Being young in the society of exhibition: Social media usage forms of university students

In this thesis, based on the idea of the society of exhibition, it has been tried to understand what the main motivations are behind the exhibition act carried out by young people in social media and how the exhibition is carried out in social media. For this, university-age youth from the groups that use social media the most were chosen as a sample in the study. Throughout the study, some theories such as transparency society, self-presentation, techno-social life and concepts such as display, surveillance and privacy were used. Qualitative research methods and techniques were used in this thesis. In-depth interviews were conducted with 20 university students studying in different universities of Turkey through semi-structured interview forms. In the research, it was determined that there were a number of reasons behind the display, including psycho-social and techno-social. Psycho-social reasons can be expressed as the desire to be liked, the desire to show, the desire to attract attention, the desire to transcend oneself and the feeling of obligation. Techno-social reasons online interactions, offline interactions, desire to be famous, social surveillance, perception of personal privacy. In the study, findings were also obtained about how young people show themselves on social media. Accordingly, body, space, consumption, activities, relationships, achievements, abilities, emotions and thoughts are exhibited in social media. While doing this, young people remove what they see as negative from their posts. In addition, by removing the negative elements from their posts, young people display themselves in a more attractive and ideal way.