This study examines how digitalisation transforms identity construction and self-presentation within the Metaverse, emphasising the sociological dimensions often overlooked in the existing literature. Using an applied qualitative approach, it draws on semi-structured interviews with 11 active Metaverse users in Turkey alongside one year of participant observation across platforms such as Second Life, Decentraland, and Spatial. Findings reveal that individuals construct alternative selves in the Metaverse, prioritising professional visibility in work-related environments while seeking anonymity, freedom, and role experimentation in social and leisure contexts. Avatars serve as dynamic tools for self-presentation, reshaping frontstage/backstage boundaries and blurring the line between real and virtual identities. The Metaverse provides diverse opportunities in education, therapy, worship, and commerce, yet it also presents complex risks concerning privacy, data security, and the absence of legal frameworks. The analysis, interpreted through Goffman's self-presentation theory, Castells' network society, and Giddens' reflexive self, underscores the multidimensional nature of digital identity transformation. By integrating the digital economy and subjectivities into its analysis, the study highlights how platform structures and user agency intersect in identity formation. This research advances the literature by offering a sociological, experience-based perspective on the metaverse and informing scholars, policymakers, and platform developers about the social, ethical, and regulatory challenges posed by digital environments while emphasising the potential for constructing participatory and inclusive digital futures.
Born on January 13, 1921, in Florina, which is located within the borders of modernday Greece, Necati Cumal & imath; settled in Turkey with his family following the 1923 population exchange. His 1994 novel Viran Da & gbreve;lar (Ruined Mountains) recounts the story of a wealthy family by drawing on the social and political transformations that took place in Macedonia from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, as the Ottoman Empire lost its influence in the region. He adapts to his new life, filled with pain and bloodshed because of the conflicts that erupt in the Balkans, and displays a heroism similar to that of Alexandre Dumas' fictional characters. The novel bears the subtitle Macedonia 1900/Book Two. The first book, Macedonia 1900, consists of short stories. Viran Da & gbreve;lar was translated into French by Orhan Altan in 2001 under the title Le Dernier Seigneur des Balkans. In 2005, it was adapted into a four episode television series broadcast on French ARTE television. Directed by French filmmaker Michel Favart, the series spans from the independence movements to the Balkan wars, the Italian and German occupations, and the Communist era. Spanning a period longer than the historical process covered in the novel, the first episode and the first 30 minutes of the second episode are based on Viran Da & gbreve;lar. There is a substantial body of academic work on how the Balkans are perceived in Western Europe. The concept of "balkanism", which is conceptualised by Maria Todorova, occupies an important place in this field of study. Most broadly, the term refers to the Balkans being othered by Western Europe as "savage," "a place where small communities are constantly at war with each other," and "backward." Within this framework, the aim of this study is to examine how the TV series adaptation relates to the novel Viran Da & gbreve;lar, which characters and storylines from the novel are foregrounded in the adaptation, and to what extent they are subjected to change. The study indicates that the series adaptation offers a significantly different portrayal of the Balkans compared to the novel.
With the increasing integration of digital platforms in everyday life, the phenomenon of childhood is gaining more and more visual images, squeezed into the duality of the viewer and the broadcaster, and turning into a commercialised field. This new cultural backdrop brings child YouTubers onto the public stage and shapes the phenomenon of digital labour and the subjectivity of the child. This study aims to trace the digital childhood experience and understand this complex phenomenon by addressing the subjectivities developed by children who produce content on the YouTube platform on the axis of performance, visibility and commercialisation. The YouTube ecosystem was chosen as the venue of research and 5 channels from YouTube Turkey were selected through the purposive sampling method. The video content and viewer feedback of the channels were taken as data, analysed through the online ethnography method, and the data obtained were thematically coded through reflexive thematic analysis and contextually interpreted under 3 main themes and 12 sub-themes. The findings reveal that children are positioned as active content producers, commercialised actors with economic value. The repetitive narrative patterns in the content and sensitivity to audience feedback indicate that children's subjectivity has evolved into a form that is increasingly demand-driven, shaped by performance pressure, and based on sustainable visibility strategies. By positioning themselves as potential brands in content promotions, children construct themselves within a commercialised fiction. These processes show that digital subjectivity is constructed through a reciprocal and dynamic interaction between the platform, the child subject and commercial relations.
This study examines the digitalised dimensions of migration during polycrises that increasingly restrict physical mobility and introduces digitalised migration as an analytical framework through the case of the government-supported e-Residency programme. Using Estonia's e-Residency as an example, the study conceptualises the integration of digital identity holders into Estonia's economic and administrative systems as virtual mobility, highlighting emerging migrant subjectivities and contributing to contemporary migration debates. Employing a data collection and analysis process that integrates traditional and innovative methods, this study examines the dynamics driving individuals towards transnational virtual mobility during periods of polycrisis and identifies the opportunities and limitations of this digitalised migration form. First, user comments on Turkish-language YouTube videos about Estonia's e-Residency programme were gathered and analysed to explore digital discussions using clustering algorithms and interpretive content analysis. Second, in-depth interviews were conducted with e-Residents and field experts, and the resulting data were analysed through interpretive content analysis. The findings reveal the potential, opportunities, limitations, and risks of e-Residency as a digitalised migration infrastructure, particularly its role in strengthening individual resilience amid economic instability, armed conflict, and global health emergencies. They also underscore the economic and intangible advantages that digitalised migration offers to source and destination countries in the era of polycrisis.
The digital transformation experienced in the first quarter of the 21st century fundamentally altered the traditional operational modalities of capitalism. Digital platforms have transcended their role as mere market actors, evolving into hegemonic forces that systematically restructure social and economic existence. The power structures emerging from this process exhibit characteristics analogous to feudal hierarchies, generating novel forms of subjugation and dependency. This study examines the historical evolution of digital capitalism through a comprehensive sociological lens, conducting an in-depth analysis of the theoretical framework underlying the concept of techno-feudalism. The investigation addresses the power relations established by digital platforms, the value chains created through user data production, and the emergent social hierarchies constituted within these processes. Within the platform economy, users continuously generate value through their daily interactions and digital traces, while the substantial majority of this value is appropriated by platform proprietors through algorithmic processes and sophisticated data mining techniques. The study demonstrates that the transformations engendered by the digital economy extend beyond purely economic dimensions, profoundly affecting social structures, identity formation processes, and the modalities of social relations. In this context, the impact of digital platforms on forms of social organisation and users' positioning within this system are critically evaluated. A novel hierarchical order between "digital lords" and "digital serfs" supplanted traditional capitalist labour-capital relations. This process has generated an extraordinarily complex structure where economic and social inequalities are systematically reproduced through digital instruments, deepening digital stratification, and and establishing new forms of class distinctions.
This study conceptualises the increasingly prevalent metaphor of "brain decay" not as a neurological disorder but as a sociocultural and class-shaped symptom produced by the speed, performance, and attention regimes of digital capitalism. The analysis examines how digitalisation restructures cognitive capacity, affective states, and collective consciousness and argues that mental degeneration is generated through multilayered processes shaped by contemporary labour regimes, technological acceleration, and unequal access to cognitive resources. To address this, the study synthesises theoretical insights from Byung-Chul Han's psychopolitics, Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital, Nancy Fraser's model of recognition and redistribution, Richard Sennett's analyses of contemporary work culture, and Hartmut Rosa's concepts of acceleration and resonance. Methodologically, the research is based on an interdisciplinary literature review, thematic classification, and metaphorical analysis. The scope,inclusion/exclusion criteria, thematic coding logic, and analytical boundaries of the review are explicitly defined. The metaphor of "brain decay" is examined through a clearsource-domain/target-domain mapping, identifying what the metaphor reveals about structural cognitive pressures while delimiting it from clinical neurodegeneration terminology to avoid conceptual ambiguity. The findings demonstrate that mental degeneration is not merelythe outcome of individual burnout ortechnological exposure but is structurally linked to digital attention extraction, neoliberal performance imperatives, and class-based disparities in cultural and cognitive capital. In this context, the article introduces two original conceptual contributions. "Cognitive resilience" refers to the capacity to maintain analytical and emotional coherence under conditions of digital acceleration and constant stimulation. "The right to mental labour" denotes the necessity of protecting attention, focus, and meaning-making processes through institutional and legal frameworks. Both concepts are operationalised through concrete and measurable policy indicators, such as notification management protocols, focused-attention intervals, screen concurrency ratios, and after-hours accessibility regulations, at the levels of workplaces, schools, and digital platforms. Overall, the study offers an interdisciplinary framework that diagnoses the contemporary crisis of mental degradation while outlining actionable pathways for strengthening cognitive well-being as a social and political priority. By integrating theoretical depth with policy-oriented specificity, the article contributes to the sociological understanding of cognition and proposes a conceptual vocabulary for addressing the structural roots of mental exhaustion in digital capitalism.
The paper concerns sense-making around digital investorial selfhood vis-& agrave;-vis investing platforms among amateur retail investors. From a cultural sociological perspective, while there is no one ideal archetype of financial subjectivity, the study identifies two structuring, binary ideal types shaping sense-making. A singularised self of an independent decision-maker, and a synchronised self, foregoing its agency to the platform's nudges. One imaginary privileges the agency of the user, whereas the other privileges the platform. Both imaginaries shape the meanings investors attribute to both their own investing and to the investing of others via apps. By using this theoretical lens, the paper overviews and interprets how investors navigate between and utilise these imaginaries while they make sense of their own use of digital investing platforms. Based on 23 in-depth interviews with individual Czech and Slovak amateur retail investors, the study shows that both imaginaries are employed differently in investors' accounts. While the singularised imaginary features prominently in the respondent's expressed subjectivity, the synchronised imaginary is more projective and attributive. I interpret this discrepancy as shaped by a broader cultural milieu of postsocialist capitalism, where neoliberal selfhood emerged especially strongly as a moral project, making not achieving self-responsible, independent, and enterprising subjectivity a moral failure.
This article examines how parental surveillance apps (PSAs) exemplify the cultural embeddedness of surveillance capitalism. While surveillance capitalism is often seen as primarily driven by technological infrastructures and operating independently of human subjectivity, this paper argues that PSAs gain traction precisely because they reinforce neoliberal ideals of responsible parenting. These apps promise to help parents fulfil cultural expectations of "good parenting" through digital monitoring, making them attractive not only for their technical functionality but also for their alignment with morally valued identities. Drawing on discourse analysis and theories of neoliberal subjectivity, the article shows how surveillance capitalism depends not only on data extraction and behavioural control but also on the mobilisation of culturally embedded norms around risk, responsibility, and care. PSAs are not merely tools; they help construct the figure of the self-governing, responsible parent, invested in their child's safety and success. At the same time, the analysis identifies counter-discourses that resist these dominant norms and question the ethics, efficacy, and long-term developmental impact of such surveillance. Ultimately, the article offers a more culturally grounded account of how surveillance capitalism becomes embedded in everyday life, particularly within familial relationships, arguing that subject formation is central to the value and legitimacy of its products.
