Erol Bulut
Biographic Data
| ID | 759374 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Erol Bulut |
| GIVEN NAMES | Erol |
| FAMILY NAME | Bulut |
| SIGNATURE | BULUT E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Koç University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7972-3919 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 43 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Generative AI in authoritarian Turkey’s field of journalism: Enhanced efficiency, amplified precarity, and new imaginaries at work
Beyond Datafication: Creative Labor and Orientalist Production Logics in Turkish Drama Streaming
Streaming companies’ opaque, data-driven production practices have transformed screen industries, and Turkey’s globally successful drama sector is no exception. Like their counterparts elsewhere, Turkish drama creators often express frustration with these metric-driven systems or strategically accommodate them. Yet, interviews with thirteen creators reveal a deeper source of dissatisfaction: Orientalist production logics through which streaming c…
Global Perspectives on Platforms and Cultural Production
While digital platforms have reconfigured the institutions and practices of cultural production around the globe, current research is dominated by studies that take as their reference point the Anglo-American world--and, to a lesser extent--China (Cunningham & Craig 2019; Kaye et al. 2021; Poell et al. 2021; Zhao 2019). Aside from totalizing theories of platform imperialism (Jin, 2013), the “rest of the world” has thus received relatively scant a…
Show me your phone!’: Affect, neoliberal rationality and nationalism in Türkiye’s street interviews
As a recent cultural phenomenon, street interviews (vox pops, sokak röportajları ) in Türkiye have challenged the country’s captured media ecology and its neoliberal authoritarian establishment. Produced by journalists and circulated through social media, these interviews invite citizens to reflect on pressing national problems but soon become sites of intense political debate. In their discussions with dissidents in these interviews, pro-governm…
Sacred Profession: Imamate as an Example of Positive Deviation
Globally connected, nationally restrained: Platform ambiguities and censorship in Turkey's drama production
About a decade ago, Turkey's television drama makers believed that streaming platforms would expand markets and create an uncensored space. Platforms did partly reform working conditions and enable drama creatives globally to produce quality shows. Yet creatives remain politically restrained because of platforms’ compliance with state regulations. Drawing on platform studies’ emphasis on how platforms have both restraining and enabling features, …
Delivery workers’ visibility struggles: Weapons of the gig, (extra)ordinary social media, and strikes
How do we interpret the extraordinary visibility and ordinariness of social media as delivery workers resist their precarious working lives? Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, photo elicitation, and digital data collection in Turkey with a focus on delivery workers’ strikes in early 2022, we argue that understanding the delivery workers’ movement requires not only considering spectacular strikes and social media protests but also workers’ everyday…
Eventocracy, Affective Supremacy and Resistance in Turkey’s Captured Media Ecology
The Turkish government has captured media to build ‘eventocracy’, a regime of ‘ruling by event’ to manage public attention and disrupt politics. Eventocracy strives for affective supremacy, a mode of political-emotional domination where the ruling AKP positions itself as the self-righteous national power. Through a chain of events, it casts the opposition’s grievances as national threats. Two specific events, the Roboski Massacre and the Kabataş …
The Fantasy of Do What You Love and Ludic Authoritarianism in the Videogame Industry
Like other creative workers, videogame developers believe doing what you love (DWYL) brings success and happiness. Drawing on three years of ethnography in a U.S. based studio, I theorize DWYL as a social fantasy, which glues developers to work despite cruelties. Because developers’ attachment to work is not an individual matter of the heart but a powerful relation that is mutually cultivated, desired, and even joyfully dictated, I conceptualize …
Networked misogyny beyond the digital: The violent devaluation of women journalists’ labor and bodies in Turkey’s masculine authoritarian regime
Following the conservative Turkish government’s political-economic capture of the news media, educated and pro-feminist women journalists have migrated online. Despite having more publicity across platforms, they face immediate prosecution based on the tweet of an anonymous troll, an informant citizen or a government official. While this is a common case of networked misogyny, inspired by Liz Kelly’s concept of the continuum of sexual violence, w…
Contested masculinities and political imaginations in “New Turkey” and Çukur as authoritarian spaces of protection
Initially known as “the Turkish Godfather,” Turkish TV series Çukur (2017–2021) occasionally received criticism from government ministers and the government’s media regulatory board. This was surprising because Turkey’s and Çukur’s cultural universes converged around the masculinist protection of family and territory. So, why this political backlash despite the convergence? Wouldn’t that convergence of masculinity produce similar political imagin…
The pandemic shock doctrine in an authoritarian context: The economic, bodily, and political precarity of Turkey’s journalists during the pandemic
What happens to journalists when hit by a pandemic in a country governed by authoritarian media regulations? We examine journalists’ experience in Turkey’s mainstream and alternative media and find that while the pandemic has deepened their economic precarity, journalists further suffer from bodily and political precarity. In the context of Covid, the body emerges as a site on which precarity with multiple dimensions (economic anxiety, illness, a…
Dewesternizing Precarity in Turkish TV Drama Production through the Body and the Law
Beneath Turkish TV dramas’ global glamor lie workplace accidents, systemic injuries on workers’ bodies, and deaths. In response, workers seek to impose restraints on what can be done to their bodies by resorting to law and evoking ideals of equality as they struggle for workplace safety, healthcare, and dignity. Drawing on ethnographic research across production sets, industry summits, union meetings and more than fifty interviews since 2015, thi…
A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry
One of the competing titles I considered early on for this book was "The Deluxe Suite on the Titanic: Precarious Playbor in the Digital Game Industry."Clunky, without a doubt, but James Cameron's historical drama has a lot in common with labor practices in the video game industry.The idea of using the Titanic as a metaphor for precarious labor in the video game industry goes back to a team meeting at Studio Desire, the ethnographic setting for th…
Games of Empire Ten Years On
The panel will retrospectively evaluate the significance of the seminal text Games of Empire (2009) for new media and game studies, reflecting on the contribution of autonomous Marxism to the study of digital culture today, as well as the methodological move it performed in tracing continuities and discontinuities between sites of production and play. Each paper will take one or two key concepts from the original book, including Empire, multitude…
A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry
This book is an ethnographic examination of video game production. The developers that were researched for almost three years in a medium-sized studio in the United States loved making video games that millions play. Only some, however, can enjoy this dream job, which can be precarious and alienating for many others. That is, the passion of a predominantly white-male labor force relies on material inequalities involving the sacrificial labor of t…
White Masculinity, Creative Desires, and Production Ideology in Video Game Development
Game workers have a problem. They code values and ideologies into games, but they are either not aware of it or deny it. Through a constructive and critical engagement with Games of Empire, I propose the concept of “ludic religiosity” to reveal how white masculinity informs game workers’ professional discourses, technological practices, ludic desires, and imaginations. Drawing on three-year-long ethnographic research and in conversation with cult…
Media, Affect, and Authoritarian Futures in “New Turkey: ” Spectacular Confessions on Television in the Post-Coup Era
A spectacular shock doctrine is reformatting Turkey since the failed coup in July 2016. We examine how the television economy transformed the organization behind the coup (FETÖ) from a public secret into a spectacle. We investigate the televised confessions of former Gulenists, who revealed the scandalous FETÖ’s inner workings live on television. We argue that former Gulenists’ media performances based on confession, apology, and spectacular secr…
Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization
Turkey’s failed coup as an ‘ongoing media event’ and the formation of public affect
Following the coup attempt in Turkey, former Gulenists made appearances on various television channels and disclosed intimate and spectacular information regarding their past activities. We ask: what is the political work of these televised disclosures? In answering this question, we situate the coup within the media event literature and examine the intimate work of these televised disclosures performed as part of a media event. The disclosures w…
Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism (Combined PDF of all articles)
Combined pdf of all articles published in the special issue "Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism", edited by Thomas Allmer and Ergin Bulut, tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 16 (1), 2018, pp. 44-240
Introduction: Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism
The overall task of this special issue of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique is to gather critical contributions examining universities, academic labour, digital media and capitalism. The articles collected in this special issue (1) provide the context, history and theoretical concepts underlying academic labour, (2) analyse the relationship between academic work and digital media/new information and communication technologies/the Inte…
One-Dimensional Creativity: A Marcusean Critique of Work and Play in the Video Game Industry
Creativity is at the heart of the video game industry. Industry professionals, especially those producing blockbuster games for the triple-A market, speak fondly of their creative labour practices, flexible work schedules, and playful workplaces. However, a cursory glance at major triple-A franchises reveals the persistence of sequel game production and a homogeneity in genres and narratives. Herbert Marcuse’s critique of one-dimensionality may h…
Can the Intern Resist? Precarity of Blue-Collar Labor and the Fragmented Resistance of the White-Collar Intern in Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources
Drawing on the literature regarding internships and cinema of precarity, this article addresses how one “learns” to intern and negotiate his or her class identity between a blue-collar past and white-collar future through an analysis of Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources . In contrast to Lauren Berlant’s astute though pessimist reading of the movie, I propose that internships may highlight the creative and organizing potential of labor power. A cri…
Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State, written by Bilge Yesil
Playboring in the Tester Pit: The Convergence of Precarity and the Degradation of Fun in Video Game Testing
The labor of video game testers has barely registered within political-economic analyses of work practices in the game industry. This article addresses this gap through a critical deployment of the concept of precarity and its multiform nature experienced by game testers. Drawing on Harry Braverman’s concept of “degradation of labor,” I aim to contribute to media labor literature by introducing the concept of “degradation of fun,” where testers a…
Networked misogyny beyond the digital: The violent devaluation of women journalists’ labor and bodies in Turkey’s masculine authoritarian regime
Following the conservative Turkish government’s political-economic capture of the news media, educated and pro-feminist women journalists have migrated online. Despite having more publicity across platforms, they face immediate prosecution based on the tweet of an anonymous troll, an informant citizen or a government official. While this is a common case of networked misogyny, inspired by Liz Kelly’s concept of the continuum of sexual violence, w…
Dewesternizing Precarity in Turkish TV Drama Production through the Body and the Law
Beneath Turkish TV dramas’ global glamor lie workplace accidents, systemic injuries on workers’ bodies, and deaths. In response, workers seek to impose restraints on what can be done to their bodies by resorting to law and evoking ideals of equality as they struggle for workplace safety, healthcare, and dignity. Drawing on ethnographic research across production sets, industry summits, union meetings and more than fifty interviews since 2015, thi…
Social class as flow and mutability: The Barbados case
This article draws on ethnographic research that examines the contemporary articulation of class identity in the postcolonial elite school setting of Old College high school in Barbados. From the qualitative data derived from this study, we argue that social class is better conceived as a series of flows, mutations, performances and performatives. We complicate the common-sense notion that class is a stable structure that allows for the categoriz…
Governance through Philitainment: Playing the Benevolent Subject
This article analyzes Free Rice within the context of "the rise of the ludic sublime," where video games are hailed as the solution to highly sophisticated political problems. As part of what we call practices of "philitainment," Free Rice, we argue, functions within the political domain of what Jodi Dean has termed "communicative capitalism" and therefore both captures resistance and actually solidifies global capitalism. Ultimately, this case s…
The Argonauts of postcolonial modernity: Elite Barbadian schools in globalising circumstances
In her book, Neoliberalism as Exception, Aihwa Ong usefully observes that the North American university has been dirempted from it historical role of preparing young people for democratic citizenship. It has instead, according to Ong, become the great global marketplace and grand bazaar for international students' ambitions. In what follows, we draw on Ong's insights. Specifically, we report on a global ethnographic study that looks at the way in…
Media, Affect, and Authoritarian Futures in “New Turkey: ” Spectacular Confessions on Television in the Post-Coup Era
A spectacular shock doctrine is reformatting Turkey since the failed coup in July 2016. We examine how the television economy transformed the organization behind the coup (FETÖ) from a public secret into a spectacle. We investigate the televised confessions of former Gulenists, who revealed the scandalous FETÖ’s inner workings live on television. We argue that former Gulenists’ media performances based on confession, apology, and spectacular secr…
Social media and the nation state: Of revolution and collaboration
This article examines the legal infrastructure of social media governance in the politically contested context of contemporary Turkey. It looks at how social media companies (specifically, Twitter and Facebook (FB)) and the nation state (Turkey) have negotiated power in the aftermath of Gezi Uprising in Summer 2013. I argue that while today’s concerns regarding online surveillance might echo the calls for a new world information order of the 1970…
Seeing and Playing as Labor: Toward a Visual Materialist Pedagogy of Video Games Through Walter Benjamin
Video games are undoubtedly one of the most popular digital media forms that have inspired utopian hopes or caused social anxieties. A mythic aura has emerged around the potentials of video games
Sacred Profession: Imamate as an Example of Positive Deviation
Globally connected, nationally restrained: Platform ambiguities and censorship in Turkey's drama production
About a decade ago, Turkey's television drama makers believed that streaming platforms would expand markets and create an uncensored space. Platforms did partly reform working conditions and enable drama creatives globally to produce quality shows. Yet creatives remain politically restrained because of platforms’ compliance with state regulations. Drawing on platform studies’ emphasis on how platforms have both restraining and enabling features, …
Contested masculinities and political imaginations in “New Turkey” and Çukur as authoritarian spaces of protection
Initially known as “the Turkish Godfather,” Turkish TV series Çukur (2017–2021) occasionally received criticism from government ministers and the government’s media regulatory board. This was surprising because Turkey’s and Çukur’s cultural universes converged around the masculinist protection of family and territory. So, why this political backlash despite the convergence? Wouldn’t that convergence of masculinity produce similar political imagin…
The pandemic shock doctrine in an authoritarian context: The economic, bodily, and political precarity of Turkey’s journalists during the pandemic
What happens to journalists when hit by a pandemic in a country governed by authoritarian media regulations? We examine journalists’ experience in Turkey’s mainstream and alternative media and find that while the pandemic has deepened their economic precarity, journalists further suffer from bodily and political precarity. In the context of Covid, the body emerges as a site on which precarity with multiple dimensions (economic anxiety, illness, a…
Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization
Critically reviewing globalization
A Holistic Approach Towards Creativity, Labor and Education in Digital Capitalism
Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. New Haven & London: Yale University Press
Work’s Intimacy
Founded in 1974, the Canadian Journal of Communication (CJC) aims to publish Canadian research and scholarship in the field of communication studies. The purview of the journal is the entire field of communication studies as practiced in Canada or with relevance to Canada
The material child: Growing up in consumer culture
Seeing and Playing as Labor: Toward a Visual Materialist Pedagogy of Video Games Through Walter Benjamin
Video games are undoubtedly one of the most popular digital media forms that have inspired utopian hopes or caused social anxieties. A mythic aura has emerged around the potentials of video games
Playboring in the Tester Pit: The Convergence of Precarity and the Degradation of Fun in Video Game Testing
The labor of video game testers has barely registered within political-economic analyses of work practices in the game industry. This article addresses this gap through a critical deployment of the concept of precarity and its multiform nature experienced by game testers. Drawing on Harry Braverman’s concept of “degradation of labor,” I aim to contribute to media labor literature by introducing the concept of “degradation of fun,” where testers a…
Governance through Philitainment: Playing the Benevolent Subject
This article analyzes Free Rice within the context of "the rise of the ludic sublime," where video games are hailed as the solution to highly sophisticated political problems. As part of what we call practices of "philitainment," Free Rice, we argue, functions within the political domain of what Jodi Dean has termed "communicative capitalism" and therefore both captures resistance and actually solidifies global capitalism. Ultimately, this case s…
The Argonauts of postcolonial modernity: Elite Barbadian schools in globalising circumstances
In her book, Neoliberalism as Exception, Aihwa Ong usefully observes that the North American university has been dirempted from it historical role of preparing young people for democratic citizenship. It has instead, according to Ong, become the great global marketplace and grand bazaar for international students' ambitions. In what follows, we draw on Ong's insights. Specifically, we report on a global ethnographic study that looks at the way in…
Glamor Above, Precarity Below: Immaterial Labor in the Video Game Industry
This article foregrounds the concept of immaterial labor to theorize the tension between the precarity of below the line workers and the glamor of above the line workers in the video game industry. I argue that even the most seemingly secure sections of the gaming workforce have a tendency to drift toward the economic precarity most acutely felt across below the line workers. In other words, we, as researchers, may need to question the presumed h…
Social class as flow and mutability: The Barbados case
This article draws on ethnographic research that examines the contemporary articulation of class identity in the postcolonial elite school setting of Old College high school in Barbados. From the qualitative data derived from this study, we argue that social class is better conceived as a series of flows, mutations, performances and performatives. We complicate the common-sense notion that class is a stable structure that allows for the categoriz…
Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State, written by Bilge Yesil
Social media and the nation state: Of revolution and collaboration
This article examines the legal infrastructure of social media governance in the politically contested context of contemporary Turkey. It looks at how social media companies (specifically, Twitter and Facebook (FB)) and the nation state (Turkey) have negotiated power in the aftermath of Gezi Uprising in Summer 2013. I argue that while today’s concerns regarding online surveillance might echo the calls for a new world information order of the 1970…
Can the Intern Resist? Precarity of Blue-Collar Labor and the Fragmented Resistance of the White-Collar Intern in Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources
Drawing on the literature regarding internships and cinema of precarity, this article addresses how one “learns” to intern and negotiate his or her class identity between a blue-collar past and white-collar future through an analysis of Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources . In contrast to Lauren Berlant’s astute though pessimist reading of the movie, I propose that internships may highlight the creative and organizing potential of labor power. A cri…
Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism (Combined PDF of all articles)
Combined pdf of all articles published in the special issue "Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism", edited by Thomas Allmer and Ergin Bulut, tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 16 (1), 2018, pp. 44-240
Introduction: Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism
The overall task of this special issue of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique is to gather critical contributions examining universities, academic labour, digital media and capitalism. The articles collected in this special issue (1) provide the context, history and theoretical concepts underlying academic labour, (2) analyse the relationship between academic work and digital media/new information and communication technologies/the Inte…
One-Dimensional Creativity: A Marcusean Critique of Work and Play in the Video Game Industry
Creativity is at the heart of the video game industry. Industry professionals, especially those producing blockbuster games for the triple-A market, speak fondly of their creative labour practices, flexible work schedules, and playful workplaces. However, a cursory glance at major triple-A franchises reveals the persistence of sequel game production and a homogeneity in genres and narratives. Herbert Marcuse’s critique of one-dimensionality may h…
Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization
Turkey’s failed coup as an ‘ongoing media event’ and the formation of public affect
Following the coup attempt in Turkey, former Gulenists made appearances on various television channels and disclosed intimate and spectacular information regarding their past activities. We ask: what is the political work of these televised disclosures? In answering this question, we situate the coup within the media event literature and examine the intimate work of these televised disclosures performed as part of a media event. The disclosures w…
A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry
One of the competing titles I considered early on for this book was "The Deluxe Suite on the Titanic: Precarious Playbor in the Digital Game Industry."Clunky, without a doubt, but James Cameron's historical drama has a lot in common with labor practices in the video game industry.The idea of using the Titanic as a metaphor for precarious labor in the video game industry goes back to a team meeting at Studio Desire, the ethnographic setting for th…
Games of Empire Ten Years On
The panel will retrospectively evaluate the significance of the seminal text Games of Empire (2009) for new media and game studies, reflecting on the contribution of autonomous Marxism to the study of digital culture today, as well as the methodological move it performed in tracing continuities and discontinuities between sites of production and play. Each paper will take one or two key concepts from the original book, including Empire, multitude…
A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry
This book is an ethnographic examination of video game production. The developers that were researched for almost three years in a medium-sized studio in the United States loved making video games that millions play. Only some, however, can enjoy this dream job, which can be precarious and alienating for many others. That is, the passion of a predominantly white-male labor force relies on material inequalities involving the sacrificial labor of t…
White Masculinity, Creative Desires, and Production Ideology in Video Game Development
Game workers have a problem. They code values and ideologies into games, but they are either not aware of it or deny it. Through a constructive and critical engagement with Games of Empire, I propose the concept of “ludic religiosity” to reveal how white masculinity informs game workers’ professional discourses, technological practices, ludic desires, and imaginations. Drawing on three-year-long ethnographic research and in conversation with cult…
Media, Affect, and Authoritarian Futures in “New Turkey: ” Spectacular Confessions on Television in the Post-Coup Era
A spectacular shock doctrine is reformatting Turkey since the failed coup in July 2016. We examine how the television economy transformed the organization behind the coup (FETÖ) from a public secret into a spectacle. We investigate the televised confessions of former Gulenists, who revealed the scandalous FETÖ’s inner workings live on television. We argue that former Gulenists’ media performances based on confession, apology, and spectacular secr…
Dewesternizing Precarity in Turkish TV Drama Production through the Body and the Law
Beneath Turkish TV dramas’ global glamor lie workplace accidents, systemic injuries on workers’ bodies, and deaths. In response, workers seek to impose restraints on what can be done to their bodies by resorting to law and evoking ideals of equality as they struggle for workplace safety, healthcare, and dignity. Drawing on ethnographic research across production sets, industry summits, union meetings and more than fifty interviews since 2015, thi…
The pandemic shock doctrine in an authoritarian context: The economic, bodily, and political precarity of Turkey’s journalists during the pandemic
What happens to journalists when hit by a pandemic in a country governed by authoritarian media regulations? We examine journalists’ experience in Turkey’s mainstream and alternative media and find that while the pandemic has deepened their economic precarity, journalists further suffer from bodily and political precarity. In the context of Covid, the body emerges as a site on which precarity with multiple dimensions (economic anxiety, illness, a…
Political science (27 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Media studies (13 works) · Art (12 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Economics (10 works) · Turkey's Politics and Society (10 works)