Turkish Literature Magazine June Issue Valrik In the essay, entitled “Loneliness in the Information Age,” the contributors attempt to explain what we have gained and lost in the transition to digital spaces and technology.
For many, what has been abandoned is the sensitivity and comfort of communicating through the human body. Ilknur Doğu Özturk calls for a more physical, embodied form of communication.
Human interactions rely on body language, tone of voice, and other factors that social media doesn’t have, she writes, and online communication, stripped of those signals, favors “high-pitched messages spoken and written by people who are trapped in echo chambers, who don’t want to hear opinions that don’t support their own, who want to believe they’re always right, and who believe they’re superior to others.”
By ignoring our surroundings in favor of the drama and scale of online forums, we are creating new forms of “voluntary solitude”: people “choose the ability to express emotions and communicate their thoughts to large audiences in the digital world, while in the real world they look away to avoid speaking to the person next to them.”
Digital and virtual forms of art can reduce physical social interaction in galleries and urban spaces, thereby isolating the individual, points out Kanan Arslan. Digital technologies may “contribute to the democratization of cultural capital,” but they can also “foreground individual experience by changing the way audiences engage with art.”
Similarly, Bilgehan Ece Şakrak shows how digital technologies have transformed cinema from an art form embedded in urban social experience to a more private and secluded form of consumption: she connects the cinematic experience to nineteenth-century urban exploration.Number The 21st century wanderer. But such possibilities have shrunk, and “wanderers have rapidly become accustomed to watching movies in domestic spaces, free from public influences.” The pandemic restrictions have only accelerated the process of “converting moviegoers into users of digital platforms.”
Zeynep Gener gives a balanced overview of the current state of gaming. Digital games can create “a global social platform that connects people from different cultures in a virtual world,” but problems are also becoming apparent. Competitive online gaming can foster anger, bullying, and stress, and “isolate some players from social life.” Excessive online gaming can also “lay the foundations for social isolation, depression, and anxiety.” The future lies in the hands of game designers, but also players, educators, and policymakers.
A polarized nation
Burcu Zeybek traces Turkey’s social divisions back to the late Ottoman period, when pro-Westernizing and reformist elites first clashed with Islamic traditionalists. These divisions deepened in the early 20th century.Number In the 21st century, during Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secularizing reforms, this dilemma became a defining feature of political culture, Zeybek writes, as the resulting polarization eliminated groups seeking compromise, creating a country in which “centrist and moderate positions were destroyed and extremists came to dominate.”
Valrik Also, About dry grass A drama set for release in 2023. Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the 2008 Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for “My Lonely and Beautiful Homeland.” Critic Feridun Andac says loneliness permeates all of Ceylan’s films. “He likes to portray lonely people, so the protagonists of his stories are in some ways lonely, incompatible and contradictory characters, and they also take on the spirit of the times they live in.”
Reviewed by Steve Bryant
