Young Turks and New Media: The Construction of Identity in an Age of Islamophobia

Abstract

The place of Islam in a multicultural society is high on the agenda of every Western nation at the moment. In the wake of a series of local and global events, Australia's Muslims have found themselves in the glare of media scrutiny over what it means to be Australian and a Muslim. Increasingly, that media discourse contributes to a rising tide of anti-Islamic feeling, also known as Islamophobia, in the community. Diasporic communities across the globe are using new technology to overcome some of the structural difficulties inherent in being cast as ‘outsiders’, even in the country in which they were born. This paper examines the use of communications and media technologies to establish, assert and define social groups and notions of social identity, using a research project with Melbourne's Turkish community as a case study. The qualitative research, which forms part of a broader study of the Turkish community in Melbourne, focuses on the experiences of a small cohort of young people of both first- and second-generation Turkish background, who are completing their education in the Australian university system. The very rapid recent spread of new information and communication technologies has had important repercussions for the way these young people communicate and maintain their interpersonal relationships, as well as the way they organise and communicate with wider networks of acquaintances, peers and communities of interest.