Madianou and Miller’s theory of polymedia12 was intended to ‘describe, but also to understand, the emerging environment of proliferating communication opportunities and its consequences for interpersonal communication’. Instead of treating each platform individually, each is defined in relation to all the others. This perspective emphasises a movement towards moral, social and emotional concerns reflected in the choice between these platforms, rather than the more technical and economic reasons previously given for these choices. Three precondi-tions are necessary to apply this theory: availability, affordability and media literacy. In Mardin these conditions were not met all the time, as teenagers and young adults have media literacy, but not always afford-ability and access to the media. The choice of one medium instead of another, for example WhatsApp instead of SMS, was often led by the need to save money; and limitations to access were frequent, due to social restrictions more than to lack of infrastructure. Women are from time to
time excluded from social media use and they end up preferring those media that can keep the communications secret and private. On the other hand middle-aged people, who have more economic opportunities, were often illiterate in digital terms if not literally so.
However, the theory of polymedia can be really useful in Mardin to understand how different mediated spaces are integrated with each other. The ethnographical research shows how different social settings online are defined by reference to the people who inhabit them, more than by the platform’s affordances or an individual’s emotional concerns.
It is not important which social media is used in generating a specific genre of usage, but rather what social circle is associated with that genre of usage.13 In other words, the appropriate units of analysis to take into account are the different social groups people create on the same plat-form or on different platplat-forms, rather than the different social media platforms in themselves.
In Mardin, teenagers and young adults actively create different online social environments and behave differently according to the people who inhabit them. When it helps them to retain these defined social groups and genres of use, they switch easily from one platform to another, or between different spaces of the same platform. For example, people share the same kinds of photographic materials (funny and con-fidential pictures) and have the same kinds of talk within small groups of school friends on Facebook and on WhatsApp. But these may con-trast with what they share on the ‘public’ wall of both Facebook and Instagram, which consists of images whose contents are quite similar to each other. Married couples share their intimate photos in the private spaces of Facebook or WhatsApp equally. So it is not the different plat-forms that matter; it is the particular types of usage and the groups asso-ciated with them. People actively change Facebook privacy settings to create different social groups, such as general public, large family, small family, general friends, school friends, flirting. In Mardin, social media has not produced social convergence of the type described in European and North America contexts.14 Instead, they retain discrete and disparate social groups on social media which are kept carefully separated from each other through the tight control of privacy settings and maintenance of different accounts.
Halil works as an English teacher in a private school. Like many other young Kurdish men, he was raised in a large family with many siblings. His family moved to the new city of Mardin from a village to escape the war between the PKK and the Turkish State 20 years ago, when Halil was a child. His parents have always been tied to their tribe,
whose members inhabited a few villages in the area between Mardin and Diyarbakır. As Halil grew up in Mardin and has lived in different Turkish cities, he has distant relationships with the members of his extended family. He claimed to be able to name around 300 relatives, distributed between his home village, Mardin and other towns in Turkey, while his tribe includes a few thousand people, most of whom he has never met.
Halil has one Facebook account with around 600 friends, of which 200 are relatives (cousins, aunts, uncles, father’s and mother’s cousins and second cousins). He has divided his Facebook friends into four different groups: the generic public includes all his 600 friends; the close family group has 11 members, brothers and sisters and a couple of nephews (whereas mother and father, uncles and aunts belong to the generation of non-internet users); the large family group includes around 100 rela-tives living in Mardin, in his village and other towns in Turkey; the fourth group is used with colleagues and students to share materials, organise activities and arrange appointments. On the public Facebook he shares songs, news, pictures and generic information that may be of interest to everybody, such as the news on the invasion of Sinjar and the massacre of the Yezidi population by ISIS, which happened a few days before Halil and I met for the interview, or news and comments about the presidential elections of a few months before. In the close family group he communi-cates practical and ordinary needs, such as ‘Don’t call me on the phone at this time because I am working!’ or ‘I am travelling to Urfa, do you need anything from there?’ In his large family group they discuss trivial matters such as the night before when he could not sleep and asked who was awake and available for a chat. Alternatively they support each other when they need something, such as when Halil went to Diyarbakır for a medical exam and was in need of a bed for a night; or they share job vacancies when they see an interesting one; they also invite each other on trips together on bank holidays. In this more private group he also shares news strictly related to Kurdish issues that can’t be posted on the public wall because it might not be appreciated by Arab and Turkish friends with different political views.
Facebook, the most used social media, is ruled by different norms according to the different social circles it is used by. Creating differ-ent groups inside the same Facebook profile is a common practice: for example, it is possible to have a public profile seen by a large group of friends and relatives, with three different closed groups with school friends, friends from work and relatives, and one private space shared with one’s girlfriend. As we have seen, for the same reason it’s common to have several Facebook profiles: one for the family, a second to flirt with
girls or boys, a third to speak with friends, and a fourth for politics. So in Mardin there is not one Facebook but many different Facebooks. What I call ‘public’ Facebook profiles are the most commonly used. They are shown to a wide group of family members and friends, and are usually used to increase personal visibility and honour, and to generate approval and recognition by others. More private uses of Facebook may have the opposite purpose, that is of reducing visibility and secretly taking advan-tage of the opportunities opened up by this new ‘revolutionary’ architec-ture that can put you in touch with a large number of people all around the world. The public Facebook wall is the site of what could be termed the ‘normative individual’. No matter what gender, age or social class an individual belongs to, he or she is mainly concerned to show off his or her best qualities and to receive the highest number of likes. Here peo-ple reproduce traditional social norms, based on male honour, female modesty and gender segregation, that are even stricter than those in the offline world. If urbanisation has widened spaces with a certain level of anonymity that allows more flexible behaviours, on the public Facebook wall people are constantly under the gaze of others. The public Facebook reproduces the same social context previously only found at weddings, which for centuries have been the only social events where a few hun-dred relatives and friends, women and men, gathered together in the same space under the gaze of these others. On the public Facebook wall, as at weddings, people aim to perform their best public self by sharing their best images and carefully controlling the comments of their rela-tives and friends. At wedding ceremonies, participants enjoy looking at other people’s behaviour and clothes and discreetly commenting about them. Similarly, people spend hours looking at other people’s Facebook profiles and gossiping about them. On the ‘public’ Facebook people per-form the most conventional and per-formal self, much as they imagine this should be at wedding ceremonies.
All of this is in stark contrast to the use of WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber, SMS and private uses of Facebook as described above. It is hard to exaggerate the degree to which social media has at this very same time become integral to the construction and experience of love and intimate relationships. Teenagers and young people send their lovers up to 600 private messages a day and spend up to 10 hours a day on different social media platforms to communicate with ‘prohibited’ partners and lovers.
Young couples in secret relationships usually use all the media at their disposal to communicate with secret partners without being seen by oth-ers, thus challenging the social rules that cannot be publicly broken and subverted.
Ayşe and İzzettin are a young couple in their early 20s. She works as a shop assistant 12 hours a day in a supermarket, and he is officially enrolled at the local university, but spends most of his time helping a friend in a grocery shop. Nobody in the family knows about their relation-ship. As they both have a new Samsung phone and the money to top up their internet credit, they spend hours sending messages and pictures to each other on WhatsApp. They each send the other around 400 messages a day, including pictures of themselves and what they are doing during the day. When she is at work, WhatsApp is the best platform because it doesn’t take up too much time. WhatsApp is also the best application for the nights when she is at home and she wants to communicate with him far from the gaze of their parents. When she has breaks at work and she is at home alone, they speak on the phone for up to one or two hours a day.
When they have used up their internet and phone credit, they send each other SMS messages. They never communicate on Facebook because it might publicly disclose something about their relationship. They rarely see each other face to face, around once or twice a month for a very short time when they can go to sit in a hidden corner of a park or meet at one of their houses when nobody else is there.