In her book, Niki Akhavan explores online cultural politics and the evolution and growth of the Iranian Internet. She adopts a chronological and ethnographic approach, which covers the years from 1996 until 2012. Over this sixteen year period, Akhavan analyzes four distinct issues that are developed through four phases of the evolution of the Internet: the genesis of cyber transnationalism and the role of the Iranian diaspora through static websites and the rise of Web 2.0; the role of the Iranian state and its supporters in shaping, using, and controlling the Iranian blogosphere; digitizing the Iran–Iraq War cultural products and the use of audiovisual materials and their recirculation in the Internet; and finally the rise of social network media and, more specifically, Friendfeed and its role in the disputed Iranian presidential election in 2009 (which is known as the Green Movement).

Although the construction of Akhavan's book is ostensibly based on the cyber political activism of Iranian net users in general, in fact, in practice, her approach focuses more specifically on the role and the presence of the Iranian state in Iranian cyberspace, and the activity and challenges of state supporters and state sponsored websites and blogs therein. Thus, in different chapters of her book, Akhavan demonstrates how, on the one hand, the Iranian state came gradually to recognize the importance of cyberspace and the necessity of being included in it (across a range of different platforms) and, on the other hand, how the state imposed different types of limitations on Iranian cyberspace, for example, by applying different types of filtering or by slowing the speed of the Internet. Ultimately, Akhavan is more concerned with underlining the cyber activity of state supporters in different platforms rather than explaining the application by the state of various limitations on and filtering of cyberspace.

While Akhavan discusses stages of the evolution of the Internet in the context of some important events in Iranian society, some chapters and issues are more significant in comprehending Iranian society and Iranian cyberspace than others. For instance she gives a detailed explanation on the emergence of transnationalism and the role of diaspora in the first days of the Iranian cyberspace, and how the Internet played an important role in bringing geographically dispersed Iranians together to express their voices based on nationalist sentiments. She takes as an example of transnationalism the campaign to safeguard the name of “Persian Gulf” instead of “Arabian Gulf.” This campaign created for the first time an important online transnational mobilization, and also had a large impact on later events and different collective and social movements and finally helped the emergence of a virtual public sphere in the Iranian cyberspace.

In another chapter, entitled “Moveable Image,” she discusses how the Iranian state institutions used the new possibilities offered by the Internet to digitize numerous cultural products about the Iran-Iraq War and to upload them on the Internet as propaganda for the Islamic Republic, and how they gradually lost their control over some of these audiovisual materials. This chapter is important because it helps to understand the cyber confrontation that happened a few years later, during the events of the disputed presidential election of 2009. In fact, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter became popular in Iran during these events, helping demonstrators to organize themselves. However, very soon they were filtered by the state and then could be accessed only via VPN or other antifilter software. As she argues in her last chapter, these online and offline confrontations between the state and its opponents would take the form of a “soft war” after the events of 2009.

Akhavan rightly discusses important topics that are crucial to an understanding of the evolution of the political aspects of the Iranian cyberspace. Her main contribution is how she structured her book: chronologically binding different stages of the development of the Internet and the emergence of different platforms to the sociopolitical events in Iran. However, her analysis remains mostly one dimensional. The most important shortcoming of her analysis is the absence of the complexity of Iranian society and Iranian cyberspace, which is especially significant in the second chapter entitled “Uncharted Blogosphere.” In fact, the Iranian blogosphere is one of the most prolific and miscellaneous platforms of Iranian cyberspace. Akhavan however, misses the potential opportunities to address this heterogeneity. She limits her arguments to a few religious, state-sponsored activist bloggers without further acknowledgment of other bloggers, such as feminists, seculars, or political, social, and cultural dissidents which constitute the main counterparts and targets of the state censorship. Considering the fact that the complexity of Iranian society is unknown to many, Akhavan's failure in addressing this issue is disappointing.

For her book Akhavan uses online research and also some previous research about Iranian society and cyberspace, and refers to the works of Gholam Khiabani and Annabelle Sreberny (2007 and 2011) Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi (2008), Alirza Doostar (2004), Roxanne Varzi (2002 and 2006), Minou Moallem (2005) and some others. However, sometimes she limits herself to quoting these sources rapidly once at the beginning of each chapter and then abandons them in the development of her research.

Yet, written from a new perspective, Akhavan's Electronic Iran is an interesting and valuable book. She links the growth of the Iranian Internet users to the cyber activism of the Iranian state within sociopolitical conditions in Iran from the 1990s until 2012. Therefore, Akhavan not only manages to give a clear idea of the evolution of the cyberspace in Iran, but she also offers a fresh view on the development of Iranian society from a new perspective.