Social Media And Politics In Turkey

This book focuses on media and zeroes in some critical and oppositional aspects of internet usage within Turkey. It does not radically challenge some works on Turkey’s recent grand narrative but presents empirical and minor accounts to this. However, in elaborating the long history of relatively resilient and multilayered oppositional digital media networks in Turkey, this book insists that an idea of authoritarian turn may be misleading as the internet communications are exposed to repressive measures and surveillance tactics from the very beginning of the country’s recent past. While discussing from citizen journalism practices to political trolls and from Gezi Park protests to disinformation campaigns, this book pays tribute to digital activists and points out that mobilizing through digital networks can present glimmers of hope in challenging authoritarian regimes.

This volume sets out to analyse the relation between social media and politics by investigating the power of the internet and more specifically social media, in the political and social discourse. The volume collects original research on the use of social media in political campaigns, electoral marketing, riots and social revolutions, presenting a range of case studies from across the world as well as theoretical and methodological contributions. Examples that explore the use of social media in electoral campaigns include, for instance, studies on the use of Face book in the 2012 US presidential campaign and in the 2011 Turkish general elections. The final section of the book debates the usage of Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools in mobilizing people for riots and revolutions, presenting and analysing recent events in Istanbul and Egypt, among others.

This book presents an ethnographic study of social media in Mardin, a medium-sized town located in the Kurdish region of Turkey. The town is inhabited mainly by Sunni Muslim Arabs and Kurds, and has been transformed in recent years by urbanisation, Elisabetta Costa uses her 15 months of ethnographic research to explain why public-facing social media is more conservative than offline life. Yet, at the same time, social media has opened up unprecedented possibilities for private communications between genders and in relationships among young people – Costa reveals new worlds of intimacy, love and romance. She also discovers that, when viewed from the perspective of people’s everyday lives, political participation on social media looks very different to how it is portrayed in studies of political postings separated from their original complex, and highly socialised, context.neoliberalism and political events.

In Media in New Turkey, Bilge Yesil unlocks the complexities surrounding and penetrating today's Turkish media. Yesil focuses on a convergence of global and domestic forces that range from the 1980 military coup to globalization's inroads and the recent resurgence of political Islam. Her analysis foregrounds how these and other forces become intertwined, and she uses Turkey's media to unpack the ever-more-complex relationships. Yesil confronts essential questions regarding: the role of the state and military in building the structures that shaped Turkey's media system; media adaptations to ever-shifting contours of political and economic power; how the far-flung economic interests of media conglomerates leave them vulnerable to state pressure; and the ways Turkey's politicized judiciary criminalizes certain speech. Drawing on local knowledge and a wealth of Turkish sources, Yesil provides an engrossing look at the fault lines carved by authoritarianism, tradition, neoliberal reform, and globalization within Turkey's increasingly far-reaching media.

This book presents an ethnographic study of social media in Mardin, a medium-sized town located in the Kurdish region of Turkey. The town is inhabited mainly by Sunni Muslim Arabs and Kurds, and has been transformed in recent years by urbanisation, neoliberalism and political events. Elisabetta Costa uses her 15 months of ethnographic research to explain why public-facing social media is more conservative than offline life. Yet, at the same time, social media has opened up unprecedented possibilities for private communications between genders and in relationships among young people - Costa reveals new worlds of intimacy, love and romance. She also discovers that, when viewed from the perspective of people's everyday lives, political participation on social media looks very different to how it is portrayed in studies of political postings separated from their original complex, and highly socialised, context.

The transformations in alternative media, journalism and social protest in contemporary Turkey have largely occurred due to the upsurge in use of social media. Some of the most fervent users of social media in the world come from Turkey where forms of social media are frequently banned by the Turkish government. This book looks at the structural, economic and political reasons why the current media system fails urban educated young professionals in Turkey and led them to a month long resistance and protest through the use of social media during OccupyGezi movement. The book outlines the history of alternative media use and the ways in which it has become a tool for the critics of the neoliberal economic system in Turkey. The collection concentrates on social media use within social movements and applies interdisciplinary approaches and research methods, ranging from cinema and visual arts to sociology, political science, content analysis and ethnographic study.

The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is known for his populist Islamist ideology, charismatic personality, and for ushering in new forms of communication strategies in Turkey. The key tools in Erdogan's political communication repertoire include religious, cultural and historic symbols and imagery. From engaging Israel to the Gezi Park protests, from the Arab uprisings to the July 2016 coup attempt, every key moment in Turkey's recent history has heralded a change in Erdogan's rhetoric. Communication Strategies in Turkey examines the transformation of political messaging that has taken place within the Justice and Development Party (AKP) under Erdogan. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with high profile AKP officials, observations at AKP rallies and headquarters, and analysis of Erdogan's speeches from 2002 to 2019, the book shows how his method of communication changed over time to prioritise a “New Turkey” to replace Atatürk and his legacy.

Turkey's Enagement with Modernity explores how the country has been shaped in the image of the Kemalist project of nationalist modernity and how it has transformed, if erratically, into a democratic society where tensions between religion, state and society continue unabated.