Please ‘Like’ Me::Reconfiguring Reputation and Shame in Southeast Turkey

This article draws on long-term ethnographic research on the uses of social media and their consequences for people’s everyday lives to shed light on how young men’s long-standing concerns over reputation and shame have been rearticulated through the use of social media. In Mardin, a mediumsized city in southeast Turkey, reputation and shame are key concerns in social media usage and affect different domains of people’s everyday lives, such as politics, love and friendships. In this article, reputation is conceived as the value an individual has in other’s people eyes, on social media being granted by displaying the desired qualities and by receiving expressions of social approbation in a context of constant surveillance. This has been extensively described in terms of the logic of honour across different cultures and at different times. Shame is viewed as an emotional experience generated by social practices that openly transgress social norms. Viewing reputation and shame as bound to mediated practices opens up new opportunities to investigate the transformation of long-standing concerns that continue to have great significance in people’s lives in southeast Turkey. It sheds light on processes of continuity and transformation that are entangled with the diffusion of digital communication technologies

Digitizing Desires:Immobile Mobility and Social Media in Southeast Turkey

This chapter is an ethnographic exploration of the mediated practices of young homebound women who escape into the place of social media to create and maintain new forms of social relationships that they cannot have offline. In Mardin, a medium-sized town in southeast Turkey, young Muslim women from conservative families commonly use social media to engage in personal communications and interactions with strangers, friends, and sweethearts that they never meet face to face. I define this movement from offline to online, ‘immobile mobility’ (see also Wallis 2011; 2013 and Ureta 2004). This concept captures the (im)mobility from the offline physical place of the home to the online digital place of social media, and also the human agency enacted through this movement. The mobility away from the constraints imposed by social norms ruling offline relationships takes place together with the reproduction of the public normative understandings of social and family relations. Online socialities do not challenge or transform social norms, but are rather a way to actively inhabit the social restrictions that limit women’s lives. This paper shows that a ‘mobile socialities’ approach allows us to shed light on questions of human agency, which have been at the core of social science’s concerns for many decades

Social Media in Southeast Turkey

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

Experiencing Homeland:Social Media and Transnational Communication Among Kurdish Migrants in Northern Italy

This article examines the ways in which experiences of homeland take shape through the use of social media among first- and second-generation Kurdish migrants living in Milan and surrounding areas in the Lombardy region of Italy. Drawing on a short-term ethnographic study of social media practices carried out in spring and summer 2018, the paper presents and compares the uses of social media among two migrant generations and conceptualizes homeland as a mediated experience that takes shape through people’s everyday social media practices. This approach to homeland can account for the multiple ways in which the affordances of digital platforms and the subjective aspects of homeland are interconnected with one another through social media practices. The paper is part of the Global Perspectives, Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata