Technology and National Identity in Turkey: Mobile Communications and the Evolution of a Post-Ottoman Nation

BURCE CELIK, Technology and National Identity in Turkey: Mobile Communications and the Evolution of a Post-Ottoman Nation (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011), Pp. 209, £ 56.50 clothTechnology and National Identity in Turkey: Mobile Communications and the Evolution of a Post-Ottoman Nation, written by Burce Celik, is a study of the use of mobile phones in Turkey and the impact of mobile technologies on national identity. In Turkey, conceptualizations of national self have been impacted by the country's Ottoman past as well as its quest for modernity since the founding of the Republic in 1923. The book informs us that cellular phone technology was introduced to the Turkish public in 1994 and since then has been a growing sector. As the book gives us the numbers, in 2010, there were 67 million users and 100 million phones (p. 1). At the outset, the sector was run as a monopoly, but since the entrance of other carriers has been made possible by a relaxing of regulations, there now are three major firms supplying GSM networks. To explain why and how the cellular telephone has become so well received in Turkey, the author questions how cellular telephony is imagined and what has underpinned its popularity. In other words, she investigates the social, political, economic, historical and cultural conditions within which cellular telephony has become an object of collective attachment or addiction and has emerged as a social practice.Celik's research is based mainly on empirical studies carried out through interviews with sample groups of cell-phone users and also with the individuals who are involved in the production of GSM network ads, scriptwriting, and commercial directing. The author also employs print-media research analysis on advertisements for GSM networks in newspapers (the dailies Hurriyet, Milliyet and Zaman) and in magazines and journals printed between 1997 and 2007 and includes visual media through analyses of GSM networks' television advertisements from 2000 onwards. Finally, she examines popular internet websites to see how cellular telephony is imagined and experienced in Turkey, especially among the youth. As indicated by the methodology, this study takes a broad look at primary and secondary sources which provide insights into the use of cellular phones through field research. Although the sampling of cell-phone users covers a wide range of demographic characteristics reflecting Turkey's diversity in terms of ethnicity, political orientation, class differences, age, gender and occupation (p.13), the findings are not fully discussed in accordance with the diversity of materials collected. Additionally, it seems that the author's analysis is based on a theoretical literature that was produced in the developed world but here is directly applied to data that was collected in Turkey, which represents a different social setting.After a brief introduction to the research in chapter 1, the second chapter presents the theoretical framework that underpins the study. The author draws mainly from Freud and Butler, and by applying their conceptualizations of nostalgia and melancholia to the Turkish case, she discusses the modernization process as it was experienced from the late Ottoman period through the transition to the Republic of Turkey. According to the author, the loss and dissolution that marked the final years of the Empire carried over into the years of the Republic and found expression in the imaginations of founding elites as 'nostalgia' for a cosmopolitan and imperial past and 'melancholia' for the losses accrued. …