Within the June subject of Turkish literary journal Varlık – titled ‘Loneliness in the age of information’ – contributors try an accounting of what we’ve gained and misplaced within the transition to digital areas and applied sciences.
For a lot of, what has been discarded are the subtleties and comforts of communication mediated via the human physique. İlknur Doğu Öztürk makes the case for extra bodily and embodied communication.
Human interplay depends on physique language, tone of voice and different components which are absent from social media, she writes.Stripped of these alerts, on-line communication favours ‘high-pitched messages spoken/written by people who are trapped in echo chambers, who do not want to hear anything that does not support what they say, who always want to be right, who believe that they are superior to others’.
By ignoring our environment in favour of the drama and scale of on-line boards, we’re creating new type of ‘voluntary loneliness’, during which folks go for the ‘digital world’s potential to precise feelings and convey ideas to giant crowds, whereas in the true world they avert their eyes to keep away from speaking to whoever is subsequent to them’.
Digital and digital types of artwork can cut back bodily social interplay in galleries or metropolis areas, thereby isolating people, feedback Canan Arslan. Digital applied sciences might ‘contribute to democratisation of cultural capital’ however in addition they ‘put individual experience to the forefront by transforming the ways spectators interact with art’.
Equally, Bilgehan Ece Şakrak reveals how digital expertise has modified cinema from an artwork type embedded in an city social expertise right into a extra non-public and remoted type of consumption. She hyperlinks the expertise of cinema to the city explorations of the 19th century flaneur. However such prospects are contracting and ‘the flaneur has quickly grown accustomed to performing the act of viewing in a domestic space where there is no public impact’. The pandemic’s restrictions have solely accelerated the method of reworking ‘cinema viewers into uses of digital platforms’.
Zeynep Genel gives a balanced overview of the state of gaming. Whereas digital video games can construct ‘a global social platform that brings together people from different cultures in a virtual universe’, issues are additionally changing into clear. Aggressive on-line video games can foster rage, bullying and stress and might ‘cut some players off from social life’. Extreme on-line gaming can even ‘lay the foundations for social isolation, depression and anxiety’. The longer term is within the fingers of sport designers, in addition to gamers, pedagogues and policymakers.
Polarised nation
Burcu Zeybek traces Turkey’s social divisions again to the late Ottoman period when westernising and reformist elites first clashed with Islamic traditionalists. These divisions solely deepened within the early 20th century through the secularising reforms underneath Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. ‘This dilemma has become the determining feature of political culture’, writes Zeybek. The ensuing polarisation has excluded teams looking for compromise and created a rustic the place ‘centrist or moderate positions are destroyed and extremism becomes the mainstream’.
Varlık additionally gives responses to About Dry Grasses, the 2023 drama from director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who devoted his 2008 Cannes Greatest Director award to ‘my lonely and beautiful country’. The critic Feridun Andaç says isolation runs via all Ceylan’s movies. He ‘likes to describe people in their loneliness. For this reason, the heroes of his story are, in a sense, lonely, incompatible, contradictory personalities; they also carry the spirit of the age/time they live in.’
Overview by Steve Bryant
