Social Media in Southeast Turkey

Social Media in Southeast Turkey Social Media in Southeast Turkey Love, Kinship and Politics Elisabetta Costa First published in 2016 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Text © Elisabetta Costa, 2016 Images © Elisabetta Costa, 2016 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Non-derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use providing author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 ISBN: 978-1-910634-52-3 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978-1-910634-53-0 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-910634-54-7 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-910634-55-4 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-910634-56-1 (mobi) DOI: 10.14324/111.9781910634547 Introduction to the series Why We Post This book is one of a series of 11 titles. Nine are monographs devoted to specific field sites (including this one) in Brazil, Chile, China, England, India, Italy, Trinidad and Turkey – they will be published in 2016 –17. The series also includes a comparative book about all our findings, published to accompany this title, and a final book which contrasts the visuals that people post on Facebook in the English field site with those on our Trinidadian field site. When we tell people that we have written nine monographs about social media around the world, all using the same chapter headings (apart from Chapter 5), they are concerned about potential repetition. However, if you decide to read several of these books (and we very much hope you do), you will see that this device has been helpful in showing the precise opposite. Each book is as individual and distinct as if it were on an entirely different topic. This is perhaps our single most important finding. Most studies of the internet and social media are based on research methods that assume we can generalise across different groups. We look at tweets in one place and write about ‘Twitter’. We conduct tests about social media and friendship in one population, and then write on this topic as if friendship means the same thing for all populations. By presenting nine books with the same chapter headings, you can judge for yourselves what kinds of generalisations are, or are not, possible. Our intention is not to evaluate social media, either positively or negatively. Instead the purpose is educational, providing detailed evi- dence of what social media has become in each place and the local conse- quences, including local evaluations. Each book is based on 15 months of research during which time the anthropologists lived, worked and interacted with people in the local lan- guage. Yet they differ from the dominant tradition of writing social sci- ence books. Firstly they do not engage with the academic literatures on social media. It would be highly repetitive to have the same discussions in all nine books. Instead discussions of these literatures are to be found v in our comparative book, How the World Changed Social Media. Secondly these monographs are not comparative, which again is the primary func- tion of this other volume. Thirdly, given the immense interest in social media from the general public, we have tried to write in an accessible and open style. This means we have adopted a mode more common in histor- ical writing of keeping all citations and the discussion of all wider academic issues to endnotes. If you prefer to read above the line, each text offers a simple narrative about our findings. If you want to read a more conventional academic book that relates the material to its academic context, this can be done through engaging with the endnotes. We hope you enjoy the results and that you will also read our comparative book – and perhaps some of the other monographs – in addition to this one. vi INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES WHY WE POST Acknowledgements This book is the product of my postdoctoral research undertaken while I was a research associate at UCL Department of Anthropology (2012 to 2015). It is part of the Global Social Media Impact Study (GSMIS), a project dedicated to understanding the impact of social media in nine different sites around the world, funded by the European Research Council (grant ERC-2011-AdG-295486 Socnet), to which I am grateful for the generous financial support. I also wish to thank UCL Anthropology Department and the colleagues who supported me throughout the making of this book. I am particularly indebted to all the members of the GSMIS team: Nell Haynes, Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, Jolynna Sinanan, Juliano Spyer, Shriram Venkatraman, Xinyuan Wang, and our supporting mentor, Daniel Miller. Their continuous invaluable assistance, help and advice in London, and during field work through Skype and email have been precious. This research would not have been possible without the help and support of the warm and hospitable people I met in Mardin. I am extremely grateful to hundreds of friends and research participants who trusted me, opened their houses and lives, engaged with me and answered my questions. I would also like to thank my research assistants, who prefer to remain anonymous, and colleagues at Mardin Artuklu University and the British Institute at Ankara. I would like to thank Luigi Achilli, Fabio Vicini and the anonymous reviewer for helpful suggestions. I am especially grateful to Marina De Giorgi, whose presence during field work and writing-up has been so precious and supportive. I would also like to thank my mother, brother and friends in London, Italy, Turkey and the world, who, despite geographical distance, have all been present and supportive in different ways. vii Contents List of figures x 1. Introduction: Welcome to Mardin 1 2. The social media landscape: Individuals and groups in the local media ecology 26 3. Visual posting: Showing off and shifting boundaries between private and public 49 4. Relationships: Kinship, family and friends 81 5. Hidden romance and love 103 6. The wider world: Politics, the visible and the invisible 128 7. Conclusion: What kind of social change? 163 Notes 176 References 185 Index 189 ix List of figures Fig. 1.1 Location of Mardin in Turkey 7 Fig. 1.2 View of the Mesopotamian valley from the old city of Mardin 8 Fig. 1.3 Partial view of the old city 9 Fig. 1.4 The suburban area 9 Fig. 1.5 Mardin, the new city 10 Fig. 1.6a–b Construction sites in the new city of Mardin 10 Fig. 1.7a–c Views of the new city 16 Fig. 3.1a–b Married couples 53 Fig. 3.2 Engaged couple 53 Fig. 3.3a–c Formal family photo (a), informal family photos (b, c) 54 Fig. 3.4a–b Children 54 Fig. 3.5a–b Students 55 Fig. 3.6a–e Male individual portraits 56 Fig. 3.7a–d Male profile pictures 57 Fig. 3.7e–h Female anonymous profile pictures 58 Fig. 3.7i–j Female anonymous profile pictures 59 Fig. 3.7k–n Female profile pictures 59 Fig. 3.8a–c Female portraits with family members 60 Fig. 3.9a–c Group portraits 61 Fig. 3.10a–d Food 64 Fig. 3.11a–b Objects 65 Fig. 3.12a–b Cars 65 Fig. 3.13a–d Holidays 66 Fig. 3.14a–c Memes on topics of ethics, morality and philosophy 69 Fig. 3.15a–f Religious memes 70 Fig. 3.16a–c Loyalty memes 73 Fig. 3.17a–e Memes on topics of love and relations between women and men 75 Fig. 3.18 Cartoon meme 77 Fig. 3.19a–b Political memes 78 x newgenprepdf Fig. 4.1 An Arab man with his grandchild holding the genealogical tree of the family 82 Fig. 6.1 Meme with Adnan Oktar 134 Fig. 6.2 Flags flying in the old city 140 Fig. 6.3 Flags flying in the new city 140 Fig. 6.4 AKP poster 141 Fig. 6.5 BDP poster 141 Fig. 6.6 Saadet poster 141 Fig. 6.7 AKP party office 142 Fig. 6.8 BDP party office 142 Fig. 6.9 Van supporting Ahmet Türk 143 Fig. 6.10 Photo posted on Facebook during the political campaign 145 Fig. 6.11 Electoral process meme 146 Fig. 6.12 Meme announcing the arrival of Prime Minister Erdogan6 in Mardin 146 Fig. 6.13 BDP candidates talking to Mardinites in the old city 147 Fig. 6.14 BDP candidate with university students 147 Fig. 6.15 Arab extended family in BDP office 149 Fig. 6.16 Meme propagating anti-Western conspiracy theory 152 Fig. 6.17 Meme used as profile picture to commemorate the death of Berkin Elvan 153 Fig. 6.18 Pro-government meme 154 Fig. 6.19 Pro-government meme 154 Fig. 6.20 Rojava 157 Fig. 6.21 Campaign to help Yezidi refugees 157 Fig. 6.22a–b Memes in support of the Kurdish population in Kobane 158 Fig. 6.22c Meme condemning the Israeli war in Gaza 159 List OF FIGURES xi 1 Introduction: Welcome to Mardin One evening in late Spring, as on many other weekday evenings, Yağmur1 went to visit her aunt and three cousins, together with her mother and younger sister. The seven Arab women sat in the sitting room of a well-furnished house for more than five hours.

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