content analysis of pages and groups of facebook social network using habermas' theory of the public sphere

along with improvement and expansion if computational communications and increasing access of various peoples to the internet and virtual social networks, a lot of theoretical endeavors have been spent for studying the internet and its political and social effects. during these attempts, the concept of public sphere in the framework of habermas's theory has a significant status. accordingly, among the groups and pages which iranian users have created in facebook, 10 cases were investigated according to purposive sampling using qualitative content analysis. the findings of the present study indicate that although using facebook among iranian users has resulted in increasing access to information, producing too much content results in fragmentation and diversification of reality. in other words, we encounter a mess in the iranian groups and pages available in facebook in which the other's voice is not heard. therefore, producing information cannot contribute to formation of the public cyber ​​sphere. moreover, although facebook gives this opportunity to people to equally participate in a dialogue, in iranian pages and groups rarely a dialogue is formed, even in cases that a dialogue is formed, in these kinds of dialogues, there will be seldom a logical debate and accessing to compromising or agreement seem impossible. at last, it should be noted that however facebook enjoys capacities for reviving public sphere, in practice it has not been able to reach to the level of a public sphere.