Spektrum Iran

Abstrakt The expansion of social media, particularly Instagram, has played a significant role in transforming the ways cultural rituals are experienced and represented in contemporary Iran. This study aims to elucidate the role of Instagram in the transformation of traditional rituals and to examine the impact of this platform’s media logic on the form, meaning, and modes of enactment of cultural occasions. The study was conducted using a qualitative approach, and its data were collected through semi-structured interviews with active Instagram users who participated in this research. Purposive sampling was employed, and data collection continued until theoretical saturation was reached, which was ultimately achieved after 15 interviews. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis based on the Braun and Clarke approach. The findings indicate that Instagram, as an active cultural intermediary, has contributed to the mediatization of rituals, the aestheticization of ceremonial practices, shifts in patterns of social participation, the individualization of ritual experience, transformations in symbolic meanings, and the strengthening of influencers’ roles in redefining the ways rituals are performed. The results suggest that traditional rituals have moved beyond exclusively place-bound and collective frameworks and, within the context of the network society, have been transformed into visual, performative, and to some extent individualized experiences. In this process, rituals are not merely represented but are also reconfigured through interaction with Instagram’s image-driven logic. Based on the findings, a form of “digital rituality” has emerged within the context of contemporary Iranian culture, in which traditional elements have become intertwined with new media mechanisms. This study demonstrates that understanding cultural transformations and the redefinition of identity in contemporary Iranian society is not possible without considering the role of digital platforms.

Abstrakt Large language models increasingly translate, summarize, and explain traditions they have not inherited. This study develops semantic sovereignty as a framework for testing whether multilingual models preserve Persianate and Shi‘i meanings or relocate them into dominant Anglophone interpretive regimes. A bounded cross-lingual mixed-method audit examined 120 purposively selected units from Rumi, Hafez, Ferdowsi, and Shi‘i hermeneutics. Four model systems, blinded during expert scoring, were tested under Persian-only, English-only, cultural-context, and expert-context conditions, with two runs per prompt, yielding 3,840 outputs. A three-member disciplinary panel applied a 0–4 Semantic Preservation Scale and a multi-label error taxonomy; mutually exclusive percentages summarize each output’s adjudicated dominant error. Across 16 model-by-domain cells, the mean score was 2.53/4.00 (SD = 0.38). Rumi was frequently psychologized into global spirituality, Hafez was over-clarified, Ferdowsi was depoliticized into leadership language, and Shi‘i concepts were flattened into generic religious vocabulary. Expert-context prompts produced the strongest descriptive means, but displacement persisted. Because product identities, exact access dates, complete raw transcripts, and output-level scores were not retained, the analysis is descriptive and bounded rather than inferential or product-reproducible. Multilingual AI should therefore be evaluated not only for linguistic performance or cultural bias, but for hermeneutic accountability: preserving metaphor, doctrine, ambiguity, register, authority, and civilizational memory. The study contributes a culturally grounded audit framework for identifying subtle semantic loss across languages.