This study questions the social relations behind the challenges that popular science magazines in Turkey have faced from their onset, by focusing on the peculiarities of different historical periods and prevailing relations of production. The history of popular science magazines from the Ottoman Empire to the present day is also the history of the transition from artisan-like relations of production to factory-like relations of production and more. In this long historical period, premodern social relations and market conditions come to the fore as the main source of the challenges these magazines face. In recent years, big capital’s interest in popular science and the enthusiastic struggle of “zero capital” magazines on the other hand reveal two different sides of the picture. Similar challenges and divergent experiences across different periods indicate that popularizing science goes far beyond bringing science to lay people. This study shows that it is possible to trace a frustrated story of modernization, as well as economic and political turmoil, in these magazines’ survival struggle in a country which has not been closely studied in this respect.
This study examines the transformation of everyday life through smartphones, focusing on the daily experiences of smartphone users in Turkey. With their multimedia features, smartphones (defined as a “melting pot” from the technological perspective or polymedia and metamedia in a broader sense) take an important place in users’ everyday lives. As these features and the services accessible through smartphones are offered in commodity form, they inevitably result in the exploitation of users’ labour, the commodification of user data, the shifting of paid work into ‘leisure time’, and finally the transformation of everyday life through smartphones. The main argument of this study is that, under these social conditions, smartphones, referred to as “a melting pot” from the technological perspective, turn into a melting pot of exploitation, and their users experience these interactions not as direct economic relations but as routine social relations.
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