Project description
Media evolution in Turkey
The media in Turkey has significantly evolved since the advent of the radio in the 1920s. The radio was met with hostility by those who considered it a Western imperialist technology. No longer the case today, new digital media are largely welcomed by Turkey’s citizens. However, this transformation has received limited attention from media scientists. The EU-funded HNMT project will explore, for the first time, the changing relationship of technology to global, class and gender inequalities from the time of Turkey’s foundation to the current period. The project will analyse Turkey’s development from a nationalist and developmentalist economy to today’s neoliberal economic system by researching radio in the 1920s, television in the 1950s and mobile tools in the new millennium.
Objective
When radio was first introduced in Turkey in the 1920s, people considered this new medium an alien technology that promoted Western imperialism. In the 2000s, however, the Western origins of digital technologies—as the new media of the present—went unnoticed and they were mostly welcomed as new venues for expressing upward mobility, class distinction, and alternative political opinions. These shifting public responses to new media forms in countries such as Turkey—that are never fully “Western”—have received little attention from media scholars, who mostly trace similar histories in Western contexts. Filling this lacuna in interdisciplinary media studies, this project examines the changing relationship of technology to global, class, and gender inequalities since Turkey’s foundation as a nation-state in the 1920s to the current era. By specifically analyzing the country’s course from a nationalist and developmentalist economy to neoliberalization, the project addresses two particular questions: 1) As new political economic conditions transform gender, class based, and global inequalities, how do these newly reframed hierarchies make visible a medium’s novelty? 2) How does this perceived novelty inform the ways that lower and middle classes, different gender groups, and state officials use new technologies to challenge or reproduce inequalities? The study combines participant observation with archival research and comparatively examines the citizens’ and the state officials’ reactions to new media forms in three periods: radio in the 1920s, television in the 1950s, and mobile devices in the 2000s. As the first comprehensive study on the history of new media forms in a nation-state such as Turkey—that is at the intersection of Europe and the Middle East—my work highlights how technological novelty is constructed in relation to global and national hierarchies. It also shows that not only inventors but also users play a key role in creating technological newness.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- social sciencessociologysocial issuessocial inequalitiesgender inequality
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- humanitiesother humanitieslibrary sciences
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Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) H2020-WF-2018-2020
See other projects for this callSub call
H2020-WF-02-2019
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
34450 Istanbul
Türkiye