Cyberspace Studies

The crucial role of cyberspace attracted the special attention of the governments in different countries, which consider it both as a challenge and an opportunity. One of the key policies and preventive measures adopted concerning the challenges posed by the cyberspace is it regulation. In fact, there are only a few states have not taken any steps in regulating their cyberspace. This paper seeks to demonstrate a set of policy proposals for the Islamic Republic of Iran through the study of three leading but different precedents in regulating the cyberspace, including the United States, the European Union, and China. This study employs a descriptive-analytical model, which recommends placing the main investment in and concentration on the final user, employing economic strategies, special attention to governmental and public institutions, prioritizing content removal over blocking, negotiating an agreement with foreign service providers, drafting a content rating system, and using international capacities for cooperation. Accordingly, the final policy proposals for the Islamic Republic of Iran would be decentralization, user-oriented decisions, prioritizing removal over blocking, and monitoring over filtering.

As a simple explanation, Internet literacy is a capability constitutive to utilizing the advantages of the Internet. But, due to the constant changes of digital technologies, what kinds of necessary capabilities are required to gain the advantages? In fact, more than focusing on the essential capabilities to benefit users from the Internet advantages, existing perceptions of Internet literacy have caused the misuse of large digital companies from users’ abilities. Due to the increasing importance of data economics, privacy, and cybersecurity, a critical review of Internet literacy has become a necessity. Based on the emerging of such new critical features of internet environment, this paper proposes a new articulation of Internet literacy. Following a review and analysis of the existing notions and classifications of Internet literacy and using grounded theory method, the article concludes by suggesting a rearticulated version of Internet literacy. The new classification is established based on the 3 main components including responsibility, productivity, and interactivity; 9 main categories, and 43 subcategories. The four critical, analytical, operational, and informational crossover components are also taken into account.

Islamophobia’s occurrence in any particular country has little do with the presence of Muslim; it is possible to be Islamophobic when there are virtually no Muslim around. This because the lack of Muslims is filled by the surplus of Islamophobic representations. This surplus of representations is now increasingly reliant on the internet. There are many studies reporting on Islamophobia on the internet, classifying the negative representations, the targeted acts of aggressive online behaviour (trolling) against Muslims. These studies are basically taxonomies, and they share this feature with general literature on Islamophobia, which is concerned with reporting instances of Islamophobia empirically with little time spent on its theorisation. Such an understanding of Islamophobia implies that it is simply dismissed as being a matter of prejudice, bias, and closed views. A Critical Muslim Studies understanding of Islamophobia developed initially in the collected volume Thinking Through Islamophobia (2010), and then subsequent publications shift the focus away positivism to decolonial discourse theory. Using decolonial discourse theory, this study will how online Islamophobia is not just a distortion of Islam, or hatred of Muslims but rather it main vectors for denying Muslim political consciousness.

This paper is an effort to discuss the concept of glocalization from a semiotic point of view. In order to carry out a semiotic analysis of globalization or glocalization, first globalization needs to be defined from a semiotic perspective. Therefore, first an explanation of globalization and glocalization in semiotic terms is provided. Some believe the ongoing process in the world cannot be best described as globalization and it should be called glocalization. According to this approach, the ongoing universal process is a combination of globalization and localization leading to new diversities, not uniformity. With a structuralist approach to semiotics a better understanding is gained on how glocalization may affect the world in which we are living. After a theoretical argument on the semiotic definition of globalization and glocalization, the results of a number of in-depth interviews with people who have experienced living in two different cultures will be analyzed in a qualitative method to provide further insight on how glocalization might work.

Over the last decade, the retail industry has had a phenomenal growth. All figures show their success and efficiency and many studies have shown the role of customer reviews in encouraging ambivalent purchasers to buy items online. There have been numerous studies on why people read and trust these comments and taking for granted the important role of customer reviews in determining buying decision, this study endeavors to identify and explain the different factors involved in making a comment “useful.” We took an Iranian retail website and collected comments on perceived “usefulness” of each review. Our results showed that perceived level of usefulness was related to the word count of the comments, personal experience of the writer with the product, emotional description of the product, and mentioning the strength/weakness points of the product.

The global cyberspace networks provide individuals with platforms to can interact, exchange ideas, share information, provide social support, conduct business, create artistic media, play games, engage in political discussions, and many more. The term cyberspace has become a conventional means to describe anything associated with the Internet and the diverse Internet culture. In fact, cyberspace is an umbrella term that covers all issues occurring through the interaction of information systems and humans over these networks. Deep evaluation of the scientific articles on the cyberspace domain provides concentrated knowledge and insights about major trends of the field. Text mining tools and techniques enable the practitioners and scholars to discover significant trends in a large set of internationally validated papers. This study utilizes text mining algorithms to extract, validate, and analyze 1860 scientific articles on the cyberspace domain and provides insight over the future scientific directions or cyberspace studies.

The current paper explores designing a web information retrieval system regarding the searching behavior of users in real and everyday life. Designing an information system that is closely linked to human behavior is equally important for providers and the end users. From an Information Science point of view, four approaches in designing information retrieval systems were identified as system-centered; user-centered; interactive and cognitive designs. However, there is a lack of research related to possible relationships between information behavior and information systems design to date. Traditionally, designers used human factors but not necessarily human behaviors while designing information systems. Therefore, there are few systems designed by information scientist aiming to regard or support the human information behavior. There are now new techniques and methodologies such as Contextual Design and Participatory Design to fill the gap. Implementing a behavioral approach to designing information systems are of interest and importance in terms of modern information technologies like social software, web 2.0, mobile phones and internet websites. New methodologies and research frameworks are proposed that place user location, attention and behavior as their main issues.