Gazetecilerin Twitter kullanım pratikleri ve Twitter kullanım pratiklerinin gazetecilikte neden olabileceği değişimler: Siber antropoloji yaklaşımıyla

Twitter which created by Jack Dorsey in 2006 as a fruit of Web 2.0 applications only to let friends and family know what he was doing and clarify wherever he or they might be is a social network site in the form of microblogging.1This tool also enables sending and reading short instant messages called tweets through the Twitter website or mobile phone or tablet application, only in 140 characters in addition with photos, videos or hyperlinks. And represents a convergence of two separate historical trajectories in its concentrated space: computing and media technologies. Despite its departure point, today this medium is used by millions of people for different purposes increasing day by day in the world. For example, politicians are spreading their messages to the public via this medium. Commercial organizations, having great success in using Twitter to inform their customers of discounts and news related to their products. Many social media marketers and researchers believe that Twitter has a lot of business values. In the limited space of the Twitter, receiving and diffusing news and information is one of usage purposes. In this remark Alfred Hermida approaches to Twitter as a real-time, networked digital technology that offers diverse means to collect, communicate, share and display news and information which is also useful in the remark of the journalism profession worldwide.Thus, even the biggest media companies of the world use Twitter as a part of conventional media tools like newspaper, television, radio etc. and reach millions of people via this medium. Not only the companies but also the journalists use this medium by signing-in individually. For receiving and distributing news and their ideas on the news in a more democratical and uncensored space in spite of the Twitter usage limitations of the media companies that they work for. By considering all these approaches, our research has the purpose to learn the answers of the following questions:  How and why journalists preferring to use Twitter?  What kind of practices do they develop while using this unique medium of its time?  What are the probable changes Twitter usage practices of the journalits can cause in journalism profession? And try to verify the hypothesis, whether journalists' Twitter usage practices alters the journalism profession. By also searching the answers to the main questions that cyberanthropology deals with; how does technology influence human life? How is it to be human on the digital media? During this study by using cyberanthropologic methods like e-mail interviewing and observation unobtrusive in other words lurking (the observation unobtrusive or lurking is a kind of observation participant without any kind of interaction between the experimenter and subject which has been shifted to the cyberspace) which are relatively new in social sciences; the subject has been examined by making online interviews via e-mail and by leading a unobtrusive observation with 50 Turkish journalists who use Twitter effectively; 22 male and 28 female, who are in average with graduate and master's degree, aged between 25-49 work at the positions as reporter, editor and news manager at newspapers, televisions (news televisions and news rooms of televisions) and news agencies. As understood this master's thesis has a format shaped with cyberanthropology.The title cyberanthropology has been used since the mid 1990s to describe a minor subbranch of social and cultural anthropology that investigates cyberspace as a new domain of ethnographic fieldwork: "As a new domain of anthropological practice, the study of cyberculture is particularly concerned with the cultural construction and reconstruction on which the new technologies are based and which they in turn help to shape." To this end in the first part of the thesis we described departure point and evolution of the cyberanthropology. This approach takes us to Norbert Wiener's cybernetic theory which gave to the scientists the idea of making anthropology on the cyberspace departing from the first studies of "Macy Conferences" which were initiated in 1942 with a seminar called the Cerebral Inhibition Meeting, held at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton: has this subject, 'control andcommunication in the animal and machine' with particular concern for issues of feedback and self-regulation.5In the first part we also tried to understand cyberanthropologic fields of research more clearly and deeply by the discourses of the cyberanthropologists like Arturo Escobar, Bryan Pfaffenberger, David Hakken and Philipp Budka. In the second section of the thesis, this move takes us to examine the computer based new media shaped with the Internet tools like Web 1.0, Web 2.0. In the second section, we examined the phenomenon of the social media which gave birth to the social networks like Twitter which accepted as an anthropological research field in our thesis. We also described Twitter as a new sociocultural space of human interaction during defining the platform as a news media. All these steps made possible conducting our research and understanding journalists (who became the other in the eyes of ethnographer) Twitter usage practices (which represent cultural constructions and reconstructions over new technologies) and the possible changes that these practices can cause on the journalism profession. When we focused on the alteration case of the journalism profession, we notice that the profession of journalism is changing with the influence of social media sites like Twitter. In this context journalists indicated the alteration in different ways like;  Obtaining the information from various sources  Timeless and spaceless news transmission  Reciprocal relationship between journalists and their readers/audience  Getting out of the range of chosen actuality of news enterprises, customizing the news and being visible as a journalist by also customizing Twitter sphere According to the our observation findings on this topic, between the four changes that were indicated by journalists the last one was more visible and more powerful as a procedure for explaining the sense of the change on the journalism profession that we aimed to find at the end of this research. In a platform used since 2007 by journalist; which renovates itself within maximum one second, which is alive all day long, which allows time and space liberation, is shaped with ten thousands of followers and tweets, is including an intranetwork between journalists… etc. It also survives journalists from being only a signature/face in the media enterprise that they work. With Twitter usage, journalists go far beyond being a professional who do his/her job well. Tweets that they send almost 24 hours, while spreading actual news and their views upon news to world, on the other hand, include what's in their private lives. So Twitter humanizes journalists in the eyes of readers/audiences who follow themAccording to our findings, via Twitter, followers can learn about the books journalists read, music they listened to, and the films they watched, briefly, can have an overview of journalists personal likes. And moreover, can become partner of a professional person's working environment or family life with the photographs' sent over Twitter. Twitter gives room to journalists for distilling and continuing their professional existence in a more local, even personal way. Twitter is a platform where journalists' professional and personal lives interpose. At the end of this research, we can say by considering journalists' Twitter usage practices that it causes some changes in the journalism profession, according to our survey and observation results. In this context, we can state that we reach to the hypothesis of this study, but we can not talk about fundamental structural changes in the journalism. In the conclusion of this master's thesis, we saw that journalists use Twitter with no doubt as a reformation point of their personal and professional lives. With this act they reform the image of the journalists. They develop many communication strategies, by getting out of the borders of the chosen agenda of the news enterprise that they work for, create their own agenda in the 140 characters limited space of Twitter, and, sharing news and their opinions related to agenda or reaching new information via people who follows them, which creates a new interaction space. Just like their professional lives being carried to this platform, journalists, who also reflect their personal lives, get humanized in the eyes of their readers/audience. And thus, cyberspace provides us to enlighten the phenomenon of rehumanization or the possible new way of being human" with our example "being a journalist, a professional" on the digital media as David Hakken indicates.6Our research experience has allowed us to verify that anthropologists can make researchs in this new area of digital interactions and sociocultural organizations. According to Escobar which can blur the categories and boundaries such as nature/culture or human/machine.7As the last word, we wish that this research remains as a useful resource on the Twitter usage practices of the journalists and the possible changes that Twitter can cause on the journalism profession. And will be able to widen the reflexive thoughts on the ethnography of the cyberspace which can incite researchers to deepen in this field.