CROSSING TEHRAN AVENUE

Abstract

The online city magazine TehranAvenue.com (TA) occupies the transnational crossroad of digital and urban space. It thus provides an important case study of how urban studies, postcolonial theory and critical cyber studies can be combined fruitfully to explain the potentialities and limits of digital and social networks in transnational Middle Eastern contexts. The article explores metaphors of the Internet as city, theories of transnational urban space and recent studies of the Internet and its politico-cultural uses in Iran to establish a theoretical method that can explain the simultaneity of local and transnational in digital and urban spaces. Qualitative data (email and telephone interviews with TA's founder, editor and contributors), combined with content analysis of the site, supports the claim that the city as metaphor and metonym can account for the intersection between contemporary North African and Middle Eastern digital spaces and national and diasporic urban spaces. The digital city – or blogabad – expands physical urban space into transnational networks. But there are important limits to the transnational reach of mediated social networking practices. In fact, the located identifications of web users are often much more important than the global reach of the technologies they use.