Significance of protesters’ words during Gezi Park protests: finding implicit meanings in sticky notes and tweets

ABSTRACT

On 28 May 2013, an impromptu occupation in Istanbul’s Gezi Park turned into a nation-wide protest encompassing diverse forms of discontent towards the government. This study explores protesters’ accounts of their experiences. We examine these experiences using two lines of inquiry – how did the participants of the Gezi Park protests use linguistic cues when writing at the park and how did those writings differ from personal reflections posted on Twitter? Using a narrative inquiry framework, we employed significance analysis on short narratives written on sticky notes in the Gezi Park and a sample of tweets posted during the protests. Narrators of the sticky notes responded to two prompts: ‘before the resistance’ and ‘after the resistance.’ Results revealed that participants in the Park used low rates of cognitive and affective expressions, and negations in the after-narratives. The after-narratives were then compared with tweets posted on Twitter. Analysis of tweets showed higher rates of intensifiers and cognitive expressions, and notably less affective expressions than the after-narratives written on sticky notes. The differences in participants’ accounts are discussed in relation to qualities of technologies individuals were using, social contexts, potential audiences, and the country’s sociopolitical history.

KEYWORDS:

• Political protest
• narrative inquiry
• Gezi Park
• Twitter
• collective action
• writing

Acknowledgments

The empirical research upon which this paper is based was made possible with generous support from Association for Psychologists for Social Solidarity in Turkey. Had they not created boards for participants to write notes at the Gezi Park and had they not shared these notes with us this research would have not been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The demonstrations started on May 28, but the actual occupation of the Park was achieved on June 1 after police withdrew from the area. The occupation of the Park ended on June 15 after the police forcefully evacuated protesters from the park. We matched the number of tweets to the number of narratives in sticky notes. The date 5 June 2013 was arbitrarily chosen; however, we were careful to choose a day during which there was no clash with the police to match the context of sticky note papers, which were written when participants felt safe enough to stop and reflect on their experience for a given amount of time.

2. The Turkish language makes use of suffixes added to verbs to indicate negation. The word ‘never’ is underlined here to represent negation but the verb takes the ‘-me, -ma’ suffixes to express negation. For example, in the following sentence, the word been would get the suffix: ‘I have never been like this before’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ayşenur Benevento

Ayşenur Benevento has a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Benevento’s research focuses on the interactions children and young people actively develop with their immediate surroundings, different social entities and culture. Currently, she is especially interested in the ways people use digital media, as a function of their specific social, economic and cultural contexts. She is a product of public school from kindergarten to graduate school.

Mukadder Okuyan

Mukadder Okuyan is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Psychology at Clark University, USA. Her research examines how individuals respond to social change as well as the heterogeneity in the experience and perception of group-based discrimination from the perspective of both advantaged and disadvantaged group members. Her work appeared in Feminism & Psychology, Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology and Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics.