Whereas the range of photographic images posted on Facebook is quite limited due to the social constraints ruling the public appearance of individuals and groups, people post many memes, video clips and news items. Photographic images on the public Facebook mainly have the goal of presenting affluent and moral selves, while memes are mostly oriented to publicly performing an educated, literate, civilised person. Being knowledgeable and committed to the main principles of Muslim morality is a very important value in Mardin: for example ‘Cahil’ (uneducated) or
‘serefsiz’ (dishonourable) are among the most common derogative terms used to criticise those who don’t confirm to these ideals.
The public display of memes citing famous writers, poets and philo sophers constitutes the best way to perform a commitment to val-ues of high virtue, scholarship and wisdom, and to show engagement in intellectual activities. Sharing authorised discourses of writers, political parties, Greek philosophers or Iranian poets gives the oppor-tunity to perform an erudite self in a highly normative way, not run-ning the risk of being criticised by others. There was no evidence that this expression of enlightenment and knowledge contributes to the shaping of individuals who think autonomously or contrary to estab-lished authorities, as claimed by some scholars of digital media in the Muslim Middle East.7
We can differentiate different kinds of memes posted on the pub-lic Facebook. The first group includes poems and writings by ancient Muslim poets or the contemporary mystic guru Osho. They address top-ics of ethtop-ics, morality and philosophy.
Fig. 3.14b Philosophical meme. Translation: ‘Don’t do politics with whom you love. Politics damages friendships. Politicians go their own way; you will be left without friends.’ Aristotle
Fig. 3.14a Philosophical meme. Translation: ‘He who knows what he is won’t be affected by what is said of him by those who don’t know themselves.’ Ibni Sina (a Persian Islamic philosopher who lived between the tenth and eleventh centuries)
Fig. 3.15a Translation: ‘If love is so beautiful, who knows how beautiful the creator (of this love) is…’ Sems-I Tebrizi (a Persian Muslim poet and philosopher, an important figure of Sufism who lived between Fig. 3.14c Translation: ‘Only tenderness can heal because all the illnesses inside human beings originate from the lack of love.’ Osho
A second category includes religious memes: some memes celebrate religious festivals such as Bayram and Friday prayer day. Alternatively, people share verses from the Koran or prayers. Writing ‘Hayırlı cumalar’
(Happy Friday) on Facebook, SMS and WhatsApp was also a common practice among Mardinites.
Fig. 3.15c Translation: Happy Bayram/May your festival of sacrifice be holy,/ holy God permit,/we shall see many more festivals. Happy Bayram.’
Fig. 3.15b Translation: ‘Thanks, God. We are the servants of every word with a scent of rose in it. Happy night and happy Friday.’ Yorgun 34
Fig. 3.15d Translation: ‘Mum is fasting, so I have to deal with all the housework ☺’
Fig. 3.15e Translation: ‘And after I said; glory to God for having created me as a Muslim.’
A third kind of meme expresses commitment to morality and gen-eral values of loyalty towards family members, husbands or wives and correct behaviours with others.
Fig. 3.15f Verses from the Koran. Translation: ‘Do not exult. Indeed Allah does not like the exultant. But seek through that which Allah has given you, the home of the Hereafter; and (yet), do not forget your share of the world. And do good as Allah had done good to you. And desire not corruption in the land. Indeed, Allah does not like corrupters.’
(Translation taken from: http://quran.com/28/76-77)
Fig. 3.16a Translation: ‘Elder sister!/Elder sister means life./
Sometimes you can say sister in the breath you take,/sometimes when you are sad you can find her there.../when you’re out of breath she gives you breath,/when you’re out of courage, she gives you courage…/elder
Fig. 3.16b Translation: ‘Do what you want to do/Live how you want to live. But to laugh don’t make anybody cry./ And don’t sell anyone to take advantage of them.’
Fig. 3.16c Translation: ‘I don’t share my thoughts so as to convince anyone that I am right./I share my thoughts so that people who think alike know they are not alone.’
A fourth category includes memes about love, romance and rela-tions between women and men.
Fig. 3.17a Translation: ‘To love is so wonderful, when you are the one who is loved.’
Fig. 3.17b Translation: ‘Women don’t like good men.’ Nejat Isler (a Turkish cinema and theatre actor)
Fig. 3.17c Translation: ‘Don’t be among those who live with those they don’t love and who die with those they cannot forget.’
Fig. 3.17d Translation: ‘Come to my city my love/Come tomorrow/
Leave everything. Say: “there is someone waiting on me” and come/
Come, so that your steps will give meaning to this city./Come, so that this city will stop being my hate/Come, so that I can breathe/Come…’
A fifth common kind of meme includes cartoons.
Fig. 3.17e Translation: ‘If you don’t know my worth when I am by you; then the day you will know my worth, you won’t find me by you.’
Necip Fasil (Turkish poet and novelist)
Fig. 3.18 Cartoon meme. Translation: ‘I said to the banker: I refer you to God, He asked me for a referral fee! I had to run away, Humanity has died for sure.’
Finally, there are memes about politics whose content is split between supporters of the government and supporters of the Kurdish movement. These memes reflected the political events happened over the 15 months of my field work: the Gezi Park protests, the local election in March 2014, the Israeli war against Gaza, autonomy of Rojava (Siryan Kurdistan), the rise of Islamic State (ISIS) and consequent crisis in Iraq and Syria. People also posted quite a lot of political posters and memes on the occasion of ordinary anniversaries, such as the foundation of the Republic or the Kurdish new year’s eve. As result of surveillance, images supporting the State, the government and the Turkish nationalist project were definitely more frequent than images supporting the Kurdish cause.
But this point will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 6.
(a)
(b)
Fig. 3.19 Political memes
Conclusion
This chapter has presented the visual material posted on the public-facing Facebook walls, and argued that people in Mardin manage to find ways to retain a highly conservative online appearance that is not so much a reflection of offline behaviour but an exaggerated version of it, while at the same time finding opportunities to display and show off their claims to wealth and status. It was suggested that the best way to understand this simultaneity is by analogy with the traditional wedding, which is also a kind of hyper-visible space where people look very different from their ordinary appearance and where they are not only more careful about how they appear in public, but also see it as an opportunity to display their aspirations and claims to status.
The premise for both of these developments is that the charac-terisation of online as a space of surveillance provides opportunities as well as constraints.8 People carefully construct and display their desired qualities because they know that this self-presentation will be observed and monitored by others. This was particularly evident in the case of those women who spent hours looking at images on the Facebook pro-files of cousins, aunts and uncles living far away to discover more about their lives. People in Mardin have always placed great importance on public events and public appearances, and for this reason they have always dedicated a lot of effort to crafting a public image of individual and collective self at ceremonies or in the ordinary moments of their daily lives.
‛The online public space’ is not a mere representation of something already existing in the offline world; it rather constitutes a new form of current visual presence, a kind of additional reality to the offline world.
As noted in this chapter, the hyper-conservatism of public appearance online is not a reflection of the offline world. In fact, it is so extreme in its avoidance of anything that might lead to a loss of reputation that it has eliminated the primary social differences that exist in this society, for example between people from rural and urban backgrounds. The point of the analogy with the wedding is also to demonstrate that general off-line public sociality in Mardin was used to produce visual realities well before the arrival of social media. Here it matters less what people really do, but more what people are seen to be doing. In this context, social media has multiplied the opportunities for producing new realities, but at the same time it has intensified people’s vulnerability – something that has in turn given rise to many concerns over morality, including the morality of using these new online spaces.
So although, in common with other areas of the world, young adults show images from their daily life on social media that never had such public visibility before, they do so in a very different way from many
‘Western’ societies. The results of my research reveal stark differences from the results of studies based in Europe and North America, where social media users publicly display connections, intimate social rela-tions and friendships.9 In Mardin, this kind of public display shows no sign of developing as an important component of social media for two reasons: people reproduce online the traditional boundaries that have always delimited the domestic private and intimate sphere offline, and they also fear that this newly produced visibility may reveal what has to be kept hidden.