Bir Popüler Kültür Mecrası Olarak Wattpad

Abstract

Focusing on Wattpad, a platform of popular culture, this dissertation aims to put forth the technical features and interactive space that the platform offers to its users, and how all these correspond to users’ interests and needs. Designed as a qualitative research, it is based on multi-platform digital ethnography, shaped by in-depth interviews conducted with sixteen famous writers of Turkish Wattpad, and three-year participant and non-participant observation in multiple platforms. In accordance with the field research conducted, this study approaches Wattpad, not in terms of literature, the first context to come to mind, but as a social media platform in which interaction takes place and community/communities are established. While concentrating on the community dynamics in Wattpad and their reflections on subjects’ lives, this study takes into consideration what we do with popular culture and focuses on the community established with/around popular culture. It argues that this kind of relationship of ours with popular culture and its community-building function, which are embodied in Wattpad, should be interpreted in relation to today’s conditions, in the light of the discussions on the conditions of the neoliberal era and the forms of subjectivity it commands. In conclusion, it tries to make inferences about the social transformation we are going through, together with digital platforms and popular culture.