THE SPECTACLE OF QUARANTINE DAYS IN TURKEY: A CONTENT ANALYSIS ON TURKISH CONSUMERS

Abstract

Changing the balances of the world, the novel Corona virus outbreak is investigated from various aspects. The outbreak started in China and quickly spread throughout the world. Within this scope, preventative measures focus on voluntary or enforced implementations of quarantines. Consequently, the discussion of changes in consumption habits of postmodern societies become quite common as well. This is because individuals, who were confined to the walls of their homes had to change their daily habits substantially. Working from home, instead of going to workplaces, cooking at home, instead of dining out or shopping online, instead of going to shopping malls, which are deemed to be the heart and soul of consumption, become widely mentioned topics. In this context, the need to socialize also drove individuals to share more posts on social media platforms, which were already highly used. The question of how such disruption change consumer societies, where consumption determines conditions and becomes a culture itself, represents the foundation of this study. To that end, Instagram is the selected social media platform for the research purposes. A total of four hashtags concerning Corona virus is selected and a total of 1,540 Instagram posts are subjected to a content analysis. In order to determine how the changing consumption habits are reflected, concepts of consumer society and the society of the spectacle are covered in the literature review. As a result, the descriptive characteristics of consumer society and society of the spectacle appear to preserve their validities, even during a challenging time such as the corona virus outbreak and relevant quarantine