Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Discorses and Paracti ces of othering, Banu Baybars,Sarpham Uzunoğlu,Mi,Mine Bertan Yıldız, Editör, The British Library, Newcastle Upon Tyne, ss.37-54, 2023
Abstract
In the post-truth era, the global online informational domain as of 2019 is mainly characterized as a
chaotic one in which most of the content is created by the users of digital, online social platforms
that had emerged in the Web 2.0 era but the exhibition of the content is mainly regulated and
controlled by the algorithms the those digital platforms have developed. In other words, the old
gatekeepers of the public informational sphere, namely the media elites are not that strong any more
but have left their places to the new gatekeepers which are the owners of the massive digital, online
platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Twitter has a unique place in this scene due to being the most popular platform used by journalists
who used to be the major gatekeepers in the sense that they are the ones who collect, categorize,
prioritize and publish the news.
Another characteristics mostly associated with the contemporary informational sphere is the
existence of echo-chambers which are defined as the informational structures in which one user
does not interact with other users from different views but mostly wit the ones that are closer to
their political views.
In this paper, we aim to investigate the case of Turkish journalists in terms of how they use Twitter
specifically focusing on their interactions with ‘others’ who are in different, or even opposite
political views from them. The study relies on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 12
prominent journalists from Turkey. Since journalists still have a strong agenda setting power and
since they are generally highly active Twitter users, we believe that our study has the potential to
provide valuable insights on the matter.