Research Project: The History of New Media in Turkey: Radio, Television, and Mobile Devices
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Contributors
Funders
ID
EC.00128
Authors
Ünal, Nazlı Özkan
Faculty Member
Publications
"Sensing" productivity at home: self-tracking technologies, gender, and labor in Turkey
(Oxford Univ Press Inc, 2023) Ünal, Nazlı Özkan; Department of Media and Visual Arts; Yes; College of Social Sciences and Humanities
This article explores how women in Turkey use sensing technologies to render visible their productivity at home in ways that contest home-workplace boundary under neoliberal, digital capitalism. It does so by focusing on a group of lower- and middle-class women, who work from home as both paid laborers and unpaid caregivers. Although neoliberalism makes it harder to distinguish home and workplace, my digital ethnography highlights that women working from home feel a home-workplace separation that renders invisible their productivity. By translating embodied knowledge into quantified data, smartwatches provide women with new information that I call revelations. Women share these revelations on digital platforms to render visible their productivity at home in ways that transgress the home-workplace boundary. By exploring these revelations as moments of "otherwise," this article highlights both when smartwatches reproduce neoliberal mentality and become tools for others in the public to register its exploitative consequences.
Wireless telephone, materiality, and making of the national auditory in Turkey
(Sage, 2023) Ünal, Nazlı Özkan; Department of Media and Visual Arts; Yes; College of Social Sciences and Humanities
This paper focuses on the radio’s novelty years in 1920s Turkey to examine how the functions of wireless technology as a material artifact are negotiated in ways that fashion a national auditory. Most studies on radio’s history prioritize sound, eliding people’s tinkering with the wireless as a technical object. Based on archival research and oral history interviews, I suggest that early radio as a material object required as much of its listeners’ attention as did the broadcast content. In young Turkey’s war-torn economy, the only affordable way to listen to radio was learning how to assemble a receiver. Few owners of manufactured radios also learnt how to fix frequent problems. To form a passive national auditory, the state monitored the cultivation of these technical skills by banning transmitter-construction while encouraging assembling/fixing receivers. In addition to the body’s visceral/affective capacities, then, nation-states also discipline technical skills while forming a national auditory.
