Urban Themes Constructed in the Persian Twitter

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 Habermas's public sphere theory, Lefebvre's 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.