This website brings together the findings of Nazlı Özkan’s project, “History of New Media in Turkey: Radio, Television, and Mobile Devices,” funded by the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Widening Fellowship. The research historically traces the ideas about new media in Turkey by focusing on three periods that match with three new media technologies: 

- Radio in the 1920s and 1930s 

- Television in the 1950s

- Mobile devices in the 2000s ​​

 

While tracing this history, the project is inspired by scholarly approaches that move beyond limiting new media to digital media and suggests that each medium was new at the moment of their introduction before they were normalized as old media. The study approaches new media as a historical concept and turns it into an analytical tool to understand how different groups such as state elites and citizens constructed technological novelty differently in ways that reflect their diverging engagements with global political economic dynamics of their era. By combining archival and ethnographic research, the research also examines how the constructions of media novelty change as the social, political, economic conditions change in different eras—from industrial developmentalism to neoliberalism. 

 

Shifting public responses to new media forms in countries such as Turkey—that are never fully “Western”—have received little attention from media scholars, who mostly trace similar histories in Western contexts. Filling this lacuna in interdisciplinary media studies, this project examines the changing relationship of technology to global, class, and gender inequalities since Turkey’s foundation as a nation-state in the 1920s to the current era.

 

The section, “Workshop” puts the project findings in conversation with other scholars who approach new media from a historical perspective. The sections, “Talks” and “Publications” further detail the archival and ethnographic results. The section, “Periodicals” lists some of the archival sources used in the study. This section provides full access to one of the first radio magazines published in Turkey in the 1920s, Telsiz Magazine. The original magazine is in Ottoman Turkish and as part of the project, historian Nihal Boztekin transliterated 18 issues into Modern Turkish.