Transformation of glocal social movements on the line of communication and culture: The Slow Food case

The New Social Movements aim to build public spaces in social spaces in order to impose their identities and goals against the forms of domination. In line with this purpose, while social movements tend to increase the number of their political actors and actions; they act as symbolic challengers on the stage of movements (Melucci, 1999 and 2014; Touraine, 2017). Movements fighting for cultural and symbolic interests have both local and global identities. The important reason for this is that global problems have created goals that are more comprehensive than individual identities. These goals, which reveal an important interconnectedness and togetherness, also bring a complexity. In order to solve this complexity, social movements need to produce common ground strategies and discourses by making use of the cultural experiences of their actors. Thus, it will be possible to collect scattered targets and create durable identities. In this study, it is aimed to reveal the relationship of the change in identity, adversary, and goals of glocal social movements with globalization and how this change becomes visible in the construction of the public sphere. For this purpose, Slow Food Movement is chosen as a case study and field research was carried out. In this study, in which ethnographic and netnographic methods were used, on-site observation and in- depth interview techniques were applied, and Slow Food's Instagram posts and printed resources were analyzed by quantitative method. In this context, in the first part of the study, discussions were made on the fields of civil society, public sphere and social movements. In the second part, globalization and network society were discussed, and in the third part, the findings of the field research were presented and evaluated. The study has two results. First of all, it was concluded that glocal social movements started to reveal multiple identities, expanded the scope and dimensions of their goals, and significantly reduced the visibility of their adversaries. After that, with the effect of these changes in identity, adversary, goals and the dynamics of the network society, it has been determined that social movements have built infotainment public sphere and started to construct their communication and actions through narratives.