The historicity of technological attachments and engagements: The case of Turkish telephony

Introduction

In this study, I am interested in exploring, within the Turkish context, the historicity of technological attachments and engagements, where individualized technologies are imagined and practised as forms of symbolic power. From old telephony to mobile technologies, I argue that technologies have taken the form of symbolic power, in the sense that technologies function as structuring agents of social distinctions and negotiations of dispositions within the social structure. The symbolic power of technologies, in this article, does not simply refer to the representational or display value of individualized technologies that express a modern lifestyle or a refined taste of the user. Instead, it describes a wider meaning structure, where technologies take up the form of empowering resource that constitutes, maintains and structures social relations, distinctions and hierarchies (see Bourdieu, 1989 and also Sterne 2003 for Bourdieun analysis of technology culture). As such, technologies are also imagined to be forceful agents to alter the existing social reality and hierarchies.

The mania for digital, personal and mobile technologies in non-Western modernities is related to ‘globalization from below’ (Alhassan, 2004), to ‘recycling modernity’ (Sundaram, 2008), to the production of alternative medial and cognitive practices ranged against authoritarian political regimes and state-run synopticism (Tüfekçi and Wilson, 2012; Rafael, 2003). While these works generally focus on the contemporary non-West, where the liberalization of the technoscape has led to the emergence of user-generated communicative ecologies, the majority of the critical historical research on media and technologies documents the historicity of technological practices in Western contexts (Marvin, 1988). The historical research shows that contemporary techniques of listening, visualizing, imagining, observing, documenting and sharing information with others are learned skills shaped through historical relations with former technologies/tools in the Western world (Crary, 1999). Disciplines such as media archaeology also claim that both the discourses and the machineries of ‘new media’ technologies are dissociable from the past in the sense that the inclusion of dead, forgotten, and neglected media has contributed to the making of ‘new’ technologies (Huhtamo and Parikka, 2011). In this regard, these disciplines show how seemingly dead media are in fact undead, ‘living’ in the machineries of new technologies. In this study, I offer an archaeology of technological practices in Turkey, with a particular focus on the social history of Turkish telephony, in order to show the historicity of technological engagements and attachments in the contemporary technological field. The new media era is not an all-encompassing and timeless realm: it has a history and one which is not limited to the history of the invention, design, and production of the materials, machines, and engineering projects of the West. Rather, the history of the technologies that inform the contemporary technological world must be extended to include the analysis of how technologies influence different societies in different ways and how these technologies are reshaped and redefined through their very multiplicities, having emerged from the non-West.

I particularly focus on the social history of telephony in Turkey, primarily because the telephone, as an individualized sound technology, blurs the boundaries of public and private lives, thereby opening up the possibility of a relational analysis of personal and collective relations revolving around the consumption of technology. The telephone was first introduced in Turkey as a commercial service provided by an internationally owned company, and then, after the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, it was nationalized as an apparatus of the modernizing state and remained a state service until the mid-2000s. Particularly, within the years between the mid-1940s and the 1980s, the state remained unable to link the wider population into telephony despite continuous public demand. As a non-ubiquitous object whose possession and use in private spaces were limited to privileged segments of society, the telephone has become a cultural currency. Ownership by some and non-ownership by others forcefully deepened social distinctions, shaping the technological practices and thus coming to function in such a way as to determine the sense of one’s place, as well as the place of others, within wider social relations. I also suggest that the history of telephony and its associated resentments, pleasures and practices inform the collective appetite for technological novelties, such as mobile technologies, which became extremely popular shortly after they were introduced in the mid-1990s as a technology of communication whose use or ownership did not require the approval of state authorities.

Methodology

I use two domains of resources for my research: the official professional history (histories that were written and legitimized by state institutions, museums, technical journals and newspapers) and popular memory of the old telephony. I present ‘readings’ drawn from archival research into representations of the telephone in state documents such as the State Developmental Planning Reports (from the 1960s onwards), records of parliamentary debates (throughout the history of Turkish Republic until the 1990s) and in the popular mainstream press of the period between 1940s and the 1970s such as Cumhuriyet (a daily that has historically associated with republican and secularist state ideology), Hürriyet (a popular daily that could be considered to be a representative of the central right) and Milliyet (a mainstream daily that was associated with the central-left within that period). While the archival research will present the ways in which the state officials and mainstream media considered the telephone technology as a state apparatus of modernization, memory of the users/non-users and owners/non-owners of telephony in the recent past will shed light on the role of old telephony in social practices and social relations.

The memories of users and non-users with telephony were collected through oral history research that was conducted between 2011 and 2013 in four different cities of Turkey: Istanbul, the country’s largest city, which was once the Ottoman capital and which has always received the largest inflows of migration, both foreign and domestic; Ankara, the current capital of the Republic of Turkey; Diyarbakır, the city with the largest Kurdish population; and Kayseri, one of the major strongholds of Islamic conservatism in the country. In all, 120 interviewees (60 were women) who were above the age of 50 years were selected on the basis of their political identities (secularists, Islamists, Kurds, Turks – these are the main four enclaves based on identity politics in contemporary Turkey (see Esmer’s research in 2012)) and class status (while majority of the sample currently belong to the middle class, they had a history of migration and social mobility from economic peripheries to the central dispositions).

Although popular memory does not offer an ‘objective’ story of how people have once imagined and engaged with technologies in the previous periods of their lifetimes, it allows us to come closer to an understanding of the play between past and present in personal narratives of technological engagements. The reconstruction or remembrance of the past is not independent of perceptions of the present. Nor is it independent from the dominant perceptions of history, largely shaped by the state and the institutions’ narratives of the past (see Spigel, 1995). However, situating a historical project addressing the symbolic power of technologies in Turkey within the dialectical relations between official history and popular memory offers the possibility of understanding how macro-policies and discourses, on one hand, and memories of people, on the other, feed into, as well as conflict with, each other.

The institutionalization of telephony as a ‘failing’ state service

There is a new mentality in the country that knows the significance of railways and telecommunications services for the development of a country and a nation. (Cumhuriyet, 1935a: 7)

The telephone is still conceived of as a luxury object in our society. We need to change this. Our nation needs to be enlightened regarding the value of contemporary technologies. (Cumhuriyet, 1935b: 3)

The above observations were made by Ali Çetinkaya, who was the Minister of Public Works in the 1930s of Turkey, which was still a very young establishment that was founded in the 1920s, upon the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The ‘new mentality’ of the country that he was proudly announcing implied a necessary break with the Ottoman past, which had become a symbol of a lethargic mentality that had failed to understand and adjust to the changing conditions of nationalism, modernity and capitalism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Although there was no revolutionary theory behind the reforms or the imaginaries of an ideal Turkish country and nation, one thing was certain in the eyes of new rulers: the new republic would be radically different from the old empire – a new governmentality regime and a new, modern subjectivity were to be instituted (Mardin, 1994). The official ideology and culture of the new nation would be based on secularism, modernity and Turkish nationalism.

The technological field inherited from the Ottoman Empire was one of the crucial sites for the transformation of both the governmentality regime and processes of subjectification. From the early republican years, the technological field was nationalized and modernized on the basis of the republican belief in technology as a means of achieving economic, political and cultural unity and progression (see also Çelik, 2011). The founding belief lay in the assumption that the modernization of the material landscape and the creation of modernity within people’s mental conceptions are interrelated. Thus, the more modernized the material landscape became, the more rational, secular and modern people’s minds and lifestyles would become.

In line with this broad state project, the country’s railway systems and postal services, including the Constantinople Telephone Company, were modernized and nationalized. Previously run by European entrepreneurs, telephone services were expropriated by the state and grouped with postal and telegraph services as part of the institution called the Organization of the Post and Telegraph (PTT henceforth). The state, the secularist state-elites and the popular media all seem to have agreed on the importance of changing the public’s mindset, as well as on the transformations of infrastructures and material landscape. For instance, the analogy of the necessity for a well-functioning brain for a healthy body was popularly used to explain the necessity of well-functioning telephone systems for a unified and modern body politic (Cumhuriyet, 1940: 2). The telephone in Turkey was not institutionalized as a commodity, then, but first as a modernizing agent of the state with the potential to transform people’s life practices and imaginaries. The promise of a domestic telephone was to link the private family home with the modernizing public society and culture.

The first shift in governmental policies with regard to technologies as state agents of material and cultural modernization projects in line with the republican ideals occurred in the aftermath of World War II. In the mid-1940s, Turkey was faced with dramatic economic crises due to the internationalization of productive capital and the division of labour in the global economic landscape. Following the adoption of Marshall Plan (the economic model developed for the Europe of World War II), the state envisioned a developmental model that was heavily based on the assumption that economic growth could only be achieved by industrialization. This view – which could also be linked to the popular economic modernization and development theories of the post–World War II era – has shaped the economic, social and political climate of the 1950s (see also Özcan, 2015). The rapid industrialization of agriculture and the guest-worker plans of European countries like Germany gave rise to a flow of internal and external migration that has continued in subsequent decades, changing the entire social, cultural and political landscapes of Turkey and perhaps even creating the main axes of the social, political and cultural tensions between urban and migrant identities in cityscapes (İçduygu, 2004). The urban landscapes of large cities were now subject to massive transformations, new shantytowns were built on the periphery of cities, transportation within cities was mostly provided by small enterprises and systems of electricity and running water were very much limited to affluent cities and neighbourhoods (Tekeli, 2009). While the urban identities were privileged and dominant as they were associated with secularist and modern lifestyles, the migrants were mostly submerged or subordinated. In this process, certain ethnic and linguistic (Kurds for instance), religious (political Islamists) and rural categories (‘peasants’ who moved to cities for the search of better means of lives) have been devaluated and marginalized (Kandiyoti, 2004). The use, ownership, skills and knowledge about technologies such as telephony were also integral to the structuration of disparities between urban and migrant identities of cities. Research on telephone books of Istanbul in the 1950s clearly reveals that the practice of telephony was very much limited to a small segment of Istanbul residents who lived in the central and wealthy neighbourhoods.

After the 1950s, the disparities between different neighbourhoods and life practices gave rise to the even more forceful social, political and cultural tensions that have continued throughout the history of modern Turkey ever since. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the democratic parliamentary system was interrupted by three military coups. While the first one was more left-oriented and was even celebrated by some leftist and secularist groups ‘as a move to save the state’ (Harris, 2011) (including the technical class working for PTT), the two subsequent military interventions were much more forceful and violent against many political oppositional groups, including the leftists, political Islamists, political Kurds and civil right activists. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) programme, which was employed by many other developing nations in the post–World War II era, constituted the basis of economic policies that aimed to decrease the economic, industrial and financial dependences on developed countries. Following the establishment of State Planning Organization in 1963, the state developed long-term plans to replace the flows of import with local industries and products and to repair the deteriorated technological infrastructures. Among the notable developments were the first attempt to manufacture domestic automobiles; to plan to develop the telecommunicational infrastructure; to the establishment of state-run companies like PTT-ARLA (a research and development company that aimed for the innovation and production of national electronic industry that would ideally cut off the dependence on Western technologies, machines and engineering); to the founding of telephone factories like NETAŞ; and to the establishment of the state-run Turkish Radio and Television Corporation.

Nonetheless, this period between the 1960s and the 1980s was marked more by futile attempts at technological development than by successful outcomes in line with such national developmental plans. For example, the attempt to manufacture a national automobile failed, while the telephone – although it had come to be seen as an essential object of modern-urban life by all classes – still failed to reach full penetration as millions of people had to wait for years just to get a telephone line. The developmental plans of 1962, 1967 and 1977 reveal that the state was able neither to correctly predict the increase in public demand for telephones nor to provide sufficient supply to potential telephone users. By 1962, there were 192,000 subscribers, but 183,000 were still on the waiting list, while by 1977 the number of subscribers had risen to 851,000 subscribers, but with 1.3 million people still on the waiting list (The 7th State Development Plans, 1996).

The popular press of the 1960s and 1970s represented telephony in three primary ways: complaints about the state-run telephone service, news concerning the emerging telephone black market and depictions of the telephone as a symbol of social status and a modern lifestyle. Numerous newspapers and newspaper headlines voiced complaints about the sad state of telephonic infrastructure and communication, as in the following: ‘The telephone company still ignores the people’s complaints’ (Milliyet, 1973); ‘60,000 people still waiting for a telephone line’ (Hürriyet, 1959); ‘Turkey the least telephonic nation’ (Hürriyet, 1960); ‘All complaining of high fees for telephone connection’ (Hürriyet, 1972); and ‘The mute telephone’ (Milliyet, 1973). The collective resentment towards state policies that were unable to meet public demand also found resonance in the discourse of technical experts. The authors of technical journals complained of the dysfunctional structure of telephone services, voicing their resentment both towards the public, who did not appreciate their ‘sacrificial’ work, and towards the changing governments, which took no responsibility for the failure of their policies.

The disproportion between demand for and supply of telephony also led to the emergence of informal and illegal markets. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the popular press ran numerous items concerning people selling their telephone subscriptions to others for large amounts of money on an emergent second-hand market and concerning thieves killed by electric shock on telephone poles as they attempted to steal the copper wire to sell it on the black market. This was also a time when there was a great amount of theft and loss of electricity, as well as being the period when the emergence of audio and videocassettes led to a concurrent emergence of film and music piracy in Turkey.

Another interesting manner of representing telephony in the press during this period was to depict actresses, politicians or bureaucrats speaking on the telephone, although the accompanying news had nothing to do with telephony. The same was true for advertisements in daily newspapers: illustrations advertising toothpaste, sewing machines, televisions and batteries were often depicted with people using the telephone. As such, despite the fact that its presence in the visual frame was wholly unrelated to the product being advertised, telephones were being used as visual symbols to suggest to readers that the advertised products could produce a similar affectivity to that of the telephone, such as engaging with all these commodities would provide a kind of social status and allow one to express a modern lifestyle and refined taste. Moreover, downtown photography studios in cities typically had a set where customers could have their photograph taken with a telephone.

The memory of telephony in daily practices and imaginations

In order to explore what the state-run telephony meant for people’s lives, their daily practices and imaginations, I now turn to the narrated memories of the users, non-users, owners and non-owners of telephony. It is important to note that the appetite for technological knowledge and use – particularly with regard to the telephone – has been one of the rare practices that aligned different individuals and collectives into a whole society. Although the society in Turkey has historically been fragmented on the basis of enclaves of differences – ethnic, religious, class and gender – the demand and desire to own and use a technological novelty seem to have been shared by all these different groups. While some radical secularists might be inclined to think that ‘Islamists were never fond of technologies. They considered the telephone as sinful and evil inventions’, just as one interviewee has said in Ankara, most of the religious interviewees recounted their experiences with telephony as a practice of negotiation of their religious or traditional and urban/modern identities. For instance, a religious housewife who migrated to Istanbul in the early 1960s and decided to wear black hijab in the 1970s has said, ‘when I first saw [a telephone], I said to myself some gavur [‘infidel’ a pejorative term used for non-Muslims] had invented it, but God bless him. He did something good for all humanity’.

The telephone was first an unfamiliar and curious object, for many interviewees, which obscurely transmitted sound through cables across space. A male retired primary school teacher in Kayseri who is in his mid-60s remembers his first encounter with telephony:

Well, I first saw the telephone in 67. It was in the principal’s room where I was a middle-school student. It was forbidden for us to enter his room. But, my friends and I wanted to see it, touch it and understand how it worked. The principal was already a respected person in our eyes. But the fact that he owned a telephone made him a very important person in our minds. We were often walking around his door with the hope that we could see how it was used. Before having seen it in the principal’s room, I kind of knew what the telephone was. Because in the primary school, our teacher had taught us that there was this machine that carried sound across space. But the machine, he was speaking about, was somewhat modern, abstract to me. Since there was no telephone for him to show us, he was speaking about it hypothetically. He was asking us if our mothers could hear us when we were in the classroom. We were saying, ‘nooo’. Then, he was saying, ‘but if there was a telephone, you could talk to her with it’. This was not making sense to me at all …

The narration of the first experience with telephony as a curious object that seemed unintelligible is common to many interviewees regardless of where and when they have encountered with this technology. However, the way this interviewee describes his first experiences with this curious object is more illustrative than many other narratives that I collected in this research. The retired primary school teacher, who was schooled in the religiously and culturally conservative Kayseri, uses the term ‘modern’ and ‘abstract’ interchangeably to describe the unintelligibility of telephony which he first heard of in the primary school as an abstract machine. The narrative shift from his experience with telephony, as an abstract machine to a concrete one, is also a shift from the abstract modern into the recognizable and comprehensible forms of power (the concrete machine adds to the personal authority of the principal). In this respect, the above narration can give us a hint that things and technologies that are claimed to be ‘modern’ might not have actual value in people’s lives except implying some sort of unintelligibility if they do not affect the social positioning of agents in actual life practices. In other words, the modern is an oblique concept to an ordinary citizen; it gains its value as it is contested and negotiated in life practices in terms of its potential to get integrated into power relations, implying distinctive social positions and prestige. A male taxi driver who is in his mid-50s expresses what having a telephone line in one’s domestic space implied in his childhood years:

In this account, the uncle who had a telephone was first characterized through the adjective ‘rich’; then wealth has changed into a wider conceptualization of power, exemplified through occupation (a job in a state institution), education level (he and his daughters were educated) and residence (he lived in the centre of Kayseri). All these qualities of the uncle who had a telephone were implying that ‘he was an important person’. As shown above in the previous discussion, the pre-neoliberal period of the 1960s through the 1970s was a term where the state power was very much involved in the distribution of wealth, education and also technological practices. Thus, in such a landscape, being a subscriber of telephony showed that the owner had an economic capital to pay the high fees of telephonic connections, had a skill and knowledge of the modern technology to conceive its necessity to daily life practices and had some connections in the state institutions to have a telephone subscription while many others were waiting in the lists to get a telephone. The contrast between now and then, in the taxi driver’s narrative, describes the transformation of the technoscape where he could not imagine having an access to the means of technologies as a person who came to Kayseri from a small village, lacking money and education into one who enjoys the pleasure of owning and using the contemporary technologies. Much as the conditions of life and technoscape have changed, he also became urbanized throughout those years. In many narratives, the telephone seems to be an object that migrants have first seen after they moved to cities. As such, the lack of memory with telephony in one’s life also seemed to explain the deprivation of life-experiences in small villages of Anatolia. A male street vendor in Istanbul who is in his mid-50s and lives in this city for the last 25 years after his migration from a village in Anatolia says,

I don’t have any memory with the telephone from my childhood. I even first saw the television from the window of a coffeehouse in İzmir. I couldn’t believe how people got inside the screen. I first spoke on a telephone there in İzmir. ‘The devil’s thing’ I thought. That was the only explanation in my mind for a machine to carry sounds. My story is not something that you can know of … My father was putting straw on the floor for my siblings and me to sleep on. We were sleeping together with donkeys. I didn’t have a childhood. I didn’t even know what money was used for, let alone the telephone. If there were someone inside a house, we would not dare to go in. Until I was 14, I wore nylon shoes. I couldn’t even ask my father to buy me a nice pair of shoes. I went to sc hool only for few days in my life. So your questions seem strange to me. ..

In this account, the interviewee obviously poses a question: how would it be possible for him to have a memory of telephony when he was deprived of all means of good and civilized life? In order to show the absurdity of my research on the meaning of telephony in his own story, he explains the conditions of deprivations in reference to his experiences with poverty, lack of education and authoritarian traditionalism that precluded the possibilities of movement, expression, imagination and self-realization. He was, perhaps, also challenging my position as a researcher who possibly approached him with a learned prejudice to ask about his experience as a person who happened to be a street vendor with a former modern technology in his life. The learned prejudice, he might be protesting through his statements, can well be the one that has been shared by some segments of the urban-elites who considered the lack of knowledge and skills of using a modern technology not as an outcome of a structural problem caused by the uneven distribution of wealth, education and means of modern-urban life practices but as an outcome of the migrants’ inability to adjust their lives and selves to the requirements of modern-urban life. A retired female primary school teacher in Istanbul, who proudly says that she had always lived in Istanbul throughout her life, recounts how the migrants engaged with public telephony:

They did not even know how to use the phone. I remember once I was waiting in line for the telephone booth. There were two men both squeezed in the booth, shouting ‘Alo! Aloo!’ without even putting the handset to their ears or putting the coin in […] I was in a hurry, so I said to them, ‘The person you’re calling isn’t answering, so let me make my call’. If I had a time, I would have explained to them about how it worked. But I had to rush.

As the knowledge and skills of using the telephone have become a cultural currency, the lack of this currency could also generate a sense of guilt on the parts of the latecomers to the cities. A male restaurant owner who moved to Istanbul when he was in his early 20s to find a better living for himself recounts his first attempt to make a telephone call in the telephone booth with a remembrance of shame:

I was trying to find the place to put the coin in, but I was looking at every single corner of the machine and could still not find it. A man behind me was waiting in the queue to make his own call. He couldn’t wait anymore, I guess, he just opened the door and showed me where to put it in. I can’t forget how I was embarrassed. I was totally blushed. I mean I was a peasant … you know, these mistakes that we make. It was not a mistake, of course, but I felt like that. Then, in time, I have taken out my peasant shirt. I have seen a lot and learned a lot in this life.

Thus, the shift in the way the interviewee has engaged with technologies – the telephone of the early 1970s and the mobile and digital devices of the contemporary era – shows how his sense of place within social space has changed. He was a ‘peasant’ who was shamefully not able to know how to integrate the modern and urban practices into his own life, and yet as he has achieved the means of social mobility – through his success in business and his urbanization – he got rid of his ‘peasant’ identity. The place of telephony in the negotiated space of rural and urban identities as well as lower class and upper class positions is particularly important, when we think of the ways in which the ‘proper’ use of technology adds to one’s self-perception and self-esteem.

Apart from being the historical ground for the negotiations of class positions and urban-modern identities, the telephone has also generated a space where the traditional (brotherhood, solidarity, communal life) and the modern (individualism, privacy of domestic spaces) were negotiated. The privileged who were in possession of a telephone needed to be responsible citizens and good neighbours – regardless of whether they willingly or unwillingly, gladly or reluctantly, shared their telephone with others. Guests were also expected to be respectful and discreet in terms of keeping their conversations short, quiet and formal. A social historian resident in Diyarbakır describes the practice of sharing, and the power of the sharer within the community, as follows:

A house with a telephone functioned like a public telephone booth. If someone had a telephone in a neighborhood, then it was as if the whole neighborhood could use it. My uncle had a telephone in his house. His wife was like an operator. When a call came to one of the residents in the neighborhood, she would go to the window and shout the name of the person being called: ‘Ayşe … Ayşe … You have a call from Istanbul!’ But, if she got angry with one of the neighbors for some reason, she wouldn’t tell them when they received a call.

The ritualized form of sharing telephony did not, however, necessarily lead to the transgression of existing social boundaries by creating new possibilities of solidarity between incommensurables. The memories of sharing telephony with others do not suggest a practice where the already segregated political, social and religious groups encounter with each other through the collective use of a domestic telephone. Rather the practice of sharing telephony reinforced the social ties between the ones who already share a common history, religion or ethnic identity (Sunni Muslims, migrants from the same village or neighbouring villages, the ones who shared the political and social stances and also among women and men separately) and contributed to the reproductions of borders and segregations between polarized groups. The already existing social borders came to be reinforced through the host’s decisions about whom to share the cultural currency with. For instance, an Alevi (a religious minority group of Turkey) family who lived in Ankara without a telephone recounted that ‘all the residents of the building used one person’s telephone, but we never approached them to ask, nor did they offer any help with the telephone. They shared it among themselves’.

The three conclusive remarks

In this article, I have tried to describe those sociotechnical, economic and cultural contexts of local modernity in which technologies, particularly telephony, have been embedded in the negotiations of social positions and have reinforced social distinctions in the recent history of modern Turkey. My aim has been to show that there is a cumulative history behind the passionate use of ‘new’ technologies in countries such as Turkey, that is, in countries where the historical dynamics of multiple modernities mediate how people engage with, perceive and use technologies. The findings of the research can be summarized with three conclusive remarks: