Comments on Authoritarianism: Youtube Mediated Feelings of the Young Citizens in Turkey

This study is about how young citizens perceive the authoritarian regime in Turkey. It argues that feelings are overlooked in the debate on authoritarianism and then proposes the concept of ‘perceived regime’ to provide a framework for the intended discussion. ‘Perceived regime’ is taken as the emotional atmosphere surrounding society and culture under certain political conditions. The main distinctive feature of the concept is that it does not take a given political setting as a ‘fixed form’ but seeks its definitions in the collective semantic world. To understand the dominant feelings of young people, this study analyses the five thousand comments posted under the seven documentaries of the 140Journos, a well-known independent new media content producer on YouTube. The study aims to understand feelings and is therefore designed as qualitative research. As it is a systematic and rule-guided method, as well as suitable for qualitative data analysis software support, I used ‘qualitative content analysis’. Accordingly, the study defines a feeling structure called ‘collective misery.’ Feelings of sadness, despair, hopelessness, anger, resentment, and envy are the fundamental building blocks of this structure, and anxiety is the beam. Furthermore, this study posits that the primary manifestation of the authoritarian regime in Turkey is a pervasive and profound ‘anomie-like’ social formation.