Production, consumption and re-production of the context and locality: Examining the media effect on the transformation of place into beyond local in the case of İzmir-Alaçati

The radical transformations of the concepts of "place", "locality" and "context" over the last hundred years, from the first quarter of the 20th century to the first quarter of the 21st century, have been discussed with an interdisciplinary perspective through the tourism and media phenomena that transform the phenomenon of place into translocal practices and instrumentalize space. The physical and perceptual effects of these transformations on the Alaçatı settlement in Çeşme district of Izmir were examined in this thesis. Since the early 1990s, the "spatial turn" is an intellectual movement in the social sciences and humanities that has profoundly influenced the study of space and place in terms of understanding and analyzing the spatial and symbolic transformation processes created by the globalization process and internet technology. In line with this goal, this study, which takes Alaçatı settlement as a case analysis, examines the transformation of rural space, cultural encounters, symbolic value changes, imaginary and spatial consumption dynamics, "rural gentrification" under the transformative effect of visual, printed and social media and tourism. It aims to make visible and examine the "neo-rural" and the hybridizing "translocality" practices that occur as a result of cultural encounters, through the "collective desire" towards Alaçatı and the "stone house" phenomenon.