Social Media in Turkish Cypriot Society: Power, Surveillance and the Monitoring Culture

This article investigates whether Turkish Cypriots perceive themselves under surveillance on social media. An online survey was conducted to 167 Turkish Cypriots to investigate the perception and factors of the social media surveillance and surveillance society in North Cyprus. Results indicated that social media surveillance perception had a significant relationship with age, gender, monthly income, collogue and superior surveillance, political party follower surveillance, and government institution surveillance. The study can be extended to Greek Cypriot sample to investigate the cultural differences in terms of surveillance perception.


Introduction
Social Media is the use of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Instagram to be informed of individuals, events and news. Facebook is the leading social network with 1.65 billion monthly users (FB, 27 April 2016). In an era where there is constant information flow among people, it is vital to look at how information flows, to whom does it flow and more importantly whether information should remain private or public. The internet in general, as engaging and entertaining, as it seems, is a source for exposed data and information of individuals in many aspects. People upload their credit card information to buy commodities, sign into social media platforms to keep in touch with one another and watch videos to stay connected with latest news. Social media is also a crucial source of information and a platform for news source for individuals. As Alice Marwick states: "These technologies are designed for users to continually investigate digital traces left by the people they are connected to through social media" ( p.378, 2012). These traces are constantly monitored by social media users and thus raises the question of how social media is related to surveillance. For Haggerty and Ericcson "Surveillance involves collecting and analyzing information of populations to govern people" (p. 3, 2006) Throughout surveillance studies, George Orwell's novel "1984Orwell's novel " " (2003 has been used as one of the primary metaphors to indicate how surveillance on the society is constructed. Written in 1949, The Big Brother in the novel is a symbol that controls not only the corporal existence but also the thoughts of the citizens in a totalitarian way. The idea of Surveillance Society has reached its peak when Michel Foucault proposed Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon to emphasize on the concepts of surveillance, social control and power. In his book Discipline and Punish Foucault depicts the prisoner in the Panopticon as the object, "[s]he is seen, but [s]he does not see" (p. 200,1977). The common ideology of the Big Brother and Panopticon as metaphor is that they both show how power is present in societies as surveillance systems and social control mechanisms.
In 1998, the movie Truman Show has brought another dimension to the concept of surveillance. Inspired by the society that is obsessed on watching TV in the late 90's, the audience watches Truman; unaware that his life is a TV show, find out the inevitable and shocking truth that he is being watched since the day he was born. The film is transformation to a surveillance society in which the "people" are watching "people". The term surveillance society is first proposed by Gary T. Mark (1985) who referred to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four and with the arrival of the digital approaches to modern life, surveillance gathered momentum with scholars like Lyon (1994Lyon ( ,2001. Today, the same question which many scholars asked still arise with every single step of technological and digital improvement: Who is watching who now?

Panopticon versus Synopticon in the surveillance society
Although the ideology of surveillance is certainly formed around the panopticon metaphor, along with the technological developments other metaphors were introduced to indicate the existing social control within that time period.
Mathiesen expands the discussion on society and emphasizes that we are no longer in a private space with our self-inflicted paranoia that helps to self-regulate one in the society, just like a prisoner under control.  Haggerty and Ericson explains (2000), surveillance as an institutional components. These components of surveillance is explicitly present in governmental institutions such as police force and authors give FBI as an example in order to show how police computer systems gather data about the people. Although the emerging TV world brought back the synopticon society in which many are watching the few, the panopticon surveillance is still present in which governmental institutions monitor people in order to collect data about the population and the society. Based on the literature above I propose the following hypothesis: H1 There will be a significant relationship between the perception of being monitored on social media by the state authorities and the scores participants receive from the Surveillance

Surveillance in Collective Society
Christian Fuchs defines society as "interconnected subsystems, communicatively connected and networked.( p.51,2008) He cites Robins and Webster (1999) who claim that new Information and communications technology (ICT) is a continuation of panopticon because they "monitor the activities, tastes preferences of those who are networked". In order to put forward how social media became a platform for surveillance, one must look at the former versions of societal networking and social dynamics. One cannot overlook the fact that neighbor relationships and interactions are one of the main aspects of social dynamics in collective societies. Nirun (1991) evaluates neighbor relationships as an element of social dynamics and states that there are some factors that form vicinity such as "location, gossip, leisure, cultural connections, economical status, and cooperation". The aforementioned interaction left its place to social media with the emerging technology. As Lyon and Trotter reiterates, social media enables information "exchange between individuals, collaborative identity construction and friendships provide unique surveillance opportunities as users often engage with a particular audience in mind." ( p.89, 2013). This voluntary participation in social media has similarities with being in social interaction with familiar people around like neighbors yet has one difference. The collective interaction has now moved to internet. The socio-cultural sphere is crucial in many cultures since some cultures are explicity private, some are explicitly based on cultural communication within the society. Sinha (2014) gives Indian culture as an explicit example of the collective society and focuses on the high aspects of collectivist culture. He cites Marriot (1976) which labels the Indian society as "dividuals" within collectives rather than individuals separated from each other. "They were found to be so embedded in their in-groups that Marriot (1976)  In UK it was announced that the government is paying several companies to monitor people on social media i and in the same way the political parties pay companies to conduct surveys on elections and the results are distributed through social media for publicity. Especially during elections, Turkish Cypriot population follow social media as it is one of the richest news source and surveys are also conducted by the political parties to build perception management. Neil Richards states that "Critically, the gathering of information affects the power dynamic between the watcher and the watched, giving the watcher greater power to influence or direct the subject of surveillance… it gives the watchers power that can be used nefariously" (p.1934-1965, 2013) Based on this, the following hypotheses are proposed: H4 There will be a significant relationship between the perception of being monitored on social media by the colleagues and superiors of the participants at the workplace and the scores participants receive from the Surveillance Society survey H5 There will be a significant relationship between the perception of being monitored on social media by the political party the participants support and the scores participants receive from the Surveillance Society survey.

Participants
Current study was conducted with 167 participants; 88 (52%) of them were women and 79 (48%) were men. Age groups differed from 18 to 60. All of the participants were recruited on social media via online surveys. Majority of the participants had at least undergraduate degree or higher (88,6%). The study targeted only Turkish Cypriots. There was an item regarding nationality differences of the participants; Turkish Cypriot, Turkish, and Other

Results
IBM SPSS 20th version was used in the study for data analysis, and assumptions of homogeneity of variance and normality were completed for each scale. In addition, participants who have more than +3/-3 z-score was also excluded from the analysis, resulting with seventeen excluded participants at total, and further analyses were completed with 167 participants. ANOVA and Correlation analyses were conducted on the data entered into SPSS. ANOVA results were measured to compare means scores depending on demographic information of the participants. Correlation coefficients were measured to see the associations among the variables.

Descriptive Statistics
The number of participants, mean scores, and ANOVA results for the variables (gender, age group, monthly income, city, and education level) can be seen in Table 1. ANOVA were conducted with participants' total score of S.S.S.

Conclusion and recommendations for further research
This research was conducted to investigate the perceptions of surveillance in the Turkish Cypriot society and the factors that affected this perceptions. Although there was a significant positive correlation with participants' gender, age group, monthly income, perceived colleague and superior surveillance, perceived political party follower surveillance, and perceived government institutions surveillance, no significant positive relationship correlation was found with participants' perceived family and friend surveillance.
Further research could be conducted on Greek Cypriot society to investigate the relationship between the surveillance and collective society and whether the political power and state authorities is implementing surveillance on the society.