Discourse (both popular and academic) surrounding Turkey has leaned toward the reductionist and the de-contextualized, framing Turkish media, culture and politics in polarized terms such as East vs. West, Modern vs. Traditional or Muslim vs. Christian. The objective of this new volume is to move away from such essentialist dichotomies and to provide scholars with a well-written, comprehensive and much-needed investigation into media and culture in Turkey. Three themes, "Structures," "Spaces" and "Voices," make up the core structure of the book, providing an intellectual and epistemological arc. Following an introductory chapter written by the co-editors, the first section, "Structures," provides critical examinations of the structural underpinnings of contemporary Turkish media and culture through analyses of, for example, journalism, cultural policy, Information Society and citizenship. The second section, "Spaces," connects Turkish media and culture to spatial/locational factors: Turkey's role and place in Europe; the Turkish diasporic space; representations of the Turkish "East;" and Istanbul as urban/social space. In the final section, "Voices," the book turns toward chapters that address central issues in contemporary Turkish media--for example, Islam, arabesk music and the presentation of Kurds on national television--from a cultural perspective. The text will be essential reading for scholars within, for example, Middle and Near Eastern Studies, Media Studies, Sociology who wish to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between media, politics and culture in this complex and increasingly important country.

“A fresh study that confirms the existence of multiple peripheries (and its others) in Turkish society and how dominant centrist media represented these differences in film and television discourse. The use of Mardin’s center-periphery concept for the analyses of films, ads and cartoons is brilliant. This is a timely project as scholarly interest in Turkey has increased exponentially since 2013. This project is key to understanding the roots of a media politics in contemporary Turkey.” —Murat Akser, Ulster University, UK “Alparslan Nas' seminal work disrupts the notion of Turkish identities as fixed and stable. He challenges the center (secular, modern, Western)/ peripheral (conservative, religious) binary by critically examining how a cultural “other” is constructed and performed through the media in Turkey. Nas’ analysis offers a (much needed) new lens and approach to understanding Turkey’s complex social and political landscape.” —Kathleen Cavanaugh, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland This book is an important contribution to the scholarship on Turkey’s cultural and political dynamics, facilitating a discussion on the recent depictions of the cultural other in the media. Turkey’s modern history has been characterized by a particular tension between the social classes occupying the “center” of society: while the bureaucratic elite are represented as modern, secular and westernized, the “peripheral” communities are portrayed as conservative, religious or non-Turkish. This book facilitates a timely intervention to problematize this possible perception and to point at the complex dynamics of center-periphery relations through the representation of the cultural other in film, television, advertisements and cartoons, which have all been produced by different social classes. Ultimately, Media Representations of the Cultural Other in Turkey argues that the notions of the center and periphery do not signify stable positions; rather, each social agent imagines themselves at the center, the cultural other at their periphery providing a crucial tool for the realization of their own identity.

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

This volume covers approaches concerning the relationship between innovation in cinema and the politics of filmmaking in new cinema practices in Turkey. The contributors focus on historiography, genres, mainstream and art cinema production, and transnational cinema, as well as changing narratives and identities. The new cinema movement in Turkey is here analysed from perspectives of new technologies, new production and distribution structures, the impact of film training, the televisual industry, new actors in commercial and art cinema, as well as the impact of the film festival circuit. Additionally, recurring themes of memory, trauma, and identity are dealt with from multidisciplinary angles. The volume covers in depth analyses of the internationally renowned filmmakers Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Fatih Akın, Semih Kaplanoğlu, Reha Erdem, Zeki Demirkubuz, Yeşim Ustaoğlu and Derviş Zaim. A timely study on the centenary of Turkish cinema in 2014, students of Middle Eastern Studies, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Urban Studies, Gender Studies, and Identity Studies will find this volume extremely relevant to their work.

How does the media influence our everyday lives? In which ways do our social worlds change when they interact with media? And what are the consequences for theorizing media and communication? Starting with questions like these, Mediatized Worlds discusses the transformation of our lives by their increasing mediatization. The chapters cover topics such as rethinking mediatization, mediatized communities, the mediatization of private lives and of organizational contexts, and the future perspective for mediatization research. The empirical studies offer new access to questions of mediatization an access that grounds mediatization in life-world and social-world perspectives.

Combining multidisciplinary perspectives and new research, this volume goes beyond broad discussions of the impacts of climate change and reflects on the current and historical mediations and narratives that are part of creating this new social and scientific reality.

The Internet has been transformed in the past years from a system primarily oriented on information provision into a medium for communication and community-building. The notion of “Web 2.0”, social software, and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have emerged in this context. With such platforms comes the massive provision and storage of personal data that are systematically evaluated, marketed, and used for targeting users with advertising. In a world of global economic competition, economic crisis, and fear of terrorism after 9/11, both corporations and state institutions have a growing interest in accessing this personal data. Here, contributors explore this changing landscape by addressing topics such as commercial data collection by advertising, consumer sites and interactive media; self-disclosure in the social web; surveillance of file-sharers; privacy in the age of the internet; civil watch-surveillance on social networking sites; and networked interactive surveillance in transnational space. This book is a result of a research action launched by the intergovernmental network COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).