Two articles, which the faculty members of Faculty of Communication of Near East University presented at the 17th International Educational Technology Conference (IETC-2017) held in Harvard University in the USA, were published in the Proceeding Book and the modified version of the articles were published in TOJET. TOJET is an open-access online international electronic journal indexed in Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), and the world's largest abstract and citation database SCOPUS.
According to the press release issued by the Directorate of Press and Public Relations Office of Near East University, "Educational Qualification of Social Media: A Search For New Public Sphere" and "Representation of Victim as a Social Construction in the Court News", the two articles that prepared by Associate Professor Fevzi Kasap, Head of the Department of Radio TV and Cinema, and Çağdaş Öğüç and Ayhan Dolunay, faculty members of NEU Faculty of Communication, were published in TOJECT IETC-2017 special edition.
New Media concept and Habermas Bourgeois Public Sphere Theory were compared
Kasap, Dolunay and Öğüç explained that their first article “The Educational Qualification of Social Media: A Search for a New Public Sphere” presents a study on the concept of “new media” that suggested about forty years ago (in the 1970s) by researchers engaged in social, psychological, economic, political and cultural studies in information and communication based researches. The faculty members also explained that the concept of new media later gained momentum in 1990s in line with the technological developments which were predicated upon the use of digital technologies, such as the Internet; taking the whole issue to a different dimension. The article also presents data that since 2000s social media platforms/websites have begun to play a crucial role in communication so as to make social media indispensible for interpersonal and mass communication.
The article prepared by Kasap, Dolunay and Öğüç provides an insight on "internet-new-media-social-media" concepts and their role in our communication world.
The article concludes that there is a dispute regarding whether to accept the social media as a new public sphere or not. Kasap, Dolunay and Öğüç explain that this issue is at the heart of their study which also presents a comparison between social media and the Habermas Bourgeois Public Sphere Theory.
Issues on “Victim as a Social Construction” were also addressed
“The Representation of the Victim as a Social Construction in Court News”, the second article of Kasap, Öğüç and Dolunay, presents a study on the crucial role of mobile devices such as cell phones in accelerating the instant access to news supported by videos. The article draws attention to the rapid growth of such social media news and the role of this news for the representation of the victim as a social construction.