‘Instagram affects everyone but me’: A study on the social media mindset in western Türkiye

This study, which is motivated by the figures that Türkiye exhibits the highest average daily usage of <em>Instagram </em>compared to all other countries, aims to understand and analyze <em>Instagram’s</em> mindset focusing on Postman’s definition of media ecology which mentioned how the platform affects users’ perception, understanding, feeling, values and chances of survival to be able to reach conclusions on social media mindset. The research part is a descriptive analysis of the social media mindset with a focus on media ecology and it is a qualitative one based on in-depth interviews. <em>Instagram </em>users who define them as regular users of social media were interviewed using the questions that were formed with regard to expert opinion and the data was analyzed using MAXQDA. The most striking result of the research was that users are quite aware of the effect of <em>Instagram </em>in relation to media ecology, but they consider themselves out of this ecosystem. This is what the authors call ‘a media survival dichotomy:’ although <em>Instagram </em>users accept that <em>Instagram </em>affects people’s perception, understanding, feeling, values and chances of survival, they also think that they are not affected.