Can Social Networks Create Public Sphere? Gezi Park Protests and Intersections with the Media

Year 2017, Volume: 6 Issue: 2, 477 - 490, 20.12.2017

Fikret Güven , Erdem Aybay

Abstract

Social network provides
a good opportunity for coordination and exchange of opinions. However, those
exchanges through social media can be misleading because it could be used to
manipulate people, distorts facts, and give wrong impression about the real public
opinion. The case of the May 2013 protests for the redevelopment of Taksim Gezi
Park serves a good example of distorted public opinion. Those protests started
as a peaceful movement, however later turned into protests for which the
intention and meaning became unclear. Protests and strikes took place across
Turkey under the banners of freedom of speech, press, and the government's
authoritarian attitude towards public concerns. Social media was a galvanizing force in the
protests; it was the most popular means of exchange and dissemination of ideas
amongst those participants.

This
paper discusses Stuart Hall’ s essay “Encoding Decoding” to evaluate how
messages were produced and disseminated in the context of the Gezi Park
protests.  Jodi Dean’ s essay “The Net
and Multiple Realities” is used to analyze whether net represents accurate
public opinion and Nancy Fraser’s essay “Rethinking The Public Sphere” is used
to bring a better understanding of social media over representation of public
opinion.  The study will try to reveal
whether social media truly reflects public opinion by analyzing Gezi Protests. 

Keywords

Social Networks, Public Sphere, Gezi Protests, Facebook

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