SPATIALIZING AND DE-TEMPORALIZING THROUGH DIGITAL SPACE: “#TB” DISCOURSE

Merve Geçikli

1Atatürk University, Kazım Karabekir Faculty of Education, Department of Foreign Languages Teaching,Erzurum, Turkey, merve.gecikli25@gmail.com, orcid id: https://orcid.or/0000-0002-8619-5026

ABSTRACT

The digial spaces created through shift in online contact among physically distant contexts have been the focus of many studies in recent years. At this point, it seems that the mobility perception has been dramatically changed because the mobile systems have seemingly manipulated space perception through constructed instant virtual environments; that is, transtiveness across places and times has become natural outcome of digital spaces by affording the transcendence of space (Katz, 2008:442). Still, in the literature, there are two parties discussing this issue from two different points: on the one hand, there are those who suggest that digital spaces actually results in a sort of ‘absent presence’ or ‘ de-spatializing’ (e.g. Gergen, 2004; Katriel, 1999); on the other hand, other scholars emphasizes mobile revolution contributes significantly to the attendance of task-based, temporal, and spatial items and dimensions in instant digital environment ( Cohen, 2015). Driven from the second perspective, the current study aims to extend the previous research by focusing on “#tb” discourse in order to explore how digital spaces are used not just for spatializing bur also for de- temporalizing. Thus, the data source of the study is the randomly collected pieces of insta posts among the ones posted under “#tb” taggings. Following narrative analysis approach, supposing that insta posts are a sort of narrative genres where individuals share their personal experience, used within discourse analysis, the data were descriptively analyzed through frequency counting of linguistic items referring to temporal and spatializing lexemes. The findings relevant to “#tb” taggings show that digital spaces seem to functionally support users to spatialize and de-temporalize immediate context by referring to any places beyond the immediate conetxt and time beyond the present.

Key Words: Spatializing, De-temporalizing, Digital Space, “#tb” Discourse, Narrative Analysis