Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes the political culture in Turkmenistan as a framework of the suppressed media environment in the country. It focuses on the transformation of the media landscape in the period from 1991 onwards in the comparative perspective of the political culture under the first President of Independent Turkmenistan Saparmurad Niyazov and his successor Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov. I support that interaction of the Turkmen political culture and the personality of the political leaders is the key factor in defining the dynamics of the media landscape of the Turkmen society. In contrast to the existing discourse on non-dynamic or static authoritarian mood in Turkmenistan, I argue that some gentle and slow transformation is going on in the political system, in the media sphere in particular, although tough control and media censorship is maintained. The political powers use methods of silencing independent reporters, surveillance of subscribers of new media, and persecution of critics of the government policy. Meanwhile, the emergence of the new generation of journalists, including citizen journalists in contradiction to the journalists still having Soviet background challenges the authoritarian regime. This analysis is based on a case study method - the content and style of the Turkmen official online newspaper and the practice of social media.

Paper long abstract:

This study focuses on different modalities of social media trade in Kazakhstan and how sellers create trust online using platform features, personal skills and physical locations of stores associated with social media accounts. Researching this topic in Kazakhstan locates this study in a specifically interesting intersection of trade, technology, informality and trust. Social media trade is a part of electronic commerce that is new and technologically advanced type of business, however many traders work informally as they fail to meet legal norms as business registration, tax payment and giving receipts. Just as individual traders poured to the streets in the period of perestroika, modern day small business owners have occupied social media and turned it into an electronic bazaar.

Driven by the question of trust building in a complex realm of electronic but yet informal trade, I focus on a concept of a "living account" that is coined by my ethnographic data (interviews, observations and social media content analysis). I explore different dimensions of trade both online and offline to understand how these realms are intertwined in the question of informality and trust. I argue that as long as an account is perceived to be "living" the question of formal registration, taxes and receipts is not relevant to customers.

As shops located at bazaars transfer their stores online, and traders learn new technology in order to increase their sales, this study challenges the notion of bazaars being static and backward as they are perceived in the literature.