farmers in Isfahan was set as a time criterion (November 14 to December 12, 2021) in order to have a valid time measure, i.e., an urban crisis in one of the cities of Iran, and based on this, we can obtain spatial action in meters and measure the texts generated on Twitter Bring. Protests by Isfahani farmers started in the city from the beginning of the year 1400. After the end of the summer and with the beginning of the autumn season there were protests of these people sporadically throughout the city. For example, a rally was formed in front of the Isfahan Regional Water Company, but again these protests continued. From the beginning of November, farmers gathered and sat on the dry bed of the Zayande Rood. The continued sit-ins and gatherings of these people led to other people joining the rally until the gathering ended on Friday, December 5, 1400 with the intervention of law enforcement (Quoted from the Farsi Wikipedia). We considered the month-long interval of these protests as directly marking the occupation of urban public space in order to achieve its demands, in accordance with the interval of extracting our data from the Persian Twitter. The process of text mining involves a variety of activities that extract information from unstructured text data. There are many different methods for text mining. Among these are information extraction, method based on used phrases, and text grouping. One way to extract information from the context of its keywords. This method briefly unveils the content of the text and gives us a general theme of the content. (monkeylearn.com/text-mining/) In a study of users with suicidal content on Twitter, words related to suicide were extracted from various suicide forums, and after refining it for several days on Twitter these words were presented to psychology professionals and a few related words were identified at the end became. It was then worked on extracting tweets associated with that word in 6 weeks. Classification of urban public spheres was used to obtain valid words in the urban sphere. According to Kamran Zakavat in his article, urban public spaces are located on several floors, those that take place in urban spaces such as streets and alleys and squares, or ecological spaces, which include tourism and health, commercial and service spaces. On the other hand, because urban public space is primarily a space where people inter-act socially and in which there are urban and community components, urban public transport is also an integral part of the urban public space (Shojaei, 1394). Similarly, the list of words associated with the city was extracted to compile the desired data on Twitter as follows: City

  1. local public places: Street, Park, Mosque, Vali-easr (street) 
  2. Urban transport: Bus, Subway, Snapp (like Uber in Iran), Tapsi (again another company like Uber), Bicycle  
  3. Local and Urban Ecological Areas: the City Council, Stadium, Municipality, Gym, Store
  4. Urban Problems Occurring in Public Places: Water, peddler, Working Children, the Disabled People, Elderly, Quarantine, Housing, Neighboring, Rent 
  5. And the specific names of the cities because the data was collected in the area of water protests in Isfahan: Tehran Karaj Shiraz Isfahan Ahvaz Abadan Sistan and Baluchistan Mashhad Rasht Tabriz Kerman Khuzestan Kermanshah Yazd 

After conducting a one-week pilot to measure the number of the tweets posted around these words and analyzing their relevance to the city, they collected tweets containing these words. Since in Persian there is no substitute for our immunities in words, it is easily possible to make mistakes in understanding words with the same spelling. One of these cases we encountered in this study is two similar words the “housing” with two readings of maskan and mosaken, and there is no means to identify the species in question, so this was removed. Or that the number of tweets containing the word count was lower than expected, which made our sampling incomplete, whereas the number of daily tweets extracted was between 500 and 2000 tweets per day in most cases, some words were used in a much smaller number of tweets and this meant that we did not have a uniform data to compare and draw conclusions, such as the word (mosque). The word in question covered more than the topic of the city where the content of the tweets was checked using the TF-IDF method (like quarantine), in which we found that tweets containing these words were more of an issue than a city issue. A number of words were removed and the remaining words were 22 words:

1. Tehran, 2. Karaj, 3. Shiraz, 4. Isfahan, 5. Ahvaz, 6. Abadan, 7. Sistan and Baluchistan, 8. Mashhad, 9. Rasht, 10. Tabriz, 11. Kerman, 12. Khuzestan, 13. Kermanshah, 14. Municipality, 15. City Council, 16. Street, 117. Bus18. Metro, 19. Shoppers, 20. Gasht Ershad, 21. Working Children, 22. Valieasr 

Then tweets containing these words were extracted in the desired interval. There are various methods for text analysis and text mining on Twitter. One of them is to draw a word cloud that represent the most important words in the text, and the frequency of a word is usually used to indicate it. This method is very suitable for summarizing text but does not specify the context of the text, meaning that if two words with the same frequency are in the image, it is not clear that they were used together or used separately in the text (ibid., 66). There are several ways to get keywords in a text. One method is TF-IDF. This method is based on weighting the words to get their meaning in the text. For example, if the word “is” is counted in a text, we will run into numerous “is”, so the TF (term frequency) value is high, but the word “is” is everywhere in the text and has a lot of generality, so the IDF (inverse document frequency) is low. So, a word has to have high TF-IDF so that we can count it as a keyword component (towardsdata science.com) Another method is YAKE which is fortunately applicable to different languages and is an automatic word extraction method that gets the most relevant keywords by statistical method and weighting to words without requiring a dictionary or external text be compares text to itself and is one of the best practices for languages other than English (campos et al., 257). There are suitable extensions for text mining in the Orange application, which can be used to output TF-IDF and YAKE by uploading the same tweets that were collected in 4 weeks took it. We will then have the keywords that have been obtained, whose continuity and content we can see. 

RESULTS

‘Working Children: As we can see in Fig. 1 in this chapter, the extracted keywords related to working children are: support, cartons, payments, spending, corruption and poverty. The image of the working childrens words cloud shows that the most used words in tweets include the Tehran, support, poverty, country and pay (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Keywords and word cloud of Working Children. 

Working Children actually the most important topics that are constantly mentioned with working children are these words. As can be seen, the only word related to the city is Tehran. The mention of Tehran as an important word when it comes to working children shows that in the eyes of Twitter users the city is associated with the urban dilemma of the working children.

Fig. 2: Keywords and word cloud of Gasht Ershad. 

In this way, Twitter users perception of child labor is a social problem mixed with poverty and corruption, on the other hand, the word support reflects the users perspective on this issue, in the sense that child labor is a problem that needs support, which is why accompanying the word Tehran with these three words, poverty and corruption and sup-port, shows us that there is probably a two triune relationship between poverty and corruption despite Children working in Tehran are in the minds of users who consider solving this problem in the interest of support (from whose side and from whom?)

Fig. 3: Keywords and word cloud of Peddler.  

1. Gasht Ershad: (a type of morality police in Iran which take care of Hijab not being fell from womens head in Iran) is a theme that covers various aspects, from womens issues to a kind of urban issue because it is one of the areas that plays a role in the urban landscape. 

2. Keywords Gasht Ershad and its Cloud Words (Image 2) More Showing The picture of this phenomena. The keyword ‘video shows this. Therefore, only the texts generated on Twitter alone are not enough to show users mental perspective on the subject and require analysis of the films, but nevertheless we can con-clude that, in addition to showing the films and the main issue of the veil in this topic, an urban issue is also formed in the minds of users because the words associated with the city are in the word cloud. It is a street and Tehran. Although this is an issue for the whole country, it shows that Twitter users have an understanding of the urban issue of Gasht Ershad only in Tehran. 

Fig. 4: Keyword and word cloud of Khuzestan. 

3. The word peddler, whether in cloud words or in keywords, has a great correlation with urban issues, metro, street and municipality, and the word “city” itself shows that this issue on Persian Twitter is an urban issue. (Fig. 3

In fact, Persian Twitter users have used this word along with urban manifestations and thoroughfares, suggesting that the perceived space in their minds is an urban image of the peddlers. On the other hand, this social issue in the minds of users is not limited to the city alone. The existence of the word kid also suggests that it has a lot of correlation with children in understanding citizens.

But the point there is that despite the presence of the word municipality in these tweets, we dont include the word peddler in the key-words of the tweet contains ‘Municipality (picture 18)‎. It can be said that when it comes to peddlers, the municipality is the main influencer, but when it comes to the municipality, this relationship is not twofold and therefore in the minds of users, municipality is an influential factor in the issue of peddlers.

4. Abadan, Khuzestan and Ahvaz: You observe that the specific names of the cities had different results. Abadan, Khuzestan and Ahvaz are associated with the name Isfahan, and since data extraction was during the protests of Isfahan farmers, this is important. On the other hand, of course, the word city and protests are just keywords. The method of extracting keywords also includes Isfahan and Khorramshahr, which indicates the importance of a contextual issue at the time in question (Fig. 4, 5, and 6). The correlation of the words Isfahan and Khuzestan shows that the citizens present on Twitter consider these two cities similar in the issue of water shortage or even see the two as reason and effect in the sense that the issue when the context is the time in question is the street protests of farmers in Isfahan, citizens also speak from Khuzestan and consider this an integrated issue. Perhaps this can be explained by users environmental awareness of the water supply issue in these two provinces. 

5. Isfahan in Isfahan Keywords The notable issue is that the word ‘city is listed as a separate keyword. Given that the Isfahan protests have caused the production of tweets to increase on Thursdays and Fridays every week.

In this word a higher number of tweets has been extracted than in other cities. So, looking at (Fig. 7) we find that the city has been the main topic of discussion in tweets about Isfahan. On the other hand, the hashtag #اصفهان is also visible separately in this word and can be the understood according to the temporal position of the topic. Because when a topic arises in an urban space as a protest or rally, it is common for hashtags to appear in conjunction with (crush or against) the same topic on Twitter for it to become a trend. 

One such issue has been the hashtag #metoo on Twitter in reaction to the harassment of women, which may name as a clear example of a topic becoming a hashtag of it. The presence of the word‎ farmers, water and protests in Isfahans word cloud confirms the high solidarity between urban space and Twitter space on this issue. For this reason, it can be said that Persian Twitter is sometimes also in the role of a media to inform everyday events, because it reflects what is happening in the urban public area. The existence of the words industry, transmission, industrial and province in the word cloud shows that users are arguing over the reasons and results of the dilemma that has led to the farmers protests, in fact the Isfahan word cloud shows us an urban public sphere where users are engaged in generating social space. Just like when several citizens are discussing an issue in a city crossroad.

6. Tehran is the word with the highest number of the tweets, with its generated content reaching more than 2,000 tweets on some days. So, this number of tweets were higher due to the high volume of keyword data.

But the remarkable thing is that the most important keyword on this list is ‘university. And obviously the word city is a particular word among Tehrans tweets, which has had a high frequency. So, we can conclude that when speaking of the city of Tehran, the word ‘university has been the most common word (Fig. 8).

Although Tehran as the capital has many urban trappings, Twitter users have spoken of universities in the city. As a key word, the university reflects the importance of its location in the city of Tehran. Of course, the synchronicity of Tehrans data extraction with a photo of graduates facing the head at the University of the Tehran is not so unrelated. (www. mizan.news/en/news/770923)

Twitter events have the even been used in the news about this photo. For this reason, the university in Tehran as an urban place is an important issue that Twitter users have paid attention to, and as mentioned, it has been facing the university and not at the university, which makes it more of an urban landscape.