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During Turkey’s Gezi Park Protests in the summer of 2013, millions of people became connected as fellow pro- testers. In the early days of the Gezi movement, the increase in participatory activism through social media made visible the police brutality exercised in the last days of May 2013 against a small group of environmentalists who were protecting Gezi Park from being demolished in order to build a shopping mall. Throughout Turkey’s political history, there has been no other example of this kind of spontaneous mass movement resisting the state apparatus with the large participation of diverse groups and self-convened protesters, without any dominant ideological appeal or leader affiliation. In this article, I will analyze the ways in which these patterns of contra- dictory interactions formed, evaluated, or triggered various types of social relationships, by critically examining the content of viral images, memes, and widely shared posts by Gezi protesters on social media. In the absence of internal cohesion or an ideological and organizational agenda, I argue that widely shared viral images, memes, and text messages provided the content to collaboratively construct and publicly frame the autonomous logic of the “Gezi spirit” by the Gezi protesters. I aim to analyze this new understanding of collective identity in autono- mous logic processed through social media as a being-with (mit-sein), rather than a fusion of the individual to an enigmatic we-ness in order to represent “I”. I claim that this autonomous collectivity is driven by fluidarity as a public experience of the self in relation to the other without intermediary apparatuses and hence can be conceptualized as having built a new sociality.

This article explores the online display of artistic ability and cultural practice to express support for the resistance in Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees while blaming the Russian attack on the country starting in 2022. Social media engagement is essential in constructing discursive traits of belonging through bottom-up articulations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomies. Here, I question the distinguished characteristics of representation related to art, artistic practices, and abilities under solidarity social media posts in the case of Ukrainians fleeing their homes. Social media users who include art and culture concerning solidarity use a discourse of inclusion and exclusion to depict refugees as parts of civilization and hence not reducible them to the bare life position. This study is guided by critical multimodal discourse analysis. I contend that these social media posts that convey specific art and culture-related representations serve to distinguish characteristics of war-torn Ukraine, people displacement, and Ukrainian refugees from the generic tendencies of otherization reflected on the ‘Southern’ refugee figure deprived of capability or motivation for logos.

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This article examines the temporality of ephemeral visual posts to social media with an emphasis on Instagram stories. Drawing on theories of the spectacle, it is my contention that interaction and user-experience design, as it pertains to social media platforms, highlights the contemporary conditions and motivations in our society of abundant visual consumption. This article investigates what it means for a social media user to attend to such time-related visual experience. Throughout this piece, I critically survey the relationship between ephemeral Instagram stories’ popularity and the high speed temporality of the social media sphere with emphasis on the digital “picturesque.” Perishable daily sharing on social media reflects a contemplative glimpse into a personal lifespan presented as an object of mass appreciation. I examine how ephemerality as a component of design impacts online sociality through the picturesque visual mode. Contemporary boredom and competitive engagement in high-technological communication networks inform how we might direct digital publics to find alternative pathways to sociality.