Content area
Full text
Akdenizli, Banu (Ed.). Digital Transformations in Turkey: Current Perspectives in Communication Studies. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015, Pp. xix, 327. ISBN 978-0-7391-9118-7 (cloth) $105.00; 978-0-7391-9119-4 (eBook) $99.50.
As Turkey prepares to complete a digital transformation roadmap in line with the 2018-2020 Medium Term Program (MTP), the content of the book Digital Transformations in Turkey: Current Perspectives in Communication Studies is very timely. "The overarching goal of this book is to provide a multifaceted description and analysis of the role of ICTs in Turkey as well as provide an analysis and critique of the role and impact of new social networking channels and technologies (such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) in various communication contexts" (p. xvi). The edited book is divided into three parts.
Part One, "Culture, Society, and the Individual" has five chapters in which researchers employ a variety of research methods including survey research, ethnography, in-depth interviews, and textual analysis. The first chapter, "A Multidimensional Privacy Orientation Scale: Development and Validation with Turkish Twitter Users," by Lemi Baruh, Haluk Mert Bal, and Zeynep Cemalcılar, presents online survey research "conducted on Twitter users from a university in Turkey, that investigates the relationship between attitudes abut privacy and Twitter usage types" (p. 4). "[W]e will introduce and provide data regarding the validity of the Turkish version of a recently developed multi-item privacy orientations scale" (p. 5). Chapter 2, "New Media, Everyday Life, and the Poor: An Ethnographic Inquiry," by Hakan Ergül, Emre Gökalp, and İncilay Cangöz, offers an ethnographic study to answer the overall question of what new media means for the urban poor (p. 21). For Chapter 3, "Online Games and the Spirit of Capitalism: An Analysis of Youngsters and Clash of Clans," Billur Ülger used indepth interviews with 10 young people who frequently engaged in playing an online game (p. 56) to investigate three hypotheses. "The current study explored young people's narratives about their perceptions on the MMOG Clash of Clans in order to uncover its role to the internalization of the Marxian capitalist notions" (p. 60)....