Establishing a Digital Belonging: A Study on the Turkish Diaspora’s Use of Facebook

What is it about?

In this study, the sense of belonging that Turkish-Germans try to establish through the use of Facebook was examined. Since Turkish-Germans could not physically feel a belonging to their home country, social media made them feel a "digital belonging". In this study, after the interviews with Turkish-Germans, how they set up their digital belongings, what they shared on Facebook to establish this belonging or what they followed were examined.Interviews were analyzed with discourse analysis and various findings were obtained regarding the establishment of digital belonging by Turkish-Germans.

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This study is important in the following respect. There is a lack of physical belonging that results from hyphenated identities being away from their home country. Social media can step in at this point and enable these hyphenated identities to establish digital belongings. There is not much work done in the field of digital belonging, so this study is important in terms of seeing how social media affects belonging.