Intimacy

Hello! (Merhaba!) How are you? (Nasılsın?) What are you doing? (Ne yapıyorsun?). These are very common ways to start conversations on private chats. Here people love messaging and they have been doing it since the arrival of the internet. 

Fatih, a 20-year-old man, used SMS on his mobile phone and Facebook private chat on his computer to communicate with his friends and his sweetheart. He owns a small Samsung smartphone, but he didn’t have enough money to pay for uninterrupted internet connectivity, while Facebook chat was difficult to use on his phone. Nevertheless, Fatih and his sweetheart Leyla were continually texting, both day and night, sweet words that flow from this intimate and private communication.

The arrival and the diffusion of WhatsApp coincided with Fatih starting a new and better-paid job, meaning that he could afford uninterrupted internet connectivity. He installed WhatsApp on his and his girlfriend’s mobile phones and they started to chat on WhatsApp all the time. He had no problem with shifting from SMS to WhatsApp. In this town the key issue for such relationships is simply to maintain privacy on private platforms. Other than that, they really don’t mind which platform or combination of platforms they use.