Narratives Through Turkish Perspective

Narratives are the spoken and visual text made use of in leisure time. It should be discussed if the modern people have more leisure time than the people of the past times or not. Yet, the statistics show us that they really spend some time for the narratives. The research show us the ordinary people spend most of their time for talking about the ‘others’, thinking about the ‘others’ as well as comparing and contrasting the ‘self’ with the others. Narratives are important in this sense since they provide enough information and setting to exemplify the others as much as possible. The ordinary people are spending their time mostly with the media and new media. The people might have more friends on their networks rather than real life situations. They correspond with their social media friends in the far end of the world more than their actual neighbors. Thus, the narratives provided through the media bring us more neighbors and acquaintances to observe, to model, to love and hate. Europe is becoming an interesting space to discover through the media. The reality and the reality reflected through the media are sometimes contradictory to each other. Economic, Social and Global issues play an important role in shaping the concepts such as Culture, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Religion. The values of the past and future times are also questioned again and again. Almost all values are ‘under restoration’. With the new technology, with the new perceptions of the past and present we’re shaping the future values. In this case, it is not important how much we value the values; it is important 14 how we would like to be seen with our values. Since it is a visual world we consume and give importance more than anything else, the visual values are becoming more effective than the others. If the values cannot be visualized these need to vanish throughout the time. On one hand, there are more and more regulations to maintain the equality and democracy among people but on the other hand, we have the regional, national and international news, media full of all kind of made up visuals and other texts representing all kinds of unethical applications and types of discrimination. The meaning derived from all these texts would be depending on how they are narrated and how the meanings attributed to these texts were interpreted. This book discusses if there are ‘some standards’ regarding the narrative concepts or not, and how these are established. During the research most of the prominent and effective serials and films of the country were chosen. The press and news regarding the transfer for interpretations were followed for a certain period requiring the number of the headlines were listed to see how much place such news cover throughout the whole media. University students or specialists were also questioned regarding their perceptions of the searched concepts if they notice the news or not and to what extend. The book discusses the main concerns regarding the perspectives about narrations in general about the current local and global issues through a qualitative and quantitative basis. We hope that the book would be helpful for those who would like concentrate on narratives for their research and for those who would like to know more about Turkish narratives and the values attributed to them. Nilüfer Pembecioğlu - 2013