Abstract:

This research aims to reveal what photographic social media with location notification services have brought the spatial interaction of individuals. Photographic social media such as Instagram and Facebook, where visual representations of places and their locations can be shared, are subject to this research instead of applications that allow reporting only visited places. How students who participated in an exchange program benefited from social media before going abroad, and how they revealed their spatial experiences in social media when they went, are the main problems of study. As one of the qualitative research methods, in-depth interviews were conducted with 18 people aged 23 to 30 years. According to the findings, the individual puts subjective experience to the socially generated meanings of place and conveys them in social media applications. While social media seems to be a channel that directs experiences about the spaces, allowing individuals to share location and photographs of the places, they also allow to express their meaningful places, to present their identities through places, and to communicate through space.

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