Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
MILLI FOLKLOR, sa.89, ss.66-77, 2011 (AHCI)
The search for and the research on identity was one of the important topics of the past century. It has been suggested that the search for identity is as powerful as techno-economic change in charting the new history in globalised world. Despite this, the subject of identity in Turkey is usually viewed form an ideological/political perspective and in a rather superficial fashion. The network approach which provides concepts and tools to study the subject in an objective and comprehensive manner seems to have been totally ignored. Similarly, online social networks, which have gained importance during the last several years, with hundreds of millions of users around the world have not yet gotten the attention they deserve from the researchers of identity. But these networks, just as in real world social networks help construct identities through social participation. They thus deserve high attention of folklore scholars, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, social psychologists, linguists and even the historians. This work aims to serve this purpose. It gives first the basic concepts regarding individual identity, group identity, social networks and online social networks. It then lists the questions that are relevant for identity research and that can be studied using data from online social networks together with methods and techniques to study them.