Fourth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Social media, with its network-based structure, enables its users to engender authentic, autonomous, and affective narratives of their lived experiences. It helps produce narrative forms that can spread and has the potential to be contagious. All these narratives are inherently affective. The power of the affective discourse cannot be denied in the news narratives of social media. For example, the affective activist citizens that have fastly grown throughout the occupy movements had the chance to improve the alternative journalistic styles by using the affective narrative network of social media. In times of occupy movements, the affective news narratives created by affective activist journalists have succeed the traditional news. In this respect we may describe social media as an affective network of storytelling and activist citizen journalists as mediators or transmitters of affective narration. Agents and assemblages of affective activist citizen media resist against the media machine of the system, affective activist citizens alternatively create their own media. In this study, we examine the activist citizen journalism practices in Turkey based on contemporary social movements and alternative media theories. We are aiming to also include the analysis layer offered by new theoretical and methodological discussions deemed as “affective turn”. While trying to establish this, we evaluate the data gathered through the content created by citizen journalists and autonomous media collectives from 2013 Occupy Gezi to present as well as from the in-depth interviews with them.