Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

A citizenless democracy seems to be the preferred regime of the global powers. Accordingly, many countries, including Turkey, are regressing into authoritarianism, where citizens are always kept under ubiquitous mass surveillance by state-corporate programs and monitored by their fellow-citizens in an interconnected society. However, this anti-democratic movement has also created its antidote. In fact, alternative media struggles proactively against the surveillance approach and security paradigm of governments more than just by producing news. Communication practices such as citizen journalism, video activism, muckraking, leak journalism, culture jamming, and hacking become tools for struggles. For example, in terms of news producing, there are new active and aggressive techniques that exceed the limits drawn by traditional codes of journalism. Making the targeted institutions transparent, turning their inside out, ridiculing and rendering them dysfunctional are just a few of these techniques. Therefore, we believe that studies defined as counter- or sous-veillence should include alternative media theories and practices. Nowadays, the digital activist citizens who constitute the contemporary networked social movements are beginning to stand up against the power elite. In addition, activist citizen journalists are at the -communicative/informational vanguard of this struggle. We argue that, in order to be valuable and productive, these activist journalists need to be protected from the eyes of the repressive rulers. Therefore using ethnographic data collected from interviews with activists, this study focuses both on the oppositional imaginaries regarding the surveillance culture and on the the counter-surveillance tactics, offensive and defensive, within the alternative new mediascape of Turkey.