Cyberspace

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.

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.

This paper focuses on the impact of cyberspace on religiosity in Iran through reviewing previous studies. The situation of religion in the age of the internet has always been a major matter of concern for Iranian scholars and policy makers. Accordingly, there have been many researchers who have addressed and approached this problem but there has been no comprehensive understanding of the impact of the internet on religiosity, as no comparative study has been conducted to date. This paper applies meta-analysis as the method for reviewing previous attempts while trying to gather all the data by classifying problems, methods, theoretical approaches and more importantly their results. The outcome of this study is to indicate the impact of cyberspace on religiosity and religious identity, apart from classifying and clarifying the status of religiosity in Iran. Having a stronger religious identity causes less online misbehaviors like searching and engaging in pornography. It also indicates using cyberspace for recreational purposes compared to using it for communication or gathering information etc. makes the users more likely to have a weaker religious identity.