According to a senior academic, a major portion of Iranian culture is shaped by the media which in turn is influenced by changes in global cultural factors and by the formation of invisible cultures within the country. So far, these veiled cultures have not received much attention.

Hadi Khaniki, a faculty member at Allameh Tabatabaie University, made these remarks in a gathering titled, "Mediaization of Culture in the World Today" organized by the Cultural Studies Office of the Iranian Sociology Association and held at Allameh University. Khaniki, who has previously analyzed the influence of weblogs on culture, is at present examining the "mediaization" of culture in Iran.

Referring to the difference between the culture passed through the media and the classic or elite culture, he said, "The classic culture or elite culture feeds from traditions, customs and official instructions. This culture has compatibility and continuity and the elites are creators and supporters of this culture. This is while the media culture or the mass culture is an incompatible, disorderly, mosaic and disconnected culture."

He then expanded on the role of the media in the cultural development of the society. According to him, "the media are vehicles of mass culture and can act as a feeding source for the elite in order to bring about innovation. In other words, the media are the chains linking big or macro societies to small or micro societies."

Khaniki believes the elites are the ones who shoulder the responsibility of cultural production within society. "However, the issue of books, press, and specialized publications they [the elite] produce and the media the public pay attention to are very different. Thus these dignified and serious print media are put against tabloid and yellow papers which are attractive to the people."

Thus there exists a paradoxical situation in which culture is produced by the elite, yet consumed by the public. Khaniki argues that the culture produced by cultural leaders and elites needs to be brought closer to the public understanding, and cultural messages need to be generalized in order to accommodate all rather than a numbered few. "This is possible as the pop music and culture was able to generalize the sublime and elite art and as Bryan Magee strived to reproduce philosophy for the laymen so that Plato’s outlooks would not only be used in the extra time of life but in the course of normal life."

He proposes changing the concerns of the elite through the media so that they would regard issues related to the public as their own and set out to reinvigorate society.

According to this senior academic and member of Allameh Tabatabi’s Scientific Committee, our culture today is primarily produced, distributed and consumed during what is considered as leisure time. Yet, this new culture is different from the "leisure time culture" of the past and is driven by the media.

In the past, no study was conducted on places such as peer clubs and tea houses and only movie theaters, religious places and shopping malls were subjects of cultural studies. Today, however, places where secret contacts are made within society have also become topics of study. Even public toilets are raised today as a topic for cultural studies; they are places where lots of invisible parts of the society, such as hidden languages, hidden politics and hidden culture could be studied. In this new culture, issues such as leisure time, lifestyle and cyberspace take on greater importance to the extent that it can be said culture is being evolved and promoted in such spheres in addition to that produced by the elite. Moreover, the advent of such open spaces has become a main topic in the media culture.

Examining the Iranian media atmosphere, Khaniki pointed out factors which indicate the spread of media culture and said, "We witness changes in cultural consumption patterns in Iran." According to national statistics of values and attitudes of Iranians conducted in the past eight years, the (average) reading rate is six minutes per day, print media 20 minutes per day, television 156 minutes per day and radio 35 minutes per day, resulting in a total 235 minutes in 24 hours. The statistics indicate that 63 percent of our leisure time is allocated to the media, out of which 66 percent is dedicated to watching television. Thus, T.V can be regarded as having the highest influence in shaping public culture.

Khaniki also pointed to changes in global cultural factors as another factor for the changing nature of Iranian culture attitudes. According to a report published by the UNESCO two years ago that studied global cultural consumption throughout the 1990’s, the share of music, computer games and sport games has increased over the period while that of print material, cinema and photography has diminished. Therefore, some cultural commodities are paid more attention while others are focus on less.

The third factor behind the mediaization of culture in Iran is the upward trend of using cyberspace. The fact that Persian has become the third most widely used language on the web support this claim as well. The speaker also pointed out the growing similarity of cultural consumption in Iran and other parts of the world and considered the prevalent use of CDs and virtual networks as another explanatory variable. Another issue he raised was the marginalization of the official culture and the formation of unofficial cultures in linguistic, social and cultural fields.

Khaniki also examined Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s "Playing with Blood", in which the director lives with a group of addicts for a period of time in order to get a first-hand account of growing drug abuse in the country. Her experiences with the addicts led her to the conclusion "that there is a culture in the society in which being an addict is considered a value and the individual draws upon his/her addiction in order to express his/her identity." He continued on by stating that "a hidden culture is taking shape within society which has values completely different from that of the official culture and the existence of these two cultures will cause asymmetry within society."

As a result of "asymmetry in the cultural situation, we will witness the formation of identity-oriented cultures," similar to wearing veils covering the face to express identity in countries such as the United States, Britain and Canada.

The last point Khaniki cited was the increasing significance attached to limited and short range but effective cultural actions in lifestyle choices. He considers these actions effective and believes they play a positive role in shaping prevalent lifestyle options. In other words, a flexible changing culture replaces the exalted fine culture that is less susceptible to change. For example "a television series creates its own literature, culture and specific social relations and after several months when it is over all its effects go into oblivion with it."

Khaniki concluded that as a result of the absence or weakness of cultural dialogue in society and the weakness of democratic structures, exchange of ideas between the elite culture and public culture do not exist. As a result, "opposing cultural poles are created. On one end is strong identity-oriented and traditionalist tendencies, and on the other, strong anti-tradition, anti- religious and anti-national values and tendencies."

He believes these poles will emerge within city, village, ethnic, religious, gender and other spheres. The coming together of different spaces in global cultural patterns has narrowed the gap between the language of politics, culture and knowledge compared to the past. However, in Iran "the weight thrown behind politics and political situations can lead the same cultural actions towards actions that are political in nature but in effect appear cultural and artistic in their language and image."

"If we take into consideration the history of tabloid media, we can detect a similar pattern of formation. When access to the media, whether in the field of politics or economy, became difficult and expensive, these media were formed with the aim of deconstruction and as a tendency towards small and flexible groups."