Social media and forms of new policy making in Turkey

Today, with the becoming widespread of social media usage, there is a significant change about the forms of policy making. One of the reasons of this change is the crisis about the institutional politics that forms of institutional policy making and forms of its organizing itself (representative democracy and political parties based on economy or ideology) today cannot answer the needs of people. Another reason is the wide opportunities of self-expression which developing communication technologies provide people. These technologies allow people, who are not physically together or close to each other, come together about different agendas and exchange opinions easily. People coming together ad hoc and create groups on various media that make user's participation possible, produce a new form of organization practice which is not based on economy or ideology. These groups become the actors of new politics while they put forward a new form of policy making that differs from institutional politics. Institutional organization forms are usually defined with the relations as vertical, hierarchical, face-to-face. But the emphasis of new organization forms is on horizontal, non-hierarchical and network style relations. In this sense, these new forms of organization based on social media are defined as more democratic. But in this study this approach is also questioned. In addition it is assumed that forms of new policy making highlight the individual act. But as different social movements showed us, individual acts can turn into social acts at any moments. There is a dialectical relation in here as in the relation of physical and virtual realities. In this study, policy making forms of different political groups by using social media will be examined. Features and the differentiation points from institutional politics of new policy making forms will be indicated. Political groups that will be examined via Twitter usage and in the frame of different themes are various because it is aimed to put forward the similarities and differences between different groups.