Social Science Research Council

"Internet Cafes in the Neighborhood: Politics of Virtuality, Intimacy, and Publicness"

My ethnographic research explores the role of new communication and information technologies in generating new modes of subjectivities, zones of intimacies, and forms of publicness among the Alevi community in the Gazi District of Istanbul. More specifically, by investigating the role of the Internet-in-use and Internet cafes in the everyday life of this neighborhood, I will develop an understanding of the articulation of new media technologies with the social space across the challenged and negotiated boundaries of public and private spheres. In this ethnographic research, I will trace the social life of the Internet across texts (commercial representations and state regulations), events (online intimacies and repercussions in public life), and practices (movement across and sociability in virtual and urban spaces). This study will provide a close analysis of Alevi practices and beliefs on information technologies, the state intervention and surveillance of social and virtual spaces, as well as commercial and official discourses surrounding the Internet and internet cafes. This study focuses on the role of new media as a link between politics of publicness and forms of subjectivity among Alevis with the goal of answering the following questions: How do online world and its offline surroundings articulate in the daily life of Gazi neighborhood? How do new forms of intimacies and publicness articulate with the political imaginaries of Alevis? In what ways, do this new media and its offline settings moderate terms of negotiation and challenges between the Alevi community and the state power? What are the concrete ways in which the Internet technology and cybercafe reconfigure the gendered space of the neighborhood and the city? What kind new registers of privacy and publicness do these new spaces of conviviality and communication technology provide?