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Drawing on data gathered during ethnographic fieldwork in Mardin, a medium-sized town in southeast Turkey, this article shows that social media users actively appropriate online platforms and change privacy settings in order to keep different social spheres and social groups apart. Keeping different online social contexts distinct from each other is taken for granted as a way of using social media in Mardin. By contrast, social media scholars have extensively discussed the effects of social media in terms of context collapse. The article highlights how context collapse is the result of patterns of usage within Anglo-American contexts and not the consequence of a platform's architecture or social media logic. It then suggests a theoretical refinement of affordances, and proposes the concept of affordances-in-practice.

This paper confronts the disparity between a tradition that has defined anthropology as a comparative discipline and the practices which increasingly embrace cultural relativism and the uniqueness of each fieldsite. It suggests that it is possible to resolve this dilemma, through creating a vertical structure that complements the horizontal task of comparison across fieldsites. This vertical structure is composed of different methods of dissemination which make explicit a series of steps from a baseline of popular dissemination which stresses the uniqueness of individuals, through books and journal articles with increasing degrees of generalisation and comparison. Following this structure leads us up through analysis to the creation and employment of theory. This allows us to make comparisons and generalisations without sacrificing our assertion of specificity and uniqueness. We illustrate this argument though a recent nine-field site comparison of the use and consequences of social media in a project called "Why We Post."

, and our supporting mentor, Daniel Miller. Their continuous invaluable assistance, help and advice in London, and during field work through Skype and email have been precious. This research would not have been possible without the help and support of the warm and hospitable people I met in Mardin. I am extremely grateful to hundreds of friends and research participants who trusted me, opened their houses and lives, engaged with me and answered my questions. I would also like to thank my research assistants, who prefer to remain anonymous, and colleagues at Mardin Artuklu University and the British Institute at Ankara. I would like to thank Luigi Achilli, Fabio Vicini and the anonymous reviewer for helpful suggestions. I am especially grateful to Marina De Giorgi, whose presence during field work and writing-up has been so precious and supportive. I would also like to thank my mother, brother and friends in London, Italy, Turkey and the world, who, despite geographical distance, have all been present and supportive in different ways. ix Contents List of figures x 1. Introduction: Welcome to Mardin 2. The social media landscape: Individuals and groups in the local media ecology 3. Visual posting: Showing off and shifting boundaries between private and public 4. Relationships: Kinship, family and friends 5. Hidden romance and love 6. The wider world: Politics, the visible and the invisible 7. Conclusion: What kind of social change? Notes References Index

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