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Beybin Kejanlioglu

Title of the presentation:
THE INTERNET USER AS PRODUCER

Short abstract of the presentation:
Walter Benjamin, in his 1934 essays like “The Newspaper” or “The Author as Producer” emphasizes a Brechtian motif: the reader as ready to become writer. For him, the publishers constantly inaugurate new columns to address the reader’s opinions and questions to exploit the impatience of people who think they have the right to see their own interests expressed. In this exploitation, however, lies a dialectical moment for Benjamin: “the decline of writing in this press turns out to be the formula for its restoration in a different one. For since writing gains in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinction between author and public that the press has maintained is disappearing in a socially desirable way.” In so doing, he also questions the journalistic expertise: “Literary competence is no longer founded on specialized training but is now based on polytechnical education, and thus becomes public property." Some of the questions that can be addressed in this context are: Can Benjamin’s such insights now be considered as the attributes of many internet users who are not only readers and viewers but also writers, producers, expressing and sharing their views, displaying their images, etc.? Can the internet be considered as democratically structured at least for the internet-literate in this sense? In other words, does a dialectical moment lie concealed in the use of military-and-market-based technology such as internet? Can the writing in depth and writing in breadth correspond to something other than the meaning implied by Benjamin? Does the defence of conventional journalistic structures and practices mean taking elitist, even conservative side against democratization of readership or its turn to authorship?

Short biography:
D. Beybin Kejanlioglu is an Associate Professor at Ankara University, Faculty of Communication. Her areas of interest are social theory and media studies, critical theory, political communication, intellectual history and communication research. Her books in Turkish are: Media and Communication in Critical Terms -of the Frankfurt School (2005); Transformation of Media Structures in Turkey (2004); and Media Policies: Dynamics of TV Broadcasting in Turkey (with S. Celenk & G. Adaklı, 2001). She also published several articles and book chapters in Turkish, English and Finnish on Turkish press coverage of EU-Turkey relations, of general elections, of war in Iraq; on the public sphere and the media; on Turkish broadcasting policy; and on the field of communication or history of communication and media studies in general. She is currently working on a project related to intellectual history, the reception of the Frankfurt School in Turkey; and taking part in a working group of the Thematic Network of European Studies (SENT), which prepares core curriculum for Master degrees in European Communication with interdisciplinary and transnational approaches.