DIGITAL SIEGE Editors Ece KARADOĞAN DORUK, Seda MENGÜ, Ebru ULUSOY

DIGITAL SEIGE

EDITORS

Ece KARADOĞAN DORUK Istanbul University, Faculty of Communication, Istanbul, Turkey

Seda MENGÜ Istanbul University, Faculty of Political Sciences, Istanbul, Turkey

Ebru ULUSOY Farmingdale State College, New York, USA Published by Istanbul University Press Istanbul University Central Campus IUPress Office, 34452 Beyazıt/Fatih Istanbul - Turkey

www.iupress.istanbul.edu.tr

Digital Seige Editors: Ece Karadoğan Doruk, Seda Mengü, Ebru Ulusoy

E-ISBN: 978-605-07-0764-9

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002

Istanbul University Publication No: 5281

Published Online in April, 2021

It is recommended that a reference to the DOI is included when citing this work.

This work is published online under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

This work is copyrighted. Except for the Creative Commons version published online, the legal exceptions and the terms of the applicable license agreements shall be taken into account.

ii EDITORS Prof. Dr. Ece Karadoğan Doruk Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Seda Mengü Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ebru Ulusoy Farmingdale State College, New York, USA

ADVISORY BOARD Prof. Dr. Celalettin Aktaş Istanbul Commerce University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Füsun Alver Istanbul Commerce University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. M. Bilal Arık Aydin Adnan Menderes University, Aydin, Turkey Prof. Dr. Oya Şaki Aydın Istanbul Commerce University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Aysel Aziz Istanbul Yeni Yüzyıl University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Güven N. Büyükbaykal Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. N. Melda Cinman Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Suat Gezgin Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Zeliha Hepkon Istanbul Commerce University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Süleyman İrvan Üsküdar University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Ayşe Melahat Kalay Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Ebru Özgen Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Murat Özgen Istanbul Univervsity, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Işık Özkan Yasar University, Izmir, Turkey Prof. Dr. R. Gülay Öztürk Istanbul Commerce University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Nilüfer Pembecioğlu Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Hikmet Seçim Cyprus International University, Nicosia, TRNC Prof. Dr. Ayda Uzunçarşılı Soydaş Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Ali Murat Vural Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Sacide Vural Istanbul Gelisim University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Dr. Erkan Yüksel Anadolu University, Eskisehir, Turkey Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pınar Aslan Üsküdar University, Istanbul, Turkey Assoc. Prof. Dr. Altın Asanova Bishkek Humanities University, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan Assoc. Prof. Dr. Safiye Kırlar Barokas Arel University, Istanbul, Turkey Assoc. Prof. Dr. Arne Baruca Texas A&M University-San Antonio, Texas, USA Assoc. Prof. Dr. Deniz Kılıç Anadolu University, Eskisehir, Turkey Assoc. Prof. Dr. Gözde Öymen Istanbul Commerce University, Istanbul, Turkey Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nuray Yılmaz Sert Manisa Celal Bayar University, Manisa, Turkey Asst. Prof. Dr. Vera Gelashvili King Juan Carlos University, Madrid, Spain Asst. Prof. Dr. Yi-Chia Wu Tarleton State University-Stephenville, Texas, USA PhD. Özgür Akgün State University of New York at Old Westbury, NY, USA PhD. Qi Li Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Shanghai, China PhD. Candidate, Dillon Ludemann State University of New York at Binghamton, NY, USA

PRODUCTION TEAM Ezel Türk Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey Ahmet Kadri Kurşun Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey

iii

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE EDITORS...... vii ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS...... viii INTRODUCTION...... xv

CHAPTER 1 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA ...... 1

CHAPTER 2 DIGITAL VALUE: ON THE ACHIEVEMENTS / LOSSES OF DIGITAL CULTURE3 Bahar EROĞLU YALIN, Sibel AK ...... 33

CHAPTER 3 DIGITAL DIPLOMACY: AN EVALUATION OF THE MEANS AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT DIGITALIZATION BRINGS TO DIPLOMACY Oğuz GÖKSU, Abdullah ÖZKAN ...... 45

CHAPTER 4 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK ...... 69

CHAPTER 5 IS THE INTERNET OF THINGS TRANSFORMING A SURVEILLANCE TOOL? Yeşim GÜÇDEMİR, Kemal GÜNAY ...... 101

CHAPTER 6 LEADERSHIP AND AGENCY IN ALGORITHMIC SOCIETY Ignas KALPOKAS ...... 119

CHAPTER 7 DIGITAL INNOVATIVENESS OF SUCCESSORS IN SMALLER FAMILY BUSINESS Marina LETONJA ...... 141

CHAPTER 8 DIGITAL PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT Murat MENGÜ, Ezel TÜRK ...... 165

CHAPTER 9 CYBERBULLYING HURTS: THE RISING THREAT TO YOUTH IN THE DIGITAL AGE Nilüfer SEZER, Serdar TUNÇER ...... 179

v CONTENTS

CHAPTER 10 AN ASSESSMENT BASED ON THE SIEGE OF DIGITAL LABOR AND GENERATION Z Damla AKAR ...... 195

CHAPTER 11 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR ...... 211

CHAPTER 12 DIGITAL PUBLIC RELATIONS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF IDENTITIES H. Burcu ÖNDER MEMİŞ ...... 247

CHAPTER 13 BEYOND THE SCREEN - FROM VIRTUAL REALITY TO MOVING MUSEUMS: TURKEY’S POTENTIAL IN A POSTMIGRANT ERA Detlev QUINTERN ...... 265

CHAPTER 14 THEORETICAL APPROACH TO BIG DATA ANALYTICS AND NEUROMARKETING: ADVANCES IN UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER TRENDS Oğuz KUŞ, Nevenka POPOVİĆ ŠEVİĆ ...... 279

CHAPTER 15 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG Ali Murat KIRIK, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN ...... 297

CONCLUSION Ece KARADOĞAN DORUK, Seda MENGÜ, Ebru ULUSOY...... 325

vi ABOUT THE EDITORS

Ece Karadogan Doruk currently works as a professor in the Department of Public Relations and promotion of the Faculty of communication at Istanbul University. She graduated from the Journalism department of the same faculty in 1995. The subject of her doctoral research is “Persuasion and trust in the process of interpersonal communication”. Interpersonal communication, social psychology, persuasion, motivation, organizational behavior, sociology of communication, social capital, research methods in the social sciences and changing forms of communication with digitalization are the main areas of her studies. She has two books called “Social Psychology of Persuasion” and “Social Capital Management” and numerous articles and papers in the field of communication.

Ebru Ulusoy is an Associate Professor in the Business Management Department at the Farmingdale State College. She earned her Ph.D. in Business Administration with a focus on Marketing from the University of Texas-Pan American. Dr. Ulusoy received her master’s degree in Production Management and Marketing from Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey. She received her bachelor’s degree in Public Relations and Advertising from Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey. Dr. Ulusoy is primarily interested in teaching and conducting research in the field of consumer behavior. She has various publications in prestigious peer-reviewed academic journals, such as the International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Business Research, and Journal of Marketing Management; and presentations at international conferences such as Association for Consumer Research and American Marketing Science.

Seda Mengü completed her undergraduate studies in the Department of Public Relations and Publicity, Faculty of Communication, Istanbul University in 1996. She received her master’s degree in 1999 and doctorate degree in 2003 at the same university. She became an associate professor in 2008 and full professor in 2013 in the Department of Public Relations, Faculty of Communications at Istanbul University. She has written three books, apart from various international articles and book chapters. Her studies focus on corporate communication, marketing communication, advertising, women’s studies, ethics, discourse analysis, culture and social policies. She participated in an EU Project as a partner Project coordinator, the action type of which is Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education, namely “Joint Online Programme for Professional Development in Innovative Management, Leadership and Strategic Communication – Macedonia, Slovenia, and Turkey between 2015-2018. She has also been involved in a three-year European Unıon Online Distance Learning Project as a consortium board member and lecturer, which is aimed to develop and implement two international online Micro Masters programs provided by a virtual campus of four HEIs – Istanbul University (Turkey), Institute of Communication Studies (Macedonia), DOBA Faculty of Applied Business and Social Studies (Slovenia), and the Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania).

vii ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Emine Yavaşgel, still works as a professor at Istanbul University Faculty of Communication. Her research interests are mainly in the fields of political communication, election communication and public diplomacy. At the same time, interpersonal communication, intercultural communication and sociology of communication are also among her fields of study. She attaches special importance to Turkish political culture studies. Siyasal İletişim/Kavramlar ve Ardındakiler (Babil Publications, 2004), Seçim Sistemleri ve Türkiye’deki Durum (Nobel Publications, 2004), İletişimin Sosyo-Politiği (Derin Publications, 2014), Özgürlüğün Siyaseti (Derin Publications, 2014), Siyasal Modernleşme (Derin Publications, 2014), Çoğulculuk/Demokrasi Kuramı (Ed.), (Filiz Bookstore, 2018) are her works.

Elira Turdubaeva has a PhD degree in Media and Communications from Kyrgyzstan-Turkey Manas University. She worked at several universities, including a prior appointment as Department Head of Journalism and Mass Communications at American University of Central Asia. Currently she is a Researcher on Network Analysis and Social Media at University of Central Asia. She is also a founder and president of a new start-up Online University in Kyrgyzstan. Her research focuses on media uses, political participation and media, election campaign analysis, social media uses, new media studies, ICT and youth, public relations, propaganda analysis, representations of gender, journalism education.

Bahar Eroğlu Yalın, completed her undergraduate education in Istanbul University Faculty of Communication, Department of Public Relations and Publicity in 1998. She received her master’s degree in Public Relations and Publicity Department of Istanbul University Institute of Social Sciences with her thesis titled “Interaction between Facts and Elements of Organizational Communication Process and Use of Intra-Organizational Public Relations in This Process” She completed her doctorate with her thesis titled “The Effect of Values on Political Thought and Political Choice: The Relationship between Politics and Value or the Political of Communication”. Starting her academic career as a research assistant in the Department of Public Relations and Publicity of the Faculty of Communication of Istanbul University, Eroğlu Yalın started to work as an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Communication of Karadeniz Technical University in Trabzon, where she settled with her spouse status. She received the title of Associate Professor in the field of applied communication in 2014, and the title of professor at the Faculty of Communication affiliated to Trabzon University in 2020. Eroğlu Yalın, who has works in the fields of public relations / corporate communication, political communication, visual communication and new media, has been a researcher at Zurich University in Switzerland. She has served as a jury member in photography and documentary competitions, and has organized competitions and exhibitions in the fields of photography and documentary film, She has been an executive in social responsibility and scientific research projects, and a member of the organizing / board of directors in international symposiums.

viii ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Sibel Ak, completed her undergraduate education in Karadeniz Technical University Faculty of Communication, Department of Public Relations and Publicity in 2012. She received her master's degree in Radio, TV and Sinema Department of Ataturk University Institute of Social Sciences with her thesis titled “Melodramatic Imagination in Populer Competition Program: Example of O Ses Türkiye. She is continuing her doctorate program in Atatürk University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Basic Communication Sciences.Starting her academic career as a expert in the department of Radio, TV and Sinema of the Faculty of Communication Karadeniz Technical University. Later, she was assigned to KTU TV, which is affiliated to the Black Sea Tec. She worked as a program director and producer for many broadcasts on university television. Karadeniz Technical University, and gave training to many students on television broadcasting. She directed and produced many broadcasts on this television channel affiliated to the university. With the departure of Karadeniz Technical University from Trabzon University in 2018, she continues to work as an Instructor in the Faculty of Communication. She worked on Communication, Radio, TV and Cinema. She is at the dissertation stage and continues to work on the general condition of the university televisions and model proposals.

Abdullah Özkan is a professor at İstanbul University, faculty of communication. His main research focuses on the public diplomacy, public relations, political communication, media and advertising. He has published 6 books. He has several articles published in national and international journals.

Oğuz Göksu, Assoc. Prof. Member of Gaziantep University, Department of Public Relations and Publicity. He completed his undergraduate degree in Istanbul Universtiy Public Relations and Publicity. He received his master and doctarate degrees from Istanbul University Institue of Social Sciences, Department of Public Relations and Publicity. His Phd Thesis (Siyasal İktidar İnşasında Lider Olgusu: Lider Tipolojileri Bağlamında Recep Tayip Erdoğan İncelemesi) was published by Literatürk Academia. He has several articles and book chapters published in national and international journals and books. Political communication, public diplomacy, political leadership, digital media, perception management are among his interest. He is advisor of Communications Director of the Republic of Turkey.

Pedja Ašanin Gole is a lecturer of Public Relations at DOBA Faculty of Applied Business and Social Studies Maribor (slovenia) and a guest lecturer at the Institute of Communications Studies in Skopje (North Macedonia). Political scientist and communicologist with almost 30 years consultancy and managerial experiences in the field of strategic communication in Slovenia and the countries of the former Yugoslavia. the author of original scientific and professional articles in the field of communication management, editor and co-author of various monographs, especially in the field of public relations and strategic communications and communication management. His current research interst is the neoinstitutional relationship between governance interactions, issues management and public relations.

ix ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Vida Sruk received her bachelor’s degree in sociology and in German linguistics and literature from the Faculty of Arts, the University of Ljubljana. She then earned her master’s degree in cultural sociology and her doctoral degree in sociology from the same Faculty. She is the author of scientific monographs about sociological elements in the works of José Ortega y Gasset and about moral aspects in Grimm’s fairy tales. Her recent research interests have been in the issues emerging from current social phenomena such as fake news, social media and shame. She is employed as a senior lecturer in sociology at the Department of Political Economy of the Faculty of Economics and Business, the University of Maribor.

Yeşim Güçdemir was born in Istanbul in 1973. She graduated from collage in 1990. Then She graduated from Journalism Department of Marmara Universty Communication Faculty in 1995. She finished her master degree Advertisment and marketing Department of Marmara Universty Communication Faculty in 1999. She completed her doctorate theises on “New Communication Tecnologi es in Public Relation and Internet Users”. She has been working in Istanbul University since 1999. Yeşim Güçdemir, became of associate professor in 2011. Since 2017, She continues her studies with the title of Professor in Istanbul University, Communication Faculty. She is the author of two books. Her researches focus on the public relations and social media. She has published several articles about on public relation and social media.

Kemal Gunay graduated from Istanbul University, where he studied Public Relations and Advertising (2007). He earned his master’s degree in Corporate Communication from Istanbul University Institute of Social Sciences (2018). He is at the dissertation stage in his PhD at Istanbul University. He is specializing in computational social science, which combines social sciences with programming and mixed-methods research. He is currently continuing his academic studies as a scholar at Istanbul University Faculty of Communication.

Ignas Kalpokas (PhD, University of Nottingham) is Associate Professor at Vytautas Magnus University and LCC International University. His research encompasses (1) political communication and identity formation; (2) digital transformations and algorithmic governance of political life; (3) the ontology of digitized existence. He is the author of Creativity and Limitation in Political Communities (Routledge, 2017), A Political Theory of Post-Truth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and Algorithmic Governance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He is also a member of the Editorial Board of SN Social Sciences, where he is also editing a thematic collection ‘Synthetic Media and Synthetic Reality: From Deepfakes to Virtual Worlds’.

x ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Marina Letonja is an assistant professor of Entrepreneurship at DOBA Business School and teaches courses of Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurial Culture, Family Business, Business Prognosys and Sustainable Development Strategies at the undergraduate and postgraduate level in Slovenian, Croatian/ Serbian and English language. Her current research field is family business and innovation management, as well innovative business models and CSR. She’s been/ is involved in development of new educational programs for SME’s, professionals and students. She has been manager of numerous international projects and is author and co-author of numerous scientific and professional articles, case studies and contributions in student materials, textbooks, handbooks, proceedings, magazines for entrepreneurs. She is Head of International Relations at DOBA Business School.

Murat Mengü graduated from METU Department of English Language and Literature in 1988 and completed his master’s degree in English Language Education at Marmara University Ataturk Faculty of Education between 1993 and 1995. Between 1998 and 2004, he received a Ph.D. in Radio-TV-Cinema from Istanbul University Faculty of Communication. In 1995, he completed the Advanced Language Proficiency Program at the Defence Language Institute in San Antonio, Texas, USA. In 2003, he studied TOEFL Preparation and Professional Writing at the same institution. In 2017, he became an associate professor of Communication Studies. He has studies in media literacy, intercultural communication, cinema-television criticism and discourse analysis.

Ezel Türk is a research assistant at Istanbul University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Public Relations. She completed her undergraduate degree at Istanbul University at the department of English Language and Literature in 2005. In 2013, she completed her master’s degree upon public relations and new communication technologies. In 2016 she got her PhD degree upon public relations and social media. She has several articles published in national and international journals. Her current research interests are social media, social networkings, digital communication, interactive communication and public relations.

Nilüfer Sezer is a member of Istanbul University Faculty of Communication Department of Public Relations and Publicity. She received her master’s and doctorate degrees from Istanbul University Institute of Social Sciences at the Department of Public Relations and Publicity. Her master thesis is “Description fonctionnelle d’un idiolecte: L’Iron parlé en Turquie; Etude phonologique” and her PhD degree thesis is “Devingen Reklam Görüntülerinde Gösterge Çözümlemesi: Üç Reklam Örneği”. She was the Dean of Istanbul University, Faculty of Communication (2014-2017) and she is already the Director of the chair “Interpersonal Communication”. Her current research interests are sciences of communication, media literacy education, digital media literacy education, visual semiotics, effective communication skills and interpersonal communications. She has several book chapters and articles in Turkish, French and English in national and international journals. She is a member of Association Internationale de Sémiotique Visuelle and Association of Media Literacy of Turkey. She is a co-author of the book “Etkili İletişim Terimleri”, an author of the book “Sınır Tanımayan Reklam Ortamı: Açıkhava Reklamcılığı“ and a co-editor of the book “Medya Okuryazarlığı Üzerine”. xi ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Serdar Tunçer holds a Ph.D. in Communications and Public Relations from the University of Istanbul. His thesis mobilizes storytelling methodology and discourse analysis of crisis communications. He is currently a Research Associate at the University of Ottawa’s Audiovisual Media Lab for the study of Cultures and Societies (AMLAC&S) as well as a Research Assistant for Imagining Canada’s Digital Twin (ICDT) project at Carleton University. His current work consists of two fields and the interconnectivity between them: (1) Decision-making for complex systems, (2) Storytelling in Artificial Intelligence. Damla Akar graduated from Marmara University Public Relations and Publicity Department in 2013. She completed her master degree in Marmara University Institute of Social Sciences Public Relations and Publicity Department with the thesis named “Media Management in Public Relations: A Study Regarding Social Media”. She started her doctorate studies in Istanbul University Institute of Social Sciences Radio Television and Cinema Department in the same year. Akar, who worked in the media sector for a while in media relations field, was assigned to IU Faculty of Communication Public Relations and Publicity Department’s Interpersonal Communication Department as an academic in 2014.

Necla Odyakmaz Acar is an assistant professor at Faculty of Communication at Istanbul University, department of Communication Sociology. In her master thesis, she studied on civic journalism. She received her PhD about media ecology. She has published book chapters and articles on media ecology, media literacy, civic journalism, new media and social media. Her current research interests are new communication technologies, power structuring in the postmodern world and the effects of media on social change

Şebnem Çağlar is a Prof. Dr. at Istanbul University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Journalism. She got her master’s degree in Public Relations and doctorate degree in Journalism from Istanbul University Institute of Social Sciences. She has seven books and several articles published in national and international journals. News, news analysis, tv journalism, social media and media sociology are among her interests.

Hatice Burcu Önder Memiş is an assistant professor member of Arel University, deparment of Public Relations and Advertising. She completed her undergraduate and master degrees Marmara University Public Relations departments. She received her doctorate degree from Istanbul University Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Public Relations. She has several articles published in national and international journals. International public relations, perception management, childhood in commercials and digital public relations are among her interests. Detlev Quintern is an Assistant Professor at the faculty of cultural and social studies at Turkish German University in Istanbul where he teaches cultural, museum and heritage studies. He received a diploma in political sciences and a PhD in history at University of Bremen, Germany. He curated museum exhibitions in Germany and Turkey. His main research focus are universal interlacings in the history of cultures, sciences, and philosophies and its museological visualization.

xii ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Oğuz Kuş, who works at Istanbul University, Faculty of Communication as research assistant, focuses on hate speech in new media, critical data studies, big data, data mining and content marketing in his studies. Author has received his bachelor’s degree from Marmara University, Faculty of Communication and he has obtained his Ph.D. degree from Istanbul University, Institute of Social Sciences. Dr. Oğuz Kuş has made research visits to Vilnius University (Lithuania) and University of Tartu (Estonia). On the other hand, he acted as researcher in the project named E-PROFMAN that was collaboratively realized by Istanbul University (Turkey), DOBA Faculty of Applied Business and Social Studies (Slovenia) and School of Journalism and Public Relations (Macedonia) between 2015-2018. Author has been a member of European Communication Research and Education Association since 2018. Nevenka Popović Šević graduated from the Faculty of Economics in Belgrade and went on to successfully pursue a postgraduate degree at the University of Newcastle in Australia, and furthermore acquired a PhD in marketing management from the Singidunum University in Belgrade. In addition to academic experience, she has almost 30 years of experience in business, including non-governmental organizations and the private sector. Since 2008, she has been teaching at BusinessAcademy’s Marketing Department. She started teaching undergraduate students at the Information Technology School in Belgrade in 2016. She has been with the Faculty of Contemporary Arts as an assistant professor in marketing at the Creative Business program since 2019. She has authored or co-authored a number of scientific papers on integrated marketing communications and neuromarketing, corporate social responsibility and sales & sales management. She has participated in a number of scientific conferences, in the country and abroad. She is a full member of the Serbian Marketing Association (SeMA) and the Public Relations Society of Serbia (DSOJ).

Ali Murat Kırık is an associate professor in Marmara University Faculty of Communication, Department of Radio, Television and Cinema. In 2008, he obtained the Bachelor’s Degree from Marmara University Faculty of Communication, Department of Radio, Television and Cinema. Meanwhile, he has worked in several media associations. In 2013, he was awarded the Ph.D. degree by the same department. His doctoral thesis is based on research I conducted on the use of the Social Media by the Turkish youth. Social media, new media, new communication technologies are in his field of study.

Ahmet Çetinkaya (PhD) is an associate professor at Faculty of Communication at Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey. His research interests include information management, decision support systems, information security, new media and social media studies. He has published work in national and international indexed and refereed journals.

Ahmet Kadri Kurşun (PhD) is a research assistant at Faculty of Communication at Istanbul University in Turkey. His research interests include desktop publishing, layout design and journalism, media literacy and new media. He is still working as the technical coordinator at Faculty of Communication at Istanbul University.

xiii

INTRODUCTION

Ece KARADOĞAN DORUK, Seda MENGÜ, Ebru ULUSOY

Digitalization is prevalent in almost every field of life in today’s world. There is no escape from its impacts. But, it is getting increasingly important to investigate its positive and negative aspects to build a digital culture that benefits, rather than hurts and divides societies and people. This book addresses a theme of growing importance in multiple disciplines, such as communication, business, political science, sociology. It aims to understand how digitalization has been transforming our world and identities.

Academic interest in this topic is due to an increasing need to understand these transformations’ details and the meaning of these transformations in the big scheme of things. This book was inspired by a desire to draw together an academic interest in this topic to investigate the meaning and impacts of digitalization and the “new” digital culture. We invited authors from different areas to write chapters that contribute to exploring how digitalization affects their field and its consequences.

Each chapter in this book seeks to contribute to the conceptual understanding of one or more dimensions of digitalization. It investigates from a multidisciplinary perspective the ‘what’s ‘how’s of digitalization, and tries to understand the advantages and disadvantages of it for society, various institutions, and individual consumer citizens.

The book begins with Yavasgel and Turdubaeva’s chapter, which explores the meaning of digitalization in terms of individual freedoms, the democratization of culture, and power use. The chapter concerns itself with the history of human rights, freedom, the democratization of culture, the right to communicate, and how these concepts and behavioral practices have changed due to the digitalization of culture. In light of these discussions, Yavasgel and Turdubaeva analyze how power is transformed and conserved globally from a critical perspective. The argument they make based on an intensive literature review in communications and sociology fields is that due to the emerging digital and data-driven technologies, such as AI (Artificial Intelligence), knowledge and culture are detached from existing institutions, practices, and geographies; and new institutions and structures emerge. They further discuss that these new structures establish new forms of control, and corporate actors and states exercise new power for surveillance and system-level control of behavior rapidly.

xv In the second chapter of the book, Eroglu Yalin and Ak discuss what is happening to the technical, material, and physical values of individuals, institutions, and societies as the culture is increasingly digitalized. They argue that the shaping of values revolves around mass consumption and standardization that result mainly from digitalization. They further question how technology has transformed how society, institutions, and individuals relate to each other and the meaning of cultural images in the digital age. As they are delving into these topics, they emphasize that the material values and individualism that result from changes in the digital culture are at the center of the different, emergent lifestyles and values in a world there are fewer intercultural boundaries. Eroglu Yalin and Ak are critical and warn readers about the social chaos that results from imposing, modifying, or destroying the fundamental values, such as religion, or imposing value judgments on minorities. Resulting, digital culture expresses a new network society with a new cultural, social, and power structure that involves replaceable and purchasable identities that are idealized rather than realistic. The authors further discuss the differences among the values of digital indigenous, digital immigrant, and digital hybrid individuals.

Next, Göksu and Özkan’s chapter illustrates the digital factors that have transformed diplomacy and the effects of these changes on the state, society, and individuals. In this chapter, Göksu and Özkan first define increasingly central concepts of diplomacy in the age of digitalization, such as network diplomacy, e-diplomacy, social media diplomacy, digital branding, digital citizenship, digital diaspora, digital journalism, and social movements. Based on an understanding of these concepts and that digital diplomacy presents an interdisciplinary perspective, they continue by explaining the structure and operations of a new sense of diplomacy that results from digitalization, which systematically enables countries to be represented more effectively. They also discuss the ways different constituencies relate to each other in this new sense of diplomacy. They later focus on the case of Turkey to illustrate the effect of digital media on the transformation of diplomatic activities. Based on their analysis, they make proposals to use digital media for more effective diplomacy. Some of their suggestions are to adopt a more active position, work on the digital image and digital branding of the country continuously, train digital diplomats, a well- developed digital diplomacy strategy, utilizing the country’s pop culture digital platforms, developing interactive cultural and language projects. They end their chapter with a positive note on the power of digitalization to disseminate the good, the beautiful, and the right through democracy and law pathways.

xvi Gole and Sruk’s chapter illustrates how dangerous it would be not to utilize digital media wisely and consciously. This chapter explores the spread of fake news, disinformation, alternative facts, and post-truth as among the most significant issues that result from digitalization. Gole and Sruk explain how the digital age has come to be a construct of interpretations of reality dependent on the context in which the distinctions between public and private, political and commercial, and social and market have transformed, and feelings have come to have more weight than evidence. They argue that even fake news has always been an issue, it is more significant and dangerous as each person has become a potential author, and the content on social media platforms can spread among users with no significant fact-checking or editorial judgment. In the post-factual digital society, lies have started to be viewed as something acceptable in certain situations, rather than being treated as something inexcusable. In the digital society that is a spectacle society, the news does not need to be rational and correct but emotionally appealing; information is something to be adjusted to the interests, likes, beliefs, and worldview of individuals. The authors also discuss how the rapidly growing diversity and anonymity of the new media also affect traditional media’s “reality.” They later discuss the implications of the culture of fake news that praise non-intellectual experiences. They argue that such a culture may threaten and undermine modern rational science’s fundamental values and soon lead to a culture breakdown. They finally discuss the diverse (non)regulatory reactions to the challenges that fake news brings and propose some guidelines for monitoring the information’s reality, raising public awareness about disinformation, and tackling the phenomenon effectively. They end their chapter by proposing that journalism that should reproduce facts and information should have the supervisory role.

In the fifth chapter, Güçdemir and Günay explore the internet as a new surveillance tool. They underline the differences between the new surveillance and traditional surveillance. They argue that with the internet, large amounts of data are collected in real-time and distant, and shared, and analyzed in new and unprecedented ways to control and discipline individuals in new forms. They also discuss how new surveillance is lower on visibility and is more likely to be involuntary. Another essential characteristic of the new surveillance is that it is related to big data, massive data generated on every aspect of life on the internet continuously. The authors explain that data collected in each field is complemented with the data collected in the other fields; in other words, that new surveillance is networked. They discuss the Internet of Things as the main tool for successful big data collection. They also talk about their prediction concerning the new era of The Internet of Robotics. Güçdemir and Günay also highlight the outcomes of new surveillance. They talk about how new surveillance leads

xvii to ensuring that people’s habits and routines are better defined than ever before, how different government, commercial, and legal areas have transformed in multiple ways by being more efficient and having better performances and predictions. They also take a critical tone highlighting the controversial issues in new surveillance in terms of ethics and privacy.

Kalpokas investigated how the meaning of leadership, primarily in the political domain, has transformed mainly into performance in a time in history where digital and non-digital have become inseparably intertwined. He suggests that this transformation is mainly due to changing political organization forms and the publics’ emancipation. He argues that one of the most critical aspects of digitalization is that has transformed leadership is that the leaders can build their strategies with advanced knowledge of fine-grained audience characteristics. He further analyses the outcomes of such leadership, such as a new social reality and the growing importance of effective exchange and information. According to the analysis of Kalpokas, leadership in the era of digitalization is not attained, elected, commanding, and directed as in the traditional leadership form. Nevertheless, it a dynamic and relational process that is somewhat performative, inviting, connecting, steering, and stimulating. One of the significant role leaders have today is identity coordination, and leaders have started to act increasingly like social media influencers. Digitalization has made the performative leaderhisp easier as it offers algorithms that would help leaders know what the audience thinks and how they think and consequently act. Leaders have the digitalization tool to develop entertaining, easy-to-consume, and more relatable content for their audience, whom they can define more finely. Kalpokas discusses the meaning of politics in the light of the transformed meaning and process of leadership as well in the chapter and suggests that political engagement once seen as a vital component of the public domain, concerned with the public goods and interest that transcend those of the individual has become ‘an expression of personal hopes, lifestyles, and grievances.’

Letonja, in her chapter, analyzes the digital innovativeness of successors in the smaller family business, based on the previous studies suggesting that the successors taking responsibility for managing further operations and growth of family businesses have to understand the importance of innovativeness for ensuring long-term competitiveness and sustaining the competitive edge of their companies and their products. The main question that this chapter seeks an answer for is whether the successors of smaller family firms are ready to face the challenges of digitization and adopting digital solutions into their daily practice. She first discusses the importance of family businesses in terms of their role in the economy, their attitude towards local communities, the long-term stability they bring to these

xviii environments, and their responsibilities as owners and their values. She continues by defining innovativeness and digital innovativeness. She specifically discusses the challenges that Industry 4.0 introduces to family businesses and how family businesses need extra support and exploit digital technologies to deal with these challenges, compete with more advanced competitors, and overall survive in the market. She utilizes a case study research methodology focusing on family businesses in Slovenia. Based on this case study, she proposes some aspects of digital innovativeness. She first emphasizes the importance of awareness of businesses introducing digital technologies in daily practices and not doing so means disappearance from the market/s. She also highlights that the scope of digitization and digital innovation in smaller FBs depends on their financial and managerial capacities. Companies perceive digitization first and foremost as having a presence on the internet via their web pages. She also emphasizes how digital transformation in smaller FBs starts with changing a mindset and a lot of training. Finally, she explains how digitalization success is dependent on the network. In other words, it is not only the result of the innovativeness of successors, but of the joint effort of the founders and their successors, and even employees.

Digitalization has transformed how perception management works. Mengü and Türk provide an overview of this topic in their chapter. Perception management means providing selective information, incentive, and reasoning to the target audience to influence their feelings and behaviors. Mengü and Türk discuss how digitization has made it easier to know people’s perceptions and then work on changing it favorably; thus, it can make perception management highly effective and efficient. They highlight the hyper-focus on the customer experience, well–defined, streamlined, and transparent operational processes, precise integration between data and process, and think in terms of “value” not “activities” characteristics of digital convergence the perception management process more effective and efficient. Similar to the discussion that Gole and Sruk provide, they also emphasize the dark side of digitalization in terms of information and what it means for perception management. They argue that deception and disinformation are essential components of perception management to make the target audience or groups believe whatever any authority wants them to believe, notwithstanding the truth or validity of the promoted information. The difference between facts and myths, and images and reality have become elusive in such a context. Not only reality is hurt, but abuse and insult have become bigger issues, again to be resolved through the troll detection opportunities that digitalization offers. They also underline the differences between new surveillance and traditional surveillance: New surveillance has low visibility or is invisible, is more likely to be involuntary, is more likely

xix to involve manipulation, is networked, and relies primarily on digital rather than physical technologies. Overall, big data is an essential factor in perception management, and it offers many challenges and ethical issues. Therefore, Mengü and Türk underline that the rules, structures, and practices of perception management should not conflict with public relations ethics and focus on building perceptions that would not manipulate the audience negatively.

Sezer and Tunçer undertake the vital task of analyzing one of the most sensitive digital culture topics in their chapter: Cyberbullying. They define cyberbullying, followed by how it is similar to and differs from conventional bullying and what it means for the individuals and society. This section emphasizes that cyberbullying varies from conventional bullying in certain aspects stemming from the nuances of the technology use, and victims of bullying in a virtual environment may be even more vulnerable. Sezer and Tunçer discuss cyberbullying’s main characteristics, such as its capacity to spread more quickly and simultaneously to a larger number of people, its longer-lasting effects, and how the bully can conceal their identity more easily, and they highlight the need for multidimensional scholarly studies on this subject. In the first part of their chapter, they first discuss different bullying types and then bullying in the workplace. They talk about the psychological and economic damage that bullying leads. They also look at different types of cyberbullying discussed in the literature, followed by describing the characteristics and motives of different types of people involved in cyberbullying compared to traditional bullies. They also underline that cyberbullying does not always target individual victims but can involve large public sections. Later, they focus on the meaning of cyberbullying in the context of Turkey. They discuss how Turkish people feel about and react to cyberbullying. They also delineate the actions taken against cyberbullying with specific examples, as well as legal actions taken in this context. They end their chapter with valuable suggestions to combat cyberbullying. They emphasize the importance of creating greater awareness of what cyberbullying is, whom it harms, and what are the social and legal consequences, engaging the public and, particularly, children and young adults into the conversation about cyberbullying, and creating opportunities for informal and formal education of Media Literacy and Digital Media Literacy.

Today mainly due to their work on social media, consumers are called prosumers. In her article on digital labor and Gen Z consumers, Akar investigates the meaning of new media usage. The base for this chapter is the understanding that the new media is an environment in which users also contribute to the content. In this chapter, Akar primarily discusses the meanings of consumption and production and how the line between the two has been blurring as the consumers of new media become prosumers contributing to the production in this

xx environment. She explores the multiple levels of working on social media that go beyond content creation but content circulation. She analyses the sense of alienation of Gen Z consumers to their own content, where these consumers position themselves in the digital production cycle, their thoughts on the use of their personal information, and all their labor- oriented behaviors based on in-depth interviews. Her findings show that a significant number of consumers define their activities in the new media environment as labor. However, Gen Z consumers are content with this idea and expect emotional and social returns instead of a financial return in each form of their participation. The vast majority of the participants evaluate the labor in this environment as positive as more people know them better and more closely in this environment. Additionally, half of their interviewees were not aware of their personal data being used for commercial purposes. Interestingly, Gen Z respondents are not concerned about this issue. Overall, Akar stresses the importance of rethinking labor activities and who gains the most value from prosumer activities.

Odyakmaz Acar and Çağlar’s chapter undertakes the task of reviewing the media sociology’s definition and its scope form different theoretical perspectives, as well as proposing further studies that can be done in this field, and highlighting the concepts and theories that can be used to explore the changes in media sociology in the digital culture. They base their discussions on the understanding that communication technologies have reached a level that they can influence the masses on a global scale; and, the media now influence, direct, supervise and even control the masses. They start their analysis of media sociology in the time of digitalization by discussing social theory and the ideas of the most significant social theorists to explain media sociology. They continue by reviewing the pragmatic approach of the Chicago school. Later, they outline the System approach and reflect on its framework. Finally, they examine Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools. After developing an understanding of media sociology based on these theories and frameworks, they discuss the meaning, the features, and the sociology of new digital media. They discuss the optimistic views of new media on the surface but take a critical perspective about its hidden meanings and effects. They discuss how digital media, compared to traditional media, offers selectivity and access opportunities to its users in choosing information and cultural resources, allows people to let their voices heard, react to injustice, interact and network with more people, organize the reaction; eases the flow of knowledge and information. From a critical approach, they discuss how digital media might become a means of pressure for the power as it allows dominant groups to watch individuals, record their every movement, analyze their reactions, and predict their behavior to suppress them. They also highlight the

xxi illusion of freedom of speech on digital media by illustrating how people usually share the dominant class’s views, not their own ideas, and how it has become the best environment for realizing the ‘society of surveillance’ and ‘biopower’ of the global capitalist empire. They also highlight the illusion of access to digital media information and mention the increased, nor decreased, inequality among individuals. Their note that every technology is useful when used wisely and consciously is a significant one to ponder.

Önder Memiş explores the meaning of the fastest-growing promotion element, public relations, in the light of digitalization in her chapter. She reviews the factors of digitalization that transforms and shapes public relations strategies and activities. First of all, digitalization means direct communication, the flow of information through multiple channels, and an increased ability of people to question, research, learn the reasons, think critically, challenge, give immediate feedback, and react. Additionally, digital platforms transform identities. These meanings of digitalization transform the mechanisms of public relations. Önder Memiş outlines the changes in the field of public relations. First of all, she defines public relations in this context as “meeting the target groups on new identities in the right digital platforms and convey the right messages in these environments.” She highlights the increasing dominance of images and perceptions in the process and the eye of others, and how different parties in the public relations process behave have also changed. She discusses the more active audience sharing in social media for popularity. Önder Memiş emphasizes the evolution of audience identities from target groups to active influencers in every communication and production stage, from creation to change, by digital public relations processes. She also stresses the intensity and intimate tone of public relations communications with a broader audience in the digital platforms. In the digital public relations process, more emphasis is given to customer relationship management and customer satisfaction. In a sense, it focuses on personalized applications. According to her, digitalization has transformed public relations positively by bringing a lot of convenience to the process. Digitalization also offers challenges in the public relations process. Önder Memiş first of all, discusses how crises that occur in digital platforms may be more dangerous, as uncontrolled negative messages may increase their effect by spreading rapidly. She also discusses how digitalization may mean more work for businesses as they need to be extra careful in creating and disseminating information. She warns that information on brands should be accurate, up-to-date, and new for increased effectiveness and to prevent crises that may spread fast in a context where target groups are questioning the crises in the institutions more, wanting to know the reasons, reacting more on social media, and increasing the awareness of other target groups.

xxii Quintern’s chapter investigates the educational, transformational value of digitalization primarily by focusing on its application in the museum as there is the necessity to newly conceptualize museum studies (museology) in a dialogical and transcultural manner. The chapter analyzes digitalization potential for museums to recover as creative spaces for emotional and dialogical ways of perception and learning beyond the screen. Quintern first explores the trend of replacing museum objects with replicas as the development of digital, 3-D, and other binary technologies make it more and more difficult for the wider public to distinguish replicas from originals. He analyzes the practices of current museums from a critical perspective that communicating cultural inheritance includes the digitalization of the objects, which consist of three-dimensional artifacts or objects, paintings, photographs, maps, models, reproductions, audio and film recordings, and other archival documents. He suggests that building digital storage is useful in a culture where there is an increasing risk that original historical “objects” enter an international criminal market where cultural heritage objects are traded illegally. He adds that digital storage might also help bring the universal cultural heritage, often slumbering in storage and archives, to the global public. He later focuses on the importance of a new museum concept in post migrant times for imperialist era victims, specifically Turkey. However, based on his critique of digitalization to rather distracting visitors, he pleads in favor of a museology that avoids as far as possible digital media. He argues that the ideal museum setting is where the “viewer” and “object” have to re-enter into a dialogical communication that should not be disturbed by any transient and ephemeral distractions. He suggests that in a society that hosts millions of refugees, new museology on the move might pave the way for a more harmonious understanding of history, and many world cultural heritage sites and museums in Turkey can act as a role model. He argues, based on some other models, that such new museology concept might immigrants to reflect on their memories and the commonly shared long history of human beings, and “their creative accomplishments that also might help to overcome the trauma of war, nourishing constantly a destructive conception of the world.” He ends his chapter with the note that such a concept might “stimulate more optimistic world views, realizing that there are future horizons of a more peaceful and harmonious possibility of living together.”

Digitalization is complex and transforms consumers, so that understanding consumers from a holistic perspective has become ever crucial. In chapter fourteen, Kuş and Popović Šević review big data and neuromarketing as research tools that support traditional market research methods and that increase the efficiency of research to understand different aspects

xxiii of consumer cognition and affect more in-depth to develop better marketing campaigns. These tools are increasingly important because they help researchers and strategists go beyond monitoring the audience’s behavior but predicting it as well. These tools are becoming popular and are utilized more widely due to digital transformations. Kuş and Popović Šević review big data in their chapter first. First of all, the data that is out, available for research has multiplied as digital technologies have caused consumers to produce data through devices and platforms. These technologies enable consumers to actively create data by, for example, letting them actively express their opinions about brands, products, or services. Researchers value this data highly because consumers themselves voluntarily produce this data. Big data analytics mean new opportunities for understanding consumer trends by offering more comprehensive data in various structures and at higher rates. In the analysis of big data, there is an opportunity to observe sub-sets and cause-effect relations. The most important features of this data are its reliability, honesty, and fast flow. In the second part of their chapter Kuş and Popović Šević discuss neuromarketing as a tool that presents the massive potential to analyze consumer trends by better understanding consumers’ unconscious processes through researching their brain activities as well as their nervous systems, that are mostly inaccessible to most traditional market research techniques. They say that the data from “inside,” which speak more about a consumer’s feelings, incentives, beliefs, and attitudes, are obtained in neuromarketing research. Overall, this chapter suggests that these research tools, in combination with traditional tools, offer more accurate and relevant data and allow observing and predicting many behavioral, emotional, and cognitive patterns; and these implicit patterns have served to improve the quality of people’s daily lives and increase the added value of organizations. Another benefit that these tools offer, according to Kuş and Popović Šević, is consumers can become aware of their decision and reliably know what they come to purchase the desired product or service. Even though these tools offer massive benefits, they are more expensive than traditional types of research and can be more technical. Besides, these approaches require an interdisciplinary perspective.

Kırık, Çetinkaya, and Kurşun review the role of digitalization on social activism and offers results of their survey research on online petitions as a digital activism tool. They discuss how social movements spread faster and achieve a broader audience in a shorter time, with lower costs on digital platforms such as social media, cell phones, and internet-based applications. They also add being able to avoid the mainstream media repression and censorship as one of the most significant benefits of digital social activism. They review in- depth, with examples such as the Arab Spring, how individuals can create shared consciousness

xxiv and interact in a virtual environment, how individuals come together to meet a common target. They also emphasize that some social movements aim to attract the public’s attention to make the problems visible to and known by society, rather than expending effort for change. Indeed, according to the review in this chapter, new social movements primarily try to create public opinion. Kırık, Çetinkaya, and Kurşun further argue that the field of struggle for new social movements is not the political field primarily, but the civil society. The most significant advantage of social movements in digital platforms is that they offer opportunities for those excluded from society to make their voices heard. Over time, digital activism is integrated into traditional activism (street activism) and is not entirely independent. After the review of digital activism, Kırık, Çetinkaya, and Kurşun focus on digital signature campaigns, and mainly Change.org. They focus on signature campaigns because it is a social phenomenon that individuals can freely share their feelings and thoughts and support signature campaigns without knowing each other and through organizing a community (crowdsourcing) to make common cause with other supporters. These campaigns are part of a broader range of mobilization; collecting online signatures can be useful not only on national borders but also on governments and administrative bodies at the international level. In their survey, the authors found that participants have low belief in the success of online petitions and their goal-achievement nature. Yet, the awareness about online petitions is observed at a high level. It is found that the participants sign a petition to contribute to the solution of the problem.

We hope that the readers of this book will find it a useful overview of the discussions of the most pressing current topics regarding digitalization, and this book stimulates more interest in these topics and serves as a resource to guide further research.

xxv

DIGITAL SEIGE

CHAPTER 1

DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER

Emine YAVAŞGEL1, Elira TURDUBAEVA2

1Prof. Dr., Istanbul University, Faculty of Communication, Public Relations and Publicity Department, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

2PhD., American University of Central Asia, Journalism and Mass Communications Department, Bishkek, Kyrgysztan e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.01

ABSTRACT The most significant development regarding the cultural formation of the 21st Century is the digitalization of communication with the invention of the Internet. We have entered a multi-layered cultural transformation through technology, communication and the shaping power of media. M. Castells (2009) who identifies technology with society, argues in The Rise of the Network Society that the networks in new media form the social morphology of the society, and revolutionize cultural processes. No expression of socializing or symbolic representations can be isolated from the power relations that form it. For this reason, a critical cultural theory naturally leads us to a political theory. Power is not a separate area of investigation; it lies at the center of the whole social life. In this chapter, digital culture will be discussed as a socialized subjectivity as part of digital habitus, and arenas which were entered into with an aim to transform and conserve the power balance will be examined. In the digital world which is comprised of components such as digitality, interactivity, socializing, participation, hyper-reality and hyper-textuality, individuals have the freedom to communicate with whomever they want, be a member of or leave online communities. But, we are trying to discover the place of reality in the digital world where identities are reproduced and consumed. The process of modernization, which, together with capitalism, transforms everything into material elements, also materialized man, gave him a numerical value, and as a result, individuals have assumed the form of the space where they belong outside their own existence as everything that is material became liquid, or, fluid (Marx, 1848). A brand new behavioral practice is demonstrated in the fluid relations established within digital living rooms representing this new social space. In this study, these behavioral practices and relations with power was subjected to descriptive analysis. Keywords: Freedom, right to communicate, globalization of communication, democratization of culture, digital culture, power 2 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER

1. Introduction

The Right to Communicate

“Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, ..., at once fruitful and barren and uncertain... To live--is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, ... endeavouring to be different?”

Friedrich Nietzsche [Translation by Helen Zimmern]

The organized emergence of the idea in the West that human beings have certain innate rights and freedoms, and that the state will never touch them coincides with the seventeenth century. This doctrine is called the doctrine of individual rights. In the classical sense, individual rights and freedoms mean nothing other than a person’s freedoms originating from being a human.

In view of the historical development of public liberties in the West, England has a special place. With the Magna Carta Libertatum (the Great Edict of Freedom), which the British forced John Lackland, their king at the time, to accept at the beginning of the thirteenth century (in 1215), the British took the first big step towards the realization of human rights. With the Petition of Rights dated 1628, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, the Bill of Rights of 1689 and the Act of Settlement of 1701, the boundaries of freedoms were expanded, and the ruler’s power was taken into the legal framework to ensure its respect towards the individual rights and freedoms.

So much that later, these edicts and laws were adopted as a list of general and abstract rights and freedoms that, acting from a number of philosophical principles, could enclose all humanity. Acting directly from philosophical principles, the list of freedoms that can be addressed to all mankind was fully manifested with the American and French Revolution manifestos in the late eighteenth century. The first document of this nature is the Bill of Rights in the beginning of the Virginia Constitution of June 12, 1776.

When it comes to declarations of rights, the first and most famous one is the French Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights of 1789. In this declaration composed of seventeen articles, people are declared to have “natural, non-transferable, non-statute of limitations, sacred” rights and right of freedom, and standard rights and freedoms such as the right to property, security of person, thought, speech, writing and conscience are listed without distinction. Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA 3

This is how human rights and freedoms framed the power of the state and set a boundary that this power must always abide by. The area indicated by this boundary is the personal private space of the individual, the circle of free movement. The state is expected not to interfere in this area, or rather not to intervene. In this context, the 1789 model rights and freedoms were found to be inadequate in the context of certain social and economic rights apart from the usual rights and freedoms.

Today in the Western sense of freedom, a human is no longer discussed as an abstract being as in the individualist doctrine, but rather a concrete being surrounded by the social conditions of the society in which s/he lives in and whose needs are ever-increasing. Economic freedoms and social rights can be considered at the top of these needs.

In this context, Habermas emphasizes that the organization theory strategically meets the “need for justification,” by instrumentalizing culture, personality and public opinion independently of the political order’s formation of public opinion for the general interests. However, there will be other problems that such justifiers will lead to. As a result of these social orders gaining autonomy against their environment, there may be a possibility of developing their own language games. In this case, it is probable to face an important problem such as where and in what language the problems concerning the whole of society are to be discussed. In the simplest terms, since real public opinion is formed in principle by interpersonal communication of a subjective nature, the debate needs to be in a place where individuals can face it.

This place can be limited to the span of public communication. However, the field of public opinion created by the media is actually an extremely abstract area. What is meant by public opinion here is rather the areas created in real social spaces. Therefore, they are largely separated from the public areas created by the media.

By developing the antithesis of this thesis, Foucault argued that “normalization” and “disciplinization” are widespread in modernity, rather than “justification”. According to Foucault, justification is actually a process of proving that the positions of power and sovereignty are based on justified grounds, while normalization and disciplinization mean infusing individuals with behaviors and needs appropriate to the interests of the order through distorted communication. There is no need to justify it in the modern sense, since the power is hidden and its source and center is not clear. In this case, at least in the consciousness of individuals, the source of authority will remain unclear. Therefore, people will have no choice but to adopt the “appropriate” solution to their problems. 4 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER

Foucault dwells upon the fact that the person who has adapted to authority and disciplined herself will now perceive pressure as a natural phenomenon. According to him, in this case, there will be no need for democratic public opinion. Since disciplinization always requires sacrifice from personal needs, individuals who acquire this ability will be easily guided in accordance with the requirements of the order. It is also possible to see disciplinization positively. From this point of view, since individuals enter into an idea movement in non- governmental organizations and sacrifice their interests, not for the order, but for the right claims of other individuals or group of interests, by doing so, they will also achieve democratic participation as they will provide community/collective action and solidarity in obtaining common interests (Taylor, 1996, pp. 58–113).

According to Naisbitt (1985), the “direct democracy” ideal is in the spirit of participatory democracy. And yet, according to him, “representative democracy” has emerged as a result of the impossibility of direct participation of citizens, but today the situation is changing again, so the citizens no longer need to be “represented”: “First the communication revolution appeared, and then, thanks to that, a highly informed public opinion. We now share information instantly. We learn what is going on as well and as quickly as our representatives” (Naisbitt, 1985, p. 175). Interpreting new communication technologies in terms of their democratic consequences, Naisbitt (1985) comments that in light of these developments, today in USA, “political left and right died is dead. Now all the movements come from the radical center” (p. 175).

The rapid change of the communication environment with the introduction and prevalence of new technologies also changes the cultural environment altogether. Obviously, just as the political organization of countries or empires was once formed in parallel to the transportation conditions of those countries, now political, social and cultural events are formed according to the new communication conditions.

As a result of the popularization of communication technologies alongside these approaches, the concept of “the right to communication” was born. Western countries that define the right to communication as a basic human right assume the rights to provide information, receive information, preservation of cultural identity, cultural change, cultural identity, opinion and expression, correction and the right to respond within this right.

Some thinkers who comment on the concept of “right to communication” state that this concept which is based on Article 19 of “the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” has a much wider content than those mentioned in this article. It is argued that the concept has an Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA 5 equality dimension as well as freedom. With these dimensions, the content of the concept is indicated as follows:

The right of everyone to receive the information they want; the presence of a balanced information order between people, regions and countries; the balance of information from outside and the information generated inside; to support globalization and cultural pluralism; to support bilateral communication at all levels; to create awareness of basic communication rights; to create a balance between active participation and private life; use of communication resources by everyone (Taylor, 1996, p. 118).

Although the broad interpretation of the concept seems to reduce its availability, the fact that it can enter into bilateral agreements between countries, and essentially its recognition as not being limited to Article 19 can be shown as proof that it bears a universal characteristic. As is known, in addition to discussions on change of order, there is also the discussion of “change of environment”, which the world began to debate at the same period of time. So much so that we are experiencing a great change of environment; the “environment” we live in and keep us informed of each other is changing rapidly. This is where the reality of today lies. The unum ac singulum1*, mandatory condition for democratization of culture in this case is the freedom of communication. Expectations from this structural development of culture are also high through today’s digital technology. In this study, based on the projection of these expectations, a descriptive analysis was carried out.

2. Freedom of Communication or Democratization of Culture

Cultural democracy is, in plainest terms, “the freedom of communication” (Topuz, 1998). It defends everyone’s right to access culture. Literally democratic politics are based on culture. In cultural democracy the very first thing that is considered is the development of the creative qualities of man. Democratization of culture means that everyone can access cultural heritage. Cultural democracy and democratization of culture are seen as two essential and complementary phenomena in this sense. As societies find their identity in their cultural assets, which are a source of creative inspiration for them, each public must be reserved the right and duty to defend and protect their own cultural existence. However, it is evident that it is difficult to prevent prejudices arising from ethnic separation from threatening inter-cultural co-existence today. In fact, as Adam Smith clearly stated in his work The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1988), nations themselves derive from ethnic structures that have an identity that emerges through myths and icons, but also bear an identity that can show flexibility.

1 *[one and only] 6 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER

According to John Rawls (as cited in Kymlicka, 1998), mutual citizenship only progresses political virtues such as “being reasonable, fairness, the desire for reconciliation and helping others” (p. 279). Therefore, it is not easy to find answers when faced with the question of how much the sense of common citizenship can apply these virtues in the multi-community. Therefore, unless socio-economic policies are structured within cultural democracy, they cannot have a contemporary nature.

One of the most important objectives of human development is the development of the individual in social and cultural spheres. Since accessing and participating in cultural life is recognized as the fundamental rights of individuals in all societies, according to Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, governments are tasked with creating the necessary environment for this right to be fully exercised. Individual freedom within the social map of the human world organized by concepts such as class, power, dominance, authority, socialization, ideology, culture and education, is far from being a universal condition of the human species. Individual freedom has recently shifted from the sphere of production and power to the field of consumption and risen to a central position as a bond that holds social order together. Freedom signals a social relationship, asymmetry of social conditions. Fundamentally it specifies a social difference. Therefore, as Michel Crozier emphasized in his work The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, today freedom is the ability to rule and have a say in power (Bauman, 1997, pp. 27–45). As long as there are those who are restricted, freedom will remain as a privilege and power.

When we approach the matter in terms of the whole social living space, the individual’s freedom and self-awareness that they have command on their conditions is regarded as the greatest achievement of mankind in modern times in this sense (Bauman, 1997, p. 132).

In fact, the idea of freedom, which expresses sensitivity to public problems, a willing tendency to these problems, has remained a utopia, and therefore modern societies in history have already ceased to be the place where public space claims are expressed. Unfortunately, this has made individual autonomy and indifference to public ones mutually dependent and conditional. According to Hannah Arendt, this led to the initial public freedom being replaced by the ideal of individual happiness (Arendt, 2009). Thus, the concept of freedom, which is identified with the individual’s right to strive for their own happiness, is removed from the content of maintaining ensemble self-control.

The ability to create new compositions and combinations from different sources is also a power that integrates culture. Therefore, interpreting culture as a continuous being will undoubtedly be the best approach. Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA 7

However, the most difficult thing is to establish the dialogue between common values. Based on the possibility and necessity of moving from a unity of movement to cultural dialogue between singular formations, one can reach Lévi-Strauss’s determination that there is one single pole of universality. Claude Lévi-Strauss highlights humanity’s understanding of plurality, while also pointing out that this concept does not mean that humanity is no longer “one and indivisible”.

Lévi-Strauss’ understanding of plurality empowers his great idea of structuralism in which only differences are meaningful and form order. According to Lévi-Strauss, “thinking that we can reach universality by rejecting or denying any kind of belonging to urbanism or secularism, everything established in a special tradition or stating that the only possible fundamental foundation is the absence and loss of foundation is a mistake. (...) Every culture, whether it wants to be so or not, is -quoting Paul Ricoeur’s phrase- an “ethic-mythical core” consisting of a special mixture. This core often gets more active unless it is denied rather than criticized” (Lévi-Strauss, 1997, p. 15). Therefore, if it wants to recreate self, it must succeed at placing differences within freedoms into the democratic structure.

2.1. Modern Reflection of Freedom as a Condition of Universal Humanity

Freedom exists only as a social relationship it is the personal possession of the individual rather than a property (Dewey, 1987, pp. 11–26). The existence of free individuals within a society indicates a distinction between social positions. Freedom, which is prevalent enough to be seen as a universal human condition, is a relative innovation connected with the emergence of modernity and capitalism in the history of humankind.

A person’s ability to dominate their own destiny which is considered to be the modern reflection of freedom has a close relation with the problems related to the most distinctive feature of modern times: the artificiality of the social order. Freedom within society is, at the same time, an indispensable condition for both social integration and reproduction which affects the whole of order and this condition is constantly recreated through the “operating” style of the order and social integration.

Individual life of individual freedom, in other words, its central position as a bond that holds society and social order together, has been achieved in the recent past by shifting from the sphere of production and power to the field of consumption. Individual freedom in society is, above all, the freedom of the consumer. And its existence depends on the existence of an 8 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER effective market, which in turn assures the conditions of existence of the market. Freedom in this case, in short, is a privilege. Or, man is basically free as he is responsible for the consequences of his behavior. Although its religious foundations are rejected, this is a sense of freedom which is derivative of certain ethical values or legal structures.

The two main features that exhibit the authenticity of the Western liberty phenomenon, which originated from the Magna Carta, are striking: the first one is the close link to individuality, and the second is the genetic and cultural connection to market economy and capitalism. The main principle of individualism lies in “the sense of open distinction between my existence and other people.” However, at this point, it is necessary to touch on the duality of modern earthly individualism. Individualism, on the one hand, is the natural, inalienable, non-transferable right of every person; on the other hand, it is something that is created, educated, legislated and forced by the powers that act for the benefit of “common happiness” of the whole society.

According to some sociologists, individuality as a value which lies at the roots of modern individualism, is the violent anxiety about the divergence and originality of the individual, the painful experience of being a self and having a self at the same time (just like a property, a person taking care of themselves, defending themselves and keeping themselves clean) and the lack of a clear and comprehensible rule that can provide or enforce a definite prescription of behavior for the instantly changing conditions of everyday life. A person has the ability to observe and correct his own behavior, just like a “gyroscope”, which allows ships traveling alone in a strong, dominant current to stay on their course. This ability is called “self-control.”

We can show self-consciousness, which is an indicator of a person’s dominance over their conditions, as the most important feature of modern freedom. The behavior directed by the conscious mind is identified with the rationalization of society. And this is expressed as a common achievement of humankind (Bauman, 1997, pp. 17–69). The desire for freedom comes from experiencing pressure. In other words, this desire arouses a sense of doing something that one should not do, or not being able to rest until doing what s/he wants to do. Sometimes we find the source of pressure in people we know, people with whom we communicate directly.

But no matter how the person explains the sense of pressure, the origins of this feeling always lie in the conflict between a person’s own goals and the possibility of acting according to their goals. It goes without saying that in a modern society that is functionally divided, the individual needs more than ever the “friendly warmth” that one can only receive from Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA 9 those with whom s/he has close relations. For some reason, the same society which, due to functional differentiation, gives the individual many choices in almost every field and truly raises them to the position of a “free” human being by leaving the responsibility to make choices to them, at the same time, contradictorily, has also greatly increased the experience of pressure. When the experience of pressure is common, in this regard, waiting for the impulse for freedom to be different cannot go beyond dreaming. In spite of state of conflict, freedom and the need for social interaction are inseparable (Duverger, 1971, p. 189). This is like a permanent attribute of the human state.

3. Globalization of Communication/Global Media Culture

Castells (2004, pp. 115–117) refers to the modern society that Luhmann described as the social system as a social structure composed of information networks based on an interconnected but decentralized set of nodes. In trying to impose this emerging “new world order” as a “single thought” in every field from politics to ideology, finances to culture and art, another weapon that is at least as effective as the money markets is “global media”. Global media, in one sentence, can be defined as media system and understanding that the new world order, or the new right in the political sphere, neoliberalism in the economic sphere, and one single idea in the ideological sphere is trying to be extended throughout the world (Duran, 2001, p. 8).

Globalization is defined both as “the downsizing of the world” and “the strengthening of the world consciousness as a whole” (Robertson, 1992, p. 21), quintessentially, as “a world process” (Hall, 1998, p. 38). Bauman (1999) says that the deepest meaning emerging from the idea of globalization is “the ambiguous, unregulated and solitary nature of world issues,” and that globalization does not “have a center, a control desk, a board of directors, and an administrative office” (p. 69).

The use of the concept of globalization to define the mutual dependence of modern societies creates the illusion that globalization is an irrepressible phenomenon independent of the nature of social systems. In this context, globalization becomes a dominant reality of today. Societies are now connected with information and communication networks, and networks hide the truth more than explaining it (Alemdar & Erdoğan, 2002, p. 509). Luhmann (1990) comments on the matter as follows: “Worldwide communicative system has established a world to cover all possibilities” (p. 178). 10 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER

According to Hardt and Negri (2001), globalization can be called an empire as it has influenced the whole world, neutralized borders and it lacks a specific center.

The expansion of capitalism has been accompanied by the continuous push of communication networks and streams of the world’s borders for the last two hundred years. The concept of world-communication, which is indistinguishably connected to terms such as the world economy and the world-society, signifies the articulation of the production and commercialization space within the communication industry into the world economy space. Mattelart clearly places the concept of world-communication which is used to cover these points into a critical perspective in his work La Mundialización de la Comunicación [The Globalization of Communication]. And according to Chase-Dunn (1999, p. 191), globalization of communication is associated with a new era, informatics and information technology.

When we review the production style properties of this period, which emerged as post-industrialization information technologies, we come across certain concepts such as automation, computer and telecommunications. The general opinion is that the factor that creates the global market is not the national markets that are separated from each other, but information technology; because it creates a favorable environment for economic competition (Chase-Dunn, 1999, p. 189).

The concept of world-communication inspired by Fernand Braudel’s concept of world- economy assumes the role of “reminding that networks intertwined with the international division of labor make space hierarchical, and leads to an ever-growing polarization between the center(s) and the periphery (-ies)” (Mattelart, 2001, p. 100).

Harvey’s (2006, p. 270) “time-space jam” and McLuhan’s (2001, pp. 44–48) “global village” concepts also dramatically express the globality of communication. “Time-space jam” indicates that telecommunications lifts borders, causing an inward collapse. Harvey uses this concept to describe general globalization which includes economic and ecological interdependence as well as globalization of communication. McLuhan’s concept of a “global village” refers to a cultural loss. There is the concern that the development of electronic communication tools shifts the world from a visual orientation to an auditory orientation, pushes people to laziness in terms of culture, literacy will decline, and that there will be a return to primitiveness.

The electronization of the communication field causes synchronization all over the world, gives rise to the idea that the world is becoming a village community, and this is viewed as a cultural loss. Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA 11

Globalization according to Morley and Robins (1997) is defined as follows: “global space is a space of flows, an electronic space, it has no center, it is a space where borders and fronts can be penetrated” (p. 181). When the developments in the field of communication are interpreted, globalization comes to be defined as a place/placelessness where borders in the world are lifted, meaning spaces lose their constancy and everything is only in flow. Rodrik (2006) says that technological advances in the transportation and communication sectors have made national borders more transitional for foreign competition than ever before and nothing except severe government limitations can turn this back (p. 64).

On the other hand, as a result of developments in the means of communication and transportation, communication networks that occur on a global scale give a new dimension to the forms of social relations. Virtual relationships that were not experienced at any time in history are now occurring in virtual environments, and at the same time virtual societies or communities are formed (Bauman, 1999, p. 25; Morley & Robins, 1997, p. 181).

Schiller (1992) also suggests that international media is becoming widespread by establishing an ideological information infrastructure and that this process is supported by market research done by advertising agencies (Önür, 2002, p. 161; Schiller 1992). Since the media is under the control of strong classes in society, the messages that are popularized in this way reproduce the class system, and the power structure of society is preserved through media ownership. While tools of communication and transportation lead to the dissolution of locality and kinship on the one hand, they allow for “replacement” by facilitating access to “close” relatives who are far away or by giving an opportunity to simultaneously meet with them in communication environments (Giddens, 1998, p. 137). By revealing new forms of sociality such as Internet communities, they pave the way for intellectual and emotional “close” relations between individuals from geographically distant distances who have never met each other, they free the individual from the abstraction of modernity and bring it back to the subject state.

In short, the media culture that prevails all over the world today is beyond nations. It operates with a global perspective, and is produced by transnational holdings. One of the important arguments of cultural expansion is that this is done more in the name of “modernization” and “development”. In this process, the mass media helps standardize behavior and consumption patterns necessary for the industrial production system by flowing images into “mass consciousness.” In other words, the fact that these products which emerged in the form of consumption culture have turned into “lifestyle” is considered as a result of cultural imperialism. 12 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER

The circulation of images across the world, the standardization of lifestyles through mass consumer goods form the basic views of cultural globalization. This symbolization implies that global cultural codes actually exist in their own “native” sources, thus reproducing them and providing a legitimate basis for their acceptance. In this way, society tends to perceive itself as part of the dominant cultural world.

It is envisaged that the media is causing an erosive impact on national and local cultures with the international network of relations and the sovereign discourse it creates. In other words, today’s cultures are surrounded by media culture as isolated areas. One of the most important characteristics of modern culture is the clear and transformative impact of the media on cultural life.

4. Digital Culture or Digitalization of Culture

Although many definitions have been made over time, culture has become one of the concepts that have been discussed thoroughly and yet a consensus has not been reached on the matter. Taylor defined culture as “a whole composed of all the talents that man has acquired as a member of society, including knowledge, faith, art, morality, law, customs and traditions” (Köse, Tetik & Ercan, 2001, p. 221). Digital culture is one of the concepts that have been frequently emphasized in recent times in terms of its effects. As a result of innovations and changes brought by the age we are in, technology is used to indicate the change of habits by its increased participation in daily life.

Digital culture, in the 21st century, is viewed as a phenomenon expanding its field of influence by spreading out towards various fields and continuously renewing itself as a response to the needs created by the modern capitalist lifestyle (Gere, 2008, p. 224). Digital technology transforms culture. In this age, where technology is an indispensable part of everyday life, consumption habits change incredibly fast. At the same time, encountering a new tool that contributes to the spread of digital culture every day has become an undeniable reality. In this context, it is possible to define the process we are in as a process independent of time and space, where there are no boundaries, where individuals set the rules and real life norms are reproduced.

Digital culture is an instant and interactive structure by nature. Users can connect and create content at any time and share that content with other users instantly.

As elements of digital culture, network websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia-type websites, e-Government and e-commerce websites, digital media websites such as Youtube, Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA 13

DailyMotion and Instagram, blogs and messaging on different platforms (WhatsApp, SMS, etc.) are regarded as virtual media (Türkoğlu, 2013, p. 35). Among these, the electronic mail (e-mail) application is seen as the most important component of digital culture with its ability to disseminate information throughout the whole world in very short periods of time (Yılmaz, 2016, p. 356).

Thanks to today’s technological development, many processes are carried out through digital tools and platforms in every field from art to sports, music to literature, science and education to culture. Therefore, it has become possible to talk about digitalization in every aspect of the life world that constitutes sociality. As the United Nations Human Development Reports revealed, the speed of adoption and implementation of digital technologies has reached considerable dimensions. Today, information and communication technologies can be seen in almost every region of the world. Although its effects vary from country to country, digital technologies are changing all around the world at a great pace. Despite regional differences, digital culture has become one of today’s fundamental realities thanks to this structural feature.

The development of industrialization related to communication technologies is increasing the impact of communication on culture more and more. In the post-industrial social order which Toffler (2008) described as the Third Wave after the agricultural and industrial revolutions, respectively, all cultural elements are commercialized.

Within the social and cultural fabric of industrial capitalism, culture is shaped by mass media around a standard concept of popular culture. The cultural industry deals with objects in a way that allows the capital to reproduce itself. The culture industry, which erodes the critical aspect of culture over time, allows culture to reach more people through mass media (Erdoğan & Alemdar, 2005, p. 329).

The differentiating structure of masses that benefits from communication in the age of digitization is also among the factors affecting culture. As the power of culture which is based on modern mass communication increases, crowds that do not receive a share of cultural activities become cultural consumers. Thus, the heterogeneous structure of the masses demanding cultural products forms a mosaic texture (Abadan-Unat, 1983, p. 68). Individuals in the communication process are involved in the cultural process using technological innovations, while communication tools create a giant wave of change which seems to be independent of each other but affects all communication tools. During this period, new tools replace mass media. Moving away from mass, the industrial ecosystem becomes an ecosystem of information (Toffler, 2008, p. 210). 14 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER

While the visual culture directed by photography is at the forefront in the industrial ecosystem, social culture is created with a greater impact in the information ecosystem. The new culture of communication emerging through digitization affects all stages of communication, including acquisition, storage, manipulation and distribution of information (Manovich, 2001, p. 19). In the advanced world shaped by digital technology, the Internet, penetrating almost every aspect of modern life, offers an uninterrupted digital environment. At home, at work, in the office and wherever conceivable; individuals, firms and governments realize their goals based on digital technology (Gere, 2008, p. 14).

Digital technologies that reproduce everyday practices online are also rapidly digitalized because of their identity and relations. In digital habitus, users internalize network practices by both establishing identities and following others. Individuals have the opportunity to display different identities at the same time by socializing on their Facebook accounts, sharing their political views on Twitter, digitalizing their personal life on Instagram with selfies, and competing with their professional skills on LinkedIn (Güzel, 2016).

Goffman’s theatre example (2016, p. 76) offers an illustrative approach to the digital culture atmosphere that the actors of virtual networks breathe. Goffman states that we create our understanding of behavior in the culture we live in by using two models. In the first model, the individual gives a genuine, sincere and honest performance. This performance consists of a person’s reactions to the situation in which s/he is in. The second model contains a performance similar to the theatre play performed by professional actors. This performance, which is expected to be taken seriously but at the same time is factitious, includes carefully combined, false behaviors and these behaviors have nothing to do with reality. This model reminds us of the exaggerated self-presentations that social media users often perform. Users make many of their daily actions public on social media through factitious performances.

There are communities in digital environments that Castells (2008) conceptualizes as virtual communities. There are structural and qualitative differences between virtual communities and traditional communities. Given these differences, maintaining membership in virtual communities, the degree of solidarity, the extent of interaction and the sense of belonging remain superficial. On the other hand, virtual communities are considered artificial associations that are not related to real life and are in contrast to real-life communities.

In general, in the digital age, as Castells (2008) dramatically expresses, networks form the new social morphology of societies. Thus, networks that significantly change the functioning and consequences of the power and culture processes provide the material grounds required Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA 15 for the expansion of digital culture products in the entire social structure even if they are produced in different times and places thanks to the new technological paradigm (p. 622).

Studies on digital culture have regarded the Internet as the beginning of the history of digital culture, and have sharply separated individuals in today’s societies from each other by dividing them into categories such as “digital immigrants” who were born before the Internet era and “digital natives” who were born after the Internet (Güzel, 2016, p. 84). The digital consumption habits of people in digital culture indicate what kind of digital consumers they are. Digital consumers who care more about the image that a product has and shows rather than just the physical, functional characteristics of the product are undoubtedly involved in a new economy and a new culture formation (Odabaşı et al., 2012, p. 104).

In fact, it is important to address the phenomenon of digital culture together with the concept of new economics in terms of understanding the concept. Since technological advances in computer and communication systems are the main characteristic of the new economy, information creation, improvement and distribution processes acquired a digital format together with the new economy (Aslan, 2007, p. 303). Therefore, in our current age of information, technology, together with the shaping power of communication and media, inevitably entered into a multi-layered and complex cultural transformation process.

In a world globalized in parallel with this development, relations between countries, institutions and individuals are concentrated and moved to the digital environment. Thus, digital communication tools, which have become an inseparable part of everyday life, also subject culture to a comprehensive change.

5. The Structure of Power in Digital Culture

In a few short years, open source software production and social Internet applications like Napster, Wikipedia, and YouTube have created digital media communities with millions of participants, for whom sharp distinctions between production, distribution, and consumption no longer map to everyday experience. Such platforms, in turn, have become touchstones for a wave of accounts of digital culture that emphasize its participatory dynamics and, sometimes as a corollary, the obsolescence or at least discomfiture of older cultural industries. This perspective shift has been sharpened by the seemingly endless series of high-profile conflicts between new and old cultural intermediaries: YouTube versus media companies, Wikipedia versus traditional encyclopedias, Napster (or Grokster or iTunes) versus the recording companies, or Google versus publishers, to name only a few. These conflicts have highlighted 16 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER the social and legal construction of digital culture in ways that, for older technologies, were comparatively settled or slow moving. In a few short years the convergence of experiential critique, institutional conflict, and new intellectual entrepreneurship has fostered an explicit and often contentious public debate about the organization of culture and the nature of cultural authority in the digital era (Karaganis, 2007).

Digital technologies are engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textural and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia and YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation, but the changes run deeper and wider than these novel organizational forms (Karaganis, 2007).

5.1. New Powers for Surveillance

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is part of our daily lives. This technology shapes how people access information, interact with devices, share personal information, and even understand foreign languages. It also transforms how individuals and groups can be tracked and identified, and dramatically alters what kinds of information can be gleaned about people from their data. AI has the potential to revolutionize societies in positive ways. However, as with any scientific or technological advancement, there is a real risk that the use of new tools by states or corporations will have a negative impact on human rights (Article 19, 2018).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications are a part of everyday life: from curating social media feeds to mediating traffic flow in cities, and from autonomous cars to connected consumer devices like smart assistants, spam filters, voice recognition systems and search engines.

The sudden rise of these applications is recent, but the study and development of AI is over half a century old: the term was coined in 1956, though the concept goes back even further, to the late 1700s. Current momentum is fueled by the availability of large amounts of data, affordable and accessible computational power, continued development of statistical methods, and the fact that technology is now embedded into the fabric of society. We rely on it in more ways than most are even aware of (Cath, Wachter, Mittelstadt, Taddeo, & Floridi, 2017).

According to Karaganis, digital culture is also about the transformation of what it means to be a creator within a vast and growing reservoir of media, data, computational power, and communicative possibilities. We have few tools and models for understanding the power of databases, network representations, filtering techniques, digital rights management, and other new architectures (Karaganis, 2007). Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA 17

Karaganis claims that digital technologies are powerful forces of deterritorialization—of disembedding knowledge and culture from existing institutions, practices, and geographies— but they are also tools of continuous social and political reterritorialization, as borders are redrawn, new institutions and structures emerge, and new forms of control are established (Karaganis, 2007).

The current research on digital culture and power include emergent forms of personal agency and authority, from our changing relationship with the digitally mediated past, to the expanded scale of interpersonal networks, to the emergence of new systems of trust and credentialization. It includes new powers for surveillance and for tacit, system-level control of behavior exercised by corporate actors and states. It includes the roles that different technical architectures play in conditioning and distributing these new forms of power, authority, and sociability. It requires, finally, attention to the differential effects of flows of information, culture, and technology around the world, as these interact with patterns of structural inequality and distinctive social histories (Karaganis, 2007).

According to Karaganis et al., digital culture, is not just about new forms of collaboration or about corporate control, although these features are central. It is also about the transformation of what it means to be a person or a cultural actor located within a vast and growing reservoir of media, data, computational power, and communicative possibilities. Of these aspects, communication may be the most familiar dimension and the easiest one to study and understand. In contrast, we have fewer tools and models for understanding the power of databases, network representations, filtering techniques, and other new architectures of agency and control. We have fewer accounts of how these new capacities transform our shared cultures, our understanding of them, and our capacities to act within them (Karaganis, 2007).

We are already seeing the first developments of combining artificial intelligence with surveillance. IC Realtime is one example. Its flagship product, unveiled last December, was billed as Google for CCTV. It’s an app and web platform named Ella that uses AI to analyze what’s happening in video feeds and make it instantly searchable. Ella can recognize hundreds of thousands of natural language queries, letting users search footage to find clips showing specific animals, people wearing clothes of a certain color, or even individual car makes and models. Ella runs on Google Cloud and can search footage from pretty much any CCTV system. “[It] works well on a one-camera system — just [like] a nanny cam or dog cam — all the way up to enterprise, with a matrix of thousands of cameras. 18 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER

China provides one example of what this can look like. Its western Xinjiang region, where dissent from the local Uighur ethnic group is being suppressed, has been described as “a laboratory for high-tech social controls,” in a recent Wall Street Journal report. In Xinjiang, traditional methods of surveillance and civil control are combined with facial recognition, license plate scanners, iris scanners, and ubiquitous CCTV to create a “total surveillance state” where individuals are tracked constantly in public spaces. In Moscow, a similar infrastructure is being assembled, with facial recognition software plugged into a centralized system of more than 100,000 high-resolution cameras which cover more than 90 percent of the city’s apartment entrances. “It’s troubling to me that a lot of these systems are being pumped into our core infrastructure without the democratic process that would allow us to ask questions about their effectiveness, or to inform the populations they’ll be deployed on,” says Whittaker. “This is one more example in the drumbeat of algorithmic systems that are offering to classify and determine the typology of individuals based on pattern recognition drawn from data that embed cultural and historical sources.”

5.2. Database as a Central Cultural Form

According to Bowker and Star (1999) over the past 200 years, massive new waves of information classification and standardization have taken place—international classifications were developed for diseases, work, criminal physiognomy, and so forth. Facts could be split apart, sorted into pigeonholes, and reassembled in new ways. It is a direct outgrowth of this work at the turn of the 21st century that we get the emergence of the database as a central cultural form. Lev Manovich (1999) puts it beautifully (p. 225):

As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world.

Manovich (1999) develops the syntagm–paradigm couple, where the syntagm represents a statement that is made and the paradigm represents the set of possible statements. He argues that with the new technology: “Database (the paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is de-materialized. Paradigm is privileged, syntagm is downplayed. Paradigm is real, syntagm is virtual” (p. 231).

Bowker (2007) gives a name to the current epoch by calling it the epoch of potential memory. To continue Manovich’s trope, this is an epoch in which narrative remembering Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA 19 is typically a post hoc reconstruction from an ordered, classified set of facts that have been scattered over multiple physical data collections. The question is not what the state “knows” about a particular individual, but rather what it can know should the need ever arise. A good citizen of the modern state is one who can be well counted, along numerous dimensions, on demand. We live in a regime of countability with a particular spirit of quantification. Michel Foucault (1991) pointed out that this is one of the principles of governmentality: A modern state needs to conjure its citizens into such a form that they can be enumerated. The state may then decide what kind of public health measures to take, where to provide schooling, what kind of political representation should be afforded, and so on (Bowker & Star, 1999).

Bowker claims that in order to be fully countable and thus remembered by the state, a person needs first to fit into well-defined classification systems. At the start of this epoch, the state would typically— where deemed necessary—gain information on its citizens through networks of spies and informers writing narrative reports. Such information gathering continues today but is swamped by the effort to pull people apart along multiple dimensions and reconfigure the information at will (Bowker & Star 1999).

According to Bowker and Star (1999), information integration, then, has a lot to do with the power of the state—the ability to collect data from numerous disparate resources, collocate it through the production of (im)mutable mobiles, and then use it to plan the future. The information tools of empire (i.e., statistics, databases) lend a certain sense of inevitability to all the changes that we witness—we are either enthralled by the spectacle or deadened by the difficulty of imagining change (Bowker & Star, 1999).

As we have seen, at a transitional movement into a new regime of memory practices, new configurations of knowledge/power come into play. These new orderings of the past are generally portrayed post hoc as liberatory by those who benefit from the change. Our new orderings are not more accurate (the past is being reworked now just as much as ever) nor more liberatory than previous regimes. However, there are new opportunities presented, and it is a key task for the social scientist to plumb the political roots of the new information infrastructures we are building (Bowker & Star, 1999).

5.3. Big Data and AI

According to Wachter (2019), Big Data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) draw non-intuitive and unverifiable inferences and predictions about the behaviors, preferences, and private lives of individuals. These inferences draw on highly diverse and feature-rich 20 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER data of unpredictable value, and create new opportunities for discriminatory, biased, and invasive decision-making. Data protection law is meant to protect people’s privacy, identity, reputation, and autonomy, but is currently failing to protect data subjects from the novel risks of inferential analytics.

Wachter (2019) claims that individuals are granted little control and oversight over how their personal data is used to draw inferences about them.

According to Cowls et al. (2018), the idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Social Good (henceforth AI4SG) is becoming popular in many information societies and gaining traction within the AI community (Hager et al., 2017). Projects addressing AI4SG vary significantly. They range from models to predict septic shock (Henry, Hager, Pronovost, & Saria, 2015) to game-theoretic models to prevent poaching (Fang et al., 2016); from online reinforcement learning to target HIV-education at homeless youths (Yadav, Chan, Jiang, Xu, Rice, & Tambe, 2016) to probabilistic models to prevent harmful policing (Carton et al., 2016) and support student retention (Taddeo & Floridi, 2018). Indeed, new applications of AI4SG appear almost daily, making possible socially good outcomes that were once less easily achievable, unfeasible, or unaffordable (Cowls et al., 2018).

Cowls et al. (2018) claim that, AI software is shaped by human values which, if not carefully selected, may lead to “good-AI-gone-bad” scenarios. For example, consider the failure of IBM’s oncology-support software, which attempts to use machine learning to identify cancerous tumors, but which was rejected by medical practitioners “on the ground” (Ross & Swetlitz, 2017). The system was trained using synthetic data and was not refined enough to interpret ambiguous, nuanced, or otherwise “messy” patient health records (Strickland, 2019). It also relied on US medical protocols, which are not applicable worldwide. The heedless deployment and the poor design of the software led to misdiagnoses and erroneous treatment suggestions, breaching the trust of doctors and hospitals (Cowls et al., 2018).

At the same time, the genuinely socially good outcomes of AI may arise merely by chance, for example through an accidental application of an AI solution in a different context. This was the case with the use of a different version of IBM’s cognitive system. In this case, the Watson system was originally designed to identify biological mechanisms, but when used in a classroom setting, it inspired engineering students to solve design problems (Goel et al., 2015). In this instance, AI provided a unique mode of education (Cawls et al., 2018). Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA 21

Cawls et al. (2018), focus on factors that are particularly relevant to AI as a technology designed and used for the advancement of social good. To anticipate, these are: (1) falsifiability and incremental deployment; (2) safeguards against the manipulation of predictors; (3) receiver-contextualised intervention; (4) receiver-contextualised explanation and transparent purposes; (5) privacy protection and data subject consent; (6) situational fairness; and (7) human-friendly semanticisation (Cawls et al., 2018).

Microsoft’s infamous Twitter bot, Tay, acquired meanings, in a very loose sense, at runtime, as it learned from Twitter users how it should respond to tweets. After deployment in the real—and frequently vicious—world of social media, however, the bot’s ability to adapt constantly its “conceptual understanding” became an unfortunate bug, as Tay “learned” and regurgitated offensive language and unethical associations between concepts from other users (Neff & Nagy, 2016).

The use of AI to predict future trends or patterns is very popular in AI4SG contexts, from applying automated prediction to redress academic failure (Lakkaraju et al., 2015), to preventing illegal policing (Carton et al., 2016), and detecting corporate fraud (Zhou & Kapoor, 2011).

5.4. Digital Rights and Freedom

The past decade has seen a staggering decline around the world in digital freedom, as the nonprofit human rights organization Freedom House underscored in a report in 2018. China has largely taken center stage in this decline narrative, thanks to tools like its social credit system and facial recognition technology, which allow the country to shrink personal freedoms, especially those of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Not to be left behind, Russia also has recently announced its plan to “unplug” the country from the internet. And in March, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a “fake news” law that will severely limit online speech for its citizens (Jash, 2019).

But while observers have kept a steady eye on these admittedly unsurprising curbs on digital rights in countries like China and Russia, an overlooked method of digital repression— internet shutdowns—is most rampant not in an authoritarian regime, but in the world’s largest democracy: India. According to a Software Freedom Law Center tracker, there have been more than 300 reported shutdowns in India over the past six years. (And these are just the incidents that have been reported; it’s likely that there have been more.) This data point makes India the leading country for internet shutdowns globally, even surpassing countries like Iraq, Syria, 22 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER

Pakistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It challenges the prevailing assumption that digital authoritarianism is only a problem in authoritarian countries (Jash, 2019).

Recently, it floated a new set of intermediary guideline rules that look to curb the misuse of social media platforms and the spread of fake news. A New York Times report in February called this a “Chinese-style internet censorship” approach. More than ever, it’s become increasingly clear that this sort of “networked authoritarianism” is on display in India (Jash, 2019).

As artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated its power to revolutionize fundamental systems of communication, commerce, labor, and public services, it has captured the attention of the technology industry, public officials, and civil society. The potential of AI to perform tasks with speed and on a scale beyond human capability has fueled great excitement. AI systems are already deeply embedded in our everyday lives - from helping us navigate through morning traffic to offering up the day’s news, to more nefarious uses of systems for surveillance (Vincent, 2018) warfare (Coughlan, 2018) and oppressing democratic dissent (Kania, 2018). Yet many of the most powerful stakeholders in the field have only just begun to consider the impact of AI systems on society, democracy, rights, and justice (Article 19, 2019).

If implemented responsibly, AI can benefit society. However, as is the case with most emerging technology, there is a real risk that commercial and state use has a detrimental impact on human rights. In particular, applications of these technologies frequently rely on the generation, collection, processing, and sharing of large amounts of data, both about individual and collective behavior. This data can be used to profile individuals and predict future behavior. While some of these uses, like spam filters or suggested items for online shopping, may seem benign, others can have more serious repercussions and may even pose unprecedented threats to the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression and information (‘freedom of expression’) (Dodd, 2017). The use of AI can also impact the exercise of a number of other rights, including the right to an effective remedy, the right to a fair trial, and the right to freedom from discrimination (Article 19, 2018).

The various principles developed by industry and states have, as of yet, failed to develop strong accompanying accountability mechanisms. They lack concrete and narrowly defined language (Article 19, 2018), independent oversight or enforcement mechanisms, and clear transparency and reporting requirements. This means that no matter how laudable the principles are, there is no way to hold governments or companies to said principles. The general lack of transparency mechanisms leaves no pathway for other stakeholders to know Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA 23 whether or not companies and governments are complying with their own principles. And in cases where noncompliance is revealed, there are inadequate mechanisms to hold companies and governments accountable for their wrongdoing (Article 19, 2019).

For instance, after Google received pushback from its own employees surrounding Project Maven, a partnership with the US Department of Defense to improve drone targeting using AI, the company published a set of AI principles that elucidated its commitment to ethics, and made a public pledge to refrain from building certain types of technology (Fang, 2019). But Google has not disclosed to what extent these principles are embedded in concrete work in the company, and there has been no demonstrable change in how the company has altered its internal decision making processes. This is particularly worrying because in the case of public-private partnerships such as Project Maven, the accountability that governments otherwise owe the public is potentially diluted by the use of technology built behind closed doors and vague, non-binding commitments (Article 19, 2019).

Facebook even signed resolutions calling for the development of ethical principles in the US Congress. Yet at the same time, recent research shows that Facebook discriminates on advertisement delivery on the basis of gender and race (Ali et al., 2019) and has also been charged with housing-related discrimination (Article 19, 2019).

Facebook’s efforts towards ethical AI had no demonstrable bearing on its practices. Indeed, these partnerships and other loose commitments did not create any requirement for the company to follow through on these ideals, nor did they provide mechanisms to hold the company to account (Article 19, 2019).

As discussed above, there are various cases of governments working together with industry to improve surveillance of dissidents, precision targeting in drones, or facial recognition software for law enforcement purposes. These partnerships regularly take shape in the absence of safeguards or meaningful oversight (Article 19, 2019).

For example, Google’s partnership with the Chinese government to develop a censored search engine (known as “Project Dragonfly”) would have excluded search results that were viewed as politically “sensitive” by the Chinese government (Gallagher, 2018). This represents an egregious violation of international human rights standards on freedom of expression and information, and also violates Google’s own ethical principles on AI (Article 19, 2019).

Another problem with trusting companies to do “the right thing” comes from their lack of understanding of the societal impacts of technology and appropriate ways to deal with them. 24 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER

For instance, in April 2018, in his testimony before the United States Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed the company’s increasing reliance on AI tools to solve problems of hate speech, terrorist propaganda, election manipulation and misinformation. But research and media reports have shown that AI tools are ill-suited to do this work - they are not technically equipped to understand societal nuances or context in speech, and often make the problem worse (Article 19, 2019).

In fact, prior to the 2017 escalation of military attacks on Rohingya people in Myanmar, local activists gathered substantial evidence that Facebook was automatically censoring the word “kalar”, a derogatory local slur used to refer to Rohingya Muslims. By simply flagging the word as problematic, without accounting for the immediate context in which it was being used, this step led to the censorship of numerous posts in which people attempted to discuss use of the term, its history, and efforts to curb hate speech in the country. Meanwhile, users who wanted to use the term as an insult simply opted for an alternative spelling. All told, Facebook’s effort to deploy AI in order to reduce hate speech in this volatile political environment resulted in censorship of legitimate speech and had no demonstrable effect towards curbing hate speech (Article 19, 2019).

In her book Cyberselfish Paulina Barsook has examined the degree to which a loathing of government intervention, or indeed government altogether, combined with a belief in the capitalist entrepreneurship as the best means to encourage creativity, have become the unquestioned tenets of those working in the computer industry. As she points out, such beliefs bear little or any relation to the realities of that industry and the means through which it has developed and continues to be supported. The most extreme manifestation of such libertarianism is possibly to be found in the discourse surrounding freedom of expression and privacy in relation to the Internet (Gere, 2008).

The Internet is the paradigm of the emergent, self-regulating, self-organizing structures that can develop and thrive without governmental intervention. In this it is a material realization of the idea of the market as a spontaneous natural phenomenon that lies at the heart of neo-liberal economics. A model of the economy as an evolved and optimized natural system clearly resonated with the cybernetic and ecological concerns of the post-war era. It also militated against hierarchical planning and elevated the role of the individual, while still promoting the idea of the collective and the common good (Gere, 2008).

Opposing the hegemony of techno-utopian capitalism has been the development of subcultural styles in literature, music and design, through which questions of alternatives and Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA 25 modes of resistance could be rehearsed. These have interacted and combined with theoretical developments such as French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of assemblages, rhizomes and nomads; Jacques Derrida’s analysis of thinking as writing; the Autonomist Marxist’s ideas about the General Intellect and Immaterial Labour; Donna Haraway’s conception of the cyborg as a model for thinking about gender and identity in a high-tech world, and Hakim Bey’s concept of ‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’, which act as enclaves against the powers that be, and are dissolved before they can be repressed or co-opted. Punk in the late ’70s, itself a response to the dislocations of capitalism as it shifted to an informational mode, inspired many of these developments, including the sci-fi genre Cyberpunk, musical styles such as Industrial Rock and Techno and other electronic genres, as well as deconstructionist graphic design and fashion. Out of these different elements there has emerged a distinctive digital style in which the extraordinary social and cultural developments of the last twenty years have been reflected (Gere, 2008).

These are, then, some of the main elements out of which our current digital culture has been assembled: Cold War defense technologies; avant-garde art practice; counter-cultural technoutopianism; postmodernist critical theory; new wave subcultural style. Though, as time goes on, their presence becomes harder to detect. Each of these elements is immanent within the technologies we use and the means we use to understand them. To acknowledge the heterogeneous nature of digital culture is increasingly necessary, as the technology through which it is perpetuated becomes both more ubiquitous and more invisible. The less aware we are of the social and cultural forces out of which our current situation has been constructed the less able we are to resist and question the relations of power and force it embodies. If, on the other hand, we can see that these forces are culturally contingent and in no sense natural and inevitable then we have the basis for asking questions. At the same time the power and reach of digital surveillance is increasing with great rapidity (Gere, 2008).

6. Conclusion

Digital culture has become a part of culture. The digitalization of culture increases digital wisdom to create value; to find solutions to problems, to innovate, to improve quality.

Because our lives are digitalized, “culture,” which is the set of what remains of the life we live in is also digitalized. Digital culture is increasingly expanding its place as part of culture. It does this in two ways. First of all, in digitalization, existing cultural elements are digitized. For example, books are scanned and converted into e-books. Paintings are photographed with digital cameras and transferred to digital media. Sound recordings, music works, etc. can be 26 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER digitalized using similar digital devices. The second way is through cultural elements which are born digital. For example, if you take a selfie with your mobile phone and share it on a social media site, that photo and the share are born in and taken their place in an entirely digital world.

A digital platform is needed for culture (or the elements that constitute it) to be digital. This platform is required for a cultural element to be digital, whether digitalized or digitally born. The most known and widespread platform of existing digital platforms is the Internet. In addition to the Internet, mobile phones, tablets, computers and digital cameras are digital platforms as well. That is why it is not true to say the Internet equals digital culture. Digital culture includes the Internet, but it is not equal to it; it is more than that. Therefore, social media, which only forms a subset of the Internet, cannot be equated with digital culture either. Social media is a part of a digital platform (the Internet), only an element within digital culture.

Digitalization has also started to be considered as an important tool to eliminate inequality. A digital platform such as the Internet, for example, helps a new photographer become popular as well as presenting the works of a very famous photographer to the world.

In other words, digital platforms such as the Internet allow the elite and the ordinary to walk side by side. It can ensure the work of the individual to takes center stage rather than the identity of the individual. Thanks to these platforms, ordinary people even can be promoted to the elite class. A good example of this is the publication of tens of thousands of copies of the books by writers whose works are read by thousands of people on the digital platform.

Today, at this point, digital platforms such as the Internet have three key features. Multimedia, interaction and virtuality. On digital platforms, it is possible to find all media such as fixed texts, images, videos, etc. intertwined. With the Web 2.0 phase, interaction is included in the picture in every possible situation, and the consumer is also in the position of producer. And by definition, being able to exist in a virtual, or digital environment is the third complementary feature.

The ultimate goal of its digitalization is no different, since culture is a phenomenon related to cultivation. It can be said that digital culture can cultivate the individual and turn them into a “digital sage” (1). A person can turn into a digital sage by accessing information, distinguishing right from wrong, using the right information, and creating a value. For instance, solving a problem, making an innovation, an invention can create a value in the form of increasing quality in one area of life. Emine YAVAŞGEL, Elira TURDUBAEVA 27

In addition to this, a new conceptualization reflecting the postmodern character of the digital world is the Internet of Things concept. It seems that the Internet of things will not only increase the comfort of people’s daily life, but will also take part in solving the major problems that stand before humanity. It will be able to do this thanks to its ability to capture data. It is understood that at the heart of the work lies the ability of devices to communicate among themselves - without involving people. Thanks to this communication, such devices are now referred to as “smart”.

Certainly, the development of devices in this way is actually important for another vital element for the information society to be clarified even more. Keeping record of data and turning it into information. Everything, large or small, in a state of motion produces incredible levels of data at any given moment. Data can also be defined as a trail of movement, motion. But human beings are able to record a very marginal portion of this data. The main reason for this is that humans used to have very few types of media that would take records until recently. Only human memory, and pen and paper could do that. Along with the invention of digital technologies, a new opportunity has emerged in this field. Computers began to record data, and they are devices that can be used for processing very high volumes of data. That is what lies behind the prediction, “A few computers are enough for the world.” So much so that the fact that digital devices can record and transform data into information has been a major step in the process of information production of humans. With the Internet of things, mankind is on the verge of a much larger leap.

We have encountered a large set of data that can easily identify current social trends or reactions on any subject and draw meaningful conclusions. Google, predictably, constitutes the largest part of the big data. It will become more possible to test the results of digitalization through this big data. However, for individuals who are likely to see the period what Harari (2018) calls “Dataism,” the question of to what extend digitalization will cause expansion or compression still waits to be answered.

Notes

1. For conceptualizations such as digital sage and discussions on digital culture under postmodernism and digitalization section, see Tanol Türkoğlu, TT Dijital Kültür Platformu, https://dijitalkultur.wordpress.com/Nisan 2016-Mayıs 2019 28 DIGITAL CULTURE AND POWER

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DIGITAL SEIGE

CHAPTER 2

DIGITAL VALUE: ON THE ACHIEVEMENTS / LOSSES OF DIGITAL CULTURE

Bahar EROĞLU YALIN1, Sibel AK2

1Prof. Dr., Trabzon University, Communication Faculty, Public Relations and Advertising, Trabzon, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

2Lect., Trabzon University, Communication Faculty, Radio, TV and Cinema, Trabzon, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.02

ABSTRACT It is possible to explore the concept of value that is different from the previous and transformed in the digital age that we are experiencing - individual or social - by revealing the interaction of value with culture. Because human beings are faced with the situation of revising values, searching for new values or producing new values in every age, and every period, every culture, every society has value systems that they own or carry. The present time and conditions emerge as factors that prepare the formation of sovereign values and also influence other systems within the social system. Therefore, information and communication technology, which allows the exchange of cultural images, determines the values in this way (Yetim, 2002) and even the activities of this technology, especially advertising, public relations and marketing, in Duverger’s words “the effect of the images they have forcibly embraced the place of an increasingly intelligent judgment.” (1998: 82). In this study, it will be conceptually evaluated how values and digital itself constitute value in the value world of the digital age defined by these two intertwined concepts, infinity, spacelessness, and timelessness. In this study, how has technology transformed society, institutions and individuals and the relationship of all three with each other? How can new cultural forms of communication age be defined? What is the meaning of the cultural images of the digital age? Questions will be searched for answers. Keywords: Value, culture, communication, digitalizationy 34 DIGITAL VALUE: ON THE ACHIEVEMENTS / LOSSES OF DIGITAL CULTURE

1. Seeking for a new Conceptualization of Value

For Weber, history, and society can only be understood through causality between values and human actions (Özlem, 2002). They are the values that guide all meanings and preferences related to the life of the individual and values emerge as observable behaviors under the influence of culture. In fact, culture, which is a value system and defined on its own values, is the sum of the customs, traditions, and traditions of the community how it behaves heard and thought, separating itself from other societies and giving it an identity. Similarly for Gerbner, culture is a system of messages and images, a symbolic organization that cultivates, organizes and reproduces social relations, values, priorities, and conceptualization of being (Özer, 2004). From this point it can be said that technology, which is an element of culture, objectively covers the technical, material and physical values such as tools of nature and intervention, architectural works put forward in all relations between tools and human beings. Technology has made the intercultural communication compulsory by limiting the world, especially through mass media. Mobility is essential for cultures to survive.

According to Toffler, it is information that initiates and accelerates social change (1981). With the push of knowledge, science and technology to the limits of industrial society, the production of knowledge, not the production of objects, but the production of new concepts and realities that encompass and transform the societal, political and cultural, such as “information society”, “information sector” or even “information age”. has become an important and necessary state (Doğan, 1995). Cultural dependence, which is a result of the culture industry in which the societies where information and technology are produced, is organized within the economic, social, but especially the dominant ideology, refers to the shaping of values according to the conditions of this industry as all commodities produced (Oskay, 1993).The buyers of all products produced under the ideological conditions of this industry are also the buyers of the values offered by these products.

Value is defined as preferring one situation over another. The way of understanding and meaningfulness of behaviors leads to the emergence of values. Values also define what individuals care about and indicate desirable or undesirable situations (Erdem, 2003). Besides, the perspective that an individual has gained in recognizing his / her environment has an effective role in guiding his / her behaviors. In addition to having human values, reproducing it and having the ability to give up its own values, each individual is the only entity that has its own value judgments. Bahar EROĞLU YALIN , Sibel AK 35

Value is not directly affected by changes in the social sphere, but directly. Rokeach says “If values had not changed, individual and social change would not have been possible (1973). If values had a completely changing nature, the continuity of society and the individual would have become impossible. Indeed, the interaction between values and society becomes more pronounced when it comes to “change“.

Communication technology, which is an important part of the economic / cultural globalization process of the mass consumption and standardization society with the birth of printing technology, enables the worldwide hegemony of commercial ideology, word and action in interaction with the spread of scientific and technical knowledge, computerization and transnational corporation (Schiller, 1989; byLull, 2001, p. 164). The development of technology and the transformation of information in this direction, especially the limitation of the world with mass media, the loss of intercultural boundaries and as a result of this has led to the emergence of different lifestyles (Huyssen, 1994).In the 21st century, where war and environmental problems and poverty have increased, as well as the advances brought by science and technology as Havel says (1994), science and technology “destroyed life rather than using it and using it, instead of using it. In addition to these, no solution was found for economic, scientific and political values. The return of global values has been distanced from their realities. Developments in science and technology, revealing modern societies that are fond of material development, imposes that the key to happiness is a power gained with material competence and knowledge (Lama, 2001). Walters explains this with the following words (1995):

“It is a known fact that modern man lived in the age of crises. Signs of this in almost every area; In the global wars of opposing ideologies and the natural and social turmoil created by technology, it is also possible to see the rapid lifestyle that threatens human existence. Peace is mentioned, but doubts, fear or anger prevail in social relations. We talk about economic prosperity but swim in debt. Freedom is mentioned, but freedom is equated with humanization. Equality is mentioned, but equality is perceived as the punishment of merit. It is also clear that these irregularities will eventually become chaos. “

The Dalai Lama agrees with Walters. It is now argued that there is a complete return towards extremism in which reality itself is questioned and that this is, in fact, chaos (Lama, 2001).This situation emerges as a crisis caused by devotion to values (Bauman, 2001).The reason for all this is again gain and competition.

This chaos actually consists of shared or non-shared values. Social chaos is produced by imposing, modifying or destroying the fundamental values of the individual, such as religion 36 DIGITAL VALUE: ON THE ACHIEVEMENTS / LOSSES OF DIGITAL CULTURE or political power, on the minorities, especially by imposing their own value judgments on others. Values, which are the source of social life, have caused more and more individuals to think only of themselves in the process of transition from traditional to modern. Therefore, this state of the lonely and alienated individual is the chaos itself. Because the individual becomes alienated, the individual begins to construct his / her own values and moves away from society. In this case, the solution necessitates the discovery of universal and common values that will make it easier to live together, given the fact that the impossibility of returning to traditional values, with the redefinition of the unifying property of value. In line with the measure of rational logical coherence, when the issue of value is considered from the perspective of life and human, at least the conditions of existence of any value practice that does not tend to eliminate the differences can be established in the public sphere. The only thing to do in this case is to turn to the principles of rational-natural law. Non-instrumental, egalitarian rationality within the framework and to turn to self-actualization values, alienation and alienation is the solution to minimize the effect (Toku, 2002). Since the present values are superior to date and time, they do not change, and people’s awareness or opinion about value changes (Özlem, 2002). Nietzsche points out that the person who creates value has to create new values, and to create new values, he must first criticize, destroy and re-evaluate existing values. According to this view, the individual who creates value and lives according to these values is accepted as a free individual (Özlem, 2002).

2. Cultural Images of the Digital Age

In every age, man is confronted with re-evaluating values, searching for or producing new values, and there are different and similar value systems that each period, every culture, every society possesses or carries within itself. These value systems are specific to the society to which they belong and show what is important in that society (Kluchohn & Strodtbeck, 1961). Therefore, the present time and conditions emerge as the factors that prepare the formation of sovereign values. And it also affects other systems within the social system.

Every society has tried to create its own culture that makes it different from other societies. Culture, as a continuum of being, plays a role in changing societies, transforming, informing and integrating societies. If we examine the concept of culture under the main headings; addition to the meaning of production and reproduction, it can be evaluated in terms of the activities of literacy, idea, and art, mastery of general information and strengthening social relations in the social context. (Cunbur, 1981).In the context of these elements, we can say that by taking the formation of culture from human beings, it forms against the living spaces Bahar EROĞLU YALIN , Sibel AK 37 and nature, and especially it is accepted as a type of communication depending on knowledge (Güvenç, 2015). There are unity and activity within the culture itself. This also ensures that culture has the ability to regulate and influence society.

All realities that have been experienced in a given time and that will be experienced in the future are shaped by people and depending on human knowledge. Therefore, all the gains related to the existence of culture produce the process and quality of human evolution, and as a result, culture and knowledge are mutually transforming each other (Yalçınkaya, 2016). Based on the meaning of the concept of culture, it is seen that culture is a fact that transforms and transforms based on knowledge. Therefore, as long as human beings and society exist and produce knowledge, the culture will continue. Also, the concept of culture has developed and changed with the transition from the classical period to the modern period and the post- modern period and has been moved beyond the boundaries that define it (Güzel, 2016). Digitization, in its simplest terms, is education, culture, in short, the transfer of all materials to the electronic environment and the access of these data to users via the Internet.In other words, it is the transformed form of knowledge. This process is time-consuming and costly. Besides, it has irrevocably transformed the nature of knowledge. It is as follows (Acun, 2008):

• With digitalization, digital copies of information sources that can be used for a long time can be produced.

• Digital resources can be stored, searched and indexed.

• Digital resources can be shared with the whole world.

• These resources, which can be shared locally, nationally and globally, can be accessed anywhere in the world without time and space limitations.

• It facilitates the transfer of information to future generations.

Digitalization, which extends the dominant field of knowledge, has influenced the world to a great extent with its philosophical, demographic and biocultural dimensions, not only in representation but also in almost every field. The social reflections of successive innovations, especially in the 2000s, have had a significant impact on culture and culture. In this context, digital culture expresses a new cultural structure that is articulated in the current intensive climate of technology. The cultural structure that emerges through digital tools or that emerges as a result of the digitization of existing structures is reflected in all habits of individuals and societies (Erdem, 2017). The fixed identities brought by social and economic status in society are now being replaced by replaceable and purchasable identities dominated by the digital 38 DIGITAL VALUE: ON THE ACHIEVEMENTS / LOSSES OF DIGITAL CULTURE revolution. In online networks that provide the greatest support to this formation, individuals have the chance to easily shape their identities in the way they want. The most important element of digitalization in terms of identity is social media. Social media is a new place where individuals display their identities as they wish (Güzel, 2016).Technology has begun to change all known facts of knowledge-based culture. Cultural images are now transforming into traditional environments instead of rapidly changing digital culture images.

The basic problems related to how to explain this concept with the concept of digital culture are tried to be explained by two interconnected concepts. First, digital culture represents a relative break with its predecessors, and secondly, the existence of digital technology has revealed the existence of digital culture. First of all, the digital culture, which emerges in the light of the latest technological developments and is determined to depend on the digital structure, is distinctly different from the previous culture (Gere, 2008).

Digitization digitizes the existing culture that can be defined as the knowledge of the world or creates a new digital culture in the digital environment. Both the digitalization of the existing culture and the new digital culture accelerate the transformation of the masses and societies. Since the 1970s, especially with the advances in image technology, the feeling of being followed and recorded by someone every second of every moment has left individuals vulnerable to technology (Kaplan & Ertürk, 2012, p. 9).With the digitalization brought about by internet technology, individuals are becoming digital entities as well as culture. Moreover, individuals are transforming into a new kind of produced image that spontaneously dissolves and alienates. The entity field is defined as being visible. This process unintentionally transfers individuals’ identities to digital culture’s own rules (Güzel, 2016). Individuals or actors, as the author puts it, present themselves to the audience who have received the approval of the society and, as expected, watched the showcase in certain patterns. Individuals who tend to present their idealized identity perform these showcase presentations through social media. In this way, their identities they want to show at the same time and in mass form, their photos, world views, private lives, etc. that they think will get the most appreciation or viewers or followers (Güzel, 2016).The sanctions of the visual-oriented digital culture are again made up of digital values focused on the visual. In this case, the socio-cultural changes among the individuals of this age to adapt to digital culture cause differences. The classification of these changes is categorized under three main headings; digital natives, digital immigrants, and digital hybrids. Bahar EROĞLU YALIN , Sibel AK 39

3. States of the Digital Individual: Indigenous, Immigrant and Hybrid

With the development of technology and the age of the Internet easily adapting to societies, the doors of a digital world have been opened for the human age; this has led to the emergence of new concepts. It was Marc Prensky who first introduced the concepts of digital indigenous and digital immigration. This concept emerged in 2000 and later, has a similar meaning in essence, although it is defined differently by different researchers.

The digital indigenous concept is used for individuals who are born in an environment where all kinds of technological opportunities exist and use these technological opportunities most efficiently. Individuals who aren’t born in such a digital and technological environment but have the tendency and necessity to use these tools are called digital immigrants (Arabacı & Polat, 2013, p.13).

Digital natives are mostly students. The thinking styles and processes of students are quite different from parents and teachers. Because they are in constant interaction with technology from the moment they are born. Parents and teachers were introduced to technology later and started to use it (Çukurbaşı and Işman, 2014, p. 29).Therefore, there are significant differences between digital indigenous and digital immigrants.

These differences are also quite different from how digital natives seek, use and create information. It is seen that digital hybrids can provide information needs such as new generation young people who are dominant in technology after the birth of 1970 and can write messages while listening to music at the same time. Also, digital hybrids do not give up the printed material. Therefore, it is considered appropriate to call this group of people born between 1970 and 1999 as digital hybrids. In this respect, digital hybrids do not and do not resemble both digital natives and digital immigrants. Although they try to take advantage of all the technological possibilities, they cannot use the technology competently like the digital natives. Although they find the paper more intimate and sincere, they are not as resistant to technology as digital immigrants. To summarize briefly, in the age of developing technology and communication, digital natives were born in this age without the need to do anything, and digital immigrants were unable to keep up with this later age and resisted. Digital hybrids, on the other hand, emerge as the group that prepares or tries to prepare themselves for the new era. 40 DIGITAL VALUE: ON THE ACHIEVEMENTS / LOSSES OF DIGITAL CULTURE

4. On the Achievements/Losses of Digital Culture

As a source of the differentiation of societies that differ in terms of knowledge and technology as productive and consumer societies, in societies where information and technology are produced, social, economic, political, especially as a result of the cultural industry realized within the dominant ideology, according to the conditions of these commodities, (Oskay, 1993) and in industrial society, the recipients of all values produced within the dominant ideology are also the recipients of the values presented.

The combination of all these elements prevented the existence of consumer societies as subjects in all areas and under all kinds of competition conditions and made it necessary to harmonize these societies in the field of values. Because values are made up of social information and as a result of this, the individual or society creates information that changes the field to perform a different and effective action (Doğan, 1995).

According to Toffler, it is information that initiates and accelerates social change (1981, pp. 34-35). Information society, information sectors, such as the information age society, political economy, and culture, including concepts that develop and transform emerged, the production of objects rather than the production of information has become an important and necessary state (Doğan, 1995, p. 197). Science as a product created or discovered by humans is largely associated with technology (Inam, 20034).Just as the printing house achieved a mass standardization through the exchange of cultural images and determined values in this way the impact of images produced by the challenges of activities such as advertising, public relations and marketing in today’s technology is increasingly replacing a mental judgment (Duverger, 1998). Because in this age when information becomes information, the world in our image is being restructured (McLuhan & Povers, 2001, p. 157). Modernization has imposed the divergence between traditional and modern values and can be achieved by having the objects produced by the meaning criterion of life.

According to Erich Fromm, nowadays, human beings have become what they have. Along with modernism, man is alienated against everything, including himself. This situation has emerged as a lack of communication, narcissism, and selfishness by strengthening these concepts as a value began to make (Bobaroglu, 2002).The modern man of the West, who did not compromise his individualism, started to look for an escape route instead of the values he deemed invalid and destroyed by the old (Scognamillo, 2003). In other words, the benefit-benefit mentality, everything except the person himself, at the same time the other societies of societies as “other by making the individual Bahar EROĞLU YALIN , Sibel AK 41 believes that the center of life. However, in fact, the individual loses his / her own value against objective values.

In modern societies, the individual is limited by institutions or rules, and in traditional societies, the individual is limited by power and charisma (Doğan, 1995).According to Inglehart (2001), there are two institutions that limit the individual and actually initiate the modernization process: mass production and bureaucratic organizations.In modern industrial societies, there are numerous production processes, institutions that centrally control people and make standardization possible. In addition, technology was used as a war threat at the end of the 20th century and natural disasters caused by damages to the environment caused individuals’ belief in science to be shaken and alienated. This change, which derives its power from emotions, has changed the current value systems and led to the transformation of religion and tradition. This transformation that changes value systems through cultural change is defined as postmodernism (Inglehart, 2001).Postmodernism or culture (Sarıbay, 1990), which emerges from the reinterpretation of modernity, does not mean superiority against modernism, but in fact, criticizes modernism and directs it.

Both traditional and modern values are shaped by “economic scarcity”. According to this assumption, the individual primarily reflects the socio-economic environment in which he lives (Inglehart 2001).The change in values and the economy affect each other mutually.

5. Conclusion

Throughout history, cultures have competed with each other to impose their own values and goals on society under changing and evolving conditions. With the development of technology and the transformation of the concept of information into informational, the concept of time and space disappeared and as a result, a new culture emerged. Castells explains this informational culture with the concept of the social network. According to him, the network is composed of interconnected nodes, and although the social organization has taken place at other times and in other places, technology provides the material basis that spreads this structure to the whole society (Castells, 2013). Networks are structures that can expand infinitely and integrate easily with new nodes. This situation is an extremely dynamic and continuous structure of social networks open to innovations and global dimensions. From a broader historical perspective, the network society, which represents qualitative change, also represents the change between nature and culture. The major splits of the information age can be listed as follows (Castells, 2013). 42 DIGITAL VALUE: ON THE ACHIEVEMENTS / LOSSES OF DIGITAL CULTURE

• First, the concept of labor is that it is falling apart between producers and displaceable labor.

• The second is the social exclusion of a significant proportion of individuals who are ignored.

• Finally, it is the separation of the capitalist logic of global networks of capital flows and the human experience of workers’ lives.

Network society deeply affects not only the social and cultural structure but also the power structure. Because cultural expressions, which are abstracted from history and geography, are mostly transferred electronically, personalizing the concept of leadership within the media system, and politics exist within the media system including computerized communication networks. The political structure existing in the electricity-based media system is of great importance for the objectives of political actors and political processes (Castells, 2013, p. 630).Even though the concept of social network primarily aims to change cultural movements and social structure, it affects the power structure as well as affects every stage of society. Therefore, unlike the previous cultural structure of digital culture, it has affected all areas of society and has subjected all areas equally and voluntarily to digital culture.

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DIGITAL SEIGE

CHAPTER 3

DIGITAL DIPLOMACY: AN EVALUATION OF THE MEANS AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT DIGITALIZATION BRINGS TO DIPLOMACY

Oğuz GÖKSU1, Abdullah ÖZKAN2

1Assoc. Prof. Dr., Gaziantep University, Faculty of Communication, Public Relations Department, Gaziantep, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

2Prof. Dr., Istanbul University, Faculty of Communication, Public Relations Department, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.03

ABSTRACT The process of globalization has led to important paradigm shifts in the understanding of classic diplomacy. In addition to the established diplomacy of the elite, these shifts have created a new sense of diplomacy based on the understanding of civil society, which inherently aim towards social persuasiveness and are of a civilian nature. With this new sense of diplomacy, the private sector, business people, academicians, think tanks, members of the media, etc., have also participated in this process, leading to a wave of diplomacy which has acquired a more civil and democratic character. Undoubtedly, these changes have also led to other important changes in the language, style, and management of diplomacy. Developments in information technologies and the construction of a digital world have wasted no time in becoming reflected in diplomacy; diplomatic missions have begun to change in terms of structure and operation, and steps have begun to be taken in accordance with the requirements of the digital world rather than through classical methods. These new forms of relationships and communication channels, which have resulted from developments in communication, informatics, and information technologies, have helped diplomatic processes move quickly towards the use of virtual media. What is now prominent are concepts such as network diplomacy, e-diplomacy and social media diplomacy, and this has resulted in the era of digital diplomacy. This article focuses on the parameters of the digital changes and evolution in the field diplomacy, as well as the effects of these changes on the state, society, and individuals. As a case study, the article focuses on the digitalization of diplomatic activities in Turkey and the role of digital media in the ability of Turkey to adequately express itself is discussed. Keywords: Digital diplomacy, public diplomacy, information technologies, Turkey DIGITAL DIPLOMACY: AN EVALUATION OF THE MEANS AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT 46 DIGITALIZATION BRINGS TO DIPLOMACY

1. Introduction

Diplomacy, which aims to protect the interests of nation-states, as well as to improve its standing against and relationships with other nation-states (İskit, 2007, p. 3) is a fundamental concept which is as old as the first government. The main players in the field of diplomacy are the nation-states themselves, and other international institutions also play an active role in the functioning of diplomacy. Concepts such as communication, negotiation, agreement, cooperation and conflict resolution are prominent notions in the world of diplomacy and many parameters, particularly technology, play a significant role in the evolution of the form that diplomacy takes.

Diplomatic relationships between nation-states in the previous century have evolved in the 21st century, and consequently the relationships between societies have been brought to the forefront. With the aim of constructing long-term relationships, which are defined in the literature as “public diplomacy”, this evolution has emphasized the effective use of the soft power of countries in diplomacy. Public diplomacy is preferred as a result of the changing and evolving world order, and the communication and technological changes that they bring, and with the effective use of soft power, such as, culture, education, media and language, successful results can be achieved.

Public diplomacy is open to mutual communication and interaction. A one-way transfer of information to the public could be perceived as communication in the form of propaganda, which aims to direct the public and impose views upon them, and consequently it is highly likely that it would draw negative reactions within any society. However, an approach based on mutual understanding, expression, and communication means that the targeted audience can take part in the process which, in turn, leads to effective communication strategies (Özkan, 2016, p. 19).

The fact that public diplomacy is based on a communication-oriented strategy, that it sets long-term targets, and that it adopts a public-to-public flow of information indicate significant potential in terms of “relationship building”. Mutual understanding, which is borne when relationships between societies, founded upon soft power elements such as culture, language, education, art, sports, science, etc. are preserved in the long term, bring about an environment of peace, preventing many problems and make it easier to resolve other problems (Özkan, 2014, p. 4).

Today, public diplomacy is used very effectively by countries in the international arena in order to construct permanently healthy relationships between countries, and to improve Oğuz GÖKSU, Abdullah ÖZKAN 47 economic, political, and cultural relationships. Public diplomacy has been affected by digitalization, which is still ongoing, and opportunities offered by the new media can be utilized at the highest level in the relationships between communities.

This article studies the dynamics of large-scale changes and evolution in diplomacy, investigates what type of opportunities are presented by the digital world in the field of diplomacy, and focuses on countries that utilize these resources in various ways, providing country-specific examples.

2. The General Situation in the Relationship between Diplomacy and Digitalization

Diplomacy is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the management of international relations by negotiations; the method by which these relations are adjusted and managed by ambassadors and envoys; the business or art of diplomats” (Demir, 2012, p. 7). Gökhan Yücel divides diplomacy into four categories. Diplomacy 1.0 involves real politics, national interests and propaganda which form the business of people in black suits, and the work by Henry Kissinger, “Diplomacy”, symbolizes this category. Diplomacy 2.0 can be classified as public diplomacy which is centered around the relationship between states and nations, and is better understood by the “soft power” concept propounded by Joseph Nye. Digital diplomacy 3.0 is diplomacy which is practiced everywhere, at any time, for everyone. For this type of diplomacy, the state does not need to be on one end of communications at all times. Digital diplomacy is about limitlessness and it recognizes the limits of public diplomacy drawn by Westphalia. Diplomacy 4.0 is defined as “uber-diplomacy” which enables interaction between objects (Yenidiplomasi, 2015).

Digital diplomacy is a very new concept in Turkey. The concept first emerged in 2009 and has gradually begun to find its place in a range of diplomatic activities. As a strategic step, digital diplomacy is positioned as an element of soft power. When elements of public diplomacy manifest in the field of digital diplomacy, it results in an integration of public diplomacy, which is simply another interpretation of diplomacy, with digital elements. In a process where the online population is ever-increasing, digital diplomacy has become a very popular approach in international relations in order to spread the messages addressed to foreign nations.

According to annual survey results published by We are Social for 2018 on use of the Internet, social media, mobile phones, and e-commerce, in the current world population of 7.6 billion; 4 billion are Internet users, 3.2 billion active social media users and 5.2 billion DIGITAL DIPLOMACY: AN EVALUATION OF THE MEANS AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT 48 DIGITALIZATION BRINGS TO DIPLOMACY individual mobile phone users. In comparison to the previous year, the number of Internet users increased by 7% and active social media users increased by 13%. In terms of time spent on the Internet, Thailand, the Philippines, Brazil, and Indonesia all share first place with around 9 hours of daily use per person. In terms of social media penetration, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Argentina are all placed near the top in the world. The Philippines, Brazil, and Indonesia are countries where people spend the most time on social media with about three and a half hours daily each, and the most sporadic users are in Japan with only 48 minutes per day. The most preferred social media platforms in the world are Facebook, YouTube and Whatsapp, respectively. The age ranges of Facebook and Instagram usage primarily falls into two groups, 18 to 24 and 25 to 34.

There is also important information available in the We are Social (2020) report, under the heading dedicated to Turkey. Turkey’s population is approximately 83 million, of which 62 million are active Internet users, 54 million are active social media users, and 77 million individuals are mobile phone users. In Turkey in 2020, the number of Internet users increased by 10% and the number of active social media users increased by 4,2%, compared to the previous year’s figures. On a typical day, Internet users in Turkey spend 7 hours on the Internet, and almost 3 hours on social media. Seventy percent of Internet users believe that new technologies bring unique advantages to people. The percentage of Internet users in Turkey compared to the entire population is 74%. Considering active social media use by gender, male users are seen to be more active than female users.

According to the 2020 report of We are Social, the number of Internet and social media users has been rapidly increasing in developing countries. One of the most striking points in the report is that underdeveloped and developing countries spend more time on the Internet than do developed countries.

The report also emphasizes that Ministries of Foreign Affairs make assumptions regarding the future, in terms of digitalization, based on data related to new media. While traditional diplomacy is still dominant in international relations, cyber-activism, which has developed with the growth of new media, is making its presence known within the scope of digital diplomacy (Lichtenstein, 2010; Yenidiplomasi, 2015).

3. On Digital Diplomacy

The concept of digital diplomacy may also be expressed by phrases, such as, “network/ social network diplomacy”, “e-diplomacy”, “online diplomacy”, “cyber diplomacy”, and Oğuz GÖKSU, Abdullah ÖZKAN 49

“Twitter diplomacy”. Naci Koru, former deputy-secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explains digital diplomacy in the following words: “Utmost utilization of technological infrastructure in the production and implementation of external policies” (Saka & Ezgin, 2016; Westcott, 2008; YouTube, 2011). Digital diplomacy allows classical diplomacy to be done through digital platforms. Digital diplomacy can be defined as the resolution of developments and problems relating to external policy using the Internet. Digital diplomacy is also defined as gaining a place in the hearts and minds of the foreign public through social networks, particularly through the use of Twitter and Facebook. Establishing communications with and transferring information to governments, NGOs, or foreign communities using digital tools are considered acts of digital diplomacy. The management of diplomacy through these means is an interactive process. It is considered a correct approach to support it with positive developments and maintain it in a planned manner. Digital diplomacy is addressed to targeted individuals, not targeted audiences. Digital diplomacy is a method which is used to prevent crises and avoid risks (Bahçeşehir, 2013; Sönmezışık, 2014).

Digital diplomacy is concerned with topics such as; soft power, power visualization, digital diaspora, digital cultural diplomacy, and digital country branding. Digital diplomacy also includes the concepts of futurism, online chatting, and cyber security. There are different opinions as to the definition and extent of digital diplomacy. In the USA, it is regarded as a new form of democratic diplomacy which requires technology-based Internet freedoms, is concerned with public expectations, and is closely related to cyber-activism. The UK considers digital diplomacy as the resolution of classical diplomacy problems using the Internet and the transfer of classical diplomacy over the Internet. On the other hand, well-meaning but irregular use of social media by political actors cannot in any way be considered as digital diplomacy (Bahcesehir, 2012; Hocking & Melissen, 2015).

Digital diplomacy is expressed in various ways in different countries: The United States Department of State explains digital diplomacy as “State governance in the 21st century”, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs describes it as “open policy”, and the United Kingdom uses the terminology of “solving foreign policy problems using the Internet”. According to Hocking and Milessen (2015), two approaches stand out in the world of digital diplomacy. These consist of “diplomatic processes” in the context of the function of diplomacy, and “diplomatic structures”, such as foreign ministries, which focus on the institutions of diplomacy. The point to consider here is that the use of technology and online tools used in diplomatic relations are insufficient. The traditional codes of diplomacy are evolving as digital technologies are developed by changing and transforming diplomatic DIGITAL DIPLOMACY: AN EVALUATION OF THE MEANS AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT 50 DIGITALIZATION BRINGS TO DIPLOMACY relations. According to Hocking and Melissen, in order to make progress in diplomacy, actions must be taken by combining online and offline practices and strategies. Corneliu Bjola and Marcus Holmes (2015) focus on the collection, understanding, and analysis of discourses coming from the foreign public opinion in particular. Thus, predictive diplomatic reactions are made possible in the context of digital diplomacy (Clarke, 2015; Saka & Ezgin, 2016).

Digital diplomacy can bypass concepts of classical diplomacy such as; sovereignty, strategy, and geopolitics. Data, generated in the online world, by mobile devices and new technologies, brings with it a certain internal governance. Kosovo, which previously had a problem of recognition from a diplomatic point of view in the international arena, became an important agenda item on an international level when it was recognized as a country by Facebook. Countries such as the United States and Great Britain, which are considered to be pioneers in digital diplomacy, have well-designed digital diplomacy strategies. More than 1,000 personnel work in the digital diplomacy unit of the United States Department of State. In this area, Israel has also been taking important steps and investing in digital diplomacy in attempts to focus on digital innovation (Yücel, 2016).

Web 2.0 paved the way for individuals to become content producers, which removed the function of information dissemination from the hands of media monopolies, therefore enabling individuals to use this opportunity as well. Today, anyone who desires is able to become a content producer. Therefore, especially in crisis situations, states should act as the primary source of information and disseminators of information by acting very quickly on foreign policy issues without leaving it to other centers of power or individuals. When a state fails to inform the public regarding serious problems or fails to explain negative developments in detail, it inevitably leads to a crisis where disinformation can spread very quickly across social media. To avoid this situation, digital diplomacy is the most functional tool. Digital diplomacy can prevent a crisis by informing large masses of people very quickly, an ongoing crises can be stopped, and a situation or crisis can be brought under control without any confusion in the information being disseminated. Digital diplomacy is a tool for building persuasion and perception within the big picture, but the critical point is how countries design their digital diplomacy and create content. Digital diplomacy determines which messages countries will provide to foreign countries and other interested stakeholders, as well as how to present these messages in conceptual terms.

While it is possible to reach a very wide audience with social media, the biggest handicap of digital diplomacy is the possibility of a negative correlation between the effectiveness of the messages. Therefore, careful planning is required. A critical error can result in mistakes Oğuz GÖKSU, Abdullah ÖZKAN 51 that may prove very difficult to correct (Digitalaffairs, 2010; Mytko, 2012). The example of Wikileaks has shown that nation-states should abandon the culture of secrecy, albeit in part. In this context, more transparent management approaches should be developed through foreign ministries and digital diplomacy should be defined as the main tool in rapid and accurate dissemination of public information concerning important diplomatic developments.

Digital diplomacy is centered around viral interaction. The content of digital diplomacy is composed of ministries, ministries’ digital activities, and the digital assets with which these activities are regularly maintained. Digital diplomacy may be differentiated from traditional diplomacy through digital learning, interaction, and communication processes. With digitalization, long and difficult diplomatic processes between states are gradually disappearing, and subsequently diplomatic relations between states and citizens, and between citizens themselves, are beginning to become more effective. For example, Twitter messages can sometimes raise effective solutions to a number of issues that international relations have difficulty solving. Social media and digital tools can enable the discussion and finalization of diplomatic issues, which may take months to solve, in front of a wide audience in a transparent way (Yücel, 2016).

According to Corneliu Bjola and Lu Jiang (2015), the use of social media by diplomats can have a transformative effect. Diplomats’ social media activity show the effectiveness of digital diplomacy in the creative design of agenda setting, information, and communication. The rapid development of new media and digital communication tools has brought about a significant evolution in diplomacy and corporate operations of diplomatic relations (Saka & Ezgin, 2016). Traditional methods applied in the past, in inter-state relations, have been partially abandoned, and shares on social media have been presented to the world as public opinion on important issues at the level of ministries as well as at the level of heads of state.

Digital diplomacy provides fast and practical opportunities for explaining and communicating cultural qualities to foreign societies. In the context of European countries, digital diplomacy in the information age in which we live, has been shown to be the most functional cultural ambassador to reach all relevant stakeholders; from ordinary citizens to artists, and from various organizations to corporate organizations. In order to create creative content in digital diplomacy, more intensive integration with technological developments is required. The United Kingdom uses digital diplomacy as a tool for international communication. In this context, the government is trying to use digital platforms, such as the British Council and Digital Theatre, in order to spread its cultural assets more effectively (Grincheva, 2012). Digital diplomacy provides countries with visibility and recognition DIGITAL DIPLOMACY: AN EVALUATION OF THE MEANS AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT 52 DIGITALIZATION BRINGS TO DIPLOMACY through digital channels, as well as allowing target audiences to quickly reach a country’s diplomatic activities online and learn about new developments.

Digital diplomacy activities should be studied within the following three categories: The first category is real-time surveillance, the second is the identification and training of strong online actors, and the last category is through direct dialogue and interaction with the wider masses. Aino Huxley (2014), in her study on the digital diplomacy activities of Finland, found that 11 ministries produced content in their respective areas, as well as publicizing in detail their country’s cultural and political characteristics. In digital diplomacy, Twitter is the most dominant digital platform among the social networks. Foreign ministries follow each other and correspond on Twitter as well as participate in and launch hashtag campaigns through the platform (Saka & Ezgin, 2016).

Understanding, planning, participation, and active support are all integral parts of both public diplomacy and digital diplomacy. Based on this, the aim is to make use of digital communication and digital diplomacy within the context of public diplomacy by paying more attention to strategic communications. Ensuring public participation in such processes is considered a duty for diplomats (Gregory, 2011; Saka & Ezgin, 2016). Technology is the most important element of soft power in today’s world. There have been many opportunities to use technology as an element of soft power (Varoğlu, 2013, p. 7). In one way, digital diplomacy is a diplomatic technique used in the construction of soft power (Yücel, 2016). On this axis and as output from the technological evolution, digital diplomacy is used in the context of public diplomacy and international relations.

4. Digital Diplomacy - Activities and Examples

The United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom are leading countries where the importance of digital diplomacy has been recognized and used effectively. The United States Department of State has created a “state plan” for digital diplomacy under the heading “21st Century Statecraft”. In Israel, due to the shortcomings and irregularities of public diplomacy, activities known as “Hasbara”, a project of “training citizen diplomats” has been launched. These citizens will be given the opportunity to represent their countries in the new media in the future. The United Kingdom, through the work of its Foreign and Commonwealth Office, has prepared and published a manual for social media tools. In 2013, Sweden attracted attention with the practice of its “digital diplomacy team” which gained many followers on social networks. Many countries have begun to appoint people who have been trained in digital diplomacy to work with their ambassadors (Clarke, 2015; Radikal, 2012; Webrazzi, Oğuz GÖKSU, Abdullah ÖZKAN 53

2014). In the context of “21st Century Statecraft”, which was established by the United States Department of State, the new media offers opportunities for diplomats to express themselves while listening to its citizens as well as people from other parts of the world. In line with this model, ambassadors and diplomats are given digital diplomacy training and are encouraged to integrate using both local and global social media tools for the purpose of dialogue. The Department of State and other units of the department have been communicating with people in various parts of the world in 11 different languages through 301 Twitter accounts. Active use of numerous social media platforms has enabled contact with 20 million people worldwide (State, 2010).

For the first time in 2002, the United States Department of State officially commenced its digital diplomacy activities. The United Kingdom and Sweden are among the pioneering countries in this field (Saka & Ezgin, 2016). In 2012, many countries, ministries, and political actors started actively using social media implying recognition of the power of social media. In 2015, at the commencement of the G20 summit held in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Twitter account saluted the participating heads of state in nine languages, thereby sending a message to the global public. Such examples have increased in recent years and patterns in classical diplomacy have begun to be abandoned.

The study titled “The State of Digital Diplomacy 2016” focuses on implementations in digital diplomacy by heads of state and their offices. According to this report, in 2016 the President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, was the best Snapchat user, the President of Paraguay, Enrique Pena Nieto, was the best Periscope user, the best social media user was the President of Argentina Mauricio Macri, and the best social media, Instagram, and Google Plus user was the White House. Barack Obama was the best United States president in using Youtube channels and LinkedIn pages. The best Vine user was the French government (Elysee France) and the best user of Google Plus was Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Iran Islamic Republic (Sodd16, 2016). On the other hand, traditional media can also integrate and contribute to digital diplomacy. TRT AVAZ’s broadcasting in digital media in five languages is an indication of how media can be effective in digital diplomacy (Yücel, 2016).

The United Kingdom is one of the pioneers in digital diplomacy. The first country to develop a “Digital Public Diplomacy” strategy was the United Kingdom. As a unit of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Digital Diplomacy department has an extensive agenda of activities. A guide for using social media and other new technologies was prepared by the Digital Diplomacy Department to train diplomats in these areas before they start working abroad. If the messages given by the diplomats reach the right target audience, their DIGITAL DIPLOMACY: AN EVALUATION OF THE MEANS AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT 54 DIGITALIZATION BRINGS TO DIPLOMACY effect becomes multiplied and, consequently, reaches a wider mass. One of the important advantages of this is that there is no cost to this process. For such reasons, digital public diplomacy displays significant advantages over traditional diplomacy (Mytko, 2012).

One important example of the use of digital diplomacy as a strategy is Kosovo. Kosovo declared its independence on February 17, 2008. The efforts of Kosovo to become recognized as a state at a global level were supported by digital diplomacy. The state defined all its citizens as “digital diplomats” and with the support of its citizens, it attempted to gain visibility and support using digital platforms. Meanwhile, the Wiki Academy, established within the context of the digital diplomacy strategy of the Republic of Kosovo’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, took steps towards correcting negative or missing information on Wikipedia. Hence, efforts were made to correctly and conveniently represent Kosovo in the world. The #InstaKosovo hashtag was also used to introduce the country to the world. Moreover, impressive footage from Kosovo was shared on digital media in attempts to create an image for Kosovo (Korhan, 2018).

In the digital era, web sites, social media accounts, news portals, and online forums play very important roles in defining a country’s image, even more so on a global level (Korhan, 2018, p. 278). Digital diplomacy allows many players to be involved in the diplomatic process. This means that diplomacy is no longer under the monopoly of a state but rather that different institutions, organizations, and individuals can also become involved.

One of the countries active in the field of digital diplomacy is Israel. Due to a need to restore its image globally, partly due to the “Mavi Marmara” event, Israel decided to manage its diplomatic relations through the new media. A post-graduate program was opened at Haifa University in 2012 in order to train “citizen diplomats”. Its students, the future “online Ambassadors”, received education relating to online activities such as information entry and updating of Wikipedia pages, the use of forums, blogs, chat rooms, Facebook and Twitter, and how to behave in comment sections of online newspapers. These students then acted as “citizen diplomats” on behalf of Israel in the context of digital diplomacy in the new media. In 2009, Israel opened its Twitter consulate to impress the global community. The Israeli diaspora has been running organized public diplomacy activities and supports these activities through digital diplomacy (Radikal, 2012; Digitalaffairs, 2010; Westcott, 2008).

The Asper Institute for New Media Diplomacy bears the responsibility for communication of Israel’s message to the global community and focuses on the roles, functions and utilization of new media technologies. This institute works on the image of Israel from different perspectives (Demir, 2012, p. 157). The state of Israel, as a policy, uses digital diplomacy Oğuz GÖKSU, Abdullah ÖZKAN 55 as a tool while attaching importance to the new media. In efforts to create a digital image through the new media, digital diplomacy activities are not left as the sole responsibility of foreign ministries and diplomats. In the context of public diplomacy, diplomatic activities are presented to the world within the framework of digital diplomacy by way of non-governmental activities.

A different example in terms of the use of digital diplomacy can be seen in the case of Egypt. During the Arab Spring, the government disabled access to the Internet for five days, hence significantly restricting the organization and actions of activists. The United States became involved with arguments regarding “Internet freedom” and “democratic development” and trained activists on how to communicate using proxy servers, online gambling sites, and marriage sites (Yılmaz, 2012, p. 162).

According to the 2013 Digital Diplomacy report, Iran was among the most notable countries in the Eastern bloc in this field, similar to the examples of the the United States and United Kingdom. The Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, spoke to President Barack Obama on Twitter, sent a message to the Pope, celebrated a Jewish holiday, and established dialogue with Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, and journalist, Christian Amanpour. Due to these interactions, it can be said that the embargo imposed on Iran was broken through the use of digital media.

The game “Trace Effects”, developed by the United States Department of State, was one of the distinguishing examples in the field of digital diplomacy (Americanenglish, 2018). Digital diplomacy has gone beyond the dimension of international relations and reached the stage of transferring and teaching cultural values. The Department of State’s “Trace Effects” game, followed by other practices, has enabled nations to convey their cultural qualities to other countries and communities through digital diplomacy. The Department of State developed this video game to teach American English and culture to children and young people. The target audience was children and young people aged 12 to 16 years. Within the scope of this game, the values of American society are presented to users, as well as the themes of entrepreneurship, activism, environmental protection, conflict resolution, women’s rights and empowerment, science, and innovation. In the game, Trace is a university student from the year 2045. In order to make the future a better place, Trace is expected to help six young people to do well to return home. The Department of State identified children and young people as target audiences with this seven-stage game and included younger generations in digital diplomacy. Therefore, young people and children around the world, who want to learn English, can do so and learn about American English and culture at the same time. This game DIGITAL DIPLOMACY: AN EVALUATION OF THE MEANS AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT 56 DIGITALIZATION BRINGS TO DIPLOMACY has turned cultural diplomacy into a game as well. The U.S. Department of State hosts this game together with education and cultural officers as well as with various public diplomacy and foreign affairs’ units.

On January 4, 2012, Barack Obama became the first among world leaders to open an Instagram account (Twiplomacy, 2018). In June 2010, Obama sent his first tweet which made him the first president to use Twitter (Yılmaz, 2012, p. 147). Obama’s “four more years” tweet, which he wrote under a photo in which he was hugging his wife after winning the United States presidential election in 2012, became the most retweeted message of all time with 749,301 retweets (Telegraph, 2012).

The use of social media by political actors plays an important role in the functioning of digital diplomacy. Particularly, the use of Twitter by politicians, the number of their followers, and their interactions are designed as a means of digital diplomacy. The importance of digital diplomacy has been increasing in parallel with the growth of digitalization and in the way that political messages are shared on social media, thereby reaching large numbers of people. They become elements of the media agenda, as well as communicating official views to other countries at the level of presidents or ministers of foreign affairs.

According to Twiplomacy’s ranking on January 1, 2019, the political actors with the highest number of followers on Twitter are as follows (Twiplomacy, 2019):

Table 1. Overview of the social media accounts of important political leaders Number of Number of No. Political Leaders/Presidents Twitter Followers Instagram Followers 1 Donald Trump / @realDonaldTrump (President of the 56 Million 11 Million United States) 2 Pope Francis / @Pontifex (President of the Pontifical 47 Million 5 Million Commission for Vatican City State) 3 Narendra Modi / @narendramodi (Prime Minister of India) 44 Million 16 Million 4 Narendra Modi / @PMOIndia (Prime Minister of India) 27 Million - 5 Donald Trump / @POTUS (President of the United States) 24 Million -- 6 ABD Presidency / @WhiteHouse (USA) 17 Million 4 Million 7 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan / @RT_Erdogan (President of 13 Million 4 Million Turkish Republic) 8 Sushma Swaraj / @SushmaSwaraj (Minister of External 12 Million -- Affairs of India) 9 Joko Widodo / @Jokowi (President of Indonesia) 10 Million 14 Million 10 Queen Rania / @QueenRania (Queen of Jordan) 10 Million 5 Million Oğuz GÖKSU, Abdullah ÖZKAN 57

According to the ranking of Twiplomacy, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as a political leader in Turkey, was ranked in fourth position amongst leaders with followers on Twitter with 5,706,601 followers in 2014. In the same year, the political leader with the highest number of followers in the world was President Barack Obama with 49,166,434 followers (Twiplomacy, 2014). Erdoğan has been one of the top leaders in the world in terms of Twitter usage since 2013. Erdoğan has more followers than many world leaders, such as, Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Medvedev, François Hollande, Theresa May, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, and David Cameron. In addition, @tcbestepe, which is the official Twitter account for the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey was ranked 14th amongst those with the highest number of followers with over 6 million in 2018. These numbers can be interpreted as an indication that a message will reach a wider audience through Erdoğan’s use of digital diplomacy.

In 2018, Erdoğan ranked 8th among 50 leaders with the most interactions on Instagram, and 7th among the most acclaimed leaders and 2nd among the most influential leaders. Erdoğan also ranked 7th among 50 leaders with the highest amount of interaction and number of followers, and 6th among the most influential 50 leaders. On Facebook, Erdoğan was 6th among the most followed 50 leaders in 2018, 10th with the most interactions, and 7th among the most influential (Twiplomacy, 2018). The popularity of Erdoğan on social networks is an indication that Turkey has strong players in the field of digital diplomacy.

5. Turkey’s Digital Diplomatic Presence and Applications

Turkey has realized some important initiatives in digital diplomacy. Most of these studies were carried out under the leadership of the foreign ministry. Public diplomacy, which can be described as a “countries’ communication of activities and policies in their work within different disciplines to the international community and various public forums”, is able to fulfill this mission through the new media. Digital diplomacy should not be limited to the use of social media by important players. The process of making maximum use of all opportunities offered by digitalization promotes the functions of digital diplomacy.

In December 2009, Deputy Undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Namık Tan, stated that in terms of public diplomacy, embassies will become more visible in social networks, such as, Twitter and Facebook (Digitalaffairs, 2010). Yenidiplomasi.com founder, Halil İbrahim İzgi, emphasizes that Turkey does not yet have a digital diplomacy strategy and that this is a huge handicap. On the other hand, according to İzgi, there are well-intentioned steps being taken in Turkey, but they will only have real meaning when they are conducted in an orderly manner. According to Yücel, digital diplomacy is user-centric and new media users in Turkey have been DIGITAL DIPLOMACY: AN EVALUATION OF THE MEANS AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT 58 DIGITALIZATION BRINGS TO DIPLOMACY taking a very active approach. Turkey’s human capital stands out as the most important element as it requires the inclusion of users in digital diplomacy (Radikal, 2012).

One of the first examples of digital diplomacy in Turkey occurred when four American journalists were detained in Libya in 2011 and were subsequently rescued as a result of Turkey’s efforts. Namık Tan, Turkey’s Washington Ambassador, announced the rescue of the journalists on Twitter and then shared photographs of the journalists. This is an example that demonstrates the presence of Turkish diplomacy in the new media. When Turkish citizens were evacuated from Libya in 2011, communication was established with them via the Internet since phone lines were not available at the time. During the evacuation of these people, the Internet was also used. It would not be wrong to name Ali Rıza Çolak, Ambassador of the Republic of Turkey in Belgrade, as an active digital diplomacy user. Another example is Ahmet Davutoğlu’s announcement on his Twitter account, as Minister of Foreign Affairs on an official visit to Batumi, that the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, had been overthrown (Radikal, 2012). Such events indicate that the new media can be more visible than conventional media under certain conditions.

“The State of Digital Diplomacy 2016” report highlights the areas where Turkey stands out. Among presidents, the most successful Facebook page belongs to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of the Turkish Republic. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was also one of the first Facetime users. The fact that Erdoğan communicated with the public using Facetime during the coup attempt on 15 July 2016 proved to be a major event not only within the local but also within the global community. According to total metric interaction data, Erdoğan was the sixth best president in terms of his use of Facebook between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2016. Erdoğan also became the fifth most popular president on Facebook. When presidential leaders’ Twitter accounts were examined, Erdoğan’s had the fifth most active Twitter account. On Instagram, Erdoğan’s had the eighth most active presidential account. The Turkish Presidency’s Twitter account is also very active, compared to presidential accounts of other countries. The Presidential Twitter account, among all presidential accounts, received the most likes, retweets, and shares with 7,666,259 single interactions. The President’s English language Twitter account became the eighth account with the most interactions (Sodd16, 2016).

The report named the “15.07.gov.tr” website as the best awareness-raising portal. Prepared for the martyrs of 15 July, this website is characterized by its very detailed narration of the coup attempt and follow ups of news and information relating to it. Meanwhile, AFAD’s (Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency) website was named the best portal in terms of disaster and crisis management. Oğuz GÖKSU, Abdullah ÖZKAN 59

For both political actors and government agencies, digital platforms are a means to rapidly share information, photographs, and videos to a wide range of audiences. Digital diplomacy is increasing in value and functionality everyday, especially in terms of informing, keeping the global community up-to-date, and sharing opinions on current issues. Digital diplomacy provides political actors with the opportunity to directly reach and interact with their audiences by bypassing traditional media. On the other hand, with digital diplomacy, users can become primary sources of information.

Research titled “Digital Government 2016”, prepared by the Diplomacy.live platform, was extended to cabinet members and ministries working in the Government of the 64th Turkish Republic. The study measures and grades the content management skills of 49 users in terms of social media presence, influence, access, mobile application use, concurrency, etc., based on 97 factors within the scope of 12 social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Google Plus, Pinterest, YouTube, Periscope, Slideshare, Tumblr, Vine, and LinkedIn. Based on this analysis, the study yielded important results in terms of digital diplomacy. According to the Digital Government 2016 Digital Presence Ratings, the ministry, which made the most effective use of digital platforms, was the Ministry of Youth and Sports. Fikri Işık, the Minister of Science, Technology and Industry, was named the most active minister in terms of digital media. The most active ministry on YouTube was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, on Instagram, the Ministry of Youth and Sports. Süleyman Soylu, Minister of the Interior, was the dominant player in terms of Twitter use, Faruk Çelik, Minister of Food, Agriculture and Forestry in terms of Youtube use, Fikri Işık in terms of Instagram usage and Ahmed Davutoğlu, the then Prime Minister, in terms of Facebook use (Thebrandage, 2016).

As can be seen, digitalization dominates the daily activities of various members of the government. Communication with both internal and external target audiences is established almost exclusively through digital channels. When governments publish their work in a digital environment, there tends to be a positive impact on the country’s external presentation and the brand development of the country.

A study of follower profiles of institutions, such as, the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA), the Turkish Red Crescent and the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities, which represent Turkey abroad, reveals that they have as many foreign followers as local followers (Koyuncu & Medin, 2017, p. 1241). This emphasizes the importance of digital diplomacy, while at the same time rendering Turkey’s humane diplomatic activities more visible. DIGITAL DIPLOMACY: AN EVALUATION OF THE MEANS AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT 60 DIGITALIZATION BRINGS TO DIPLOMACY

Table 2. Social media accounts of Turkey’s prominent digital diplomacy players (Updated on 3 April 2019) Turkey’s Digital Diplomacy Players Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube (Followers) (Followers) (Likes) (Subscribers) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan RT_Erogan 5,231,297 9,029,845 -- 13,586,295 Presidency of the Republic of Turkey 6,512,637 661,431 1,790,523 37,866 Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1,332,726 -- 295,254 5,672 Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu (Minister of 1,290,291 104,031 287,068 -- Foreign Affairs) Presidency of the Republic of Turkey 457,226 19,247 635,652 66 Directorate of Communications İbrahim Kalın (Presidential 1,402,617 ------Spokesperson) Turkish Cooperation and Coordination 197,146 41,188 46,575 3,077 Agency (TİKA) The Turkish Red Crescent 804,601 101,549 284,407 8,258 The Presidency for Turks Abroad and 61,067 39,523 193,455 7,891 Related Communities (YTB) Yunus Emre Institute (YEE) 31,335 10,079 48,759 4,054

This view of social media accounts is an indicator of the potential for Turkey’s digital diplomacy players, institutions, and society. It is considered essential to move this potential to higher levels with investments in digital innovation.

6. Digital Diplomacy Efforts by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs operates in various fields for the purposes of utilizing digital tools and creating effective visibility in the new media. In addition to the corporate website, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs provides visibility through digital platforms in its social media accounts. The Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs prefers to address foreign communities in their own language. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ official website offers English, French, and Arabic languages as well as Turkish. With the aid of different language options, foreigners can more effectively use the website for their activities and for their information collection.

A comparison of the social media accounts of the United States Department of State and the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs highlights a striking difference. The most active ministry in the United States in terms of digital diplomacy is the Department of State. Oğuz GÖKSU, Abdullah ÖZKAN 61

The Department of State has accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, Flickr, and Tumblr. The Department also has a blog known as “Dipnote”. The Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not the only public institution that has assumed roles in terms of digital diplomacy. The “Directorate of Communications”, which was established after the transition to the presidential system of government, has begun coordinating communication activities for the Republic of Turkey. The Directorate of Communications also has also taken over the activities of the Public Diplomacy Coordination Office (KDK) which was established in 2010. In addition to its official website, the Directorate of Communications has Twitter accounts administered in English and Russian. These accounts address foreign communities in their own languages, directly interacting with citizens from other countries regarding current events in dialogues that extend beyond classic diplomatic rhetoric.

One recent example of digital diplomacy was observed following the local elections on 31 March 2019. The President of the Republic of Turkey’s Director of Communications, Fahrettin Altun, responded to remarks from the United States State Department’s spokesperson on Twitter regarding the election results for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality in English. Such examples have occurred many times in recent history. This dimension of diplomatic relations suggests that a transparent communication strategy should be adopted for the wider community.

In this context of digital diplomacy, an e-consulate (virtual consulate) and e-passport applications have been developed. Since 2007, the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has used the e-consulate application. The e-consulate makes it possible for 80-90% of procedures, which would previously have been carried out in traditional ways at physical consulates, to now be carried out by electronic means. The e-passport application is a project conducted together with the Ministry of the Interior. As of 1 June 2010, the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to issue e-passports. E-passports provide a high level of security. The chips in the passports contain all identification data and photographs. In terms of relations with the European Union (EU), and in line with international civil aviation criteria, an e-passport is currently one of the most important topics in terms of international relations.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ e-visa application is another process enabled by digital diplomacy. The “evisa.gov.tr” website, which was created for the purpose of this application, demonstrates Turkey’s knowledge in the field of digital diplomacy. The website was accepted DIGITAL DIPLOMACY: AN EVALUATION OF THE MEANS AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT 62 DIGITALIZATION BRINGS TO DIPLOMACY as the best portal in “The State of Digital Diplomacy 2016” report. In an evaluation of the digital performance of 210 countries, the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was ranked 25th among 210 countries in the study which measured the digital diplomacy assets of foreign ministries across 25 social media platforms, including assessments of their activities on websites and mobile applications. As a digital environment which enables many applications relating to various diplomatic representative institutions within Turkey as well as to foreign diplomats, the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ “Diplomatic Portal” application was also included in the report and cited as a successful venture.

Another important application developed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spouses’ Solidarity Association. This association was established to assist families of foreign affairs and other ministry officials who had been martyred during a mission abroad. The association also offers activities aimed at introducing Turkey and Turkish culture to foreigners, including the spouses of foreign mission chiefs in Ankara. This website was named as “the best diplomatic club site” in “The State of Digital Diplomacy 2016” report. In short, the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has worked proactively in the field of digital diplomacy and performed its activities with a high level of sensitivity in regard to the effective and correct use of the means of communication in the digital world.

7. Discussion and Conclusion

This study, which examined the parameters of digital change and transformation in diplomacy, and investigated the impacts of those changes on the state, society, and individuals, shows that the transfer of classical diplomacy to the Internet has resulted in an alternative approach to diplomacy. Having regard to digital diplomacy as a strategy within the broader framework of diplomacy, it systematically enables countries to be represented effectively in digital environments. Countries support their national foreign policies with digital diplomacy. In this context, digital diplomacy is utilized as a complementary tool. National foreign policy strategies and messages exist in the new media by way of digital diplomacy, and are able to be made visible through online media websites as well as social media accounts.

Digital diplomacy is perceived as change management in global politics. Institutions and practitioners try to manage the digital process by coming together in the common denominator. Through social media platforms, countries introduce their own endeavors to different audiences on the public diplomacy axis and are able to use digital tools for this purpose (Holmes, 2015). In order to stand out in digital diplomacy, nation-states need to make Oğuz GÖKSU, Abdullah ÖZKAN 63 huge investments in the field. Many things in the world are now controlled by algorithms where ordinary citizens are only aware of the interfaces. In this sense, algorithmic superiority now plays an integral role in the protection of a country’s diplomatic interests (Yücel, 2016).

Turkey currently does not act in the field of digital diplomacy with the same level of sensitivity that it applies to cyber security (Sönmezışık, 2014). However, the evolutionary effect of digitalization, artificial intelligence, technological developments, and social media platforms in every walk of life requires Turkey to adopt a more active position. Digital diplomacy also introduces the concept of the digital image and digital branding of a country. In the future, other developed countries will begin to invest in their digital images just as the United States, Israel and the United Kingdom have done.

Regarded as the modern continuation of traditional diplomacy and public diplomacy, digital diplomacy has gained a very important role thanks to the rapid rise and widespread nature of the convenience of digital and social media, digital branding, digital citizenship, digital diaspora, digital journalism, and social movements. In this sense, digital diplomacy presents an interdisciplinary perspective. Digital diplomacy is far from being a kind of diplomatic problem; but rather it is a matter of digital transformation and digital innovation (Yücel, 2016). While diplomacy still has a heavy presence among the governments of nation- states, digital diplomacy appears to be an integral part of this process due to the power, influence, and all-encompassing environments created by digitalization (Westcott, 2008).

Turkey has taken a number of steps forward in terms of digital diplomacy, but its shortcomings in digital investment are far more apparent. The issues that need to be addressed by Turkey in terms of digital diplomacy can be summarized as follows:

- Digital diplomats should be trained, digital transformation training should be given, related programs should be opened in universities, and pioneering countries and best practices in this field should be closely monitored and current developments should be pursued. Digital diplomacy will be the most important tool in addressing online audiences and “online colleagues”.

- A digital diplomacy strategy should be developed in the field, following which systematic and pre-planned steps should be taken. State officials, particularly the officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, should be trained in the field. After educating professionals in professional training programs in the area of digital diplomacy, dynamic digital diplomacy activities should be carried out through these professionals. DIGITAL DIPLOMACY: AN EVALUATION OF THE MEANS AND OPPORTUNITIES THAT 64 DIGITALIZATION BRINGS TO DIPLOMACY

- Turkey should produce content for digital diplomacy in an attempt to manage foreign impressions regarding Turkey. In line with this aim, as an exercise beyond the transfer of news and developments from the traditional media to the new media, the dialogue- based structure of digital media should be utilized and foreign communities should be addressed directly.

- Twitter should be used for dialogue purposes from time to time, and should be positioned as an information tool. All information disseminated by traditional methods should be conveyed to the new media in an innovative way.

- Within the framework of digital diplomacy, an Internet series should be started immediately. The increased interest in Turkish TV series should be utilized on digital platforms. A “project series” aimed particularly at Middle Eastern and Arabic communities, starring the most popular actresses and actors in those communities, could be broadcast. An exclusive series which can be broadcast in Turkey and simultaneously to the Arabic world by means of the Internet should be prepared in a suitable format. In cooperation with the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an interactive project series should be prepared in an attempt to make Turkish culture and Turkish language more widespread.

- As a precaution against rising Islamophobia in the West, Turkey should utilize the tools provided by digital diplomacy. In order to overcome the dominance of the orientalist perspective, Turkey should prioritize its cultural values, as well as its secular and democratic management structure.

- Digital diplomacy should be evaluated in the context of country branding as well as in the field of international relations. The potential brought about by digital diplomacy should be utilized to reinforce a country’s image, and a long-term strategic roadmap should be prepared for Turkey with contributions from all shareholders within society.

Whether diplomatic attempts are made using traditional tools and methods or by way of digital environments brought to us by the 21st Century, the most critical aspects to take into account are to act strictly in line with the foundational principles of legitimacy in state policies, and to act in accordance with the requirements of the law, the state, and democracy. Only in this way can diplomacy serve to achieve international peace and to bring countries together. Spreading an understanding of diplomacy, which overlooks legitimacy, breaches international law and restricts freedom, and in the digital world will only serve to worsen current problems and introduce further contradictions. However, our world and the international community Oğuz GÖKSU, Abdullah ÖZKAN 65 have wearied of recent conflicts, and have a desire for calmness, brotherhood, and peace. It must be the common hope of everyone who believes in peace that digitalization disseminates the good, the beautiful, and the right through the pathways of democracy and law.

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DIGITAL SEIGE

CHAPTER 4

FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY

Pedja AŠANIN GOLE1, Vida SRUK2

1Senior Lecturer, DOBA Faculty of Applied Business and Social Studies, Department of Marketing, Social Media and Public Relations, Maribor, Slovenia e-mail: [email protected]

2Senior Lecturer, University of Maribor, Faculty of Economics and Business, Department of Political Economy, Maribor, Slovenia e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.04

ABSTRACT This chapter analyses a part of postmodern digital society characterized by unbridled communication on online social networks, the spread of disinformation, fake news, alternative facts and post-truth. In the context of globalization, which transformed the distinction between public and private, political and commercial, social and market, in digital society we are also witnessing the processes of digital commodification and mediatisation of everything as a result of prevailing neoliberal ideology. This is manifested using technologically advanced forms of constructing personal biographies, online staging of an individual’s public in private image, the individual’s Potemkin villages. More than truth and credible facts, it seems that this digital age is constructed of interpretations of reality dependent on the context and falsified news which we become aware of only after the disclosure of the truth; that is ‘post- truth’. Strongly diverse ideas, which in the context of the gradual shaping of the often-incoherent term ‘postmodern society’ have been in process of development by a wider scientific discourse for almost sixty years now, contain the tendencies of ‘post-factual’ in many elements. Although postmodernism first positioned itself as an emancipatory way of freeing people from oppressive narratives and abuse of power, the mediatisation of society and of the world in a digital society, and the emergence of media populism in the form of counterfeit, fake news, alternative facts and the post-true, is a typical example of reverse process, the gradual and persistent farewell of reality, which is not emancipatory at all. Through the prism of post-modern escape from objective truth, reality, language games and the attitude to freedom, we explain why fake news is, actually, the post-factual reproduction of a postmodern digital society. The facts in a postmodern society are in fact social constructs, and only relative truth exists, because objective truth is a serious ambiguous concept. Keywords: Postmodernism, digital society, fake news, post-truth, post-factual, language games, freedom, individualism, commodification 70 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY

“Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth” (Huxley, 2016)

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a totalitarian state is created based on the principles of stability and happiness, which is maintained using synthetic drugs. Children are produced in laboratories, people are divided into classes according to intelligence, families no longer exist, brain washing happens during sleep, sex is free, and emotions are excluded. In 1984, Orwell not only foresaw the future, but promptly warned us about what could happen to us. His big brother keeps on watching all the time, all ambiguous words are deleted from the vocabulary, the police monitor citizens through the screening screens, the Ministry of Truth publishes lies, and newspapers write about the successes of authority, sports, crimes and astrology. Anthony Burgess in his A Clockwork Orange speaks of a dystopic future, which has already come in today’s world of violence, banality and indifference. Burgess’s literary hero Alex should not shock anybody today. Just like Orwell’s Big Brother or Huxley’s Brave New World, “we are well on our way to fulfilling that dark vision, where truth is the first casualty in the establishment of the authoritarian state” (McIntyre, 2018, p. 1): we live in a world of false and fake news,1 alternative facts,2 disinformation3 and misinformation4, in the post-truth5 world and the post-factual digital society.

1 The Australian Macquarie’s Dictionary defined ‘fake news’ as ‘disinformation and hoaxes published on websites for political purposes or to drive web traffic; the incorrect information being passed along by social media’ (Macquarie Dictionary, 2017). A review of relevant literature used the term ‘fake news’ reveals six types of definition: (1) news satire, (2) news parody, (3) fabricated and distorted information, (4) (photo) manipulation, (5) advertising and public relations, and (6) propaganda (Tandoc, Lim, & Ling, 2017; Wardle, 2017). We conceptualize fake news as distorted signals uncorrelated to the truth. Fake news is fabricated information that appropriates the look and feel of real news and media content: from how the websites look like to how the articles are written, etc., and by trying to appear like traditionally trusted content, it takes on a certain form of credibility. 2 ‘Alternative facts’ are nothing more than another euphemism hiding the insinuation, falsification of objective facts and truthfulness. 3 The deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false; false information that is purposely spread to deceive people (cf. Lazer et al., 2018). 4 The inadvertent sharing of false or misleading information (cf. Lazer et al., 2018). 5 ‘Post-truth’ is an expression that includes distortion and falsification of facts that have been repeatedly posted or repeatedly shared on online social media. The Oxford Dictionaries defined ‘post-truth’ as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping political debate or public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, less often also used as “occurring after or resulting from a disclosure of the truth” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2017). The prefix “post” is meant to express that the truth is irrelevant; or, as Kalpokas (2019, p. 2) state: “post-truth does signal something that is both ‘post’ and a return, a re-legitimation of arguments based on their emotional appeal and symbolic value and subjective rather than impersonal truth”. Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK 71

Fake news is nothing new: people have been spreading it and complaining about it for centuries. Fake news, alternative facts and post-truth did not start with the elections for 45th US President or the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign. For example, false scientific assertions about the usefulness of spinach due to the high degree of iron, or the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines or climate change mean a widespread denial of fact. The sociology of science has for a long time called into question the principle of absolute truth as an independent entity on the basis that other scientific networks, infrastructures and validation structures could well produce other forms of verifiable knowledge. Historians of science have found that attempts to dispel myths by expert knowledge may only have the contrary effect of increasing the emotional commitment to an unshakable and unfalsifiable core belief (see Law, 2017). It is not only a credulous public that takes emotional satisfaction in myths. But today, the growth of online news has prompted a set of concerns. The focus of concern has shifted to social media. With the Internet and social media, controlling media content (through propaganda, manipulation, spinning, etc.) has become much easier as individual responsibility is deficient while we are using mainstream media, tweeting, posting pictures, commenting or creating yet another website for spreading messages in public (Trajkoska, 2018). Content on social media platforms can be spread among users with no significant fact-checking or editorial judgment. Social media, which increase the speed and breadth of spreading information, have become extraordinarily powerful in a very short time, and have a dramatically different structure than the previous media technologies. Twitter, founded in 2006, has more than 300 million active users worldwide, and Facebook, founded in 2004, has more than 2 billion. Those platforms have become a primary source of news for many people (cf. Pivec & Maček, 2019). The spread of falsity online is a serious concern for the democratic process.

The European Communication Monitor notes only a small number of practitioners (12.3%) dealing with fake news as a major issue for communication management, and the European countries with the strongest impact of fake news are the Czech Republic, Romania, Serbia and Russia (Zerfass, Tench, Verhoeven, Verčič, & Moreno, 2018, pp. 16–18). Among the respondents of the European Communication Monitor, every second communication expert reports that misleading news in mass or social media influence the public sphere in his or her country. However, only a quarter of them feel that dealing with fake news is relevant for the daily work of their communication department or agency. This is striking as 22.5% of European organisations and their reputation have been affected by fake news in the past few months. Russia, Serbia, Slovenia and Poland report the strongest impact. The main sources of misleading content are social media (81.3%), but mass media (59.6%) also play a huge role. 72 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY

Despite these challenges, only 12% of the affected organisations have already established advanced routines to identify (potential) fake news (Zerfass et al., 2018).

We are living in a post-truth digital world, where fake news and post-truth replace the truth, alternative facts replace real facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence. Regardless of whether the fake news, post-truth and alternative facts are a result of political spin, mass delusion or a bold-faced lie, this is all about disinformation by which its practitioners try to force someone to believe something, regardless of the evidence. Taking into account the decline in conventional media, the growth of online media and, in particular, social networks, the ideal conditions for post-truth are created if we add fake news to the wired-in cognitive biases that make us feel that our conclusions are truthful even when they are not. As in McIntyre (2018), we also argue that the post-factual digital society is borrowed from postmodernism - more specifically, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth - in its attacks on science and facts.

1. Digital Society: Postmodern Escape from Interpretation in Objective Truth or Reality

A postmodern interpretative and mediatized society is an era of boundless individualization and the ever-presenting of new ‘post-istic’ terms (which, like the old ones, point to the threat of the survival of the fundamental Western civilizational values): post-moral, post-democratic, post-factual, post-truth, etc. Numerous examples of post-truth euphemisms as examples of postmodern linguistic creativity are listed by Keyes (2004, p. 33): ‘neo-truth, soft-truth, faux truth, lite truth, poetic truth, parallel truth, nuanced truth, imaginative truth, virtual truth, alternative reality, strategic misrepresentations, creative enhancement, non-full disclosure, selective disclosure, augmented reality, nearly true, almost true, counterfactual statements, fact-based information’. As we have already determined (Sruk & Ašanin Gole, 2018), in the postmodern digital society everything is vanishing into unbridled heterogeneous randomness, which no longer represents the search for the truth, certainly not a unified one, and also not a partial one, but only follows unscrupulous insinuation and profiteering, which is creating its post-factual ‘truth’ as ‘alternative facts’ every day, while degrading the truths of others from the position of power in a post-democratic context as fake or false news; in the end, a post-true always appears. The mechanisms of the global economic flows of a modern society generate unscrupulous devaluation of life (symbolic or true) values ​​or mercilessly transform them into market ones (Varufakis, 2015a; 2015b), thus undermining the last bulwarks of individual self-determination and social solidarity. According to Keyes (2004), lies have stopped being Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK 73 treated as something inexcusable and have started to be viewed as something acceptable in certain situations, which has supposedly led to the beginning of the post-truth era.

A postmodern society, just like postmodernism, is a diverse metaphor rather than a defined concept. Even though this term has been discussed for decades in intellectual discourses of various artistic disciplines, scientific sciences and other practices, this notion is rather inconceivable as various interpreters try to circumvent it and mark many divergent phenomena in such a way that there are content and explanatory overlaps with a variety of sketches or concepts. As a metaphor, the term postmodernism has been used in a completely non-uniformed and inadequately articulated way since the middle of the second half of the 19th century (Vester, 1993; Welsch, 1987). However, these metaphors hardly have anything to do with today’s discourse on postmodernism. The actual discussion on postmodernism began to develop in the American literary debate in the 1960s by rejecting any criteria of the classical modernism, a postmodern (literature) should now be distinguished by ‘fleeing from interpretation’, rejecting all meanings and praising direct, non-intellectual experiences; so the elite and mass culture should be coming closer together. And this is a kind of ‘democratization’ which the American architect Charles Jencks also had in mind when he urged that the new architecture should equally address both the elite and the ordinary street person. In the mid-1970s, the concept of postmodernism was transferred to the domain of architecture, which is considered to be the most obvious core demonstration of this phenomenon in practice, as the contrast between modernism and postmodernism explicitly expresses here. The transparency of steel-glass-concrete buildings, unified tower-like buildings propagated by Le Corbusier – that is of functionalistic uniformity – confronts postmodernism and the principle of plural design, eclectic playing with shapes and stylistic elements. All kinds of style and fashion are allowed.6 They compete, they are combined as well as complementing, commenting, denying and reinterpreting each other. The plurality of codes and taste cultures governs; it is in fact ‘double encoding’. A ‘dialogue of language without meta-language’ is emerging (Welsch, 1987, p. 119). In the 1970s and 1980s, Ihab Hassan expanded the term of postmodernism to the general-cultural, broadly diversified concept of ‘postmodern episteme’. In a distinctive cognitive theory, he articulates the starting points, which still define the postmodern discourse today: the tendency towards pluralization, decentralization and the formation of differentiation. These tendencies allegedly consist of sub-tendencies, which can

6 The scientific and idealistic approach of modernism, facing a direction of high technologies of the future, is replaced by the postmodern perspective, which is borrowing from the past. According to Harvey (1990), the examples of postmodern architecture include the “imitation of medieval markets and fishing villages, conventional or folk houses, renewed factories and warehouses, and the return to landscapes of all kinds” (Haralambos & Holborn, 1999, p. 915). 74 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY be associated with terms such as openness, heterodoxy, plurality, eclecticism, non-orientation, un-naturalism, revolt, deformation. Already the latter allegedly contains a dozen terms used in annulation: decoration, disintegration, transmission of the focus, differentiation, discontinuity, etc. (Hassan, 1983)7.

1.1. Digital Liberation of Man Through Language Games in Public Discourse

In French philosophy, postmodernism is reflected in the ideas of the post-structuralism thinkers Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, as well as so-called anonymous postmodernists (as named by Eickelpasch (2000), since they had never set themselves in the context of the terminology concerned): Michael Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida. For Lyotard, postmodernism is more the state of mood or spirit than an era (Welsch, 1987). The totality and unified modernism programs are now replaced by the irreducibility of a variety of local and heterogeneous language games, forms of action and ways of life. Affect is opposed to the general. Lyotard (1988) notes that postmodernism undermines the meta- stories of human liberation, self-fulfilment and social progress. He connects the development of post-industrial society and post-modern culture in the 1950s with technology, science and certain social developments, and especially with changes in language. One of the central concepts of his analysis is a ‘language game’ that serves to justify or legitimize the behaviour of people in a society. Through his statements, the discourse participant tries to achieve the acceptance of his individual version of what is supposed to be true or correct. Although since the Age of Enlightenment, language games have largely been replaced by scientific marking games, where it is no longer important who speaks, and where only the statement, verified by evidence and rational arguments, is the objective reality, Lyotard concludes that a parallel knowledge of the subject still exists while science is trying to distance itself from it. Science is based on meta-stories and together they have established the faith in progress and self- actualization of the individual as well as various total ideologies.

In the postmodern age, all of these become obsolete. We have already established (Sruk & Ašanin Gole, 2018) that it is characterized by two aspects: abandoning the search for truth on the one hand, since marking language games are discredited and knowledge is fragmented to such an extent that diversity prevents the search for one great truth, which would cover and legitimize the whole knowledge. On the other hand, technical linguistic

7 In the context of his epistemology, he created a table of differences between modernism and postmodernism, which clearly illustrate the opposition of the central terms of the two paradigms (Hassan, 1987). Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK 75 games are being enforced and do not assess the claim according to its correctness anymore, but according to their effectiveness and usefulness, the sole aim of which is merely the usefulness of knowledge in terms of its marketing (Haralambos & Holborn, 1999, pp. 916– 917). In the category of language games, we included the established phenomena of modern media communication such as ‘fake news’ or ‘alternative facts’, which are perceived as a reflection of the enforcement of such declarations as potential guarantors for obtaining a general social, political, moral, perhaps even legal verification, as well as an expression of the confirmation of the status, position and influence of individuals and various groups not only in a public discourse, but in a modern ‘post-factual’ society in general. Modern possibilities of various forms of Internet communication provide the individual, as well as various groups or organizations (chosen political elites as well as illegal terrorist formations), with an optional, practically unlimited and actually relatively anonymous spreading of half- truths and falsehoods. By their own semantics of language games, they reflect their position in society and confirm, consolidate and build it by actively acting in a direction of realizing their ambitions or goals, whether it be a relatively innocent implementation of one’s own fantasy dreamlike image in the form of a Facebook profile (as a kind of ‘post-factual’ constructed biography in Beck’s (2009) sense), or whether it be a more or less perfidious militaristic incitement and recruitment of a terrorist youth. It is important to gain acceptance in a certain addressed group. Here, a discursive situation of communion is not only constitutive, but also a belief about the importance of the media in determining the truth of information plays a great role. The mediation of the position through the electronic media (formerly in the form of oral traditions and direct communication, and after that in a written form which gave the matter additional weight due to the high cost) inevitably guarantees them their legitimacy, credibility and truthfulness. In this context, the functioning of these social (partly psychologically dependent) structures seems ironic, but “every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts” (Brodnig, 2017, p. 55).

Post-structuralists deny the possibility that the above-individual structure of a certain communication context can be understood as a theoretically transparent and completed system, and consequently manage it. They strongly reject the modern philosophy of the subject as well as any opinion committed to the intellect and order of humanistic sciences, which consider structuralism to be the last bastion. 76 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY

1.2. Individualism, Risk and Threat Instead of Postmodern Society Unity

As a reaction to postmodern criticism, the paradigmatic core of the classic theory of society is called into question, with four aspects that should be pointed out.

The self-evidence of presupposition of the totality and objectivity of a society (which, for example, functionalism and Marxism are based on) and the idea of ​​a centre of society become unsustainable from the viewpoint of postmodern deconstructivism and are replaced by the concept of the ‘desalvation of a social’ (Giesen, 1991).

Postmodern philosophy, which abandoned the idea of ​​eternally valid foundations, also denies the term of the individual subject and Weber’s concept of subjectively meaningful sense. From a postmodern standpoint, culture and society consist of a multitude of free- floating differences without the centre and without any limits, and above all without being linked to a subjective sense of action or superior intelligence. The idea of ​​a freely floating universe of codes resembles the autopoiesis of Niklas Luhmann (1984; 1988; 1992). In this context, the concept of his system theory could also be interpreted as a transformation of modern thinking into postmodern thinking (Vester, 1993) as the predecessor of the post- realistic digital society with fake news and alternative facts. A postmodern critique of the continuity and progression thinking, as is the case in the philosophy of history, leads to a radical unwitching of the future and eliminates the utopian core of classic social theory. The future as a free field of progress and emancipation is transformed into the future of risk and threat, into a digital online society.

The image of sociological criticism also changes due to the loss of utopian fundamentals of social theory. With the multi-perspective and multi-culturalism of postmodernism, the current assumption of the Archimedean point, which allows a critical distance to social structures and processes, becomes questionable. Giesen (1991, pp. 777-779) notes that sociological critiques in postmodernism are no longer interested in “the progress and unity of society, but the promotion of differences, the preservation of diversity and breaking the law.” And what is the spread of disinformation in the online sphere in the form of post- factual alternative facts and fake news, if not exactly that? Based on the general postmodern assumption of this radical plurality, a change in the sociological social analysis is noticeable. The social processes of pluralization and diversification of life forms, styles and personal biographies are at the heart of interest, while the structures of unification and cohesion are pushed to the margins of interest. By using postmodern cognizance to focus on specific, Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK 77 local and heterogeneous, and taking into account the multiplicity of divergent forms of life and knowledge, it draws attention to the shortcomings of the classical instrumentation of social analysis, and thus “sharpens our sensibility for differences and strengthens our ability to transmit incommensurable” (Lyotard, 1986, p. 16). It is a constant game of ambivalence, polysemy, and multiplicity of meanings.

A postmodern discourse of a digital society with a tendency to eliminate the borders between theory and ideology, reality and fiction, and to one-sided condemnation of conceptual thinking – while simultaneously unbridled emphasis of the mythic, imagery and rhetoric – creates a rather problematic Counter-Enlightenment mood. Postmodern science can also be described as a state characterized by a complete decomposition of any interconnected structures. Analytical concepts are abandoned in favour of the game with metaphors and imprecise linguistic expression, logically discursive argumentation is replaced by irony, meta- language games and masquerades. Habermas (1985) and Honneth & Joas (1986) have warned against uncritical irrationalism and Counter-Enlightenment withdrawal into the mythic as propagated by certain streams of postmodernism. The sense and purpose of this kind of understanding of postmodern sociological science becomes questionable in the context of acceptance of these radical ideas. If a theory of society actually followed this paradigm, it would lose all the scientific features, and consequently itself.

The original motive of the enlightenment era was to enable an analysis of the world by separating reality from divine authority. Since science adopted the interpretation of reality and truth, philosophy became more antirealistic in order to preserve the space in which it could still play an important role. Thus, postmodernism also first positioned itself as an emancipatory way to free people from oppressive narratives and from the abuse of power we are constantly exposed to. In the late 20th century, the postmodernists went a step further and claimed that ‘there is nothing outside of the text’ and that all our ideas about the world are derived from the models of power that have supervised us. With the interpretation that knowledge is a (repressive) power, postmodernism has deprived the very ground on which it could oppose power. However, the appearance of media populism in the form of counterfeit, fake news, alternative facts and post-truthfulness is an example of a farewell from reality that is not emancipatory at all.

In the last thirty years late postmodernism has moved into the media from the academic world and then to everywhere else. Counterfeit, fake news, alternative facts and post-reality, which we are witnessing in a digital mediatisated society, unintentionally remind us of Lyotard’s language game, which serves to justify or legitimize the behaviour of people in 78 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY society, and means that every participant in public discourse, through his or her statements, tries to achieve the acceptance of his or her individual version of what is supposed to be true or correct as well as the acceptance of his or her interpretation of facts and the real world and of his or her Potemkin village. This Lyotard game is marked by two aspects: abandoning the search for truth, since marking language games are discredited, and knowledge being fragmented to such an extent that diversity prevents the search for one great truth that would cover and legitimize the whole information.

1.3. Postmodern Digital Society

A postmodern digital society denotes a modern society in which a specific transformation or adjustment of phenomena and processes has occurred through digital technology, as had already been partially identified by postmodernism. It is marked by a special form of individualization that manifests itself through the use of technologically advanced forms of personal biographies design, online staging of an individual’s public and private image, by abandoning any kind of privacy and, to a large extent, ethics as well, and by creation of digital tribalism, with the ideological and axiological positioning of polarized social groups in web echo-chambers of conformity information cascades, where new optional parallel realities are created. As a result of progressive consumerism, axiology leans towards egoistic attitudes perpetuating hedonism at all costs.

Postmodern digital society is an online society with digital citizenship in which the Internet is the dominant communication tool. Mossberger, Tolbert and McNeal (2008) argue that the benefits of online society are economic opportunity, civic engagement and political participation; digital citizenship is the ability to participate in society online, the inclusion in prevailing forms of communication through regular and effective use; the impact of Internet use on the ability to participate as democratic citizens; and the effects of Internet on the equality of opportunity in the marketplace (Mossberger et al., 2008, pp. 1–2). In the ‘Going Digital: Shaping Policies, Improving Lives’, the OECD (2019) notes that digital technologies have caused us to live, interact, work and produce differently than in the past, and identifies seven policy dimensions that allow us to shape digital transformation and improve lives: (1) communications infrastructures, services and data; (2) effective use of digital technologies and data; (3) data‑driven and digital innovation; (4) good jobs for all; (5) social prosperity and inclusion; (6) trust, and (7) market openness in digital business environments.

As we have already noted (see Sruk & Ašanin Gole, 2018), the facts in postmodern society are in fact social constructs and only relative truth exists, because objective truth is a Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK 79 serious ambiguous concept. Typically, journalistic news is usually interpreted as a journalistic construction or production of reality, as content traditionally meant reliable, accurate and realistic reporting of recent, interesting and socially important events. This should ensure that the general human right to freedom of expression and information, the right to visibility and, consequently, the public’s right to the public is enforced.

In the context of globalization and digitalization, which in the digital society transformed the distinction between public and private, between political and commercial, and between social and market, we are now witnessing the processes of commodification and mediatisation of everything: individuals, often physically proximate, communicating through social media on their smart mobile phones, organizations expressing themselves in all kinds of media, from print magazines to websites, from images on Instagram to video on YouTube or storytelling using images or video on Facebook, or Twitter (cf. Hjarvard, 2008; Ihlen & Pallas, 2014; Verčič, 2016; Zerfass, Verčič, & Wiesenberg, 2016). Mediatization characterizes changes in practices, cultures and institutions in media-saturated societies, thus denoting transformations of these societies themselves.

Following the development of online platforms and the rise of social media, the whole of society has become mediatisated; anyone can become their own media and part of citizen journalism and digital citizenship. All we need to become a medium is a smartphone, as everyone can create their own media and publish their own truth, their own news, their own story, regardless of whether it is a story supported by facts or a complete fiction. Rational argumentation simply replaces the creation of news that does not need to be justified but must simply be appealing. The news as a truth thus replaces storytelling and narration. On- line social networks allow the mediatisated 21st century entity to directly target the users who are likely to accept the entity’s own truth-telling news and share it, as it is a ‘trusted’ circle of virtual friends, supporters and followers. When a mediatisated person on his or her own medium shares misleading or cleverly manipulated news, his or her virtual ‘friend’ sees it, trusts him or her and then shares the news with his or her own ‘friends’ and ‘supporters’. Online social media thus enable everyone to communicate with a wide audience at any time. It seems that the 11th thesis of the Cluetrain Manifesto has come true: “People in network markets have found that they get much better information and support from one another than from sellers” (Weinberger, Levine, Locke, & Searls, 2000).

By making online social media the primary means of accessing news in a digital society, traditional media revenue falls, and if they want more advertising revenue, they need more clicks on their content. It is important that content is attractive (and not necessarily true, 80 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY since the attractiveness and non- truthfulness are bringing clicks, cheering, commenting and sharing news.) The new criterion of value has also become viral, but not truthful or of high quality for many classical media, and thus the classic media follow the example of the new online social media.

2. Post-Factual, Fake news and Post-Truth as the Heritage of Postmodernist Thought

Social media has changed the way society communicates, learns, and conducts business. The deepening crisis of the diffused society, which is generated in the face of new as well as old fears, seems uncatchable and is persistently evading our cognitive apparatus, which desperately tries to circumvent and name which seems to be indescribable. The current state has become obsolete, while the new one cannot be determined yet.

As in any war, the first casualty is truth. Most types of dissembling of information have taken the form of mathswash, presenting vague estimates as firm predictions with nary caveat or error bar in sight. Other claims are misleading but catchy – designed to spread faster than efforts to debunk them. In any case, it’s about the culture in which public discourse is framed largely by appeals to emotions (as a cultural-cognitive institutions) by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Post-truth means ignoring facts and expert opinions - this is of secondary importance relative to the appeal to emotion.

On the one hand, postmodernism has brought many ‘destructive’ ideas that have ruined all scientific and theoretical as well as real-political absolutization; on the other hand, it has brought the very promising buds of plurality of living, perceiving and expressing - an unimagined freedom of thought and a multitude of democratic possibilities of articulating and operating. This liberating anti-elitism, even anti-intellectualism and cultural-political pluralism has seemingly announced the fight to a total rational-scientific paradigm, as well as to social inequalities and rigid political, religious, racial, sexual and other prejudices - practically to any discriminatory social limitation. By tearing down the ruling views and structures, and by giving space to a new, partially anti-rational paradigm of methodological non-claustrophobia, associativity, unbridled optionality, fantasy, individualism, and diversity, it has spread the spirit of ‘freedom’. It has quickly become clear to certain thinkers that this freedom or optionality and incompleteness may endanger, perhaps even undermine the fundamental values ​​of modern rational science and soon lead to a culture breakdown. Plurality or optionality, that has embodied itself in deviational formations of certain postmodernist branches and has begun to demolish the foundation of what we call objective and true, should Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK 81 quickly turn out to be counterproductive, even more if it turns from the mental experiment into a program.

In these views, postmodernists have conceptually indicated and clearly presented a highly flexible view of truth and information which should be considered as facts and which have quickly come to power in modern digital society with the help of new technologies, thus opening the door to lies (a more appropriate term in the spirit of time) or untruths and manipulations throughout the public sphere. Whether talking about disinformation, fake, counterfeit, distorted or alternative facts, it is always intimidating when realizing that easily verifiable truths or facts in everyday discourses are increasingly subject to arbitrary manipulations. The use of fake news is absurd in the time of the not-so-recently-unimaginable technological zenith of humanity, when the world is legally and politically globally regulated, and in which virtually everyone is enabled to digitally get as much credible information as possible from a wide variety of alternative sources. They are used for a wide variety of purposes through various tools and platforms by all public service agents, political and economic elites, secret services, terrorists, governments as well as private individuals. Thus, the postmodern idea of ​​the relativity of everything has led to a ubiquitous ideology that, whenever necessary, adapts the facts and therefore reality. Thus reality, becoming an individual creation according to the desired, and depending on the technical and scientific possibilities of being falsified, according to financial and authority’s possibilities to exercise one’s will, is often legitimized through democratic positions. For example, Washington Post states that the 45th US President published (mainly on Twitter) a total of 9,451 items of fake news in the first 800 days of his presidency, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyses, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement of the president (Kessler, Rizzo, & Kelly, 2019). It also raises concerns that his supporters justify his actions saying that other US presidents before him also made untruthful claims, as if this relativizes or justifies his wrongdoing in some way. All means of personal morality, professional ethics and social responsibility are publicly and formally stepped on every day and degraded into empty phrases. By using and misusing algorithms (the Cambridge Analytica case), by referring to supposedly scientific statistics, by arbitrarily supporting the pre-taken stands based on constructed alternative facts, the invisible totalitarianism of flexible manipulations is constituted – the manipulations in the form of data and fact abuse, which takes place in all segments of modern society and achieves its (current) climax with the help of promptness, flexibility and prevalence of the most important media of the digital society – the social networks. 82 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY

The current debate on fake news should therefore be monitored in the broader context of the neoliberal economy, and a political discourse growing from it in the context of globalization, which has, in the view of the progressive evolving digitization, basically invasively moved the boundaries of communication and of entrepreneurial and political practice of in-cultural and cognitive relations. Neoliberal capitalism is the only ideology in the history of mankind that has succeeded globally. Based on excessive consumerism, with its own non-consequentness when it comes to freedom and responsibility in business (see Stiglitz, 2009; 2010), by the tireless undermining of non-market values ​​and apparent democraticness (see Varufakis, 2015a; 2015b), neoliberal actors – using modern electronic, mostly online, media – have finally managed to achieve information control and ideological unification, which authoritarian and totalitarian systems of the past could only dream of. The electronic media revolution – global digitalisation and the accessibility of social networks participation has facilitated ideological manipulative activity and the spread of diverse falsehoods to various populists within ideological and legal democratic and autocratic systems, to economic elites all the way to individuals of different kinds of motivations, which largely agitate uncontrollably through aggressive online social networks and other benefits of digital society. The constitutionally guaranteed ‘freedom of speech’ of modern democracies is a fundamental human right, used for the attempts to undermine confidence in this very democratic system in a digital society.

Fake news is the news that paints an unrealistic image of reality and is spread by people who lack reality, actuality, credibility. Thus, fake news is supposed to be a creation of ‘liars and bullshitters’8 who – in the postmodern, post-factual era of constructing diverse arbitrary ‘realities’ – irresponsibly and carelessly use the possibilities offered by the new online media. These actors are supposed to be systematically exploiting psychological mechanisms9 that

8 The syntax ‘liars and bullshitters’ referring to a distinction introduced by the one of the world’s most influential moral philosophers Harry G. Frankfurt from Princeton University in his book On Bullshit (2005). The bullshitter ’lack of connection to a concern with truth’ (Frankfurt, 2005, p. 33) and an ’indifference to how things really are’ (p. 34). It is for this reason we should fear the bullshitter more than other sorts of liars. Frankfurt argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true; in fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. 9 The Swiss Das Magazin published a text entitled ‘Ich habe nur gezeigt, dass es die Bombe gibt’, which - at a time of a general non-understanding of how someone who calls Mexicans “the rapists” and evidently uninvited grabs a woman’s “pussy” could have been elected president of the United States – shocked the public when offered an answer saying that big data as well as personality analyzes contributed to the election victory of the 45th US President. The article specifically describes the methods of British consulting company Cambridge Analytica, which advertised its offering of so called psychograms of citizens. Based on the identified personality structure of the individual that can be targeted online or on social networks with appropriate political propaganda messages, the individual concerned is more likely and predictably to respond to (Brodnig, 2017, p. 131). Even if it later supposedly appeared that this psychologically-based marketing using psychograms was not used in Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK 83 seduce people to believe fake news or at least pass them on (spread) (Jaster & Lanius, 2019, p. 81). This phenomenon is not new but has reached its climax in the digital age of the present day, because “our psychic mechanisms work interactively with the specific structure of the media in an unfavourable way” (Jaster & Lanius, 2019, p. 77).

Fake news in the context of the ‘attention economy’ (originally in German: Aufmerkasamkeitsökonomie) works much better than complexly and controversially formed serious news. Its evolutionary-developmental ‘negativity base’ and the individual’s preferences of simple content that fit well into his or her other beliefs and worldview are perfect for the launch and grateful reciprocation of fake news. When this news starts to circulate, it encounters the appropriately structured and motivated perception of many people. Today, due to today’s media of hyper production and distribution of information, which in their composition and abundance are practically uncontrollable, people tend to voluntarily believe messages that confirm their already existing beliefs and do not irritate them by generating cognitive dissonance10. Any subsequent corrections and contradictory evidence should be ignored, and thus, on the basis of a confirmatory error11, it is possible to explain what is the “connection between fake news and the way of thinking that forms conspiracy theories: they are both mutually encouraged” (Jaster & Lanius, 2019, 72). It is quite evident in the social media which opinions are in line with our worldview and which are opposed to it. Thus, the Internet is the ideal place for ‘digital tribalism’, as publicist Michael Seemann calls this phenomenon of the simplest and most effective grouping with tribal epistemology within the digital environment. He refers to fake news as a “food for fastening the hungry tribe” and adds that in this case, the “demand determines the supply, and not vice versa” (as

the 45th US President election campaign, it appears that, in view of his online election fight and the functioning of the agency in question (for example, in case of Brexit), a careful observation of the further development of such activities and ethical issues, imposed by the accelerated digitization of political campaigns, should by no means be ignored (Brodnig, 2017, p. 132). 10 If the information is not in accordance with the individual’s belief system, usually a rather unpleasant confrontation with the situation arises and consequently psychical stress occurs, often caused by the conflict between contradictory ideas, beliefs or values in the individual’s axiological system or worldview. Psychology then speaks of cognitive dissonance (cf. Festinger, 2012). 11 We accept the information, which is in line with our assumptions easier than those that undermine our view of the world. From the 1960s on, psychologist Peter Wason carried out a number of studies showing that people tend to selectively collect and memorize information and interpret them one-sidedly in a way that best suits their already existing beliefs and expectations (Wason, 1968, pp. 273–281). This, the psychology calls it the confirmation bias, was initially, from an evolutionary point of view, quite beneficial since it is important for our survival to compare new information with the existing one and to select the appropriate one from an endless mass that is coming in on a daily basis. If we want to survive, we need to select the information successfully. Selective perception is indispensable for our survival. It is the least stressful to take the information that is not contrary to our beliefs, attitudes or behavioral patterns. As a rule, it happens that in this case we see what we want to see because it matches our expectations, desires and fears, and not what actually is (Jaster & Lanius, 2019, pp. 56–57). 84 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY cited in Jaster & Lanius, 2019, 76). Fake news is a tempting offer for polarized social groups created with the help of informational and conformal cascades in echo-chambers. Professors Kahan and Braman from Yale University believe that our cultural identity is the one that determines which opinions we form and articulate (Kahan, 2006; Kahan & Braman, 2006). It seems interesting that in groups with a strong group identity, it is considered that their members often do not believe what they say they believe to be true in relation to conformity cascades. The opinions or beliefs in these cases are extremely important because they signal belonging to a group, where the reality of the message is of secondary significance. With the help of cascades and echo-chambers, progressive polarization of these groups occurs and, consequently, loyalty to the group overrides the truth, therefore “fake news in such tribal biotopes offers a welcome opportunity to people to position themselves with the group or within the group” (Jaster & Lanius, 2019, p. 78). Social media functions as an echo chamber that reproduces the predispositions of group ideology. When a network settles on an agreed account, collective memory becomes relatively impervious to alternative accounts, even if more factually accurate. Yet while collective memory shores up the group identity of insiders and insulates them from the perspectives of outsiders, it can also become more expansive and inclusive if collective fears, threats and tensions are sufficiently reduced.

All forms of fake news or un-truths are found in online media as well as in classic media due to the rapidly growing diversity and anonymity of the new media, and even more to their price advantage. Only a small part of the new media is subject to traditional journalistic standards, which are also gradually dying off in classical media. The online media also offer a perfect cover and easier operation possibilities for secret services, fanatics and fools. It is easier than in traditional media to publish the results of spying (counter-intelligence) activities and hackers, which are then taken over by the classical media, but it is easier to hide the traces of the source of information on the Internet (Unterberger, 2017, p. 41).

The enforcement of fake news in recent years has undoubtedly been based on digitization and consequent democratization of mediatisated news-providing. Nowadays spreading news is unprecedentedly cheaper than it was twenty years ago; all public and private institutions, companies, public and private individuals are almost uncontrollably able to communicate their ‘tweets’ to the public or advertise themselves via a YouTube channel, and thus use content marketing to directly address the consumer basically in real time (Jaster & Lanius, 2019, p. 48).

In spite of the fake news enforcement in its most diverse content and design appearances, it is necessary to investigate the way conversational language, propaganda, marketing communications and public relations influence our thinking, the way they form and shape Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK 85 our social reality, and influence the opinions and views of individuals as well as public opinion (Brodnig, 2017, p. 107).

2.1. Fake News, Advertising Psychology and Post-Truth

Accusations about the decisive influence on Brexit by launching disinformation and falsehood, especially in the final stage before the referendum, have raised the question of legitimacy of the referendum outcome. The fact that a ‘democratic’ decision was largely voted in on the basis of influencing emotions using untrue data, the impact of which is indubitable, but unfortunately its actual scope cannot be definitely determined, let alone proved, relativizes the decision of Great Britain to leave the EU, if not in a legal, then certainly in a moral sense, all the more so because of the scant majority. Fake news, therefore, has decisively influenced our political reality, and in spite of the paralyzed English Parliament regarding the adoption of exit modalities and consequently the impeded activities of the European Parliament, interest is still high to reveal the backgrounds of the processes and actors that have caused this political crisis, of the economic elites that financed the advertising referendum campaigns based on ‘junk news’ and misinformation, as well as scientific and technological approaches that have enabled such manipulations. The election of the 45th US President using fake news, his constant counterfeiting of the truth using alternative facts and self-crediting of the term of fake news, while effectively using this term to characterize all the media, journalists and news that are not in his political, economic or personal line (cf. Brkan, 2019; Broadnig, 2017; Jaster & Lanins, 2019; Kalpokas, 2019; Kessler, Rizzo, & Kelly, 2019; Kuhla, 2017; Tandoc et al., 2017). It has to be acknowledged: the media basically enthroned the 45th US President. The Internet is especially important to his identity as a politician, as it has been formed in particular through online social media, which represent the dominant form of his communication (see Issenberg, 2013). It is not so important how many people actually follow the 45th US President on Twitter, it is more important that classical media report about his Twitter statements, and actually force the discussions and direct the public discourse (Brodnig, 2017, p. 137).

Fake news is often based on greed12. Even more problematic and dangerous, because of being far more far-reaching, is fake news, frequently as more or less targeted disinformation serving for political propaganda in the game of power and thus in achieving ideological goals. Of course, it is not to be forgotten that visible and invisible actors are involved, driven by materialism.

12 Unterberger (2017, p. 62), for example, collected some essential facts about the limitless corruption of party- political influencing. 86 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY

The problem of the digital election fight and advertising in general is clearly apparent in the description of concrete Cambridge Analytica activities during recent US presidential elections. The leading data scientist of a British company, David Wilkinson, explained in April 2017 in Vienna how it works. Cambridge Analytica were allegedly combining big data that was, especially in the US, easily obtained at an individual level, through surveys, using research that revealed how people think. They connected data science and behavioural psychology to understand what directs and drives people on the inside, who they vote for in a certain way, or why they think about things the way they do. The last step is a targeted action: to address the right person at the right time. This is called micro targeting in advertising. Campaigns try to accurately identify the users relevant to them, therefore they belong to a group of potential buyers of their product or voters of their candidate. “Digitization has enabled these types of targeted ads as the users leave many traces online - and companies deduce certain conclusions based on it” (Brodnig, 2017, p. 133). Targeting is much more effective than classical advertising that addresses everyone, and many of the addressed ones will never opt for a promoted product or candidate, while the detected addressed ones will - thanks to the espionage preferences - react to the targeted suggestions as they were intended to do13. The fact that information or disinformation can be adjusted to the interests, worldview, political orientation of a digitally disguised individual or group, etc. and an indispensable fact that the repetition of a message generates its credibility and thus the ‘reality’, as well as the readiness of the individual to accept the information in accordance with his beliefs, to certain extent explains the individual’s receptiveness towards fake news.

The problem with targeting is the fact that “it can convey a distorted image of the candidate to the voter and is often non-transparent” (Brodnig, 2007, p. 137). Especially dangerous

13 Data scientist David Wilkinson exposes two groups of voters to be mobilized in the US presidential election campaign: those who still haven’t decided and those who clearly preferred the Republicans or the current 45th US President, but their physical participation in the elections seemed questionable. They were supposed to be targeted: the first ones by receiving very individual and separate election promises tailored to the previously identified priority interests of individuals based on their Internet activities; only those topics were launched online that were relevant to the candidate’s portfolio. In the second case, the messages were emphasizing the historical importance of these elections and how important it is to support the 45th US President and exercising the right to vote. This ‘get out the vote’ group was also provided with the electronic help to find their polling location so that the rain or a bad mood wouldn’t deter them from voting. To manipulate and gain even more delicate groups of voters - those who in principle prefer the Democrats - required a special strategy which might be in our European understanding of democracy, unlike the American, described as illegal. Thus, by using targeted ‘dark posts’, they addressed certain subgroups of the population and launched disinformation, statements out of the context or even falsehoods. The targets of the Republicans‘cyber manipulation were two groups of the population: young women and African-American women. In order to sabotage the win of the competitor Hillary Clinton as a candidate for the 45th US President, the first group was provided with statements of women allegedly sexually harassed by Bill Clinton, and the other group was targeted with Hillary Clinton’s statement describing African-American criminals as ‘super predators’ (her statement from twenty years ago – 1996 she had already apologized for) (Brodnig, 2017, p. 134). Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK 87 digital tools are those that allow political parties or businesses to send often dubious targeted messages to a small part of the population. These are so-called dark posts. They can only be seen by the addressed persons. Thus, the general public knows nothing about them, and journalists get these advertisements only if they happen to end up in a certain target group.

3. Commodification of Social Capital and Trust in a Digital Society

The essence of the societal and social networks as well as mutual relations in general is social capital. People connect into networks, just like into organizations in order to achieve more than if acting alone (cf. Stinchcombe, 1986). Not only the relations and progress of society, but also the position of an individual and any other entity within a society depends on the bonds, on the social capital. Bourdieu (1985) defines social capital as an aggregate of actual and potential resources associated with the possession of lasting networks of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition in a form of a membership in a group. This ensures each member a support of collectively owned capital, a ‘recommendation’ that gives them the right to trust in the various meanings of the word (p. 248). Social capital therefore exists as a social role only in connection with the recognition of the entity, which is a part of society and is created by interaction between individuals of the entities, regardless of the position of the individual entity within the society. Social capital created this way is crucial for the successful functioning of the entity within a society, work process, and also the interaction of the individual and the capital (OECD, 1998, p. 9).

Any interaction and any cooperation are conditioned by trust. The higher the level of trust in the network or society, the greater the likelihood that the entities will cooperate with each other. Trust in other people or entities is - besides cooperation - crucial for the level of social capital. Building trust is linked with the likelihood of others acting in a trustworthy manner; trust therefore determines a level of risk for individuals entering into social interactions and is directly related to the established social institutions (norms, rules, standards, customs, habits). The moral attitude of an individual as an entity is thus a reflection of the established interpersonal relations in a society and is based on reduced expectations regarding mutual loyalty, affection and belonging. In stable and traditional societies where institutions are supported by legal order (allowed - sanctioned) or professional standards (desirable, recommended, standardized), trust among the entities is much larger than in new-emerging societies, such as a digital society where the old institutions are no longer in force, and the new ones have not yet been developed to the extent that they would be supported by a legal and professional order. So only a third pillar of institutions remains 88 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY

- the cultural-cognitive institutions. For the purpose of strengthening trust, the key is a stable system with the functioning of all three institutional pillars - regulatory, normative and cultural-cognitive institutions (Scott, 2014) that enable, restrict and ensure the existence and functioning of a stable social, economic and political life (North, 1990). Meanwhile, a non-traditional digital society creates a social situation where people themselves develop the motivation for socializing in order to establish affiliation with the same collective identity, which raises solidarity and an initial level of a generalized confidence.

However, with the rise of a globalized digital society, the process of commodification is becoming more and more extensive. We understand commodification as a process that concretizes the goals of marketization and represents a transformation of nature, things, people, relationships, meanings and non-material resources into the goods in the market. Thus, the entire human life is a commodity in the digital society market, becoming and being an experience that should be paid for. The development of technology, logistic connections, the expansion of the advertising industry etc. have in a globalized world led to the constant emergence of new products, regardless of whether they have a direct use value or serve only to satisfy the individual entities’ desires to fill-in the abundance of time, and slowly displace existing products. A similar truth applies to the services, knowledge, entertainment, personality traits, talent and ultimately social relations that embed a person as an entity in this world. All these products and services are being commodified in the globalized digital world; they become marketable goods that individuals and other entities are willing to pay for. Probably one of the first forms of commodification of a person is his ability to make what he offers to the market work, where he gets paid for the work done and where it provides him with survival. Another form is that an individual, as a social entity, offers personal characteristics, talent, knowledge, experience, including its social relationships and networks to the market, creating added value by selling them, a surplus to use in seeking of the new market opportunities in order to commodify what has not been commodified (Goldman, 1992). So, everything is subject to a commodification process to generate profit in a digital society: sharing posts on social networks, drawing Potemkin villages with extreme - only good, beautiful, or just bad, frightening - self-designed news and photographs to influence the emotions of the followers, and online ‘friends’. In a digital society, it is about realization of the universalization of the Western liberal postmodern society, additionally driven by neoliberal: the purpose is not merely the exchange of goods to satisfy the needs of the entities, but a complete marketization of everything with free trade (Wallerstein, 2006) and the maximization of profits, consequently eliminating any restrictions in capital creating and ensuring it with Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK 89 a freedom to commodify almost everything - even the most intimate part of a human being’s life. The announced greenhouse gas reduction coupons bring emissions trading, air pollution trading; not only a man - his image or trust, but also the air in a globalized digital society, becomes merchandise that needs to be commodified.

Moreover, the digital society - even more than ever - allows the feeding of an individual’s ego. As Holiday (2017) notes, it has never been easier to explain yourself and to boast. We can brag to millions of fans and followers about our achievements, which only rock stars and cult leaders were able to do before. We can follow our idols on Twitter and talk to them, read books and watch TED Talks lectures, pick up inspirations as never before (there is a smartphone app for everything). We can announce great news on social networks and then observe the greetings pouring in. Commodification of the image thus evolves into the commodification of feelings and senses that are reflected through that image. As the image of each individual is unique, its universalization and standardization are not possible. Thus, the performance of a digital individual on social networks is measured by the amount of applause, likes, comments that become a para-standard of a dehumanized digital society of social media.

The transition of a human from a natural state to the social world is characterized by his acquisition of fundamental freedoms, independence and the right to the disposition of his own body, which is a key step in commodification of a man as an individual, as a social entity. Already in a traditional postmodern society, an individual in the fashion industry commodifies his or her image and body, which becomes a piece of merchandise in the market; the image and the body have a potential value both in the market and within economic relations. In a digital society, however, the independence of an individual with rights and freedoms becomes reduced through his unlimited commodification, that is with a transformation into a merchandise, through marketization, using social networks. An individual as a social entity becomes a commodity that produces a commodity. He commodifies his knowledge, personal qualities, image, experience, mental impressions in order to create an innovative invention of goods - intellectual property with a potential market value, and only those who are willing to pay a certain price for its further use have access to it (Suarez-Villa, 2001). For example, accumulated knowledge is transformed into merchandise that in the globalized digital society becomes accessible only to those who own the capital. Knowledge makes it possible to transform the shaped mental impression into a product with high added value, if there is enough interest in the market for this transformation of the mental impression of course. Another typical example of creating a mental impression is the commodification of a man’s image, which in a traditional postmodern society was in fact a by-product of 90 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY the entertainment and fashion industry, and only flourished in a digital society with social media used to become a primary goal of the entertainment industry and the waste of time. The images of individuals are commodified and transformed into commercial goods that co-create a spectacle, and the core of this industry is a man (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002). Thus, digital society is actually a spectacle society; we become lonely individuals who are satisfied with the spectacle. However, the spectacle is not only a collection of images (on Instagram for example), but a social relationship among people connected into social networks, transmitted through commodified images on those social networks. This produces alienated individuals who strive to be a part of this spectacle that is becoming a dominant way of life, and at the same time the means to ensure the legitimacy of a digital society, driven by the commodification of the man’s image (Debord, 1999). Social and political reality is also perpetuating so many outrageous spectacles, self-righteous tantrums, opinionated absurdities and outright lies that political satire simply struggles to compete with reality. Facts have become a stake in adversarial political contests rather than a generally agreed aspect of a shared reality (Law, 2017).

The basis for any kind of commodification of an individual is personal freedom of the individual and trust. We are free only as much as we don’t impose our freedom on someone else because then we restrict the freedom of another and consequently ourselves. The individuals in a digital society of social media, who don’t like imposing a freedom of another that affects their freedom, seem to have a fairly easy choice: they ‘unfriend’ their ‘friend’ on Facebook or Instagram, or a Twitter follower whose posts they believe to be limiting their personal freedom. Nevertheless, there is always the possibility of an unplanned view of the public posts of that ‘friend’ or a ‘follower’ even if it is fake news.

The sense of freedom in mutual relations is a constant effort to establish ourselves in relation to what is expected. To be the right one, to meet expectations, is an inclination of man, it is the socially required role of a person who wishes to feel accepted, to feel whole, involved, confirmed, desirable, respected. But to be the right one also has a very narrow frame and one should fit into this frame. Social expectations undoubtedly limit the freedom of the individual or any other entity. At least to a certain extent, we all need this restriction to be able to survive, not to be rocking back and forth all the time as a boat in the open restless sea; we - the individuals, organizations and societies - need it. And yet, we are ready to give up a small part of our freedom every day especially on social networks, just to avoid further revealing and loss of trust. And so, in fact, we are increasingly commodifying our own trust. Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK 91

According to the OECD (2019), “trust fundamentally underpins digital transformation and digital society. Almost 30% of Internet users do not provide personal information to social networks because of security or privacy concerns; only 17% of peer platform (e.g. home‑sharing) users read the terms and conditions in full, suggesting that more effective measures are needed to protect consumers online.” It is therefore necessary to better manage the risks of digital security and privacy, and to improve the protection of consumers online.

4. Conclusion

The current crisis of facts is part of a much longer process of communication shift from facts to data. According to Law (2017, p. 4), a concern for factual information beyond subjective interpretation emerged with modern accountancy practices, followed by developed statistical methods in science, administration and economics. Market research surveys and opinion polls began to be deployed around a century ago to manipulate political outcomes. All this provided government policies with an air of objectivity beyond the reach of ideological dispute. However, a different kind of post-truth consensus is being constructed by the corporate, governmental and ideological manipulation of big data, algorithms and bio-psycho- social profiling. Using artificial intelligence on the social networks of a digital society can reveal everything about an individual, even the most intimate matters of his or her private life and also how to persuade him or her with what sort of advert. Politicians and citizens are beginning to come to terms with big data techniques for manipulating behavioural change.

Postmodernism is certainly one of the intellectual roots of a post-factual (or post-truth) digital society. Even before it was possible to anticipate the scope of the digital media impact over the last decade, the post-factual disassembling of moral and cultural-political underlying rationale of the society began to appear in the ideological experiments of the postmodernists14, who widely opened the door to relativity, inconsistency, arbitrariness, and experimentation. The postmodern relativization of individual domains (literary genres, scientific disciplines, etc.) suggested a dangerous disintegration of a rational paradigm and classical values, and a sliding into a modern-age anarchy of a flexible and irresponsible relativization of all criteria.

14 Thus, American neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty (1989) stems from the rejection of any kind of universalism, whether it is truth, reason or morality, and calls for the recognition of radical contingency that is the dependence of knowledge and morality on language games, which proves him to be an ‘anonymous’ postmodernist. Rorty propagates poetic culture of a new self-ironic liberalism that replaces rational argumentation with the creation of new descriptions, which are not to be justified, but made attractive: “I’m singing you – democracy.” The utopia of poetic culture is based on one of the central motifs of postmodernism, on elimination of the boundaries between science, art and politics. This results in the negation of all rational structured typing, which existed until then. A spiritual relationship with postmodernism declared by Lyotard, which celebrates multitudes and differences, is declared by the German philosopher Manfred Frank (1984) saying: “Every sense, every meaning and every worldview is in the stream, nothing escapes the game of differences” (p. 85). 92 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY

Then, the unbridled freedom of arbitrariness and egalitarianism does not necessarily mean the freedom of an individualized individual, but a multitude of new, complex and rather opaque forms of un-freedom. The truth as such is not a priority value from now on, but a placative phrase that is filled with any content depending on the need.

There is a mixture of fictitious and scientific as well as the misrepresentation and arbitrary interpretations of data, information, facts occurring. It is not all that relevant whether something is based on objective facts, but the relevant matter is the publicity, attractiveness and effectiveness of the communicated content; the scope of, for example, clicks, likes, sharing and commenting of posts on social networks.

There are undoubtedly multiple truths in our digital society within a single public discourse that can be constructed, communicated, updated, and perpetuated with omnipresent digital technology. Of course, the whole of history is full of the creations of the truths (religious, political (party, national), aesthetic and finally scientific), which over time have been constantly exceeding and upgrading in terms of advancement of cognitive possibilities and new discoveries. Freedom of expression as one of the fundamental democratic rights - together with the effective technological options - supported a play of arbitrarily possibilities of the truth and reality. Thus, there are many ‘truths’ in the social space, especially in the media space (the use of the plural form of the term shows a postmodernist paradigm), even if the facts that legitimize a certain ‘truth’ can be objective and “are never a matter of point of view or personal opinion – but are the facts, which can be clearly identified” (Kuhla, 2017, p. 131). When Kellyanne Conway, the former spokesman of the 45th US President, speaks about ‘alternative facts’, she creates a new meaning of the word ‘truth’ as she doesn’t even mean the facts, but an image of another reality for which there is no evidence at all, but the post-truth sense exists. Such practice involves people who do not comply with argumentation based on rational rules and supported by the facts (Kuhla, 2017, p. 132). Naturally, there are many shades of truth even in the pursuit of argumentation committed to reality in journalistic reporting; the efforts for factual truth are rather delicate matter and are always connected to freedom. Thus, as expressed in the German Constitution, “the goal of journalism is not the truth, but freedom” (Schneider, 2017, p. 127).

In a world where it is difficult to distinguish between what is truth and what is false and fake news, science should remain faithful to finding the truth. But various disinformation has moved from the fringes of digital society to the centre of the public discourse, assisted in part by a new technology. Current digital society is a post-real world, a society of post- facts, fake news, perpetuated post-truth, post-factual world (Coughlan, 2017; cf. Pomerantsev, Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK 93

2016). As information becomes more and more available to be accessed online, as ‘research’ has been opened to anyone with a web browser, the opportunities for countering accepted truths also multiply (Kahn-Harris, 2018), for example, anthropogenic (human-induced) climate changes are a myth, measles vaccine causes autism, Aids either does not exist or is unrelated to HIV, evolution is a scientific impossibility, etc. As climate changes rush towards the point of no return, as once-vanquished diseases threat to cause pandemics, the task of facing our digital society becomes urgent and difficult. Humans are not only reasoning beings who disinterestedly weigh evidence and arguments. Fake news as unemotional post-factual reproduction of the postmodern digital society and as a part of a post-modern assaults on truth offers a dystopian vision of a world unmodified, in which nothing can be taken for granted and no one can be trusted.

Media digital integration and interaction with its flexible understanding and dealing with the truth (whether it is a private or business domain) is closely connected to accelerated commodification, and increasingly more of those domains of human life that are not subject to market laws and striving for profit. Clear boundaries of social acceptance should be set to the digital society market as it expands into the spheres of life15 where previously non-market values (at least declaratively) are being replaced by market values now (cf. Sandel, 2012), which “deepens the gap between the poor and the wealthy, builds up social inequality, kills the sense of justice, a common good and public interest, replacing the idea of ​​civic duty and destroys the quality of life” (Stefančič, 2014, p. 155), thus changing social morality. It is about a triumph of conversion values over life values, where the non-market values ​​from the goods that should not be for sale are transformed into commodities due to (neoliberal) market ideology and thus are morally devalued (see Varufakis, 2015b, pp. 24–41). By society transforming itself from the society with the market economy into a market society, commodification has burst out to such an extent that it has led to the social-moral dehumanization of the individual and the community. With the help of digitization and web formats, a public destruction of personal, spiritual and physical integrity of the individual has effectively started on the Internet, especially on social networks, undermining genuine interpersonal relations based on acquaintance, opened and deepened communication, and social solidarity in general. Under the guise of individualism as a free self-actualization, digital society has broadly opened the doors to individuals and other entities for publicly

15 Along with all the absurdities of trading with blood, organs, other person’s womb, insurance policies of strangers, waiting in line, excuses, protected animal species, emission licenses, etc., online formats enable the parents with the profitably marketing of a daily intimate sphere of their minor children, where time engagement and professionalism is certainly a violation of the prohibition of child labor, not to mention the total loss of privacy, public exposure to arbitrary attacks by the ‘followers’. 94 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY celebrated exhibition and at the same time a paradoxical isolation of the new-age individual within the electronic parallel reality of billions of participants. An individual awkwardly exposes himself as well as cleverly faking, while sinking into isolation, into actual (not digital, viral, virtual, seeming) isolation, in which he is virtually connected with thousands of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ of his digital imprint, while he loses contact with the real life while delivering himself as a ‘glass man’ to the profit exploitation of various global concerns, and permanent more or less justifiable critics of a planetary cyber-audience.

The Internet as a main useful acquisition of digital society is less controlled and regulated than the rest of the media space, so new systems solutions and instruments will be needed as soon as possible to enable the public concerned to control such activities. According to Brkan (2019), the massive and brisk spreading of online disinformation, through social media, targeting vulnerable parts of population and (technical) difficulties in recognising their fake nature poses an ever-increasing threat to democracy and fundamental human rights in our digital society, mainly during election periods. The (non)regulatory responses to these challenges have been remarkably diverse. On the one hand, the EU is hesitant towards making immediate regulatory solutions and currently fosters self-regulatory approaches as pointed out in the European Commission Communication on tackling online disinformation (European Commission, 2018b), in the Report of the High-level Group on Online Disinformation (European Commission, 2018c) and in (a non-binding) Code of Practice on Disinformation (European Commission, 2018a). The Communication outlines the key overarching principles and objectives which should represent the guidelines for actions to raise public awareness about disinformation and tackle the phenomenon effectively, as well as the measures which the Commission intends to take in this regard.

The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB, 2019) is one of the few organizations that has published a handbook for communicators on countering information influence activities, based on the extensive research report of the Lund University (Pamment, Nothhaft, Agardh-Twetman, & Fjällhed, 2018). The same team from Lund University (Pamment, Tewtman, Fjällhed, Nothhaft, Engelson, & Rönngren, 2019) has prepared a Counter Disinformation Toolkit for the United Kingdom Government Communication Service to support communicators in identifying and countering threats to democracy. The toolkit is based on a RESIST model: Recognise; Early warning; Situational insight; Impact analysis; Strategic communication response; and Track outcomes. This counter disinformation toolkit includes examples and case studies. Pedja AŠANIN GOLE, Vida SRUK 95

The current revolutionary overthrows of the entire communication and media space in a post-fact, and postmodern digital society can only be compared with the consequences of the invention of the press. It is a complete change of spiritual, social and political framework conditions in global terms. With the help of the Internet, “the whole mankind became the potential author of all mediatized texts, without - as it was in the entire history of the past - a limited number of gatekeepers” (Unterberger, 2017, p. 55). Are citizens becoming immune to fact-based reasoning? Law (2017, p. 4) says that “traditional media struggles to staunch or counter the online circulation of misinformation; indeed, it often reproduces it under editorial pressures. Peer to peer online transmission of misinformation undercuts professional journalism. Sources recommended by a friend are less likely to be challenged or ignored than journalistic sources. Instead they are rapidly re-tweeted or ‘liked’. Pseudo-democratic intimacy is supplanting hierarchies of impersonal expertise.” Politics, governments, organizations and individuals will have to accept the fact that, this time, it is not possible to stop the wheel of time. At several levels, however, systemic corrections, technological, legal, moral and other concrete measures will have to be considered, by means of which it would be possible to at least partially monitor the reality of information and direct the development of entities in a digital society. A partial engagement of individual organizations with individual challenges brought about by a digital society (as we have mentioned in the preceding paragraphs as examples) is not sufficient. We need to get to know cognitive, psychological and neurological predispositions of human understanding, communication, perception, selection, processing and interpretation of information and the postmodern world. We also need to know the functioning and traps of modern digital technology and constantly creatively and socially- critically monitor the social reality of the public sphere and creatively face the emerging social problems arising from the specifics of digital media and the phenomena generated by it.

The digitalization of the emerging digital society is not yet at its peak, but we are somewhere in the beginning, therefore many new things await us. The role of social media in a society as the most visible external sign of a developing digital society is changing, and the social media themselves are in the middle of transformation due to the constant technological and social, probably also regulatory control and the rise of the Y generation, and especially of the Z generation, where there is no loyalty anymore, at least not in the sense we know from the previous generation, when you were ready to support someone for better or worse (a brand, organization, product, politician, friend). People are simply not ready to pay for something just because something is named as it is, so it would be wise for organizations to listen to their stakeholders, develop and implement listening strategies, and adjust to their stakeholders more 96 FAKE NEWS AS A POST-FACTUAL REPRODUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN DIGITAL SOCIETY than ever before, otherwise those stakeholders will pass these organizations. Even though populist policies over the past decade, due to the speed of the disinformation transmission (regardless of whether they are called fake news, false news, alternative facts, post-truth or otherwise), facilitated by modern technologies of a globalized mediatized world, have shaken the modern society by attempting to break the trust in institutions, the Internet and social media have reduced the world since we can all talk simultaneously, through several communication channels. The emergence of digital communications channels has surmounted the physical and emotional distance between politicians and citizens. At the same time, they have contributed to the democratization of the media space and the public sphere in general, since instead of the one medium communicating with a mass audience, basically all of them can now communicate with many audiences, talk to them and not only share their impressions. Therefore, it is all the more important to maintain the supervisory role of journalism in a digital society – the journalism that should reproduce facts and information.

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DIGITAL SEIGE

CHAPTER 5

IS THE INTERNET OF THINGS TRANSFORMING A SURVEILLANCE TOOL?

Yeşim GÜÇDEMİR1, Kemal GÜNAY2

1Professor, Istanbul University, Communication, Public Relations, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

2PhD, Istanbul University, Communication, Public Relations, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.05

ABSTRACT Technological development is the most important driving factor in the creation of new surveillance. The Internet of Things (IoT) has created the new surveillance term. The Internet of Things records and transmits large amounts of data which is being shared and analyzed in new and unprecedented ways to ensure the ubiquitous surveillance of individuals. This massive volume of data is called Big Data. The mass storage and accumulation of data makes it possible to monitor the lives of individuals. The IoT devices’ transmissions and the amount of data are increasing rapidly day by day. All these data are available for using perpetual surveillance. These data can be used for any government, commercial, legal issue. The data gathered from the Internet of Things provides an opportunity to surveil. Governments’ and companies’ surveillance tools have more access than ever in human history. This has revealed the concept of big data and has caused many different challenges in terms of personal privacy too. The IoT has been used in different areas, such as automation, health, building and home automation, transportation, textile industry and public services and so on. While it offers influential and efficient solutions to challenges of humanity, the surveillance aspect of it has always been questioned. Keywords: Surveillance, big data, technology, industry 4.0, the internet of things 102 IS THE INTERNET OF THINGS TRANSFORMING A SURVEILLANCE TOOL?

1. Introduction

Surveillance is used as a control mechanism and power device by governments and it is a means of disciplining societies. In other words; supervision aims to have information about the objects being monitored and to supervise and control them in this way. A relationship of power is produced between the observer and the supervised or the continuation of the existing power relationship is ensured by surveillance. Throughout history, it has been observed that governments try to keep societies under control with different surveillance techniques in pre- modern political structures. Surveillance is now expanding as a practice of power aimed at mental and psychological power to supervise and control.

Surveillance was particularly relevant to Jeremy Bentham’s book of the Panopticon, written in the 18th century. According to Bentham, surveillance is a new method of achieving mental power over the mind (Mattelart, 2012, p. 13). Observing in The Panopticon is invisible so that the object being monitored is driven to self-control, to keep its behavior under control, assuming that it is observed everywhere at any time. The minds of individuals through auto control are kept under control. Another highlight of The Panopticon is that a small number of people can easily monitor a large number of individuals in this way. This case, as Foucault points out in his “The Birth of the Prison” book (1992), has an invisible existence that can exist anywhere, anytime, and transforms into an observer that sees, hears and controls everything. According to Foucault, the model of the Panopticon is of paramount importance to understand the emergence of self-disciplined modern societies (Lyon & Bauman, 2013, p. 58).

In our globalized world, there is no need to use physical force on people anymore. The development and diversification of informatics and communication technologies are becoming a part of everyday life. All of the daily life practices are now carried into a virtual environment and every stage of social life is systematically recorded. In a digital environment, the governments take their social control and surveillance powers to the highest levels through various methods. As new technologies become widespread, the need in this way decreases. Probably in the forthcoming period, the contradiction between freedom and surveillance will create new syntheses by feeding each other mutually.

2. Surveillance

Surveillance is growing in the digital world. Today, technological change is the most significant driving factor in modern societies. Security is a political priority in many countries today and is, of course, a great source of motivation in the world of surveillance. Yeşim GÜÇDEMİR, Kemal GÜNAY 103

The prominent means of procuring security, it seems, are new surveillance techniques and technologies, which are supposed to guard us, not against distinct dangers, but against rather more shadowy and shapeless risks (Lyon & Bauman, 2013, p. 87).

Surveillance is used as a control mechanism and power device by the governments. Surveillance is a way for governments to discipline societies. In other words; surveillance aims to have information about the objects being supervised and to supervise and control them in this way. A relationship of power is produced between the surveillance and the observer and the continuity of the existing power relationship is ensured. Surveillance, defined as the “collection and analysis of information about populations in order to govern their activities” (Haggerty & Ericson, 2005, p. 3), has been the most vital tool for governments to manipulate the masses in the historical process. Throughout history, it has been seen that governments try to keep societies under control through different surveillance techniques.

Z. Bauman’s state that, “Every and any kind and instance of surveillance serves the same purpose: spotting the targets, location of targets and/or focusing on targets – all functional differentiation starts from that common ground.” Security points at the entrances of large places, calculating bank loans according to the credit score of the person, and checking people at the crossing points of the country are the same surveillance (Lyon & Bauman, 2013, pp. 80–81). In fact, in order to go to countries like the United Kingdom, police security systems have been moved to aircraft boarding points. The criminal status can be checked at the flight points, before boarding plane.

The last half of the 20th century has seen a significant increase in the use of technology for the discovery of personal information. Examples include video and audio surveillance, goggles, electronic tagging, biometric access devices, DNA analysis, computer monitoring including email and web usage and the use of computer techniques such as expert systems, matching and profiling, data mining, mapping, network analysis and simulation. We are a surveillance society. The general view is that we live in a time of revolutionary change with respect to the crossing of personal and social borders. New surveillance, relative to traditional surveillance, has low visibility or is invisible. It is more likely to be involuntary. Data collection is more likely to be automated involving machines rather than involving humans. Data collection is often integrated into a routine activity. It is more likely to involve manipulation than direct coercion (Marx, 2002). In the capitalist system, new surveillance tools such as IoT have further strengthened the powers of the state and capital groups. Both public and private life in society are threatened by surveillance. Every stage of life is recorded continuously with surveillance tools. 104 IS THE INTERNET OF THINGS TRANSFORMING A SURVEILLANCE TOOL?

Scholars from an increasingly wide range of disciplines are discussing surveillance. For example, Bentham and Foucault offer architectural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is often physical and spatial, involving centralised mechanisms of watching over subjects. Panoptic structures function as architectures of power, not only directly but also through (self) disciplining of the watched subjects. The Panopticon has become particularly famous through Foucault’s concept of panopticism, resulting in Bentham often being understood through the reading of Foucault (Galič, Timan, & Koops, 2017). In particular, Jeremy Bentham's book of the 18th-century Panopticon is related to surveillance. It is a new method of achieving mental power over the mind. Observing in panopticon is invisible so that the object being monitored is driven to self-control, to keep its behavior under control, assuming that it is observed everywhere at any time. The minds of individuals, through auto control, are kept under control. Another highlight of the panopticon is that a small number of people can easily monitor a large number of individuals in this way. This situation, as Foucault in his book, The Birth of Prison (1992), has an invisible existence that exists in every place of power at any moment and transforms into an observer that sees, hears and controls everything. According to Foucault, the model of Panopticon is very important to understand the emergence of self-disciplined modern societies (Lyon & Bauman, 2013, p. 58). As previously mentioned, Bentham’s panoptic prison design (1995) is the focus of Foucault’s panoptic theory (1991). This suggests that a subject will self-discipline themselves when under the pressure of a watcher. Within the prison example, this would take the form of a central guard tower which can view all prison cells around it. Prisoners would not, however, be able to see into the central guard tower. Therefore, prisoners are unsure if they are specifically being watched at any one moment. This would then mean, according to Foucault, that they would constantly self-discipline themselves on the off chance that they are being watched at that one moment. The prison cells are therefore the sole site of surveillance. Ultimately, therefore, the panopticon is centred around exercising power over a citizen’s body without necessarily using force (Champion, 2019). Deleuze, Haggerty and Ericson, and Zuboff develop different theoretical frameworks than panopticism to conceptualise the power play involved in networked surveillance. This view offers infrastructural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is networked and relies primarily on digital rather than physical technologies. It involves distributed forms of watching over people, with increasing distance to the watched and often dealing with data doubles rather than physical persons. Deleuze observed that Foucauldian institutions and their ways of disciplining no longer existed, or at least were shifting into other modes of surveillance and exercising power. Deleuze, partly in collaboration with Guattari, further developed the shift, already described to some extent by Foucault, from disciplinary societies towards societies of control (Galič et al., 2017). Yeşim GÜÇDEMİR, Kemal GÜNAY 105

The above-mentioned theorists working on this subject, surveillance theories, branches out to conceptualise surveillance through concepts such as dataveillance, access control, social sorting, peer-to-peer surveillance and resistance.

Marx classified surveillance into traditional and new surveillance in his article, called “What’s New About the New Surveillance”. Table 1 indicates several dimensions for categorizing aspects of surveillance. He intended this comparison to make a more systematic contrast in surveillance technologies, focus on fundamental changes in modern technologies for the collection and analysis of personal information, specify the change between periods, settings and methods that the theory should take into account, provide a more logical basis for ethical and policy decisions about specific tactics and practices (Marx, 2002). Table 1 underlines differences between new surveillance and traditional surveillance.

Table 1. Surveillance Dimensions (Marx, 2002) Dimension A. Traditional Surveillance B. The New Surveillance Senses unaided senses extends senses Visibility (of the actual collection, who does it, where, Visible less visible or invisible on whose behalf) Consent lower proportion involuntary higher proportion involuntary Cost (per unit of data) Expensive inexpensive Location of data collectors/ on scene remote analyzers Ethos harder (more coercive) softer (less coercive) data collection folded into routine Integration data collection as a separate activity activity Data collector human, animal machine (wholly or partly automated) Data resides with the collector, stays local with 3rd. parties, often migratea Timing single point or intermittent continuous (omnipresent) Time period present past, present, future Data availability frequent time lags real-time availability more democratized, some forms Availability of technology disproportionately available to elites widely available The object of data collection Individual individual, categories of interest Comprehensiveness single measure multiple measures Context contextual acontextual Depth less intensive more intensive Breadth less extensive more extensive The ratio of self to surveillant higher (what the surveillant knows, lower (surveillant knows things the knowledge the subject probably knows as well) subject doesn’t) Identifiability of object of emphasis also on anonymous emphasis on known individuals surveillance individuals, masses Emphasis on individuals individual, networks systems Realism direct representation direct and simulation 106 IS THE INTERNET OF THINGS TRANSFORMING A SURVEILLANCE TOOL?

single media (likely or narrative or multiple media (including video and/ Form numerical) or audio) specialists, role dispersal, self- Who collects data specialists monitoring more difficult to organize the store, easier to organize, store, retrieve, Data analysis retrieve, analyze analyze discrete non-combinable data easy to combine visual, auditory, text, Data merging (whether because of different format numerical data or location) Data communication more difficult to send, receive easier to send, receive

2.1. Big Data Surveillance

The big data notion was first used in the Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Visualization held in 1997 by NASA researchers Michael Cox and David Ellsworth. The article is called “Application- Controlled Demand Paging for Out-of-core Visualization”. In this study, it was mentioned that the data sets were massive and even the computer system’s memory, disks and even external disks were filled, and this problem was called big data (Aktan, 2019).

With the advancement of technology and the development of the internet, the power of knowledge has become prominent. Humanity and machines generate massive data every second on the internet, this makes it very important to extract meaningful data. Big Data is a meaningful and processable form of all these data from different sources such as social media shares, photo archives, and cookies. Tons of data are generated daily from different sources such as social media shares, social networking, IoT devices’ transmissions and the amount of data is increasing rapidly. This has revealed the concept of big data and has caused many different challenges in terms of personal privacy too.

Periods of intensive technological innovations bring an unpredictable series of side effects. The age of big data is no exception. Not only do algorithms formalize the way we feel, think, behave, and live; but also the availability of massive amounts of digital data shapes the production of scientific knowledge in many directions (Christin, 2016). Healthcare, education, journalism, finance, criminal justice etc., these kinds of expert fields are transformed in multiple ways via algorithms. Work practices, models, norms, and identities of professional actors have been changing by algorithms (Christin, 2016).

The internet has given people unprecedented access to information. It provides a massive infrastructure for connection and data-gathering. The critical science of big data must pay attention to wide transformations in communication and social organizations which create the condition where big data is suitable not just to states and corporations, but researchers too (Couldry, 2017). Yeşim GÜÇDEMİR, Kemal GÜNAY 107

Big data is a notion that defines heterogeneous data in various volumes, which cannot be processed using traditional database techniques, and consists of various digital contents (Gahi et al., 2016).

1. Structured data: Structured data refers to all kinds of data that are easy to model, input, store, query, process and visualize. In general, it is indicated in pre-defined fields with certain types and sizes, managed in relational databases or spreadsheets. In this type of data, which has a solid structure, it is easier to obtain useful information because the processes do not require high-performance capabilities or parallel techniques.

2. Semi-structured data: Semi-structured or self-describing data reflects a structured data type, but it does not just follow a solid model. In other words, semi-structured data also includes various metadata models, such as labels and signs, used to describe specific elements and hierarchical representation of different fields in the data, as well as the models in which structurality is defined. The most well-known examples of semi-structured data include XML (Extensible Markup Language) and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) programming languages.

3. Unstructured data: Non-structural data are types of records submitted and stored except for a defined format. Usually, it consists of texts in free formats such as books, articles, documents, e-mails, and media files such as pictures, audios and videos. The fact that it is hard to present this type of data rigidly has resulted in new mechanisms such as NoSQL in the data processing processes.

Big data consists of five dimensions. These are volume, variety, velocity, veracity and value. Volume refers to the quantity of data (i.e. size of data). Variety refers to types of data (i.e. structured data, semi-structured data and unstructured data). Velocity refers to the speed with which data is generated, processed and transferred. Veracity indicates the accuracy and reliability of data. Value shows the achievement of data aggregation, analysis and the quantifiable progress that the aggregation and analysis of data provided (Gandomi & Haider, 2015).

Big data is a type of surveillance for states and companies. A great variety of organizations from healthcare to finance to law enforcement have used big data to increase their efficiency, performance and predictions (Christin, 2016). The surveillance process is similar to the big data process. It comprises gathering data, recording, and splitting it into categories in terms of people and their behaviors. A vast number of scholars underline the expanding pervasiveness of surveillance, referring to the rise of “mass surveillance”, Lyon called this term “surveillance society”. Big data is being exploited for surveillance practices in a great 108 IS THE INTERNET OF THINGS TRANSFORMING A SURVEILLANCE TOOL? number of institutional domains beyond policing and justice, including but not restricted to health, finance, banking, credit, insurance marketing, education, immigration, defence, and activism (Brayne, 2017).

The Internet of Things extends from small household appliances to smart cities. Data on communication between smart devices is called big data. The meaning of the data used on the internet of objects is very valuable for the future. Big data enables new forms of classification and prediction using machine learning algorithms.

3. Technological Trends and IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a term used to define the next-generation of internet network generated via intelligent objects with sensors and software, activated in a wide variety of fields, for instance automotive, construction, health, textile, education and transportation (Aydos, Vural, & Tekerek, 2019). Another definition of IoT is the connection of everyday objects to the internet such as television, home appliances and so on. It enables real-time and distant monitoring, a massive collection of data about people, animals, property, plants (Maras, 2015).

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become the transformation technology for many areas by creating design innovation with new digital and intelligent manufacturing technologies. Within the scope of the supply chain, the internet of objects has a wide range of applications to industrial automation, health, building and home automation, transportation and public services.

Three major industrial revolutions have taken place up to the present period. The Industrial Revolution (Industry 1.0), which started with steam engines in the 18th century and increased in production in the industrial sense, was followed by the Second Industrial Revolution (Industry 2.0), which emerged as a transition to mass production at the beginning of the 20th century and opened the way for the utilization of electricity. The mass production of goods has become standard practice (Howard, 2018). Afterwards, The Third Industrial Revolution (Industry 3.0), in which the production systems are no longer analogue, and where digital systems are used in industry, arose. In this way, the first three industrial revolutions brought mechanization, electricity and information technology (IT) to human production. These three industrial revolutions led to increased productivity in production. However, production companies in the world have faced very serious difficulties due to environmental, social, economic and technological developments at those times. To overcome Yeşim GÜÇDEMİR, Kemal GÜNAY 109 these challenges, companies have always been in search of virtual and physical structures that allow close collaboration and rapid adaptation throughout the entire life cycle from innovation to production and distribution. The trade boundaries between the post-cold war countries have disappeared and purchases have started to increase among these countries. In the 1960s, customers were only purchasing the product. In the 2000s, with the involvement of the customers’ requests and expectations, the service processes of the companies have become more complex. Thus, companies have now felt the need for interdisciplinary work and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0), where all objects are communicated and interacted on the Internet, have emerged (Yıldız, 2018). The development of these industrial revolutions is shown in the figure below.

Figure 1. The History of Industrial Revolutions (Liubomyr (El.) Kachur, 2018)

Smart objects and networks are used in every aspect of our lives in modern societies. The Internet of things positively affects human life due to the fact that many devices communicate with each other and exchange data. The Internet of Things is a technological ecosystem where devices that connect to each other interact with a network through communication protocols. IoT devices interact with each other, can process data, generate a product and work on it (Gokalp & Aydin, 2018). The Internet of Things defines the network of devices that are connected via the Internet. Being connected, such smart devices, which include smart home devices such as smart meters and smart locks, are able to share data with each other, providing benefits such as a better quality of life and greater insight into the business. The next-generation mobile connection technology 5G, with a forecasted number of 1.3 110 IS THE INTERNET OF THINGS TRANSFORMING A SURVEILLANCE TOOL? billion subscriptions by 2023, would be a major boost for the application of IoT in everyday life (Statista, 2019).

The Internet of Things is a paradigm that connects smart devices via the Internet, controlling data and conducting the application process as desired. Although the areas of application of the internet of things, which have remote sensing, performance monitoring tasks, are limited in some areas, they are exposed to applications in industry, energy systems, home automation, logistics, health, agriculture.

The Internet of Things notion was defined by Kevin Ashton during his 1999 speech for Procter & Gamble. He mentioned that Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) was a presupposition for the Internet of Things. He also concluded if whole devices were tagged, the computers system could manage, track and inventory them. To a certain extent, the tagging of things has been provided by way of technologies as digital watermarking, barcodes, and QR codes. The control of inventory is one of the more evidential edges of the Internet of things (Foote, 2016).

A very rapid increase of IoT devices has been recorded in the past few years and this ascent shows a tendency to continue. It is estimated that by the end of 2020 there will be approximately 20 billion connected devices (Mendez Mena, Papapanagiotou, & Yang, 2018). Statista indicates that the number of the Internet of Things’ devices will have reached 75.44 billion by 2025 as Graph 1 below shows, a fivefold increase in decades (Statista, 2019). According to another piece of research shown in Figure 3, approximately 50 billion devices are expected to be connected to the Internet as of 2020 (Aydos et al., 2019). Yeşim GÜÇDEMİR, Kemal GÜNAY 111

Graph 1. IoT: number of connected devices worldwide 2012-2025 (Statista, 2019)

Figure 2. IoT growth chart for years 112 IS THE INTERNET OF THINGS TRANSFORMING A SURVEILLANCE TOOL?

3.1. IoT and Surveillance

The mass storage and accumulation of data make it possible to monitor the lives of individuals. IoT technology makes it easy to record and collect large amounts of data, thus it ensures that people’s habits and routines are better defined than ever before. This mass observation puts some pressure on people (Maras & Wandt, 2019). IoT includes efficient smart systems that can decide and implement not only data collection and use but also large data analysis methods using human- free M2M (machine to machine) interaction when needed. Besides, machines that communicate in real-time through sensors on IoT platforms enable the optimization of industrial production processes using resources efficiently and effectively (Aydos et al., 2019).

The Internet of Things is a much wider concept than simply connecting electronic devices to the Internet. IoT has the ability to communicate with people to update status information. Products developed under the concept of IoT works effectively with mobile devices. Even if users are away from their devices, devices can be controlled and managed.

IoT devices are able to use sensors such as various microcontrollers to record and transmit a large set of data. The sensors can inventory a wide variety of observable measurements (see Table 2 below). Many sensors are cost-effective, causing manufacturers to connect multiple sensors to IoT devices (Maras & Wandt, 2019).

Table 2. Examples of IoT devices and components My Samsung Samsung What it iPhone iPhone Galaxy Apple Friend Smart Smart Sensor provides X 5 S9 Watch Cayla TV 9000 Dishwasher Doll Series Series Transmit audio Microphone X X X X X X within a room Transmit audio Camera X X X X X within a room Measures Barometer atmospheric X X pressure Measures air Thermometer X X temperature Measures Three-axis orientation X X X X X gyroscope angular velocity Measures Accelerometer X X X X X acceleration Detects the presence of Proximity nearby objects X X X X X Sensor without the need physical contact Yeşim GÜÇDEMİR, Kemal GÜNAY 113

Measures the amount of Ambient light ambient light X X X X X X X Sensor around the phone Communication 802.11 WiFi using 802.11 X X X X X X X WiFi protocols Short-range NFC device X X X communication Low energy Bluetooth X X X X device-to-device Triangulates GPS location your exact X location on earth Measures the Heart rate X user’s heart rate

Figure 2 visualizes the use of many IoT applications for the use of people, vehicles, houses, cities, trade and industry. As is seen, computers, smartphones, school services, smart office, smart health, smart school services, smart sockets, smart grids and wearable materials are some of the Internet of Things applications. The common attribute of IoT applications is that data collection from smart objects with embedded sensors is gathered and used over the network. The Internet of Things applications are rising gradually, expanding the areas of usage and making life easier for people. A numerous amount of customized data gathered by convenient IoT applications covering smart environments, smart cities, smart metering, smart farming, smart livestock, security and emergency, retail sales, logistics, and smart health are being shared and analyzed (Aydos et al., 2019).

114 IS THE INTERNET OF THINGS TRANSFORMING A SURVEILLANCE TOOL?

Figure 3. IoT applications (Aydos et al., 2019)

Online retail giant Amazon uses a system that not only monitors the productivity of warehouse employees but also automatically creates paperwork to fire them because they do not meet expectations. Amazon’s system follows a metric called “time off task”, which means workers have to stop or take a break. Previously, it was reported by The Verge that some employees felt under pressure because they did not give bathroom breaks. Amazon fulfilment centre workers face challenging conditions. The workers are forced to “make rate” with bundling hundreds of boxes per hour and lose their jobs if they don’t move fast enough (Bort, 2019).

The report also indicates a profoundly automated tracking and termination process. Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity. According to Yeşim GÜÇDEMİR, Kemal GÜNAY 115 the document, these automation systems generate any notification of terminations regarding quality or productivity without advice from supervisors. The workers are treated like robots because they are monitored and supervised by these automated systems (Lecher, 2019). Wearable devices will be able to extract highly sensitive and personal data from employees. It is a reasonable expectation that most people are worried about surrendering such data (Weston, 2015). While it appears to be an effective measure for employers, this can become a problem and cause a drop in employee morale through monitoring. Being under constant surveillance, even at the workplace, is a controversial issue in terms of ethics and privacy.

Another example of surveillance is smart dolls such as Hello Barbie and Cayla. These dolls are designed in such a way that children can talk, sing, play and interact with them. The smart dolls make use of speech recognition and can answer children’s questions. All these features can influence the behavior of users in certain ways and can manipulate and persuade them to behave differently (Keymolen & Van der Hof, 2019). The internet of things is now combined with Robotics in various diverse fields of everyday life and is preparing a new era of the Internet of Robotics. The Internet of Robotics is at the mature stage of development and is currently facing various challenges to be solved for more applications, such as design, sensors, security and long-range communication systems and so on. The Internet of Robotics IoR is improving rapidly and has the capability to use many services from monitoring, manufacturing, security surveillance in various diverse areas (Nayyar, Puri, Nguyen & Le, 2019).

Privacy and security issues can be shown at the top of the list of legal problems that may arise with the use of robots. Robots can detect, process and record the situation around them with their sensors. Robots can enter places where people cannot and can see that people cannot. Robots can be used for surveillance by people. Robots are especially used in the areas of security, travel and marketing for surveillance. Robots can enter protected areas. A home robot can be programmed to transmit information about people living in that house. It is possible for cars to follow a route, know where to stop, know how long the driver stops, know the behavior patterns of the driver in the traffic. With the Internet of Things technology, all this data can be transferred to the cloud or elsewhere. All of these activities can cause both privacy protection and security problems (Yüksel, 2017). Robots are capable of observing with advanced sensors. This requires paying special attention to privacy issues and the security of personal data. Moreover, malicious people can access the robots through the internet connection to steal personal information. 116 IS THE INTERNET OF THINGS TRANSFORMING A SURVEILLANCE TOOL?

4. Conclusion

The Internet of Things enables more gathering of enormous amounts of data from people’s behaviors and their daily habits than ever before. All these data are available using perpetual surveillance. These data can be used for any government, commercial, legal issue. The data gathered from the Internet of Things provides an opportunity to surveil. Governments’ and companies’ surveillance tools have more access than ever in human history.

New surveillance gathers the user’s profile, elicits information about people’s behaviors, their choices, and buying habits. Machine learning helps in modelling and predicting human habits. All these refined data can be used by governments or companies to direct or manipulate people for their purposes and goals.

Surveillance is often ambiguous, and individuals become voluntary elements of surveillance with their consent. It builds opportunities and constraints for users. IoT offers many advantages for people such as communication, automation, control, information, monitoring what you want to track, saving time and money. Constraints imply that the people who are monitored maintain self-control, keeping their behavior and their habits under control, assuming that they are being observed everywhere, anytime. Furthermore, the IoT has some disadvantages. It has complex systems; it may cause more failure than traditional systems.

The IoT may face some challenges in the near future such as security vulnerabilities, regulatory and legal issues, the determinism of the network, lack of a common architecture and standardization, scalability, limitations of the available sensors, dense and durable off- grid power sources and so on. With the involvement of IoT technologies in all areas of life, consent has been created in society to collect data of people and machines. There are some questions arise with this consent such as who will use the collected data for what purpose and where. It is also important to answer the questions of whether these transactions will be implemented in accordance with the privacy definition, how to define and provide privacy and security definitions too. The era of the IoT has just begun, it is necessary to question the assumptions and preconceptions of this new period. The presence of smart devices in all areas of our lives is steadily increasing.

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CHAPTER 6

LEADERSHIP AND AGENCY IN ALGORITHMIC SOCIETY

Ignas KALPOKAS1,2

1Lecturer, Vytautas Magnus University, Faculty of Political Science and Diplomacy, Department of Political Communication, Kaunas, Lithuania

2Assistant Professor, LCC International University, Department of Social Sciences, Klaipėda, Lithuania e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.06

ABSTRACT Leadership, as a phenomenon, has a key function in society, mobilising individuals and driving them towards a certain goal. However, it is by now more than clear that leadership has been severely disrupted by digital innovation, not least by the advent of social media, big data, and algorithmic governance. Hence, the aim of this chapter is to explore the changes and to formulate a concept of leadership that is responsive to the modes of mobilisation, new affordances of data analytics, and the irruption of private business logics into the very core of leadership and campaigning strategies. Consequently, the very question of agency in leadership has become straightforward. To that effect, the chapter concludes by finding leadership to be diffused within more-than-human assemblages in which aspiring leaders continue to play a major role but by no means an unquestionably central one. Instead, leadership must constantly be performed, regardless of other considerations and formal conditions. Keywords: Leadership, big data, algorithm, affect, performativity 120 LEADERSHIP AND AGENCY IN ALGORITHMIC SOCIETY

The extent to which today’s world has been digitised is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that we no longer have the need to distinguish between digital and non-digital – both have become inseparably intertwined into one. Such a fundamental change to everyday life cannot have left leadership – one of the paramount structuring roles in our societies – unchanged. Hence, this chapter sets to explore the changes in and evolving characteristics of today’s leadership, primarily focusing on the domain of politics.

To that end, the chapter first delves into some of the arguments characterising changes in contemporary leadership, particularly changing forms of political organisation, the emancipation of publics, and the necessity of a connective function. Subsequently, one of the defining characteristics of today’s societies, the abundance of data and the capacity for its algorithmic analysis, is brought into the mix, demonstrating how leaders can build their strategies with advance knowledge of fine-grained audience characteristics, enabling them to embark on a course of action that is almost guaranteed to bring the desired result. These changes are, in turn, seen in the context of an emerging experience age whereby audience members expect tailored and precision-targeted communication that is engaging and intuitively appealing. In this context, it comes as no surprise that affective, rather than information- or ideology-based, publics become the prime domains in which leadership is performed. The emphasis on performance is itself not accidental – in this new environment, leadership can neither be static nor depend on taken-for-granted characteristics. Instead, leadership is always emergent, an aspiration (hence the term ‘aspiring leaders’ is used throughout the text) rather than a fixed reality even if a formal leadership position is attained. Finally, this chapter concludes with the attempt to locate agency in the contemporary performance of leadership.

1. The Argument of Leadership Change

There is little doubt that the idea and practice of leadership has been significantly affected by the advent of digital communication. In fact, there has been an interesting and somewhat perplexing mix of continuity and change. As Bakardjieva, Felt and Dumitrica (2018) assert, ‘leadership does not evaporate, but changes its form and substance’ (p. 912). Leadership is becoming increasingly connective: in other words, leaders operate as central nodes whose embeddedness in the broader fabric of networks, information environments, identities, and affiliations becomes key in mobilising support (Bennett & Segerberg, 2011, p. 772). As a result, there are ample opportunities for construction of communities and interactive spaces that are by no means restricted to coalescing around leaders – instead, such spaces are mobilised by shared concerns (Sutkutė, 2016, p. 40). Ignas KALPOKAS 121

However, the above does not imply leaderlessness: such movements may not be based on political parties or other organisations but they still necessitate the classical leadership role of helping to bring about a new social reality and steer the processes of mobilisation and informational and affective exchange prior to the individual’s immediate environment becoming oversaturated with competing demands (Bielinis, 2018; Zakaraitė, 2016, p. 91). Leadership becomes of crucial importance to the extent that in today’s politics ‘the burden of mobilization’ shifts from large organisations to individuals (Bennett & Segerberg, 2011, p. 772). Enabled through the use of social media, this type of leadership is typically associated with ‘inviting, connecting, steering, and stimulating, rather than directing, commanding, and proclaiming’ (Poell, Abdulla, Rieder, Woltering & Zack, 2016, p. 1009). Crucially, it is sustained and consistent performance in the connective function that defines leadership.

Certainly, formal attributes, even an official position of power, are trumped by actual performance. In fact, someone can easily lead without formal attributes. Nevertheless, while it might be a truism that ‘headship does not necessarily mean leadership’ (Teles, 2015, p. 32), it is still necessary to explore the contours of the latter. Indeed, due to the lack or absence of formal structures and procedures, particularly in case of leadership originating in the digital realm, leadership is not attained or elected for but performative as ‘the main way to stand out and be recognized as a leader is to continuously produce influential discourse’, thereby attracting substantial following and consolidating the identity and collective presence of the group or the public (Bakardjieva et al., 2018, p. 912). In that sense, the line between (political) leaders and social media influencers is beginning to blur.

Online leadership can often be anonymous due to the possibility of several individuals to blend into a single avatar in case of a purely online, or at least online-coordinated, movement: on such occasions, leadership becomes ‘polycephalous’ (Bakardjieva et al., 2018, p. 912). Nevertheless, the function persists: even in movements where official and/ or formal organisational structures have been largely absent (such as Occupy), ‘strategizing and leadership were still key to protest communication and mobilization’ (Poell et al., 2016, p. 997). Hence, continue to ‘define objectives and identify directions and means for action; maintain the identity and structure of the movement and connect and mobilize the support base’, albeit by different means (Bakardjieva et al., 2018, p. 912). Such roles are carried out by individuals who may not have been formally appointed but are, instead, ‘centrally positioned in social media-facilitated networks’, thereby becoming leaders if not in name then in function, connecting otherwise disparate participants into publics and framing the 122 LEADERSHIP AND AGENCY IN ALGORITHMIC SOCIETY movement or protest (Poell et al., 2016, p. 997). And although polycephalous can perform the above as well, as shown below, personalisation still adds greater efficiency.

It seems reasonable to suggest that leadership, despite its performative, connective, and identity-coordinating role, has considerably shrunk in autonomy since ‘[d]ecision-making, choosing between alternatives […] is delegated to the collective wisdom of movement participants who can choose to take up, align with, or tweak the directive issued by leaders in their personal and local ways’ (Bakardjieva et al., 2018, p. 912). On the other hand, the present analytical turn in leadership, laid out in the subsequent sections of this chapter, and the necessity of campaign planners to employ data analytics in preparation of their strategies (Larsson, 2019) can be seen as pre-empting such audience contestation: if it is possible to know what the audience thinks and expects in advance, then any concerns and building blocks of collective wisdom can be weaved into connective leadership discourse and bent towards the strategic interests of the aspiring leader.

Still, the entire leaderlessness narrative of today’s movements can be seen as, above all, a strategic construct: as parties and formal organisations are losing their appeal and traction in favour of progressive individualisation of participation, there is a definite need to transcend traditional alignments with something that allows the individual participant to at least feel central and autonomous, even if legacy leadership structures persist behind the surface (Poell et al., 2016, p. 1009). In a similar manner, even when particular figureheads are not pronounced and explicitly visible, ‘covert’ leadership roles still persist nevertheless, remaining ‘unrecognized and, more disturbingly, unaccountable’ (Bakardjieva et al., 2018, p. 900). Hence, covert leadership is more potent due to such subterranean operation. Also, it must be argued that it is not impossible for overt connective and covert leadership to coexist, including within the same movement/organisation and, even more paradoxically, within the same person, particularly in case of ostensibly non-political leaders (such as social media influencers) assuming a functionally political role.

Notably, political organisation themselves, parties included, are increasingly drawn into being more connective than prescriptive, relying on ‘technology platforms and affordances’ that are becoming ‘indistinguishable from, and replace, key components of brick and mortar organization and intra-party functions’ thus engaging with supporter networks and managing affiliations way beyond the traditional focus on electoral mobilisation (Bennett et al., 2018, pp. 1666–1667). In other words, instead of drawing individuals towards pre-existing structures on the basis of pre-manufactured ideologies, parties and movements are sustained within interactive processes while co-creating their ideological substances with individuals that they Ignas KALPOKAS 123 aggregate and connect within that process of co-creation. However, much of that co-creation takes the form of data harvesting, which is not necessarily that empowering and possibly less bottom-up than Bennett, Segerberg, and Knüpfer (2018, p. 1667) would imagine – instead, it is more about strategic management and crafting of wishes and expectations.

Certainly, then, tapping into the prevalent concerns and considerations circulating within digital media becomes a must (Mazzoleni, 2017, p. 142), with online flows of affect resonating with every major event and development (Döveling, Harju & Sommer, 2018, p. 1), open for embodiment and making use of it. Once mobilised, moreover, such affective agglomerations give rise to ‘mediated feelings of connectedness’ (Papacharissi, 2016). However, affective flows do not go well with complexity and detailed elaboration. As a result, not only politicians traditionally labelled as ‘populist’ but also mainstream political actors become compelled to resort to simplistic explanations (Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou & Wodak, 2018, p. 7; see also Hannan, 2018, p. 220). That is simultaneously exacerbated by data-informed targeting described below: it is futile to engage in elaboration if one is capable of striping sharp and precise blows were audiences are to be the most impressed.

2. The Data-Algorithmic Turn

While the preceding section has made it clear that aspiring leaders retain a connective function that is crucial for mobilisation and political action, it is yet to be explained how this function is to be filled with substantive content. Indeed, as Bocullo (2016, p. 67) stresses, merely being active does not automatically imply being successful. Pertaining to this problematic, a clear shift in the performance of leadership has been caused by the availability of big data and the increasing role of data-crunching algorithms. For the purposes of this chapter, the key role of algorithms lies in their capacity to ‘plough through an immense quantity and breadth of data to identify patterns and correlations’ in order to determine both the present characteristics and the likely future actions and decisions of the target audiences (Faraj, Pachidi & Sayegh, 2018, p. 64). Their functions involve, among other things, profiling and targeting, system optimisation, management and control of present things and events and predictions of those to come (Sadowski, 2019, pp. 5–6). Effectively, then, identities are ascribed and future actions mapped out as a result of the analysis of big data pertaining to present and past behaviours (Newell & Marabelli, 2015, p. 4). The employment of machine learning techniques enables the production of fine-grained maps of target populations, concerning not only their basic political allegiances but also the most salient issues and corresponding views down to the level of individuals (Sunstein, 2018, p. 4). 124 LEADERSHIP AND AGENCY IN ALGORITHMIC SOCIETY

The knowledge thus derived allows to build statistical models for the targeting of individuals through messages that are customised and ‘leverage aspects of personality, political leanings, and affective proclivities’ (Faraj et al., 2018, p. 64). As a result, the connective function of leadership is both enhanced and simplified: if it is possible to know in advance what concerns, hopes fears, and affective proclivities have to be addressed in order to attract and mobilise target audiences, it becomes possible to exert influence with great efficiency.

In fact, ‘algorithms are everywhere beneath the surface of contemporary life, governing all types of activities imaginable: ‘what songs or films a streaming service will recommend, the price at which a given commodity will be offered to market, where a restaurant will seat its customers, which potential partners will appear in a dating app, and […] what adds are served to you’ (Greenfield, 2018, p. 212). While at their simplest, algorithms can be seen as mere command structures describing how an input is to be transformed into an output, in today’s practice they typically purport to assist choice (while, in fact, simply framing choice) so that only ‘meaningful’ content is encountered and only the most ‘efficient’ choices are being made when buying, voting, or choosing a date (Bucher, 2018, p. 49). In fact, the algorithmic environment is becoming so dense and difficult to disentangle that some even imply refer to it as ‘algorithmic soup’ (Bostrom, 2017, p. 211). And it is this ‘soup’ that aspiring leaders have to navigate in expectation to be matched with target followers in very much the same way in which a purchase might be recommended, either as sponsored content or on a ‘people like you have bought this’ basis.

The raw material for inferring leadership strategies and content – big data – have become relatively abundant: because ‘in a world where surveillance is the norm, merely existing in the world means you are structured into the technologies and systems that structure most of social life today’ (Caplan & Boyd, 2018, p. 4), and data collection is one of the main default principles of today’s technologies. Emergent patterns have to be sought in data that had previously been unstructured, such as ‘a large body of text, a series of images, or indeed a real-time video feed’; that has to be done with an open mind because as big data are being analysed, ‘the patterns themselves begin to suggest the questions that might be asked of them’ (Greenfield, 2018, p. 211). Nevertheless, the predictions construed from such patterns are anything but vague and open-ended. Instead, they are used to instantly and (allegedly) accurately answer questions that would have otherwise necessitated careful thinking and lengthy deliberation to the extent that now we seem to enter ‘a world of constant data-driven predictions where we may not be able to explain the reasons behind our decisions’ (Mayer- Schönberger & Cukier, 2017, p. 17). It is thus not surprising that data are now seen as a crucial Ignas KALPOKAS 125 form of capital by businesses operating in industries as diverse as technology, manufacturing, energy, or finance (Sadowski, 2019, p. 1). Same applies to data-driven campaigning that combines in-depth knowledge of the audiences with algorithmic determination of topics and channels to render the messaging as impactful as possible (see Stroud & McGregor, 2019).

Algorithms become governance mechanisms on their own right. They do so by structuring the social in terms of (re)arranging groups, predicting (and sometimes pre-empting) human action, and guiding decision-making processes; hence, they become ‘increasingly autonomous actors with power to further political and economic interests on the individual but also on the public/collective level’ (Just & Latzer, 2017, p. 245). Hence, algorithms can be seen as productive of social order and interpersonal realities that bind individuals and therefore significantly shaping behaviours on a large scale through their automated selection of content, key function in communication planning, and framing of the choice environment (Just & Latzer, 2017, p. 254). The influence, however, is not only societal: it is personal as well since algorithms influence ‘not only what we think about (agenda-setting) but also how we think about it (framing) and consequently how we act’ (Just & Latzer, 2017, p. 245). Indeed, it is the algorithmically run platforms and applications that produce and allocate the market of attention, drawing it to some things but not others, shaping the individual consciousness and perceived reality and, through it, social order; as a result, algorithms become highly strategic artefacts (Just & Latzer, 2017, p. 246). Moreover, despite their clear-cut ‘if… then’ nature, algorithms are also implicated in emotional matters, particularly in the ways experiences and feelings are shaped and orchestrated, be it joy or frustration, curiosity or anger (Bucher, 2018, p. 49). The preceding function is also neither coincidental nor easily ignored. Instead, as emotions are indispensable in shaping motivations and behaviours, the influence over such factors gives extra power to algorithmic governance and extra weapons in the arsenal of an algorithmically-rich aspiring leader.

Few users of digital platforms have still retained the illusion of full access to information and an open-ended choice environment – instead, it is by now clear that the companies behind such platforms employ data-intensive systems that are unobtrusive and yet greatly effective in filtering user encounters with media by showing them things they are predisposed to like (Webster, 2017, p. 356). In other words, users are sorted and herded into predetermined information enclaves rather than choosing to immerse themselves in one information environment or another. It is his enclosure-building function that aspiring leaders strive to build upon, because having tapped into existing ones or forming new ones through sustained identity-building and audience-aggregating practices, they can capitalise on audience 126 LEADERSHIP AND AGENCY IN ALGORITHMIC SOCIETY self-filtering, whereby group- and opinion-congruent information gets more efficiently and more favourably processed than any competing alternatives (see Kalpokas, 2019).

Moreover, algorithms can be written to easily adapt to a changing or unpredictable environment: that is particularly characteristic of machine learning algorithms that trawl large data sets in order to discover novel patterns that had not been foreseen by the code writer (Etter, Colleoni, Illia, Meggiorin, & D’Eugenio, 2018, p. 74). That gives algorithm- wielding actors increased flexibility: they can plan their campaigns in real time without the need to identify key themes or variables in advance. A key element here is the capacity for opinion mining, i.e. the extraction of opinions and sentiments from text that can even be unstructured and/or constantly evolving, such as online comments (Balazs & Velásquez, 2016, p. 96). Clearly, successful employment of this technique enables an aspiring leader to discover important themes to be included into communication as well as to track the performance of current and past communicative acts. More broadly, its applications may involve, among other things, ‘enhancing sales and improving a company’s marketing strategies […], identifying ideological shifts and analysing trends in political strategy planning’ or even determining momentum in both stock markets and political campaigns (Giatsoglou et al., 2017, p. 214).

Decision guidance techniques enabled by data-crunching algorithms, in the form of either recommendations or targeted content delivery, ‘can be understood as a design-based instrument of control’, dynamically configuring the choice environment that individuals find themselves in and doing so in ways that are highly personalised, ‘affecting individual user’s behaviour and perceptions by subtly moulding the networked user’s understanding of the surrounding world’ (Yeung, 2017, p. 130). Certainly, such activity is not without manipulative undertones – after all, the aim is to achieve decisions, at both individual and collective levels, that are preferred by the choice architect. From an audience perspective, it is extremely difficult to resist such decision guidance as it operates through subtle persuasion and provision of what is desired instead of through blunt coercion, offering ‘bespoke, highly personalised services that are algorithmically designed to respond rapidly, dynamically and as unobtrusively and seamlessly as possible’ (Yeung, 2017, p. 131). Hence, by using psychological data about the target individuals and groups, actors are capable of triggering the necessary responses and nudging people towards predetermined action, the two being largely inseparable (Williamson, 2017, p. 271).

3. Bringing Experience into the Mix

Ever since the widespread adoption of the internet, it has been commonplace to talk about the coming of the Information Age – one in which every piece of information is immediately Ignas KALPOKAS 127 available at one’ fingertips. However, it appears that the latter era has proved to be self- defeating: the ever-increasing amount of information has undermined its own accessibility. Hence, the key point of reference is no longer the information that is being consumed (and taken as a given) but, instead, ‘how we choose to consume this information’ (Schaap, 2017). In the current era characterised by overabundance of information, we are unavoidably passing from the Information Age to the Experience Age in which attention acts as the basic exchange currency (Wadhera, 2016; see also Kalpokas, 2019).

Indeed, it can be confidently stated that ‘the density of the web environment in the contemporary media landscape results in an intense and incessant competition for attention’, resulting in the dominance of entertaining and easy-to-consume content that has much more to do with popular culture than a well-informed public sphere, even when ostensibly pertaining to the latter (Dahlgren & Alvares, 2013, p. 54). Such a shift is further reinforced by today’s media environment, defined by abundance, interactivity, and mobility (Mazzoleni, 2017, pp. 140–141). The key challenge for any aspiring leader is, therefore, the necessity to attract audience attention at any cost at a time when almost any target group is spoilt for choice. The emphasis on attention is further underscored by the characteristics of modern media that offer ‘intense experiential immersions with strong affective valences’ (Dahlgren & Alvares, 2013, p. 54). Therefore, it is both natural and easier to offer audiences content in which they can lose themselves. Nevertheless, competitive stakes are simultaneously increased: if every communicator (or, at least, the majority of them) invests in creating strongly immersive experiences, then the only way to compete is to create something even more immersive than any of the competition.

The communicative affordances of today’s media and aspiring leaders’ usage thereof also causes a corresponding expectation on behalf of the audience. As Newman (2016) states, ‘we live in an age where people want to experience everything’; in other words, ‘we want to be immersed in the story, feel like we are “living” the story, not just reading it’ while simultaneously being entertained. Hence, audiences cannot be merely left to consume information – they must get involved in fashioning and curating it as well (Riccio, 2017). The involvement and entertainment aspects are only further strengthened by the broader trend towards gamification of most areas of life (Papsdorf, 2015), meaning that consumers expect satisfaction and entertainment even in traditionally mundane aspects of life. Crucially, therefore, the current stage in the development of communication practices can be aptly labelled ‘the me-age’ – one in which ‘the best content is the kind that makes the reader the star’ (Newman, 2016), typically through content that is ‘relevant, contextual, and engaging’ 128 LEADERSHIP AND AGENCY IN ALGORITHMIC SOCIETY

(Abramovich, 2017), in other words, personalised. And for the latter, one needs significant amounts of data to be analysed and put to good use, potentially (and, for better-funded campaigns, unavoidably) adding machine learning to the mix in order to ‘continually refine and personalise customer experiences as consumers interact with them’ (Colvin & Kingston, 2017) thereby effectively structuring both individual and societal realities (Just & Latzer, 2017, p. 254).

Me-centricity also implies a further shift: one towards intuitive adaptation of the environment (including the information environment) to audience expectations. Indeed, in an incessant stream of information, whereby everything is happening and changing quickly, verifying and thinking might easily seem like just a waste of time: instead, intuitive connection with what is being offered acts as an apparently good enough substitute. Hence, it becomes clear that consumer experience has become ‘a key competitive differentiator’, necessitating the feeling of being ‘uniquely understood and important’ (Wladawsky-Berger, 2018). In other words, not the quality of the offering (informational or otherwise) but the experience of it becomes the key determinant of success.

Indeed, the challenge is not that some messages can be heard while others cannot; in fact, that is precisely the problem – as each message, as well as its own distinct meaning, can be heard but simply cannot be attended to, the result being the need to ‘drastically select from the environment with which we must interact in order to make it more manageable’ (Couldry & Hepp, 2017, pp. 112–113). And as we select in a piecemeal fashion and without taking time for reflection and interpretation, we, quite literally, lack the sense of what is happening (Couldry & Hepp, 2017, p. 114), leaving ourselves open to prefabricated attention-grabbing narratives and content offerings that simply have an emotional, or gut, sense of being correct. Crucially, the role of emotion cannot be underestimated, particularly in the Experience Age. Even under normal circumstances, ‘it is the behavioural impulses generated by emotions that give or deny humans the energy to act on their perceptions’ (Markwica, 2018, p. 87). Notably, emotions can be seen to ‘aid decision-making, learning, communication, and situation awareness’ (Poria, Cambria, Bajpai, & Hussain, 2017, p. 98), providing individuals with the capacity for quick and decisive action when it is at its most necessary. An in the experience age the emotional aspect is given even greater primacy, particularly because aiming to create the most pleasurable experiences possible, the sellers (of goods, services, information, or ideas) have to submit themselves to the centrality of the ‘me’, striving to ensure that each and every consumer of their offering receives the highest degree of personal(ised) satisfaction as possible, thereby further challenging anyone aiming to exert influence on others. Ignas KALPOKAS 129

In the above environment, even the most evidence-based proposition becomes less of a buck-stopping argument and an appeal to the truth than merely one more contender operating within a competitive marketplace in which no factual but experience value exerts the strongest influence upon the audience (McIntyre, 2018, pp. 19–20). In other words, if one is striving to prove something, it also matters what counts as proof in the eyes of the target audience in an environment generally characterised by ‘the selective use of facts that prop up one’s position, and the complete rejection of facts that do not’ (McIntyre, 2018, p. 34). In search for reasons, one has to again return to the issue of attention. Here one needs to refer to the standard economic model of supply and demand which predicts an increase in value of something the demand for which exceeds supply, with attention functioning as the exchange item in this case (Léveillé Gauvin, 2018, p. 293). Moreover, attention can potentially be seen as even scarcer than previously thought because ‘advances in neuroscience, particularly in brain imaging, have dismissed the notion of multitasking’: as the brain can only deal with one task at a time, merely alternating between demands with an unavoidable cognitive cost involved in every switch, forcing communicators to deal with ‘the challenge of gaining attention, and having influence on consumers in the face of constant distraction/task switching’ (Romaniuk & Nguyen, 2017, p. 911). Hence, if attention can more easily be won by attending to the audience’s wishes, fears, and biases, regardless of their factual value, then that can only mean a more efficient return on investment. The necessary factor, then, is a pre-cognitive ‘click’, grabbing audience attention straight away and maximising pleasurable emotions (Léveillé Gauvin, 2018, pp. 293–294). Since in the social media attention ecosystem ‘ability to attract attention’ becomes the main source of admiration, it simply has to be acknowledged that (almost) everything that is efficient becomes not only justifiable but even necessary (Marwick, 2015, p. 149).

4. Affect and the Performance of Leadership

The next major issue to be tackled is the prevailing mode of public mobilisation in the current era dominated by digital(ised) interaction. In this context, one must side with Papacharissi (2016, p. 310), for whom publics that are ‘activated and sustained by feelings of belonging and solidarity, however evanescent those feelings may be’. The key element here is that of feeling: publics being mobilised on an emotional-affective basis. Papacharissi (2016, p. 311) aptly defines affect as ‘a form of pre-emotive intensity subjectively experienced and connected to’. Similarly, for Döveling et al. (2018, p. 2), ‘affect is something people engage in, a practice of relational nature’. Affect is also foundational to engagement on social 130 LEADERSHIP AND AGENCY IN ALGORITHMIC SOCIETY media, ultimately prompting ‘a feeling of cultural and social belonging’ for digital individuals (Döveling et al., 2018, p. 4; see also Giaxoglou & Döveling, 2018, p. 2). As a result, then, affective publics, characteristic of today’s politics, are such that ‘are mobilized and connected, identified and potentially disconnected through expressions of sentiment’ (Papacharissi, 2016, p. 311). Such emotion-based narration of life usually breaks prevalent conventions, disrupting dominant narratives, and thus allowing fresh perspectives with which target audiences find it easier to identify (Papacharissi, 2015, p. 131). The idea that feelings and emotions are crucial in today’s mobilisation has also been expressed in other related contexts, such as discussing post-truth, but typically in a pejorative sense (see, notably, McIntyre, 2018, p. 13). In contrast, it must be stressed that affective formation of publics should be understood in a value-neutral sense, as simply the default form of bringing followers together in which today’s aspiring leaders must engage.

Certainly, when a group (however ephemeral and affective) is formed, its shared (and thus collectively reinforced) beliefs will start shaping its members’ perceptions of the world, motivating individuals to perceive the world in group-congruent ways, and members may well feel an urge to defend collective perceptions, even at the expense of verifiable facts (McIntyre, 2018, p. 45; see also Post, 2019, p. 232). However, the same could have been said about traditional groups as well. The difference may likely be one of quality and not one of kind: as the solidarity of the new publics is affective, the urge to believe and to stick with those who jointly partake in affective flows would perhaps more likely operate on the level of gut feeling or intuitive sense. That, in turn, opens up opportunities for data-rich aspiring leaders to act on affective triggers that are known in advance to nudge target audiences towards the expected action or affiliation.

There is, clearly, a further aspect of the current information environment that can be operationalised by aspiring leaders, namely, the dependence of many users on influential information content. Crucially, with the proliferation of multiple entertainment options coexisting with information media not only on the same devices but also on the same platforms, the time and attention dedicated to news content is naturally restricted. Notably, as ‘news today is ubiquitous, pervasive, and constantly around us’ (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2017, p. 106), despite audience willingness (and often even perceived necessity) to be informed, the very ubiquity of content may give rise to so-called ‘news-finds-me’ perception whereby individuals forfeit following news from dedicated sources in expectation to be kept informed by means of ‘general Internet use, information received from peers, and connections within online social networks’ (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2017, pp. 106–107). As a result, users Ignas KALPOKAS 131 become more reliant on information entrepreneurs, which could be friends and family but also external opinion leaders or influencers, to receive information about the political and/ or social environment (Anspach, 2017, p. 590). And as social media in particular facilitate influence through sharing, discussion, and endorsement, the effect might not be ‘dampening partisan selectivity’, as Anspach (2017, p. 591) suggests, but quite the contrary: enclosure of individuals into influencer-led information silos, particularly if the architects of such silos have advance knowledge of what framing or emotional load is more than likely to leave individuals with no other option but to follow the lead. And with the capacity on behalf of campaign strategists to ‘scrutinize the relative success of each individual post, tweet, image or video’, which marks the advent of the so-called ‘analytics turn’ in political communication and leadership (Larsson, 2019, p. 15), every attempt at herding can be continuously recalibrated and refined.

A further shift with notable influence on leadership is a redefinition of the political domain as such, strongly related with the me-centrism of the experience age. Traditionally, politics was seen as a public domain, concerned with the public goods and interest that transcend those of the individual. More recently, however, political engagement has become ‘an expression of personal hopes, lifestyles, and grievances’ (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, p. 743): in other words, ‘the personal becomes political’ (Papacharissi, 2015). Even though individuals continue aligning themselves with organisations, movements, or some less-formal groups, such as followers of a particular leadership figure, self-expression, and not ideological identification, appears to be the key driving factor (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, p. 744). Hence, collective action – the typical logic of movements – has become connective action, whereby shared partaking and association become key organisational resources (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, p. 752). Such movements may first seem to conform to the leaderlessness argument outlined above, not least because their assembling tends to be based on individual affective engagement rather than centralised authority; nevertheless, central signifiers around which publics must coalesce remain vital (Papacharissi, 2015, pp. 71–72), and the treasured prize of any leadership struggle is the control of such signifiers.

The availability of analytics is not only in line with but also strengthens what Cooren (2012, p. 5) calls the ‘ventriloquism’ of leadership figures, understood as ‘the activity that consists of making someone or something say or do something’. In this case, analytics- enabled leaders bring about the collective voice in a similar way in which a ventriloquist brings about the voice of the dummy (see, generally, Clifton, 2017; Kavada, 2015, p. 881). In this context, Hauser’s (2018) concept of the metapopulist stands out as a crucial analytical 132 LEADERSHIP AND AGENCY IN ALGORITHMIC SOCIETY tool. Whereas the traditional populist leader stands as a clear embodiment of, say, ‘the common man’, the metapopulist ‘is not the name that identifies the unity of an equivalential chain with a hegemonic segment, but he or she is a signifier that has to hold the parological incoherence of the significations of communities’ (Hauser, 2018, p. 67). Notably, therefore, ‘the essence of the metapopulist leader is thus persistent incoherence as a precondition for being a transcendent singularity that addresses the society as the totality of heterogenous communities and singularities’ (Hauser, 2018, p. 67). A single leadership figure can then enable diverse audiences to feel uniquely understood.

The detailed knowledge of audience expectations and the capacity to personalise communication allows the data-rich metapopulist to be all things to all people as different segments of the population can project their desires and their sensibilities onto such a leader without the necessity for these projections to coalesce into some larger picture. In this respect, ‘the full subject of the metapopulist leader vanishes and his or her subject has no being other than as cleavages in a chain of signification that represents him or her for others’ (Hauser, 2018, p. 68) – the figure (and, indeed, the person) of the leader becomes that which is represented or, rather, deemed to be relevant for representation by the algorithmic analysis of data at the expense of being alienated from the actual physical person of the leader (see Zakaraitė, 2016, p. 93). Hence, the aspiring leader can also be seen as ‘an empty set – a set which has no elements such as beliefs, ideas, values, or feelings that could be attributed to the metapopulist leader him or herself’ but is, instead, a protean projection of the concrete public in question (Hauser, 2018, p. 68). One can say that the leader performs the public back to itself.

5. Towards a Theory of Social-Mediated Leadership

In earlier analyses of mediatisation and leadership, it was not uncommon to stress agency- enhancing effects, for example, in expanding the audience that can potentially be reached and mobilised as well as giving the opportunity to produce influential discourse to a broader set of individuals without support structures or capacity and/or aptitude to produce formally authoritative discourse associated with traditional leadership figures, thereby resulting in actively performed ‘freedom of expression, democratic participation, and the creation of culture’ (Peters & Johnson, 2016, pp. 27–28). Nevertheless, the more critical voices have always contended that instead of great liberation and empowerment, social media platforms should more adequately be seen as replicating the already prevalent paradigms and hierarchies of communication, including those separating users into producers and consumers of content, the latter being better equipped for ‘accepting and amplifying messages rather than contesting Ignas KALPOKAS 133 or co-creating them’ (Swann & Husted, 2017, p. 201). Nevertheless, the nature of content still needs to be taken stock of by aspiring leaders, prioritising the types that can be noticed, taken up, and shared by audience with particular ease.

In the context of the increasing speed and experientialisation of communication, increased attention is deservedly turned to memes. Memes as the means of communication have become the new normal, to the extent that a news story or an ongoing development almost naturally is reacted to by the means of a ‘quick-fire mocking-up of a meme or a gif’ which, in turn, can be seen as performing ‘an interpellative function’, hailing to user to identify with them, either positively (agreeing) or negatively (disagreeing)’, with the effect that ‘the circulation of digital visual media often serves to shore up political identities, affiliations and the antagonisms associated with them’ (Dean, 2018, p. 5). Again, such meme-circulation can be seen as a further indicator of me-centric connective action, whereby associative and affective identity-performing content becomes key to political association and an attractive form of political action.

In order to establish a connection with the audience, communication unavoidably becomes not only more me-centric from the audience member’s side more personalised, even intimate, from the aspiring leader’s side (i.e. there is double personalisation), focussing not only on the agenda but also on personal and family life of the aspiring leader and ever more firmly leaving the organisation to which (s)he belongs (if there is one) behind. The drive is to demonstrate the ‘real’ and ‘ordinary’ person behind the leadership position (or ambition), their individual qualities and individual takes on the task at hand as well as the proximate emotional characteristics (Metz, Kruikmeier, & Lecheler, 2019, p. 2). The preceding naturally follows from the basic tenets of social media, not least the bypassing of the traditional communication channels that may have been somewhat reluctant to include highly personalised messages into e.g. their news bulletins (tabloids, of course, may be an entirely different matter altogether) and the interactive nature of social media that might give the simulated impression of a quasi- personal conversation with the aspiring leader, driving communicators to ‘self-personalise’ (Metz et al., 2019, p. 4).

Clearly, the leadership of today necessitates a ‘post-heroic’ reinterpretation: it is no longer correct (if it ever was) to concentrate on individual figures and their exceptional traits and deeds – instead, leadership must be seen as a dynamic and relational process (Collinson, 2018, p. 364). Likewise, an interpretation of leadership as practice emphasises ‘a world that is continuously on the move, where stuff does most certainly appear, but only ever as a transient phase that provides temporary structuring in the ongoing flow of action’; hence, leadership would be located in the ability to change, or at least affect, the directions of such 134 LEADERSHIP AND AGENCY IN ALGORITHMIC SOCIETY an all-encompassing flow (Simpson, Buchan, & Sillince, 2018, p. 647). The aim of a leader should perhaps even be less ambitious than establishing a single direction of that flow (i.e. total agreement among followers); instead, ‘leadership work’ should be conceived as a ‘never- ending-story’, captivating, enthralling, and carrying followers in its own flow (Crevani, 2018, p. 89). A similar pattern of thought could be seen in metapopulist politics.

6. Leadership, Agency, and the Transformation of Politics

A key question thereby becomes one of agency. Is agency still with aspiring leaders, is it overtaken by algorithms as autonomous actors or is it with the industry that writes and employs them? It is certainly not unreasonable to claim that should the power of data be seen as emanating from the insights produced, then ‘data analytics industry is powerful in shaping what is said, made visible or known through data’ (Beer, 2018, p. 466). But also, by ‘data’ we can never mean a complete and infinite entity, regardless how ‘big’ the data are – instead, reference is always made to the ‘subset of the world’s infinite aspects that have been captured by some instrument or process of measurement’ (Greenfield, 2018, p. 210). Hence, data is not objective or neutral – instead, it is dependent on decisions (typically by corporate actors) on what is to be measured and how, opening up new avenues for examining agency. Moreover, an oft-repeated feature that deserves attention in this context is that the governance of information and the structuration of experience is based not on the public interest but in line with ‘commodified, consumer-oriented logics’ that shapes the writing of algorithms (Boler & Davis, 2018, p. 83). In this sense, the strategizing for and performance of leadership should be seen as not governed by its own logic but by the commercial logic of those harvesting and analysing data.

No less importantly, ‘algorithms increasingly define the spaces of our information encounters, encounters with others, and the status of knowledge as it is produced and circulates in digitally-mediated contexts’ (Boler & Davis, 2018, pp. 82–83). Structures composed of data and algorithm work to shape political engagement, not only opening up new avenues but also determining how people engage in and perceive politicians and policies; hence, programmes, messages, slogans, and public appearances may well matter less than the underlying backend structure that allocates access to information, thereby framing ambient (and hence more salient) views (Flyverbom & Murray, 2018, p. 7). Hence, leadership clearly becomes contingent upon the code writers and the semi-autonomous operation of (particularly machine learning) algorithms.

Definitely, the agency of individuals, both aspiring leaders and their followers, tends to be further complicated by their personal dependence on algorithmic infrastructure not only for Ignas KALPOKAS 135 their choices but also for the development of the aptitudes, ideas, and affective proclivities that give rise to choices pertaining to leadership and followership. That, in turn, leads some to even postulate the coming of ‘infrastructural subjectivation’, i.e. the establishment of ‘a set of relationships that mobilize and aggregate users and non-users with non-human data points’, giving rise to ‘a data economy which is no longer constrained or otherwise limited to a person’ (Langlois & Elmer, 2019, p. 238). Clearly, to talk of meaningful choice in this environment is hardly possible, particularly as ‘the user is fed personalized findings which functionally determines one’s windows on the info-world’ (Boler & Davis, 2018, p. 83). Effectively, the person is torn into pieces, i.e. elements and sets of data that are assembled, reassembled, and disassembled as necessary (Lazzarato, 2014, p. 27). That applies to the leaders and the followers alike: not only every follower is turned to analysable data that informs how to nudge them most efficiently but also the leader and their communication is dissected into minute details and shaped in accordance with task-specific aims and in line with the predicted consequences of every specific act.

It is clearly the element of decision and choice, not only on behalf of the audience but also on behalf of the aspiring leaders that unavoidably becomes problematised in an algorithmic environment. Crucially, the question becomes whether we can still talk of a human decision, individual or collective, or is it more about decisions and outcomes being chosen for humans within the meshwork of humans, data, algorithms, and digital technologies. Effectively, then, we encounter a two-tier world, comprised of ‘a frontend (the world we see and navigate) and a backend (the largely invisible computational architecture that sustains and informs the frontend)’ (Hildebrand, 2016, p. 5). Therefore, the world can no longer be conceived as passive – it is, instead, acting underneath the surface, sustaining the interface with which we interact (Choat, 2018, p. 1030). To that effect, agency becomes dissolved within the algorithmic structure of everyday, weaved into the fabric or data-algorithm-world relations.

Moreover, the self ultimately becomes disentangled from the physical body and, instead, ‘becomes conceivable as an assemblage – a distributed, networked self that constantly emerges at various intersections between humans, non-humans, objects, materials and energy flows’, thereby rendering identities ‘fluid, hybrid and constantly evolving’, inconceivable without their broader algorithmically animated assemblages (Pötzsch, 2018, p. 3314). Acknowledging this shift would also necessitate ‘overcoming the ontological, epistemological, and ethical coordinates of anthropocentrism’ focusing, instead, on ‘the relationship between human and non-human’, i.e. engaging in a truly post-humanist study (Ferrante & Sartori, 2016, p. 177). Hence, instead of humans using the environment and their own creations in a merely 136 LEADERSHIP AND AGENCY IN ALGORITHMIC SOCIETY instrumental fashion, humans can only be seen as co-authors of interactions (Zatarain, 2017, p. 91). Hence, instead of projecting their leadership ambitions onto the environment, humans (as sources as well as nodes within the utilisation of data) become parts of a larger, more-than- human, agglomeration. Leadership, therefore, again seen as relational, conceivable only in relation to the aspiring leaders, their target audiences, data intermediaries, and the algorithms themselves, only emerging from the interrelationship between humans and their (mostly technological) environment.

Clearly, then, instead of sticking with either of the more clear-cut alternatives indicated above, the agency of leadership must be seen as embedded in assemblages composed of both the social and the technical elements that simply cannot be reduced to mere constituent parts– in effect, leadership becomes relational and performative (see, generally, Bucher, 2018, p. 50). Leadership is based on performance in both senses of the word: both as an act of staging a show, a play, or any other type of entertainment and as an action of carrying out a given function. It is performative in the latter sense because such leadership is a constant process of pulling publics together and directing them and performative in the former sense as necessarily based on staged entertainment that attracts and retains attention in a highly competitive and attention-scarce environment. This is why leaders beyond institutional confines and not fitting the prevalent mould (i.e. so-called ‘anti-systemic’ leaders) tend to perform well: they can perform a personally connective function while automatically standing out by almost by definition performing against the grain.

The focus on leadership as performance within diverse agglomerations both builds upon and reframes the arguments of the alleged leaderlessness of contemporary political action, the connective dimension of leadership activity, and datafication and algorithmisation of mobilisation. The agglomerated (and agglomerative) performance focus integrates these perspectives to give a more balanced account of factors both hindering and enabling leadership in today’s world. Nevertheless, the key takeaway should be the dissolution of agency of both the aspiring leaders and the audiences within the broader agglomerations that are, fundamentally, more-than-human. Hence, leadership in a digital age is truly a qualitatively new phenomenon that cannot be fully pinned to persons engaging in leadership-focused performance. As a result, such a shift of agency should also imply a necessity to rethink the broader concepts of politics and public action as well as of group dynamics within any entity – these should be the focus of future research. Ignas KALPOKAS 137

7. Conclusion

Leadership has undergone significant change in the face of digitisation. First, it might seem to have been dislodged from its privileged position by the connective empowerment of ordinary individuals that can mobilise bypassing traditional movements, parties, and other entities. Simultaneously, though, the connective work of aspiring leaders has been simplified by the availability of data and their algorithmic analysis which offer ways to understand the target audience in great detail and refine audience-specific campaigns that individuals are simply bound to fall for. Meanwhile, both digital empowerment and the ever-growing expectation that any communicators will tailor and target their messages in increasingly granular detail have triggered the formation of a me-centric attitude of audiences, necessitating intuitive affective mobilisation. Hence, leadership becomes non-stop performance in which aspiring leaders constantly compete to audience attention. Finally, there is the issue of agency: as the proper domain of analysis becomes agglomerations composed of human and non-human actors, including algorithms, it is unclear which element is the active mover. The answer is that they all are, in their own distinct ways that come together within the performance of leadership.

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CHAPTER 7

DIGITAL INNOVATIVENESS OF SUCCESSORS IN SMALLER FAMILY BUSINESS

Marina LETONJA1

1Assistant Professor, DOBA Business School, Maribor, Slovenia e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.07

ABSTRACT Family businesses represent the majority of companies in Slovenia and as well in the EU. Their contribution to GDP and employment is very important - in Slovenia, they create up to 69 % of total sales revenues and to 70 % of all employment (EY, 2015). Most smaller family businesses are still owned by the generation of their founders and are facing the transition of management and/or ownership to the next generation. Succession is one of the most researched fields of family business while innovativativeness of family businesses, or of founders or succesors remains unexplored. In order for the succession process to lead to longterm sustainability of family businesses, the succession process must be timely and well planned, the potential successor(s) must be carefully selected and prepared for taking the batton from their predecessor. The successors taking responsibility for managing further operations and growth of family businesses must understand the importance of innovativation for ensuring long-term competitiveness and sustaining a competitive edge for their companies and products. It is not enough that the founders were innovative, nowadays it is important that their successors are also innovative and consequently their companies are innovative as well. Facing the challenges of digitization, smaller family firms have to adopt digital solutions into their daily practice. Are the successors ready for it? Keywords: Family business, succession, innovativeness, digital innovation 142 DIGITAL INNOVATIVENESS OF SUCCESSORS IN SMALLER FAMILY BUSINESS

1. Family Business and its Importance for the Economy

What is a family business (FB)? There is no uniform definition of a family business which would be widely applicable in all possible areas from public to political debates, legal regulations, as a benchmark for support services, to obtain statistical data and academic research, which is confirmed by many different authors, also by Mandl (2008). The absence of a uniform FB definition also leads to other problems, with the exception of the lack of reliable FB data in national economies. For this reason, the European Union (EU) Expert Commission has developed a FB definition that would allow statistics by sector (eg. FB contribution to employment, total FB revenues), comparable between countries, and recommendations for its application in all EU Member States (Mandl, 2008): “most decision making rights belong to the natural person who set up the company or they belong to a natural person who has acquired a share of the capital in a company, or it belongs to their spouses, parents, children or direct heirs of children; most of the decision-making rights are direct or indirect; at least one member of the family is formally involved in the management and leadership of the company; if a company is listed at the stock exchange, it meets the FB definition, if the person who founded or acquired the company or their families or descendants own 25% of the decision- making rights from their participation in the company’s capital.”

Glas (2003), Vadnjal (2005), Lovšin Kozina (2006) and Llach and Nordquist (2010) identified FB on the basis of an entrepreneur’s statement that the company is a family business, thus following Birley (2001). This definition is also used in our contribution.

The FBs have some advantages over non-family businesses (Morris, Williams, Allen, & Avila, 1997): a long-term perspective, a strong commitment to the company, a personal and positive motivational work environment, dedicated employees. Pistrui, Welsh and Roberts (1997) note that FBs in the socio-economic transition scenarios have the following obvious advantages: they have the support of the family network, which represents a source of key support services, including funding sources, business contacts, personal relationships, and human resources; they are better equipped to take risks, which is essential in transitional environments and are flexible. Morris et al. (1997) identify weaknesses of the FBs, such as nepotism, family conflicts, succession problems, and overlapping of family and business interests. According to Howorth, Rose and Hamilton (2006, as cited in Letonja, 2016), a variety of FBs and their behavior are opening up important and diverse areas of research that overlap with research on entrepreneurship. Marina LETONJA 143

It is meaningful and necessary to deepen the knowledge about smaller FBs in Slovenia, which as a former socialist state, is one of the most developed European transition states. In Slovenia there were specific conditions of transition from socialist to market economy; the tradition of FBs existed mainly in the craft sector (Duh, 2003), even before the 1st and 2nd World War; social and economic changes since its independence enabled the re-birth of entrepreneurship and the development of FBs (European Commission, 2010); now the legal basis for the development of private FBs is in the Companies Law (2009) and Craft Law (2004). FBs are not only important because of their role in the economy, but especially because of their attitude towards local communities, the long-term stability they bring to these environments, the responsibilities that they feel as owners and their values. The economic crisis may be the right moment for the FBs to prove the significance of values they have always betrayed (Mandl, 2008).

FBs in Slovenia are mainly micro and small companies with less than 50 employees (95%), total yearly revenues of €4 million or less (87%), are more than 20 years old (74%) and operate in various industries. The most important of these are retail and wholesale trade (19%), construction (19%) and the manufacturing of industrial goods (17%), with other industries also well- represented (EY, 2015).

FBs are typically led by the first (58%) or second (37%) generation, and only 5% are led by a third or younger generation. Since privately owned businesses have been a possibility only since the market economy was introduced in the early 1990s, this makes the third or younger generation owners much less common. Interestingly, this is in line with the average for Western Europe and North America, where usually less than 10% of FBs survive through a third generation. From the 1950s until the end of communism, however, entrepreneurial craftsmanship was allowed. Many craft manufacturers grew into modern industrial middle- sized companies with more than 30 years of operation (EY, 2015).

FBs represent a significant contribution to sales, added value, and employment to the Slovenian economy. The average family business had €2.54 million revenues, €0.77 million added value, and 20 employees (EY, 2015).

2. Successors in Family Businesses and Long-term Survival

FB’s success depends on the successful transfer of management, leadership, and ownership (Duh, Tominc, & Rebernik, 2007). Several studies find that only 30% of FBs survive the transfer to the next generation, and many companies fail quickly after it is taken over by the 144 DIGITAL INNOVATIVENESS OF SUCCESSORS IN SMALLER FAMILY BUSINESS second generation (Morris et al., 1997; Sharma, Chrisman, & Chua, 2003). Unsuccessful succession is a serious problem for the FBs, their employees, and for advancement of the economy. Intergenerational succession is crucial in a FB’s life cycle and as such is at the heart of research interest. Howorth et al. (2006, as cited in Letonja, 2016) argue that transfer of entrepreneurial learning among family members and revitalization of the entrepreneurial spirit through transfer of ownership, management, and leadership enable valuable lessons in entrepreneurial research.

For long term survival of FBs it is crucial that succeeding generations do not take only a managerial role in the company but that they absorb the tacit knowledge of their predecessors as well as develop the necessary entrepreneurialism, entrepreneurial skills, and understand the importance of a continuous innovation process for longevity of the FB.

3. Innovativeness

Innovativeness refers to the ability of the company to innovate; it introduces new processes or ideas into an organization. Innovativeness is often used alternately with the term “innovation” (Wang & Ahmed, 2004) and “Innovation Orientation” (Siguaw, Simpson, & Enz, 2006). This is despite the general agreement in the literature that innovativeness is not the same as innovation, but is the precursor of innovation and represents the ability of the company to innovate (Hult, Hurley, & Knight, 2004). According to Lynch, Walsh and Harrington (2010), innovativeness can be viewed as a strategic and competitive innovation orientation of the company, and innovation as a rudder used by the company in order to exploit its competitive advantages. Such a way of perceiving allows a vigorous mental image of the input state (innovativeness) and output (innovation) (Manu, 1992). In other words, unlike innovations, innovativeness is not the end, but a means to get to the end and is an “idiosyncratic view that captures the important difference between innovativeness and innovation” (Menguc & Auch, 2006, p. 65, summarized by Lynch et al., 2010).

According to Lynch et al. (2010), in the literature on innovation, the authors Siguaw et al. (2006) and Avlonitis, Papastathopoulou and Gounaris (2001) argue that the confusion surrounding the construct of innovativeness is contributed to the fact that many authors combine predecessors that help shape innovativeness with the concept of innovativeness of the company as such. Midgley and Dowling (1978, as cited in Letonja, 2016) wrote that most researchers failed to recognize that innovativeness is a self-contained construct, which should not be used as a synonym for innovation or as preliminary elements that are necessary for the innovativeness of the company. The absence of a clear and uniform definition of concept and Marina LETONJA 145 theory leads to serious operational problems and measurement problems (eg. one-dimensional versus multi-dimensional).

In continuation, we summarize Lynch et al. (2010), who reviewed and compiled various publications and definitions of innovativeness: “Willingness to change” (Hurt, Joseph, & Cook, 1977, as cited in Letonja, 2016); “Inborn personality traits” (Midgley & Dowling, 1978, as cited in Letonja, 2016); “Relationship and behavior” (Goldsmith & Hofacker, 1991, as cited in Letonja, 2016); “Innovativeness reflects a behavioral change in response to an impulse” (Stamboulis & Skyannis, 2003; Hjalager, 1997, as cited in Letonja, 2016); “Openness of the mind, entrepreneurship, readiness to change, the ability to innovate or to be creative” (Zaltman, Duncan, & Holbek, 1973; Bethon et al., 1999, as cited in Letonja, 2016); “The purpose of the company is to be innovative” (Kundu & Katz, 2003, as cited in Letonja, 2016); ”The ability of the company to introduce new processes, products, or ideas into a company” (Hult et al., 2004); “Innovativeness consists of a technological and behavioral dimension that identifies both the technological capacity and the behavioral readiness and dedication of the company to innovate” (Avlonitis et al., 2001); “Concept of company’s creativity” (Amabile, 1997; as cited in Letonja, 2016); “Inclination, responsiveness, and acceptance of ideas deriving from a general approach to business” (Menguc & Auch, 2006, p. 66, as cited in Letonja, 2016); “Generalized readiness to follow new paths and be creative” (Marcati et al., 2008, as cited in Letonja, 2016); “Is related to the concept of risk” (Cowart et al., 2007, as cited in Letonja, 2016). In the literature, we also found the following definitions of innovativeness: “Purposefull introduction and use within the function, group or organization of ideas, processes, products, or processes, new to relevant acquired units designed to significantly improve the function of a function, group, organization, or wider community” (West & Farr, 1989, as cited in Letonja, 2016); “The company’s aspiration to new ideas, novelties, experiments and creative processes that can be realized in new products, services, technological processes; although innovation can vary in the degree of radicality, innovativeness reflects, in essence, willingness to rise above the existing level of technologies and practices” (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996, as cited in Letonja, 2016); “Take advantage of opportunities and new ideas in a way that benefits the company or organization; can mean a purely new and radical idea, a further improvement of a product, service or process, a new way of using an existing product, service or process” (Tidd, Bessant, & Pavitt, 2005, as cited in Letonja, 2016); “Innovativeness is reflected in creative processes, testing new ideas, technologies that can lead to new production processes and result in the development of new products and services for existing and new markets” (Keh, Nguyen, & Ng, 2007, summarized by Vidic and cited in Letonja, 2016). 146 DIGITAL INNOVATIVENESS OF SUCCESSORS IN SMALLER FAMILY BUSINESS

All these definitions of innovativeness have something in common; at least five key dimensions stand out (Lynch et al., 2010): creativity, openness to new ideas, the purpose to innovate, risk readiness, and technological innovation capability.

3.1. Innovation Capacity of an Individual

Innovation capacity can be measured at the individual and corporate level (Angehrn, Nabeth, & Roda, 2001; Raava, 2007, summarized by Aulawi, Suryadi, & Rajesri, 2009, as cited in Letonja, 2016). The concept of innovation capacity was introduced by Suárez- Villa (1990, summarized by Natario, Couto, Tiago, & Braga, 2011) in order to measure the importance of inventions and the potential for innovation (of the nation). It emerged as a meta concept to recognize the real and potential ability of the system to convert knowledge into innovation, which influences long-term economic growth and the creation of well-being (Schiuma & Lerro, 2008, summarized by Natario et al., 2011).

The individual’s innovative capacity is the ability to develop new products that can meet market needs; to use better technical and technological processes for these products; develop and adapt new products and technological processes in the future; and respond to unpredictable activities in the field of technical and technological changes and the unpredictable opportunities created by competitors (Ussahawanitchahit, 2007, summarized by Aulawi et al., 2009, as cited in Letonja, 2016). Tang (1999, as cited in Letonja, 2016) believes that knowledge and skills form the basis of the ability to innovate - knowledge related to domain and skills related to creativity.

Lin (2007), Liao, Fei and Chen (2007) and Liebowitz (2002) (summarized by Aulawi et al., 2009, as cited in Letonja, 2016) emphasize the importance of sharing knowledge for the development of an individual’s innovation capacity. A company that encourages its employees to contribute knowledge has more opportunities for employees to develop new ideas, which supports innovation ability. Therefore, willingness to share and accept knowledge increases the individual’s ability to innovate.

In FBs, founders have important tacit and experiential knowledge and skills, which they transfer in different ways to their successors as well as (limited) to other employees. This influences the development of the innovation capacity of successors, as well as the development of the innovative capacity of employees in the smaller FBs (note by the author). Marina LETONJA 147

3.2. Innovation Capacity of the Company/Corporate Innovation Capacity

The ability to innovate is one of the most important factors affecting a company’s business operations (eg. Hurley & Hult, 1998; Schumpeter, 1934). The innovation capacity of a company is its ability to mobilize the knowledge that employees have in the company (Kogut & Zander, 1992) and combine it with new knowledge that results in a product and/or a process innovation (Cakar & Ertuerk, 2010). According to a Resource Based View (RBV), innovation capacities as a source of competitive advantage are deeply rooted in the context of an organization, and it is difficult to accurately define and imitate them (Nonaka, 1994, as cited in Vidic, 2012).

A lot of research on a company’s innovation capacities was published in literature on the diffusion of innovation (Rogers, 1995). A company must be innovative to survive in a volatile environment (Johnson, Meyer, Berkowitz, Ethington, & Miller, 1997). Innovation capacity is the most important determinant of a company’s business operations (Mone, McKinley, & Barker, 1998; Cooper & Kleinschmidt 1987, summarized by Cavusgil, Tarner, Calantone, & Zhao, 2003) and a company must be innovative to gain competitive advantage and survive (Li & Calantone, 1998). This finding is supported by several empirical studies (Cooper, 2000; Gatignon, & Xuereb, 1997, summarized by Cavusgil et al., 2003; Cooper & Kleinschmidt, 1987; Rogers, 1983; 1995). Avlonitis and co-authors (1994) argue that it is not enough for a company to demonstrate behavioral readiness, commitment, and strategic intention to innovate and take on risk (i.e., willingness and dedication); a company must have the necessary skills to innovate. Hurley and Hult (1998, p. 4) understand innovation capacity as “the ability of a company to successfully adopt or realize new ideas, processes, or products”. Later, Hurley, Hult and Knight (2004) deal with innovation capacity as a “cultural predecessor” that provides social capital and thus facilitates innovative behavior. The ability to innovate can be defined as a company’s strategic flexibility for innovation at a company level; this requires the necessary technological and managerial capabilities for a flexible market response (Gilbert, 2007, as cited in Letonja, 2016). Utterback (1979) estimates that more flexible companies (having a more flattering organizational structure) are better innovators than rigidly structured companies. Paleo and Wijnberg (2008) note that by presenting innovativeness in terms of innovation capacity, researchers essentially offer a method for understanding how to create innovative companies (eg. Hurley et al., 2004). Lynch et al. (2010) note that it is best to understand the innovation capacity of a company as its ability to potentially produce innovation; this dimension is influenced by the 148 DIGITAL INNOVATIVENESS OF SUCCESSORS IN SMALLER FAMILY BUSINESS organizational structure of the company. Innovativeness is therefore composed of the ability to innovate, with skills and knowledge needed to readily take advantage of competitors, offered by market opportunities.

Innovation skills are critical to achieving better innovation performance of a company (Drucker, 1990, summarized by Cavusgil et al., 2003). A company with a high level of innovation is usually using a knowledge transfer method of learning by doing, which prevents competitors from accessing this knowledge in the market and imitation of knowledge is more difficult. Problems with imitation of knowledge impair the tacit R & D component; namely, the (tacit - note of the author) characteristics of a company’s developmental and research capabilities enable it to have a better R & D capability and success in innovation programs (Cavusgil et al., 2003).Tacit knowledge and its transfer is critical to the innovation capacity of a company, especially of smaller FBs (note by the author).

4. Innovativeness of family business

4.1. Inovativeness of the Company/Corporate Innovativeness

Lynch et al. (2010) defined a company’s innovativeness with the following words: “Innovativeness of the company is in the company expanded mindset and the attitude to innovation that all companies have to a certain extent; it consists of a culture of readiness, inclination, acceptance, market responsiveness, dedication, purpose, and technical and technological capabilities to deal with risky behavior and quickly incorporate changes in business practices through (early) creation and/or accepting of new ideas, making it innovate easier and brings competitive advantages”.

An innovative company has many features that can be classified into two main categories of skills (EU, 1995):

• strategic skills: long-term orientation; ability to identify and predict market trends; readiness and ability to collect, process and assimilate technological and economic information;

• organizational skills: a sense of and risk management; internal cooperation between different departments in the company, and external cooperation in public research, consulting, with customers and suppliers; integrating the entire company into the processes of change and investment in human resources. Marina LETONJA 149

Innovativeness is the ability of a company or an individual to innovate (Hult et al., 2004), is the result of innovation capacity and is reflected in innovation (Keh et al., 2007; Manu, 1992). At the same time, we find that when we study the innovativeness of an individual, for example, an entrepreneur, this refers only to him, to his engagement in a company and can be understood as an input to that company. On the contrary, when we study the innovativeness of a company, it relates to the whole company, its products, processes, and services. Innovativeness of an entrepreneur plays an important role in a company, but they are not necessary - for example, an entrepreneur is not innovative, but is open to innovation; therefore, for example, employees in a company are innovative and consequently the company is innovative. Innovativeness is understood in this case as a company’s output.

5. Innovativeness of Successors

5.1. Inovativeness of an Individual

Innovativeness is based on knowledge; a new way of doing things must be based on a new way of looking at things (Marcati, Guido, & Peluso, 2008). Hurt et al. (1977) wrote the definition of innovation, which refers to an individual, rather than a company; Hurt in Teigen (1977) understand innovativeness as a level to which an individual, in comparison with others in the social system, adopts relatively early something new. Kim (1997, as cited in Letonja, 2016) and Lall (1992, as cited in Letonja, 2016) defined innovativeness as “the skills and knowledge needed to effectively absorb, master and improve existing and create new technologies, products and processes”, which we understand as a definition, also referring to the level of an individual. Innovativeness is also considered a component of human personality. There are two different constructs - general and specific innovativeness (Kirton, 2003; Midgley & Dowling, 1993, summarized by Marcati et al., 2008, as cited in Letonja, 2016). General innovativeness refers to the openness and creativity of an individual, to their readiness to follow new paths and a specific level of creativity in cognitive style - that is the way in which individuals are mentally processing information, deciding, and solving problems. Specific innovativeness, however, refers to the premise of being the first to adapt innovations in a specific field (Goldsmith & Hofacker, 1991, summarized by Marcati et al., 2008). Verhees and Meulenberg (2004, as cited in Grundstroem, Oeberg, & Roennbaeck, 2011) interpret innovativeness as a willingness of the owner of a company to obtain information on innovations and adapt them both to suppliers’and customers’ markets, thus portraying innovativeness as a personal characteristic of creativity and conscious decisions about the level of openness to new ideas. The authors also derive from the findings of Kirton (1976, 150 DIGITAL INNOVATIVENESS OF SUCCESSORS IN SMALLER FAMILY BUSINESS as cited in Verhees & Meulenberg, 2004) that the kind of creativity and decision-making is very individual and varies from adaptive to innovative. Adapters do things better within the accepted (given) frames of thinking, and innovators prefer to do things differently because they redefine the problem and they move from established patterns and frames.

6. Innovation

The word innovation comes from the Latin term innovātiōn, meaning novelty or changing existing (Dictionary, 2016, as cited in Letonja, 2016). An innovation or novelty, a new phenomenon, can be a new idea, a new manufacturing or technological process, a new product or an object with new features. Innovation differs from invention in commercialization. The innovation is therefore successfully adopted on the market. Innovation brings new, greater usefulness in the form of quality raising, lowering costs, raising company’s reputation, limiting competition, etc. (Wikipedia, 2015, as cited in Letonja, 2016). In 1971, the OECD published its broad and fairly realistic definition of innovation, but there are still attempts to limit the notion of innovation to technical and technological innovations, including international statistics. The definition of the OECD is: “Innovation is any novelty for which users feel it is useful in practice” (Mulej, 2011). In the Green Paper on Innovations (EU, 1995), innovation is defined as “synonymous for the successful production, assimilation and exploitation of innovations in the economic and social sphere.” It offers new solutions to problems and thus covers the needs of individuals as well as society.

Innovation is (EU, 1995):

• “Renovation and increase of the selection of products and services and related markets;

• Establishing new methods of production, procurement and distribution;

• Introduction of changes to management, work organization and

• Working conditions and skills of the workforce.

The official international definition of innovation does not cover only technology, but statistical guidelines in the Oslo manual - unlike its definition - cover only technologies: “Innovation is the renewal and expansion of a range of products and services and related markets; the establishment of new methods of production, procurement and distribution; introduction of changes in management, working organization and working conditions and labor capabilities” (EU, 2000, as cited in Letonja, 2016). Marina LETONJA 151

Innovation is a new benefit from a new idea, which is created (commercially) comprehensively. According to other related concepts, creativity and entrepreneurship are an element of the innovation process (Amabile, 1988; Anderson & King, 1993; Kanter, 1988, as cited in Letonja, 2016), while innovation invention, and diffussion processes are placed under the umbrella of organizational and cultural change (King & Anderson, 1995); the concept of “change” is too broad, since innovation is only a useful part of the changes, and should be taken as such into account by users.

In continuation, we list a number of different definitions of innovation. Thompson (1965, as cited in Letonja, 2016) defines innovation as “generating, accepting and implementing new ideas, processes, products, or services”. Zaltman et al. (1973, as cited in Letonja, 2016) and Rogers (1983; 1995; 2003, as cited in Letonja, 2016) define innovation as an “idea, practice, or something that the user perceives as a novelty”. Drucker (1985) defines innovation as a “tool of entrepreneurs to exploit the change as an opportunity”; it is a “specific instrument of entrepreneurship”; “by innovation we gain and make resources”; Trommsdorff and Schneider (1990, as cited in Letonja, 2016) define innovation as “the development of an invention into a commercial product”; Kings and Anderson (1995, as cited in Letonja, 2016) write that something is labeled as an innovation, “it must be a novelty, it must have tangible quality, the result of a deliberate rather than a random operation, it must be directed towards profit generation and different from routine changes.” Further definitions of innovation are: “successful use of creative ideas in the organization” (Schaper & Volery, 2004, as cited in Letonja, 2016); “to be more than an idea, it is a potential solver of a problem that immediately responds to the demands of the user” (Kuratko & Hodgets, 2004, as cited in Letonja, 2016); “innovation arises from an invention when it is developed to its usefulness, and when it is also accepted by customers, purchased and used, and enables the author, the manufacturer and the seller to earn a profit, because it is considered useful” (Mulej & Ženko, 2004); “the process through which businesses identify new opportunities for change, turn them into reality and create value from them” (Tidd & Bessant, 2009); according to Shahid (2009, as cited in Letonja, 2016), innovation derives from the creative use of knowledge and has two important components: creativity (artistic, scientific and other) and stock of knowledge.

The central element of innovation definitions is “novelty”, but the scope of “novelties” in the literature was treated inconsistently. As already noted, by definition, the EU in the Green Paper on Innovations (EU, 1995) defines innovation as the novelty that at least one user, in his experience, considers a useful novelty. Whether innovation is new from the point of view of authorship for someone who, as a user, takes it over and adapts it (“innovation adopter”) 152 DIGITAL INNOVATIVENESS OF SUCCESSORS IN SMALLER FAMILY BUSINESS or it is something new for one organization, for most organizations in a total number of organizations, or for the whole world - this reflects significantly different ranges of “novelty”. It is not clear in the literature whether “novelty” refers to one or more of these dimensions, or it is assumed that “novelty” for an organization is equivalent of “new to the world” (Damanpour, 1991; Damanpour & Gopalakrishnan, 1998; Kimberly & Evanisko, 1981; Knight, 1967; Li & Atuahene-Gima, 2001, as cited in Letonja, 2016). Rogers (2003, as cited in Letonja, 2016) says that new in innovation does not necessarily involve new knowledge. Someone may have been acquainted with an innovation for some time, but had not taken a position on it, or had not accepted or rejected it. A novelty in innovation can be expressed in terms of knowledge, a belief or decision to accept innovation.

The notion of innovation is ambiguous: in everyday language, both are marked - the process and its result (EU, 1995). According to a definition proposed by the OECD in the Frascati Manual, it involves transforming an idea into a market product or service, a new or improved production or distribution process, or a new social service method. The term refers to the point of view of the process. On the other hand, when the concept of innovation refers to a new or improved product, equipment, or service that is successful on the market, focus is on the outcome of the process. This ambiguity can lead to confusion: when we talk about dissemination of innovation, are we talking about dissemination of the process, i.e. methods and practices that enable innovation, or are we talking about dissemination of results, i.e. new products? In the first case, dealing with the notion (innovation process), the emphasis is on the way in which the different stages lead to it (creativity, marketing, R & D, design, production and distribution) innovations are formed and produced. In the second case (the result of innovation), emphasis is placed on a new product, process, or service. We distinguish between radical innovations or breakthroughs and progressive innovations that change products, processes, or services through successive improvements (EU, 1995).

Opinions are therefore very diverse. We will remain by the definition of the OECD and the EU: “innovation is the novelty of any content that users consider to be the source of their new benefits”; it is therefore up to users, not authors, to decide what innovation is and what is an unsuccessful invention innovation diffusion process.

6.1. Digital Innovation

Innovation allows an organization or a company to maintain a competitive advantage. By combining different skills, an extensive and active search for opportunities creates new opportunities (Tidd et al., 2005). Innovation is a key competitive activity in the Marina LETONJA 153 knowledge-based global economy (Ganzaroli, Fiscato, & Pilotti, 2006). The development of new products, the introduction of improvements, is very important for the survival of companies in the global competitive world. More than production and the ability to produce at the lowest cost, it is important that the next generation of entrepreneurs in smaller FBs have an entrepreneurial education, sufficient knowledge and values, culture, ethics, and norms for the innovation invention diffusion processes. The relationship between the next generation and innovation in FB is very interesting (Ganzaroli et al., 2006).

Talking about innovation and especially digital innovation we have to mention the concept of Industry 4.0. The fourth industrial revolution refers to a bundle of partly related digital technologies that will bring major disruptions to manufacturing industries enabling major business improvements in productivity and shaping current business models (Kagermann, Wahlster, & Helbig, 2013, as cited in Letonja, 2016). Which industries are within the scope of Industry 4.0? Technologies such as the industrial internet of things, cloud computing, cybersecurity, Big data and analytics, simulation, horizontal and vertical integration, additive manufacturing, advanced manufacturing solutions, and augmented and virtual reality are within its scope.

Most smaller companies in most economies are family businesses. They represent the backbone of these economies. These FBs need support in dealing with the challenges that Industry 4.0 introduces. They have to exploit digital technologies in products and/or in processes in order not to be driven out of markets by more advanced competitors, their products becoming commoditized or being relegated to the role of OEM (original equipment manufacturer) supplier, with system integrators or who manage the data platform in control (Porter & Heppelmann, 2014). The key challenges that smaller FBs are exposed to in the context of industry 4.0 are existing law digitalization levels, limited financial resources, and limited managerial resources (Ricci, Battaglia, & Neirotti, 2019).

According to Lund (2015) digitization, i.e. the adoption and socio-technical organization of digitized artifacts has a profound impact on today’s society. Even if digitization of analogue artifacts, i.e. when physical products are equipped with digital capabilities, has been a cumulative trend for a decade or more, the impact is truly evident today. Some examples of digitized artifacts aimed at consumer markets are the “connected” car, the digitized television set, and in the near future, digitized IKEA furniture. These digital innovations provide new features such as media on demand and ubiquitous services available on multiple platforms.

We can put digital innovation in context with the help of the following cases that we summarized by Nylen and Holmstrom (2015): “Looking back, the first online shopping 154 DIGITAL INNOVATIVENESS OF SUCCESSORS IN SMALLER FAMILY BUSINESS websites were often poor translations of printed mail order catalogues. E-commerce has since evolved, expanding the frontiers of digital service innovation. Now, online retailers such as Amazon and Zappos offer more than convenience and cheaper products; by offering recommender systems as well as products at the far end of the long tail, they provide truly novel retail goods consumption. Online digital service innovation investments have also enabled traditional firms such as cab companies and grocery store chains to gain strategic competitive advantage. A new family of products is currently emerging as digital components are embedded in traditional products such as toothbrushes and heat pumps. Frequently referred to as ‘smart products,’ the embedded digital components enable firms to complement physical goods with online and mobile services that utilize the data generated. While the promises of smart products and ‘the Internet of things’ is hotly contested, it is predominantly discussed in the context of home appliances. However, smart products are also emerging in the context of industrial manufacturing equipment. Here, embedded digital capabilities enable real-time monitoring and service forecasting instead of scheduled servicing. The effects of digital innovation are particularly pervasive for firms that engage in information-based products that can be fully digitized. While the mainstream media industry is currently in the midst of such a restructuring process, it seems that the music industry has somewhat stabilized after a transformation that was ignited at the turn of the millennium: record labels had optimized their operations for selling one product—music records/CDs. To this end, pressing sound onto vinyl albums (later CDs) and then distributing copies was an efficient means of delivering music artists’ recorded work to the public from the 1940s onward. In the late 1990s, the emergence of peer-to-peer networks such as Napster and Kazaa confronted the music industry with unexpected challenges. When the audience wanted to listen to new music in novel ways, the industry’s somewhat closed approach to innovation was exposed. Although customers were moving in another direction, many major record labels continued to consider their core business the production and sale of music CDs. Historically, labels controlled their own value chain from end to end: from signing a new artist to distributing his or her music to record stores. Unwillingness to challenge this definition, along with certain insensitivity toward customers’ interest in MP3 files, hampered digital innovation. While the music industry effectively illustrates an information-based sector that failed to manage digital innovation, other, more firm-specific examples include the bankruptcy of book retailer Borders in 2011 and Kodak’s failure to re-orient its business as digital cameras emerged. We have, however, also seen how digital innovation can enable established firms to move into new domains. A classic case of such digital portfolio expansion is IBM’s shift in focus from hardware to software and services as PC diffusion accelerated in the early 1990s. Another example of Marina LETONJA 155 digital portfolio expansion is Apple effectively becoming a music distributor with iTunes. Along with new entrant Spotify, Apple contributed to energizing the business ecosystem in the music industry through digital service innovation. Although the Internet once seemed hopeless as an arena for paid content, Netflix rebutted such notions while invigorating the film and television industries. To this end, Netflix took digital service innovation a step further by not only distributing digital content, but also producing it. Going back to the music industry, additional links in the value chain were eventually reconfigured due to digital innovation; for example, software such as Garageband enables cheaper and highly mobile music production, while free-of-charge alternatives such as Soundcloud illustrate that iTunes and Spotify are not the only gateways”.

“Digital innovation is enabled by digital technology and digitization (Yoo, Lyytinen, & Boland, 2009, as cited in Lund, 2015) and refers to the embedding of digital computer and communication technology into a traditionally non-digital product” (Henfridsson, Yoo, & Svahn, 2009, as cited in Lund, 2015, p. 8).

“Digital innovation differs from other forms of innovation primarily due to the architecture and the generativity of digital technology (Yoo, Boland, Lyytinen, & Majchrzak, 2012; Yoo, Henfridsson, & Lyytinen, 2010a; Tilon, Lyytinen, & Sorensen, 2010, as cited in Lund, 2015). The architecture is modular and multilayered and due to standardized interfaces between the layers, it is possible to combine and reconfigure components to create digital innovations (Kallinikos, Aaltonen, & Marton, 2013, as cited in Lund, 2015). Layered characteristic of digital technology enables generativity which creates unbounded opportunities and features for digital innovations (Yoo et al., 2012, as cited in Lund, 2015). The architecture and the generativity also create challenges for how to organize digital innovation processes” (Svahn & Henfridsson, 2012, as cited in Lund, 2015, p. 8).

Digitization, i.e. the adoption and socio-technical organization of digitized artifacts must be introduced in the practice and daily operations of family businesses, as well smaller FBs in order for them to remain competitive in the long run.

Many smaller FBs in Slovenia are facing succession and the younger generation is taking over the management and/or ownership of smaller FBs and the question is: “do the successors of smaller FBs understand the importance of introducing digitalization in the processes in their companies in order they remain competitive and survive on the long run?” It is not enough that successors are innovative – it is more and more important that they and their FBs become digital innovators. 156 DIGITAL INNOVATIVENESS OF SUCCESSORS IN SMALLER FAMILY BUSINESS

The research question is: “Are the successors in smaller FBs introducing digital innovation in their companies and to what extent?”

7. Research Method

For the purpose of our contribution to the book Digital Siege, a qualitative research study was conducted. This approach was a suitable research approach due to the nature of the research question and field development level of the topic researched. A case study research methodology was used (e.g., Yin, 2003), which has been widely accepted in family business research (e.g., Chirico, 2008). We applied a multiple-case study approach since multiple cases “... permit replication logic where each case is viewed as an independent experiment that either confirms or does not the theoretical background and the new emerging insights” (Chirico, 2008, p. 435). There is no general agreement on the ideal number of cases so ten out of 30 cases were selected from the database of FBs which were involved in the research study in spring 2019. Case studies’ analysis was used to identify themes emerging from the data in relation to digital innovativeness of successors in smaller FBs.

The case studies included in the research are in three classes of micro, small, and medium-sized FBs, which employed from 0 to 249 employees. To avoid the danger that the sample would not be relevant, the first question asked was if the successors consider their company as a family business (Birley, 2001). Limitations of the sample were: founder of the FB is employed in a firm or is still active in the firm although already being retired; founder still owns a firm; next generation is involved in a firm. The author conducted personal interviews with successors on the researched question via Skype. Only hand-written minutes were taken and replies were transcribed immediately after the interview. Research was geographically limited to Slovenia.

8. Findings

The selected ten cases of smaller FBs were from typical sectors in the Slovenian SME landscape: production of metrology products and services, production of plastic products, production of joinery products, trading and machine building, personal services and trade, tourism, goldsmith, real estate agency, farmer’s tourism, and health tourism.

Case 1: Production of metrology products and services. They developed an innovative solution in the field of measurement systems. The system is the result of the knowledge and development of a team of experts from an accredited metrology laboratory that enables Marina LETONJA 157 measuring of various parameters. It enables automatic monitoring of temperature, relative humidity, pressure, pressure difference, air velocity and air flow, illumination, CO2 and volatile organic materials, pH and other parameters according to a user’s needs. It automatically protects processes and products and helps meet the regulations and standards in laboratories, industry, healthcare, warehouses, greenhouses, galleries, and transport. The main advantages of this innovative system solution are a continuous measurement and remote monitoring capability, which provides access to results of measurements collected in one place, and monitoring of real-time measurements. Using the system saves time, money, and excludes the possibility of human error that is always present in manual entries. In digitization, they see numerous advantages for metrology. Data is more accurate and quicker to access, since it is now stored in the cloud instead of “folders”. Digitization is present in the process of implementing their services. The confirmation of the latter represents an information system for the digitization and automation of a metrology laboratory, through which this company achieved a breakthrough to foreign markets. The introduction of an electronic certificate, which results in a paperless business, should also be pointed out. Upon completion of the procedure, the client receives a certificate in a PDF format, which is electronically signed within 24 hours. The image of the certificate is uniform in all countries. It is published in two languages, and the second language is adjusted to the partner’s voice field. In exceptional cases, an entire version with an additional third language on the certificate may be used. In the last ten years the company has, thanks to digitization, increased the number of metrological reviews 7.2 times (720%). Digital innovation for this FB was a result of the innovative work of the founder and one of his successors.

Case 2: Production of plastic products. Digitization in this FB is understood as a wider transformation of business based on a range of technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, big data analysis, and process automation. This transformation, in itself, generates new business changes - new market relationships and business models are in place. Digitization in this FB was started by digitalizing the mindset of all employes through comprehensive training. In addition to business processes that were directly related to production, they digitized other processes, including marketing, using all modern tools, which also meant social networks. The successor of this FB introduced digital innovation in the company and was also an active blogger. Digital innovations in the company are based on the successor’s ideas and developed as a team effort.

Case 3: Production of joinery. In the last five years, a paperless system was introduced at all levels of the company’s business, thus saving time and organization of the production process. 158 DIGITAL INNOVATIVENESS OF SUCCESSORS IN SMALLER FAMILY BUSINESS

The paperless system was present at all levels, from production planning, to procurement processes, order confirmation, and delivery to customers. Digitization reduced the purchasing department to only two employees, inventories decreased, delivery deadlines were shortened, automatic data flow between the company and suppliers was achieved, as well as between applications. Digital innovations in the FB’s processes were a result of innovative decisions and actions of the successor.

Case 4: Trading and maschine building. In this FB they emphasized that one of their priorities was digitization of business processes, which resulted in the reorganization of a trading company into a production-oriented company. They believed if communication at all levels (within the company, to customers and suppliers) took place without errors, procedures could be simplified, and processes could be accelerated. Since the successor actively entered the FB two years ago, they succeeded in getting a subsidy for introducing digitization into their business processes. Their latest achievement was an entirely online supported procurement system. Digital innovations in the FB were the result of a joint effort between one of the founders and the successor.

Case 5: Personal services and trade. Since the next generation took over management of this FB, digitization has made the organization of work and all processes much more transparent and easier to reach for their customers. The entire reservation system for personal services was digitized and this has contributed to the decrease of costs of personnel and other administrative costs. An online store for well known cosmetic brands was developed and introduced, thus increasing revenues from sales of cosmetics. All digital innovations were the result of one of the two successors.

Case 6: Tourism. Due to an economic crisis the number of overnight stays has decreased. The FB had to direct its operations to foreign markets. To do so, they had to make qualitative web page and promotional materials and connect with tourist agencies selling to tourists in foreign markets and already providing services entirely online. The results of going online and developing cooperation with tourist agencies has shown a higher number of foreign tourists replacing the decreasing number of domestic tourists. The digital innovation of processes in this FB were initiated by the successor of the family and implemented together with the founders.

Case 7: Goldsmith. This FB is unique in making jewelry with lace details. They have modernized their production process by introducing digital machines for engraving, making diamond effects, and casting but in spite of this modernization, they strongly believe that Marina LETONJA 159 creativity and art can not be replaced by any machine. This is why they employ more young and talented designers, who with their creativity and hand-made jewelry, will continue to offer customers the values that the founders have transferred to their successors - this is the details, originality and attention to customers. The successor of this FB was responsible for innovating the production technologies.

Case 8: A real estate agency. The company constantly finds new ways to reach new business solutions and success. The successors of this FB were constantly thinking ahead and looking for new ways to improve business operations and processes. They were aware of the need for digitalisation and implemented use of a new IKT, which can help them better in managing and improving the company’s business. This company was in the process of changing their internet page, which resulted in a number of significant improvements with several new programs, which will greatly help the FB in advertising, as well as in organizing working time, task allocation, and company management.

Case 9: Farmers tourism. This FB strived to be in line with trends, especially with regard to internet advertising. They were active on social networks, and the official web site was modern, enabling online booking, a voucher booklet, and the latest - virtual walks. The entrepreneur and his sons - successors were developing innovations to introduce simpler solutions into their organization. The company strived to make new, functional things from old things, which lead to cheaper solutions. Digital innovation was the result of joint efforts between the founder and successors.

Case 10: The founder of this FB was an innovator in the field of health tourism development; he and his partners were developing various types of joint advertising and market launch, they innovate based on monitoring technological development trends, investing in service improvement technologies. The successor is an innovator because as a younger generation he has brought many innovations related to digital and technological advancement. He introduced a passport scan instead of manual into the system, then carried out technical and security surveillance over all premises in and out of the business building to increase the safety of night-shift employees. He introduced a digital employee registration system for the purpose of working time records and a number of other innovations that facilitated employees’ work processes and accelerated total business. The founder knew how technological changes could affect a fundamental market transformation. The successor was more focused on products that ultimately bring higher profits to the existing services, and was aware that technological changes in existing services affects competitiveness. 160 DIGITAL INNOVATIVENESS OF SUCCESSORS IN SMALLER FAMILY BUSINESS

These ten cases demonstrate that smaller FBs in Slovenia paid attention to the introduction of digitization into their processes. The smaller FBs in Slovenia are aware that not introducing digital technologies into daily practice means they could disappear from the market.

The scope of digitization and digital innovation in smaller FBs depends on their financial and managerial capacities. Many of the smaller FBs participate in calls for the acquisition of funds for the introduction of digitization into their business as they do not have enough financial resources.

In many cases we can see that companies believe that they are digitized through their presence on internet via their web pages. But in other cases, we can see that smaller FBs understand what it means to be in line with the challenges of Industry 4.0 and having digital technologies introduced and implemented in their organizations and processes.

Digital transformation in smaller FBs starts with changing a mindset and a lot of training is needed for the successful implementation of digital innovation and of a complete digital transformation.

In the case studies presented in this chapter we can recognize a pattern, that digital innovations are linked to the presence of active successors in FBs. The younger generation is flexible, understands new technologies and their mindset is different from the mindset of the founding generation. They are more ready to take the risks connected with digital transformation as well as the adoption of digital technologies. But we learned that digital innovation is, in many cases, not only the result of digital innovativeness of the succesors but it is the joint effort of the founders and their successors and even of employees in smaller FBs.

Based on the findings of our research we can develop the following proposition:

“The successors in smaller FBs are introducing digital innovation in the FBs’ processes with regard to the financial capacities of their companies”.

9. Conclusions

The Deloitte survey on the next generation of FB leaders (Drevenšek, 2018) shows that many FBs in Slovenia do not have a fully-fledged digital strategy at this time; only 26% of respondents have a solid digital transformation strategy, a quarter have a strategy for the use of digital technologies, while 35% of respondents said that they adopted the digital strategy only recently. Almost 40% of respondents still lack a digital strategy or are only introducing or working on it. However, digital awareness of the next-generation family leaders is high, Marina LETONJA 161

“but other family members may not be so aware of the digitalization and opportunities that digital technologies bring.”

We can conclude on the basis of our qualitative research findings, the results of Deloitte’s survey in Slovenia are still valid. In most smaller FBs the successors understand the meaning of digital transformation and importance of introducing digital technologies into different areas of business operations to remain on the geographical maps of certain industries. In some of the cases digitization is already deeply rooted and in others only the first steps have been undertaken.

Adoption of digital technologies through digital innovation is a challenge which is faced by all smaller FBs and is a “must” in their struggle to survive in the highly competitive environments. Younger generations will face these challenges easier and with more flexibility and readiness for risk taking than older generations.

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DIGITAL SEIGE

CHAPTER 8

DIGITAL PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT

Murat MENGÜ1, Ezel TÜRK2

1Associate Professor, Istanbul Arel University, Communication Faculty, Department of New Media and Communication, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

2Research Assistant, Istanbul University Faculty of Communication, Department of Public Relations & Publicity, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.08

ABSTRACT The 21st century has witnessed the emergence of digital society in various parts of the world as a consequence of the increasing use of new communication and information technologies which have brought profound socio-economic changes into our lives. With the advent of computer technology, it has become possible to digitize almost everything. Change has always been a characteristic of human evolution but the speed at which these transformations have taken place has been unprecedented. Needless to say, various forms of traditional media have significantly been influenced by advanced innovations and it can easily be foreseen that this change will continue into the future. Throughout all these changes, perception management has had to be exercised in a more rigorous way. This study aims to provide an introduction to the topic of change and transformation in perception management in the light of digitalization, a topic which has already attracted much attention from scholars and researchers, particularly in the last decade. Keywords: Perception, digitalisation, perception management 166 DIGITAL PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT

1. The Concept of Perception and Perception Management

First we should provide a clear definition of perception. In general terms, perception is the way we notice or recognize things using our senses of sight, smell, hearing, and touch According to a more elaborate definition, perception is the “awareness of the elements of the environment through physical sensation” which indicates “a mental process, such as seeing, hearing, or smelling, resulting from the immediate external stimulation of a sense organ” (Collins Online Dictionary, 2021). Although we perceive the world around us with ease and enthusiasm, we do not directly know how this happens. It can often be difficult to think that any perception mechanism exists; most individuals are simply ‘given’ perceptions as obviously true facts about the world.

It is clear that the sensibility of all images has fallen fit to the demands of their being outlived and reproducing, and there are a number of ways in which senses have evolved. In this sense, the contact of human beings with the outer world occurs as a result of perception. According to Wade (2005), perception is not only the most effective mental activity, but also a completely remarkable one. Rather than supplying us with objective impressions of our surroundings, the function of perception is to provide an effective plan.

In evolutionary terms the function of perception is to enable us to interact with the objects in the world surrounding us. Perceptions guide behaviour. Vision is used to determine the location of objects with respect to the perceiver, so that they can be approached, grasped, cast aside, or avoided as appropriate for survival (Wade, 2005, p. 3).

As stated by Borghi (2005), fifty years of studies in cognitive technological know-how have demonstrated that the observation of cognition is essential for a systematic knowledge of human behaviour. A developing wide variety of researchers in the discipline are demonstrating that mental strategies together with remembering, questioning, and information language are primarily based on the bodily interactions that humans have with their environment. It should also be noted that cognitive systems arise from perception and movement. It is extremely vital for the embodied framework to demonstrate that cognition is grounded in bodily interactions with the environment. The manner in which human beings constitute and recognize the world round them is directly related to perception and action. Regarding the recent data, Borghi (2005) also emphasizes that even though “a direct non-semantic route to action might exist; interactions between perception, action, and knowledge are very limited and profound” (p. 22), thus they should be taken into consideration. Murat MENGÜ, Ezel TÜRK 167

Perception management signifies the domination of knowledge acquisition from the external world to boost the obtained perceptions. Agarwal (2009) defines perception as “a process by which individuals select, organize and interpret their sensory impressions so as to give meaning to their environment” (p. 1). As a sophisticated process, perception differs from one person to another. It should be emphasized that behavioural patterns of individuals are far more affected by their perception of reality than actual reality. A comparison between sensation and perception indicates that while sensation entails merely the reception of stimuli by means of sensory organs, perception encompasses the reception of unprocessed data from the senses and makes it pass through a cognition process that consists of filtration, modification and transformation phases. It is clear that individuals are constantly exposed to abundant stimuli; however, they only single out of some of them. “Learning, motivation and personality” are the main the factors that influence the tendencies in this selection process. Likewise, some external factors, such as intensity, size, contrast, repetition, motivation, novelty and familiarity” (Agarwal, 2009, pp. 1–2) also play a significant role in the selection process.

As a significant aspect of part of modern information warfare, perception management is a propaganda technique that is intended to modify the perceptions of a target audience. Having originated in the U.S. Military as part of their PSYOPS (Psychological Operations) program, this term began to describe how selective information is provided to a target audience to influence their emotions, incentive and unprejudiced reasoning for the purpose of creating a change in behaviour that is favourable to the sponsor (Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 2012). Likewise, perception management is specified by the U.S. Department of Defence, as a process which “combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations” (as cited in Brunner, 2013, p. 2).

Kenneth Eade (2016), the best-selling author of the Brent Marks Legal Thriller Series, quotes the definition of perception management by the United States Department of Defence as the “actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviours and official actions favourable to the originator’s objectives.” In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations, security, cover and deception and psychological operations.

At this point, a vital distinction between Perception Management and Psychological Operations (PSYOP) should be highlighted. While psychological operations indicate the 168 DIGITAL PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT implementation of various means of communication to “demoralize an enemy and encourage surrender” (p. 4), perception management incorporates psychological operation alongside “truth projection, operations security, cover and deception” to form it into a lot of extensive and across-the-board informational thought (Agarwal, 2009, p. 4).

The closest definition of Perception Management in the business sector has been provided by Chris Komisarjevsky, CEO of Burson Marsteller, as “a methodology which helps us while we work with our clients to go through a very systematic thoughtful process in order to be able to help our clients identify what resources they have, what their barriers for being successful are , and how we can use communications tools (internet, social media, TV etc.) to help them accomplish their objectives” (Osmani, 2019).

Initially the military, then the business world including marketing, brand management, advertising, and risk management followed by governance and politics along with leadership, psychology, journalism and even sports are the main areas where perception management is extensively practised.

Johansson and Ning Xiong (2003) convey that perception management can include the following:

• reasoning about information requests with respect to the underlying mission and situation;

• ranking the importance of various information requests and resolving the conflicts between them;

• real-time distribution and adaptation of perception tasks through, e.g., cooperation or negotiation among decision agents;

• management of other data acquisition resources, in addition to sensor devices, that can also support the perception process (e.g., in a command and control system, additional resources may include human observers or news agencies);

• planning of sensor external actions (e.g., controlling the motion of a mobile platform carrying sensors) to support the purpose of perception with increased scope and utility of gained information;

• pro-active deployment and planning of resources according to predicted situation tendency, to get first-time information of an event which is likely to happen in the upcoming period (p. 3). Murat MENGÜ, Ezel TÜRK 169

The increasing volume and detail of information captured by organizations using the likes of multimedia, social media, and the Internet are much likely to influence future job prospects as well as how the public perceives those organizations.

In the business world, perception management is the act that helps to put brands in positions that make them have advantages over their competitors. Perception management in business is all about convincing people to be customers and remain loyal customers. Marketers and branding experts frequently indulge in perception management, which allows them to create a positive climate for what they intend to sell. One of the greatest influencers of perception management is digitalization – digitization has made perception management highly effective and efficient. Undoubtedly, perception management and information warfare are very common in the present Digital Age. It is very common to the extent that it has become quite elusive to differentiate between facts and myths, as well as images and reality. This is where business leaders and astute marketers can come in and make sure that rational substance goes with story, and plausible narrative goes with branding. These leaders can deliver on the promise and make sure that reality correlates with the image, in order to elongate term value, sustainable organizations, and sustainable marketing campaigns. Goldstone, Feng, and Rogosky (2005) discuss that perception management has in time become a fancy phrase for assisting brands to gain advantage over their competitors. The time period traces its starting place to the US military, however, and it has since spread through commercial enterprise circles. Perception Management is now offered as a career via PR firms. Emphasizing the necessity of asking questions and getting answers from others in perception management Otara (2011) states that most leaders commonly do not acquire feedback very regularly and, in many instances, where it is given it is not in the most constructive manner. But, constructive remarks provide information that helps individuals recognise how they are doing.

According to Goldman (2004), deception and disinformation are important components of perception management in order to make the target audience or groups believe whatever any authority wants them to believe notwithstanding the truth or validity of the information being promoted. Perception management operations have become a mainstream part of information management procedures in a variety of modern organizations. The operations pertaining to perception management have been an integral part of information management procedures in several modern organizations. Goldman (2004) discusses that perception management can be executed both as part of a wider international public diplomacy initiative between governments and it can function as a means of public affairs communications between a 170 DIGITAL PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT government and its citizens. Many public relations firms provide perception management services to business clients by assisting them to shape the perceptions of stakeholders.

Waldbuesser and Komlósi (2015) put forth that the younger generations receive a lot of attention, enjoy a lot of freedom and thus could have the simplest possibilities of building their social networks through which they manage to strengthen their relations. The dwindling impact of regional/local ties on all examined generations by Waldbuesser and Komlósi may point toward the emergence of a new, technology-extensive tradition of interconnection and readiness to work freely in this network of connected entities. One should perceive and involve all members of the new digitalized data surroundings in a radically different manner than before.

Sanders (2014) asserts that state agencies all over the world have an extended-settled interest in belief superintendence. We can see that this falls unevenly into four categories: prizing the constancy from a suspect during interrogations, wiping memory or putting memories into the sub-consciousness so they cannot be retrieved without the fit techniques, the consummate physical and subjective check of a substance, and counteracting the perceptions of the common movement, publicizing and the shaping of events. Furthermore, Sanders assets that the mind control of individuals has been of particular interest to the U.K. and U.S. governments since as early as 1947 and in all likeness, much earlier than that. There are several valid techniques that have been used since the 1940s, consisting of the administration of drugs, pain, hypnotism and psychotropic machinery. One should only look at the inquiry methods practised in prisons across the world to realise that these techniques are still being used.

“…both the U.K. and U.S. governments knowingly employed unethical and illegal testing methods on unwitting civilians, in order to achieve their ends. This monstrous and wide- ranging human experimentation was often carried out by the very cream of the medical and psychological profession. The testimonies of various survivors of the whims of these ‘professionals’ gives support to the documented evidence” (Sanders, 2014, p. 215).

It can easily be seen that Sanders highlights many deviations, not to say abnormalities, related to the mind manipulation phenomena and the way it has impacted societies. For example, some experimental packages might also very well be related to different issues and tragedies which have been plaguing our world. Knowledge management entails human expertise, which is now and again known as ‘tacit expertise’. It is quite clear that in the digital environment, since records can be easily copied and re-processed, the internet can, in spite of everything, be regarded as the world’s largest photocopying gadget. What becomes valuable is what cannot be copied (Quinn, 2002, p. 18). Murat MENGÜ, Ezel TÜRK 171

2. The Concept of Digital Perception Management

The increase in the number of computer devices and Internet users has a positive impact on perception management. Incontestably, the Internet is one of the best places to change the perception of a person, and it has been widely used to change the perception of both consumers and prospective consumers. Consumers are the final link in the chain of every business. They are the ones that purchase your product or service, talk about it, and may even recommend it to other people. Perception management involves managing and tweaking what consumers think about a brand, and digitalization has made it easier and more effective. Customers of every brand are regularly online, and they are connected to each other and also connected to you. Fortunately for brand consumers, the Internet is designed in such a way that anyone can say anything at any time he/she wishes to, making it possible for them to state their positive or negative opinions about a brand. Fortunately for brands, too, the Internet does not prevent them from viewing these opinions. This is exactly where perception management comes in. These opinions are taken, presented by the brand to its team, and used to create value. With digitalization, it has been made easy for brands and individuals to know the perception of people, and then work on changing it favourably. As the outline of the dawning digital date has taken shape, a heavy totality of personal data is incessantly being handled, recombined, interchanged and often stored for unsettled periods of time (Camenisch, Leenes, Hansen & Schallaböck, 2011). At this point, it might be convenient to point out content management. Mauthe and Thomas (2004) express that content management functions as a cornerstone for many operations in the media industry. However, since such systems extend all kinds of media and custom cases, there is an excess of dissimilar solutions that all pigeonhole Content Management Systems (CMS).

Furthermore, the exchangeability of telephoning, fax, video and e-mail along with the convergence of the internet, digital television, and diverse Wi-Fi communication devices will enable conversation technologies to become a network of networks to be able to transform the ways of doing business. Not only have management topics including digital disruption, techniques for using digital transformation, digital convergence, leveraging social media to enhance digital product fulfillment, and developing cost via digital products emerged, but also various means of media consisting of all styles of software programs, e-book publishers, movies, video games, magazines, newspapers, music have all been dramatically affected with the advent of digital technologies and this change sees likely to continue in the future as well. 172 DIGITAL PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT

Describing the concept of digital convergence and displaying the opportunities it provides for digital product companies, Strader (2011) emphasizes that digital convergence provides possibilities and incentives for digital product corporations to undertake an extensive range of horizontal integration techniques, cross-industry techniques, intermediary strategies, and tactical stage mass customization and interactivity strategies. Nevertheless, once a route is selected it is very often duplicated via competition. In fact, digital convergence offers opportunities and the inducement for digital product agencies to undertake an extensive range of horizontal integration techniques, move-industry techniques, intermediary strategies, and tactical stage mass customization and interactivity strategies, but as soon as a course is selected it is regularly duplicated via competitors (Strader, 2011, p. 137).

Digital convergence furnishes opportunities and the motivation for digital result assembly to adopt a distant rove of level integration strategies, trial-labour strategies, intermediary strategies, and tactical mass customization and interactivity strategies. Doug Tedder (2016) summarises the characteristics, the results and the future of digital transformation as:

• A hyper-focus on the customer experience

• Operational processes are well–defined, streamlined, and transparent.

• Clear integration between data and process.

• Think “value” not “activities”.

Likewise, the results of digital transformation are:

• Ability to collaborate in real-time among application engineers to co-design and co- create solutions

• Ability to have engineers engage directly with customers

• Strong knowledge capital and knowledge work flow

• Growth in sales that touch digital things

• Software, media, or sales through Internet channels have gone up by orders of magnitude

• Traffic and Internet audience more than doubled

Finally, for the future of digital transformation, the following predictions are made:

• Digital transformation will become the key strategic thrust for most CEOs Murat MENGÜ, Ezel TÜRK 173

• Digital transformation initiatives will be consolidated into a single vision and function

• Digital transformation will require new skills and a shift in IT investments

• Big data analytics will serve as the foundation for digital transformation

• The Internet of Things (IoT) will be a catalyst for the expansion of digital transformation to all corners of the economy

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) will drive new digital transformation revenue streams.

As far as the impacts of information systems are concerned, McLean and Wetherbe (2006) assert that these systems soften individuals in changeable ways. What is a profit to one individual may be a malediction to another. This section discusses some of the ways that IT may affect individuals, their perceptions, and their behaviours. For instance, in the 1970s, researchers forebode that information processing system-supported message systems would reduce managerial will in determination fabrication and thus create disgruntled managers. This discontent may be the spring of intuit dehumanization.

In this context, O’Sullivan (2018) claims that public perception in the internet era can be ephemeral. No matter what experts may deliberate, gossip mills can readily distribute misinformation or downright deception. In this context, O’Sullivan puts forth the lessons for maintaining trust as follows:

• Don’t lie! Institutional credibility is gold and difficult to recoup when lost; it’s better to say you don’t know but are taking steps to find the answer.

• Government and private-sector secrecy, poor messaging, poor infection control, and a lack of preparedness increases the potential for fear and panic, among both organizational personnel and the public, as happened at various points during the 2014 U.S. Ebola scare.

• Sometimes reassurance/confidence-building measures, even if not seen to be effective by experts, can help maintain public or civilian employee cooperation. Ohio and Texas schools during the U.S. Ebola outbreak fumigated their facilities because of “irrational” public fears, even though there was essentially no risk of infection. Such measures can allow normal functioning to return in situations where people can vote with their feet about whether to report to work (p. 169).

Digitalisation surely makes a substantial contribution to perception management. There is no doubt that as a consequence of the reverberations the Internet has brought about, not 174 DIGITAL PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT only the geographical, but also administrative borders have been slipped over. Despite the free circulation of information, serious problems pertaining to trust have inevitably emerged.

It is assumed that one the most important of these problems is fake news as well as insulting and abusive messages intentionally circulated especially by trolls on social media for the intention of provoking polemics with other users. Thanks to digitalisation, such deliberate intention can be realised far more easily and effectively.

Having examined the emerging role of security in the context of digitalisation, Little, Farmer, and El- Hilali (2017) emphasize that companies of all sizes need to make sure that their records are well secured with the ability to store, access and get better. The fact is that greater records might be generated and hung on disparate pc systems. Many groups are using the technique of deploying records protection solutions to remedy quick-time period problems. Lots of those answers revolve around one vendor or hardware platform. The current facts-protection strategies are primarily based on obsolete commercial enterprise practices such as a 10-hour running day and overnight backup windows. The present-day international situation of 24-hour-a-day enterprise and digital transactions has necessitated an extended reliance on data systems. In this sense, it has also been pointed out by Little et al. (2017) that multimedia systems and communique have made extremely good progress in investigating mechanisms, policies in our running systems, dispensed structures, networks to support special kinds of allotted multimedia programs and their quality of service (QoS) parameters which includes throughput, end-to-cease postpone, loss price, and others for the last two decades. Researches in human-computer interfaces (HCI), gadget getting to know, database, and different person-driven research domains indicated via many venues the want of transition from QoS to user notion, and the close connection between QoS and perception of users. May (2006) identifies four different physical presentation media and channels of communication used in computerized control today: “the graphic media that derives from visual perception, the acoustic media that derives from auditory perception, the haptic media that derives from tactile and kinaesthetic perception, and the gestic (or “gestural”) media that derives from visual perception. The gestic and the graphic should be considered as separate channels of communication because gestic media is based on the temporal dimension of movement in itself, rather than on its potential for producing graphic traces of movement…” (p. 54). Pointing out that in a culture which locates growing emphasis on happiness and well- being, multimedia technology encompasses emotional design to enhance the commercial area, Axelrod and Hone (2006) explore affective computing and illustrate how modern technology is capable of emotional recognition and show. Setting out a study with the aim of assessing the Murat MENGÜ, Ezel TÜRK 175 importance of affective computing and the capability of innovative technologies in emotional recognition and display, Axelrod and Hone empirically show that affective systems improve user performance and satisfaction:

• WoZ (Wizard of Oz) methods were successful to simulate an affective system;

• people performed significantly better when they used the responsive system;

• after the game, people reported themselves as significantly happier when they used a responsive system;

• people reported that they think they show emotions significantly more when they are told that the system will respond to them, and most of all when they are told that it will respond but it does not do so;

• people blink significantly more if they are told that the system will respond to them;

• user behaviour was rated as more positive when the system responded to them, and most positive of all for the group who were also told that the system would respond;

• behaviour was rated as more intense for participants who were told that the system was affective (p. 123).

Kalguya (2006, p. 220) discusses that it is important to improve cognitive mechanisms that have efficiency of multimedia learning for individual users. Recent advances in our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, learning processes, and the natural world of function have created foundations for changes in mechanisms of supervision.

A study conducted by Ramos-Soler, López-Sánchez, and Torrecillas-Lacave (2018), aiming to establish a classification of minors with regard to their “perception of risk, digital consumption habits, family and/or educational protection factors, and the flow of communication” (p. 71) displays that there is a noticeable association between risk perception and the variables pertaining to families and behaviours. In Turkey there have been a few studies about digital perception management and they mostly discuss the issue in a theoretical framework. One of them (Boztepe-Taşkıran, 2018), handles perception management together with a relational paradigm that is responsible for relationship management between corporations and their target audience. In the concept of contemporary public relations where a relational paradigm dominates, practices for perception management should not conflict with public relations ethics and should focus on the purpose of building positive perceptions between corporations and their target audience. Another study of the same author (Boztepe-Taşkıran, 2016) discusses 176 DIGITAL PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT and suggests the use of social media for better digital perception management. According to this view, companies should exist in social media platforms where they take control and should maintain a two-way communication and a dialogue in an interactive way. However, apart from controlled contents, management of misconceptions of other social media users is also significant for digital perception management.

3. Concluding Remarks

Based on these premises, it is irrefutable that the Digital Age has posed considerable amounts of challenges for every stakeholder wherein the speed of events is such that, even professionals of perception management can lose the plot when they intend to create a favourable impression. Additionally, without checks and balances that prevent those from going overboard, perceptions also backfire on them. This is why it is of paramount importance to adhere to some rules and structures for perception management to yield a favourable outcome – for both immediate term and longer term.

It is worthy of note that perception management, regardless of where and why it is conducted, requires a voice and a medium. In the world we live in today, the brand is the voice, and it is being heard through digital means, which is the medium. The role of marketing communication professionals is significant here, for they serve as the nexus between brands and consumers. To be the first solution in the hearts of customers, many brands have been left with no other option than to adopt perception management. Without digitalization, perception will only be possible if consumers walk up to a team member of a brand to intimate his/ her opinion. The technologies that exist today, such as machine learning and data mining, together with the availability of the Internet, have bestowed power on modern day users. The consumers of today are knowledgeable about the available opportunities in a respective field. Advancement gives them the upper edge in picking products and services of their choice. In this kind of world, the importance of perception management can never be overemphasized.

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Boztepe-Taşkıran, H. (2016). Kurumsal algıların yönetimi açısından sosyal medya: Halkla ilişkiler alanına yönelik bir değerlendirme [Social media in terms of managing corporate perceptions: An evaluation of public relations field]. In A. Büyükaslan & A. M. Kırık (Eds.), Sosyal medya araştırmaları 3 [Social media research 3] (pp. 367–396). Konya, Turkey: Çizgi Kitabevi. Boztepe-Taşkıran, H. (2018). Algı yönetimi açısından halkla ilişkilere yöneltilen eleştiriler ve ilişkisel paradigma ekseninde bir değerlendirme [Criticism of public relations in terms of perception management and an evaluation on the axis of relational paradigm]. In A. Z. Özgür & A. İşman (Eds.), İletişim Çalışmaları 2017 [Communication studies 2017] (pp. 312–325). Sakarya, Turkey: Sakarya Üniversitesi Yayınları. Brunner, E. M. (2013). Security policy, gender and US military identity. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. Camenisch J., Leenes R., Hansen M., & Schallaböck J. (2011). An introduction to privacy enhancing identity management. In J. Camenisch, R. Leenes, & D. Sommer (Eds.), Digital privacy: PRIME - Privacy and identity management for Europe (pp. 3–24). Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. Eade, K. (2016, July 4). How to sell a war [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://dissidentvoice.org/2016/07/ how-to-sell-a-war/ Goldman, E. (2004). National security in the information age. London, UK: Routledge. Goldstone, R. L., Feng, Y., & Rogosky, B. J. (2005). Connecting concepts to each other and the world. In D. Pecher & R. A. Zwaan (Eds.), Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thinking (pp. 315–382). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Henson, R. (2005). The next decade of HR: Trends, technologies, and recommendations. In H. G. Gueutal & D. L. Stone (Eds.), The brave new world of eHR: Human resources management in the digital age (pp. 255–293). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Kalyuga, S. (2006). Expert-Novice Differences and Adaptive Multimedia. In G. Ghinea & S. Y. Chen (Eds.), Digital Multimedia Perception and Design (pp. 206–224). Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Little, D. B., Farmer, S., & El- Hilali, O. (2007). Digital data integrity: The evolution from passive protection to active management. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Mauthe, A., & Thomas, P. (2004). Professional content management systems: Handling digital media assets. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. May, M. (2006). Feature-based multimedia semantics: Representational forms for instructional multimedia design. In G. Ghinea & S. Y. Chen (Eds.), Digital multimedia perception and design (pp. 47–80). Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. O’Sullivan, T. M. (2018). Mitigating extreme infectious disease disaster risk. In. V. M. Bier (Ed.), Risk in Extreme Environments: Preparing, avoiding, mitigating, and managing (pp. 162–174). New York, NY: Routledge. Osmani, A. (2019, September 19). Outsourcing in Kosovo and its Perception Management [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.kosbit.net/outsourcing-kosovo-perception-management/ Otara, A. (2011). Perception: A guide for managers and leaders. Journal of Management and Strategy, 2(3), 21–24. Retrieved from http://www.sciedu.ca/journal/index.php/jms/article/view/397/187 Perception. (2021). In Collins Online Dictionary. Retrieved from https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/ english/perception Perception management. (2012). In Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Retrieved from https://www. bits.de/NRANEU/others/jp-doctrine/jp1_02%283-12%29%5B1%5D.pdf Ramos-Soler, I., López-Sánchez, C., & Torrecillas-Lacave, T. (2018). Online risk perception in young people and its effects on digital behaviour. Comunicar - Media Education Research Journal, XXVI(6), 71–79. Ronnie, L., Johansson, M., & Xiong, N. (2003). Perception management: An emerging concept for information fusion. Information Fusion. 4(3), 231–234. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1566-2535(03)00033-2 178 DIGITAL PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT

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CHAPTER 9

CYBERBULLYING HURTS: THE RISING THREAT TO YOUTH IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Nilüfer SEZER1, Serdar TUNÇER2

1Prof.Dr., Istanbul University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Public Relations and Publicity, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

2Ph.D., Researcher in Residence at AMLAC&S, University of Ottawa, Department of Communication, Ottawa, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.09

ABSTRACT Cyberbullying refers to the behaviour of inflicting harm upon a certain individual or group by using information or communication technologies. Although it originally became a topic of discussion in Europe and North America, it has now become a worldwide issue. Bullying is not a new phenomenon but ‘conventional bullying’ is now being replaced by cyberbullying. With the increasing use of the Internet, mobile devices and particularly the spread of social media, the number of individuals vulnerable to cyberbullying is on the rise. In this context, angry or offensive messages, those mocking, teasing, intimidating, acquiring private information by means of fake accounts or attempts to spread such information may all be considered as examples of cyberbullying. While conventional bullying may occur at a certain place or time, cyberbullying emerges anytime and anywhere people may have access to the Internet. Additionally, factors such as cyberbullying’s capacity to spread more quickly and simultaneously to a larger number of people, its long-lasting effects and the perpetrator’s perception of concealing his/her identity enhance the need for multidimensional scholarly studies on this subject. Keywords: Bullying, mobbing, cyberbullying, internet, Turkey 180 CYBERBULLYING HURTS: THE RISING THREAT TO YOUTH IN THE DIGITAL AGE

1. Concept of Bullying

The term “bully” has a long history that can be traced back to the 1530s (Bully, 2019). Bullying is defined as “intentional and aggressive behaviour occurring repeatedly against a victim where there is a real or perceived power imbalance, and where the victim feels vulnerable and powerless to defend himself or herself” (UN Report, 2018). A bullying situation involves at least two people: a bully and a victim. The former causes the latter harm either directly through physical abuse or indirectly through verbal or written means. Unless action is taken to stop the bullying, it can continue over long stretches of time.

1.1. Methods of Bullying

Bullying can take on several different forms with the core value being the intentional infliction of harm on an individual or group:

1) Physical bullying (using your body or objects to cause harm): includes hitting, punching, kicking, spitting or breaking someone else’s belongings. 2) Verbal bullying (using words to hurt someone): includes name calling, put-downs, threats and teasing. 3) Social bullying (using your friends and relationships to hurt someone): includes spreading rumours, gossiping, excluding others from a group or making others look foolish or unintelligent. This form of bullying is most common amongst elementary school girls (RCMP, n.d).

2. Mobbing: Bullying in the Workplace

The concept of “mobbing” was first used in the 1980s by Heinz Leymann (1996) to designate acts of repression, violence, intimidation and harassment in working life. It derives from the word “mob”, which means an illegal crowd associated with extreme violence and, in turn, derives from the Latin “mobile vulgus”. Mobbing means harassing, intimidating or troubling somebody and is assessed in the context of psychologically abusing an individual (Gender Equality Commission, 2011). In other words, “mobbing” is the act of one or multiple individuals coercing, intimidating or abusing a certain individual labeled as “unwanted” into absolute submission by exclusion or by verbal or physical harassment. It is bullying that takes place in a work environment.

Turkey first became familiar with the concept of mobbing with the Draft Code of Obligations in 2011 that stipulated the obligation of an employer to prevent psychological Nilüfer SEZER, Serdar TUNÇER 181 abuse at the workplace. Mobbing, often thought to be targeting women, may also victimise males with the same intensity (Gender Equality Commission, 2011). Though it is noteworthy that victims are usually female, the first mobbing lawsuit in Turkey was filed by a male bureaucrat, Ş.T., who was employed at the Turkish Grain Board, on the allegation that he and his family suffered depression due to psychological pressure and claimed 15 thousand TL of emotional damages from his managers.

2.1. Types of Psychological Pressure in the Workplace

In order to make such a distinction, types of psychological pressure should be discussed clearly in the context of mobbing’s formational and developmental stages. These may be examined under the following three topics:

a. Downward Psychological Harassment: These are cases of psychological harassment perpetrated by superiors towards their subordinates. Superiors use the corporate power they possess by repressing their subordinates and pushing them out of the corporate framework.

b. Horizontal Psychological Harassment: These are cases where the perpetrator and the victim of psychological harassment at the workplace are colleagues of the same standing who have similar posts and similar opportunities. For example, cases of envy, competition, conflict of interests or personal disfavour between employees who are in the same conditions.

c. Upward Psychological Harassment: This is the case where the employee perpetrates psychological harassment against the executive. This type of case is rarely encountered. Its examples may be employees’ rejection of recognising the executive, loyalty to the former executive or envy (TISK, 2012).

It is observed that, based on his/her personal traits, the perpetrator may employ a range of methods in the act of mobbing. Such methods include isolation, insult, sarcasm, denigration, constant negative criticism, work overload, work diminishing, rumours, condemnation, physical violence and sexual harassment. In summary, attacks in the workplace in the context of mobbing that target the victim’s job or position may manifest themselves in various forms and due to various reasons for degradation and deterioration. They may be an attack on the educational status, an attack on capabilities or an attack on the working style. Attacks on personality may target the creed, ethnic identity, physical appearance, language, dialect, social surroundings, private life, clothing or mannerisms of the victim. In conclusion, people subjected to mobbing, by the magnitude and impact of the damage they suffer, are rendered incapacitated to perform their jobs (Gender Equality Commission, 2011). 182 CYBERBULLYING HURTS: THE RISING THREAT TO YOUTH IN THE DIGITAL AGE

3. The Age of Cyberbullying

The term “cyberbullying” appeared or was first used in Canada by Bill Belsey, an educator and the founder of the Canada-based anti-bullying website www.bullying.org (Froese-Germain, 2008, p. 46). Cyberbullying is defined as a type of bullying consisting of intentful and hostile behaviour that is performed by a certain individual’s or group’s use of information and communication technologies to harm others (Seçkin, 2017). Today, due to developing technologies, people have the opportunity to bully others not only in the work environment but also in a virtual environment, particularly on social media. In this context, cyberbullying extends the span of conventional bullying and endows people with a greater range of facilities to move mobbing beyond the psychological intimidation efforts taking place between superiors and their subordinates (Gender Equality Commission, 2011). Furthermore, information received through the Internet may be used against individuals and may serve as elements of repression. In whatever form and for whichever purpose it may serve, the phenomenon may lead an individual to depression with psychological and economic damage or even suicide.

3.1. Differences and Similarities Between Bullying and Cyberbullying

Though bullying has been around since the beginning of human history, cyberbullying is a relatively new phenomenon due to its reliance on new digital technologies. Technology has made positive contributions to the advancement of human life. However, as a neutral tool, technological advancements can also serve as tools to harm people. Cyberbullying is one such example of this type of negative use of technological advancements.

Similarities between bullying and cyberbullying may be listed as follows:

a) Bullying constitutes the common essence in these two types of behavior. With bullying, the victim is subjected to psychological, rather than physical harm. It is impossible to observe or gauge the damage and destruction to the victim’s psyche and the degree of harm the victim suffers.

b) In both types of bullying behavior, the perpetrator has the intent of willingly and intentionally harming the victim. The perpetrator is not disturbed by the despair the victim is pushed to and moreover, the perpetrator may hold the belief that the victim has deserved how he/she is being treated.

c) The attack is not of physical nature but targets the victim’s personality and individual psyche. Intentful behaviour that aims at hurting that person is involved. The victim Nilüfer SEZER, Serdar TUNÇER 183

is hurt from such behavior targeting him/her, suffers a loss of self-esteem and feels psychologically insecure.

d) The parties in both types of bullying are identical: victim, perpetrator and onlookers.

e) In regard to their results, both types of bullying bring upon the victim a heavy and unbearable burden. Indeed, as a result of both types of bullying, the victim may resort to committing suicide in an attempt to put an end to their suffering. Even if such a dire outcome is not always involved, the victim goes through a psychologically sever trauma, feels a sense of defeat in the face of such treatment and experiences shame and loss of self-esteem because his/her personality is plundered. He/She cannot understand why they are treated that way and secludes himself/herself from real life (Seçkin, 2017, p. 89).

It should be noted that cyberbullying varies from conventional bullying in certain aspects stemming from the nuances of the technology used in the former to inflict harm (Slonje, Smith & Frise, 2013):

a) Cyberbullying is associated with technological expertise to a certain extent;

b) It is a type of bullying that essentially occurs indirectly, rather than face-to-face and may have anonymous outcomes;

c) Accordingly, the bully may not be able to observe the victim’s response, at least in the short term;

d) Roles of witnesses to the act of bullying – due to opportunities presented by the media – may be more complicated than the roles of witnesses to convensional bullying;

e) It is presumed that one of the incentives in conventional bullying is the status gain acquired by exposing the perpetrator’s power in the eyes of others. However, in cyberbullying, the perpetrator does not achieve such a result;

f) Scope of potential onlookers – due to opportunities of the media – has further extended in cyberbullying; and

g) It is difficult to avoid cyberbullying because the bully is able to reach the victim anywhere through technology, not physically but virtually.

Additionally, according to Hinduja (2011), bullying perpetrated in a virtual environment renders a victim even more vulnerable. At this point, the victim may feel much more defenceless against the destructive nature of what is shared on social media against him/her 184 CYBERBULLYING HURTS: THE RISING THREAT TO YOUTH IN THE DIGITAL AGE and sometimes the victim cannot comprehend who the bully is and why he/she is targeted. Additionally, the bully, relying on confidentiality, may act even more cruelly and aggressively.

3.2. Types of Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying may emerge in very different forms. In light of research, it may nevertheless be discussed under two topics (Seçkin, 2017, pp. 79-80):

A. Electronic Bullying:

This type of cyberbullying is associated with technical cases emerging in the form of cracking the passwords and access to personal information of the victim (i.e. hacking). The party that acquires the account data of the person targeted is then able to send malevolent messages or make indecent requests. The victim who is unaware that his/her account has been hacked or learns this far too late and faces a troublesome adversity.

B. Electronic Communications Bullying:

This type of cyberbullying involves actions such as constant harassment through messages, humiliation, mocking, unauthorised publication of a person’s photograph/video, all through use of ICT (Information & Communication Technologies). This type of bullying involves aggressive behaviour interfering with human relations and may lead to very negative outcomes for the victim.

In both electronic bullying and electronic communications bullying, gaining an advantage relies on the perpetrator’s aptitude in using the technology. Particulary for committing electronic bullying, the person is required to have advanced skills for technology use. An average level of skills in technology use may prove insufficient for such practices. Electronic communications bullying may not require a congruent level of technology use skills. Possession of average skills of technology use may be sufficient for this type of cyberbullying and many people, whenever they intend to, may easily commit electronic communications bullying.

According to Willard (2007), there are seven different categories of common cyberbullying:

1) Flaming: Sending angry, rude, vulgar messages about a person to an online group or to that person via email or other text messaging. Nilüfer SEZER, Serdar TUNÇER 185

2) Online harassment: Repeatedly sending offensive messages via email or other text messaging to a person. This action may put a person in a difficult situation and may even lead to highly embarrassing circumstances.

3) Cyberstalking: Online harassment that includes threats of harm or is excessively intimidating. Cyberstalking may be long-term, and this may weaken the victim’s defence mechanism.

4) Denigration (put-downs): Sending harmful, untrue, or cruel statements about a person to other people or posting such material online.

5) Masquerade: Pretending to be someone else and sending or posting material that makes that person look bad.

6) Outing: Sending or posting material about a person that contains sensitive, private, or embarrassing information, including forwarding private messages or images.

7) Exclusion: Cruelly excluding someone from an online group. A person excluded from the communication environment suffers emotional damage and feels secluded.

In summary, actions such as incitement-agitation, harassment, defamation/slander, mimicking, exposure, exclusion, sending disturbing and repetitive messages or stalking are characterised as cyberbullying. Though all bullying is serious and hinders normal development, with the dramatical increase of opportunities due to the development of digital technologies there is an increasing need to focus effort on the re-assessing of the concept of cyberbullying and handling it concretely. Indeed, recent discussions regarding cyberbullying have taken place in popular culture mediums, such as popular teenager and young adult series, film and cartoons (e.g. 13 Reasons Why, Cyberbully, Ralph Breaks the Internet, The Duff) where the main character is someone who is sexually abused and becomes a victim of cyberbullying. Because pop culture plays an important role in the lives of teenagers, these kinds of productions may increase the debate on cyber bullying.

3.3. Parties Involved in Cyberbullying

As in conventional bullying, cyberbullying essentially involves three parties: the perpertrator, the victim and onlookers. Nevertheless, although the parties are identical, the status of the parties in cyberbullying has certain differences (Horzum & Ayas, 2013). For the perpetrators, the biggest difference between traditional and cyberbullying is the anonymity afforded to them through the use of digital technologies. For the victim, this anonymity of the 186 CYBERBULLYING HURTS: THE RISING THREAT TO YOUTH IN THE DIGITAL AGE perpetrator of cyberbullying can cause more anxiety by making it more difficult to identify the perpetrator, while also leaving a wider and more perminent trace of the harmful actions. (Beale & Hall, 2007). The most significant difference, however, between traditional bullying and cyberbullying is with the third party: onlookers. Though it is true that both types of bullying are not experienced only by the perpetrator and the victim, but that they also affect the people around them, either directly or indirectly. In cyberbullying, the number of onlookers, sometimes ranging into the millions, as well as their anonymity is significant. Bullying does not only involve the perpetrator and the victim but, especially in the case of cyberbullying, can sometimes involve large sections of the public as well. Therefore, awareness of ethical rules for Internet use and ways of identifying, stopping or coping with cyberbullying are gaining importance for the public at large.

3.4. Causes of Cyberbullying

The number of studies handling cyberbullying is growing because the problem is a universal one, namely bullying, and the recent technological advancements have extended the impact of such behaviour. One of the most important factors in the proliferation of cyberbullying is the lack of knowledge in this field. Lack of knowledge both in terms of society lacking an understanding of the scope and impact of cyberbullying and in terms of the individual lacking coping mechanisms to deal with it. Most of the time, an individual is unable to share his/her negative experiences in the virtual environment with their family and other trusted people around them and, not knowing what to do, the individual experiences isolation and profound despair.

But what causes a perpetrator of cyberbullying to resort to such harmful actions? Identifying why an individual resorts to such actions to destroy the social, academic or emotional lives of others is considerably difficult. Hatred, grudge, envy, personality disorders, inferiority complex, deficiencies in development of emotional capabilities and intelligence and power worship are just some of these causes.

The causes leading perpetrators of cyberbullying to these actions may be listed as follows (Willard, 2002):

1. Perpetrators of cyberbullying, often referred to as cyberbullies, assume that there is a low possibility that they may get caught and, therefore, act with ease;

2. Perpetrators of cyberbullying believe that they cause no physical harm to their victims; Nilüfer SEZER, Serdar TUNÇER 187

3. Justifying themselves based on the fact that others commit cyberbullying too, perpetrators of cyberbullying do not view such actions as unethical; and

4. Perpetrators of cyberbullying may also act in such a manner in order to inflict revenge on people who bullied them.

Indeed, it can be understood that perpetrators of cyberbullying are emotionally apathetic, and they are not really aware of the destruction caused by the harm they inflict. Their self- confidence in avoiding “getting caught” makes them act in an even more unrestrained manner. Furthermore, ethical self-justification of their actions enables them to rid themselves of the moral burden.

4. Struggling Againts Cyberbullying: The Turkish Experience

Many studies on cyberbullying show that individuals subjected to such cases are usually children and young people (Beran, Mishna, McInroy & Shariff, 2015; Hango, 2016). Considering that this group also uses the Internet most significantly and efficiently, it may be established that the rate of Internet use is correlated with being a perpetrator or victim of cyberbullying. And like Internet access, cyberbullying is a worldwide phenomenon.

4.1. Internet use in Turkey

According to the Report on Household Use of Information Technologies (IT) published annually by TÜİK (The Turkish Statistical Institute, 2018), the use of computers and the internet are increasing in Turkey with many households possessing internet connectivity and with more men using the service:

•The ratio of Turkish internet users in the age cluster 16-74 is 72.9 percent: Computer and Internet use in the year 2018 in the age cluster 16-74 was 59.6 percent and 72.9 percent respectively. In the previous year, i.e. 2017, these ratios were 56.6 percent and 66.8 percent. In the age cluster 16-74, the ratios of computer and Internet use for males were 68.6 percent and 80.4 percent and 50.6 percent and 65.5 percent for females.

•The rate of internet use increased from 90 percent in 2017 to 93 percent in 2018 in young people in the 16-24 age group: The rate of internet use of young males within the 16- 24 age group (making up 15.8 percent of Turkey’s total population) increased by 3.6 percent to 96.9 in 2018 compared to the previous year while for young women the same period saw a smaller increase of 2.3 percent to 89. 188 CYBERBULLYING HURTS: THE RISING THREAT TO YOUTH IN THE DIGITAL AGE

•Eight out of ten households have Internet access: According to the data of the Report on Household Use of Information Technologies, by April 2018, 83.8 percent of households had home Internet access. This ratio was 80.7 percent in the same month for 2017.

•The ratio of households with broadband Internet access is 82.5 percent: The ratio of households with broadband Internet access in April 2018 was 82.5 percent. While 44.5 percent of the households had residential broadband connection (ADSL, cable connection, fiber connection, etc.), 79.4 percent of the households had mobile broadband connection. The ratio of households with broadband Internet access in the previous year was 78.3 percent.

4.2. Cyberbulling: Comparison between Turkey and the world

“Some 25 percent of young people are exposed to bullying via mobile phones or the Internet. Eleven percent of them say that embarrassing or damaging photographs of them have been taken and shared without their permission. More than half of young people say they do not trust their families so do not tell them when they are targeted by cyber bullying,” said BTK head Ömer Fatih Sayan, commenting on a new initiative “Don’t be a cyber bully” (Şimşek, 2018).

In addition to TÜİK’s study, the Ipsos Survey Company conducted a worldwide study, which included Turkey, on the issue of cyberbullying. According to the results of the Ipsos Cyberbullying Survey of 2018, which studied the issue of cyberbullying and the public’s perceptions on the issue in 28 countries including the United States, Germany, France and Turkey, public awareness for the issue of cyberbullying has shown an increase, but still one in every four respondents worldwide asserted that he/she was not familiar with the term. As per the study, 75 percent of 20.793 respondents from 28 countries asserted that they had either witnessed, read about or heard about cyberbullying. Compared to the year 2011, the awareness score for cyberbullying has shown an increase of 9 percentage points.

The Ipsos Cyberbullying Survey (2018) also has a particular emphasis on cyberbullying experienced by children. According to the data, 17 percent of the respondents worldwide asserted that their children faced cyberbullying, while 4 percent asserted that their children regularly experience cyberbullying. Of those participating from Turkey, 20 percent of the parents in the survey asserted that their children experienced cyberbullying. Compared to 2011, the ratio of cyberbullying faced by children in Turkey has increased by 5 percent. The platform where children experienced cyberbullying the most was identified as social media. Nilüfer SEZER, Serdar TUNÇER 189

Social media is followed by mobile platforms and online messaging platforms. With the increase in cyberbullying, awareness for the issue shows a congruent increase as well. Where Sweden (91 percent) and Italy (91 percent) are identified as countries with the highest level of awareness for cyberbullying, the lowest level is observed in Saudi Arabia (37 percent). Turkey stands somewhere in the middle with an awareness for cyberbullying at a level of 60 percent.

Much research shows that young generations are reluctant to report incidents of cyberbullying if they do not feel safe and know that their privacy will be protected (Beran et al., 2015; Hango, 2016; Hinduja, 2011). According to another survey by Ipsos/Reuters (2012), more than 10 percent of the families around the world reported that their children faced cyberbullying, while around 25 percent reported that they knew somebody who had experienced this kind of bullying and one-third of the respondents question whether cyberbullying has any differences from other types of harassment. According to the research, the data obtained is a reflection of the universal response against cyberbullying on a global basis. While the study is labeled as a ‘first’ in its specific field, it is also seen as a guide to draw the boundaries of cyberbullying. The study posits that subsequent studies on the subject will show if a rising trend of responsiveness towards cyberbullying exists and will also underline parental awareness. More than 18 thousand adults representing 6,500 children from 24 countries participated in the online survey on the subject. According to 60 percent of the respondents, the main media of cyberbullying are Facebook and similar social networks. Mobile devices and online chatrooms, with their shares of 40 percent, follow social networks as a main media for cyberbullying.

The study also shows that awareness towards cyberbullying is high. Two thirds of respondents asserted that they are informed of the concept of cyberbullying, reporting that they had read or heard something about the concept. As per the same survey, the ratio of being informed on cyberbullying is 50 percent in Turkey. In other words, half of the Turkish respondents in the survey had witnessed, read about or heard of this subject. Furthermore, 22 percent of the Turkish respondents held the view that cyberbullying can be eliminated with necessary sanctions. As for the question “Did your child experience cyberbullying at home?” 88 percent of the Turkish respondents gave the answer ‘No, never.’ While 80 percent of the Turkish respondents asserted that they witnessed disturbing behaviour on social media networks such as Facebook, this ratio is 39 percent for cellphones or other mobile devices, 55 percent for chatrooms, 41 percent for e-mail messages, 46 percent for online instant messaging system and 45 percent for other types of websites (Ipsos/Reuters, 2012). 190 CYBERBULLYING HURTS: THE RISING THREAT TO YOUTH IN THE DIGITAL AGE

4.3. Actions taken to stop cyberbullying in Turkey

In this context, for the purpose of combatting cyberbullying, although not of significant currency in the greater public, certain important projects in educational circles with assistance from the European Union, Ministry of National Education and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) have been launched. One of these such actions is the Combatting Cyberbullying project implemented between 2014 and 2016 under the Strategic Partnerships/KA2 partnered by the Directorate General of Innovation and Educational Technologies (YEĞİTEK). The target population of this project aiming at assuring safe Internet use for children aged 9 to 16 also involves parents and teachers. Under the project, a Cyber Safety Game was also launched through the creation of a mobile application. Available on EBA Market and Google, the scenario, graphics and encoding were designed by YEĞİTEK and aimed to teach students safe Internet use through gameplay and also, provide them with advice on how to stay safe on the Internet. Under the same project, guidebooks for students and parents on safe Internet use were prepared (Siberzorbalık, 2015).

Another project on the subject which also received European Union assistance was the multinational project designed by Vahide Aktuğ Middle School. The project involved the creation of the website http://www.clearcyberbullying.eu which serves as a source of information on cyberbullying and also includes a dramatization of cyberbullying situations that can be printed and used as educational handouts. While websites of some schools have started to host information sections on cyberbullying, other schools have introduced videos and animations for awareness of young people on the subject. Another awareness project assisted by TÜBİTAK called “Improving Cyberbullying Awareness of the Turkish Youth in Basic Education: A Field Study on Young People’s Perception and Awareness of Cyberbullying” designed public service announcements and suggested the concept of media literacy as a means to combat cyberbullying. Under the project, in addition to public service announcements, informational guidelines were introduced (Siberzorbalık, 2015).

4.4. Legal actions taken regarding Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying and the terms of “cyberstalking”, “cyberthreats”, “cyberharrasment” and “cybersexting” are similar to each other in their origins and are directly related with harrassment in the cyber sphere. Sometimes, these concepts may be intermingled and furthermore, in legislation, they may be used in substitution of one another. Indeed, the terms with the closest meanings to each other are bullying, cyberbullying and cyberstalking (Beran & Li, 2007, pp. 25-33). Whatever they are called, such actions constitute criminal behaviour Nilüfer SEZER, Serdar TUNÇER 191 and some instances are punishable by prison sentence under certain types of crimes in the Turkish Penal Code - a fact that many perpetrators may not be aware of. Often children or young people may be using the Internet to commit such crimes without being aware they are doing so. Parents may also not be aware that they are contributing to such crimes when they share what they believe is “a joke”, but is really cyberbullying (Şimşek, 2018).

It is also important that victims of such cyberbullying incidents, as well as their close family and friends, be aware of their legal rights and obligations. These may include supply evidence on cyberbullying and receiving legal consultancy. In cases of emergency, by filing a criminal complaint at the prosecutors’ offices or law enforcement units, the legal procedure may be initiated against a perpetrator of a cyberbullying crime. At this point, subjects such as the digital channel or account the offence is perpetrated from, its method and the perpertrator’s identity are of particular significance to prosecutors.

In Turkey, cases such as rights abuses, fraud or forgery that may be encountered on the Internet and associated penalties are designated under the title ‘Cyber Crimes’ in Articles 243, 244, 245 and 246 of the Turkish Penal Code (Law No. 5237) promulgated in the Official Gazette of the date 12/10/2004. Various units such as the Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB) of the Information Technologies and Communications Authority combat cyber-crimes through relevant statutory arrangements. In 2011, the Cyber Crimes Department Presidency of the Turkish National Police was founded. Through this unit, the scattered organisational frame of various department presidencies and field services offering assistance for investigation of crimes committed by use of information technologies and examination of digital data was unified under a specific department and the capability to combat against cyber-crimes was enhanced.

In Turkey individuals who experience offences in the online environment may resort to the following remedies:

• Filing a criminal complaint at the Public Prosecutor’s Office with any data or finding associated with the crime;

• Complaining on the 155 Police Hotline, for crimes of suicide incitement, sexual abuse of children, facilitating drug use, obscenity, slander, harassment and crimes committed against Atatürk;

• Filing a complaint at the web address www.ihbarweb.org.tr; or

• Filing a complaint on ALO 166 Internet Complaint Hotline of the Telecommunications Communication Presidency. 192 CYBERBULLYING HURTS: THE RISING THREAT TO YOUTH IN THE DIGITAL AGE

According to lawyer Fehmi Ünsal Özmestik “Methods that should be followed in the legal procedure may vary on the basis of each particular event” and in certain situations, as an option to achieve more expedient and effective results, it may be considered that face-to-face interviews and interaction with the perpetrator of cyberbullying is arranged prior to initiating the legal procedure (Ünal, 2019).

5. Conclusion & Suggestions

Bullying refers to the act of imposing dominance over others by use of power, threatening, intimidation or coercion. On the other hand, the term cyberbullying has certain methodological differences from conventional bullying. As a formal definition, cyberbullying refers to “intentional and recurring harm” induced through use of digital technologies using computers, mobile devices and other electronic devices. This is a plain and brief definition and it is the most favoured one since it contains the most significant characteristics of cyberbullying.

These important factors covered by this definition are as follows (Serter, 2017):

• Intentional: The act sould be intentional, not accidental.

• Recurring: It is representative of a certain mannerism, not a specific event isolated from other events.

• Harm: The target should be aware that he/she is harmed.

• Computers, cellphones and other electronic devices: The use of digital technologies is a key distinguishing factor of cyberbullying from conventional bullying.

Adapting this definition to the daily lives of children and young people, cyberbullying may be identified as repetitive online mocking, intimidation, threat through e-mail or SMS or the perpetrator’s sharing of disturbing content about another person on his/her digital or social media accounts. Destructive comments, threats, rumours and photographs or videos in online circulation are also examples of cyberbullying.

It is undeniable that the acts of cyberbullying cause destructive effects on their victims. Since the content in most of the cyberbullying cases is related to the victim, it can often become difficult for the victim to cope with the attention and focus on their situation. One of the most important opportunities in combating cyberbullying is to create greater awareness of what it is, who it harms, and what are the social and legal consequences. Scholarly studies and projects are needed to study and identify solutions that can be applied universally or individually. Empathy training on the subject is one possible solution. Such measures should Nilüfer SEZER, Serdar TUNÇER 193 also be supported with legislation, clearly indicating that those who commit cyberbullying “pay a price”. However, in addition to such scholastic endeavours, there is also a need to engage the public and, particularly, children and young adults who are most often the victims and perpetrators of such crimes into the conversation around cyberbullying. Schools also offer platforms for such discussions amongst young people. Informative websites on cyberbullying, such as www.eba.gov.tr, are available to aid in the School-Student-Family triangle of communication and cooperation. Preventative work against cyberbullying are tasks that may be assumed by school administrations and teachers. In addition to educating the educators, such measures against cyberbullying may include educational and social scenarios to aid students, peer support groups, lessons on Digital Citizenship and responsible Internet use are some of the actions that may be conducted to assist students in preventing cyberbullying. Likewise, training programs designed for parents, informing the parents on ways of identifying and combatting cyberbullying are also required in the struggle against cyberbullying. It is also important to remember that digital platforms must also be involved in the fight against cyberbullying. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and others, also bear a responsibility in educating about and combating against such cyber-crimes.

In conclusion, it is evident that the real struggle against cyberbullying should be through informal and formal education of Media Literacy and Digital Media Literacy, spanning from preschool education to life-long education. With this strategy, children and young people along with their teachers, parents, families and anyone who uses digital technologies can become responsibly literate in media and digital media. This method may also help save them from cyberbullies and teach them how to help cyberbullying victims.

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Hango, D. (2016). Cyberbullying and Cyberstalking Among Internet Users Aged 15 to 29 in Canada. Insights on Canadian Society. Ottawa, ON: Statistics Canada. Horzum, M. B., & Ayas, T. (2013). Rehber öğretmenlerin sanal zorbalık farkındalık duzeyinin çeşitli değişkenlere göre incelenmesi [Examining the level of cyberbullying awareness among teachers according to various variables]. Hacettepe Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakultesi Dergisi [Hacettepe University Journal of Faculty of Education], 28(28-3), 195-205. Ipsos/Reuters Survey. (2012). Cyberbullying a problem around the globe: poll. [Online Report]. Ipsos. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyberbullying-poll/cyberbullying-a-problem-around -the-globe-poll-idUSTRE80A1FX20120111 Ipsos Cyberbullying Survey. (2018, July 8). Siber Zorbalık Konusunda Kamuoyundaki Farkındalık Artıyor. [Awareness Raising on Cyber ​​Bullying]. [Online Report]. Ipsos. Retriveed from https://www.ipsos.com/ tr-tr/siber-zorbalik-konusunda-kamuoyundaki-farkindalik-artiyor.201 Leymann, H. (1996). The content and development of mobbing at work. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 5(2), 165–184. https://doi.org/10.1080/13594329608414853 RCMP (n.d). Bullying and Cyberbullying. RCMP. Retrieved from http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cycp-cpcj/bull- inti/index-eng.htm Seçkin, Z. (2017). Örgütlerde Mobbing ve Siber Zorbalık [Mobbing and Cyber Bullying in Organizations]. Konya,Turkey: Çizgi Kitabevi. Serter Ş. (2017, July 21). Modern Çağın Yükselen Tehdidi: Siber Zorbalık [The Rising Threat of the Modern Times]. [Web Page]. Sivil Sayfalar. Retrieved from http://www.sivilsayfalar.org/2017/07/31/ modern-cagin-yukselen-tehdidi-siber-zorbalik-ii/ Siberzorbalık. (2015, October 21). İlkokul Öğrencilerinde Siber Zorbalık “Öğrenciler, Aileler ve Öğretmenler İçin Bir Kılavuz [Cyberbullying Among Primary School Students “A Guideline for Students, Families and Teachers]. [Online Report]. Retrieved from http://siberzorbalik.net/?lg=en&p=duyurular&id=155 Slonje, R., Smith, P. K., & Frisén, A. (2013). The nature of cyberbullying, and strategies for prevention. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(1), 26-32. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2012.05.024 Şimşek, C. (2018, January 1). Quarter of Turkish youths exposed to cyber bullying: Technology authority. Hürriyet Daily News. Retrieved from http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/quarter-of-turkish-youths -exposed-to-cyber-bullying-technology-authority-125045 TİSK. (2012). Psikolojik Taciz (Mobbing) İle Mücadelede İşletme Rehberi [Business Guide for Combating Psychological Harassment (Mobbing)]. 321, 11 Retrieved from: https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/ article-file/208747 TUİK. (2018). Hanehalkı Bilişim Teknolojileri Kullanım Araştırması [Household Information Technology Usage Survey]. [Web Report]. TUIK. Retrived from http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_id=1028 UN Report (2018). UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence Against Children. [Online Report]. UN. Retrieved from https://violenceagainstchildren.un.org/content/bullying-and-cyberbullying-0 Ünal, A. Y. (2019, February,10). Sosyal medya kullanıcılarının yüzde 20’si ‘siber zorbalık’ mağduru [Social Media Users Cyber ​​Bullying Victims]. Hürriyet Newspaper. Retrieved from https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/ turkiye/sosyal-medya-kullanicilarinin-yuzde-20si-siber-zorbalik-magduru/1388413 Willard, N. (2002). Computer ethics, etiquette, and safety for the 21st-century student. Eugene, OR: ISTE. Willard, N. E. (2007). Cyberbullying and cyberthreats: Responding to the challenge of online social aggression, threats, and distress. Research Press. DIGITAL SEIGE

CHAPTER 10

AN ASSESSMENT BASED ON THE SIEGE OF DIGITAL LABOR AND GENERATION Z

Damla AKAR1

1Research Assistant, Faculty of Communication, Public Relations and Publicity, İstanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.10

ABSTRACT Developments in Internet technologies and the emergence of new media environments have significantly transformed the concept of audience. New media users have become not only users, but also prosumers contributing to the production cycle in the new media environment. The increase in such content contributed by users to the production process has also led to a proliferation of user data circulating in the new media environment. Marketing of such data to advertisers, which is extremely easy to control, necessitates rethinking the developments in communication technologies within capitalist relations of production. This study, which aimed to address users’ participation in the new media environment from a “digital labor” perspective, aimed to read the siege of digital labor through Generation Z, which was born into new technologies, and uses these technologies in the most intensive way. In line with this aim, 12 people selected through the convenience sampling technique were interviewed and the data collected were analyzed through a descriptive approach. The results obtained at the end of the study showed that while the participants were close to identifying their activities in the new media in the form of content creation and time spent on labor, they did not consider themselves digital workers. The participants’ emotional motivations and social expectations were found to be more effective in their content creation and contribution to the content created. Keywords: New media, digital labor, cognitive capitalism, prosumer, user data 196 AN ASSESSMENT BASED ON THE SIEGE OF DIGITAL LABOR AND GENERATION Z

1. Introduction

With the development of Internet technologies, the emerging new media technologies have significantly influenced social life. People who spend most of their employment and entertainment time on the computer can easily access news, gaming- and entertainment- based sites, and television broadcasts. New media has become the most significant mass media by strengthening its power every day. The emergence of new media environments has enabled users to go beyond being consumers alone, creating an environment in which users also contribute to content. The discovery and sharing of such user-generated content has thus brought out the “participatory media culture” (Dijk, 2016). The onset of discussions on “participatory culture” has led to the start of discussions about whether participation in the field of communication is going to have a democratic effect.

With the advancements in information and communication technologies, computerization has caused the concept of “labor” to lose its material appearance and take on an abstract form. The authenticity of commodity generated by means of this immaterial labor is based on the creation, expansion and transformation of the ideological and cultural environment of the consumer, rather than being exhausted through the act of consumption. Immaterial labor produces a social relationship (Lazzarato, 2005). Hardt and Negri (2018, p. 298), have said that one aspect of immaterial labor is the affective labor in human relationships and interactions. Such labor, exchange and communication, which are based on the creation and manipulation of emotions, usually arise through human contact.

Christian Fuchs, one of the new media thinkers, has described users in the new media environment as “creative, efficient, and networked digital workers,” and pointed out that content produced by such users has become immaterial labor. Fuchs (2015) has also stated that the data generated by means of such content are sold to targeted advertisers who offer customized ads to users by accessing their preferences and data by paying money.

In the capitalist system, cultural products are also a commodity, and the media serves to ensure that capital makes profit and the supervision of power continues (Bulut, 2009, p. 7). The difference in quality between the audience commodity in the media and the audience commodity on the Internet is the fact that the Internet audience is also in a position that produces content and is involved in the process by keeping it in circulation (Fuchs, 2017). This argument supports the assumption that being a content producer does not prevent commodification, but rather expands it in a different dimension. The user who produces certain content shares a visual product or text with other users through the new media. This is Damla AKAR 197 also followed by the process of interaction with other users’ feedback, such as likes or dislikes. Data are inputted to a network system through the function of content generation, which is open to all users during the process of interaction.

This study aims to assess the siege of digital labor through Generation Z, which was born into new technologies and uses these technologies in the most intensive way. In in- depth interviews with Generation Z users (also termed as the digital generation), a user’s alienation to his own content, where the user positions himself in the digital production cycle, his thoughts on the use of his personal information and all his labor-oriented behaviors were researched. The lack of a comprehensive study examining users’ labor-oriented relationships in the new media environment paves the way for the contribution of this study to the field.

2. Theoretical Framework

2.1. Digital Labor and Users’ Content Generation

The science of political economy deals with the production and transformation of instruments necessary for the continuity of human life. From the beginning of human history to the present, there have been unique forms of production and division specific to each period, including communal, proslavery, feudal and capitalist forms, and there have been power relations based on those forms (Yaylagül, 2016, p. 144). Marx emphasized that the way material life is produced conditions the course of social, political and intellectual life (Marx, 2011, p. 9). Political economy has consistently given particular importance to understanding social change and social transformation (Mosco, 2009, p. 3). It is not possible to discuss the discipline of communication, an important branch of social sciences, independently of social and economic variables either.

At the heart of political economic criticisms is the understanding that social consciousness is also shaped by the economic and consequently strong factors in terms of power, depending on the property–ownership structure of media institutions. Political economy — which focuses on the possession and ownership structure of mass media and their instruments, their modes of production, what is produced, and to whom/to what extent they give profit — is interested in the development process of capitalism (Güngör, 2016).

Understanding the relationship between communication and commodification as well as property–ownership relations in approaches to political economy of communication is also a very important issue (Özçetin, 2018). Kıyan states that Dallas Walker Smythe, who aimed 198 AN ASSESSMENT BASED ON THE SIEGE OF DIGITAL LABOR AND GENERATION Z to analyze the economic functions of mass communication systems and the role they play in the reproduction of capitalist production relations in his study titled “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” has been a pioneer of studies addressing communication in the context of political economy (Kıyan, 2015). Smythe has conceptualized the “audience commodity” approach, which is the main discussion of political economy studies, as the “sale of the audience to advertisers in exchange for advertising revenues.” Smythe has argued that one of the commodities produced by the mass media industry is an audience and claimed that the main function of the mass media industry is to sell the audience to advertisers instead of selling ideological packages (Smythe, 1977; Yaylagül, 2016).

With the advancement of communication technologies, users have become content producers, and user information has been marketed to advertisers, intensifying the discussion on audience commodity in the field of communication in different dimensions (Kıyan, 2015). Rapid developments in communication technologies have created new areas of consumption and lead to significant convergences in the relationship between production and consumption. The audience commodity that we encounter in traditional mass media has been transformed in the Internet environment, and a “digital commodity” has emerged. In the audience commodity on the Internet, users are also content producers and are constantly engaged in creative activity to build a community (Saraçoğlu, 2015). Unlike the audience in traditional mass media, the audience in the Internet environment can show presence in this environment and generate content without any restrictions of time or space.

Such users, who have emerged with the introduction of the Web 2.0 environment, are called “prosumers” (producer-consumers) and “creators” who both produce and consume (Alikılıç, 2011). Prosumer users of the new media environment produce content, circulate it by sharing it, and continuously consume it. With the advent of the Internet, the spread of production through networked portable devices has created new possibilities for large-scale Internet companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with regard to user activities. What users produce on these social networking platforms is everything they do in that environment, and the digital labor rhetoric makes sense in this context (Kıyan, 2015).

The concept of digital labor focuses on the analysis of unpaid user labor and other forms labor that are necessary for accumulation of capital in the field of communication technologies (Fuchs, 2014). The free labor model of Web 2.0 capital has increased the intensity of circulation of commodities, and transformed contributions that cultural workers offer through unpaid content on social media into a form that functions on a voluntary basis (Witheford, 2019, p. 122). Fuchs (2015) states that the labor object of Facebook is “human experiences,” and that Damla AKAR 199

Facebook has earned the right to use representations of these experiences for accumulation of capital. Users’ content production in the new media environment creates a value for companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These communication environments, which users consider completely free and entertainment tools, make a profit based on their voluntary “labor” behavior.

Users create two distinct values of use based on digital labor behavior (Fuchs, 2015):

1. The value of use for users themselves and others.

2. The value of use for users’ capital.

Fuchs’s first point of attention focuses on users’ content production. The content produced and circulated creates a network of sharing, a common ground, where users meet in the new media environment. The second point draws attention to the aspect of selling users’ information to advertisers and targeted advertising. All data entered by users on the Internet to create a profile and the likes they share help create a comprehensive database about them. Companies that use this situation get a second value of use by selling information about users to advertisers.

The content produced by users within the structure of the new media environment suitable for the culture of participation is increasing every passing day. A great deal of reasons such as recognition, prestige, self-expression and communication with other people are motivators for users to produce content (Aydoğan, 2016). Paralleling this situation, many concepts such as class relations, trust relations and recognition are being reconstructed within social networks. Outcomes of “labor” in the new media environment are now seen as intangible products such as “emotion.” Cote and Pybus (2014, p. 242) have stated in their study that people respond quickly to calls for them to become subjects on social networks. In the new media environment, the way individuals exert labor is reciprocated with the production of emotions. The concept of social labor supports this approach. The concept of “social labor” is defined as a tool in which consumers add value to their identity and social relationships by producing and sharing cultural and emotional content (Anderson et al., 2016). In this regard, the act of creating content on social networks by people can be seen as an investment in their personal capital and personal–group relationships.

2.2. Theory of Generations

The advancement of new communication technologies affects every generation in society in a different way, resulting in significant differences in lifestyles. German sociologist Karl 200 AN ASSESSMENT BASED ON THE SIEGE OF DIGITAL LABOR AND GENERATION Z

Mannheim, one of the first researchers to study the concept of generation, has argued that the following five elements should be formed in order to claim the existence of a generation (Mannheim, 1952, p. 292):

• The emergence of new participants in the cultural process,

• In this process, the constant disappearance of the former participants,

• The ability of members of any generation to participate timewise only in a limited part of the historical process,

• The need for sustained reasons for transferring cultural heritage,

• The continuity of the transition from generation to generation.

The studies on the theory of generations gained momentum with the studies conducted by Strauss and Howe, and this theory has also been called the “Strauss-Howe Generational Theory” by some researchers (Arslan & Staub, 2015, p. 5). The foundation of generational classifications is based on political, economic and social events that have a profound effect on a society and its being linked to people born during such events (Şahbaz, 2019, p. 81).

Based on the results of different research studies, and by taking into consideration certain historical periods, generations have been classified as “Traditionalists — Silent Generation (1925–1945),” “Baby Boom Generation (1946–1964),” “Generation X (1965–1979),” “Generation Y (1980–2000),” and “Generation Z (people who were born after 2000)” (Göksel & Güneş, 2017, p. 810).

Generation Z represents a group who were born in the 2000s and who like to use Internet technologies and learn fast (Güzel, 2019). The general characteristics of people in Generation Z are listed as follows (Seymen, 2017):

• They use technology extremely well,

• They keep five windows open at the same time and are ready to share,

• They work actively and voluntarily,

• They communicate with images/videos and graphics,

• They focus on the future,

• They work to succeed and win. Damla AKAR 201

People of Generation Z, who can sustain a very good position in the virtual world, can access information through the virtual environment very quickly, be educated at an earlier age, and grow and develop more quickly (Akdemir et al., 2013). According to a US-based study that gives important insights into Generation Z’s view of the digital world, Youtube is one of the most widely used media by Generation Z. Youtube is followed by Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, in the order given (Hadımlı, 2017).

3. Methodological Design of the Study

3.1. Purpose and Significance

Communication tools like Facebook and Google, which have come into our lives with the advent of modern communications technologies and the Internet, actually serve as a sort of means of production (Hebblewhite, 2019, p. 209). As discussed in the theoretical section, the process of content creation and dissemination in such means of production is defined as “labor” in this study. How the resulting user data in this creation process are used in targeted advertising studies and the concept of audience commodity on the Internet are discussed. When collecting the data in the research section of the study, an attempt was made to determine how all these definitions discussed in the theoretical section corresponded to users. The aim of this study was to examine the digital labor behavior of people of Generation Z who actively used Internet technologies and to understand where and how users positioned themselves within the production cycle in the new media environment. Within the framework of this aim, answers to the following questions would be sought:

• Do Generation Z users consider their participatory activities in the new media environment to be “labor”?

• Do Generation Z users identify themselves as digital workers?

• Do Generation Z users expect a financial return in return for their participatory activities in the new media environment?

• What are the motivations emotionally and socially behind the content produced by Generation Z users?

• How do Generation Z users evaluate the use of the data they enter on the Internet for commercial purposes by different sources? 202 AN ASSESSMENT BASED ON THE SIEGE OF DIGITAL LABOR AND GENERATION Z

The transition to the network-based manufacturing model with the advent of the knowledge economy has also changed communication methods at intra- and inter-production sites (Hard & Negri, 2018, p. 300). Information technologies have overcome all the constraints produced by elements of time and space. The contribution to the production cycle and the sort of labor exerted in the new media environment does not necessitate people’s being together spatially. With this aspect, production continues uninterrupted, regardless of whether people are currently working or on their own free time. In this respect, this study has significance in terms of two outcomes: (1) it examines how the concept of “labor”, which has undergone a significant change with new technologies, is besieged by cognitive capitalism, and (2) it demonstrates the level of awareness of Generation Z users who are the most significant contributors to the production cycle by using these technologies intensively.

3.2. Method and Sample

A literature review was conducted in the field when establishing the theoretical framework of the study. Books, theses, and articles written in this field were examined. The data obtained using the in-depth interview technique were analyzed by using a descriptive approach. A semi-structured interview form approach was adopted during the study. In the semi-structured interview form approach, the interviewer is free to ask previously prepared questions and to ask additional questions to obtain more detailed information on these questions by adhering to the subject he is studying (Yıldırım & Şimşek, 2016, p. 132). The information obtained from the literature review was used to prepare the questions in the interview form, and the aim was to answer the research questions prepared in accordance with the end goal of the study. Depending on how the interviews proceeded, when necessary, the participants were also asked some questions that were not on the form. The new questions at the time of the interviews were determined based on the participants’ explanations. Attention was paid to ask easily understandable and focused questions, and reactions that could misdirect the participants’ responses were avoided.

In this study, the convenience sampling technique was preferred from among the purposive sampling methods, and users from Generation Z were reached in this way. Within the scope of the study, a total of 12 participants, including 7 women and 5 men from Generation Z, were interviewed. The names of the interviewees were used in the study after they were coded. During coding, a two-digit coding consisting of a digit and a letter was used. The first digit in the code indicates the order of the participant (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and the letter next to it indicates the gender of the participant (F for Female, M for Male). Damla AKAR 203

Table 1. Information about the sampling unit The order of the participant Gender Age 1 Male 19 2 Male 18 3 Male 19 4 Male 16 5 Male 16 6 Female 19 7 Female 16 8 Female 16 9 Female 19 10 Female 17 11 Female 16 12 Female 16

3.3. Limitations of the Study

The major limitations of the study were reliability and generalizability. The fact that the research population was Generation Z, which was quite large, reveals the smallness of the sample. Moreover, the choice of convenience sampling and the fact that the results in research using this type of sampling method are less reliable and less generalizable are some other limitations.

3.4. Analysis of the Findings

In this study, an attempt was made to determine whether the participants considered their activities in the new media environment as labor, and if so, how they explained this labor behavior. To that end, the participants were first asked if they defined their activities in the new media environment as labor.

From among the participants, 10 people defined their activities in the new media environment as labor. It is noteworthy that when making definitions of labor, the users emphasized their desires such as to increase the number of followers and get likes from other users. The users who emphasized their active behaviors on the new media as labor expressed that they only saw the content production phase as a labor process, and their actions such as liking, sharing and commenting were only reactions to the labor produced by others. Two of the people who participated in the study stated that activities in the new media environment could not be defined as labor. 204 AN ASSESSMENT BASED ON THE SIEGE OF DIGITAL LABOR AND GENERATION Z

“I think there’s labor only in the phase of producing content. In other cases, there is a case of responding to labor already present. Therefore, the effort, time, cost, etc. that are exerted are part of this effort.” (1M)

“I’m describing it partly as labor. My process of creating followers and keeping them in my account at all times can be considered labor. I can also describe the effort to increase the number of likes as labor.” (2M)

“I don’t define it as labor. No one who doesn’t actively work in the media should say they’re media users.” (5M)

“In the new media environment, I see only the behavior of content generation as labor. Liking, sharing, and commenting on a content are just a reaction to the labor that has been put forward. In terms of sharing content, you must first think about some content, find products that will reveal it, and then create and share the content. I see each of these processes as labor.” (6F)

Fuchs (2015) has stated that users in the new media environment are not just information consumers and has identified users as creative, effective, and digital workers who create content, connections and social relationships of value and use. It was aimed, within the scope of the study, to reveal the users’ opinions about whether they would identify themselves as digital workers. In this context, only 2 of the participants stated that they considered themselves digital workers, whereas the other 10 participants stated that they could never identify themselves as digital workers.

“I don’t consider myself a digital worker because I don’t make money.” (7F)

“I don’t define myself as a digital worker because I use the digital media for my own wishes and benefits.” (10F)

The results with regard to the fact that the majority of the participants did not identify themselves as digital workers show that the value of use of social media is thus alienated from users themselves (Fuchs, 2015). The participants were unable to clearly see how their labor had been exploited as they had used new media for personal reasons and to communicate with their social environment. In fact, who makes a profit from this interaction is the social networking platform company in question (Netchitailova, 2017).

In another question, an attempt was made to understand whether the participants expected a financial return as a result of their contributions on the new media. It was observed that the participants expected emotional and social returns instead of a financial return in each form of their participation. Damla AKAR 205

“I don’t expect a financial return in return for what I share. The reason I share stuff is to make my memories permanent and to be able to include my loved ones in them.” (6F)

“I don’t expect a financial return. I use it to have fun and have a good time.” (7F)

“I don’t expect to get a financial return. I see it purely as a place to communicate with my own environment and share my memories.” (9F)

It was seen that emotional and social motivations lied behind the contributions made by the participants to the new media environment in all of their answers. During the interview, this topic was further pursued, and more detailed questions were asked to identify the motivations that led them to exert labor in the new media environment.

“I’m gaining respectability, people are able to get to know me better, and when something important happens, I can reach a broader audience. More practical solutions can be found when I need help or when someone needs help. As I produce content, I get happy that my social circle treats it nicely and congratulates and appreciates me. It also makes me think positively about life.” (1M)

“I’m only gaining a sense of spiritual satisfaction on social media. My friends’ comments on what I share make me feel valuable. Besides, it can be a pleasure to see what my friends, who I haven’t seen in a long time, do.” (6F)

“I like what I share to be liked, commented on, and appreciated. For instance, I’ve been playing volleyball professionally for many years. I like to share my accomplishments, the games I’ve won, the teams I’ve played with, the people there. It also allows my circle of friends to expand. I’m meeting people with common interests on a common platform.” (9F)

“My activities in the new media environment and what I share on social media are expanding my social circle. Besides, people know me better.” (12F)

The vast majority of the participants stated that the new media environment helped them be known better and more closely by people. It is worth noting that Generation Z maintains and develops their social relations in the new media environment through different variables such as being an individual, feeling valuable and being appreciated.

Within the scope of the study, an attempt was made to determine the opinions of Generation Z users with regard to the sharing of the data they entered into the Internet environment with other institutions and the use of their data for commercial purposes. Of the 12 participants interviewed during the study, 6 stated that they did not know that their personal data was used 206 AN ASSESSMENT BASED ON THE SIEGE OF DIGITAL LABOR AND GENERATION Z for commercial purposes by other institutions. It was stated by 5 participants that they thought this would not cause great distress.

“This situation doesn’t bother me. This is because we live in a consumer-based society, and the seller considers this as the most viable way to reach the consumer. As long as I am a conscious consumer, I’m unlikely to be fooled by manipulation techniques used against me based on the information that I share.” (6F)

“I don’t think it’s going to be much of a problem if you’re in a circle of friends and have a private account unless you have a very large account. However, this can be unpleasant if you appeal to a large audience and use social media more actively.” (8F)

Of the research participants, 1 person considered the acquisition of personal data and the sharing of it for commercial purposes as labor.

“We are the ones who produce content, share it and contribute comments and likes in the new media environment. However, when we look at it, we do not make a financial profit. I don’t want to make it anyway, but it’s ridiculous from such an angle: We’re the ones who do everything, we make up the whole system, but we don’t get any profit. Other institutions, with our help, come out on top and make a profit.” (7F)

On social media, labor is like household chores, and there is no pay in return for it. Such activities, which are often held in leisure times, do not have union representation and are difficult to consider as labor (Fuchs, 2015). The Generation Z participants born into digital technologies and using the new media most effectively did not define their activities in the new media environment as labor and did not consider themselves digital workers. Social motivations of the participants, such as prestige, being appreciated and feeling of value, which they obtained from such environments, constituted the idea that there should be no material equivalent to this participation. The results match Fuchs’ view that digital labor is an alienated digital work and that new media users are exploited digital workers who generate added value and pecuniary profits. Users’ emotional gains from such environments are also becoming capital within cognitive capitalism.

4. Conclusion

The advancement of new communication technologies is affecting all areas of social life and the creation of new media environments have caused significant changes in the processes of production and consumption in the media. While advances in technology have

Damla AKAR 207 significantly changed the concept of labor, the new media environments have also brought forth a need to rethink labor activities in this field.

The audience commodity approach introduced by Dallas Smythe (1977) has reached different dimensions with the emergence of new media environments. In such new environments, the audience has begun to actively contribute to the production of content. The audience of the new media environments is constantly producing for such environments without any time constraints. Users who do not get any financial compensation for such production see it as a recreational and leisure activity only, while producing continuously as a digital worker. The user, on the other hand, makes his interests and tastes available to the system with the information he or she enters into the system and with his or her reactions to other pieces of content. Users constantly see advertisements tailored to them depending on the data obtained from this information during their stay in the system.

New media users enter platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter more than once during the day. This behavior serves different purposes for users, such as relaxing/letting go at work, spending time on the road, relaxing/having fun at home. In this study, an attempt was made to determine how Generation Z, who uses the Internet and new media most actively, interprets all these participatory activities of them as labor. Most of the participants described their activities on such platforms as labor, and similarly, a majority of the participants stated that they did not consider themselves digital workers. Even though the users acknowledged that they were exerting labor in the process of producing content, this was not a job for them, and they did not expect a financial return.

Although the users did not expect a financial return based on their labor behavior, the emotional and social gains they achieved appear to be the primary reason for their contribution to such environments. Many different reasons such as gaining prestige, being appreciated, feeling valuable, and forming a social circle are the major sources of motivation for the Generation Z users in all their labor-oriented behaviors in the new media environment. In the study, an attempt was made to identify the Generation Z users’ opinions on the use of data they entered into the new media environment for advertising purposes by other institutions. While half of the participants did not know that the data they entered into the system were used for commercial purposes, the vast majority did not consider it a problem.

New media has now become part of users’ daily lives. Users continuously contribute to such environments by producing content. However, this creates value for new media companies. It is not only the exploitation of users’ labor which poses privacy issues but also 208 AN ASSESSMENT BASED ON THE SIEGE OF DIGITAL LABOR AND GENERATION Z the use of lots of data entered into such environments and their sale to advertisers. Users’ contribution to the production of content will increasingly continue in the long run. They achieve different emotional gains as a result of their labor behavior on the new media. They will keep taking part in this cycle of production as long as they use new media tools with certain emotional and social motivations.

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DIGITAL SEIGE

CHAPTER 11

MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE

Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR1, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR2

1Associate Prof., Istanbul University, Faculty of Communication, Journalism, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

2Prof. Dr., Istanbul University, Faculty of Communication, Journalism, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.11

ABSTRACT Media sociology is an effort to reveal the micro and macro effects that changes and transformations in the structure of the media cause on the social structure. Media sociology, which focuses on the products and consumers of printed or digital media and tries to identify and solve the problems that arise in the relationship between the media and society with a sociological approach, utilizes both cultural studies and critical theory as well as system theory. Media sociology studies, which have become an important sub-branch of sociology today, have saved the media from being a dependent variable and enabled it to be recognized as an independent institution on its own. Since it was accepted that “life is digital” in the 21st century, the center of media sociology studies shifted to digital technologies and the digital society created by using these technologies. This study aims to reveal the definition of media sociology, its scope, studies that can be conducted in this field, and the concepts and theories that can be employed in these studies. Our study, which aims to fill the deficiency of comprehensive research in the field of media sociology, is based on the literature review as its method. We assume that our study, which explores the approaches and discussions that can be a guide in media sociology studies by compiling them from a certain perspective, will make an important contribution to the literature. Keywords: Media sociology, social theory, new media sociology, digital society 212 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE

1. Introduction

Social theory, which constitutes the theoretical basis that media sociology draws on the most, either did not focus on the social influences of the media until the late 19th century or developed theories suggesting that this influence was insignificant. The media became the subject of social theory when newspapers began to pay attention to the common man along with the improvements in democracy and human rights towards the end of the 19th century. This led the elitist view to see the media as a threat to democracy, a manipulation tool, as the public’s poorly supervised access to representation and the symbolic.

The contribution of system theorists, who consider society as a system and view the media as a part of this system, to the studies of media sociology is undeniable. System theorists, who argue that society cannot be regarded as a whole consisting of juxtaposed individuals, suggest that society is shaped within the framework of communication processes and social systems network. Media sociologists’ area of research focuses on revealing social systems that form around the meanings produced through the media. The “Critical Theory” shaped by the ideas of Frankfurt School philosophers and the “Cultural Studies” covering the work of Birmingham School philosophers are the studies that shed light on the field of work of media sociologists.

This study aims to reveal the definition of media sociology, its scope, studies that can be conducted in this field, and the concepts and theories that can be employed in these studies. Our study, which aims to fill the deficiency of comprehensive research in the field of media sociology, is based on the literature review as its method. We assume that our study, which explores the approaches and discussions that can be a guide in media sociology studies by compiling them from a certain perspective, will make an important contribution to the literature.

In the first part of the study, which consists of five main sections, the foundations and development of social theory are elaborated, and the significance of social theory studies for media sociology is emphasized. In the second part, the studies of Chicago School sociologists are discussed; the third part questions the social position of the media within the framework of system theory, and the fourth part investigates the studies of the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools and their influence on media sociology. The fifth chapter includes a sociological perspective on new media, which has started to be used more effectively than traditional media by the younger generation since 2000 and, therefore, should be an important research area for media sociologists. Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 213

2. Media Sociology Studies and Social Theory

Having limited power to influence the masses since its technology was not adequately developed in the 19th century, the media could not find a place within the research interests of social theory. In that century, the social theory either did not mention the social influence of the media at all or emphasized that it had little or no significance. As also discussed in Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” which was published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840 and is considered one of the earliest studies of modern society, the generally accepted idea of that century was: “the press has enormous power in a democracy, but contrary to its general appreciation, not the power to manipulate consciousness: Although the press knows very well how to ignite human passions, it cannot create these passions alone” (in Maigret, 2014, p. 50). The social theory’s inclusion of the media into research happened as a result of the development of industry and communication technologies in the late 19th century, as well as progress in democracy and human rights which made the ordinary citizens visible to the press. The fact that journalists started addressing other people, as well as the elites, frightened the elitist sociologists, and these sociologists regarded the masses manipulated by the media, which was beginning to be considered as the public’s poorly supervised access to representation and the symbolistic, and saw the culture of these masses as a threat to the high and elite culture they defended. Today, however, communication technologies have reached such a level that they can influence the masses on a global scale. The masses are now influenced, directed, supervised, and even controlled by the media. Therefore, examining the social effects of the media, which has become a means of social control under the authority of economic and political power centers, has become one of the main subjects of social theory and media sociology studies.

Being the most important background that media sociologists refer to when producing their thoughts on media and social relations and social effects of media, social theory feeds on a rich pool of thought formed by the work of many thinkers. The initial ideas that social theorists who addressed societies in an evolutionary approach were based on Auguste Comte’s ideas, which separated the stages of human development according to the ways of thinking, and the ideas of Karl Marx, which classified the history of humankind according to the means of production.

Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, Niklas Luhmann, and Jürgen Habermas, who developed their ideas within the framework of social theory, approached social transformation in the light of the theory of evolution just like Comte and Marx. 214 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE

According to Spencer, evolving societies became different, or increased differentiation was indicative of progress. As a result of differentiation, just like in an organism, the elements became codependent, and, as was necessary, integration between the parts took place. The most significant point that distinguishes Spencer from Comte is that while according to Comte, theology or religion belonged to a social evolution phase that had been left behind; Spencer argued that religious feeling would never disappear. According to Spencer, religious emotion could change shape, but it would always continue to exist. Therefore, Spencer rejected Comte’s positivist and rationalist Humanity Religion. On the other hand, Durkheim divided societies into two in terms of having “mechanical solidarity” or “organic solidarity.” To Durkheim, mechanical solidarity was the result of similarity, and organic solidarity was the result of differentiation. In primitive society, individuals were alike, whereas, in modern society, the individual was differentiated from society. Among differentiated individuals, division of labor and consensus arose, whereas, in primitive societies, individuals could replace each other (Şentürk, 2019). The fact that Spencer considered social development equivalent to differentiation and Durkheim defined advanced society with differentiation between individuals calls for questioning the media’s role in this differentiation because both thinkers argued that this differentiation would inevitably bring social solidarity and partnership. However, research on media’s influence on individuals and society revealed that one of the most important effects of the media is stereotyping.

Stereotypes can be considered a certain subset of our social reality beliefs. Stating that the dominant understanding of a society tends to be the understanding of the dominant social groups of that society, Marx remarked that these groups had the power to determine common understandings and made definitions accepted in society indisputable. Communication technologies are undoubtedly the transmitter of the views that dominant groups want to impose on society. This means that the stereotypes in the media convey the message of what thoughts, actions, and roles are appropriate for members of the society. The actions of individuals manipulated in this way are made predictable, controllable, and preventable. The content of the media that creates discourse aimed at directing the actions of individuals has become an ideology that legitimizes the interests of the dominant groups whose views it conveys. The stereotyping effect of media is an important field for media sociology studies.

Unlike Marx, who classified society in terms of production types and argued that the existing contradictions in capitalism would necessarily bring socialism and that the West would overcome these contradictions with its internal dynamics; Max Weber held the view that ‘the economy and the bureaucracy would gradually increase their control over society and Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 215 the individual, and this would eventually turn into an “iron cage.” “Taking everything under state control (socialism),” which Marx saw as salvation, meant the loss of the freedom for the individual and society to Weber. According to Weber’s sociological approach, East and West differ in terms of modes of behavior. While individuals of developed Western societies adopt rational behavior, individuals of the undeveloped East adopt value-dependent, traditional, and emotional modes of behavior. Rational behavior is rarely seen in Eastern societies, while in Western societies, value-dependent, traditional and emotional behaviors are rare (Şentürk, 2019). Rationalization as a social process involves the systematic application of scientific reason to the everyday world and the rationalization of routine activities through carrying systematic knowledge into practice. In general, social rationalization consists of the extension of bureaucratic control, construction of modern surveillance systems, dependence on the nation-state as a supervisory actor, and the emergence of new forms of administration. Therefore, rationalization, a dominant theme in Weber’s sociology, is often compared to the theme of alienation and reification in Marx’s works (Turner, 2014, pp. 37-38). Habermas objected to Weber and argued that the most rational behavior was communicative behavior. According to Habermas, human social behavior was divided into four categories: teleological, normatively regulated, dramaturgical, and communicative. Teleological (strategic or instrumental) behavior belonged to the objective world, normative behavior belonged to the social world, and communicative behavior belonged to the subjective world. True rationality was in communicative behavior, not teleological behavior, as Weber claimed because it constructed the world of life (Şentürk, 2019). However, system processes tend to colonize the world of life in the modern era, utilizing the tools of money and power that make language no longer a means. In the root of this problem lies the increase in differentiation and material production resulting from social evolution.

Emile Durkheim’s views on religion and ritual have guided media sociologists in studies on how mass media (and, later on, the media) influences society. In line with this view, it has been suggested that the media contents produce common meanings and then reinforce social cohesion. Media sociologists, especially focusing on Durkheim’s view that “society regularly needs to preserve and reaffirm the collective ideas that make up common senses, unity, and personality” have argued that media contents justify the social and economic status quo by multiplying dominant ideas or ideology (Matthews, 2017). Durkheim, who saw society as a biological organism composed of parts that were independent of the individuals who constituted it and had assumed different functions, commented on ‘social phenomena’ used by society to suppress individuals and limit their actions. Defining religious or moral rules 216 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE and cultural rituals as social phenomena used for social oppression, Durkheim’s views led media sociologists to treat media contents as social phenomena that have manipulating and action-restricting effects on the individual.

In early research on how political and economic social contexts influence media organizations conducted as part of Max Weber’s proposition to “focus on journalistic institutions and examine who owns or controls them, how they work in terms of politics and economy,” Fred Seaton Siebert et al. claimed that “journalistic institutions take the shape of the social systems they operate in; ” whereas Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini stated “the relations that media institutions have with the state (or the government) is a significant determiner in their activities,” (Matthews, 2017). In addition, media is the most appropriate field for the condition that Weber conceptualized as ‘social action’ and ‘social relationship’ and interpreted action and relationship through the interaction with the other. People interact with each other, particularly through new media, and shape their actions with the information they acquire through the media. Being a structure that people both influence and are influenced by, the media is an ideal environment for the emergence of ‘social action’ and ‘social relationship.’ As media organizations are usually privately owned, profit-making commercial enterprises, they can often act under the direction of political power. Moreover, it is the political mechanism that determines the legal framework and the rules that media organizations have to follow and obey; however, the media is a force that the political system needs to manipulate, supervise, and use to monitor society. For this reason, politics and the media have turned into two social systems that act together and look after each other’s interests.

Another view emphasized in media sociology studies is the concept of ‘partnership,’ which Karl Marx described as ‘social as collaborative work’ and Ferdinand Tönnies described as ‘social as community’ and which they considered as the power that created communities. Marx had the opinion that, through the collaboration of hand, tongue, and brain, societies “became capable of executing more and more complicated operations, and of setting themselves, and achieving, higher and higher aims” (Fuchs, 2014, p. 61) Tönnies expressed that it was the feelings of togetherness and values ​​that kept communities together. These feelings and values​​ created ‘co-operation.’ What Marx wanted to express with the concept of ‘partnership’ was people working together to produce the goods they needed and the common use of the means of production. However, the capitalist system has transformed the concept of ‘partnership’ to meet its own interests and resorted to filling many people into factories to produce goods. Nonetheless, workers have not been able to own any of the means of production. Thus, Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 217 they have become alienated to people, to the product, to themselves, and to their own labor. The question ‘Can communication tools eliminate this alienation?’ belongs to the study field of ​​media sociology. Many studies on this subject indicate that the media cannot create a social action that leads to cooperation and partnership, even if they create interaction between people. Because even though the media leads to interaction between people, it cannot create a social action that leads to collaboration and partnership. This is because consciousness formed by the media is one that legitimizes the hegemony of power groups.

Although there were many studies on the influence of mass media in the pre-World War II period, the most important studies based on theoretical and conceptual foundations began in the 1950s. The social transformation created by modernization, and particularly the concept of “mass society” that was developed within the framework of Marxist thought, shaped the sociological thought on mass media until the 1950s. Media sociologists adopted this idea agree that the mass media, whose power was increasing day by day, would have negative effects on individuals who flocked to cities, broke with their roots, and became lonely. In particular, they argued that mass media was influential in the reproduction of the status quo. Media sociologists with a liberal pluralist approach adopted the idea that mass media would contribute to democracy by facilitating the circulation of ideas and bringing more people together. In the 1960s, the relationship between the media and power began to be emphasized. In particular, issues such as “the relations of media workers with power and to what extent they are independent of power” and “how much the media allows for different voices and thoughts in their contents” started to constitute media sociology. In the 1980s, the relationship between globalization and media, and audience studies became the most important subjects of media sociology. Since the 1950s, a growing body of media studies has focused on the ownership structure of the media, media employees, the organizational structure of the media, and the influence of the reader/viewer/audience on the media content.

Media sociologists working on the negative effects of the media’s ownership structure on the content claim that the horizontal integration (or merger) created by the gathering of small enterprises of the industry within holding companies as well as vertical integration resulting from media owners who also have businesses operating in many areas disproportionately increase the influence of the media. This structure also imposes a noncritical and politically reactionary media culture. Essentially, this media culture positions the media viewers as consumers, not citizens, and imposes the cultures of the developed countries on the underdeveloped countries (Matthews, 2017). Debating the social impacts of media technologies, Jürgen Habermas, one of the recent representatives of the Frankfurt School, 218 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE states that people are coded as consumers. Habermas argues that the distinction between the “system world,” which includes the state and capitalist organizations, and the “life- world,” which defines the world of individuals who are in social, familial, and face-to-face communication -which he considerably emphasized while explaining the communicative action theory-, is now abolished, and the life-world has been invaded and colonized by the system world. In the process of invasion and colonization, the media causes the destruction of the public sphere, and the multinational corporations that are the carriers of the capitalist system lead to the abolition of democracy. In this process, “passive consumers” take the place of active receptors and debaters (Alver, 2007, p. 155). In the words of Habermas: “Inasmuch as the mass media today strip away the literary husks from the kind of bourgeois self-interpretation and utilize them as marketable forms for the public services provided in a culture of consumers, the original meaning is reversed,” (in Kellner, 2016, p. 139). The public sphere, which is extremely important in the production of social awareness and creation of public opinion, is now occupied by the media, and the media directs society through content produced by professional perception managers. The new society established by a form of communication that allows no exchange of ideas and is transformed into propaganda through unilateral information flow has been transformed into a society defined as mass society or consumer society.

The most important subject of recent media studies is the research centered on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony.” The concepts of “globalization of capital,” “multinational corporations,” and “economic power,” which began to be expressed along with globalization, tell us that besides political power, capital has become more prominent in the structuring of power, because “the culture in which money is everything,” which Veblen explained as the “culture of money,” has become a global culture. The one who owns money owns everything. The media that positions the citizen as a consumer is a tool that produces and then reinforces the hegemonic power of capital. Economic infrastructure has become the main determinant of the social system. The biggest problem of the media, which is a part of the social system, is that it operates under the guidance of economic and political systems. The declaration of the Immediast Group, which was formed by Noam Chomsky, also showed that the most important problem of the media is to be under the direction of capital and political power. They underlined that the media should be freed from the capital and state control as soon as possible in order to carry out the task of informing the public and supervising the system on behalf of the public. Their studies dwell upon media employees, the obligation to produce media content as a “marketable product” and the problems that this obligation brings, such Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 219 as corruption, standardization, and banalization. Media sociology, whose research subject is what media employees take into consideration or ignore in order to minimize commercial risk while creating content, aspires to determine the structural positions of media employees as “gatekeepers.”1*

While studies dealing with the social effects of the media with a liberal approach place great responsibility on the media for the protection of freedom of expression and securing freedoms, the work of those who adopt the Marxist approach suggest that the media supports the shaping of unequal social relations, images, and representations of ideological society (Stevenson, 2015, p. 25). The liberal approach deals with the effects of media on social life from a positive libertarian perspective and with the assumption that society and institutions are free. However, it ignores the property problem determined by the economic infrastructure as well as the social structure deteriorated by the relations of production. For this reason, optimism prevails in the predictions of society and communication established within liberal views. Those who produce opinions in line with liberal views have dreamt of a more tolerant, democratic, pluralist world where there are no limits, and people can easily access and share information. Concepts such as Marshall McLuhan’s “Global Village,”2** Alvin Toffler’s “Electronic Cottage,”3***, and Etzioni’s “Active Society” have been produced with this optimism. However, the Marxist approach provided a more realistic analysis by establishing meaningful relationships between economic infrastructure, property problems, and the mass culture produced with media contents.

3. The Influence of the Chicago School on Media Sociology Studies

Holding a pragmatic approach, the Chicago School, which included the most significant representatives of the liberal approach, drew a positive picture of communication and

1 *Gatekeeper (Door Holder); The view that compares the job of the media owners or reporters, editors-in-chief, executive editors, other communication professionals working in the media who have the competence to gather, reject, approve, process and present news to the job of a janitor who monitors people coming in and going out of an apartment building (Çebi, 1996, p. 248). Gatekeepers are people who make decisions in the first stage of the news production process. These people at the gate of the news channels choose which of the events that were sent to them will make the news and go beyond the gate and reach the audience through the channel. They decide which events will make the news in what order and for how long. Gatekeepers are usually news editors. These people primarily determine the agenda of the institutions they work for and thus contribute to the determination of the agenda of society (Yaylagül, 2006, pp. 72-73) 2 **Global Village; McLuhan’s idea that electronic media will reunite humanity and create a single state of consciousness globally by spreading culture. 3 ***Electronic Pavilion; Toffler’s prediction that in a society on the brink of the third wave, houses will be equipped with electronic devices, and art and craft, food production as well as other types of small scale production will be more home oriented (Görgün, 1992, p. 62). 220 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE communication technologies. While George H. Mead held the view “if communication between people were perfect, then democracy would be perfect too,” Charles H. Cooley saw the possibility of building a real secondary community in the technical revolution of the media. John Dewey, by deepening Cooley’s thesis, argued that instead of creating an unorganized and perverted mass, communication, in reality, opened up an authentic “public” space by enabling the individual who held expectations of having means of intellectuality, inquisition, and self-representation to understand the phenomenon of independence and, by giving institutions the legitimacy provided by real discussion. Robert E. Park, who laid the foundations of the ethnographic analysis of the press, pioneered actual sociological press sociology rich in terms of observing journalist behavior through field research. Park’s study of the division of labor in newspapers as well as his efforts to analyze the gaze of the journalist through the question “what do they choose as a case?” in order to prove the validity of the concept of gatekeepers, which was borrowed from Kurt Lewin and included in journalistic research, are important in media sociology studies (Maigret, 2014, pp. 58-60).

Harold Lasswell used the term “hypodermic needle” to describe the effect faced by passive audiences, the term “mass communication” to describe the boundaries of the field of research on the so-called mass media, and lastly, in 1948, he coined the famous term “communication model,” (Who says What to Whom in Which Channel with What Effect) which defined the sub-branches of this field (from the examination of the message formulator to the effect of the messages) (Maigret, 2014, pp. 78-79). Lasswell’s formula illustrated a typical feature of early communication models: the fact that the communicator intends to influence the receiver was acknowledged from the start, and from this, it was concluded that communication was a persuasive process. Such models have contributed to the tendency to overestimate the effect, and, particularly, the results created by mass communication. This formula was the result of Lasswell’s interest in political communication and propaganda and was very suitable for political propaganda analysis (Mcquail & Windahl, 2005, p. 29). While Lasswell approached mass communication as a planned application of certain technologies for the purpose of mass persuasion, information transfer, or control, and clearly demonstrated the concerns of the field through his formula, the dominance of the prevailing view on media’s influence prevented this consideration from being sufficiently taken into account. As Lasswell’s formula lost its influence, studies on communication shifted to the definition of “sender” and “receiver,” their roles in communication, and the influence of social structure and social forces in their relations with each other. Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 221

“The common ground between those who saw mass media appearing as a sign of a new beginning for democracy and those who saw the media as evil means was that they had the same understanding of the mass communication process. Their viewpoint was primarily formed by the assumption of a fragmented mass of millions of readers, listeners, and viewers ready to receive the ‘Message,’ then it was based on the idea that each Message was a powerful and direct stimulus for action that produces an immediate response. In short, communication media was thought to be a new unifying force that reached every eye and every ear in an impersonal society characterized by the scarcity of interpersonal relations” (Maigret, 2014, p. 104). As a result of the field studies on “influence” conducted under the leadership of Elihu Katz, Bernard R. Berelson, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld from Columbia University until the mid-1950s, it was determined that the influence rising from interpersonal relations played an extensive role in the transmission of information and changes in attitudes, the primary groups were significant, and the role of the mass media was limited. As a result of the findings of field research, the concepts of “two-step communication flow,”4* opinion leadership, and gatekeeper began to be used in media research (Erdoğan, 2005, p. 2). With the two-step communication flow theory, the thesis of the unlimited power of the media was proven wrong. It was found that the influence of the media was indirect and limited, it was filtered by the cognitive abilities of the individual, and expanded horizontally within networks, not vertically from the sender to the receiver.

Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz reiterated their “opinion leadership” and “two-step communication flow” theses with the research results and evaluations they presented in their book “Personal Influence,” and thus refuted certain theses, such as the direct influence and hypodermic needle. In their essay “Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action,” Lazarsfeld and Robert K. focused on providing status, supporting social norms, and narcotic effect as the main functions of mass communication in society. Regarding the ownership structure and functioning of the mass media, Lazarsfeld and Merton stated that the media was supported by large commercial industrial companies, so the media was naturally expected to contribute to the system by cultivating conservation (cultivation theory) or by preventing the development of real critical view, and that this was

4 *The Two-Step Flow Method consists of a combination of several approaches. Sociometry employs the questions asked about relationships in primary groups (Who meets whom? Who says who is influenced by whom? What is it about?) in parallel with the sociology of interests and consumption of media (Who reads, listens to, watches what?). The secondary wave of interviews is conducted with the same people, shuttling between the same interview, monitoring and influence questions (it is possible to identify influential people between family and friends networks), verification techniques, and re-evaluation questions on consumption questions (why has the behavior been changed?). It is concluded that the assumption of the superiority of interpersonal relations over the media is confirmed in the decision making (Maigret, 2014, p. 103). 222 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE normal (Erdoğan, Keloğlu, & Durmuş, 2005, pp. 11-12). Psychologist Elihu Katz started a discussion and stated that the media studies focused on the question of what the media does to people, whereas the question that actually needed to be asked was what people do with the media. “The Uses and Gratification” approach was based on Katz’s research and work. According to Katz, people have social and psychological needs. As a result of these needs, people build certain expectations from the media and other sources to meet those needs. As a consequence of being exposed to the media, they meet some of their needs (Yaylagül, 2006, p. 62). The “Uses and Gratification Movement” is an approach that treats media as a liberating environment. According to this approach, media consumers use the media to improve themselves in line with their needs and desires. This use makes the consumer active as an action taken by the decisions made by the consumer of their own free will. Media is an important part of society. It is indispensable for ensuring integrity when it acts in harmony with society. However, it is extremely dangerous for social cohesion when it acts together with different interest groups apart from society. If we define the media as the field of meaning-value production and power establishment, the importance of media as a field in which the culture that holds society together is produced and power relations are legitimized can be seen more clearly.

There are many studies aimed at determining the “use and gratification” of the viewers who received something from the mass media in the 60s and 70s. However, in these studies, almost no researcher has tried to answer the question “why we read the news.” This is because, with the development of communication technologies, the journalist has moved away from society, and the desires and needs of the individuals forming the society have lost their importance for the journalist. The needs of the boss have become more important for the journalist that neither receives nor needs feedback from the viewer/reader. As Herbert Gans pointed out, reporters and editors at news magazines and network television programs “had little knowledge about the actual audience and rejected feedback from it. Although they had a vague image of the audience, they paid very little attention to it. Instead, they filmed and wrote for their superiors and for themselves, assuming that what interested them would interest their audience” (Schudson, 1994, p. 319). The fact that media employees take care of the interests of their bosses rather than the public resulted from journalism’s neglect of its duties that are needed to be fulfilled within the framework of social responsibility theory, the duty to inform the public and to oversee politicians and bureaucrats on behalf of the public. Journalists under the capital’s control have begun to see the public as heaps that consume whatever you give, do whatever you want, and are easily manipulated. Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 223

Stuart Hall gave the most remarkable response to those who see the people as a homogeneous mass and a heap that acknowledges the content conveyed by the media unquestioningly, through a hegemonic reading. One of the most significant studies on media audiences is undoubtedly the “Coding/Decoding” by Birmingham School representative Stuart Hall. In this study, Hall presented some characteristics in terms of age, gender, and ethnicity for the way audiences react and interpret media content. The study also showed that media viewers interpret media content using a collective framework of meaning. These collective frameworks might arise from broader social, political insights shared by groups, or from more local perspectives, they form as part of their communities (Matthews, 2017)

In recent years, media sociology has focused especially on the audience’s resilience against, dependence on, testimony to, and fragility against media content in its studies on media’s social impacts. Particularly, in new media studies, there is evidence that users tend to adapt themselves to the content.

Another communication scientist who studies the consumption of media content, Sonia Livingstone, describes the act of consuming television content as an interesting process in which the viewer is active. In addition, Livingstone prefers to use the concept of ‘text’ instead of ‘message’ for media content. According to Livingstone, media content is more complex and open to interpretation than the ‘message’ suggests. Therefore, it would be correct to use the concept of ‘text’ to define the structure of media content, which includes signs and words that are open to layered reading incorporating all the meanings and implications.

Livingstone’s basic framework is centered on how people interpret a media text is based on a negotiation between qualities of the text and the qualities of the reader. Qualities of the text would include such things as how that text is structured, the form of the text, its degree of openness, and what sorts of social understandings are infused in the language of the text. Reader qualities would fundamentally include everything the individual reader brings with him or her at that time: cognitive skills, previous experience with the medium, a particular emotional state, and, more importantly, for this discussion, social history, and all the memory traces connected to it. The interpretation that comes out of this is the result of the text pulling meaning in some direction, and the reader working the meaning in another direction (Gorham, 1999, p. 238).

Tamar Liebes argued that the concept of “mass media audience” is problematic since it did not explain the common experiences of individuals who wandered in a forest of multiple TV channels, alternating between the “old media” and the “new media” every day (Matthews, 224 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE

2017). Similarly, new media technology has made the boundaries between the content producer and the content consumer invisible, regarding the production of media content. Everyone in the new media can produce and share their own content like a professional message designer. This has made the research field of media sociology broader and more difficult. Media sociologists are now also investigating the problems arising from the fact that new media consumers are not only consumers but also producers in an interactive communication environment.

4. Considering Media Sociology within the Framework of System Approach

Before World War II, there had been attempts to handle scientific issues from a different point of view, and the scientific studies aimed at understanding the universe and life in the world acknowledged that everything was connected and complementary and that the whole had to be understood in order to be decoded. However, it was later suggested that the parts of the whole must be deciphered in order for the whole to be understood. The word “system” was chosen as the best explanation for this idea. As a result, the new school of thought known as the “System Approach” entered into the scientific world with the “General System Theory” initiated by the Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1920s.

Bertalanffy postulated the existence of principles and laws that applied to any kind of system (at least in predefined classes of systems), irrespective of the nature of the system’s elements and specific properties. Bertalanffy’s “general systemology” aimed at their formulation. It should ideally reach the stage of a logico-mathematical theory, able to derive a priori from the abstract definition of a system and the introduction of special conditions, definite general laws of systems that apply not only to the natural sciences but also to the human and social sciences. This “systemology” is intended to be simultaneously logic and a methodology of system modeling, facilitating, and codifying the model transfers between different fields of research, enabling in that way to avoid superficial analogies while underlining the significant “homologies” and furthering the progress of non-physical sciences toward “exactitude.” Its major goal is to generate a new type of unity of science: not a unity based on the reduction of the concepts, methods, or even laws of all sciences to the ones of a single science regarded as more essential but rather a formal unity based on the generality and ubiquity of the system concept and on the “isomorphisms” it induces between sciences of which the logical and methodological autonomy is guaranteed (Pouvreau & Drack, 2007, p. 283). Those who used the system approach in sociology were Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann. Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 225

Focusing on the relations between systems and subsystems, Parsons firstly discussed society as a system in order to explain the social function and saw “integration” as the most important function of that system. Accordingly, the system approach is a model that is used to emphasize particularly the functional explanations as well as the continuity of the system. In this approach, society is described as a system comprised of related elements. Parts of the system cannot be understood separately from the integrity of the system; in other words, no parts are separate from the whole. On the other hand, any changes seen in any part of the system leads to an imbalance in the system (Çelik, 2007, p. 53). In The Social System, in which Parsons put forward his ideas about the social system, he discussed social action in three sub-systems. These were the social system, cultural system, and personality system. The behavioral organism, which was later added to these sub-systems, refers to the discussion of the individuals living in and constituting the social system -which is defined as a living system- as the major organisms that make up this structure. Thanks to the innate learning skills of these organisms and their ability to adapt to the feedback from their environment, the adjustment/adaptation process necessary for the social system can be achieved (Sarp, 2016, p. 19). Parsons’s Theory of Structural Functionalism, which proceeded towards the social system and general system theory by examining social action, proposed a holistic model of society, and placed order and balance at the center of the system. In structural functionalism, society is regarded as a system similar to the biological system, drifting apart from its environment and withdrawing into its own shell. Therefore, the social system tries to ensure integration in order to eliminate the disturbances in its environment, improve the interaction process between the system and the environment, and create relative stability (Alver, 2007, p. 98). An attempt to fill the gap that emerged in Parson’s theory of structural functionalism due to ignoring the system-environment relationship was made by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. In Luhmann’s theory, the formation of the system always required the limitation of the “environment,” which was not always included in the “system” in every stage. In other words, the concept of the system included the necessity of a distinction between the inside and outside of a system. Luhmann drew a boundary that separated the system from its environment and showed a clear distinction between those involved in the system and its environment. Therefore, no system structure could be understood without establishing a relationship with its environment (Çelik, 2007, p. 56).

At first, Luhmann disregarded social differences as the structural principles of society and, instead, paid attention to the different social systems (economics, politics, law, science) that he thought to be independent of each other, and described these systems, each of which 226 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE assumed important social tasks, as functional systems. Luhmann considered the media system as a social system similar to the economy, science, and religion systems. Elements of this system were communicative operations. Social systems created unique codes that determined what to communicate. In the case of media, these codes were named “information” or “non-information.” Only in the case of information, communication could be established. According to Luhmann, the three types of programs he identified as news, advertisement, and entertainment programs within the media system serve as carriers for the design of social reality. In line with this approach, the media directs society by designing reality. The communication media conducts the selection/elimination of events and directs others to accept the selection/elimination. It does this by creating symbols and codes. Luhmann argued that “world society,” which he defined as the unity of social sum, would be realized through communication, which, to him, was the basic operations of social systems (Alver, 2007, pp. 99-102). According to Luhmann, social systems do not consist of people’s activities but rather “communication” processes and networks between them. Society only exists when individuals communicate. Individuals cannot take part in society unless they communicate; their participation in society only occurs when they communicate. Individuals become visible through social communication. To Luhmann, society is not shaped as a simple collection of people but as a network of communication processes and social systems. The systems thus consist only of communication through meanings created by society. Humans affect systems in proportion to the communication (such as verbal, written, performative) that occur within different meaning systems and thus are interpreted in different ways (Çelik, 200, pp. 58-59). In societies consisting of individuals in contact with each other, changes occur in the codes of social participation of individuals. The development of communication technologies primarily leads to the facilitation of social participation and the elimination of hierarchies. In traditional societies, stratification based on the hierarchy is sharper, whereas, in today’s society, we cannot speak of stratification. Especially, the new media that has come into our lives along with internet technology eliminated hierarchical order. Any person can now communicate one-to-one with whomever they want. These developments have facilitated the inclusion of individuals in the system. While the individual feels that s/he is integrated with the system, s/ he also feels important with the confidence of being able to communicate comfortably with everyone and therefore approves of the system. As Luhmann predicted, new communication systems have included people in the system, made them visible, and educated them to become world communities. Produced to form a global political, economic, and social system, “global culture” is transmitted to people through the global communication network, and this network also provides the legitimacy of this new system. Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 227

The structuralistic-functionalist social system approach developed by Talcott Parsons formed the basic theoretical framework of sociological research in the 1950s. In response to Parsons’ approach that excludes the human actor, the “bringing men back in” approach has begun to dominate sociology since the mid-1960s. In this context, interpretative approaches such as ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism have emerged from the idea that the individual actor is the focal point of social theory. The structuration theorist Anthony Giddens, who developed a critical approach to classical social theory, emphasizes that while explaining what people do in real life, the structuralistic-functionalist approach disregards the reasons and goals of people, and therefore considers them “cultural puppets.” According to him, structural forces do not externally determine or limit behavior. The focal point of social analysis is the reasons and motives of people, not social facts, structures, systems, or institutions (Yıldırım, 1999, pp. 26-27). Explaining the social system through structure and action, Giddens does not completely deny the social structure and its effects like interpretivists but states that without action, the structure cannot exist. As soon as the ‘action’ takes place, the ‘structure’ becomes meaningful, and the social structure can exist thanks to social action. Otherwise, there can be no mention of a ‘structure.’ While the structuralist and functionalist views do not see any difference between structure and system, Giddens renders structure and action interdependent and defines the phenomenon ensuring this interdependency as a system. From this point of view, the studies that have been done and to be done by media sociologists on the influence of the media on the social structure and its role in the formation of social action that ensures the existence of the social structure are extremely important in understanding the society and the individual. Since the media, which is a part of the social structure, is extremely influential in all kinds of decisions made by individuals who constitute society. Media sociologists are the ones who will reveal the rate, causes, and consequences of this influence.

Unlike structuralists, Giddens claims that the social formation of subjectivity does not require deactivation of the knowledgeable subject in social theory. Social life is the result of the ingenuity of knowledgeable social agents, and each social agent is a practical social theorist. However, Giddens then states that the knowledgeability of the human agent is always limited to subconscious on the one hand and unrecognized conditions/unintended results on the other (Yıldırım, 1999, p. 32). Among the most important obstacles to the agent’s access to information and taking action are factors such as social structures and the power groups that hinder the actions of agents. To Giddens, the individual/agent is a knowledgeable person who has judicial power- who is able to think-, not passively receiving the impositions of the 228 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE social structure, on the contrary, influencing the structure with his thoughts, and is capable of resisting the limitations/constraints of social structure.

Talcott Parsons, who adapted the system approach to sociology, constructed the society as a social system but put knowledge and energy at the center instead of the individual. Like Parsons, sociologist Amitai Etzioni saw knowledge as a force in social change. Etzioni said that knowledge should be used as a way of putting the energy available in society into use. Knowledge is also needed to make energy usable. Scientific knowledge exhibits an active structure that ignites everything in society, thus leading to social transformations and constituting a source of power on society. This power can also manifest itself in governance, and with the use of knowledge, a society that can adapt more easily can be formed. Etzioni, who identified four types of society: “Passive Society,” “Over-Managed Society,” “Drifting Society,” and “Active Society,” stated that the society formed by knowledgeable individuals would be an “Active Society.” Active society members form social laws themselves, are creative, shape society in the direction they wish and act within the framework of reason. Therefore, they constantly need knowledge (Görgün, 1992, pp. 54-56). Technology depends on science. Science produces knowledge, and knowledge turns into technology. Therefore, knowledge is valuable. Since Francis Bacon stated that “knowledge is power” in the early 16th century, the value of knowledge has increased a great deal. Knowledge is now a treasure that is hidden with great care and not shared with anyone. The knowledge of technology and product, which is called “know-how,” has been transformed into knowledge shared between 2-3 people globally and hidden from society. Therefore, it is impossible for a society that cannot access knowledge to be active. The development and globalization of communication technologies have not made it easier for people to access information; on the contrary, this has caused some confusion about what knowledge is or is not under a bombardment of information and has paved the way for the society to get increasingly ignorant by deepening the knowledge gap.

5. Looking at Media Sociology from Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools Perspective

Undoubtedly, the most important analyses on the social impacts of communication technologies were made by the thinkers of the Frankfurt School. Unlike the thinkers of the Chicago School, which had a very positive approach towards the media and communication technologies within the framework of the liberal view, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School who adopted the Marxist thought were very pessimistic. The prevailing view among the Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 229 thinkers was that media technologies would lay the groundwork for ideological domination and hegemony and strengthen the domination of a small group rather than liberating people. In addition, the development of communication technologies would lead to the facilitation of similarizing, supervision, and surveillance of people. The concept of the “culture industry” produced by Frankfurt School thinker Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer made a significant contribution to the study of media sociology. With the concept of the cultural industry they used instead of mass culture, Adorno and Horkheimer wanted to describe the culture manufactured by sovereign powers and imposed on society through the media, manipulates society, produces false consciousness, and makes it uniform.

From the perspective of the classical Frankfurt School, commercial television is a form of “cultural industry.” The Frankfurt School used the term “cultural industries” to draw attention to the industrialization and commercialization of culture within capitalist production relations. In the 1930s, the Frankfurt School introduced a critical and trans-disciplinary approach to culture and communication studies, combining audience reception studies on social and ideological effects of mass culture and communication, criticisms on the political economy of the media, and text analysis. They used the term “culture industry” to point out the industrialization process of mass-produced culture and the commercial obligations that operate the system. Critical theory thinkers analyzed all cultural fictions that were massively transmitted in the context of industrial production (Kellner, 2011, pp. 118-119). In industrial production, the products of the cultural industry show the same characteristics as other products of mass production. These characteristics include commodification, standardization, and massification. The main function of the cultural industry in the capitalist system is to provide ideological legitimacy to existing capitalist societies and to integrate individuals into the social structure of that system. In the batch and mass production system called Fordist Production Form, capital owners holding the means of production started to run the cultural industry acting upon the idea that needs, thoughts, and behaviors should become the same in order to get the products they produced in their factories consumed at an equal rate. To stimulate the economy, televisions, radios, newspapers, and especially the film industry all mobilized to create a society of men and women who define and identify themselves with the products they use and compete to consume the same products. Frankfurt School thinkers, who had fled from Hitler and taken refuge in the United States, described this new society that consumed the same standard products and was very pleased with the situation as a ‘mass society’ and the thinkers conducted studies that reveal the power of the culture industry in creating this society. 230 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE

Adorno and Horkheimer believed that the mass media was oppressive. While mass media instruments prevented criticism against the sovereign system, they also enabled the masses to integrate with the sovereign system. Members of the Frankfurt School (especially Adorno and Horkheimer) drew attention to two points about cultural industries. The first of these was that cultural industries became increasingly dominant and replaced traditional socialization institutions, and the second was the fetish character that cultural products assumed as a result of commodification. Adorno and Horkheimer thought that monopolies dominated the field of culture, which made the culture uniform. As a result of these technological developments, culture and industry were intertwined, and this caused the corruption of culture. Advertising became a significant and inseparable part of this new industry and culture, as well as an important factor in guiding the public (Yaylagül, 2006, p. 89). According to Frankfurt School thinkers, the mass media, which were run like industries, implemented a constant seduction because they made people relax, lighten up, dream, and hope. The stereotypes they transmitted reduced the complexity of the world, and their reassuring uniformity appealed to people. The identification models they proposed were simply funny, distracting things, a means of staying closed in a state of infinite passivity (Maigret, 2014, p. 88). The most important contribution of the Frankfurt School to the field of media studies was introducing ideology into media research and establishing a link between history and communication. By reflecting Marx’s views on economic exploitation and his idea of economic and social sovereignty onto the cultural universe, the Frankfurt school argued that culture was not an innocent entertainment or a non-profit art but an area that determined power relations. Culture and economic or political sovereignty were closely interdependent, and the infrastructure (economy) determined the superstructure (culture). To them, the media had the same function as the concept of religion in Marx, as the new opium of the people. More research to be made in the field of media sociology will reveal the depth of many phenomena, such as reification, dedifferentiation, and alienation in the society through the media, whose technology is developing day by day. It is the research of media sociologists that will refute or validate the assumption that media is social opium.

Herbert Marcuse saw television as a means of managing, manipulating, and suppressing a one-dimensional society. According to Marcuse, when information and the individual started to be controlled by the mass media, information began to be managed and restricted. The individual was no longer aware of what was actually happening. As a result of the entertainment machine’s overpowering effect, the culture emerged –an industry that brought the individual together with other individuals while also becoming an anesthetic environment Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 231 in which all destructive ideas were excluded (Kellner, 2011, p. 122). Frankfurt School thinkers agreed on the view that mass media invalidated dissident and marginal thought by ignoring them and compelling people holding those kinds of ideas to keep their silence while, on the other hand, reproducing the social and cultural environment of the capitalist world repeatedly.

Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who influenced Frankfurt School thinkers with the concept of “hegemony,” which we can explain as the “organization of spontaneous consent” (Hall, Lumley & McLenan, 1985, pp. 12-13), tried to find an answer to the question of “how an elite minority dominates the rest of society (numerically, the majority) and how the majority agrees to be dominated and governed” in his work. In Gramsci’s conception, societies maintained their stability through a combination of “domination,” or force, and “hegemony,” defined as consent to “intellectual and moral leadership.” Thus, social orders are founded and reproduced with some institutions and groups violently exerting power and domination to maintain social boundaries and rules (i.e. the police, military, vigilante groups, etc.), while other institutions (like religion, schooling, or the media) induce consent to the dominant order through establishing the hegemony, or ideological dominance, of a distinctive type of social order (i.e. market capitalism, fascism, communism, and so on) (Kellner, 2013, p. 4).

Louis Althusser, a French Marxist philosopher who studied the Ideological State Apparatuses with a similar approach to Gramsci, argued that the Ideological State Apparatuses -which he defined as institutions such as educational systems, religious organizations, trade unions, the family, and media- taught what it meant to be something through the meanings and values they constantly conveyed to the people and tried to make them perform certain practices required for the role taught. To Althusser, ideology hid the relations of exploitation in societies. Advocating a structuralist cultural Marxism, Althusser emphasized the relationship between culture, ideology, power, and social structure. According to his views, the Ideological State Apparatuses cause people to have the wrong ideas about the world and the society they live in. Ideology is the imaginary relationship that individuals establish with the real social conditions they are in. Ideologies make people believe that they are free and autonomous. And to do this, ideologies turn people into subjects and allow them to see themselves as determining agents, although they are actually shaped by ideological processes (Yaylagül, 2006, pp. 102-103).

While dealing with the rise of Nazism in the theory of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, who constitutes a source for media sociology studies with her studies on labor, work and action, and political theory of action, stated that “if absolute despotism was able to settle, it did so 232 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE by exploiting social rootlessness and the absence of community rules. The main character of the ‘mass man’ is the isolation and the lack of social relations.” In the same way, Adorno and Horkheimer positioned what they called social fragmentation at the source of the evils of modern societies: people were left to themselves, but they became “alienated” from themselves by losing their roots and communities. Therefore, the new forces governing the society were, in particular, directly manipulable by the media they were faced with. To them, there were two essential means of this manipulation: flattery and seduction. Mass communication led to the silence of the masses: it was the black sun of modernity; it generalized the lack of respect for critical reason and true culture by “deceiving” people (Maigret, 2014, pp. 87-88).

Certain critical approaches focused on the social effects of television, and excessive violence on television has often been blamed. Some articles on television and violence suggested that the representation of violence in the media would directly lead to social problems. However, George Gerbner and colleagues from the Annenberg School of Communication developed a more sophisticated social ecology approach to violence and media. Gerbner’s group investigated the “cultural environment” of television violence, followed the escalations in representations of violence, and explained the “message systems” describing the perpetrator of the violence, who the victim was, and what messages were linked to media violence. “Cultivation Theory” investigated the effects of violence and concluded that heavy viewers of the images of violence in the media intensively exhibited “mean world syndrome.” This syndrome has various effects ranging “from depression to fearful individuals voting for rightwing law and order politicians to the exhibition of violent behavior” (Kellner, 2011, p. 123). Cultivation Theory, an important study in media sociology, emphasizes that people who are heavily exposed to television content believe in the world transmitted from television rather than the real world, and these people evaluate the real world under the influence of this world. The ever-developing media technology makes it necessary to conduct Gerbner’s research repeatedly.

In its early periods, The Birmingham School (English Center for Cultural Studies), another school known for its work on the media, based their studies on Roland Barthes’ discussions about how reality and ideology were established in language, as well as Althusser’s suggestion that the media was the ideological apparatus of the state, Gramsci’s emphasis suggesting hegemony was established through cultural practices, the post-structuralist theories handling the subject as a process of comprehension, Ernesto Laclau and John Mouffe’s emphasis on the subject in discursive practices, and again Gramsci’s propositions on the concept of resistance (İnal, 1996, p. 43). The school’s leading thinkers, such as Edward P. Thompson, Richard Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 233

Hoggart, and Raymond Williams, believed that one must analyze popular culture products in order to understand the culture of the working class.

Williams, who considered culture as “a whole way of life of a community or a social group” (Williams, 1993, p. 10) based on the discontinuity and the necessity of continuous reconstruction of hegemony, pointed out the possibilities of intra-system opposition in “culture” and the multicultural dimensionality of culture, advocating the view that “In any society; in any time period; there are certain systems of values, meanings, and practices that we can definitely call dominant and effective. This dominant system is not a stable structure; it creates a continuous inclusion process. This combination looks extremely inconsistent and contradictory. Gramsci uses this combination in terms of the opposition of the lower classes to the dominant classes in hegemony. To me, the foundation of an effective and dominant system of values and meanings cannot be established only by an abstract construct; it is possible with a harmonious combination of reality and social system. That is why hegemony cannot occur only through ideas and manipulation imposed from above. Hegemony is realized only by combining all the experiences and practices of life and the mutual harmony between them” (In Arık, 2017). Hall followed Althusser and said that although building the truth, the media pretended to reflect the truth. Hall analyzed the media’s meaning production practice from Gramsci’s hegemony theory as well as Althusser’s Marxist culturalist perspective that allowed relative freedom to the media and operated as “ideological state apparatuses” in the reproduction of sovereign ideology. According to Hall, the media tended to reproduce interpretations that served the interests of the ruling class, but these interpretations were also an area of ideological struggle (Yaylagül, 2006, p. 115).

The early thinkers of the Birmingham School came up with similar ideas to the Frankfurt School thinkers. Both schools’ thinkers worked on the hegemony of the capitalist class and capitalist ideology, interclass inequalities, social inequality, and power relations. Birmingham School thinkers of the pre-1980 period, just like the Frankfurt School thinkers, attributed the integration of the working class to the capitalist order, and the impossibility of a revolution to the mass culture created by the mass media. They studied the consumer culture and the media culture that legitimized the hegemony of the ruling class. They established the connection between culture and ideology and considered culture as a type of reproduction of hegemony and ideology. However, after 1980, cultural studies in England and North America shifted to identity issues created by consumption, and consumption as a return of the postmodern world. However, scholars who took a less critical approach to research on the impact of media on consumption and identity formation almost ignored the content production of the media 234 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE and the factors affecting the content. Ultimately, the Birmingham School, which assumed that there might be dissident elements in the culture produced by the media, and the working class can increase their resistance opportunities, and the Frankfurt School, which argued that the culture transmitted from the media is homogeneous mass culture and does not contain differences and opposition views within itself, thereby making the revolution impossible, were drawn apart to different poles. Researches and studies carried out in both schools are extremely valuable for media sociology. The Frankfurt School’s way of handling mass, mass culture, culture industry, cultural imperialism, public space, and many other similar concepts, along with research and comments in these fields, were the first examples of media sociology. It also provides resources and guidance for future studies. Likewise, the problem of popular culture and mass culture, which the studies carried out within the Birmingham School attempted to solve, and heterogeneous mass evaluation set out by Stuart Hall in his Encoding/ Decoding article were pioneers for similar studies.

6. New Media Sociology

The development of Internet technology led to changes in the forms of communication and improvements in the reception and dissemination of knowledge and information. The facilitation of the flow of knowledge and information led to changes in people’s lives, cultural patterns, and attitudes and behaviors towards events. This change triggered a social change, and the social change influenced different fields such as economy and politics.

Although the Internet has brought great and indispensable gains to our era, it focuses more on acts rather than probability, on reality rather than concepts, and consensus-shaped values rather than the inner world (Kissinger, 2016). The meanings and values formed by the increasingly expanding consensus on the Internet are overturning the values of Bourdieu’s symbolic systems from the past that were formed by socialization and education, and creating a whole new system of values instead. Sociologists that started to work in this field with the prevalence of the Internet are primarily interested in trying to determine the influence of internet-based chat rooms and discussion forums on users’ identities. Specifically, the identities created within these platforms by users who are living disconnected from society due to various reasons have attracted the attention of researchers. In addition, the social and psychological impact of the virtual reality created on the Internet has been of interest to sociologists. The political effects of the Internet and the use of the Internet by marginal groups, politicians, and activists have also been among the research topics. Common methods in this early phase of studying the online world include network analysis, which is adopted to Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 235 examine the links facilitated by the Internet between people, virtual ethnography in discussion forums and chat rooms, and content analysis of the information published online.

Max Weber underlined that parliamentary democracy formed a passive society; the people living in this system were uneducated, politically ignorant, and incapable of creating intelligent political judgments, and had no ability other than consenting to the policies produced, and were masses following a charismatic leader. Nowadays, there is an attempt to create a society of personalities who are incapable of even consenting and cannot do anything but passively adopt. The most important tool for the creation of passive societies is undoubtedly digital networks. New communication technologies that are monitoring individuals, recording their every movement, analyzing the reaction of the individual to the events in the light of the information they obtained about individuals, and foreseeing their thoughts are becoming a means of pressure for the power. Therefore, as one of the most accurate analyses for new communication technologies, we can adopt Kissinger’s view (2016, p. 388) that “one of the most radical aspects of new technologies may be the power they will give to the small groups (the dominant class) at the top step of political and economic structures in the processing and monitoring of information, and forming of discussions and, to some extent, the truth.” Although digital media allows people to let their voices be heard, react to injustice, and organize the reaction, the same media can also help the dominant groups monitor and suppress those who seek their rights.

Although we think that digital media allows individuals to share their ideas on anything they want at any time, the ideas usually belong to others, not to themselves. In fact, based on Bourdieu’s concept of “received ideas,” we can say that the ideas circulated in the digital environment are ideas that are produced or copied according to the mood of that moment rather than ideas created through consideration within the framework of logic because the views shared in the new media are mostly the views of the dominant class. In this way, just as in traditional media, every day, the digital media agenda is determined, and participants are manipulated. The received ideas also constitute the structural mortar of what Noam Chomsky calls a “powerful elite consensus.” While the diversity in the new media discourse could lead to the formation of different views in society, thus causing the emergence of a debate environment, social awakening, and action, society is put to sleep with received ideas.

The key features of the new media include an open, network-based, unlimited, interactive, and decentralized structure combining different and interactive environments. In this regard, new media is sometimes also called multimedia. The new media that collects audio, video, and data content together to include the interaction elements can be defined as “environments 236 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE that cannot be created without the computing power of computers” (Aydoğan & Kırık, 2012, p. 59). With a technological determinist perspective, many communication scientists define this point of communication technologies as ‘media convergence.’ Stating that with technological convergence, there has been a change in the media industry’s operating logic, and thus, a change in the media consumers’ logic of processing news and entertainment, Henry Jenkins suggests that media convergence is more than a technological convergence, and this convergence has changed the relations between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres, and viewers. Jenkins (2016, p. 20) describes this convergence as a “cultural change caused by encouraging consumers to seek new information and establish links between scattered media content.” Underlining that the ‘convergence’ concept manages to define technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes depending on who is talking and what s/he is talking about, Jenkins argues that the media holdings desiring to expand their empire on multiple platforms, and consumers that desire to consume media wherever, whenever and in whatever format they want are shaping the ‘convergence culture.’ The convergence culture created and expanded by digital networks has completely changed the character of the traditional media consumer and the new media consumer. The traditional media consumer is defined as stable, passive, abstracted, and invisible, while the new media consumer is defined as active, nomadic (with no commitment to communication networks or media), linked, and visible.

While the Internet, in a sense, ‘isolates’ individuals by ‘confining’ them to a virtual environment and detaching them from the real world by interrupting their relationship with everyday life, it also keeps them in ‘safe detention’ thanks to the opportunity to access all kinds of information and personality profiles at any given time. In addition, as the Internet has the means to manipulate individuals at will in the virtual environment, it turns them into objects of ‘education’ through the knowledge and information it offers (Dolgun, 2004). Like a look from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, communication technologies, which allow surveillance of the entire society and each individual, are the best environment for realizing the ‘society of control’ and ‘biopower’ that Michel Foucault used to define the sense of power adapted to the postmodern society. Describing the tool of sovereignty that destroys decentralized, landless nation-states as ‘Empire,’ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri acknowledge that communication technologies are the greatest power of the global empire, which has attacked with all its power to reach its aim in the near future. The power structure of this empire, which feeds on production, transportation, and communication technologies, is based on the biopower approach that Foucault also significantly emphasized. Hardt and Negri (2002, p. 48) state Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 237 that biopower, which they describe as a “form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it,” is of vital importance to the empire. As Foucault said, life has now become an object of power. The most important function of postmodern power is to encircle life in all aspects, and its main task is to manage life. Therefore, the concept of biopower describes a situation where what really matters for those in power is precisely the production and reproduction of life” (Hardt & Negri, 2002, p. 48). This new media, which incorporates global meanings and values and imposes a culture created by the global capitalist empire’s perception managers, and the new communication technologies as the transmission technology of this media need to be thoroughly analyzed in the context of individual-power relations. In order to do this analysis, it is necessary to have all forms of literacy, such as ‘technological literacy,’ ‘information literacy,’ ‘media literacy,’ and ‘network literacy.’

Conscious individuals who want to acquire all these literacies primarily need to know that new communication technologies are employed by power centers to create a society of surveillance and control. All of the personal information of digital media users is stored utilizing these technologies because the digital environment that creates user profiles for advertising, sales, or application development with user information is invaluable for capital power and political power that want to code individuals as consumers in every field. ‘Data mining,’ the process of storing data in a technological environment and using it as needed is considered among the most important professions of the future. ‘Data analysis,’ which is the work of analyzing and processing the big data stored in the digital environment using many methods and making it available to the use of power centers by building connections between the data, is just as important. However, probably because they do not want to leave the task of managing such information to people, the elites are also conducting artificial intelligence studies with all their power.

Another important point is that ‘knowledge,’ which has changed meaning with the culture of convergence, is no longer real knowledge, but it is transformed into the knowledge of reality imposed by digital technology. Pierre Levy claims that “no one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity” (Jenkins, 2016, p. 49). Another widely used concept for the new media in recent years that has increased the appeal of this environment is “collaboration.” Although it reminds the concept of ‘partnership’ formed by collaboration and Marx deemed important because it would bring social solidarity, the collaboration produced by the new media is adopted to describe a technological revolution that eliminates the ‘bureaucracy,’ which Weber used to define the hierarchical construct 238 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE in modern society. Communication technologies, voice recognition technology, three- dimensional object scanners, and the micromachines doing the work of human fingers, which are expected to deliver the big blow to the ‘iron cage’ established by bureaucracy, allow companies to distribute routine jobs efficiently. However, such technological capacity excludes those who do not have specialized human skills. While automation expands, the field of constant human skills narrows down. This structure defines a new type of individual who continually learns new skills and constantly changes the ‘foundations of knowledge.’ This individual, intertwined with the postmodern society structure that internalized intermediate communication, is forced to accept the idealized new self-conveyed through the new media. According to Richard Sennett (2009), this ideal self is guided by the obligation not to fall behind the machine. People with this idealized self-refrain from addiction, do not hold on to others, and are disconnected from the rest of the society. They experience relationships through the friendships that they form in the digital environment. Mary Chayko (2018, pp. 43-44) states that nowadays, by using new communication technologies, people construct the places in which they live and form their relationships, and make a great effort to maintain the relationships they have formed. According to Chayko, this new situation is ‘social’ in terms of interpersonal relationships and that it is ‘mental’ in the sense that constructing and preserving these relationships require mental activity. Therefore, the bonds created on social media are “socio-mental.” Again, according to Chayko, society is a socio-mental structure that is united around a common consciousness and a common conscience, and social media groups, eliminating the need for face-to-face communication, can realize being a society. Manuel Castells (2013), who calls the techno-economic system shaped by new information technologies as informational capitalism and suggests that these technologies connect the world and people through a digital network, describes this digital society as ‘virtual communities.’ Whereas individuals of virtual communities experience deepened feelings of depression and loneliness, regression in family ties, and constriction in their social environment in the real world, they can communicate and form intimate connections with each other without a reserve in the virtual world. Virtual environments allow groups that are media- marginals in the real world to use their right to speak, communicate, unite, and be equal to the media-elites while, at the same time, causing an everlasting rupture in their connections at the slightest problem. Castells describes what he calls the “network society” as a capitalist society built around a network of global and financial flows. Castells suggests that historical evolution and technological change have gotten closer than ever, and therefore, social interaction and organization have assumed a wholly cultural form. Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 239

As a global digital network, the main feature of the Internet that connects isolated alienated postmodern society individuals is its “hyperlink” structure. This hyperlink structure not only connects one place, document, or resource online to another but also allows the users to make as many connections as possible by facing fewer technological obstacles between sites, sources, and people (Lievrouw, 2016, p. 19). Due to its hyperlink structure, the new media creates a contrast to the traditional media that transmits the ‘messages’ of a limited number of creators. The new media offers selectivity and access opportunities to its users much more efficiently than traditional media during the selection of information and cultural resources, as well as their personal interactions and expressions. Therefore, openness and easiness of interaction in the new media are crucial to the process of social and political change. The interaction of the user with the new media is based on participation/interaction, whereas it used to be based on exposure/receiving with traditional media (Lievrouw, 2016). The association of interaction, participation, and action in the new media brings Jürgen Habermas’s relation of public space, ideal speech situation, and communicative action to mind. According to Habermas (2001, p. 112), “the concept of communicative action relates to the interaction of at least two subjects capable of language and action (whether by verbal or non-verbal means) in an interpersonal relationship,” and the public sphere of Habermas is an ideal speech environment in which people have equal rights to speak. However, the public sphere that Jürgen Habermas idealizes as an “ideal speech space” is closed to disadvantaged groups. Even if they are taken into the sphere, these media-marginal people or groups are not allowed to speak; they are interrupted, or ignored. Even if everything is positive, these people or groups do not have the ability to find the right words to express themselves as they do not have the necessary knowledge. Therefore, they are bound to listen and approve of what is being spoken. As in the words of Nancy Fraser (2015, p. 113), “they were silenced, discouraged about improving their demands, and heard as if they said ‘yes’ when they said ‘no.’” The political negotiation made in the public sphere resulting in consensus led to the perception that everyone who was there approved the decision, and ‘I’ was transformed into ‘we.’”

Optimistic approaches predicting that new communication technologies will allow groups and individuals who are excluded from mainstream media, public sphere, and politics to participate in discussions and dialogue have argued that these technologies will facilitate access to information, which will, in turn, lead to a democratic society of individuals equipped with knowledge of politics, culture, and economy. However, for those such as Douglas Kellner (2015, pp. 861-862), who are cautious about new communication technologies, democracy is 240 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE based on political negotiation and jurisdiction and includes face-to-face discussion. Therefore, all media-based policies consist of the decline of politics involving rational negotiation and discussion processes; the media and now the Internet are degenerate forms of political debate drawn to a sensational, extreme, and manipulative sphere.

New media sociology or Internet sociology, which concentrates its field of study on how new communication technologies play a role in mediating and facilitating communication and interaction, focuses on how this technological structure influences and is influenced by the social structure. Digital sociology, which operates as a subfield of Internet sociology, observes the diversity of new communication technologies that drive our lives (such as smartphones, computers, tablets, wearable devices). While conducting research centered on the Internet of Things, digital sociology focuses on the diversity of the way we use them (such as communication, production, and sharing of cultural and intellectual content, entertainment, education, trade) as well as the meaning of these technologies for social life and society in general (such as identity, belonging, politics, security). The sociology of digital communication examines social events mediated by social media platforms and other digital communication technologies. Most researchers working in this field often employ the theories and concepts by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Among these theories and concepts, the “field” theory and the concepts of “capital” and “habitus” take the lead.

Bourdieu (2014, pp. 81-86), who defined the concept of “field” as “the network of objective relations between positions,” stated that the dynamics of a field lie in the distinct form of its structure, and in the distance between the different specific forces facing each other. “Though the borders between fields are porous, each field is characterized by its own logic (the ‘rules of the game’). Actors within fields struggle to accumulate and monopolize capital based on the field-specific rules of the game with more successful actors being more adept at both accumulating and reinvesting capital.” As Ignatow and Robinson pointed out, “For Bourdieu, actors’ positions within various social fields correspond with the volumes of the different forms of capital they possess. Capital has come to be a centrally important concept in studies of digital inequality, with sociologists developing and employing in empirical research concepts such as ‘information capital’ and ‘digital capital’” (Ignatow & Robinson, 2017, p. 952). For Bourdieu (2015), the capital was “what is efficacious in a given field, both as a weapon and a stake of struggle, that which allows its possessors to wield a power, an influence, and thus to exist, in the field under consideration.” Media is a field that has rules in itself, and when its rules are not followed, it does not transfer what is desired to its user. The individual who wants to be active in this field must know the rules of the field Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 241 and how to use this field, as well as the advantages and disadvantages that the field will offer him/her. The complexity of digital media, especially when it comes to access information or the difficulty of accessing digital media, creates inequality among individuals. Inequality in entering the field and the coercivity of the rules are obstacles against individuals’ benefiting from this field effectively. Having become the most important field of information for the individual who has lost communication and interaction with the other individuals constituting the society, media (especially digital media) is also the most important determinant of the individual’s habitus, his perspective of the world.

Habitus is the internalization of the field; it is a series of historical relationships that are included in individual bodies in the form of mental and bodily schemes. These schemes are acquired through social interactions in everyday life and include schemes related to compatibility, aesthetic tastes, and undesirable things, as well as habitual linguistic practices. Employing the concept of habitus reveals the importance of Bourdieu’s work in the field of digital inequality. Transferring a Bourdieusian framework to the digital field allows us to grasp how individuals relate to their sources of information and especially how information habits of people in different locations are manifested (Ignatow & Robinson, 2017, p. 954). Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is indispensable for revealing actions, decisions, and orientations that help individuals identify their successes and future. Various studies have revealed that digital technologies are inadequate in situations requiring information habitus, such as career development and education, and even negatively affect the development of individuals.

One of the greatest sources of happiness and satisfaction for people is to communicate with others. The more people interact, the more they experience satisfaction. Today, people who are surrounded by a digital life meet their communication and interaction needs through digital networks. Today’s individual, who is getting increasingly lonely and trying to satisfy the need to be together and safe by creating virtual communities, has to deal with more stimuli than traditional community individuals. Digital networks that have turned into a global network are conveying things to their users from all over the world. For the individual who has lost face-to-face communication, it is impossible not to be affected by the content imposed on him/her through communication. Interestingly, in many ways, social media has brought people together on a level like never before. Social media and people’s interactions in it allow the expression of many different emotions and the development of relationships due to the easiness of interactions. 242 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE

7. Discussion and Conclusion

The media is a technological tool that produces, disseminates, and offers information and regulates human activities in this process while restricting these activities from ever so often. Communication technologies influencing human activities can be defined as techno- social systems. For example, drawing on Gidden’s structure-action duality, the media (both traditional and new media) is a technological structure that influences and restricts human actions in the society it occupies, but it is also influenced by those actions. However, given its potential to influence and alter human actions, it is also a social structure. The situation that Weber conceptualized as ‘social action’ and ‘social relationship’ and described as an action and a relationship through interactions with the other precisely expresses the new media. Communication, which used to be one-way in traditional media as feedback was ignored, has been replaced by an interactive environment in the new media. This is an ideal environment for the emergence of ‘social action’ and ‘social relationship.’

As Bourdieu explained through the concept of habitus, the media is trying to make the individual act in the interests of certain forces (global capital being the greatest power) by altering his/her world view. Digital media, or new media, is much more effective than traditional media in changing its habitus and directing human action because it is capable of catching the individual personally. Digital environments, functioning as public fields for ‘the ideal types’ of the 21st century, offer people techno-socialization. The actions of the individual who socialize through new media have become largely imprisoned or organized in digital media as well. The place for expressing discontent or rebelling against injustice in everyday life that is surrounded by new communication tools is the virtual public sphere.

In postmodern theory, where differences, diversity, and heterogeneity are glorified, the proliferation of differences and diversity in the new social order is described on the basis of consumer desires and needs. Described by postmodern cultural studies with the restructuring of global and local identities and new forms of resistance and struggle, forms of hybrid culture and identities correspond to global capitalism in which there is an intense flow of products, cultures, and human beings. Global post-modern discourse involves the pluralization of culture and the embracing of voices, differences, and marginalities that are excluded from the narrative of Western culture. However, according to the Frankfurt School’s approach, global post-modern discourse serves to legitimize global capitalism through new media and its technologies. The influence of the media culture produced by the elite and transmitted through the media is profound in the realization of social control and capital accumulation. As Douglas Necla ODYAKMAZ ACAR, Şebnem ÇAĞLAR 243

Kellner (2016, pp. 146-147) particularly emphasizes, the technology, culture, and politics of current global capitalism, which is the new world order, is portrayed as more diverse and pluralistic, enabling the voices of differences and marginalities to be heard; however, it is controlled and limited by international companies. Transnational companies narrow the limits of cultural narratives instead of expanding them and become the new, powerful determinants of culture. Globalization, which means the hegemony of the transnational cultural industries, is largely American. The cultural industries of the United States dominate the world market in terms of films, television, music, fashion, and other cultural elements. Although global postmodernism connotates diversity and differentiation, it should also be considered that it has a pari passu tendency towards global homogenization and uniformity, the themes that the Frankfurt School constantly emphasized.

Cyber-travelers or cyber-nomads, who spend most of their day in the new media, are facing excessive information transfer due to the hyperlink characteristic of the new media. Therefore, they cannot be expected to focus on or follow one particular event. Having short- term focus and multitasking consciousness, cyber-travelers act with the illusion that they must not miss anything shared on the Internet as well as the concern to be noticed and to look busy. Surely, every technology is useful when used wisely and consciously. Those who produce the technology and hold the ownership of the new media define this environment as a field of freedom, the environment that makes the oppressed heard. It is not rational for users to adopt the same discourse and approach the new media in this way. As it is impossible for people who get far from knowledge to produce ideas, it will become impossible to decide what is right and what is wrong when digital platforms are the only source of information for new generations born into the digital world. Those who will decide what is right are the owners of communication technology.

Unlike social theorists who ignored the social influences of communication technologies in the past, today, these technologies are considered to have significant impacts that cannot be ignored. Undoubtedly, the role of communication scientists and sociologists who produce ideas on communication has been essential in revealing the importance of the media. One of the biggest challenges for the early media sociologists is the exclusion of the media by social theorists who produce ideas about society, culture, and social change. Media sociology studies seeking to reveal the organic connection of media to individuals and society by drawing on the opinions produced within social theory have developed mediation theories known as “the mediatization thesis” and have emphasized the integration of media with society. Media sociology studies, which have become an important sub-branch of sociology today, 244 MEDIA SOCIOLOGY UNDER DIGITAL SIEGE have saved the media from being a dependent variable and enabled it to be recognized as an independent institution on its own. Since it was accepted that “life is digital” in the 21st century, the center of media sociology studies shifted to digital technologies and the digital society created by using these technologies. There is an effort to explain various sociological issues such as family, science, health, knowledge, culture, economy, race, and many others in connection with digital technologies. Issues such as social inequalities, social networks, social structures, social institutions, self, and identity are now studied through digital society. The problems arising from the fact that new media consumers are not only consumers but also producers in an interactive communication environment are now made into research subjects by media sociologists. It is the task of media sociologists to analyze the media that plays the most important role in shaping the social structure. The way to understand the society and the individual, who is the building block of society, is possible with the theses to be produced within the scope of media sociology on the media-society relationship, the media-power relationship, and the media-capital relationship.

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CHAPTER 12

DIGITAL PUBLIC RELATIONS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF IDENTITIES

H. Burcu ÖNDER MEMİŞ1

1Asst. Prof., T.C. Arel University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Public Relations and Advertisement, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.11

ABSTRACT As digitalization has led to the transformation of many fields, it has also played a key role in the evolution of public relations. In particular, the fact that social media facilitates direct communication with institutions, managers, and other identities without the need for any other intermediary is among the main factors influencing this transformation. Digitalization has changed the target groups. Target groups now have more access to information. The information flowing through many channels has increased the abilities of individuals to question, research, learn the reasons, think critically, challenge, give immediate feedback, and react. The diversity of thoughts that emerges in the face of events has allowed the intensification of comparisons, reasoning and sharing them in all kinds of digital media. Thus, a virtual environment has been created in which individuals can come together and discuss their ideas freely and share their different interpretations or new information immediately. These virtual environments are as effective for communication as the environments where individuals are physically next to each other. At times, they help facilitate the physical gatherings of many people as in the case of popular uprisings in the Middle East and Egypt. Another significant aspect of digital platforms is the assumption that such digital platforms, as well as anything posted on such platforms, have the potential to transform the identity of individuals. Today, individuals tend to define themselves and who they are through knowledge sharing, posts, and feedback, in addition to their standing and attitudes towards an issue on such platforms. What does this mean for public relations? As a matter of course, the first answer to this question is to meet the target groups of these new identities in the right digital platforms and convey the right messages in these environments. Thus, the information needs of target audiences with new identities are met through the right platforms. At the same time, public relations also find the opportunity to reach the symmetrical communication it aims to achieve. Keywords: Digital public relations, social media, identity, digital communication 248 DIGITAL PUBLIC RELATIONS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF IDENTITIES

1. Introduction

While digitalization has changed many areas, it has affected mostly people and their lifestyle. The ease of access to products and services, the immediate spread of information, and social networks have changed the way people live. Images and perceptions are more important than ever. As explained in the further sections of this study; for individuals, what others think about them, how they treat them, and how one appears in the eyes of others have gained importance.

The development of social media has created an environment where people can express themselves freely. People can easily publish their responses and comments on their social media accounts, although there is a risk that they will be monitored and followed by control mechanisms. They can demonstrate their reactions to any crisis, social issue, and problem with a sense of social responsibility and citizenship. However, this situation is not limited to this.

For example, it is important that new information, a current topic or a joke is first shared and announced by the person in his/her social media groups. Thus, as a person who has shared any subject first, they can gain popularity in social media. This brings admiration to the person and causes him/her to be mentioned more. This means more to people than other needs like interacting with others or establishing relationships. This makes it possible for the person to actually reconstruct and present his/her identity as the first person to try, buy, share his/her first experiences with that product, announce a social issue, or show his/her reaction.

Therefore, digital public relations should consider where and how the target group needs to position themselves in terms of identity. Target groups should consider that they build their own identity while managing a crisis in a digital environment, sharing a social responsibility campaign with their target group through digital platforms.

This study aims to discuss the potential correlation between the transformation of the identity of the individuals during digital processes and digital public relations. In this context, this study was designed as a think piece (Özgen, 2019, p. 16) with an aim to reveal the correlation between digital public relations and identities capable of being reconstructed and represented during the digitalization process.

Within this context, the study aims to develop a perspective on digital public relations and transformation of identities. Qualitative and quantitative research can be conducted on to what extent digital public relations have an impact on the transformation of identities. This study was designed as a preliminary study prior to conducting such types of research (Özgen, H. Burcu ÖNDER MEMİŞ 249

2019, p. 16). In the first section of the study, digital public relations are discussed whereas the second section discusses the definition of identity and how it is formed. In the third section, how identities may evolve through interaction with digital public relations processes and how such identities may be influenced by transfer and sharing of public relations practices on digital platforms are illustrated examples based on the literature review.

2. Digital Public Relations

Social media has enabled individuals to access information more quickly and to share information that they acquire instantly. In addition to accessing and sharing information, it has enabled them to put forward their own comments, attitudes and thoughts, and to pass these on to other people and influence their ideas. Together with the impact of social media, online communities have come together to share their ideas on many topics. These communities both influence each other’s ideas and reach out to organizations and brands and take them into their sphere of influence with their attitudes and comments. Therefore, they have become “new impressors,” as new stakeholders, and represent groups in which institutions and brands have to communicate (Alikılıç, 2011, pp. 12-14). Web 2.0 has created a space for users to determine their own content. Thus, the “inventor” concept was born, meaning producing while consuming (Çankaya, 2010, as cited in Alikılıç, 2011, p. 13).

Consumers influence products through advancing communication technologies and are involved in their creation, design or change processes. This means that, in parallel to the concept of “inventor”, they become “prosumers” (Köse & Yengin, 2018, p. 101). Therefore, target groups are also active in the design and renewal phase of products and services.

Another important point for public relations practitioners in the digital environment is the content that consumers create themselves. There is no problem with the content when the brand is in favor of the corporation. However, if the content bears negative elements for the corporation and the brand, public relations practitioners should take intervening actions. Otherwise, crises may occur in digital platforms and these messages increase their effect by spreading rapidly. In this case, public relations practitioners can communicate with the owners of the content and transmit information to them and have them delete such content. Another point in digital public relations is blogs. Readers feel closer to blogs and find them more reliable. Since interaction is also intense in blogs, public relations workers should evaluate this highly interactive environment. Practitioners can contact bloggers. Blogs with high and still increasing numbers of followers have created areas practitioners should work on by developing further strategies. In blogs, people can write whatever they want, 250 DIGITAL PUBLIC RELATIONS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF IDENTITIES independent of any censorship effects, and what they write finds an important reciprocation in readers. Personal, corporate, thematic blogs, community blogs, micro blogs such as Twitter, Instagram, and Foursquare can be given as examples (Aydınalp, 2013, pp. 5-6). Blogs create an environment for public relations practitioners to reach their target group and communicate in a more intimate and sincere tone in a digital environment.

Blogs allow dialogue to be established in the digital world. The language and communication style of bloggers is closer and more sincere than the language used in traditional media. For this reason, many readers attach importance to the opinions and comments of bloggers in line with their areas of interest (Güçdemir, 2015, p. 37). Therefore, it is important for public relations practitioners to follow blogs and bloggers followed by their target groups. Thus, they use the right communication channels to deliver the right messages to their target audience.

Another field of study in digital public relations is to take an interest in corporate blogs to strengthen brand promotion. Information on brands should be accurate, up-to-date and new in order to inform the target groups on the corporate blogs and to establish desired communication with them. In order to keep these pages up to date and fresh, it is beneficial for public relations practitioners to get support from social media experts and work together with them. Another method that has been transformed in the field of public relations together with digitalization is press releases and how they are sent. Press releases should be written and sent in a way that is easily accessible and readable when using search engines. Micro blogs, such as Twitter, ensure the maintenance of customer relations. Practitioners can easily see consumers’ ideas about brands, institutions, services, and applications in micro blogs. Thus, it is easier to direct these flows, to exchange ideas and to fix them by intervening quickly if there are problems. It is also possible for institutions to announce and disseminate social responsibility activities through micro blogs (Aydınalp, 2013, pp. 6-7). Although digitalization brings a lot of convenience, it should be noted that false messages or information will easily spread and strategies should be created bearing this in mind.

Other tools used in social media include RSS, wikis, podcasting, social networking, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Pinterest, Foursquare, Linkedin, Instagram, and Whatsapp. Information, photos, videos about institutions, brands, products and services can be shared using these tools (Güçdemir, 2015). Target groups focus on these tools in line with their areas of interests. Therefore, institutions use these tools to communicate with their target audiences through the right channels. H. Burcu ÖNDER MEMİŞ 251

Another field of application that is important in public relations activities carried out in the digital environment is crisis communication. Crises are periods that challenge and threaten institutions in terms of time and cost pressure. Therefore, it is important that practitioners share the information needed by the target group accurately and quickly. Strategies to manage the crisis in a virtual environment are gathered in two groups. The first of these is the publication of press releases, holding press conferences, answering questions, and transferring traditional crisis communication practices to the internet on a one-way communication basis. The second is innovative media tactics. Innovative media tactics include engaging in dialogue with target groups through the internet, giving links, setting up a system for transmitting information, using multimedia effects, and providing online chat services (Güçdemir, 2015, pp. 115-116). For institutions, blogs have special importance in times of crisis. Therefore, in times of crisis, practitioners should follow blogs, blog writers and what they are writing, and review and develop strategies. In this respect, it may be useful to compare blog posts in times of crisis. Thus, how blogs handle the topic in times of crisis will become more visible. In this period, it becomes clearer which messages should be given to target audiences. Journalists write based on official sources. Blog writers can create content with their own comments. Therefore, making comparative studies in this sense can contribute to institutions in times of crisis. In addition, blogs announce crises more rapidly, even before other media sources. Therefore, blogs and blog writers should be paid attention to and the correct communication should be established with them so that the right information is included in these blogs (Güçdemir, 2015, pp. 117-119). As can be seen, it is important to transfer the applications and methods in public relations to a virtual environment and to develop strategies and techniques. Failure to do so may result in inadequacy and increased threats and risks.

In reputation management carried out in the digital environment, blogs, folksonomies, wikis, microblogs, and social networks are used. These tools are very important for an institution’s reputation management. This is because information is freely written on blogs and experiences are easily shared on microblogs. The opinions and experiences shared on micro blogs, especially the comments coming from experiences about products and services, affect the person. Wikipedia has become a more trusted source than other encyclopedias. The information here is up-to-date and kept constantly updated. The information contained in Wikipedia is also shared and disseminated in areas such as Twitter and Facebook. On social media platforms, people can easily write about their dissatisfaction when they are not satisfied with a service or product. Therefore, customer satisfaction and the management of customer relations put more emphasis on these platforms. These also affect the corporate reputation. 252 DIGITAL PUBLIC RELATIONS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF IDENTITIES

In addition, social bookmarking, for example, is based on people’s own experience, allowing individuals to find more and different information than they can find in traditional search engines (Özel & Sert, 2015, pp. 164-169). Therefore, this is a factor affecting the corporate reputation in the virtual environment.

The digital world has changed many things in sales and marketing. Now it is much easier to determine what consumers like, at what price they want to buy something, where they travel, which shelves they look at most, and how they differentiate between products. With digital processes, position, product, price, positioning, promotion, process and people, which are called the “p’s of marketing,” have become more practical and open to improvement through more accurate applications. For example, it is possible to identify location through GPS, camera, WiFi, and beacons. Thus, who goes where, and how often, are identified and recorded. Price is among the marketing mix elements that the consumer pays attention to most and is important in the purchasing decision. Price calculations are now made according to the demands of consumers, and how much they can pay for which product or service. This is done through “big data and precise algorithms” (Aksu, 2018, pp. 174-175). Amazon and Alibaba can be mentioned as examples. Big data and artificial intelligence algorithms will be more dominant in digitizing marketing processes and marketing will continue to develop in this way. For this reason, organizations will need digital marketing experts who are familiar with these algorithms and data, who can build all these systems themselves, and who are good at customer analytics. Digitizing marketing develops e-commerce. It is easily observed in digital environments which places consumers visit, what products are sold there. Target groups are surrounded by smart products such as refrigerators determining needs and placing orders accordingly, or washing machines estimating and delivering the amount of detergent needed when you press on the detergent button called “Single-Button” on the washing machine by Arçelik. “Applications like Internet of Things (IOT), integration between machines, big data and artificial intelligence” will further increase in digital marketing and institutions will need digital marketing experts who understand, produce, and use these applications (Aksu, 2018, pp. 177-178). Today, many consumers buy from e-commerce channels such as Hepsiburada, Trendyol, Getir, GittiGidiyor, and sell second-hand goods from places such as Letgo.

Digital public relations use the internet to reach wider audiences. Thus, it exceeds traditional public relations methods and maintains its applications on a digital platform. Digital public relations are used to give current information about institutions and services to stakeholders of the institutions and their target audiences. It uses journalism networks and the internet to provide this information. Thus, digital public relations publish press bulletins H. Burcu ÖNDER MEMİŞ 253 online through journalistic networks and the internet. People looking for content receive this information. They either reuse information when citing sources or give content as it is. People looking for information can frequently access the website of an institution. They can increase the frequency of visits to the website by allowing other people to enter it. So this can bring the institution to the top in search engines. The institution being ranked at the top in the search engine means that it is more visible and recognizable. At this point search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play. Search engine optimization provides a website to be found on search engines and visited more frequently with appropriate keywords. It also directs more users to the website. It is important to use keywords that best promote the institution to get efficient results in the search engine. These keywords should be the words that give information about the institution itself, its products and services. Quality content, appropriate keywords, strong language, internal links on the site, external links to the site are the main components of search engine optimization (Gifford, 2010, pp. 63-64). As it is seen, it is important to use technical applications in digital public relations. For example, it is necessary to know the features of search engine optimization.

The internet has changed the public relations methods of public relations practitioners. Through the internet, practitioners’ methods of transmitting information, communicating with target audiences, crisis and issue management have changed. In addition to these, the internet and digital methods have also affected the legal basis of public relations (Hallahan, 2004, pp. 255-256). Digital assets are intangible and non-physical assets of an organization that are stored and distributed through computers. These digital assets include creative content, organizational records, and databases that public relations practitioners produce and distribute online. Digitized data covers the information of an institution’s products and services. The point that should be taken into consideration by institutions is that institutions cannot claim rights about public information, because this information is an inexhaustible public domain that can be changed again. Digital data is important because it is the currency of the internet age. These digital data are also important for the protection of organizations. IT managers store the digital assets described above on computers that need to be controlled by the organization. They refer to them as bytes and bits. At this point, there is a difference between data processing managers and public relations practitioners: The purpose of data processing managers is to protect information. The purpose of public relations practitioners is to share information as openly as possible with the target audiences. The important part of this in terms of digital public relations is that public relations practitioners share information in a digital environment as safely as possible. In other words, public relations practitioners should 254 DIGITAL PUBLIC RELATIONS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF IDENTITIES protect the institution against possible digital risks while sharing the information. People also have expectations and demands regarding organizations in a digital environment. They measure the performance of the institution according to the fulfillment of these expectations and demands. When the institution displays bad attitudes in a digital environment, this situation causes damage to the institution. In the context of digital public relations, public relations practitioners must have knowledge of how to share information securely in a digital environment to protect their institutions (Hallahan, 2004, p. 256).

3. Identity and Transformation

Hall (1990/2015, p. 133), emphasizes that we should not think of identity as a definite, complete structure, and that identity is constantly changing. Roles and identities are different. For example, a person can be a mother, spouse, and employee at the same time. Roles are structured by social institutions according to their rules. Behaviors are also shaped accordingly. Identities, on the other hand, are meaningful and important for individuals themselves. Therefore, they play an important role in the structuring of individualization. In addition, identities are stronger in terms of nurturing meaning and individuation when compared to roles. Identities determine meaning and roles determine functions. Individualism can be included as an element of collective identity if we talk about individualism by excluding it from individual identity (Castells, 2008, p. 13). Castells (2008, pp. 14-15) questions where and by whom identities are formed. He highlights that history, geography, power, collective memory and biology are effective in the formation of identities. According to him, identities are divided into having three origins. The first is legitimate identities. Legitimate identities are created by the dominant institutions in society to make their domination more permanent. The second is the identity of resistance. This identity is developed as a counter-stance to the domination of legitimate identities. Finally, the projected identity reconsiders traditional societal roles, such as the feminist women’s identity, which goes beyond the traditional idea that feminist women’s identity only focuses on women rights, but is expanded and opposes patriarchy in a more general sense.

Aka (2010, p. 18) emphasizes that social and cultural identity should be clearly defined. Social identity is expressed in terms of the relationships that individuals establish among themselves. In social identity, a person develops, feels and belongs to a group on the basis of these relationships, and at the same time finds meaning in the context of the roles presented to them, pointing to Goffman’s (2009) explanations in his study “Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life” (Aka, 2010, p. 18). According to Subaşı (2005, p. 301), cultural identities have H. Burcu ÖNDER MEMİŞ 255 a history. Therefore, they are not constant and are in a state of change. Identities are elements that define different aspects of people and thus enable people to express themselves in relation to a past process (Aka, 2010, p. 18).

Identity refers to the social status and status of individuals in relation to their cultural and social environment. Beliefs, attitudes, and value judgments are also included. Identity is both a personal matter and it is shaped together with the living environment at the same time. Thus, it has a social aspect as well. The individual identities of people distinguish them from others (Güvenç, 1993, pp. 3-5, 28; Yıldız, 2007, pp. 9-10). The identity of the person is positioned based on other people. What a person is not and what he/she does not look like can shape his/her identity. Levi-Strauss said, “me against others” (Yıldız, 2007, p. 10). Recognition, identification, and belonging (Güleç, 1992, pp. 14-16) are important elements of identity. Subjectivity, objectivity, individuality and sociality, uniformity and change constitute the dimensions of identity. In addition, these are the images that the individual interacts with during the socialization process and develops against the groups he/she is in and hears about. If there is an inconsistency between these images, then identity problems occur (Güleç, 1992, pp. 14-16; Yıldız, 2007, pp. 9-10).

Taylor (2000, pp. 49-50) says that there was no issue about who an individual was and how he/she was known before modernity. With modernity, societies’ relationship styles, the interactions of individuals and sense of belonging began to change. Individuals begin to feel lonely in city life. They tried to address this loneliness through other interactions and belonging. Therefore, as a result, the definition of a person has changed. Globalization has also been influential in identity. Globalization makes societies the same in terms of consumption and lifestyle habits. However, the cultural differences of societies reveal a situation opposed to this similarity. In other words, societies have very different cultural characteristics. However, globalization wants to put all societies in the same mold. (Durdu, 2013, pp. 348-362).

Mass media and consumption culture have been dominant in the transformation of identity along with globalization. With the development of communication technologies, people have easier access to information, products, and services. One important element in shaping identity is the sense of belonging. People want to be members of a group, to feel a sense of belonging, and to change themselves at the same time. In the process of socialization, people try to find a balance between these two desires. One may also want to be part of a group by interacting with a number of encouraging elements. Media is one of the most important encouraging elements. Especially today, celebrities, the brands they use and their lifestyles stand out on social media. People who take celebrities as role models want to use the products they use 256 DIGITAL PUBLIC RELATIONS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF IDENTITIES and be like them. Thus, people can develop a sense of belonging to a group of people they admire (Kadıoğlu, 2013, pp. 106-107). As has been emphasized, the self-defining methods of an individual who defines himself within structures such as family and family relations have changed in contemporary society.

Consumption culture and conspicuous consumption are noteworthy in the transformation of identity. As has been previously described, identity involves being different from others, and highlighting these differences over and over again. Consumption culture tries to make people feel this difference via brands. It gives them a feeling of being privileged. At this point, the products are purchased not only through the need to function, but also to show that you are privileged and different from others. These forms of distinction can be in the form of social distinction and intellectual distinction. It is possible to purchase and share the brands that contain these details and to share them with others and to make them available to others. At this point, the most important thing is not only the purchase, but the announcement of the purchase to the others. Thus, identities are presented by being shaped through it (Kadıoğlu, 2013, p. 112). As Goffman (2009) emphasizes, through the performance offered to the others, identities are conveyed by being constantly reshaped.

Consumption culture enables individuals to define themselves through the commodities they buy. Thus, identities can be redefined and revealed, and shown to people. On the one hand, in the culture of consumption, one tries to create as many similarities and identities as possible between the members of this class in order not to be separated from the class he/she feels connected to. On the other hand, the consumption system displays a structure based on diversity. The more different the person is from other identities, the more approval and appreciation he/she gets. Therefore, the individual seeks to be as different as possible, to be different and to show it. What makes this possible is the commodities he/she buys. Therefore, gaining status and prestige and emphasizing one’s position in society is possible through the purchase of commodities. The social classes in which people are located and their roles in these classes shape their identities and how they lead their lives. One of the manifestations of identity in the culture of consumption is lifestyle. Lifestyle includes leisure activities and demographic characteristics. In consumer culture, unlike traditional lifestyles, people may show that they live other lifestyles (Odabaşı, 2013, p. 145-162). What people do, how they lead their lives, what they support and what they are against (i.e., where they belong and where they do not) constitute an important detail of identity when evaluated as part of lifestyle. Today, we see that all of these are frequently exhibited on social media. Thus, people identify and present themselves to others through repetitive processes bearing these elements. H. Burcu ÖNDER MEMİŞ 257

Another factor in the transformation of identities is the fact that images are replacing reality and people want to reserve a place for themselves in the world of images Fichter (1994, p. 3). emphasizes that today’s real interactions, human life, and experiences have been replaced by images. In other words, people live “as if”. Relationships and experiences in real social life are now emptied. These are replaced by false experiences or those pretended to be happening (Kahraman, 2004, p. 2). What other people think about a person and how they come up with ideas about him/her have become very important now. There are actions, beliefs, thought structures, and symbols in the concept of images. Symbols also have a significant impact on the way people deal with life. How an individual is dressed or how he/she behaves play a role in this image as well as non-verbal forms of communication. The image of an individual plays an important role in the execution of his/her relationships and the way he/she lives in society. However, as the difference between images and reality grows, this difference begins to carry a risk for a healthy social life and healthy relationships (Kahraman, 2004, pp. 3-14).

4. Transformation of Identities in Digital Public Relations Process

Today, people are building their identities in social networks by shaping their profiles. Individuals want to be active, visible, and noticeable in the social media environment even though they are connected and social in real life. This is because social networks offer people more than just the opportunity to communicate with each other or to be social. This means that people can both stay and engage with the public sphere and stay private in their own private profiles at the same time (Dursun & Barut, 2016, pp. 538-539). Avcıoğlu (2011) states that political views, believes, living area, working, and producing status are important in the construction of identities in virtual environments. According to Şengün (2014) and Rheingold (1993), identities that are formed in the virtual environment and presented to others over and over again are idealized over real ones (Dursun & Barut, 2016, p. 540). Individuals display themselves by sharing content in their profiles, contributing to existing ones with their own ideas, and presenting themselves through communicating with others (Özdemir, 2015, pp. 112-131; Dursun & Barut, 2016, p. 541).

As stated by Bhattacharya & Sen (2003, p. 77), according to social identity theory, individuals do not need intensive communication with other members of the group in order to be able to perceive that they belong to such a group. Based on this theory, individuals are able to create rapport with a group and identify themselves as a member of such a group without extensive communication activities and intensive sense of engagement. In such a 258 DIGITAL PUBLIC RELATIONS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF IDENTITIES case, individuals form an identity different from their own personal identity through social identity in order to define and present their individuality. Based on a study conducted by Scott & Lane (2000, p. 43-62), individuals are in search of some organizations in order to be able to restructure their identity. Companies and brands as created by such companies use this need to address the need of the target groups for seeking a new identity, and make efforts to establish a bond with such groups in a manner to meet their needs for restructuring such an identity (Atılgan, 2020, p. 1899).

Bauman (2006, p. 44) states that individuals are engaged in the act of consumption in order to restructure their identity, define themselves, and make themselves visible. In the postmodern period, consumers act emotionally. Consumers prefer products to get an image. They are more concerned with the lifestyle and identities the products offer them than the real benefits of the products. Individuals expect such consumer products to provide them with an identity. In this regard, images, symbols, signs, and stories play a crucial role. Consumers surrounded by digital processes of the postmodern period use brands to develop various discourses. In this manner, they create their own stories and similarly contact other individuals. Today, target groups play an active role as consumers and have the power to determine market conditions. In this context, consumers assume various identities with the impact of new communication technologies, digital processes, digital marketing, and means of consumption. Therefore, consumers intend to assume various identities and roles rather than a single identity (Orçan, 2010; Bocock, 1997; Slater, 1997; Odabaşı, 2006; Fırat & Schultz, 2001; Fırat, 1995; Bayazıt Şahinoğlu, 2009, as cited in Hayta, 2014, pp. 11-25).

Birch (2016, p. 84) discusses the cultural transformation of creation, use, and management of an identity today. Shavers (2016: 194) presents the elements of social media, websites, e-mail accounts, photographs posted online, mobility, forums, telecommunication, online storage, and online shopping as the identifiers of digital identity. Aiello, Lodha & Ostrovsky (1998, p. 137) define digital identity as the identity used in various digital platforms such as online shopping, B2B trading, online banking, and intercompany identities (Kavut, 2020, pp. 990-996). Digital identity is associated and intertwined with various areas such as personality, personality traits, types of personality, social media, artificial intelligence, the “Internet of Things (IOT)1”, image, image management, and reputation management (Kavut, 2020, p. 1001). As previously stated by Shavers (2016, p. 194), online shopping, social media, websites, and forums are among the identifying elements of digital identity.

1 The concept of “Internet of Things (IOT)” was first used by Kevin Ashton in 1991. It means that many electronic devices are communicating with each other (https://www.oracle.com/tr/internet-of-things/what-is-iot.html, https://proente.com/nesnelerin-interneti-nedir/, 30.09.2020). H. Burcu ÖNDER MEMİŞ 259

The scope of the practice of digital public relations covers providing online shopping, creation and maintenance of corporate websites, utilization of blogs, forums, and social media accounts, management of social responsibility, crisis, image, and reputation through digital platforms (Güçdemir, 2015). In this sense, it is evident that the defining elements of digital identity are also used by digital public relations and digital public relations play a crucial role in the transformation of identities as well as in the evolution of such identities into digital identities.

From another perspective, target groups are now able to easily access the products used by their favorite celebrities and readily own what such celebrities wear or use thanks to digitalization. Marketing activities through digital methods have created platforms to enable such target groups to look like their favorite celebrities. Further, marketing activities allows people to assume the lifestyles and images of such celebrities through the products and brands used by such celebrities. For instance, “e-commerce featured serials” can be given as an example to this. While watching FoxPlay, Hepsiburada and 4N1K series called New Beginnings in Turkey, an environment where people can buy the clothes of the actors/ actresses in the series instantly is offered. Thus, the target group is able to access the clothes of the actors/actresses they admire, like, and want to resemble (Shiftdelete.net, 2019). Instant access to the clothes and accessories of the protagonists whom the target audiences identify with, and want to resemble, provides an opportunity for them to look like these people. This affects their identity, presenting themselves to others. Based on the assumption that users share such practices through their own social media accounts, it is evident that digital public relations might play a crucial role through marketing in how target groups build an identity for themselves. As is mentioned above, creating images, identifying and presenting themselves through images constitute an important place in social networks today. Such applications enable the target groups to adapt the images to themselves and share them on social networks through digital public relations techniques.

Another practice announced by public relations using their social media accounts is social responsibility activities. Such activities are announced through different organizations’ social media accounts. Therefore, organizations directly contact target groups who intend to express themselves based on particular lifestyles and through various identities embracing such lifestyles. Fairy’s campaign in 2017 can be given as an example. In 2017, Fairy collaborated with the Turkish Marine Research Foundation (TUDAV) and organized a social responsibility campaign on the environment. They announced that they extracted the phosphate from their products for the survival of the fish in the sea and organized an exhibition by working with 260 DIGITAL PUBLIC RELATIONS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF IDENTITIES famous names such as Gonca Vuslateri, Sedef Avcı and Kıvanç Kasabalı. In order to draw attention to the subject, underwater photographs of the celebrities were exhibited. The study was announced via Twitter, on the account of P&G Turkey (Onedio.com, 2017). Today, organizations announce their social responsibility activities through digital platforms and make efforts to ensure that such announcements are shared online as much as possible.

This is because ecological identities get involved in such cases. While conveying information about nature and environment to the society on the one hand, ecological identities reveal differences from other ideas, structures and identities on the other hand. Underlining the difference is one of the most important elements in identity formation. Thus, in order to incorporate more supporters of ecological identities, ecologists specifically emphasize their differences from other groups. Hence, those who have an ecological identity can both see and show themselves differently by being pleased to carry this difference in their daily social lives. In addition to marginalization, identification is also effective in the formation of ecological identity. Ecological identity predicts that nature is central to the completion of the self and its identification with nature (Kılıç & Tok, 2013, pp. 241-243). For these reasons, digital public relations studies shape crisis management and social responsibility activities according to these identities and announce them through digital platforms.

5. Conclusion

Digitalization has changed many concepts. With digitalization, while many things are being redefined, human beings have taken the process of redefining themselves. Photographs, shared content, updates, and ideas used in social media show that humans are reconstructing and presenting themselves to others.

Identities are subject to transformation in the digital era since an individual’s self- perception and perception of others as well as self-definition have changed in conjunction with digitalization during the postmodern period. Devices and equipment used, new communication technologies as well as changes to the means of production, relations of production, and means of consumption play a role in the transformation of identities. Digital platforms enable individuals to build various images and create different perceptions. Therefore, individuals are able to rebuild themselves using different identities in the content they post on such digital platforms.

For individuals, what the others think about them and how they appear to others has become more important than ever. Approving and liking of others has gained weight in H. Burcu ÖNDER MEMİŞ 261 defining oneself. At this point, digital public relations discovered the target groups’ search for new identities. Reactions, ideas, features, likes, and needs that came into play in the repositioning of the target audiences have been the main area of study and agenda of digital public relations.

When a product or service is marketed to the consumer, the reality on which the consumer defines himself/herself through that product emerges as an undeniable issue in the promotion process. In fact, not only the stage of using, but also the stage of supplying the product serve the purpose of making the consumer different from others.

Now, target groups are questioning institutions’ complicity in crises more, wanting to know the reasons, reacting more on social media, and increasing the awareness of others. In addition, access to and sharing of information has become easier. They talk more about the environment, women’s rights, animal rights, children’s rights, economic injustices, and irregular architectural construction., Through social media people can inform the society and seek solutions. Of course, these issues also point to the new identities of the target groups.

Therefore, digital public relations cannot work independently of all these issues of interest to the target groups. In this process, it is necessary to take into account the new identity constructions of the target groups and to concentrate on the processes of these identity constructions. After the Industrial Revolution, digitalization has been the breaking point that has changed the target groups the most. In this process, where and how identities are located and how people want to define themselves have been an important field of study for digital public relations. For this reason, digital public relations have to expand its application fields through new identity building processes.

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CHAPTER 13

BEYOND THE SCREEN - FROM VIRTUAL REALITY TO MOVING MUSEUMS: TURKEY’S POTENTIAL IN A POSTMIGRANT ERA

Detlev QUINTERN1

1Assist. Prof., Turkish German University, Cultural Studies and Social Sciences, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.13

ABSTRACT Postcolonial debates that discuss the genesis, character and development of the museum institution in Canada, the USA, Oceania and Western Europe have revealed the necessity to newly conceptualize museum studies (museology) in a dialogical and transcultural manner. While there is the need to decolonize imperial museums and to restitute stolen artefacts, objects, works of art and monuments, a notable trend is replacing museum objects by replicas. The development of digital, 3-D and other binary technologies makes it more and more difficult for the wider public to distinguish replicas from originals. In the context of continuing restitution debates, the question about which museum hosts the original object and which hosts the replica might become of importance. Furthermore, it is obvious that historicity of material cultures and objects bear an aura that communicates with the “viewer,” which is an emotional relationship that cannot be replaced by digitization and virtual reality. The pervasive two- dimensionality in daily life, often from early childhood, longs for alternatives. Museums have the potential to recover creative spaces for emotional and dialogical ways of perception and learning beyond the screen. Turkey shows a specific history of its museums which were influenced by 19th centuries European developments but were differing from British, German or French colonial ethnographic epistemologies. The latter were driven by strategies of collecting material cultures and arts in Asia, Africa, America and Oceania. Turkey is currently hosting around four million refugees in a relatively young post-migrant society, a new museology on the move might pave the way for a more harmonious understanding of history. Keywords: Postcolonial museology, digital museums, auratic objects, museums in Turkey, museums on the move BEYOND THE SCREEN - FROM VIRTUAL REALITY TO MOVING MUSEUMS: 266 TURKEY’S POTENTIAL IN A POSTMIGRANT ERA

1. Introduction

As a result of the annual meeting of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in Tokyo in 2019, the definition of “museum” is the subject of an ongoing controversial debate. What is a museum these days? Can museums be a driving and inspiring public voice when it comes to urgent societal questions, among which include war, peace, racism, justice, climate change, migration, and others? Given this backdrop, this paper will discuss critically what role digitization can play in museums. There can be no doubt that museums benefit from digital humanities, especially when it comes to digital cataloguing and archives that make open access to a wider public possible. In the context of current debates on restitution and postcolonial justice, digital storage might help to bring universal cultural heritage, often slumbering in storage and archives, to the global public. And, when it comes to the question of fair restitutions of stolen artefacts that were mostly looted during colonialist robberies in the Global South, 3-D reproductions might replace the illegitimate appropriation of the “objects,” while the originals are restituted.

In the context of educational and learning pathways, digitization and virtualization are to be avoided, so the paper will argue (I am aware that during the current Covid-19 pandemic the advantages of digital access to museums by far outweigh its disadvantages. I argue with regard to hopefully post Covid-19 times). As colonial collecting for public museums seems to have come to an end (for private collections it is different), museums have primarily educational tasks; they have the potential to pave the way for learning paths beyond the screen. As in daily life, virtualization takes the place of real life experiences more and more, and museums also have the potential to counteract the one- or two-dimensional sensations that harbour the risk of an increasing alienation from integrative perceptions of the real. While museums communicate mainly three-dimensional material cultures, the institution is challenged to develop new didactical learning pathways that will have to adopt appropriate methods in their specific historical–cultural background accordingly. In this respect, the genesis of the museum institution in Turkey looks back to a specific history, being currently challenged with particular difficulties as a young post-migrant society.

2. Museumization, Digitization and Cultural Heritage in Postcolonial Times

The code of ethics of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) still defines the principle guidelines for museums as to “preserve, interpret and promote the natural and cultural inheritance of humanity” (ICOM, 2017). A more antiquated but at the same time more Detlev QUINTERN 267 extensive understanding of the museum institution’s core mission underlines that collecting, researching, exhibiting and mediating also rank among the key responsibilities of museums (Deutscher Museumsbund, 2017). Current museum practices show that communicating cultural inheritance includes the digitization of the museal objects, which consist of three- dimensional artefacts or objects, paintings, photographs, maps, models, reproductions, audio and film recordings and other archival documents (letters, inventories etc.).

In light of postcolonial criticism, at the end of the 1980s in Vancouver, Canada, First Nations people ensured their right to (re-)use museal objects for ceremonies of their communities. The musealized objects were thus reanimated and brought back to their original purpose. The museum task “collecting” seems to have been removed from the current guidelines of public museums due to widespread critique by decolonial voices. This holds true especially for ethnological museums that operate under names like Museum of Cultures in Bale or Frankfurt, the Museum of Five continents in Munich or – still under the antiquated name – “Tropenmuseum” (Tropical Museum) in Amsterdam.

Despite the omnipresent debates on postcolonialism, more attention should be paid to the increasing risk that original historical “objects” enter a criminal international market where objects of cultural heritage are traded illegally. The systematic looting of cultural heritage in Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere point in this direction: demodernization goes hand in hand with eliminating historical consciousness and memory (Quintern, 2018). An internationally operating dark net has been trading stolen heritage up to the present day. Where have all these looted artefacts gone? Here, digital archives can help to identify and search for such lost objects. Furthermore, rumors circulate from time to time that due to the lack of budgetary resources, museums look for ways to sell parts of their collections. In a world where everything seems to be for sale and more and more public property and institutions are sold out to private investors, nothing seems to be unthinkable. So far, the market for antiquities focuses on regions of the world where, through staged chaos, it seems to be easy to snatch valuable objects. It appears as if there are shadowy storage and private museums hiding their robberies, a fact that should be highlighted in debates on postcolonial museums.

In a contribution to the discussion of postcolonial museology, Soares and Leshenko referred recently to the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro who got to the heart of the key issue already in the 1970s. Ribeiro denounced imperialist geopolitics of knowledge that separated the cultures that investigate from those that were investigated (Soares & Leshenko, 2016). While white anthropologists were the researchers, people of colour were forced to be their object. Photography revolutionized anthropological research, being now winged by the BEYOND THE SCREEN - FROM VIRTUAL REALITY TO MOVING MUSEUMS: 268 TURKEY’S POTENTIAL IN A POSTMIGRANT ERA concept of visual objectivization. Nothing illustrates this better than the large collections of photographs in European museums. The looks of Herero women into the lens of European anthropologists speak volumes. These women in the former German colony “South-West Africa” (postcolonial Namibia) show resistance, pride and scorn towards white arrogance and its machinery. Not many of the Herero and Nama survived the concentration camps and massacres that introduced a more systematized form of imperialist genocide into history in the first decade of the 20th century. Jewellery of Herero women were still displayed, without any mention of the colonialist background, in the visible storage of Bremen’s Overseas Museum at the beginning of the 21st century. Very recently a critical museal reflection started to revise carefully the silencing of selected African “objects.” Luckily the debates on the necessity to decolonize museums have changed this long-lasting museal attitude that so far was phasing out imperialist crimes against humanity from the histories of museums’ collections during the colonial long 19th century. The museumization of peoples from the Global South had come to an end. A post-imperial museology in a hopefully multi-harmonious world requires new theories, methods and approaches in which digital media will have an important but subordinate role.

At this point, the need for the decolonization of museums shall not be discussed in further detail. I wanted to touch on the historical genesis of European ethnological museums, in particular as the interventions of First Nations and other people from the Global South into the day-to-day routine of museums in Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand and finally Europe, pioneered the current widely discussed participative museology. In 1992, a delegation from Mexico called for the restitution of a formerly and most probably stolen ruling insignia of Montezuma, or as known to the Aztecs Moctezuma II, the last independent Aztec ruler before the Spanish occupation. Hernán Cortes sent the gold-feather head ornament of the holy quetzal bird in 1519 together with around 160 other objects to the Spanish royal house. From there the jewellery of high historical and spiritual value for the indigenous Mexican people entered the collection of the Habsburg Dynasty in Austria. The National Museum of Anthropology (Muséo National de Antropología) in Mexico City exhibits a copy of the original. Because of increasing calls in Austria for a restitution of the head ornament, which has significant value for Mexico, a former minister for educational and cultural affairs of Austria expressed the fear that in case of a restitution, the case would set a precedent and pave the way to emptying the museum collections in Vienna. What would remain are Austrian cowbells being then exposed in museums. So why not combine an Austrian cowbell with a copy of the feather adornment of Moctezuma II? The original then could be presented in Mexico City while the Detlev QUINTERN 269 copy could be exhibited in Vienna. The example of the important Aztec ornament should be sufficient. However, in many similar cases, discussions of conservation conditions have often served as a pretext for declaring the admittedly sensitive issue of transportation. As a last resort transportation inability is argued. An Egyptian loan request of the famous Nefertiti in Berlin was refused with the argument that the object was too fragile to be transported to Egypt. Currently there is a debate about whether to display or reinstitute the Benin Bronzes, currently in various German museums. Why should the Egyptian public not have the chance to see Nefertiti, at least on loan? More often than not, museal objects are not even inventoried; if they are, then neither their provenance nor their contexts are mentioned and the collection history is incompletely documented.

It is therefore less a question of urgent restitution but more of being capable to confess inflicted injustice. Digital storage of European museums might be a first step to disclosing historical “treasures” of world heritage and material cultures often out of sight in storage. In this context, digital museums and libraries can be of great benefit for cross-border research projects.

Today it is hard to imagine that a protest, such as the one in front of the ethnographic museum in Vienna in 1992 for the 500-year anniversary of the so-called discovery of America, would be harshly dealt with by police. Instead, an indigenous delegation would hopefully be invited into the museum. Museums, when conceptualized as an open space for public debates, overcoming cultural, religious, gender, age and other imagined borders in general, bear the potential to become an alternative to object-centred museal monologues and the loneliness of screened “realities.”

This short critical outline of the self-conception of museums and its guidelines as well as the debates on their future should offer a brief insight into the background of the current crisis of the European museum institution, especially when based on so-called ethnological “collections”. Lynn Maranda writes in Museum Ethics in the 21st Century: Museum ethics transforming into another dimension that in the forthcoming decades, one of the most important ethical precepts will be the interface between museums and aboriginal, indigenous, native and other people of colour ‘along with the particularly thorny but related question of the increasing requests for the repatriation of cultural property’ (Maranda, 2015). In addition to the question of cross- and transcultural dialogue and restitution of looted heritage, in post- migrant times, museums should also be opened up to the victims of the imperialist era. Living carriers of cultural heritage from the Global South are neither objects nor to be digitized or purely virtualized. In this context, the many world cultural heritage sites and museums in Turkey can act as a role model. BEYOND THE SCREEN - FROM VIRTUAL REALITY TO MOVING MUSEUMS: 270 TURKEY’S POTENTIAL IN A POSTMIGRANT ERA

3. On the Genesis of Museums in Turkey – a Subtle Difference

The genesis of Turkey’s museums differs from the founding history of mainly ethnological- oriented museums in cities like Berlin, Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam. In the last quarter of the 19th century, following the Africa or Congo Conference in Berlin in 1884/85, which introduced the disastrous scramble of Africa by European imperialist powers that led to another continent of open veins, the museum institution became more of a home for colonial representation and nationalist glory. The colonization of vast African territories by Germany, England, France, Belgium and other European powers went hand in hand not only with the robbery of mineral and natural products, which were expropriated by forced and enslaved labour, but also with the looting of art, material culture and knowledge.

Of course, archaeology also played an important role in this context. Unlike the removal of ethnographic and objects of art, archaeological artefacts and even monuments often required the digging up of entire areas. Breaking up the earth went alongside the imperialist monopoly of the interpretation of old civilizations, world history, and its periodization. Today archaeologists are more aware of the long-lasting relationship between imperial power and archaeology (Lydon & Rizvi, 2010).

The archaeologist and artist Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910), who founded the first museum of the late Ottoman Empire in 1881, participated in several excavations, for example in the South of Lebanon, which was already subjected to French colonial penetration at this time (Makdisi, 2000). The history of late Ottoman archaeology needs to be discussed in the frame of the dependence on European colonial powers, which were leading the excavation campaigns at that time, for example in Lebanon. Who gave the excavation permission in 1887 in Sidon and who controlled the campaign? Was there an autonomous and self-responsible Ottoman archaeology? In the mid of the 19th century many of the Ottoman provinces, among them Egypt, were more and more under the control of European powers. This holds true not only for financial but also for cultural affairs, first and foremost archaeological excavations. The famous marbled Alexander Sarcophagus, found in one of the royal tombs of Sidon, had been formerly decorated with polychrome painted relief scenes, which probably portrayed Alexander the Great during the battle of Issos / Essos in 333 BC. The sarcophagus of the excavation campaign in 1887 ranks among the gems of Istanbul’s archaeological museum. Interestingly, the Alexander Sarcophagus remained in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul. Many other archaeological findings found their way from Ottoman territories into the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris or to Museums in Berlin. But this is another kettle Detlev QUINTERN 271 of fish and cannot be discussed in further details at this point. The experiences that Osman Hamdi Bey had with illegal excavations, trafficking of real and fake cultural heritage and other incorrect handlings led to the Antiquities Protection Act (Asar-ı Atika Nizamnamesi), which he introduced (Vogel 2013). The Müze-i Hümayun or Imperial Museum (Osman Hamdi played an important role in the establishment of the museum) has become today’s archaeological museum.

It is also interesting why, during his early stay in Paris, Osman Hamdi as an artist focused on the painting techniques of his teachers, the famous orientalist painters Gérôme, Boulanger and Zonaro, but never adopted the sexist motives—often the typical orientalist keyhole perspective into the female bath of the harem. Wendy Shaw discussed Osman Hamdi and the rise of the Ottoman Imperial museum in detail (Shaw, 2003).

In this context, I want to leave the question of the differing museological backgrounds of the late Ottoman time and Western European, noting that the main distinction might be traced back to the absence of a pseudo-scientific craving for objects of material cultures, arts and even natures. We need only think about the myriad of stuffed animals, often killed and then transported from Asia, Africa, America and Oceania into zoological collections. Collecting things and life became a kind of scientifically deduced obsession and soon an ideological pillar for European museums as a scientific and popular institution at the same time. We are aware that the establishment of more public ethnological museums in Europe was linked with early European enlightenment before at the turn to the 19th century “collecting” material cultures and art became synonymous with an unprecedented transfer of historical testimonies of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania into European museums.

From the 16th century on, cabinets of rarities and arts, which emerged with the upcoming era that often is called in a Eurocentric manner “Renaissance,” merely represented global aspirations of feudal lords adorning themselves with various exotica. Hernán Cortéz, whom we mentioned already, took with him things that were curious to him, e.g. gummi balls from Mexico. Missionaries often burned objects which were satanic in their eyes (the term fetish has its origin here). But towards the end of the 18th century the European Enlightenment introduced “modern” collecting of cultural and scientific artefacts, which has now become more and more systematized scientifically. An era which had its starting point in the so- called French expedition into Egypt in 1798–1801, a colonial war against the land of the Nile resulting in an Egyptomania that also went together with the removal of obelisks to Paris. Edward Said had substantial reasons to set the starting point of Orientalism with the French occupation of Egypt, going along with a pseudo-scientific exploration of the long BEYOND THE SCREEN - FROM VIRTUAL REALITY TO MOVING MUSEUMS: 272 TURKEY’S POTENTIAL IN A POSTMIGRANT ERA history of the ancient civilization (Said, 2003). This was in contrast to previous religiously justified plundering and pillaging (e.g. the Spaniards in Mexico or the missionaries in Africa); from now on scientific Orientalism and its companion in Africa deduced the usurpation of material cultures was seemingly scientific. Scientific books and other knowledge carriers (e.g. African masks or canoes) were now looted with scientific legitimation. As it was assumed that “barbarian”, “uncivilized” and “backward” cultures would disappear in the evolutionary course of history from lower to higher stages, it was seen as necessary to prevent the material cultures from disappearing. They were worse off, however, by being “rescued” for future generations. Racism became science. From then on, the core of the collections of European museums, libraries and art collections, whether public or private, were made up of plundered cultures.

Also, European public history became triumphant when erecting Egyptian obelisks on representative squares. The transportation of cultural heritage to Paris or Rome should be understood as a continuation of imperialism, having its starting point with the Roman occupation of the land on the Nile in 33 BC, and then de-memorizing1 and confiscating the long history of Egypt. Paris, London, Rome, Berlin and other European metropolises face the challenge of decolonizing not only their museums but also their public historical places. But of course, this cannot be done digitally nor virtually. We will have to discuss whether and to which extent digital technologies—bearing in mind that digitization is no more than a technical tool—can be of help.

While pseudo-scientific anthropology and other young disciplines, like ethnography, imagined that the history of Africa was at a long-lasting standstill (it was also assumed that people and cultures beyond Europe would vanish into nothingness) European ethnological “collections” grew to the same extent, coming along with imperialist expansion and settler colonialism. For Adolf Bastian, often seen as the founding father of ethnology in Germany, the psychic carried more weight than the physical extinction of the African people which, as he understood it, depends on the almighty course of history and is not avoidable (Quintern, 2017).

This is not the place for a discussion of the character of the Ottoman Empire in comparison with imperial European powers, which systematically plundered the Global South. For the history of museums in Turkey, it is important that the transition period from the late Ottoman

1 By de-memorizing I mean the appropriation of cultural memory by transferring material cultures and carriers of knowledge from its original locations in Africa, Asia, America and Oceania into far away museums mainly in Europe and the USA. The material basis of cultural memory in the Global South, often looted, is stolen and interpreted by Eurocentrism. Detlev QUINTERN 273

Empire to the Turkish Republic in the long 1920s was not, in contrast to neighbouring Iraq or Syria, characterized by European colonization and occupation. From the early Turkish Republic times onwards, museums have often interpreted and visualized the long history of Turkish lands in a national, and not rarely nationalistic, frame. Museums policies, far from representing other than Turkish cultures, followed a clearly given education policy which, like the Saglık Muzesi (Health Museum) founded in Istanbul already in 1917, having, for example, public health and sanitation as the focus of its mission. At that time digitization, 3-D technologies and virtual museums were still a long way off.

4. The 3-D Museum – an Alternative?

Digital and 3-D technologies nowadays enable us to reconstruct and reproduce scenes like the relief of the Alexander Sarcophagus in the Archaeological Museum. This is proven by the reconstruction of a section of the Persian battle frieze, a colour reconstruction, on the basis of an electronic measurement and a form created with the aid of the prototyping method (plaster, natural pigment etc.) (Brinkmann, 2018). The research project, which focused on color in Ancient Greece and Rome as its key theme, showed that digital-based reconstructions have the potential to tour successfully. The exhibition “Colored Deities – The Colorfulness of the Antique Sculpture” had great success when shown in Munich, the Vatican City and Copenhagen in 2003 and 2004. Thus, as a consequence of improved digital-based reproduction technologies, the borders between the original museal object and its imitation seem to become more and more blurred. At the time of Osman Hamdi Bey—and he had drawn the requisite conclusions—it was much more challenging to reproduce fake archaeological artefacts, before selling them on to the growing international market for antiquities. That, however, is a different matter.

Possible potentials and dangers of 3-D reproduction technologies can also be understood from the exhibition “The Terracotta Army—the Legacy of the Eternal Emperor” (Die Terrakotta Armee—Das Vermächtnis des Ewigen Kaisers), which has toured since 2002 through different German and Austrian cities and was shown recently in the Northern German city of Bremen in 2018. In Hamburg, the exhibition caused a scandal in 2007 when the visitors were presented—after rumours had questioned the authenticity of the “Chinese Army” presented at the “Völkerkunde Museum”—with the following note at the beginning of the exhibition: “Indications by third parties point to the question that some or all of the displayed objects might be copies. […] For reasons of credibility we will keep tracking the suspicion.” (Spiegel Online, 2007). The wider and historically interested public was seemingly misled BEYOND THE SCREEN - FROM VIRTUAL REALITY TO MOVING MUSEUMS: 274 TURKEY’S POTENTIAL IN A POSTMIGRANT ERA and, while assuming they were seeing and studying the original terracotta sculptures, they were obviously being deceived. This is an alarming example showing the tendency not only to commercialize public history, but also to lead the public to believe in its authenticity, even though the organizers of the exhibition should have known about their deception. In the best- case scenario, this can be interpreted as a marketing strategy, which transcends the border between real and fake.

The aura of historical objects and artefacts is not reproducible. Besides seeing, touching, hearing, smelling and tasting, historicity opens the way to a more latent way of perceiving multifarious dimensions of a museal object. In the quest to the essence of cognition, learning psychologies and theories are challenged to grasp the communicative interplay between “object” and “observer”. Objects are not just material things but bear and evoke emotions at the same time. An African mask not only is a carving that narrates its story, spiritual function, beauties etc., but also materializes and expresses the intentions and emotions of its origination process, the communicative and creative interaction between human and nature. Newer neurological research points out that emotional access to an object of learning directs, in cases where the findings are associated with positive emotions, to different parts of the brain than negatively connoted information, stress and fear, for example. In the former case, the information is absorbed by the hippocampus, before being transmitted to the cerebral cortex where the knowledge is stored and digested creatively, whereas in the latter case, the information enters the amygdala, initiating a fast reaction that is counterproductive for any learning process (Giessen & Schweibenz, 2007). Two-dimensional information, even if not giving rise to fear or anxiety, evokes a certain stress of which the “information receiver” is mostly not aware. The cold and passing information are volatile, not having an emotional vis-à-vis that enables intercreativity. Digitised information on a screen counteracts lasting and deep learning processes. Perception remains on the surface and risks evaporating into nothingness.

However, screened and permanently floating images and information initiate a permanent appetite for more. This is particularly dangerous for infants and toddlers. Gertraut Teuchert- Noodt compared the childish desire for seemingly interactive, initiated, non-stop running images and impressions, with a digital seduction that can easily lead to various forms of addiction which can cause physiological malfunctions similar to those resulting from drug abuse (Teuchert-Nodt, 2016). Sadly, parents are often proud when their baby or toddler masters how to use a touchscreen. It seems that today, digital “Maya the Bene,” based on a popular TV series originally developed for children, produces joy and excitement while a real butterfly causes fear. Detlev QUINTERN 275

I have often observed school classes visiting Istanbul’s Museum for the History of Science and Technology in Islam in large groups. The teachers seemed not to be prepared for the visit, mostly. The children, mobile phones in hand, rushed through the exhibition halls without pausing for a moment, avoiding to look at the exhibited instruments. The eyes were replaced with the mobile phones’ lenses, and for them to read an explanation in the panels was unthinkable. We will later have to think about alternatives of museological approaches in order to overcome the epidemic of hasty flippancy. Egloff summarized Ludwig Fleck, a science theorist who was working as a medical practitioner in the 1920s, who had emphasized that students only see the new if the teacher draws their attention to it. This holds true for adults when being confronted with something new: a futuristic painting, an unknown landscape or looking through a microscope for the first time (Eglof, 2011).

Let us return to the well-rooted and heavy Alexander Sarcophagus of Osman Hamdi Bey, which is also a good example of a deep and material-based relief storytelling. To take a small stool, to sit in front of the amazing sarcophagus, trying to understand what the sculptor wanted to tell us about war and peace back in 325 BC, is clearly different not only from digitized but also from moving pictures. Obviously, this was not a drone attack which, when shown today on TV, never seems to involve any human beings, either as attackers or as victims. On the sarcophagus, the opponents have almost the same equipment and weapons; in a way, it depicts a battle at eye level. But should the relief scenery be animated, maybe downloadable as an app or sold as a computer war game? I plead in favour of a new, more contemplative museology that avoids as far as possible digital media. “Viewer” and “object” have to re- enter a dialogical communication that should not be disturbed by any transient and ephemeral distractions. The two-dimensional screen flattens realities, a flattening that makes it necessary to go beyond the screen.

5. In Place of a Conclusion: Beyond the Screen – Museums on the Move

On the occasion of the World Refugee Day on 20 June 2019, the museologist Marlen Mouliou pointed the way to a museology on the move that explores urban spaces as a pool of impressions and memories. Together with a group of refugees from mainly Syria and Iraq, photographs and texts, produced during the curatorial excursion, were finally exhibited in a refugee camp near Athens (Mouliou, 2018). The young curators sent photographs to their relatives and friends in their home towns and to camps in other countries. BEYOND THE SCREEN - FROM VIRTUAL REALITY TO MOVING MUSEUMS: 276 TURKEY’S POTENTIAL IN A POSTMIGRANT ERA

Digital mediation can be a tool to involve a wider and distant audience in the creative process, particularly for the communication of the museological results and the process towards the final exhibition. For example, if a friend of one of the curating refugees somewhere in the world interacts with the excursion of the urban space by expressing and sending via a commonly used instant messenger service their wish to have a photograph of the Lykeion, the famous philosophical school established by Aristotle in ca. 335 BC in Athens. For refugees, as their families and friends are commonly widely dispersed, messaging is often their only, and therefore intensively, used way of communication. It seems that refugees not only are mastering digital communication, or more precisely messaging, but also can be seen as pioneering the “messenger” as a communicative tool. Even for the poorest, the capability to communicate has—and this is more than understandable especially for unaccompanied minors—the highest priority. Could the museological approach of Mouliou serve as a model for Turkey?

Of countries hosting refugees, Turkey leads the world with ca. 4 million refugees (Germany hosts around 1.1 million refugees) (UNO, 2018). Most of the refugees are from Syria and Iraq. Many are sheltered in camps near the cities Gaziantep and Şanlıurfa, which is around 20 km away from the world cultural heritage site Göbekli Tepe, the oldest ceremonial complex excavated to date, and dating back to the 10th Millennia BC. With its up to around five-meter high T-shaped stelae, designed mostly with quite realistic zoomorphic reliefs, the world heritage site invites visitors on a journey through time into earliest beginnings of human settlements of the Epipalaeolithic era.

Excursions with pupils and students from the nearby refugee camps might motivate the young people to reflect on the commonly shared long history of human beings and their creative accomplishments. This also might help to overcome the trauma of war, which nourishes a destructive conception of the world. It seems that the war of aggression and the scorched earth policy since 2003 (e.g. in Iraq) targets also the memorial capacities of the population in the wider region. The looted artefacts pass across the many borders into private antiquity auctions and collections with much more ease than any refugee or bilker. Shortly after the break-in at the National Museum in Baghdad in April 2003, the websites of four United Kingdom–based companies, all members of the Antiquities Dealers Association (ADA), had the stolen items on offer for sale. Among them were 29 cuneiform tablets. In autumn of the same year, the websites disappeared (Brodie, 2016). For generations growing up since then, it seems that war, violence and the sound of explosions are more ordinary than birdsong. A museology on the move, empowering young refugees who have often been Detlev QUINTERN 277 traumatized, to curate an exhibition with their memories of Göbekli Tepe or other world heritage sites and museums, might stimulate a more optimistic worldview, with one in which the possibility of living together peacefully and harmoniously is on the horizon.

References Deutscher Museumsbund e.V., ICOM Deutschland (2017). Standards for Museums. Berlin, Kassel: Deutscher Museumsbund e.V. / ICOM. Brodie, N. (2016). The Plunder of Iraq’s Archaeological Heritage, 1991–2005, and the London Antiquities Trade. In M. M. Kersel, C. Luke & K. W. Tubb (Eds.), Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and the Antiquities Trade (pp. 206-227). Florida, USA: Maryland University Press. Brinkmann, V. (2018, 2020 November 25). Polychromy Research Project [Web page post]. Retrieved from http:// www.stiftung-archaeologie.de/AlexSarcoph_Alexander_A_fullsize.html International Council of Museums (2017). ICOM code of ethics for museums. ICOM, Maison de l’UNESCO: Paris, France: ICOM. Eglof, R. (2011). Evolution des Erkennens. Über Ludwik Flecks Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache [Evolution of cognition]. In B. Pörksen (Ed.), Schlüsselwerke des Konstruktivismus. Eine Einführung [Key works of constructivism. An introduction] (pp. 60-78). Wiesbaden, Germany: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Giessen, H. W., & Schweibenz, W. (2007). Kommunikation und Vermittlung im Museum. Überlegungen zur Museumskommunikation, kognitiven Lerntheorie und zum digitalen Storytelling [Communication and Mediation in Museum. Reflections on museum communication, cognitive theory of learning and digital Storytelling]. In M. Mangold, P. Weibel & J. D. Woletz (Eds.), Vom Betrachter zum Gestalter. Neue Medien in Museen — Strategien, Beispiele und Perspektiven für die Bildung [From observer to designer. New media in museums — strategies, examples and perspectives for education] (pp. 51-65). Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. Quintern, D. (2017). The objects wounds—The musealization of Africa and the dismembering of colonial violence. In BIGAS-Workgroup “Tracks and Traces of Violence“, In V. Azarin, A. Gemeke & K. Fink (Eds.) Tracks and traces of violence. Representation and Memoralization of Violence. Views from art, literature and anthropology (pp. 299-313). Berlin, Wien, Zürich, Germany: LIT Verlag. Quintern, D. (2018). Demodernization as Orientalization: The Case of Iraq. In Y. Rabkin, & M. Minakov (Eds.), Demodernization, A Future in the Past (pp. 163-179). Stuttgart, Germany: Ibedem. Lydon, J., & Rizvi, U. (Eds.). (2010). Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology. Introduction (pp. 39-50). Walnut Creek, USA: Left Coast Press. Makdisi, U. (2000). The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. London, UK: University of California Press. Maranda, L. (2015). Museum Ethics in the 21st Century. Museum Ethics transforming into another Dimension. ICOFOM Study Series [Online, 2020 November 25] 43b, 151-165. Retrieved from https://journals.openedition.org/iss/443; http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/iss.443 Moliou, M. (2018). The Museum of Our Discoveries: Empowering Young Refugees in an Urban Context, Museum International, 70(3-4), 124-133, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/muse.12215 Said, E. W. (2003). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Shaw, W. K. (2003). Possesors and Possesed. Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire. Berkeley, Los Angeles, LA: University of California Press. BEYOND THE SCREEN - FROM VIRTUAL REALITY TO MOVING MUSEUMS: 278 TURKEY’S POTENTIAL IN A POSTMIGRANT ERA

Soares, B. B., & Leshenko, A. (2018). Museology in Colonial Contexts: A Сall for Decolonisation of Museum Theory. ICOFOM Study Series. Advance online publication 46, 61-79. http://journals.openedition.org/ iss/895 http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/ iss.895 Teuchert-Noodt, G. (2016). Die Entwicklung des kindlichen Gehirns untersteht dem Dreiklang von Aktivität, Dynamik und Kompesation [The development of the brain of children is under the control of the triad of activity, dynamic and compensation]. Trauma — Zeitschrift für Psychotraumatologie und ihre Anwendungen [Trauma — Journal for Psychotraumatology and its applications], 14 (2), 48-57. Terra-Kotta Armee in Hamburg. Krieger unter Vorbehalt [Warriors with reservation]. (2007, December 11). Spiegel Online Retrieved from https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/terrakotta-armee-in-hamburg- krieger-unter-vorbehalt-a-522481.html UNO Flüchtlingshilfe, Deutschland für den UNHCR [UN refugee relief. Germany for UNHCR] (2018, 2020 November 25). Zahlen und Fakten zu Menschen auf der Flucht [Statistics and facts on refugees] [Web page post]. Retrieved from https://www.uno-fluechtlingshilfe.de/informieren/fluechtlingszahlen/ Vogel, J. (2013, 2020 November 25).Wissenschaft am Rande Europas? Osman Hamdi Bey und die Professionalisierung der osmanischen Archäologie [Science on the pheriphery of Europe], Themenportal Europäische Geschichte [Thematic portal European history] [Web page post]. Retrieved from http//: www. europa.clio-online.de/essay/id/fdae-1591. DIGITAL SEIGE

CHAPTER 14

THEORETICAL APPROACH TO BIG DATA ANALYTICS AND NEUROMARKETING: ADVANCES IN UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER TRENDS

Oğuz KUŞ1, Nevenka POPOVİĆ ŠEVİĆ2

1Research Assistant, Istanbul University Faculty of Communication, Department of Public Relations & Publicity, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

2Assistant Professor, Faculty of Contemporary Arts, Belgrade, Serbia e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.14

ABSTRACT The daily life of individuals is on a path of digital transformation. This process creates a paradigm shift in consumer trends analysis and consumer behaviour. Consequently, a positivist and digitally supported perspective in the process of the analysis of consumer trends has emerged. Competences like intuition and foresight have begun to be supported with data analysis. This is because digital technologies cause consumers to produce data through devices and platforms. Moreover , techniques such as neuromarketing, which integrates neuroscience with marketing, create new opportunities for consumer trend analysis. This paper aims to shed light on the concept of digital transformation, and on the ways in which reliable data and scientifically-supported methods such as big data and neuromarketing contribute to the analysis of consumer trends. In this sense, it also contributes to the use of digital measurement in a marketing context and to the development of a positivist marketing perspective. . Keywords: Consumer trends analysis, big data analytics, neuromarketing THEORETICAL APPROACH TO BIG DATA ANALYTICS AND NEUROMARKETING: ADVANCES 280 IN UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER TRENDS

1. Introduction

For many years surveys, in-depth interviews and focus group studies have been conducted in order to learn about the consumption behavior of individuals. The findings from these studies have guided marketing professionals in the process of establishing a marketing strategy. It is possible to define these methods as conventional consumer trend research methods. They have two significant features which are outdated in today’s digitally transformed marketing atmosphere. Firstly, consumers who were involved in the research process had a passive role. They would respond to pre-designed questions or they would be given limited freedom when it came to responding to semi-structured questions. Secondly, intuition and the experience of marketing professionals played a crucial role and it was an integral part in the process of strategy establishment. However, digital technologies have now totally transformed daily life. Consequently, a paradigm shift has occurred in the analysis process of consumer behaviour and consumer trends. It is possible to state that consumer trends analysis has now started to be based on a more positivist perspective compared to the past.

New technological developments enable individuals to actively express their opinion about a product or service. In addition, digital transformation and technological devices have become an integral part of daily life. Consequently, a vast amount of data is being produced. The most important features of this data are reliability and honesty due to the fact that data is produced by consumers voluntarily. In this sense, big data analytics are creating new opportunities for developing an understanding of consumer trends. This enables professionals to put their consumers into categories and provide relevant services more efficiently by identifying unprecedented patterns.

The neuromarketing approach is another example of the transformation of consumer trends analysis conducted in a positivist way. It is clear that neuromarketing relies on direct and honest signals. However, these direct signals are not the data created via digital devices, social media or other platform activities. They are brain signals which are collected through various neuroimaging techniques. Neuromarketing is the integration of the marketing discipline with neuroscience methods and it presents massive potential to analyze consumer trends. The goal is to better understand consumers’ unconscious processes. Neuromarketing is not only about consumer preferences, but also about feelings, expectation and motivation. The interaction between neuroscience and marketing can enable professionals to understand why consumers behave or act the way they do. Therefore, better solutions can be created for businesses. Oğuz KUŞ, Nevenka POPOVİĆ ŠEVİĆ 281

This paper provides background information on digital transformation and it aims to explain the positivist paradigm shift in terms of analyzing consumer trends and digital measurement through presenting advances of big data analytics and neuromarketing. It delves into big data and neuromarketing at a conceptual level and it highlights the cases of certain applications.

2. Big Data

In a digitally sieged age, when the number of persons applying for an e-residency program exceeds the number of weekly births in Estonia (Korjus, 2017), when states accept virtual currencies as a digital asset (State of Wyoming, 2019), when gardening is supported with sensors and smart phone applications (Edyn, 2016) along with many other developments, it can easily be predicted that a huge amount of data is created as a result of digitalization.

Taking the figures presented by IBM Big Data & Analytics Hub (2013), 10 billion mobile devices will be in use by 2020, 294 billion emails sent every day, over 1 billion Google searches done every day, trillions of sensors will monitor, track and communicate with each other and populate the internet of things with real-time data, 30+ petabytes of user-generated data will be stored, accessed and analysed on Facebook, and 230+ million Tweets sent each day.

The digitalization process, and an exponentially increasing data traffic, together direct us to a specific term: big data. Cox and Ellsworth, (1997), researchers at NASA, stated that “Visualization provides an interesting challenge for computer systems: data sets are generally quite large, taxing the capacities of main memory, local disk, and even remote disk. We call this the problem of big data”, and with this statement they introduced the term ‘big data’ to the literature. Big data consists of three components, namely volume, variety and velocity. Volume refers to the amount of data, variety refers to the structure (structured, unstructured, semi-structured) and granulation of data, while velocity refers to data rate. The new data flows fast and the time span in which they create value is getting shorter and shorter (Fasel, 2014). Volume, variety and velocity, the three main features of big data, have caused data to surpass the capabilities of its ingestion, storage, analysis and processing by conventional systems. Big Data means very large data sets, with both structured and unstructured data, that come at high speed from different sources (Fowdur et. al., 2018). This term should not be used only for characterising huge amount of data. Big data has a revolutionary philosophy not only in terms of technical aspects, but also with regard to obtaining information from the data. In this light of this latter point, using a radical techno-optimist approach, it can be suggested that big data analyses will allow new intellectual break-throughs. Stephens-Davidowitz (2017) THEORETICAL APPROACH TO BIG DATA ANALYTICS AND NEUROMARKETING: ADVANCES 282 IN UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER TRENDS provides a new perspective on the philosophy of this concept by explaining the strengths of big data from four aspects.

1. Big data provides unprecedentedly diverse new types of data.

2. Although people still have thoughts or questions which they do not express, they cannot avoid sharing them with the digital world (e.g. searches on internet). In this way, a second reliable aspect of big data is revealed in that it provides honest data.

3. Big data provides the opportunity to focus on sub-sets.

4. Big data allows researchers to conduct several cause-effect experiments.

At this point, the important characteristic which must be emphasized is not the size of the data, but the immeasurable innovative shift which this data size creates on the analysis processes. This innovative shift not only allows us to address daily phenomena from a positivist point of view, but also strengthens the prediction and measuring capabilities of individuals and organizations.

For instance, the results of the research conducted by Youyou, Kosinski and Stillwell (2015) underline that computer models need 10, 70, 150, and 300 likes (on Facebook), respectively, in order to know a person better than an average work colleague, cohabitant or friend, family member and spouse. In addition, people’s personalities can be predicted automatically without involving human social-cognitive skills. A previous study conducted by Kosinski, Stillwell and Graepel (2013) revealed that easily accessible digital records of behaviour such as Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. Another study which collected 19 million Facebook status updates written by 136,000 participants revealed significant results on the relation of language usage on social media and personality, gender and age. These results highlight that neurotic people disproportionately use the phrase ‘sick of’ and the word ‘depressed’ or that males use the possessive ‘my’ when mentioning their ‘wife’ or ‘girlfriend’ more often than females use ‘my’ when referring to their ‘husband’ or ’boyfriend’ (Schwartz et al., 2013).

As understood from the above-mentioned cases, big data analyses have allowed people to observe several patterns which could not have been realized until now. The discovery of these implicit patterns has served to improve the quality of people’s daily lives and increase the added value of organizations in many fields varying from health and space science, to Oğuz KUŞ, Nevenka POPOVİĆ ŠEVİĆ 283 mail transport and online series broadcasting. It is not hard to predict that such a shift, which provides a significant added value to efficiency, will be used by private organizations to follow consumer trends and develop marketing strategies. Various scholarly studies have indicated that big data analytics has the potential to contribute to marketing oriented activities. For example, the Institute for Public Relations (2016) indicated that the public relations profession must continue to evolve alongside big data. Another example is that of Erevelles, Fukawa & Swayne (2016) who underlined that radical innovation enables firms to create greater value through big data. Similarly, Kuş, Efremov and Suhadolc (2018) stated that data-oriented perspective transforms phases of digital marketing communications and enables brands to personalize their message. Moreover, Michael and Miller (2013) argued a long time ago that big data will be a game-changer for understanding consumer trends:

“Advances in data storage and mining technologies make it possible to preserve increasing amounts of data generated directly or indirectly by users and analyse it to yield valuable new insights. For example, companies can study consumer purchasing trends to better target marketing.”

Moreover , the fact that the media necessary for yielding maximum benefit from big data are being developed makes it easier to conduct data-driven consumer behaviour tests. Hofacker, Malthouse and Sultan (2016) suggest that:

“The environments that enable Big Data; social, online and mobile; also enable rigorous tests, often with strong external validity.”

Approaching the subject based on the big data perspective suggested by Stephens- Davidowitz, it is important to understand how big data analyses can be used for discovering consumer trends.

The activities of Walmart provide an intriguing example for drawing attention to the functionality of big data in terms of predicting consumer trends. Reviewing its data bases in 2004, the company analysed whether there was a correlation between the weather conditions and consumption habits. The findings suggest that consumers buy a significant amount of goods before a storm. However, it was interesting to discover the fact that the sales of Pop- tart, a famous breakfast product, particularly increased at an immense rate. Walmart located Pop-tart products next to storm equipment within its stores and thereby increased its sales (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013; Stephens-Davidowitz, 2017). THEORETICAL APPROACH TO BIG DATA ANALYTICS AND NEUROMARKETING: ADVANCES 284 IN UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER TRENDS

In today’s market, one of the most important parameters for creating added value is relevancy. Relevancy is of vital importance for platforms, the product of which is the content. This is because contents, which attract the attention of the target audience, are provided on a constant basis, and the user, who becomes a member of a platform for consuming content, remains on the platform, continually providing added value to it. This added value is seen in different ways such as producing content for the platform, clicking on the advertisements provided by the platform, continuing to pay monthly membership fees to the platform or shopping more on the platform. However, in addition to this, the user keeps creating data for the platform at any moment that he/she stays on the platform. These data processes, which are followed by the measurement processes conducted, are used for understanding patterns, thus increasing relevancy and user experience.

Mayer-Schönberger and Ramge (2018) states that platforms like Spotify and Apple Music aim to match the music preferences of users with suggested songs, while Netflix and Amazon make product suggestions for the same purpose. Regarding the Netflix example, it is stated that Netflix uses several different algorithms at the same time for suggesting content to the users (McAlone, 2016; Molina Fernandez, 2018). It is of great importance for Netflix to provide its users with contents that match their needs and to suggest these contents to the users in order to keep its subscribers on the system. For this reason, Netflix predicts user needs by means of big data analyses and provides various suggestions to them. Netflix even organized a competition, in which an award of 1 million U.S. Dollars was given to a company or a person, who could increase the accuracy of this suggestion system by 10% (Bennet & Lanning, 2007; Hallinan & Striphas, 2016). In this context, it is possible to argue that a new, highly positivist business order has emerged, in which consumer trends are predicted by means of big data analyses, and in which accuracy and relevancy have gained importance.

It can be suggested that in the marketing activities which are carried out within the framework of this business order, intuition is gradually replaced by advanced measurement methods. This is because big data analyses allow creating perspectives outside the traditional paradigm in order to understand consumer trends in a collective manner. This system, which can be called the culture of analytics, refers to a cycle, which is centered around big data. Gutierrez (2016) argues that for companies like Amazon and Netflix, using data in innovative ways does not only depend on being technically developed, but that they achieve this since they have a culture of analytics that covers all aspects of the organization. Gutierrez suggests that four different components, namely 1) existence of a purpose, (2) linking insights to Oğuz KUŞ, Nevenka POPOVİĆ ŠEVİĆ 285 actions, (3) pushing analytics to business end-points and (4) creating feedback loops, are necessary in order to develop analytic strategy.

A culture of analytics is a mindset, which is related to each and every component of an enterprise. As a result of this, it can be argued that this mindset can apply to understanding consumer trends. In this context, this process is a measurement cycle, which is centered around big data and in which each phase complements each other. This cycle is a process in which big data as a potential is converted into a kinetic value by means of processes that comprise data-driven thought as a philosophy and positivism, and use data mining in technical terms. It is possible to make use of Hofacker, Malthouse & Sultan’s (2016) thoughts for defining this cyclical process created by big data. According to these researchers, “Big Data have the potential to further our understanding of each stage in the consumer decision-making process. While the field has traditionally moved forward using a priori theory followed by experimentation, it now seems that the nature of the feedback loop between theory and results may shift under the weight of Big Data.”

Considered from the perspective of big data, the whole process of understanding consumer behaviours is only a matter of cyclic measurement. This is because big data analyses, which are conducted for measuring consumer behaviours, allow for the development of applications intended for consumers, while data obtained as a result of measuring the success of the application makes it possible to optimise the applications developed for consumers. In addition to this, this cyclic process also comprises four components, which are related to a culture of analytics.

This conceptual framework and these examples suggest that data is analysed with innovative perspectives and new forms of understanding in order to measure consumer trends. Measurements which are implemented for detecting consumer trends are now carried out using the analysis of data with more volume, velocity and variety. As this process is executed, the aims are to reveal the patterns which were not realized before, and to interpret, and understand human behaviour from a data-driven perspective. In an age of creating added value through the means of including the digital footprints of consumers to the data set, big data is only one of the means used for measuring and understanding consumer trends. Neuromarketing is another method, which aims to measure the behaviours of consumers by positing a positivist perspective to the essence of the application. THEORETICAL APPROACH TO BIG DATA ANALYTICS AND NEUROMARKETING: ADVANCES 286 IN UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER TRENDS

3. Neuromarketing – influences on consumer motivation and behavior

Let us go for a moment to imagine a traditional mini market research as a focus group. Regardless of whether there is a polemic about the type of packaging of a given product, its functional peculiarities or its price, it often obtains very arbitrary responses from the respondents, which do not support the validity of the results. This is because the majority of decisions in the customer’s brain are made at the subconscious level. Sometimes it seems like consumers do not think the way they feel and do not say what they think. Human thoughts are very complex, often filled with extremely contradictory requirements, so it is difficult to anticipate real needs in business transactions. Well, welcome to the world of neuromarketing!

For a long period of time, marketing communicators exclusively used traditional methods to create effective marketing campaigns. It is astounding but true that every year millions of dollars are spent on some new products and services that ultimately do not come to life at all. Numerous media messages never attract consumer attention. As consumers’ emotions represent a great mirror in which one can see in what way and how the purchasing decision is processed, both good understanding and cognitive response have always been a real research challenge (Slijepcevic, Popovic Sevic & Radojevic, 2018). For this reason, it would be absurd to underestimate the existence of neuromarketing and all its research tools, which make it easier to penetrate and interpret consumer awareness. Thanks to neuromarketing techniques, significant data from the “inside”, which speak more about a consumer’s feelings, incentives, beliefs and attitudes, are obtained. Neuromarketing research is thus focused on the part of unconscious processing in the human (consumer) brain, which is largely inaccessible to most traditional market research techniques (Bakardjieva & Kimmel, 2017).

Through neuromarketing techniques, marketers accurately determine the desires, tastes, perceptions and emotions within consumer behavior. Respondents in the context of neuromarketing research are not ambiguous and are not in a position to provide desirable answers as in traditional research techniques, primarily in surveys and focus groups. Neuromarketing examines the domain of the unconscious in the consumer, and this is the main reason for the distinction results in relation to the aforementioned conventional market research methods. In this way marketing researchers allow far more objective insight into the psychological reactions of a potential customer during his/her exposure to a marketing message or the purchase process. Neuromarketing provides objective analysis of influencing consumer behavior, focusing on the subconscious and emotions. Brainwaves, Oğuz KUŞ, Nevenka POPOVİĆ ŠEVİĆ 287 facial expression and visualization of brain activity explicitly reflect the views, opinions and emotions of consumers and become more reliable parameter in detecting their behaviour.

Neuromarketing is defined as the practical application of consumer neuroscience knowledge for managerial purposes. On the other hand, consumer neuroscience is an area of science that deals with all the neural processes that are based on economic consumption, with all its psychological and behavioural aspects (Reimann, Schilke, Weber, Neuhaus & Zaichkowsky, 2011). Through neuromarketing, this subconscious level of the buyer’s brain is quantified, explained, and explored. There are two spheres in it. The first is based on intuitive and emotionally based purchasing decisions, and the other, being very well designed, is based on a rational buying decision. While traditional marketing is based on detecting consumer behaviour that has an awareness of a person, neuromarketing determines the unconscious identity of that same consumer.

Nowadays, companies are more than interested in tracking, anticipating and even influencing the behaviour of their target consumer public, whether they are consumers (products), users (services), public companies, non-profit sector, etc. They are at the point of no longer questioning the use of neuroscience for marketing purposes, which aims to have an adequate understanding of the behaviour of the target group and which makes the neuromarketing process more efficient and possibly more cost-effective. Indeed, consumers today have problems with the verbalisation of their thoughts, and this greatly complicates the job of marketing communicators and market researchers. Many organisations attempt to understand the importance of neuromarketing as much as they can to more easily identify human needs, and to keep in line with consumer behaviour. Some researchers believe that the ability to anticipate the needs of consumers in the future is far more important than the reasons why consumers behave in a certain way (Spence, 2019). In this way, there would be a significant rationalisation of costs so that marketing budgets would be targeted.

Researchers working in different fields, starting with psychology, economics, neuroscience and marketing, synergistically examine various neurobiological systems and come to conclusions about consumer preferences and the flow of purchasing, which ultimately establishes synchronicity between the design of the usable values of products, design, price, distribution, and promotional tools. Through a seemingly ordinary walk in the supermarket, analysis can take into account both consumer research in the purchasing process and cognitive neuroscience. It is very important how consumer preferences are shaped, in cooperation with all external inputs such as sociological, cultural, economic and demographic indicators. To what extent do gender, age, hobbies, religions, professions and the like significantly determine THEORETICAL APPROACH TO BIG DATA ANALYTICS AND NEUROMARKETING: ADVANCES 288 IN UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER TRENDS the process of shaping consumer preferences about a particular product and/or service? And how do they do this? It is certain that neurocognitive processes significantly influence the transformation of consumer preferences. This is best seen through a two-way study of the functioning of the consumer’s brain. Firstly, we monitor how consumers respond to marketing communications that are either traditional or Internet-based, and then explicitly perform other tasks (searching for product information, product selection, product use, etc.)

The basic issue of neuromarketing related to the testing of consumer behaviour concerns buying decisions, as well as the way in which consumers examine different products and service alternatives based on perceived values and costs. The next set of tests are specific consumer interests, which act like the ‘reward’ value system, and are especially found in the food and money domain. More precisely, a favourite trademark or an extremely well-designed product will present a kind of prize stimulus in the brain of the consumer, which will be a special trigger of motivations and will have an impact on the definitive purchase of the given product.

In the field of consumer neuroscience, researchers continually study the process of making consumer purchasing decisions through all their development phases, and until now, there has been no single model of thought that would demonstrate how integrated unconscious processes such as attention, recall and the reward/rejection system work (Block et al., 2015). It is therefore essential to create a unique and integrated model that will help to more effectively monitor the process of making a consumer decision in its holistic meaning. From the above, it follows that there is no “miraculous button” that opens up direct routes to the consumer’s brain. The fact is that products and services that “rewardingly” affect the consumer through perceived value are not equivalent to the ‘wondrous button’. Neuromarketing is not a shortcut to consumers, nor is it a consumer’s mind reader, but it is certain that thanks to its tools, we can target and perform consumer selection more efficiently (Stanton et al., 2017).

Of course, one should not lose sight of the fact that consumer behaviour has a basis in two types of motivation systems, both positive and negative. An example of the first type of behaviour with positive motivation is to go to your favourite restaurant, while the negative motivation, for example, is the purchase of medicines. At the same time, our consumer sees both emotional and rational appeals in the commercial sky. Through a different spectrum of emotional appeals, one wants to evoke an interesting event from childhood or youth, something that brings us to a memory of something precious and where, even often driven by impulses, we can in an unplanned manner buy a product or service. On the other hand, with rational appeals, consumers want to focus very strongly on the organisation through figures, Oğuz KUŞ, Nevenka POPOVİĆ ŠEVİĆ 289 statistics and any other quantum determination of the value of the given product. However, in most consumer decisions, the impression is that irrational motives still prevail. This is certainly the case with foodstuffs, cosmetic products, and even when buying a car! Depending on life situations, consumers do not necessarily have to be strictly determined by the action of emotional or rational appeals; often they are combined. Through the use of various media, consumers now have the opportunity to research and read the opinions of other users before and after the use of a product or service (Slijepčević & Radojević, 2018).

Neuromarketing research is not based only on the study of the brain of consumers, but also includes the examination of the entire nervous system, which means loosening psychological and cognitive processes of the respondents. Thanks to modern neuromarketing, researchers can measure muscle movement on the subject (all the muscles of the face and body), hormonal imbalances, blood pressure, and thus can anticipate the behavior of individuals. The neuromarketing observation of consumers includes so-called visual processing through consumer attention and his/her recollection when it comes to certain characteristic features of the product. Typical examples are the advertising messages, slogans, the logo of certain brands, the design of the given products, but also other aesthetic components, represented by colours and shapes, which are processed in the form of a visual stimulus in the brain of the consumer (Solnais, Andreu-Perez, Sánchez-Fernández & Andréu-Abela, 2013).

Neuromarketing takes place in artificial conditions, and this, in turn, limits the application of research results within the real consumer world. At the same time however, through neuromarketing an insight into the functioning of the human (consumer) brain is achieved, which no other research can provide. Indeed, no research except for neuromarketing can pinpoint whether a viewer and a listener of one video and audio commercial in a specific second of broadcasting noticed the keywords of the promotion and how he/she reacted to certain music in that same advertisement. However this is achieved thanks to the EEG (electroencephalography) device, very current in neuromarketing research. In this way, through neuroscience methods, marketing researchers are significantly assisted. They are provided with the help of reliable measurement of the effects of commercial content, which consumers are unable or unwilling to articulate precisely (Hsu & Yoon, 2015). In this way, thanks to complex neuromarketing tools, market communicators are directly helped to choose the best part of the content of the advertisement, i.e. how to achieve maximum engagement of consumers. This eliminates entire parts of the advertising content that are ineffective in transmitting messages and more destructively affect the target audience (Conick, 2018). In this way, in situations where the company has a limited range of products, a marketing budget THEORETICAL APPROACH TO BIG DATA ANALYTICS AND NEUROMARKETING: ADVANCES 290 IN UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER TRENDS is certainly saved, and no product is offered as a product to the mass market, but is directed to the company’s target group.

On the other hand, taking an example of a billboard advertising a product for children in a traditional form of marketing communication with a targeted audience, precisely due to the eye-tracking neuromarketing method, it can be determined whether the potential customer looks more closely at the baby or at the product being advertised on the same advertisement. What is more, a deeper analysis of this technique can provide more complex information regarding, for example, the facial expression of our observer. Marketing agencies already have a great deal of understanding of the importance of shaping campaigns using tools that explore the activity of the consumer’s brain, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI, which gives the perfect image of blood mobility in the brain of the respondents as a result of a particular marketing message.

It is quite certain that neuromarketing, as a new scientific paradigm, has its advantages and disadvantages and that it is more expensive than traditional types of research. But if you are planning to launch even more complex marketing campaigns or a complex re-branding requirement, it makes sense to use neuromarketing research techniques. It is believed that the most intensive application of neuromarketing tools in immediate market practice was mainly due to the following factors: scientific knowledge about the functioning of the brain, the development of neuroscientific tools and equipment for conducting neuromarketing research, and the visible advantages of application of new knowledge for marketing purposes (Morin & Renvoise, 2018).

After almost two decades, the field of consumer neuromarketing has taken significant steps forward in generating new insights into consumer behaviour. More precisely, it has contributed to a more comprehensive understanding of the ways in which consumers’ value all that is marketed. Thanks to neuromarketing tools, and through consumer neuroscience, marketers now have maps that display evaluation models and evaluations at different stages of the purchasing process, which provide important information on consumer behaviour (Plassmann, Venkatraman, Huettel & Yoon, 2015). In this way, it certainly creates a much sharper picture of the decision-making process on the purchase, which begins with the consumer attention and memory and then builds emotions. This confirms that, due to neuromarketing from the cognitive aspect of consumer behaviour, it has switched to an affective (emotional) aspect of consumer tracking. Oğuz KUŞ, Nevenka POPOVİĆ ŠEVİĆ 291

Market communicators can implement neuromarketing tools in order to better understand why customers intend to buy a particular product or service, which significantly helps them promote products and services through the use of celebrity figures or in the association with a social event. There are several areas where tangible benefits and results from neuromarketing monitoring of consumers are rightly expected: monitoring and designing new empirical tests for several different consumer groups; establishing new mechanisms that take into account the psychological context of consumers through a variety of biological factors such as hormones and genes, and monitoring factors that are most responsible for consumer preferences and final purchasing decisions (Shiv & Yoon, 2012).

A group of authors believes that neuromarketing through consumer neuroscience should move from the current focus (the human brain) to a more reactive field, which would have a dynamic network of activities within the same brain (Braeutigam, Lee & Senior, 2017). More specifically, the activity of the human brain is spontaneous and does not respond to certain stimuli. In future research this can lead us to how people react to stimuli, rather than ordinary noise or other sounds in the middle, with a primary focus on impacts in the purchasing process.

New neuroscience technology in the marketing sphere could provide researchers with a better understanding of consumer emotion in the decision-making process, in terms of developing more effective methods that would more easily free up, follow and interpret consumer’s emotions. In this way, confidence and loyalty in relation to the company and the brand would be significantly built, but it would also better measure the intensity of consumer preferences, which in the future, it is believed, should be more explicit (Mileti, Guido, & Prete, 2016).

The neuroscientists’ community has come to realise that all the complex integrative functions of the brain depend on the activity of the network formed by the connections between neurons and the parts of the human (consumer) brain (Sporns, 2015). These connections are of utmost importance for the processing of information and are important for detecting all brain activities related to purchasing decision-making activities, as well as product preferences, product selection and generally making other decisions in the purchasing process, such as product selection, comparison of the company’s and competitor’s product, etc. There is both the hope and the expectation that one day, through neuromarketing techniques; we could more effectively look at the heterogeneity of consumer behaviour. In the field of commercial neuromarketing, both research and equipment are becoming , in time, more financially accessible and statistical analysis techniques are being improved, which contributes to a significant improvement of this scientific method (Smidts et al., 2014). THEORETICAL APPROACH TO BIG DATA ANALYTICS AND NEUROMARKETING: ADVANCES 292 IN UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER TRENDS

4. Conclusion Remarks

The studies of consumer trends linked to the behaviour regarding how purchasing decisions are made as well as the use of goods and services have long allured a variety of techniques from the fields of psychology, economy, data science, marketing and neuroscience. Scholars and marketers have been trying to solve numerous dilemmas behind the science of successfully marketing products and services to the consumers. There have been significant innovations allowing us to consider various channels shaping consumer behaviour. Although there have been decades of consumer behaviour research, we are still very far from understanding how and why a consumer behaves in a certain way.

In this review we have tried to identify the current and future issues facing big data and neuromarketing towards better understanding consumer trends. The human mind is a very complex thing – filled with totally unpredictable desires and feelings and therefore many questions still remain unanswered. However, with modern marketing techniques excellent progress has been made in better understanding the crucial workings of the human mind compared with previous decades.

Neurocognitive processes capturing both big data and neuromarketing will be essential for understanding the behavioral map. Every organization is truly interested in predicting and monitoring its target audience, be that B2C or B2B interactions. Perhaps the most important issue here is not only to frame consumer trends but to challenge them with more traditional market research methods as neuroimaging and big data facilities are becoming more widely available. Furthermore, this suggest a growing utility of commercial neuromarketing.

In the modern era today’s consumers are faced with a multitude of commercials but seem to better understand what motivates them and what moves into action buying. Thanks to neuromarketing, not just marketing practitioners but also consumers become more aware of why they buy chocolate with a hint of berry godzi or shampoo with the mysterious x factor. It is also a world in which consumers can become aware of their decisions and reliably know whether they actually come to purchase the desired product or service or not. Precisely speaking, memory, attention and perception as basic elements of consumer’s emotions are observed by neuromarketing techniques. On the other hand, it is possible to explore hidden patterns in consumer data with big data analytics in order to develop more consumer friendly products or services.

Based on the above-mentioned literature review, it is possible to argue that big data analytics and neuromarketing techniques, as positivist consumer trends research tools, enable Oğuz KUŞ, Nevenka POPOVİĆ ŠEVİĆ 293 marketing professionals to obtain objective and honest findings about their target audience. In this sense, these tools enable professionals to establish more effective marketing strategies and to develop better product or services. On the other hand, identifying expectations of consumers about a product or service is a vital part of marketing. Big data analytics and neuromarketing potentially make it possible to identify the expectation of consumers even though s/he is not aware of this. In this regard, the potential to improve the experience of consumers with products or services has been created.

On the other hand, approaches to consumer trends research such as big data analytics and neuromarketing can be more technical and they can require higher budgets. In addition, these approaches require an interdisciplinary perspective, and specialists from other professions should be involved in the process.

Further research holds much promise for the investigation of not only consumer behaviour, but also of the advancement of big data and neuroscience in order to possibly intervene in behavioral disturbances and predict future consumer behaviour. Overall, the authors believe in the synergy of different methods within consumer activities that will be predominant for more detailed analytics and a greater perception of consumer trends. This would lead to the shaping of a better understanding not only of consumers, but also of their consumption behaviour and decision making process. Moreover, this would provide significant practical consequences to the marketers.

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DIGITAL SEIGE

CHAPTER 15

DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG

Ali Murat KIRIK1, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA2, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN3

1Assoc. Prof. Dr., Marmara University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Radio TV and Cinema, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

2Assoc. Prof. Dr., Marmara University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Journalism, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

3Ph.D., Researcher, Istanbul University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Journalism, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.15

ABSTRACT With today’s widespread Internet use and the considerable potential of Web 3.0 technology, social movements are not only becoming more prominent but are also significantly affecting greater masses. Indeed, social movements’ most important political feature is their pro-democratic nature and their emergence in oppressive political environments. Led by various vested interests, social movements represent certain interconnected historical sequences of political interactions and practices. In the transforming post-Internet world, however, physical social movements have been replaced by virtual environments. In contrast to new social movements (from the late 20th to the early 21st century), virtual environments do not become specific struggles organized around partial demands and thus do not allow themselves to be easily absorbed by institutional systems. One of the most important characteristics of the city square movements is that, unlike old and new social movements, they can express a wide range of social demands and mobilize highly heterogeneous masses. Thus, as digital activism increases, the latest social movements are occurring in the virtual world. Social movement theory, as a basic substructure of activism, is the interdisciplinary study of social sciences that attempts to explain why and how social mobility occurs and its potential social, cultural, and political consequences. Types of activist movements conducted in the digital environment are encompassed by the concept of digital activism, which currently uses the major tools of online petitions and signature campaigns, social networks, blogs and microblogs, mobile phones, WhatsApp-like applications, and proxy servers. In this study, digital signature campaigns, one of the most used strategies of digital activism, are discussed in the case of change.org, and a quantitative survey is used to determine how digital activism has evolved through signature campaigns and to discuss how digital signature campaigns affect facts and events. Keywords: Web 3.0, social movement, digital activism, digital signature campaign, internet 298 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG

1. Introduction

Rapid technological development has led to huge changes in social life. Indeed, as the new order of technology penetrates more and more aspects of life, it also causes great transformations in sociological life. The main factor in digital change, of course, has been the Internet. Additionally, speed, one of the most important globalization concepts, has its own place in the latest social system. At the same time, speed has enabled information exchange and formed the basis for social movements to spread broadly over the Internet and through social media.

With development of Internet technology, personalized information and individualization have gained more and more importance. As Internet-based technological tools spread over time, traditional media platforms moved to virtual space. The new world order, led by 40 years of technological developments, drastically changed old practices and habits. Traditional mass media tools—newspapers, television, and magazines—have also been affected by this change. According to Evans (2008, p. 35), this rapid technological change has irreversibly transformed all types of communication, marketing dynamics, and lifestyles.

Processing information, transmitting it through a medium, and offering it to a final consumer has exposed people to massive information flow, an avalanche in which they have often become lost while attempting to distinguish correct information and faded into loneliness and vulnerability. Simultaneously, this massive and constant flow has transformed information into a different dimension, pulled it away from reality and fictionalized it during the production process. Or, according to Baudrillard (2005), information has become a “hyperreality” and a consumable commodity.

Screen addiction has emerged with people’s extensive use of smartphones and tablets, and individuals have begun to live their lives in a virtual environment that includes the digital activism concept. Social movements have spread through digital media in Turkey and around the world to gather a wider audience in a shorter time, execute effective, low-cost campaigns, and avoid mainstream media’s repression and censorship. These recently widespread strategies have helped move activism to the virtual environment and paved the way for a number of websites operating in this field. In the social movement context, therefore, this study attempts to elucidate digital activism through the case of change.org. by using a quantitative survey to examine websites’ roles in digital activism. Ali Murat KIRIK, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN 299

2. Social Movements and Sociological Transformation

Considering the virtual world only as a source of entertainment, news, and information would be in error. Internet technology that brings the masses together and enables content sharing is at the center of society. Therefore, it is of great importance in social activism because individuals can create a common consciousness and interact continually within the virtual environment. Today, social movements spread through the Internet can affect individuals of all ages, thus creating a certain sociological transformation. Too, the Internet, with its highly influential and ubiquitous power, has become a source of disinformation. Before examining the Internet, however, we should clarify the meaning of “social movement.”

2.1. Scope of Social Movements

Usually having broad scope, social movements have been examined in detail in every historical period. They are mostly country dependent, but some spread worldwide. According to Moyer’s work, social movements are nonviolent actions against unjust public policies and conditions, which draw strength from “the people,” who struggle for change against governing powers. Social movements consist of mass struggles that might require many years to solve social problems and rebuild social values. The desire for positive change in existing conditions and in society’s common interest is regarded as a basic element of social movements (Moyer, 2001, p. 17). According to Moyer, change is the sine qua non of social movements.

Moreover, Tilly states that social movements emerged in the late 1700s as a form of action parallel to increased English and American democratic representation. In that context, social movements are generally considered as integrated into and unique to democratic societies. However, social movements are not specific only to democratic societies; they also occur in both democratizing and authoritarian societies (Christiansen, 2011, p. 4).

Additionally, researchers hold other, different opinions about social movements. One view argues that social movements do not always aim at change, and, due to their structure, cannot actually effect change. According to Şentürk (2006, p. 39), instead of expending effort toward change, some social movements aim only to attract public attention and raise awareness: for instance, ecology, women’s rights, world peace, and homosexual movements. Each aims to attract the masses’ attention to deficiencies and problems in its respective area. Such movements do not recommend alternative systems, nor do they act to eliminate the existing order. In other words, to improve the current situation, some social movements aim to make problems visible to society and point toward partial transformation. 300 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG

The decades during and after the 1960s showcased profound and dramatic worldwide transformation through social movements. Civil rights, freedom of expression, and student movements during the late 1960s and early 1970s; women’s rights, peace, and environment/ ecology movements in the 1970s; nuclear disarmament movements during the 1980s—all have been regarded as indicators of radical transformation. These social movements, with various goals and actors against problems and crises caused by spreading and deepening modernity, have been conceptualized as “new social movements.” In the 1970s and 1980s, environmental, women’s rights, peace, and human rights movements and, in the 1990s and 2000s, the global justice movement emerged and spread one after another.

However, changes in the social arena have altered reasons for social movements: their nature, their participants’ characteristics, goals, and modes of action. Innovative social movements have centered mainly around identity-based approaches, while their issues have diversified and have appeared, at first, other than class-based. Along with the latest social movements—characterized by increased middle-class participation, decreased need for power to accomplish goals, by targeting change in a cultural field, and by identity issues— innovations have also occurred in social movement theories (Topal Demiroğlu, 2014, pp. 134–135).

2.2. Overview of New Social Movements

Social movements are an effort to resolve the difficulties and reduce tensions encountered in a particular subject. In this respect, social movements have taken place at every place where there is human existence, living within a social organization. Hence, social movements are considered to be a historical phenomenon rather than a union action or a community organization specific to modern period. It is accepted that the social movements have affected by the social changes and transformations led by the modern period and they have gradually changed form. Experiencing various transformations after new developments, social movements had different dynamics as a result.

Although social movements began to be discussed in the middle of the 18th and 19th centuries, they took their place in social sciences literature in the 19th century. Following the developments in sociology discipline in the middle of the 19th century, social movement studies gained importance and sociologists had an increasing interest in the field. Many studies have been carried out later on about the causes, effects and socio-political contexts of social movements. While in the beginning, social movements were explained in terms of socio-psychological reasons using the “mass” concept, the emphasis was later placed on the Ali Murat KIRIK, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN 301 conscious and organizational structure of the movements (Çetinkaya, 2015, p. 28).

Kendall (2008) examined major features of social movements in detail and focused on three criteria. Accordingly, social movements offer opportunities for those who are excluded from the society to make their voices heard. In other words, those who do not have power in mainstream politics can get involved in and get the chance to express themselves. Social movements are more developed in industrialized societies compared to non-industrialized ones. Traditional beliefs and patterns of behavior in undeveloped societies prevent a mass movement. Many social movements survive with voluntary support, since they are, although organized, not institutionalized.

Social movements reach their peak with the integration of the social media that enable individuals come together to meet a common target. The most important of these events have been the Arab Spring. The revolts started with an unemployed university graduate setting himself on fire in Tunisia in 2011 and had a tremendous impact in all the Middle East geography. This uprising event has a great importance in terms of understanding the social dimensions of social media. During the riots that began in Tunisia and Egypt and spread to almost all Arab countries, Facebook and Twitter soon reached millions of new users in these regions. In Egypt, for example, the number of Facebook users increased from 5.5 million to 8.5 million within only 6 months, while in Libya, 600,000 new users became active on Twitter in the course of Arab Spring (Babacan, Haşlak & Hira, 2011, p. 79).

Social movements have many parallels with the features of the periods they grow, in terms of their forms of organization, the subjects they prioritize and their main characteristics. Societies defined as industrial and post-industrial (modern / postmodern) have their own structural differences. Although such conceptualizations are controversial among sociologists, it is agreed that the two social structures have a variety of differences, leading to variations in production, consumption, management and organization (Hira, 2016, pp. 148-149). In view of these claims, the new social movement theorists state that the classical Marxism is based on anti-system movements, that precedes purely economic contradictions, and that the form of solution it offers proposes a fundamental change of the political structure in a revolutionary way to remedy the situation and is insufficient to explain the new situation, and they point that the identity-based new movements have a character shaped by difference and otherness.

The use of social media has been a great determinant of social events increased especially in the 2000s. Consider the dismissal of President of the Philippines, Joseph Estrada, as a good example of how the new communication tools are regarded by political powers. During 302 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG

Estrada’s trial, admission of evidence was blocked and the trial was abandoned. The result was a mass rally of outraged Philippine citizens. The importance of this rally was that there were mainly mobile phones and text messages through which the rally was organized and the communication was established. In the end, the reaction from the people caused the legislators to consider the evidence and Estrada was overthrown. He blamed the text messaging- generation for his fall (Shirky, 2011, p. 29).

‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement, started in New York on September 17, 2011, spread all over the world from Manhattan -known as the heart of global capitalism-. The movement, supported on a global scale with 100 cities in the US, has emerged as a struggle against Wall Street, as it is believed to cause the economic collapse, and against the destructive power of large banks and multinational companies on democracy. Inspired by the Arab Spring revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement aimed to uncover how the richest 1% write the rules of the global economy.

The occupation actions around the world are organized using a collective decision-making tool that is based on a non-binding consensus known as the people’s assembly (Calhoun, 2013). It is possible to say that new social movements are spreading every day through social media.

3. Digital Activism in the Context of Web 3.0

Web 3.0 technology, realized after the participatory and sharing content of Web 2.0, aims to enable users reach the information they need, using the existing internet infrastructure, more easily and quickly over today’s millions of web sites created worldwide. Web 3.0 is more comprehensive than other versions.

3.1. The Web 3.0 Concept

Web 3.0 -called the new generation web- proposes a vision to carry the web page contents to a new level where they can be interpreted using ontologies. The semantic web is based on making computers carry out the job of searching and organizing the services individuals or organizations need. It provides access not only to content but also to services on the web (Berners-Lee, 2001).

Web 3.0 or Semantic Web is an application that aims to collect the information around the world on a single platform and enable the associated processes to be managed automatically by the computers over the web. Web 3.0 requires all the information and data on the web to Ali Murat KIRIK, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN 303 be associated with descriptions. In other words, it is aimed that content and keywords (meta- data) are intertwined in the new web technology (Yağcı, 2011, p. 140).

Web 3.0 is fully online and is based on semantic relationality of data in digital environment. Web 3.0 is expressed as the era of gathering and aggregating. The data collected by semantic web technology is used by the users and transformed to be interpreted by the computers as well. Web 3.0, or semantic web technology, enable various methods for the individuals to access any data they are interested in. The most important difference here is the linked data. As the technology advanced rapidly, data gained further value. The data is required to be classified and associated with each other in parallel with its increased value (Yengin, 2015, p. 49-50).

It is particularly important that Web 3.0 has a personalized structure today. The system holds your past search experience, together with the synthesis of the meta-data it has it returns you the right-most result in a short time (Yağcı, 2011, p.141). It evaluates millions of different results and returns the most ideal one.

Web 3.0 technology and the high level of personalization it offered gives the user an advanced internet experience. As one visits a news site, for instance, the website identifies the user and retrieves his/her preferences to present the news he/she will be interested in. Similarly, daily weather reports of his/her current location are reported automatically. Especially, the artificial intelligence embedded in Web 3.0 technology knows the content that would be useful for the user while using a search engine and creates personalized orderings of the search results. This shows that the control over the internet is passed from the human hand to software.

Web 3.0 is not expected to bring an additional burden to user. It is expected rather to reduce the workload searching for information and to save time. The greatest development aimed by Web 3.0 is the possibility of the users to use their native language while communicating with the computer. Computers present the most appropriate results for a search query, customized for every single user (Odabaşı, Çetinkaya & Şahin, 2009).

3.2. Digital Activism

Development of information and communication technologies made the Internet an important part of the daily life and digital media has begun to create a transformation in society. This transformation has begun to rapidly change the way the concept of activism is applied and perceived (Mustvairo, 2016, p.10). Social trends of today are formed through the 304 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG digital space. Expressions related to these social trends are also organized over digital areas. It is defined as digital activism to participate in informal actions over the Internet or to support a political or social event. Joining a campaign group on a social media website, retweeting, creating a hashtag, and signing an online petition are all examples of digital activism.

New social movements try to create public opinion instead of reaching directly to the governing power or to classes in power over a bureaucratic system. At this point, public opinion is regarded as a mechanism of public pressure (Lelandais, 2009, p. 68-69).

Digital activism can be expressed as a result of developments in digital technologies and new communication technologies. Social movements have existed throughout the history and often had a characteristic that leads to transformation of the social structure. An independent autonomous communication process, free from control of corporate power, has enabled acceleration of the social movements. Digital activism is defined as planned actions of individuals or groups, which exploit the rapid spreading capacity of network structures and information technologies, aiming mainly to strongly shape the public opinion while having the capability to grow independent from centrality, as either a support of or a reaction against social and political events or subjects like freedom of expression, human rights and environmental issues. It is also referred as ‘Internet activism’, ‘e-activism’ or ‘cyber activism’ (Kırık and Özcan 2014, p. 65-66).

The term digital activism is technically appropriate since it includes activism activities carried out primarily through social media, cell phones and internet-based applications, all of which are new communication technologies that work with a digital code. According to Karatzogianni (2015, p. 1), digital activism is any kind of activity that is carried over digital networks and serves a particular purpose such as political participation or organization of protests. Over time, digital activism is integrated into traditional activism (street activism) and is not completely independent of it. According to Ricketts (2012, p. 186), on the other hand, digital activism is an effort by activists to exploit the power of digital networks in every possible way.

There are positive approaches to the use of the Internet as a means of resistance against the dominant powers. Castells advocates for internet-based actions. He states that this way of acting gives beneficial results. Aydoğan says that a new public space, an ‘opposite public space’, is formed by the expressions and statements over the Internet. Thus, he describes the public space of Castells as ‘the opposite public space’. Earl and Kimport (2011, p.21-22) are skeptical about the fact that people in the virtual environment can choose sex, race and social Ali Murat KIRIK, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN 305 status different than what they actually are, and that they can create a new social identity. Users can prefer a different profile than their real identity since it is a virtual account. It is thought that sometimes they exhibit destructive and harmful behaviors as they take comfort from being anonymous.

Together with digital technologies, it is seen that activism has begun to gain a new set of features and expanded its scope. Internet environments directly affect the public and the media. Therefore, it also affects politicians and laws. Since activists often try to influence laws, rulers and other power holders to change, it can be said that successful, convincing and effective digital activism can directly reach target groups. For this reason, activists from all over the world carrying out social movements started to use this new source. Even an action in the physical world can no more be thought of being independent of the Internet. Boycott calls and signature campaigns over the Internet, bulk e-petition submissions, virtual protests, crashing or hacktivism are now possible online actions (Tani, 2018, p. 51-52).

Two important events in the world are considered as the first examples of digital activism and they raised awareness about the term both in the literature and in society. The first of these is the activism event against the Ministerial Conference of World Trade Organization, held in Seattle, USA in 1999. The action is important as it was the first time that internet and mobile phones was used effectively and as it showed how powerful digital tools are (Sert, 2016, p. 34). A large group of activists argued that large companies and powerful states harmed undeveloped countries and small businesses, and they organized long-lasting demonstrations filling the streets of Seattle. The demonstrations of this activist mass against globalization could not find enough space in the mainstream media and the public was not sufficiently informed about the developments (Scholz, 2010, p. 23).

One of the most important actions in the historical development of digital activism is the revolution in the Philippines in 2000, which is regarded as the first example of mobile activism in history. It is important in terms of the time it emerged and the form it had. The President of the Philippines, Joseph Estrada, was accused of corruption and electoral fraud in 2000. However, TV news announced Estrada was found innocent by the senate and was absolved of the crime, leading to the reaction of millions of people against Estrada. A large mass of people who wanted to overthrow the president began to send messages to each other, protesting and mocking the president. In fact, this led people to realize that there was a large number of people who were uncomfortable with the situation, and they started to motivate each other to gather for protests. At that time, there were merely 11 million telephone subscribers in the 78 million-country, and the internet penetration rate was only 1%. The 306 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG activists, realizing that the most suitable media for organizing are the mobile phones, began to send location messages to indicate assembly areas, and other slogans and riot messages. According to data from Smart Communications, one of the telecommunications companies in the Philippines, 70 million text messages were posted on a single day. 91,000 people attended the online signature campaign (Cullum, 2010, p. 61-62; Earl and Kimport, 2011, p. 25; Rizzo, 2008, p.136; Wong, 2001, p. 381).

Activists from all sections, from the most powerful lobbyists in America to opposition groups in China, are aware of the power the Internet possesses. The use of digital media can be fruitful in many areas such as gaining support for a campaign, raising awareness on social issues, and creating and collecting funds (Wong, 2001, p. 381; Gurak, 2014, p. 7).

People and organizations that organize environmentalist movements – one of the new social movements – do not directly present their change demands to state institutions, instead they create masses who are aware of the purpose of the movement and take action, forming a social movement as a result. Therefore, the field of struggle for new social movements is not the political field primarily, but the civil society (Vahabzadeh, 2003, p. 10).

The new media is supportive of the social movements in organizing various actions and is the main source for such activities. Some events are held only through online channels. These include piracy, viruses and worms, virtual sit-ins, cultural jamming websites, protest websites, alternative media sites, e-mail bombs and online signature campaigns (Kalafatoğlu, 2015, p. 317).

3.3. Digital Signature Campaigns

Online actions have emerged as the philosophical background of real-life activism and direct actions have been transferred to the virtual world. Signature campaigns can be considered within this concept, and they constitute a form of digital activism. They can be carried out against state organs, institutional authorities or against various companies (Kalafatoğlu, 2015, p.312). Digital signature campaigns play an important role in creating a social platform. It is a social phenomenon that individuals can freely share their feelings and thoughts and support signature campaigns without knowing each other and through organizing a community (crowdsourcing) to make common cause with other supporters (Tezcan, 2017, p. 47).

Digital signature campaigns are carrying the signature campaigns or petitions -the conventional activism tools- to the virtual platform either through activists’ own web sites or using the potential of the social media to shape public opinion. These campaigns, organized Ali Murat KIRIK, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN 307 in digital environment or transferred from the real medium to the virtual one, are important factors for digital activists to organize digitally to voice social problems, to struggle to achieve their purposes and to develop common reactions. The effective use of such sites is important in digital activism for individuals and communities to share opinions and find supporters (Yılmaz, Dündar & Oskay, 2015, p. 490).

The study by Della Porta, Andretta, Mosca and Reiter (2006) on global justice activists reveals that digital signature campaigns are the most frequently used type of action. Signature campaigns in many countries are a means for citizens to express their feelings about an issue concerning them. New types of applications have emerged in signature campaigns as a result of the widespread use of the Internet and information technologies all over the world. Digital signature campaigns are part of a wider range of mobilization provided by the Internet. Today, citizens have more tools to interact with institutions and to have a voice in decision- making processes. Many national institutions in Europe, for example, provide the citizens with opportunities to participate in digital signature campaigns. The Scottish Parliament is the first in Europe to allow digital signature campaigns. After the trial period, they officially launched their signature campaign site in 2004 (epetitions.scottish.parliament.uk). Collecting online signatures can be effective not only on national borders, but also on governments and administrative bodies at international level. International signature collecting campaigns create mobilization and enable announcement of any violations of human rights or death penalties to the whole world, thus suppressing governments (Della Porta et al. 2006; Mosca & Santucci 2009, p. 121-122).

4. Materials and Methods

4.1. About the Research

In this section, the subject and the purpose of the research are stated, the hypotheses, the universe and the sample are presented, the data collection tools and the statistical analysis are given in detail and lastly the findings are reported.

4.1.1. Purpose of the Research

It is aimed to examine digital activism through the case of change.org in the context of social movements. 308 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG

4.1.2. Hypotheses

The following hypotheses are put forward to be tested in this research:

Hypothesis 1: Answers to the question “How much do you know about online signature campaigns?” vary depending on demographic characteristics.

Hypothesis 2: Answers to the question “How many times did you participate in online signature campaigns?” vary depending on demographic characteristics.

Hypothesis 3: Answers to the question “Why do you participate in online signature campaigns?” vary depending on demographic characteristics.

Hypothesis 4: Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org vary depending on gender.

Hypothesis 5: Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org vary depending on age.

Hypothesis 6: Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org vary depending on educational level.

4.1.3. The Population and the Sample

According to the 2019 report by We Are Social, there are a total of 52 million social media users in Turkey (https://wearesocial.com/global-digital-report-2019). The sample used in this study was consisted of 407 social media users selected by stratified random sampling method.

4.1.4. Data Collection Tools

The questionnaire technique was used to collect data. The survey consists of 2 sections. Measurement tools used in the questionnaire are explained in the following subsections.

4.1.4.1. Questions about Personal Characteristics

These consist of questions including age, gender, educational level and opinions about online signature campaigns.

4.1.4.2. Questions about change.org

These consist of 6 questions about opinions on change.org.

4.1.5. Data Analysis

For statistical analysis, the NCSS (Number Cruncher Statistical System) 2007 (Kaysville, Utah, USA) program was used. While examining the research data, descriptive statistics such Ali Murat KIRIK, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN 309 as the mean, standard deviation, median, frequency, ratio, minimum and the maximum were collected. Pearson Chi-Square Test was used for the analysis of the qualitative data. The significance levels of p <0.01 and p <0.05 were considered in the analyses.

4.2. Findings and Discussion

4.2.1. Findings about basic and demographic characteristics

Table 1. Descriptive sample statistics: Gender variable

N % Male 213 52.3 Gender Female 194 47.7

Table 2. Descriptive sample statistics: Age variable N % 18-24 years 256 62.9 Age 25-32 years 96 23.6 33 years and older 55 13.5

Table 3. Descriptive sample statistics: Educational level variable N % Undergraduate student 313 76.9 Educational Level Graduate student 74 18.2 High school student 20 4.9

Table 4. Number (n) and proportion (%) of Daily hours spent on the Internet N % 1-2 hours 107 26.3

How many hours do you spend on 3-4 hours 199 48.9 the Internet in a day? 5-6 hours 67 16.5 7 hours and more 34 8.4 310 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG

Table 5. Number (n) and proportion (%) of Opinions about Online Signature Campaigns n % Yes 58 14.3 Do you think online signature campaigns are successful and No 108 26.5 achieve their purpose? Partially 241 59.2 I heard about 55 13.5

How much do you know about I heard about and participated in 269 66.1 online signature campaigns? I heard about but not participated in 68 16.7 I have not participated in 15 3.7 To keep up-to-date 49 12.0

Why do you participate in online I have never participated in 12 2.9 signature campaigns? To be informed about the topic 36 8.8 To contribute to solution of the problem 310 76.2 1-2 times 149 36.6 3-4 times 80 19.7 How many times did you participate in online signature 5-6 times 41 10.1 campaigns? 7 times and more 66 16.2 I have never participated in 71 17.4

The distribution of the respondents’ opinions about online signature campaigns are given in Table 5.

Table 6. Number (n) and proportion (%) of Opinions about Change.Org 1 – Not at all 5 – Extremely 2 3 4 Effective Effective n % n % n % n % n % In bringing together people with similar 11 2.7 102 25.1 144 35.4 93 22.9 57 14.0 ideas In highlighting a 9 2.2 64 15.7 144 35.4 115 28.3 75 18.4 certain problem In supporting street 50 12.3 158 38.8 114 28.0 72 17.7 13 3.2 protests In gaining national 20 4.9 124 30.5 151 37.1 97 23.8 15 3.7 support for protests In initiating social or 52 12.8 146 35.9 135 33.2 58 14.3 16 3.9 political change In gaining international support 66 16.2 135 33.2 119 29.2 66 16.2 21 5.2 for protests

The distribution of the respondents’ opinions about change.org are given in Table 6. Ali Murat KIRIK, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN 311

Relationship between demographic characteristics and answers to the question “How much do you know about online signature campaings?”

Hypothesis 1: Answers to the question “How much do you know about online signature campaings?” vary depending on demographic characteristics.

The hypothesis was tested using Pearson Chi-Square Test.

Table 7. Number (n) and proportion (%) of answers to “How much do you know about online signature campaigns?”, by demographics How much do you know about online signature campaigns? I heard I heard I have not I heard about and about but not participated about participated participated in in in n % n % N % n % 18-24 years 31 12.11 191 74.61 30 11.72 4 1.56 Age 25-32 years 7 7.29 58 60.42 23 23.96 8 8.33 0.001** 33 years and older 17 30.91 20 36.36 15 27.27 3 5.45 Undergraduate 32 10.22 230 73.48 44 14.06 7 2.24 student Educational 0.001** level Graduate student 23 31.08 26 35.14 21 28.38 4 5.41 High school student - - 13 65.00 3 15.00 4 20.00 Male 26 12.21 137 64.32 44 20.66 6 2.82 Gender 0.427 Female 29 14.95 132 68.04 24 12.37 9 4.64 1-2 hours 11 10.28 77 71.96 17 15.89 2 1.87 Daily hours 3-4 hours 27 13.57 133 66.83 26 13.07 13 6.53 spent on the 0.001** Internet 5-6 hours 17 25.37 33 49.25 17 25.37 - - 7 hours and more - - 26 76.47 8 23.53 - -

The answers to the question “How much do you know about online signature campaigns?” were statistically different among various age groups (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of the answer “I heard about and participated in” were higher among respondents aged 18-24 years compared to older age groups.

The answers were statistically different also among respondents with various educational levels (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of the answer “I heard about and participated in” were higher among high school and undergraduate students compared to graduate students.

The answers were statistically different also among males and females (p>0.05). 312 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG

Again, participants with differing daily hours spent on the Internet had statistically different answers for the question (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of the answer “I heard about and participated in” were higher among who spend 7 hours and more compared to other groups with lower daily hours.

Relationship between demographic characteristics and answers to the question “How many times did you participate in online signature campaigns?”

Hypothesis 2: Answers to the question “How many times did you participate in online signature campaigns?” vary depending on demographic characteristics.

The hypothesis was tested using Pearson Chi-Square Test.

Table 8. Number (n) and proportion (%) of answers to “How many times did you participate in online signature campaigns?”, by demographics How many times did you participate in online signature campaigns? 7 times I have never 1-2 times 3-4 times 5-6 times and more participated in n % n % n % n % n % 18-24 years 89 34.8 65 25.4 22 8.6 50 19.5 30 11.7 Age 25-32 years 33 34.4 13 13.5 17 17.7 11 11.5 22 22.9 0.001** 33 years and older 27 49.1 2 3.6 2 3.6 5 9.1 19 34.5 Undergraduate 110 35.1 72 23.0 32 10.2 59 18.8 40 12.8 student Educational 0.001** level Graduate student 29 39.2 8 10.8 9 12.2 4 5.4 24 32.4 High school student 10 50.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 3 15.0 7 35.0 Male 84 39.4 41 19.2 23 10.8 28 13.1 37 17.4 Gender 0.427 Female 65 33.5 39 20.1 18 9.3 38 19.6 34 17.5 1-2 hours 49 45.8 15 14.0 11 10.3 16 15.0 16 15.0 Daily hours 3-4 hours 70 35.2 50 25.1 14 7.0 38 19.1 27 13.6 spent on the 0.001** Internet 5-6 hours 13 19.4 13 19.4 12 17.9 4 6.0 25 37.3 7 hours and more 17 50.0 2 5.9 4 11.8 8 23.5 3 8.8

The answers to the question “How many times did you participate in online signature campaigns?” were statistically different among various age groups (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of 7 times and more participation were higher among respondents aged 18-24 years compared to older age groups. Ali Murat KIRIK, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN 313

The answers were statistically different also among respondents with various educational levels (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of 7 times and more participation were higher among high school and undergraduate students compared to graduate students.

The answers were statistically different also among males and females (p>0.05).

Again, respondents with differing daily hours spent on the Internet had statistically different answers for the question (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of 7 times and more participation were higher among who spend 7 hours and more compared to other groups with lower daily hours.

Relationship between demographic characteristics and answers to the question “Why do you participate in online signature campaigns?”

Hypothesis 3: Answers to the question “Why do you participate in online signature campaigns?” vary depending on demographic characteristics.

The hypothesis was tested using Pearson Chi-Square Test.

Table 9. Number (n) and proportion (%) of answers to “Why do you participate in online signature campaigns?”, by demographics Why do you participate in online signature campaigns? To To be contribute To keep informed I have never to solution up-to-date about the participated in of the topic problem n % n % N % n % 18-24 years 25 9.8 204 79.7 19 7.4 8 3.1 Age 25-32 years 7 7.3 75 78.1 14 14.6 0 0.0 0.001** 33 years and older 17 30.9 31 56.4 3 5.5 4 7.3 Undergraduate 32 10.2 248 79.2 25 8.0 8 2.6 student Educational Graduate student 11 14.9 53 71.6 6 8.1 4 5.4 0.005** level High school 6 30.0 9 45.0 5 25.0 0 0.0 student Male 38 17.8 143 67.1 20 9.4 12 5.6 Gender 0.001** Female 11 5.7 167 86.1 16 8.2 0 0.0 1-2 hours 15 14.0 71 66.4 17 15.9 4 3.7 Daily hours 3-4 hours 14 7.0 168 84.4 13 6.5 4 2.0 spent on the 0.001** Internet 5-6 hours 5 7.5 54 80.6 4 6.0 4 6.0 7 hours and more 15 44.1 17 50.0 2 5.9 0 0.0 314 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG

The answers to the question “Why do you participate in online signature campaigns?” were statistically different among various age groups (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of those who aim to contribute to solution of the problem was higher among respondents aged 18-24 years compared to older age groups.

The answers were statistically different also among various educational levels (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of those who aim to contribute to solution of the problem was higher among undergraduate and graduate students compared to high school students.

The answers were statistically different also among males and females (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of females who aim to contribute to solution of the problem was higher compared to males.

Again, participants with differing daily hours spent on the Internet had statistically different answers for the question (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of who aim to contribute to solution of the problem were higher among who spend 3-4 hours compared to other groups with lower or higher daily hours.

Relationship between gender and scores on effectiveness of Change.Org

Hypothesis 4: Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org vary depending on gender.

The hypothesis was tested using Pearson Chi-Square Test.

Table 10. Number (n) and proportion (%) of scores on effectiveness of Change.Org, by gender Gender Male Female n % N % 1 - Not at all effective 4 1.9 7 3.6 2 58 27.2 44 22.7 In bringing together people 3 70 32.9 74 38.1 0.558 with similar ideas 4 51 23.9 42 21.6 5 - Extremely Effective 30 14.1 27 13.9 1 - Not at all effective 9 4.2 0 0.0 2 33 15.5 31 16.0 In highlighting a certain 3 58 27.2 86 44.3 0.001** problem 4 74 34.7 41 21.1 5 - Extremely Effective 39 18.3 36 18.6 Ali Murat KIRIK, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN 315

1 - Not at all effective 18 8.5 32 16.5 2 83 39.0 75 38.7 In supporting street protests 3 53 24.9 61 31.4 0.001** 4 54 25.4 18 9.3 5 - Extremely Effective 5 2.3 8 4.1 1 - Not at all effective 7 3.3 13 6.7 2 62 29.1 62 32.0 In gaining national support for 0.257 3 81 38.0 70 36.1 protests 4 57 26.8 40 20.6 5 - Extremely Effective 6 2.8 9 4.6 1 - Not at all effective 31 14.6 21 10.8 2 76 35.7 70 36.1 In initiating social or political 3 60 28.2 75 38.7 0.038* change 4 39 18.3 19 9.8 5 - Extremely Effective 7 3.3 9 4.6 1 - Not at all effective 40 18.8 26 13.4 2 66 31.0 69 35.6 In gaining international 3 63 29.6 56 28.9 0.519 support for protests 4 35 16.4 31 16.0 5 - Extremely Effective 9 4.2 12 6.2

Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org “in bringing together people with similar ideas”, “in gaining national support for protests” and “in gaining international support for protests” were statistically different among males and females (p>0.05).

The ratio of males who think Change.Org to be effective “in highligting a certain problem” was higher than that of females. The higher ratio of males was found statistically significant (p=0.001; p<0.01).

The ratio of males who think Change.Org to be effective “in supporting street protests” was higher than that of females. The higher ratio of males was found statistically significant (p=0.001; p<0.01).

Again, the ratio of males who think Change.Org to be effective “in initiating social or political change” was higher than that of females. The higher ratio of males was found statistically significant (p=0.028; p<0.05). 316 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG

Relationship between age and scores on effectiveness of Change.Org

Hypothesis 5: Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org vary depending on age

The hypothesis was tested using Pearson Chi-Square Test.

Table 11. Number (n) and proportion (%) of scores on effectiveness of Change.Org, by age Age 33 years and 18-24 years 25-32 years older n % N % n % 1 - Not at all effective 2 0.8 2 2.1 7 12.7 2 58 22.7 15 15.6 29 In bringing together 52.7 people with similar 3 100 39.1 39 40.6 5 9.1 0.001** ideas 4 59 23.0 27 28.1 7 12.7 5 - Extremely Effective 37 14.5 13 13.5 7 12.7 1 - Not at all effective 9 3.5 0 0.0 0 0.0 2 34 13.3 6 6.3 24 43.6 In highlighting a 3 97 37.9 33 34.4 14 25.5 certain problem 0.001** 4 80 31.3 26 27.1 9 16.4 5 - Extremely Effective 36 14.1 31 32.3 8 14.5 1 - Not at all effective 19 7.4 22 22.9 9 16.4 In supporting street 2 106 41.4 30 31.3 22 40.0 protests 3 80 31.3 17 17.7 17 30.9 0.001** 4 38 14.8 27 28.1 7 12.7 5 - Extremely Effective 13 5.1 0 0.0 0 0.0 In gaining national 1 - Not at all effective 9 3.5 7 7.3 4 7.3 support for protests 2 81 31.6 23 24.0 20 36.4 3 94 36.7 38 39.6 19 34.5 0.006** 4 63 24.6 28 29.2 6 10.9 5 - Extremely Effective 9 3.5 0 0.0 6 10.9 1 - Not at all effective 34 13.3 14 14.6 4 7.3 2 88 34.4 31 32.3 27 49.1 In initiating social 3 98 38.3 22 22.9 15 27.3 or political change 0.001** 4 27 10.5 27 28.1 4 7.3 5 - Extremely Effective 9 3.5 2 2.1 5 9.1 1 - Not at all effective 48 18.8 13 13.5 5 9.1 2 79 30.9 32 33.3 24 In gaining 43.6 international 3 82 32.0 25 26.0 12 21.8 0.013** support for protests 4 30 11.7 24 25.0 12 21.8 5 - Extremely Effective 17 6.6 2 2.1 2 3.6 Ali Murat KIRIK, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN 317

Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org “in bringing together people with similar ideas” were statistically different among various age groups (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of respondents among 18-24 years and 25-32 years who think Change.Org to be effective were higher compared to that of 33 years and older.

Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org “in highlighting a certain problem” were statistically different among various age groups (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of respondents among 18-24 years and 25-32 years who think Change.Org to be effective were higher compared to that of 33 years and older.

Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org “in supporting street protests” were statistically different among various age groups (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of respondents among 18-24 years and 25-32 years who think Change.Org to be effective were higher compared to that of 33 years and older.

Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org “in gaining national support for protests” were statistically different among various age groups (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of respondents among 18-24 years and 25-32 years who think Change.Org to be effective were higher compared to that of 33 years and older.

Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org “in initiating social or political change” were statistically different among various age groups (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of respondents among 18-24 years and 25-32 years who think Change.Org to be effective were higher compared to that of 33 years and older.

Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org “in gaining international support for protests” were statistically different among various age groups (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio of respondents among 18-24 years and 25-32 years who think Change.Org to be effective were higher compared to that of 33 years and older.

Relationship between educational level and scores on effectiveness of Change.Org

Hypothesis 6: Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org vary depending on educational level.

The hypothesis was tested using Pearson Chi-Square Test. 318 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG

Table 12. Number (n) and proportion (%) of scores on effectiveness of Change.Org, by Educational Level Educational Level High school Undergraduate Graduate student student student n % N % n % 1 - Not at all effective 3 15.0 0 0.0 8 10.8 2 11 55.0 71 22.7 20 27.0 In bringing together people 3 3 15.0 126 40.3 15 20.3 0.001** with similar ideas 4 3 15.0 70 22.4 20 27.0 5 - Extremely Effective 0 0.0 46 14.7 11 14.9 1 - Not at all effective 0 0.0 9 2.9 0 0.0 2 7 35.0 37 11.8 20 27.0 In highlighting a 3 7 35.0 116 37.1 21 28.4 0.001** certain problem 4 6 30.0 94 30.0 15 20.3 5 - Extremely Effective 0 0.0 57 18.2 18 24.3 1 - Not at all effective 0 0.0 32 10.2 18 24.3

In supporting 2 10 50.0 121 38.7 27 36.5 0.001** street protests 3 10 50.0 85 27.2 19 25.7 4 0 0.0 62 19.8 10 13.5 5 - Extremely Effective 0 0.0 13 4.2 0 0.0 1 - Not at all effective 0 0.0 13 4.2 7 9.5

In gaining 2 7 35.0 90 28.8 27 36.5 national support 3 10 50.0 123 39.3 18 24.3 0.001** for protests 4 3 15.0 78 24.9 16 21.6 5 - Extremely Effective 0 0.0 9 2.9 6 8.1 1 - Not at all effective 0 0.0 43 13.7 9 12.2

In initiating 2 17 85.0 98 31.3 31 41.9 social or political 3 0 0.0 118 37.7 17 23.0 0.001** change 4 0 0.0 43 13.7 15 20.3 5 - Extremely Effective 3 15.0 11 3.5 2 2.7 1 - Not at all effective 3 15.0 54 17.3 9 12.2 In gaining 2 7 35.0 92 29.4 36 48.6 international 3 7 35.0 103 32.9 9 12.2 0.001** support for protests 4 3 15.0 45 14.4 18 24.3 5 - Extremely Effective 0 0.0 19 6.1 2 2.7

Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org “in bringing together people with similar ideas” were statistically different among respondents with various educational levels (p=0.001; Ali Murat KIRIK, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN 319 p<0.01). The ratio among undergraduate and graduate students who think Change.Org to be effective were higher compared to that of high school students.

Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org “in supporting street protests” were statistically different among respondents with various educational levels (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio among undergraduate and graduate students who think Change.Org to be effective were higher compared to that of high school students.

Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org “in gaining national support for protests” were statistically different among respondents with various educational levels (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio among undergraduate and graduate students who think Change.Org to be effective were higher compared to that of high school students.

Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org “in initiating social or political change” were statistically different among respondents with various educational levels (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio among undergraduate and graduate students who think Change.Org to be effective were higher compared to that of high school students.

Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org “in gaining international support for protests” were statistically different among respondents with various educational levels (p=0.001; p<0.01). The ratio among undergraduate and graduate students who think Change.Org to be effective were higher compared to that of high school students.

Table 13. Hypothesis Tests Results Hypothesis Result Hypothesis 1: Answers to the question “How much do you know about online signature Accept campaings?” vary depending on demographic characteristics. Hypothesis 2: Answers to the question “How many times did you participate in online Accept signature campaigns?” vary depending on demographic characteristics. Hypothesis 3: Answers to the question “Why do you participate in online signature Accept campaigns?” vary depending on demographic characteristics. Hypothesis 4: Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org vary depending on gender. Accept Hypothesis 5: Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org vary depending on age. Accept Hypothesis 6: Scores on effectiveness of Change.Org vary depending on educational level. Accept

5. Conclusion

Mass media technologies not only affect the masses, but have also become a medium for mass movements. Just as the society expressed its mass reactions and political thoughts in the squares, they have also become able to discuss in virtual media thanks to developing 320 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG internet technologies. While the voices of homogeneous communities in physical squares are loud, in virtual squares, on the other hand, all segments of society can voice their sounds in a heterogeneous manner and present their demands.

People, getting increasingly lonely with individualization, transferred their social life to digital environment. In this period of smart phones, tablets and other technological devices becoming vital parts of our lives, people make their presence felt as much as they show popularity in social sharing applications. Such that activism movements and social reactions that once took place only in physical squares have also got their share of digitalization. Indeed, the concept of digital activism emerged and social movements were able to reach and influence masses and made their voice heard in a shorter time. Those denied and ignored by the society and the government were able to interact through digital activism, without pressure and censorship.

Social movements provide the necessary environment to make their voices heard for those who are left out and those who are marginalized. Those who want change, want to make their voice heard, who are not satisfied or want to say that I am here and who do not have enough power can express themselves thanks to social movements. Digitalization, on the other hand, paved the way for individuals to find their intellectual groups and make their voices heard without time and space boundaries or other limitations. Before digitalization, the conditions of social movements must existed, with digitalization, however, instant reactions can now be taken.

While Web 2.0 turns the user into a participant and a content creator, Web 3.0 enables all the available information to be controlled from a single platform. Web 3.0 is able to provide users with personalized data by collecting, combining and associating data with each other. Web 3.0 provides an advanced internet experience; returning the most relevant result through evaluating millions of different results and taking into account the search histoy of the user.

Digital activism is the ability of new social movements to create public opinion on their requests by making use of the rapidly advancing internet technologies. The public pressure created over the internet affects the media and the government, hence takes role in drafting laws.

The formation of a civil society that will support the actions will then activate the relevant places if enough plural voice is formed. Thus, online activities that will bring civil society together are carried out frequently and easily. Such activities include tools such as piracy, digital virus and worm generation, virtual sit-ins, cultural defeat websites, protest websites, Ali Murat KIRIK, Ahmet ÇETİNKAYA, Ahmet Kadri KURŞUN 321 alternative media sites, email bombardment and online signature campaigns.

Today, petitions, one of the conventional activism tools, are frequently turning into digital petition drives via the internet, and individuals can easily express their feelings, thoughts and wishes in the face of problems that concern them. In this study, the change.org website, an example of digital activism in the context of social movements, was examined and findings were presented.

Individuals’ levels of knowledge about petitions drawn up in virtual environments were evaluated based on their participation rates in petitions and reasons for participation with respect to age, gender and educational level demographics. Population of the study was consisted of social media users in Turkey, while a sample of 407 participants was recruited through stratified random sampling. Questionnaire technique was used to collect the data. NCSS (Number Cruncher Statistical System) 2007 (Kaysville, Utah, USA) program was used for statistical analysis. In addition to descriptive statistics (Average, Standard Deviation, Median, Frequency, Ratio, Minimum, Maximum) to evaluate the data, Pearson Chi-Square test was used for the analysis of qualitative data. Significance was evaluated at p <0.01 and p <0.05 levels.

The gender distribution of the study was determined as 52.3% male and 47.7% female. 62.9% of the participants were between 18-24 years, 23.6% was between 25-32, and 13.5% was 33 years or older. The rate of undergraduate educational level was 76.9%, graduate level was 18.2%, and 4.9% of participants had high school as the educational level. Thus, while there was an equal distribution of male and female participants in the survey, the proportion of young people between the ages of 18-32 was high. In addition, the high rate of undergraduate and graduate participation shows that the participants had mainly high education levels.

It is found that the participants have low levels of belief in success of online petitions and in their goal-achievement nature. 14.3% of the participants were in favor of success of online petitions, while 59.2% of them agreed partially. The rate of those who disagreed was 26.5%.

The awareness about online petitions is observed at a high level, and it is found that the participants sign a petition with the purpose to contribute to solution of the problem. In addition, 82.6% of the participants signed petitions at least once.

Change.org, reaching 19.5 million users in Turkey as of May 2020, is continuing its activities with the motto of digital meeting point for those who want change against all kinds of problems. In 2019, 3 million people signed 28,176 petitions on the platform, which offers 322 DIGITAL ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF CHANGE.ORG users the opportunity to start online petitions in order to make some changes and create awareness. Citizens who wish to express their needs in the course of Covid-19 outbreak, which affected all the world and Turkey as well since March 2020, launched above 1200 online petitions over Change-org website. More than 1 million users signed the petitions, which assume an important role in submitting requests to authorities.

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CONCLUSION

Ece KARADOĞAN DORUK1, Seda MENGÜ2, Ebru ULUSOY3

1Prof. Dr., Istanbul University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Public Relations, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

2Prof. Dr., Istanbul University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Public Relations, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

3Assoc. Prof. Dr., Farmingdale State College, New York, USA e-mail: [email protected]

DOI: 10.26650/B/SS07.2021.002.16

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Defining the present in comparison with the social, economic, political, social changes and transformations of the past years is troubling to do while experiencing another transformation brought by our age and questioning the results and benefits of said transformation. Each discipline and field of study tries to define the electronic transformation from different perspectives, that is, the “digital siege” as we used in the title of this study. Many fields of study, from communication to digital labour, from digital diplomacy to the

325 internet of things, from big data to digital culture, from cyberbullying to digital literacy, from network society to media sociology, continue to discuss the benefits of the digitalization era.

Digitalization refers to the transformation triggered by the adoption of digital technologies that produce, process, share and transfer information. In this transformation, innovation is not confined to one area but can be seen in all areas of life. In this process, transformation is taking place in many areas such as telecommunication systems, computer technologies, software fields, artificial intelligence, dissemination effects arising from public applications and service use, electronic commerce, social networks, blogs, portals and libraries (Castells, 2008, p. 125).

Digitalization has surrounded us with the penetration of internet-based networks in all areas of life and its indispensability. The old order of the world has changed in shaping today’s societies. The 21st century has witnessed the emergence of the digital society in various parts of the world as a result of the increased use of new communication and information technologies that have brought profound socio-economic changes to our lives. With the advent of computer technology, it has become possible to digitize almost everything. Change has always been a feature of human evolution, but the speed at which these transformations take place has gained unprecedented momentum.

Digitalization affects all societies in different ways at different levels. Its effects in economic, social and political areas can be observed exactly. In the economic sense, the digitalization process in production systems provides positive operational effects such as implementing automation and reducing costs, as well as increasing productivity and creating new employment areas in certain business lines. Digitalization of public services makes the relationship between the state and society easier and more practical, reducing bureaucracy. Service procurement and interaction in compulsory fields such as health, education and culture also become easier and more effortless. Social networks, blogs and websites make it easier to access and share information. However, with all these positive transformations, digitalization has also brought various problems such as the decrease in the need for the workforce in certain areas, the disappearance of certain business lines, cybercrime, and problems in social relations. The digital world has exposed us to a different and new level of reality from the world of social action we know until today. Human relations, human society relations, communication styles, socialization processes, human-object relations are being reconstructed. It is as if a new world is taking shape.

As one of the areas where the digital siege is felt the most, media and the usage of media is one of the issues that we communication academicians are most interested in. It is argued

326 that the digital age has become a structure of interpretations of reality, with the context where the distinctions between public and private, political and commercial, social and market are transformed and emotions gain more weight. It is said that the rapidly increasing diversity and anonymity of new media affect the “reality” of traditional media, the consequences of a fake news culture that praises non-intellectual experiences and that such a culture can threaten the core values of modern rational science and soon lead to the collapse of the culture.

However, as the culture is becoming increasingly digitalized, it is questioned what kind of changes occur in the technical, material and physical values of individuals, institutions and societies. Digital culture is considered as a socialized subjectivity as a part of digital habitus and the areas entered are examined in order to transform and protect the balance of power. Actors of different classes compete for power in various fields such as religion, education and arts, using economic, social, cultural and symbolic forms of capital. For this reason, today, intense discussions continue about the emergence of communication in the world of “digital culture”, which can be described as user profiles, language used, numbers, signs, icons and shares. The role of reality is investigated in the digital world where identities are reproduced and consumed.

The network society deeply affects not only the social and cultural structure but also the power structure. Although the concept of social network primarily aims to change the cultural movements and social structure, it also affects the power structure and includes every stage of society. Therefore, unlike the previous cultural structure, digital culture has affected all areas of society and subjected all areas to digital culture equally and voluntarily.

One of the issues to be examined in the digitalization process is the reflection of social inequality on digital use. The accessibility and usability of the digitalized world by all members of society should be evaluated within the framework of a social policy. The convenience and the rapidity and diversity of accessing information provided by digitalization should be distributed throughout society. Furthermore, it should not be overlooked that the usage practices of the digital world should be presented in the context of “digital literacy” with an education policy that covers the whole society. Work should be done on the prevention of cybercrime, the security of personal information and the demarcation of freedom of expression.

As a result, societies, individuals and institutions are faced with the digitalization process and its positive and negative consequences. This book has attempted to examine how individuals, societies and institutions are socially, politically, culturally and economically reshaped within the digital spiral in the light of different scientific evaluations.

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