Trend networks of Twitter: Examining trends of Twitter Turkey through the concept of network society

Reality being built makes the truth invisible; the truth being invisible on the other hand is most frequent in this day and age where the signs are most intense. Additionally, construction of social reality takes place in cyber space. In cyber space, social media; and in social media, Twitter transforms into the biggest device that represents the unconscious of neo-collectivism. In order to discover the unconscious of neo-collectivism, disciplinary paradigms of social sciences' focus gravitates towards the very person in this space. However, this new person belongs to the realm in which it is conceivable to see without being seen. For this particular reason, on Twitter, the channel where collectivism of social media is within sight the most, we can bring forward ideas via users on a new society, given birth by this new person. With that being said, this thesis study aims to scrutinize Twitter profiles by looking at the trends designated at the center of Twitter Turkey. In order to unveil the collectivism on Twitter and analyze the agents forming the society, it is a necessity to forge a paradigm via trends. In this study, four trends comprised of hashtags with their process of becoming trends are selected via partitioning. Afterwards, the tweets posted with respect to these trends were put in Twitter Trends Analysis, and then Twitter Profile Analysis respectively. Twitter profiles of the users that own the said analyzed tweets were put in analysis by their last 1000 tweets. Therefore, the most frequently used words were interpreted after having them generated into a word cloud. The computer programme used on data acquisition process was R-Studio and this process was conveyed in detail. The study was designed with one of the qualitative research designs, the grounded theory, and the frame of conceptional contents was constituted with the concept called network society. In conclusion, theoretical sampling, the intended purpose of said grounded theory was unraveled at the end of this study. This study, in which the notion of discovery is in the foreground, the researcher was fictionalized also as a participant and the researcher's experiences were included for analysis and interpretations. Intended with this research is to analyze how Twitter trends affect this research, how to examine the structure of network society on Twitter Turkey and present a procedural point of view. In line with this purpose, the concept of Twitter Trends Network was constructed as a model and was given place in literature. Keywords: Twitter, R-Studio, Trends, Network Society, Grounded Theory