New Media and Politics of Communicative Citizenship

Abstract

In this chapter, the aim is to consider the impact of technological and economic convergence in the media system in 2010s. The Internet emerged as a new area of limitation and censorship, which intensified during the 2007–2011 period that corresponded to Justice and Development Party’s second term in power (Yes?il et al., 2017). Since 2011, there have already been major civil protests such as ‘Do Not Touch my Internet’ taking place in various parts of Turkey, and internet users had already begun to rely on online alternative media for news provision. During the Gezi protests, social media held a crucial role in news-making and news-gathering, as ‘regular’ citizens turned into citizen journalists (İnceoğlu and Çoban, 2014). In this chapter, the focus is on the emergence of citizen journalism networks, new content producers that blur the line between news and video-activism/documentary forms. The chapter mainly draws on data that were gathered through two different independent research projects conducted by the author between 2014 and 2015 in Istanbul. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.