On the night of July 15, as breakaway factions of the Turkish military seized bridges over theBosphorus strait and buzzed Istanbul with fighter jets, Professor Zeynep Tufekci was in the departure lounge at Antalya Airport, waiting to board a short flight to the capital.
Watching the scenes unfold on TV, it didn’t take the Turkish-born Tufekci long to realize what was happening. “I went immediately to the gate agent and said, ‘I’m not getting on this plane, and you shouldn’t let anyone else, either,’ ” recalled Tufekci, whose full name is pronounced ZAY-nep too-FEK-she. “And then five minutes later, I’m live-tweeting a coup.”
For hours, Turkey’s fate hung in the balance. Soldiers occupied central Istanbul and state television went dark, but a defiant President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appeared on CNN Turk using Apple’s FaceTime app. Opponents of the military overthrow used social media to organize and take to the streets, beating back the coup attempt.
Tufekci, an associate professor in UNC’s School of Information and Library Science, stayed up through the night, feverishly taking notes, tapping out a New York Times opinion piece on her phone and sharing bits of information and analysis with her 220,000-strong Twitter following. For a scholar of new media and civil society, it was an incredible moment.
“I’m sitting there thinking about what this means for Turkey, wondering if I’m safe, and also thinking, ‘Huh — I’ll have to rewrite the conclusion of my new book now,’” she said.
Tufekci has a talent for being at the center of a story. She has emerged as a leading voice at the intersection of information technology, society and government. Instead of carving out a narrow niche in academia, Tufekci’s interests have expanded as social media, big data and privacy concerns invade our politics and personal lives.
“She’s one of UNC-Chapel Hill’s greatest public intellectuals,” said Gary Marchionini, dean of the School of Infor- mation and Library Science. “Especially for a young person, she’s just prolific.”
During an interview in her Manning Hall office, Tufekci made two cups of tea, answered emails, took a call from Turkey and packed a bag for a trip. Her treadmill desk — which lets her write and walk at the same time — seems almost obligatory.
“I am one of those people who thinks while I’m on the move,” she explained.
That’s given her a lot of time to think. She moved as a child to Belgium, where her father worked for NATO. She saved her grocery store wages and bought one of the earliest home computers, teaching herself to code by repairing clunky programs.
“At the time, the computer couldn’t do much of anything. So debugging became a game.”
She kept up her tech skills after returning to Turkey, where she earned an undergraduate degree in sociology and got a job at IBM. The company’s internal network — an early, limited internet linking employees all over the globe — fascinated Tufekci. She applied to the University of Texas at Austin to delve deeper into the emerging world of digital communication.
“I loved grad school,” she said. “They paid you enough that you were poor but didn’t starve. And in return, you got to read books and discuss big ideas. If I could have stayed forever, I would. But eventually they kick you out.”
Her master’s thesis at Austin was titled “Mental Deskilling in the Age of the Smart Machine” — an early hint at her fascination with how technology affects lives.
“We have the same humans we’ve always had, so how will this new technology change the rules of the game?”
“The architecture of technology changes the way you can play the game. You’re still a human being with the same age-old impulses, but you’re playing a new game. So instead of thinking about technology as this thing that’s going to create new kinds of humans, I approach it from thinking that we have the same humans we’ve always had, so how will this new technology change the rules of the game?”
At Chapel Hill, Tufekci explores those changing rules. She has written about bias in Facebook’s algorithms, warned about the threat of hacked voting machines and analyzed conspiracy theories in online media. She closely follows social movements in the United States and abroad, tracking the way activists use new communications tools and the way governments respond.
Her next book will look at the effects of new media on social movements and political change.
That knack for giving context to daily headlines has made Tufekci a popular contributor to The New York Times, a widely viewed TED talker and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. And she has done it all while keeping up the teaching, research and scholarly publishing that guides an academic career.
The public engagement, she said, “definitely comes at a cost. But we face these huge challenges, and we need deep expertise. We do something in academia that no other institution in the country is doing.
“I just came back from San Francisco, where I talked to a lot of big companies. They’re thinking about making money, about expanding, about raising capital and working with investors. Which is all fine. But there are very few people doing what I’m doing, which is studying the effects of these new technologies on the public sphere and our society.”
The freedom to research and write about anything is what keeps Tufekci in academia. With computer programming skills and keen insight into human behavior, she would make a tempting hire for a Silicon Valley firm. “But I have to preserve the critical eye I bring to this. I get to point out things that nobody else is allowed to point out, when it comes to the externalities of this technology. That’s what tenure is good for.”
And it’s especially meaningful for someone who grew up under strict censorship laws in Turkey, where news was limited and debate stifled.
“When you grow up like that, in a very information-deprived environment, and then you come to a major U.S. university ... .” She motions to the bookshelves lining her offce. “I was drunk with the joy of it. I still am.” ◆
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Originally published in The Carolina Alumni Review, the alumni magazine of UNC Chapel Hill.