Confession, revelation and storytelling: patterns of use on a popular Turkish website

Date

2006-10-01

Author

ogan, christine
Çağıltay, Kürşat

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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This article reports a survey of 4531 users of Itiraf.com ('Confession.com'), a confessional website based in Istanbul, Turkey, where people make personal confessions, tell stories and establish online and offline relationships with other users. Adopting a uses and gratifications approach to the web-based survey, to determine why the contributors to this website return so regularly and what uses they make of the site, the study adds to the limited information available on Turkish internet users. The major finding of the study is that diversion drives most reading on the site, but social interaction provides the largest gratification to those who participate through writing confessions, commenting on others' confessions and meeting people offline. Some differences in use patterns were found among Turkish respondents who lived in other countries. A rapidly changing social environment in the country provides a partial explanation of website activity.

Subject Keywords

Sociology and Political Science, Communication

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/43281

Journal

NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444806067589

Collections

Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology, Article

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Citation Formats

c. ogan and K. Çağıltay, “Confession, revelation and storytelling: patterns of use on a popular Turkish website,” NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY, pp. 801–823, 2006, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/43281.