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In this article, everyday technology, which tends to expand without limits, is discussed in the context of contemporary practices that start from antenatal to death and that correspond to the desire for immortality of modern man. For this purpose, it is examined how technology intervenes in life and death through the episodes of Arkangel, Right Be Back, and San Junipero in Black Mirror, the popular science fiction series. In this study, the current social and human dilemmas that appear in the narratives are discussed, without ignoring the technical analysis of the series. In this respect, gene based medical studies that reformat the body, smart and synthetic technologies that add a new dimension to digital control and surveillance, contemporary medical and technoscientific assumptions about death and immortality are debated. The theoretical framework of this article consists of theoreticians such as Jean Baudrillard, David Le Breton and Byung Chul Han who consider that the change in social structure and relations is mainly driven by technology and critically approach this unavoidable trend. According to the main argument and inference of this research, technologies that can descend to every part of the body are no longer just the comfort and convenience extensions of daily life, and they affect almost all ontological processes between existence and extinction by being articulated with human destiny. However, this global trend is also the loss of the natural and the real for the modern characters who are deprived of the human conditions such as pain and death that make life precious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to describe the contemporary debates in sociology in the context of Ali Shariati and Cemil Meriç who are significant but not popular scholars of the Eastern intellectual world by making comparison with some Western thinkers and issues. In this way, it is dealt with some typical modern sociological matters and criticise indirectly the West-oriented worldview. For this purpose, it is also focused on the question of how the Eastern scholars approach some debates from objectivity to value-judgment; from equality to class conflict; from religion to freedom; from genocide to the problem of intellectuality; and from security to power. At this point it should be underlined that the concepts East and West do not refer to geographical distance but to socio-cultural and ideological differentiation. It is not coincidence that these differentiations are portrayed in the context of essential scholars like Cemil Meriç and Ali Shariati who both internalise the West and, despite this, turn their faces to the East because these two thinkers have significant worth and background in reaching the roots of this civilisation and in constructing the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to deal with the Orhon Inscriptions among the concepts and debates on cultural memory for the purpose of 'remembering', 'adaptation', 'updating' and 'refunctionalising' through the television documentary "Time Traveller: Following the Steps of the Turks". What do the inscriptions tell us about today? What does deducing, analysing and developing a methodology for this provide to the national heritage under the titles of past, identity, belonging and memory? In this article, accordingly, cultural memory questions and suggestions are offered through the Orhon Inscriptions. Documents and documentaries, without doubt, are instruments of interpreting the past and projecting the future. This research is conceptual as well as methodological. In this respect, a minimal "cultural memory glossary" is fictionalised and thus a sort of conceptual ground is generated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses -- not chronologically, but sociologically -- the transition from the age of asceticism, which advises one to eat like a bird in order to perfect the soul, to the modern age, in which the diet society is highlighted. It asserts that this ambivalent and conflictive situation between soul and body creates a collective regime in which the human being is embodied and the body becomes nothing. The body, being beyond all means of liberation, turns into both an unending capital and an abysmal swamp of modernity. Under this regime, the Self reflects upon itself and categorises the body as either skinny or fat. Besides, the exhibitive industrialised visualisation of the Self is unexpectedly blinding. Here, the body disappears as much as it is highlighted. The new style-life formula, which reduces bliss and salvation to the gym, slimming pills and diet programmes, incessantly guides the masses through the medical sciences and, in particular, the media. Every tendency towards achieving absolute beauty and happiness is reborn from its own ashes as a new form of dissatisfaction and leads to endless searching. Through the Mexican film Malos Hábitos (2007), this paper focuses on the dichotomies between physical and spiritual existence, the individual and the social body, hunger and gluttony, mirror and appearance, and desire and dissatisfaction. In this respect, it implicitly offers a critical stance of secular discourses focusing around the concepts of the body and freedom that have often been debated in recent years in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If it is claimed that, socially and architecturally, Istanbul has been getting uglier by the day, it should be noted that one of critical breakpoints of the deformation process was the deportation event between Turkey and Greece in the 1960s. That resulted in profound and essential changes in the urban, social and demographical form of Istanbul, and is dealt with in this paper through a film, Politiki Kouzina (A Touch of Spice, 2003). This film that is about a Greek family who were deported from Istanbul and moved to Athens by virtue of some political disagreements during the first years of the 1960s, deals with this change by examining the deportation process which catalysed the large-scale demographic and cultural transformation which has ethnically made Istanbul more homogenous and monophonic. The deportation, which is a reflection of the nation-oriented State, 'disinfected' Constantinople of strangers and destroyed a multi-coloured notion of the city. As a result of the deportation, the ethnic Greek population of Istanbul was reduced from 135,000 to a mere 7,000. This situation can be accepted as being one of the most influential events to affect the urban culture of contemporary Istanbul. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dubai Film Festivali, Ortadoğu sineması açısından bir endüstri platformu işlevi görmektedir. Burada 'pazar' kelimesi daima 'savaş' kavramlarının önüne geçmektedir. Dünyaca ünlü oyuncu ve yapımcıların sık sık konuşmacı ve jüri olarak ağırlandığı festivalde, Ortadoğu'daki insan hakları ihlalleri, işgaller ve yoksulluk gibi 'sıcak' konular büyük oranda göz ardı edilmektedir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]