Digitizing Desires: Immobile Mobility and Social Media in Southeast Turkey

This chapter is an ethnographic exploration of the mediated practices of young homebound women who escape into the place of social media to create and maintain new forms of social relationships that they cannot have offline. In Mardin, a medium-sized town in southeast Turkey, young Muslim women from conservative families commonly use social media to engage in personal communications and interactions with strangers, friends, and sweethearts that they never meet face to face. I define this movement from offline to online, ‘immobile mobility’ (see also Wallis 2011; 2013 and Ureta 2004). This concept captures the (im)mobility from the offline physical place of the home to the online digital place of social media, and also the human agency enacted through this movement. The mobility away from the constraints imposed by social norms ruling offline relationships takes place together with the reproduction of the public normative understandings of social and family relations. Online socialities do not challenge or transform social norms, but are rather a way to actively inhabit the social restrictions that limit women’s lives. This paper shows that a ‘mobile socialities’ approach allows us to shed light on questions of human agency, which have been at the core of social science’s concerns for many decades.