Social media in Southeast Turkey: Love, kinship and politics (original) (raw)

2018, New Media & Society

Elisabetta Costa's monograph on the meaning, uses, and perceptions of social media in Mardin, Southeast Turkey, illustrates how these media platforms mediate Mardinite private and public lives in discreet ways. In this part of Turkey, people's social media practices center on meeting conservative cultural expectations, enhancing ideals of "honour, respectability, fame and popularity" (p. 6). Costa observes, based on her 15 months of ethnographic research in Mardin, that "it matters less what people really do, but more what people are seen to be doing" (p. 79). This summarizes the discrepancies between the actors' inconspicuous online activities and the things they post to the viewing public. Costa draws on Madianou and Miller's (2012) polymedia theory to understand how actors navigate social life through the different media platforms. When the three conditions of polymedia-availability, affordability, and media literacy-are present, actors easily connect and switch from one platform to another when necessary. Gender, generation, and economic hindrances make it hard to fully apply this theory in Mardin. For instance, teenagers and young adults are educated and the various media platforms are available, but they face the obstacle of affordability which in turn limits their preferred choice of sociality. In other cases, it is more about restrictions faced by women and housewives who are forbidden to use the Internet. Still, there is a category of people who are digitally and sometimes, literally, illiterate although they can easily afford the Internet (pp. 43-44). The author profiles the social media landscape in Mardin, revealing that Facebook is the most popular. In fact, Facebook is associated with chatting, flirting, and matchmaking (p. 104). By all indications, Facebook's popularity is partly because people use it to spy on others, present virtuous public profile, and chat privately. Costa develops the concept of public-facing Facebook to reiterate Mardinites' tendency to present on Facebook what they know would not ruin their reputation, honor, relationships, and respect. Here, "the 'public' Facebook is a place where people post what they know is going to be constantly under the gaze of others, and is where they perform a self that is imagined as continuously monitored, controlled and judged" (p. 51). This concept of public-facing Facebook gains strong analytical power when we look beyond the actors' religious memes, calm profile pictures, and their liking of virtuous online posts. What the actors hide or are believed to conceal from Facebook incite public interest and suspicion. Costa takes us deep into non-public-facing Facebook social world of her respondents, revealing secrecy, deceit, and double-standards. The common practice of owning more than one Facebook account to "keep different spheres of their lives separate" (p. 38) tells how actors use privacy setting on this social media platform to skillfully control, reveal, and limit what goes to which audience. As would be expected, WhatsApp enables a more secretive, one-to-one platform of communication and interaction. In Costa's words, WhatsApp "cannot reveal secrets and intimate confidences in public and, above all, it cannot put people in touch with