Post-colonial Studies and Internet: the Discourse Analysis of the Students' Impersonal E-mails of Tehran University

Postcolonial Studies is one of the new study areas about the issues of the third world. This critical attitude comprises a set of theoretical approaches that are accounting for colonial discourse analysis with emphasizing on the effect of colonialism on cultures. On the basis of this approach west scholars who study orientation are used to call it as "non-civilized other" to marginalize orients self. The ultimate goal of postcolonial studies is combating against colonialism and imperialism discourse and deconstructing it, but it is not sufficient to criticize the colonial discourse merely. Rather we need to use "self-criticism" for achieving a critical solution. In this research the students have been considered as a part of the enlightenment spectrum, so, 40 impersonal Tehran university students’ e-mails have been analyzed. In this research a lot of e-mails containing comparative themes toward being Iranian or not have been purposively chosen and studied based on the post-colonial studies. After studying the e-mails based on Fairclough's critical discourse analysis, we came to this conclusion that 3 criteria are compatible with Orientalism that dominate on these e-mails. These criteria includes as asynchrony, negative making and totality making. It can be said that there is a considerable amount of Orientalism discourse in Tehran university students’ e-mails and therefore a group of the elites have accepted symbolically their baseness alleged by the colonial discourse.