Multimodal online dissident culture in Instagram: A critique of the Turkish economy

Ever-present mass surveillance has blocked the flourishing of a traditional dissident culture in Turkey. Focusing on popular ‘just for fun’ Instagram accounts during the lira's freefall that began in the autumn of 2021, this study seeks to identify the creative strategies for digital social res...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational journal of cultural studies Vol. 27; no. 3; pp. 323 - 348
Main Authors Arda, Balca, Baş, Özen
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.05.2024
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects
Confidentiality
Content analysis
Culture
Dissent
Economic crisis
Economic policy
Group formation
Policy making
Popular culture
Resistance
Surveillance
online dissidence
authoritarianism
Turkey
digital culture
dissident culture
fun culture
countersurveillance
Instagram
multimodality
social media
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Summary:Ever-present mass surveillance has blocked the flourishing of a traditional dissident culture in Turkey. Focusing on popular ‘just for fun’ Instagram accounts during the lira's freefall that began in the autumn of 2021, this study seeks to identify the creative strategies for digital social resistance embedded in multimodal content sharing of posts, which are composed of visuals, text, and sound. For this, we employed a multimodal-type analysis of Instagram posts regarding Turkey's economic crisis, followed by an interpretative content analysis aiming to (1) identify, categorize, and compile a typology of the main countersurveillance strategies inherent in multimodal posts, such as memes, edited videos, and animations, Photoshop-crafted still images, and (2) explore the contextual traits of the connected dissident culture. We discuss how these multimodal-type posts support connected dissident group formation while maintaining confidentiality while criticizing governmental conduct of economic policy making in Turkey.
ISSN:1367-8779
1460-356X
DOI:10.1177/13678779231213991