An attempt is made to examine Shīʿī Iranian clerical self-representation and participatory networks as medium of authority. The analysis traces how such networks are enacted through social media technologies, focusing in particular on the photo-video sharing app, Instagram. In theoretical terms, this case study understands digital media technologies as a phenomenological performance that makes religious identity formation possible as a distinct social practice. I argue that since the 1990s, Shīʿī clerical authority has undergone a performative network transformation with digital technology playing a key role in the process. The term “performative network” refers to the complex repertoire of (self) representations that signal the confluence of repeatable and transferable frameworks, where the boundaries of “private” and “public” spheres blur into emerging social networks. Through ties that constitute diverse relations, Shīʿī clerics engage in diverse modes of authorial performances by carving out new spaces of public presence—an alternative landscape where self-representation becomes, despite physical absence, accessible, spreadable, and inherently more visible. Within the pathways of this network, the emergence of social media connectivity underlines what sociologist Scott Feld has described as a community marked by “foci” as the basis of distinct associations that interact in digitally mediated domains. These online communities are personalized around certain performatives of self-presentation by male clerics of diverse age, most of them seminarians from mid-ranking status groups across Shīʿī dominated regions of Iran. The result, I finally argue, is the creation of new bridges between social networks that go beyond conventional notions of state-society relations, many of which include mundane practices of clerical authority that are framed in everyday life.