Online Outsiders: A Research of Digital Disabled Activism in Turkey

The conceptual framework of this article is composed of ‘network society’ (Van Dijk, 2016) and ‘digital activism’ (Joyce, 2010). Van Dijk (2016) has observed the rise of the network society and according to that, he defines network society as communication networks that shape the most important forms of an organization in a society. The infrastructure of digital activism is based on the digital network (Joyce, 2010). With the influence of the new media, especially in the last decade, disability and methods of publicly representation the lives and experiences of people with disabilities have been witnessed and their ways of representing themselves have expanded. In the second half of the 20th century new social movements and digital activism have brought profound changes. The increasing global impact of wider human rights discourses has made possible a number of cultural representations that allow more progressive ways of seeing and understanding disability in different contexts. New media technologies offered new ways for citizens and movements to mobilize and organize themselves. In this context, the subject of this article is digitalized disability activism in Turkey. This article explores the opportunities and challenges in practice and disabled digital activism perspectives in Turkey. In this study, online media environments in Turkey such as the Internet newspapers, blogs, forums, social networking sites, especially Twitter contents were investigated via disabled keyword between 19-26 January 2019. Content analysis technique was used to evaluate the data sets and the findings were evaluated through descriptive method