Immortal death : an anthropological understanding of digital afterlife in Turkey

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Immortal Death

An Anthropological Understanding of Digital Afterlife in Turkey

Nisa İrem Kırbaç 12159050 nkirbac@ku.edu.tr

Amsterdam - June 21st, 2019 MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology

Graduate School of Social Sciences University of Amsterdam

Master thesis

Supervisor: dr. C.H. (Tina) Harris

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Plagiarism Declaration

I hereby declare that this thesis meets the rules and regulations for fraud and plagiarism as set out by the Examination Committee of the MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. This thesis is entirely my own original work and all sources have been properly acknowledged.

Nisa İrem Kırbaç 20/06/2019

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Abstract

This research seeks insight into the formation and regulation of the meanings of beginnings and endings of life with the expansion of technology. In line with this, I conceptualize digital identity as an extension of an individual’s life through which regulative surveillance is achieved. Drawing on data I have collected during three months of fieldwork in Turkey, I argue that digitalization leads individuals to become subjects/objects of a never-ending vulnerability and insecurity. Individuals, while living and after death, become more vulnerable to various forms of violence and are often deprived of their right to privacy at social, commercial and legal levels. To develop an understanding of how technology extends lives and forms digital afterlives, I conducted over twenty interviews with data privacy lawyers, employees in commercial institutions, those whom I call the ‘left-behinds,’ (digital caretakers of people who have passed away), as well as acting as a participant-observer for data protection authorities and attending a funeral. Increased digitalization is not always an advantage for those who are living -and death-. I demonstrate that social media facilitates a kind of afterlife by allowing mourners to interact over death without limitations of place and time; making death More visible than is typically outlined in modernist discourse. This in turn leads chief mourners to become more vulnerable in their grief process. As death becomes a part of digital life, post-mortem privacy emerges as the concept through which I explain the way personal data becomes more ‘public’ and consequently more ‘vulnerable’ at legal, commercial and social levels when the owner of this data has died.

Keywords: Internet, Turkey, anthropology of death, digital identity, digital afterlife, post-mortem privacy, vulnerability.

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Acknowledgements

To all the lawyers, engineers, professors and left-behinds, without your assistance this thesis simply would have not been possible. I would like to express my special gratitude to all the professors and professionals for giving me their attention and time. I would like to thank all the left-behinds for their generosity and trust in sharing their most intimate feelings about losing a loved one with me.

I would like to thank my supervisor, Tina Harris, for her guidance, support, patience but most of all her generous encouragement throughout the year.

I would like to thank Olin for proofreading this thesis and offering many useful comments. I would like to thank Derin for her inspiring comments, continuing assistance but most of all for her never-ending friendship. Her support really motivated me to finish this thesis.

Finally, I would like to thank my father, brother and boyfriend. Thank you so much for being unbelievably supportive throughout my thesis process. Thank you for never getting tired of listening to me.

I want to dedicate this thesis to my mother, Şura Hatice Kırbaç, who died in 2010. You taught me a lot when you were alive, and continue to do so with your cherished memory.

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Introduction

Background

“‘I'm fine’ I remember the moment I shared these words on my Facebook wall three days after my mother's death. This post means a lot for me, as much as any Facebook post can mean for anybody. I also remember why I decided to post this. I did it not only because I was exhausted from replying to each condolence message in my private message box, but also I wanted to inform more people about myself and to be supported in some way, as this post was the last time I shared about my mother. Because the post was not directly referring to my mother’s death, it was something only those who had already heard of the situation could understand. A friend of mine, who did not know about my loss, thought that it was absurd that I made a post about my current mood and wrote a mocking comment. I remember finding this very ‘rude’ -which is meaningless- and completely removed social media from my grief process.

Following my mother’s death, responsibility became an increasingly important notion in my life even to this day-- responsibilities to my brother and father, responsibilities to my mother, and most importantly to myself. My realization of my responsibilities towards myself began about six months after I lost my mother, when I realized that everything was awful in my life. I realized that I had to move on, even though I suffered a great loss. It took me almost three years to completely - if such a thing is possible - accept my mother's death. What I became aware of at the end of this process is this: death is an extraordinary situation, and in order to accept it, one must realize the reality of death. This is only possible by fully acknowledging that the deceased is gone and we will never again be able to interact with them in a worldly sense. In addition to this, however, there is a constant effort to keep the deceased person present in this world. I believe this paradox is the greatest challenge for people who loses their closest.

Then one day somebody hacked my mother's Facebook account. Fortunately, we reported it to Facebook and closed the account. The incident was solved without any real harm, at least technically. This event did, however, bring with it a sense of violation, of personal information and privacy, that stayed with me even as the technical aspects of the issue were solved. It made me feel guilty that while I was questioning this issue a lot (death, being left behind, responsibilities towards the deceased) I had somehow overlooked the digital traces of my mother until her account was hacked. It forced me to consider what

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else about my mother had been exposed to strangers since her death, what had been held or used by them that we were not aware of? This question reminds me of my feelings when I realized that my mother read my diary. However, it took me a shorter time to realize that my mother read the diary as my mother implied that she had done so, and the page in which I had dried a flower had changed. Therefore, it is both rare and easy to recognize when someone uses your physical objects. When we think about the digital world, things gain a very different dimension. It is impossible for me to be aware of every digital trace that my mother left-- they will continue forever in different ways, everywhere” (Amsterdam, April 2019)

This is what I wrote in my notebook during my fieldwork as an answer to the question, “Why I am working on this topic?” The internet has become a part of our lives in a very short period of time. Only thirty years ago it was necessary for people to use home phones to communicate with each other. In contrast, today, from the moment we wake up in the morning we can communicate with anyone in seconds. Despite the sudden introduction of technology into our lives, people have learned how to adapt their old habits to the internet and gain new habits around these spaces. The intersection of technology and death begins at this point and evolves into two areas that are highly interrelated. Firstly, as my Facebook post shows, we do not only share our happy memories on online platforms, but also some of our mostly intimate information and feelings such as grief. This way, we can keep our communication with the other mourner, who do not necessarily share our pain, and the deceased person. Secondly due to technological limitations and capitalist and governmental authorities, it has become impossible for all of this personal information to remain ‘digital traces’ that we leave behind after we die. My attitude towards my mother's digital assets shows that despite all this, I was not as considerate as I should have been about the consequences of my technological habits. It also made me think about the rest of the Turkish society with whom I share everything. My experience reveals that all the digital assets that we acquire throughout our lives, like their physical counterparts, continue to belong to us after we die. However, no authority that has the power to use this data openly speaks about it. Consequently, the intrinsic vulnerability that people have just because they exist in the world takes a new form; people become permanently vulnerable to manipulation in many ways after they die. In this way, I hope to explore the vulnerabilities of being in the digital world, both as a mourner and as a person who has died.

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Setting

Istanbul is the city with the highest population in Turkey. The current population of Turkey is estimated to be approaching 80 million with more than 15 million people living in İstanbul (Turkish Statistical Institute 2017). This makes İstanbul the financial center of the country. Levent and Maslak are the two main financial districts in the city, both of which are home to the headquarters of the largest local and global companies, banks, and legal firms. As I will mostly focus on actors rather than places for my project, carrying out fieldwork in İstanbul strengthened my research in terms of the increased number of interlocutors; bankers and lawyers whom I could reach.

Internet usage rates are increasing rapidly in the county. Although the number of internet users is growing globally, 72% of Turkish population uses internet in their daily lives—well above the worldwide average of 57% (Kemp 2019). İstanbul has the highest percentage of computer usage and Internet access in the country (Turkish Statistical Institute 2013). Statistics show that the percentage of households with internet access is more than 60% in İstanbul, far higher than the country average (ibid). Turkish citizens use online services for social networking, shopping, banking and governmental services. Turkey, where individuals spend 7h15m of their day on the internet, is among the top 10 in the world in terms of the number of active Facebook and Instagram users (Kemp 2019). Other heavily used social media platforms are downloaded are WhatsApp, Twitter and Snapchat. Moreover, the number of citizens who use online services to buy something and access their bank accounts is increasing in the country (ibid). The number of people using mobile banking services is more than 35 million, and people use these services both for financial (i.e. money transfers and tax payments) and non-financial (i.e. credit card and loan applications) transactions (The Banks Association of Turkey 2017). Hence, the financial sector and digitalization are strongly related in Turkey, and İstanbul, being the most technologically-oriented part of the country, serves as a perfect fieldwork site to study the cultural, sociostructural, financial and legal transformations in the region through expanded use of technology in everyday life.

As the internet and technology are inevitable parts of the individuals’ everyday lives, they need protection. In Turkey, the main regulation concerning the protection of personal data is the Law on the Protection of Personal Data numbered 6698 (Official Gazette of the Republic of Turkey 2016) that was issued on April 7, 2016. Hereafter in this thesis, I will refer Turkish Personal Data Protection Law as KVKK; abbreviation of its original name, Kişisel Verilerin Korunması Kanunu. KVKK takes “Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of

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24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data” (European Parliament and of the Council 1995) as a reference. KVKK derives from European Union rules, but it does not directly correlates with the current EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Özdemir 2018). Although the EU directive that guides the KVKK was the main regulation in the union during the implementation of it in Turkey, the EU issues GDPR to replace the former directive shortly after KVKK comes into force. The Grand National Assembly of Turkey approves and enacts KVKK hurriedly, because adoption and implementation of “legislation on the protection of personal data in line with the EU standards” (European Commission 2016) is one of the five remaining requirements that Turkey needs to meet for visa-free access to the Schengen area.

When considering the historical development of the relationship between the state and citizens in Turkey, it is possible to realize that top-down practices in Turkish legal system are not new or specific to the current government. Strong state tradition and authority in Turkey date back to the Ottoman Empire. According to Kemal Karpat, the common belief that respect for state authority is reflective of public faith in the impartiality of the judiciary, while immensely popular during the early periods of the Ottoman Empire, was replaced by or transformed into a glorified image of state as a mystical entity in the 17th_{century (1996: 67). During the transition}

from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic, the bureaucrats and intellectuals considered modernity “as the ultimate goal, without regarding its content and relevance to society…With modernity, centralization became the chief characteristic of Turkish statism” (ibid).

Historically the Turkish state has always been the dominant aspect in state-citizen relations. While the dynamics remain the same, there has been a constant shift in the governing ideologies, and therefore the social structures. Consequentially to this power dynamic, the top-down legislation tradition creates a constant distance between the citizens and their legal rights. Similar to modernization, the process through which KVKK becomes the main regulation over personal data protection is a reflection of the top-down functioning of the centrally concentrated justice system in Turkey. Various contradictions stem from the tension between sociocultural values, knowledge and practices of privacy, which leads the notion of ‘digital traces’ to become too challenging for any person to fully comprehend. It is undeniable that the number of internet users is increasing exponentially over time, and therefore the same can be said about amount of online data. However, technological means are not only extensions of the activities of a living person, but also of the dead. When considering the unawareness regarding personal data and privacy in the region, the fact that people are constantly online today causes some problems

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about post-mortem privacy. ‘Digital traces of the deceased’ is a notion which comprises, on the one hand, the concept of death that has become extremely privatized in Turkey through Islamic and national laws; and on the other hand the feeling of in-betweenness inherent in online platforms.

On top of all this, because the KVKK does not cover the data of the deceased people, both the mourners and the dead people become vulnerable the digital era. Article 2 of the KVKK outlines the scope of the law:

“The provisions of this Law shall apply to natural persons whose personal data are processed as well as to natural or legal persons who process such data fully or partially through automatic means or provided that the process is a part of any data registry system, through non-automatic means” (Official Gazette of the Republic of Turkey 2016) Digital identity creation is supported by the Turkish government in various forms. However, law protects data only until the point of death. This is because Turkish law defines natural person with respect to personality that “begins at the very moment the child is fully born and ends by death” (Official Gazette of the Republic of Turkey 2001). So the digital traces that deceased people leave behind make way for a continuous interaction between the deceased and the mourners, as well as within the mourners themselves.

Dead people are affected mainly because their online personal information becomes manipulable through ignorance of their autonomy and right over their own data, which is interfered with by different actors. Furthermore, the mourners are harmed as they cannot adapt to death and mourning concepts that change shape with digitalization. Although it is crucial to highlight the socializing, democratizing and life-facilitating power and potential of the online interactions, the afterlife of digital data is not acknowledged enough in Turkey as these services mostly do not have specific regulations on their users’ accounts and data after they die. Although the case is similar in most of the other parts of the world, İstanbul is a great place to explore this term when considering the above mentioned contextual background. Higher usage of social media means more online personal data of living and death; and this positive relationship raises the issues on privacy of these data after death.

To conclude, what makes Turkey and specifically İstanbul crucial as a locus for fieldwork for this research is that in contrast to increased practices that make death more public and visible, legal, social and financial regulations, together with technological advancements, constrain digital afterlife in a particular way. Hence, when considering this background, digital afterlife and post-mortem privacy are crucial issues to explore in this field.

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Research question

Originally, the central question that guided my research was: How might an anthropological investigation of post-mortem privacy shed light on digital afterlife in İstanbul? The question that aims to identify and analyze the financial, legal and social ways of dealing with post-mortem privacy and digital afterlife in Turkey from an anthropological perspective, did not change completely. However, after observing the strong relationship between traditional and contemporary rituals regarding death, I revised the question: How does technology change rituals related to the digital traces of deceased people and how do customs and expectations of post-mortem privacy shed light on digital afterlife in İstanbul?

Theoretical framework

Privacy

For the purposes of my research, I will follow Irwin Altman’s definition of privacy as “the selective control of access to the self” (1975: 24). There are three main characteristics of privacy according to Altman’s theory (1977). Firstly, it is a dynamic and dialectic process in which individuals control their boundaries with others through opening up or closing off. Secondly, it must be optimized to accommodate the individual’s shifting needs in terms of interaction. In his words: “Crowding is a deviation from a desired level of interaction in a too much direction, and isolation is a deviation in a too little direction” (ibid: 67). Thirdly, it is a multi-mechanism which requires the use of a range of behavioral mechanisms, allowing for people to adjust their interactive circumstances to their need for privacy. For Altman, privacy is inherently paradoxical. Whereas the need of individuals to reach the optimal level of privacy through dynamic adjustment of their relations is a universal phenomena, mechanisms used to regulate privacy are culturally specific (ibid: 68). Privacy is therefore simultaneously universal and culturally determined. Following George Simmel, Graham Jones (2014) states that “secrets produce value through both the exclusion of outsiders and the inclusion of insiders” (54). Given that these are social concepts, it can be argued that the definition and spectrum of secrecy depend on the societal environment that secrecy occupies.

The long-term anthropological studies show that privacy is a social fact, and that it evolves with society, time and circumstance. The two major turning points that stand out with regards to privacy are the rise of modernism (when the body becomes private) and postmodernism (when the private becomes public). Despite postmodernism’s emergence in the 1960s as a counter-reaction to modernism with anti-modernist ideals, Sarah Michele Ford (2002) argues that there

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is no clear endpoint between these two periods, and therefore one must not consider the two to be mutually exclusive or chronologically ordered. She then interprets the relationship between the two concepts through their presence on the internet, which is a vital element of postmodernism: “Internet, is in fact an element of contemporary society in which the modern and the postmodern at times coexist and at other times are in tension” (ibid: 86).

There are various internal and external factors that shape our notions of secrecy and risk is one of these. The paradox of secrecy refers to the idea that secrecy “must be performed in order to be realized” (Herzfeld 2009:135). People do not realize the need for privacy before they actually feel the risk of the invasion of privacy. Meanwhile, “Secrecy engenders risk insofar as concealment entails the possibility of unwelcome revelation; noncirculation also creates risks of its own, such as the breakdown of social relations or cultural reproduction” (Jones 2014: 54). The literature on secrecy shows that the notion of privacy is strongly related to era and culture. When the sense of limitlessness that technological developments bring is combined with the postmodern worldview that excludes the private, the concept of privacy takes on an entirely new form. So how can this shift be understood anthropologically? How does technology impact the foundations of anthropology? This broader question will allow for the inspection of how technology, not just the internet, extends people’s lives and afterlives.

Liquid modernity

Throughout this thesis, I work with the theoretical influences of Zygmunt Bauman on postmodernity as liquid modernity, and David Lyon on liquid surveillance in the digital era. In his foreword to 2012 edition of Liquid Modernity, Bauman refers ‘liquid modernity’ as “the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty” (13). Furthermore, he addresses the pragmatic interpretation of this metaphorical conceptualization: “Why this metaphor of liquidity? Look into any encyclopedia: You will find that a liquid is a substance that cannot keep its shape for long. In terms of society, that is a revolutionary change” (Bauman 2004).

Essentially, the uniqueness of this era stems from the removal of limitations on identity creation that are imposed by modernist thought. Modernity prevents departures from norms, and therefore leaves no room for individual freedom or autonomy. In liquid modernity, instead, “unstable things are the raw building material of identities that are by necessity unstable” (Bauman 2000: 85). Digital platforms are perfect spaces for identity creation in the liquid world; they are now indispensable for individuals because they aid in the activities of daily life by removing the barriers regarding time and place. In turn, however, digital platforms “depend for

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their existence on monitoring users and selling the data to others” (Bauman and Lyon 2012: 12). So, they become spaces for the “‘liquefied’, ‘flowing’, dispersed, scattered and deregulated version [of] free-floating capitalism, marked by the disengagement and loosening of ties linking capital and labour” (Bauman 2000: 149).

The perceptions of time and space are the key figures in the transformation from heavy to liquid modernity. In the era of heavy modernity the fundamental objective is to conquer space, and accordingly time emerges as “the principal tool of power and domination” (Bauman 2000: 9). Bauman writes “Accelerated movement meant larger space, and accelerating the moves was the sole means of enlarging the space” (ibid: 112-113). Contrarily, space loses its ‘strategic value’ (ibid: 117) in light modernity. Everything moves at light speed, and as “space may be traversed, literally, in 'no time'; the difference between 'far away' and 'down here' is cancelled” (ibid). Time and space hold little significance in the capitalism of digital platforms, thereby setting the stage for capitalist expansion.

In the light of this growing instability of the world, a transformation of the power relations and disciplining tools in inevitable. Michel Foucault's articulation of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as “a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism” (Foucault 1991: 197) is characterized by ‘fixedness to the place’ (Bauman 2000: 10). Roy Boyne writes as follows: “Panoptical surveillance was formerly a model for the whole of society, Bauman’s work seems to suggest, but now its power is diminished as its context has been lost” (2000: 287). In liquid times, surveillance does not require any fixed space or the ‘mutual engagement’ (Bauman and Lyon 2012: 16) of the managers and the managed. Technology enables social structures and capital to flow efficiently over time and across space, and accordingly the power to discipline and control the liquid subjects “has become truly exterritorial” (Bauman 2000: 11). The ‘Post-Panopticon’ provides a model for today’s boundary-breaking “electronic technologies through which power is asserted” (Bauman and Lyon 2012: 10).

‘Liquid surveillance’ emerges as a post-panoptic idea that “spreads in hitherto unimaginable ways, responding to and reproducing liquidity” (ibid: 9). David Lyon asserts that in “the post-panoptical world of liquid modernity much of the personal information vacuumed so vigorously by organizations is actually made available by people using their cellphones, shopping in malls, travelling on vacation, being entertained or surfing the internet. We swipe our cards, repeat our postcodes and show our ID routinely, automatically, willingly” (ibid: 2012: 17).

New technologies through which independent individuals become “simultaneously promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote” (Bauman 2007: 6) facilitate surveillance

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and encourage tendencies to classify anything. David Lyon refers to “the classifying drive of contemporary surveillance” (2003: 13) as ‘social sorting’. As digitalization becomes an integral part of the physical world, technical authorities find ways to classify any move on the internet, from transactions to social media posts.

The beginning and endings of life

Kaufman and Morgan (2005) elaborate on how anthropological studies shed light on the historical discourses and practices of the beginnings and ends of life. Kaufman and Morgan show how, throughout history, beginnings and ends have been transformed, created and regulated life and death in line with the interests of particular cultural, political and financial authorities and technological advancements. Discussions concerning abortion, childbirth, burial practices, embryos and comatose patients demonstrate that “producing persons is an inherently social project” (ibid: 320), one that is shaped by cultural, political and financial interests. Additionally, in the contemporary era, meanings and limits of life and death are being extended through “biomedical technique together with a legitimating socio-economic and bioethical apparatus” (ibid: 330). Hence, technology and the process of defining and redefining the limits of life and death are strongly related. This relationship is twofold: On the one hand, technology extends the beginnings and ends of human life; on the other hand, various actors manage these beginnings and endings through the use of technology.

An extension of person: Digital identity

Marshall McLuhan (1964) argues that technology extends individuals’ sensory and nervous systems. McLuhan exemplifies the concept of extension, writing: “With the telephone, there occurs the extension of ear and voice that is of extra sensory perception. With television came the extension of the sense of touch or of sense interplay that even more intimately involves the entire sensorium” (ibid: 293). What follows these sensory extensions is the conscious extension that comes with network technologies. Today, “we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness” (ibid: 69). McLuhan’s discussion foresees the current media and cultural landscape. Eric Peterson (2008) writes that “Certainly my body inhabits or lies in an imaginary space, but this is not a new function brought about by computer technology and telecommunications. My body does not become transparent or disappear in weblog storytelling. Rather, weblogs draw attention to the imaginary inherent and lived by a body that is both seeing and visible, a body that simultaneously sees and sees itself seeing”. Although Peterson’s (2008)

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text does not refer to McLuhan's theories, the case undeniably embodies his work, with the blogger and his blog replacing the man and his extension, respectively.

Digital identity is “…a growing sense of another self, a notion of a self that is digitally distributed across text messages, Web pages, social networking sites, blog comments, and so on” (Graham, Gibbs and Aceti 2013: 134). The growth of digitalization in daily activities leads to the formation of digital identity as an extension of the beginnings of life (Kaufman and Morgan 2005). Paul Bernal considers online life an intrinsic component of the contemporary world, stating that “…to function fully in that life an individual needs to be able to assert an online identity” (2014: 234). In the contemporary world having a digital identity is nearly inevitable, and various anthropological works have shed light on the way this identity coupled with online socialization resemble and differ from the real world. Virtuality is an age old concept, one that has become increasingly integrated into people’s everyday lives. Tom Boellstorff acknowledges virtual worlds as “places of imagination that encompass practices of play, performance, creativity, and ritual…They draw upon physical world cultures in multiple ways yet at the same time create possibilities for the emergence of new cultures and practices. Just as in the physical world, people within virtual worlds perform and cycle through different roles and identities” (Boellstorff et al. 2012:1). Digital identity emerges as a new life form that is unique to its creator and makes itself a necessity in everyday life.

Vulnerability

Coeckelbergh (2013) considers vulnerability as an integral concept of risk, and he suggests that vulnerability affirms “the potential ‘victim’ of the risk” (7). Basically a person or a thing becomes vulnerable if “the entity is at risk” (ibid). Risk is inherent to any being in the world, and therefore human existence is essentially vulnerable as “we always already stand in relation and are engaged in the world technology” (ibid: 9). Coeckelbergh notes that the relationship between technology and risk is paradoxical: New technologies both facilitate and prolong human life so that people become less vulnerable to certain types of threats (Kaufman and Morgan 2005), but also they “always create new risks and vulnerabilities, thus transforming human vulnerability rather than substantially reducing it” (Coeckelbergh 2013: 5).

Online platforms and specifically social network sites (SNS) reveal how the public and private can fuse together on the internet. boyd and Ellison describe SNS as a “web based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and

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nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site” (2007: 211). Therefore, SNS are public spaces through which individuals share their private memories, thoughts . User-generated content created through SNS is persistent due to increased recording practices; replicable as it is easy to replicate bits more than anything; scalable since it allows for increased visibility of a larger population, and searchable thanks to search engines (boyd 2010:48). Although these characteristics make everyday life much easier in many ways, they also draw attention to the long-term and hidden influence of digitalization on privacy. The internet inhibits users from seeing the risks and comprehending how digitalization may violate users due to its limitless nature.

From Bauman’s perspective, liquification of the social structures leads the way for new forms of vulnerabilities to emerge, and social media platforms are the places where these vulnerabilities become clearly visible. The modern notion of privacy has lost its meaning in today's liquid society, and is replaced by the illusional state generated by online platforms. In his interview with Ricardo de Querol, Bauman comments on this illusional state: “You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age…Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap.” (de Querol 2016). Social media allows individuals to construct their own identity and community as a ‘DIY job’ (Bauman and Lyon 2012: 34), and silently make money through creating an illusional a sense of belonging. Vulnerability changes shape, but in any case it follows individuals throughout their lives. Coeckelbergh refers this process as follows: “[I]t first appears that our vulnerability diminishes, but then soon we discover new vulnerabilities, or, rather, we experience that our vulnerability has not diminished but is merely modified, transformed—if not increased” (ibid: 81). Coeckelbergh is concerned with new forms of risk, notably those posed by society's high dependence on technology, writing, “[O]ur own minds and bodies, increasingly safe from biological viruses, are extended via the Internet and in this way become vulnerable to virtual viruses, system breakdowns, and other ICT ‘security’ problems…Moreover, we relate to others and to ourselves through the medium of technology, which has transformed the vulnerability we experience in these relationships.” (ibid: 73).

SNS are one of the ways through which people become vulnerable by extending themselves. Following this, in the next section, I will focus on the new vulnerabilities that emerge from ‘being in the digital world’.

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An extension of death: Digital afterlife

Digital afterlife refers to “the persistence of digital user data after the user has passed away” (Bollmer 2013: 143). Digital traces of people after they die remain untouched due to various limitations. Digital environments and technological developments that lead digital identity to emerge as a new life form are not capable of determining the difference between the data belonging to a person who is dead and one who is alive, and therefore the data of the deceased may remain indefinitely on the internet. As Graham, Gibbs and Aceti (2013) assert “…even after death, people’s lives are extended, prolonged, and ultimately changed in the present, future, and in history through new circulations, repetitions, and recontextualizations” (133). The process that starts with the creation of a digital identity and continues after the death of the creator is shaped by external factors such as legal, financial and social interests. The connection between the user and his/her online data is tentative and needs active management to be maintained (Bollmer 2013: 143). Church (2013) states that “When the identity of the living creator shifts from mortal to post mortal, the cosmic realities that govern temporal space change. However, the digital identity maintains itself, still fluid and present to the community”. New technologies do not only extend sensory and cognitive capabilities, but also lifetimes.

Towards a more public death

Following the traces of digital afterlife, I will explore Tony Walter’s theorization of death. In his work, Tony Walter (1994) proposes three historical approaches to death by considering the social, bodily and authority contexts around individuals’ experiences of death and dying. Firstly, in traditional society, where death and death-related practices are experienced in public within a community due to geographical and social factors, God was the main authority behind death. Secondly, Walter characterizes modern death with the split between the public and private due to increased bureaucratic control over death through biomedical technologies and “the exclusion of personal feeling from the public sphere” (ibid: 52). In the modern era, death was avoided in conversations and rituals around death were mostly maintained in the private sphere. Thirdly, since the mid twentieth century, there have been many rapid developments in information technology and mass transportation that influence the neo-modern understanding of death. Neo-modernism “conflates the public and the private: the private feelings of the dying and bereaved become the concern of the professional” (ibid: 41).

It is possible to see the traces of Walter’s (1994) theory in Turkey. Elisabetta Costa’s studies on social media use in Mardin, a town in southeast Turkey reveal that today Turkish people “post hundreds of photos of themselves that were previously kept strictly outside of the public

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gaze, and some of these images portray moments from their intimate, personal and domestic lives” (2016: 52). This transformation is criticized by some of the locals of the region and led them to “adopt different strategies to limit and contain the display of their personal and private life, the overall outcome has been the entry of the private into the new online public space” (ibid: 52). Hence, discourses and practices around digital property is a contradictory point in Turkey. Following this, although traditional mourning lasts for 40 days in the region (Cihan 2006; Keskin 2003), Gönden and Güzel (2017) reveal how social media, as an inevitable part of our lives, contradicts with traditional societal norms. In their words, the contradictions of contemporary existence “can be seen in [social media] posts about death, funeral, and mourning which are crucial in Turkish culture” (116).

Online memorialization

In this section, I will take on the growing trend of online memorialization in relation to Walter’s conceptualization of neoliberal death that turns private into public. Hallam, Hockey and Howarth (1999) assert that the people who are left behind after someone dies have direct responsibility for the afterlife of the dead, through praying, caring for the grave and taking care of the legacy. Expansion of social interaction through online platforms have transformed the ways afterlife is experienced and the responsibilities are fulfilled by the left-behinds in the neo-modern era. Following the greater emphasis on the self, private experience, practices and discourses around death are now more public, and visible, majorly by the means of media and technology (Walter 1994; Walter et al. 1995).

In the contemporary world, social media platforms and various websites facilitate the way death becomes public and visible, as they function in a similar way to traditional graveyards. They allow left-behinds to fulfil their responsibilities to honor the dead and overcome their personal mourning processes. People deal with their loss on online platforms by sharing their messages and prayers towards the death (Carroll and Landry 2010; Roberts and Vidal 2000; Brubaker, Hayes and Dourish 2013). Roberts and Vidal (2000) divide the Web memorial themes into eight categories: “standard obituary, celebration/storytelling, detailing grief/missing, guilt, focusing on death circumstances, philosophical musings about life and death, religious interpretations, and other” (531). Consequently, the expansion of possibilities to grieve leads to an increased emphasis on death through memorialization.

In his book Death and the Right Hand, Robert Hertz (1960) treats the corpse as a social entity, besides being a biological entity and focuses on the moral obligations around death. Due to its social status, death is strongly related to collectivities and societal bonds. Collective

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consciousness make sense of death as a temporary exclusion at the beginning, and consequently, mourning is “the necessary participation of the living in the mortuary state of their relative” (ibid: 86). This mortuary state of the deceased is problematic in the contemporary era because in contrast to traditional, non-digital artifacts, digital content does not decay over time “thereby expanding the reach of mourning and memorializing” (Brubaker et al. 2013: 158). Today, Facebook and various websites serve as digital cemeteries through facilitating personal mourning process and collective experience of death. For Nansen, Arnold, Gibbs and Kohn (2014), “The restless dead are both emerging through these hybrid interfaces of the digital and the physical, materialized in more lively forms of media and exhumed within a network of social and technical connections previously delimited by cemetery geography and physical inscription in stone” (1). Hence, the sensory and cognitive extension of human life that accompanies the digital age leads to a reinterpretation of Hertz’s conceptualizations of mourning and end the mortuary state in relation to Walter’s neoliberal death.

In the case of Turkey, a study reveals the reasons behind mourning as sadness and anguish; “mourning was a mechanism by which to cope with sorrow, but did not seem to hinder daily life activities” (Bahar, Beşer, Ersin, Kıssal and Aydoğdu 2012). It is possible to say that mourning does not hinder daily activities but become a part of them. Gönden and Güzel (2017) give the example of emoji usage to express their death related feelings and state that emojis becoming common symbols to express personal feelings is parodical.

Our intrinsic vulnerabilities are easily exploited by social media. Bauman explains this during his interview with Feona Attwood: “Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook as you know, has made 50 billion on the stock exchange, on what? On our fear of loneliness. The success of Facebook is very simple. There’s no secret in that. Mark Zuckerberg put his finger on the gold mine. And the gold mine was people’s fear of being abandoned. Facebook is the way in which in spite of being lonely, we are connected” (Attwood:2018:135). Grieving after losing a loved one is an emotional process, and consequently it draws the capitalist authorities’ attention to its monetary value.

Post-mortem privacy: Invisible afterlife

To be able to connect the macro and the micro level of theory, the conceptual framework must reach beyond the concept of post-mortem privacy and its management. Aesthetics is one of the most important differences between traditional and digital forms of graves. As digital platforms do not allow conventional aesthetics associated with memorials, “…the photographs and written text by the deceased create a new brand of digital sublimity for the bereaved. Thus, the

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digital landscape is adorned with its own unique aesthetic” (Church: 2013: 187). Changing practices concerning death and afterlife at the social level increase the visibility of deceased people by allowing their online contacts to memorialize them and post and repost digital traces of the deceased. This change in the aesthetics of graves and death-related practices in the digital era raise another branch of issues related to post-mortem privacy.

Gibson explains the way contemporary practices around digital afterlife violate post-mortem privacy as “…public space through roadside memorials and internet archives are now sites where individual life and death is recorded for posterity. While access and use of these spaces might signify the growing democratization of public forms of grief, remembrance and memorialization, they are also signs of the ascendency of the individual to claim the value of its specific life history and existence beyond traditional public and private rites/sites of mourning and remembrance” (2007:422). Hence, neo-liberal death, which is mainly based on private feelings becoming public issues, is becoming problematic in the digital age in the sense that they challenge the essential bond between the individual and their own online creations.

Regulation of digital afterlife

Bernal (2014:234) mentions that the right to online identity has three levels: “the right to create an online identity, the right to assert that online identity and the right to protect that online identity”. Thus, he recognizes the right of the user to control their online data and identity. Extending Bernal’s ideas on online identity, Harbinja (2017:26) defines post-mortem privacy as “the right of a person to preserve and control what becomes of his or her reputation, dignity, integrity, secrets or memory after death” and elaborates on digital post-mortem privacy through theories of autonomy. Building on the ideas and conceptions of various classical and contemporary theorists, Harbinja asserts that “autonomy should in principle transcend death, allowing individuals to control their privacy/identity/ personal data post-mortem” (ibid: 30) and establishes an analogy between controlling digital afterlife and the concept of testamentary freedom. Hence, she advocates the need for regulations concerning digital afterlife and post-mortem privacy.

Lessig (1999) elaborates on the changes in regulatory processes concerning property with technological expansion. In his words “the right is protected to the extent that laws (and norms) support it, and it is threatened to the extent that technology makes it easy to copy” (ibid: 171). Law, norms, code, and the market are four actors behind the management of property and they “interact as they regulate” (340). Law regulates entities by allowing and permitting certain behaviors. Individuals “certainly feel their freedom regulated, even if only rarely by the law”

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(ibid: 122). Norms are mostly socially determined ‘rules’ that regulate entities. The market regulates and constrains entities in favor of financial authorities and opportunities. Finally, Lessig introduces code, “the instructions embedded in the software or hardware that makes cyberspace what it is”, as the fourth regulatory power that “could be a significant threat to a wide range of liberties, and we don’t yet understand how best to control it” (ibid: 136). It is important to note that these factors that regulate and constrain property and behavior are not independent from each other.

In the neoliberal era, technological advancements and focus on death as a self-journey give rise to public practices of mourning and grief (Walter 1994). On one hand, mourning, which was supposed as a process within society to get used to the absence of the deceased (Hertz 1960) leads death to be visible in public sense. on the other, it raises issues about privacy of digital traces.

Methodology

I conducted semi-structured interviews ranging from thirty minutes to three hours with six individuals (3 men and 3 women) who work in the legal field. These people were graduate students of law, data protection lawyers and law professors between the ages of 24 and 45. All of them have been registered with Istanbul Bar Association and had at least a master's degree, except for one law student in the US. Through the interviews I learned more about the legal history of privacy and current practices on personal data protection in Turkey. In this way, they helped me get to the root of the problem concerning privacy and personal data.

I conducted semi-structured interviews with four men between the ages of 25 and 35 who work in the commercial field. Interlocutors were employed as data scientists and research and development engineers in various business industries such as e-commerce, banking and telecommunications. These narratives allowed for a deeper understanding of the world of algorithms and a greater awareness of the unlimited possibilities of surveillance and control in the digital age.

A basic definition of an algorithm is “a sequence of instructions telling a computer what to do” (Domingos:2015:1). However, attributing a particular meaning to an algorithm prior to entering the field may lead anthropologists to overlook the emergence of the algorithm as an emic term that gains meaning only through its use within a particular professional culture (Seaver:2017:7). During my interviews with the engineers, I adopted an ‘algorithms as culture’ approach, and I draw specifically upon Nick Seaver’s framing of algorithm-culture relationship, which defines algorithms as objects that are “culturally enacted by the practices people use to engage with

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them” (ibid:5). Therefore, I attempted to answer three questions he poses to ethnographers: “How their [algorithmic systems’] secrecy is constituted in practice?” “What kinds of information are so important that they must be kept secret?” and “What kinds of information are so important that they must be widely known?” (ibid:7).

The majority of approaches regard interviews as unreliable, since they “merely reflect what people say, not what they do” (Seaver:2017:8). In contrast, interviews were crucial for my fieldwork as more than half of the interlocutors were working in corporate offices or universities, and therefore were familiar with the ‘interview culture’ (Hockey:2002). For the purposes of my fieldwork, I regard the interviews not as artificially-created situations that “extract people from the flow of everyday life”, but rather as part of their lives (Seaver:2017:8). To understand beliefs about responsibilities towards death and digital legacy among Turkish people, I conducted unstructured and semi-structured interviews with five women left-behinds between the ages of 25 and 50. By left-behinds, I mean the individuals who somehow communicated with the digital traces of their loved ones after his or her death. The interlocutors were family members, partners and friends of five deceased people (2 men, 3 women) who had died of various causes, including car accident, bullet wound, heart attack and lung cancer. Their ages at the time of their death range between 20 to 55 years. The interviews were excellent, full of inside information regarding the role of social media and digital identities in grief processes. Two of the interviews were conducted in Izmir, a city on Turkey’s Aegean coast. All of the other interviews were conducted in different places in Istanbul, mostly at quiet cafés, or by request at interlocutors’ offices. I was more comfortable with semi-structured interviews throughout the research. In the beginning, they helped me to develop a comprehensive understanding of the topic. Additionally, it was better to have several already-prepared questions before talking to professionals such as lawyers, professors and engineers.

All except four of the interviews were audio recorded after receiving permission from the interlocutors. All of the interviews were conducted in Turkish, except for Teri’s, as he told me that he was more comfortable with English. I then transcribed and translated the interviews from Turkish to English. Maintaining the fidelity of my interlocutors’ words proved to be a challenge, because the interviews often involved complex region-specific notions deeply rooted in the cultural, sociological, and historical realities of Turkey.

In addition to interviews, I spent time at two collective events as participant observer. Firstly, I attended the 2nd Personal Data Protection Symposium on February 7. I was there as a participant observer; I took notes during the talks, met new people and observed how those

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people interact with each other. I obtained a list of possible interlocutors who are mostly professionals of the topic. Moreover, being there allowed me to become acquainted with various perspectives and discussions around privacy and personal data, especially at the legal level. I conducted my second participant observation in my grandfather’s funeral. As grief period is seven days in Islam, I had chance to participate in different rituals that helped me understand death in Turkish culture. In this time, I participated in and observed the gathering at the house of the deceased, prayer in the mosque, and the burial ceremony at the cemetery. This event was puzzling for me in two ways. Firstly, it was methodologically insightful as it was important for me to find the balance between being a participant and observing at the same time. I was, after all, a subject of the event - a left behind - yet even through such a personal experience, I was compelled to integrate the insights I gathered into this research. In this case, I was my own interlocutor. It was also theoretically insightful because I had the chance to explore the similarities and differences between death in real life and death in digital life.

Since death is a sensitive topic, I paid extra attention to protecting the rights, cultural values, and vulnerabilities of the interlocutors. All names and other identifying characteristics of the interlocutors, the organizations, and the deceased people are concealed. The given names and surnames are all pseudonyms to protect the interlocutors’ identities. I decided on the names through a random Turkish name generator tool. Additionally, privacy-related issues are treated confidentially by the organizations, and so I took care to comply with their policies. The sensitivity of the topic increased and became more apparent during the interviews with the left-behinds. In that sense, I explained the research to the participants in detail in order to ensure that they understood the limits of confidentiality. I chose cases where the loss had occurred between 4 to 8 years prior to the time of the interviews. It was important to keep some distance from the interlocutors and to strike the right balance between remaining silent and interrupting during the interviews in order to avoid any emotional harm towards the left-behinds. I have also been careful with the information of dead people so as not to violate their post-mortem privacy. Outline

In this study, I will first identify key concepts such as digital assets and digital afterlife, to ascertain how practices involving online personal data have become extensions of real life. I will also provide a legal and financial framework through which online platforms are regulated in Turkey, with a focus on data privacy and online surveillance. Elaborating on how these platforms are incorporating interactive customs from real life, Chapter 3 will focus on how death and mourning move into the digital sphere. Traditional funeral and mourning processes

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will be compared to online practices, revealing the extent to which these customs are preserved or changed during digitalization. Concepts such as sequestration, spatial and temporal limitations, and online communities will be discussed in relation to arising discussions about privacy. In the context of data privacy, Chapter 4 will focus on how the deceased leave a digital trail that falls into a data-ownership purgatory, and how the lack of regulations about digital afterlife can be beneficial for companies which collect and capitalize on user data. At the end of these chapters, the study will conclude by mapping out the advantages and disadvantages of the digitalization process, remarking its intertwinement with death, a universal but also inarguably cultural concept.

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Chapter 2: Becoming digital

Technology as extensions of human faculties

Digitalization is a crucial part of human life in Turkey. Internet usage rates are increasing rapidly in the country. Technology has various advantages, such as facilitating communication, both between individuals, and between individuals and businesses. The following are two excerpts from two interviews that exemplify how communication and commerce become easier with technology and how technology removes barriers regarding place and time.

“Because in the end these data collection services have improved our lives in many ways. It is how you find out about the opportunities around the world, it is how we travel, it is how I make friends, it is how I keep in touch with friends, make business decisions and things like this. But we need balance. And balance is the hardest thing we can obtain anywhere” (Teri, Istanbul, January 2019)

“The advantage is that it offers easy access to the companies. Instead of calling or going to the ATM and spending hours, you can do whatever you want right away. For instance if you want to top-up your phone, you can do it online in a click. You can turn the TV channel over without leaving your seat. I mean, these all come together with digitalization. You're not home anymore, but you can turn on the air conditioner. Remote management is a part of what we call Industry 4.0. remote management” (Taha, Istanbul, February 2019)

As Teri’s and Taha’s reflections reveal, technology improves lives as they become a prominent part of everyday. Individuals use technology for almost everything, because the internet allows ‘space-time compression’, through speeding up the pace of life and bringing the whole world closer together (Ford: 2002: 91). Consequently, technology extends individuals sensory and nervous system, and consciousness (e.g. McLuhan: 1964).

Extension of lives through the internet, by adding to the ‘beginnings and ends of life’ (Kaufman and Morgan: 2005) is possible. This may happen in two ways. Firstly, individuals extend themselves through providing information about themselves on the internet. However, by means of internet, individuals do not only extend themselves, but also any other social entity with which they interact through online platforms. Hence, social actors such as our social media connections have a role in individuals’ processes of digital identity creation. Digitalization, both, strengthens the real-life relationships, and, provides an environment through which

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completely new types of relationships can be established. Besides the social media interactions which are usually mutual, others may extend one’s life and death, either by posting after the deceased or posting about prenatal events. The internet enables these extensions by allowing people to act in behalf of others, regardless of the loss of individuals’ autonomy.

Technology becomes an inevitable part of everyday life -and death- and leads individuals to create new identities for themselves. However, ‘being-in-the-world is always a being-at-risk’ (Coeckelbergh:2013:9), and this makes any person who has been on the internet in any way at any point his life ‘at risk’. The next section is about what I mean by risks and vulnerabilities of the online world.

Inherently vulnerable

Online platforms are perceived as independent from previous understandings of public and private spaces. That means that “technology provides a forum for rituals otherwise performed in private, non-mediated environments” (Kern, Forman and Gil-Egui:2013:3). Online platforms give a magical feeling that the users are in a special place where the private and public are fused. This magical feeling, on the one hand, leads the individuals to use technology more, but on the other hand, it leads to concerns regarding privacy. Teri reflects on the inherent ambiguity of online platforms that make them dangerous:

“N: Do you think that people are aware of the possible dangers? Do you think people are aware of the importance of the digital data and protection of it?

No, I don’t think so. And one reason they are not aware of it is because they don’t understand the consequences of doing things online. It is very easy to just go online and do things, and when you wake up tomorrow, nothing really happens. But what this data will mean one year from now, five years from now, how companies use your data to convince you to do things is something we need to look at. And what people need to do is track record of what they search…And also people are not aware because they are not aware of how much protection they deserve. So for example if I write something online, usually people will assume ‘oh I wrote it online. So it is for the public’. Actually it is not. As soon as you write it online it is still yours. If someone copies that without your permission, you have the right to say ‘I want you to pay me for this or I want you to stop putting this online’. People are not aware that they have the right for more protection than they think. Usually they just assume ‘I put it online or someone else puts it online, so I can just take it or download it’. No you can’t! You should know that it is still your property, it is still their property, it is still that concept, it is property. It is all

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the same as before the internet. So if we told people how important this is, and how much protection they have, they will be more aware and I think more people should be educated about this issue” (Teri, Istanbul, January 2019)

Today information is more likely to be lost or used for unknown purposes, hence they are more pervasive (Walter:2018). When Teri mentions the difficulty of understanding the consequences of online actions, he draws attention to the long-term and hidden influence of digitalization on privacy. In addition to the inherent vulnerability of the internet, contemporary technological and legislative practices engender crucial risks. In light of this, the following section will discuss the financial motivations of today’s capitalist powers.

The digital book of deeds

Visibility appears as a problematic notion when considering the importance given to digitalization and its widespread use in everyday life. Visibility opens doors to new techniques for monitoring, and the rise of Big Data completely changes the power relations between individuals and institutions. According to Lyon (2002), to understand the term surveillance, it is important to be able to analyze it in historical context by comparing today’s applications to the Panopticon. The Panopticon was first mentioned by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. It is actually an architectural model in which there is a tower in the center surrounded by cells, with people who needs to be watched by the person standing on the tower. Foucault and Rabinow (1984) emphasize that the significance of this model is that it makes the power visible but also unverifiable (210). Even though people do not exactly know when they are surveilled and even if they are really being surveilled or not, they pay attention to their behaviors. Thus, it is both a real architectural design and a God-like metaphor. However, the concept of the Panopticon is limited in its ability to explain today’s surveillance practices. In the digital era, power is fluid and ‘exterritorial’ rather than being fixed. Canberk works as a data engineer at Yadeo1_{, one of the leading e-commerce companies in Turkey. He reflects on}

the power that comes with the ability to control and understand Big Data:

“For me, you're just a point on the internet... I have the power to manipulate all your thoughts. If one has the data, they can control everything, and Google opens everything to us. That's how we can collect everything[...]In the digital world, we can be manipulated very easily” (Canberk, Istanbul, January 2019)

1_Pseudonym

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Canberk speaks up about the excessive power given to the capitalists enterprises through their ability to control mass amounts of data. This does not match Foucault’s observations of panoptic practices in the modern era before the introduction of the internet. In contrast to modern surveillance techniques, which are only effective in fixed places, today’s ‘post-panoptic’ (Bauman:2000; Bauman and Lyon:2012) surveillance systems are so advanced that they can trace any move online in a few seconds, regardless of physical structures or locations. Big Data characterizes today’s surveillance. Drawing on a number of sources, Rob Kitchin (2014: 262) summarizes the key features of big data: “huge volume, consisting of terabytes or petabytes of data; high velocity, being created in or near real time; extensive variety, both structured and unstructured; exhaustive in scope, striving to capture entire populations of systems; fine-grained resolution, aiming at maximum detail, while being indexical in identification; relational, with common fields that enable the conjoining of different data-sets; flexible, with traits of extensionality (easily adding new fields) and scalability (the potential to expand rapidly)” (as cited in Lyon: 2014: 5). Erberk works as a research and development engineer at a bank in Turkey, and therefore has considerable knowledge and experience with Big Data. The explanation that Erberk provides for big data corresponds with Kitchin’s definition:

“There is one ambiguity regarding the definition of big data that needs to be clarified. Big Data isn't just about the volume of the data. Yes, there should be a large amount of data but not every large amount of data is the Big Data…What happens with Big Data is when you have so big data that you can’t find enough space to store it all or your computer can’t run it, so you can't manage it in the existing system and need another way to do that. Big Data is actually this methodology. We call this power Big Data” (Erberk, Istanbul, March 2019)

More precisely, Big Data is the name given to the methodology used to manage large data sets. One may have a large data set, but this is not Big Data if they insist on using conventional ways to deal with it. Thus the crucial question to ask at this point is about the tools and mechanisms that make companies that powerful in managing personal data. Technological development allows personal information in codes to become meaningful through collection, categorization and analysis. Digital space removes limitations of the offline world regarding the amount of data collected from individuals and paves the way for post-panoptic surveillance. Kerim is a law professor specialized in data-privacy in Turkey. He draws an analogy between the mass amount of personal data and a Book of Deeds to emphasize the limitless capacity of Big Data:

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“On the one hand, there are big companies that write your deeds... When you ask Google to show your personal data, it can tell you everything. What did you look for, what did you watch on YouTube, what did you eat, what did you drink? It knows everything” (Kerim, Istanbul, February 2019)

The concept of book of deed has an important meaning in Islamic tradition. It is the book in which the rewards and sins of a person are written by angels during an individual’s lifetime. According to Islamic belief each individual will receive their book of deeds on the Day of Judgement. The Quran describes this as follows: “This Day you shall be recompensed for what you used to do. This Our Record speaks about you with truth. Verily, We were recording what you used to do (i.e. Our angels used to record your deeds)” (al-Jaathiyah 45:29). Much like the angels charged by God to constantly record individuals, capitalist authorities eagerly develop new algorithms and techniques to monitor, manipulate and sort their clients. Moreover, they are as invisible as the angels. This metaphor reveals the post-panoptic power granted to what Kerim refers as ‘big companies’ in the contemporary world.

Personal data is everywhere and new technologies to manipulate this data are being developed each and every second. Collection of any personal data, even online conversations is the first step of Big Data methodology, because the machine learning algorithm needs to have enough samples to learn how to understand human behavior. Categorization comes after collecting the data. “You're a point in the digital world for me. But a point with features” says Canberk. These features makes us meaningful in the digital world, especially when it comes to categorization. Codes are “the invisible doors that permit access to or exclude from participation in a multitude of events, experiences, and processes” (Lyon:2013:13), therefore, directly or indirectly influencing the decisions of online users. Canberk reflects on this notion of ‘social sorting’ and show how online data is categorized both within and between the limits of the already established social stigmas:

“So I worked in a company where we were profiling the users. What kind of news are they reading? Are they reading economics? Are they reading gossip pages? The company can analyze all of these, separate people into different segments... For example, if someone reads economics, we considered is as an upper segment and show them the BMW ads...Or if someone reads the gossip pages we show him/her Toyota ads. So we're separating everything” (Canberk, Istanbul, January 2019)

The information that is constantly monitored and categorized by companies is not limited to information the users intentionally provide. As Canberk says, any online action, including

Immortal death : an anthropological understanding of digital afterlife in Turkey

Immortal Death

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 2: Becoming digital