IMPACT OF DIGITAL NETWORKING ON TAKSIM SOLIDARITY IN THE POST-MOBILIZATION PERIOD

Date

2024-10-30

Author

Türe, Mustafa Can

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Communication technologies have played a vital role in the organization of social movements, activism and advocacy throughout history. This project aims to understand the role played by digital communication in transforming political mobilizations into long term social movements. It explores whether use of digital communication technologies helps ephemeral dissident organizations consolidate into established and stabilized pressure groups. It investigates the impact of digital network communication on the Taksim Solidarity movement, an umbrella organization consisting of 120 NGOs and political groups in the post-mobilization stage. To this end, we take a mixed-method approach combining digital network and textual content analyses, a comprehensive survey and expert interviews. Our findings show that the contribution of the Internet and social networking is extremely little to the organization of the coalition. Contrary to the techno-utopian enthusiasm, it has organizationally grown apart as the promises of the internet are not utilized by its constituents following the Gezi Park protests. In the explanatory chapter, the analysis of the expert interviews reveal that several factors are conditional to digital and organizational cohesion of the coalition. Rising authoritarianism, governmental and judicial pressures on free speech, restrictive political culture, deficiency of transparency in deliberative decision-making and the financial, organizational and workforce vulnerabilities of civil society organizations stand out as the main rationale behind the non-fulfilment of the potentials of social networking.

Subject Keywords

Social movements, Internet, Social Media, Digital Networks, Taksim Solidarity

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/112254

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis