[Air-L] New open access book: Social Media in Southeast Turkey

[Major, Alison]

***************Apologies for any cross-posting***************



UCL Press is delighted to announce the publication of an open access book that may be of interest to members of this list: Social Media in Southeast Turkey.



Download Free: http://bit.ly/1OLJclY



This title available in both free open access http://bit.ly/1OLJclY and print editions (paperback, £15.00, http://bit.ly/1OLJclY | hardback, £35.00 http://bit.ly/1OLJclY).



This book presents an ethnographic study of social media in Mardin, a medium-sized town located in the Kurdish region of Turkey. The town is inhabited mainly by Sunni Muslim Arabs and Kurds, and has been transformed in recent years by urbanisation, neoliberalism and political events.



Elisabetta Costa uses her 15 months of ethnographic research to explain why public-facing social media is more conservative than offline life. Yet, at the same time, social media has opened up unprecedented possibilities for private communications between genders and in relationships among young people - Costa reveals new worlds of intimacy, love and romance. She also discovers that, when viewed from the perspective of people's everyday lives, political participation on social media looks very different to how it is portrayed in studies of political postings separated from their original complex, and highly socialised, context.





Download a free open access copy: http://bit.ly/1OLJclY



About the Why We Post



Why do we post on social media? Is it true that we are replacing face-to-face relationships with on-screen life? Are we becoming more narcissistic with the rise of selfies? Does social media create or suppress political action, destroy privacy or become the only way to sell something? And are these claims equally true for a factory worker in China and an IT professional in India?



With these questions in mind, nine anthropologists each spent 15 months living in communities in China, Brazil, Turkey, Chile, India, England, Italy and Trinidad. They studied not only platforms but the content of social media to understand both why we post and the consequences of social media on our lives. Their findings indicate that social media is more than communication - it is also a place where we now live.



This series explores and compares the results in a collection of ground-breaking and accessible ethnographic studies. To find out more, visit http://www.ucl.ac.uk/why-we-post