The impact of Wikileaks in Turkey seems to be limited for now. Turkey still has not entered the digital age.

Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, which recently has been publicizing the confidential cables of American diplomats. I personally wait everyday for new leaks. It is just like Japanese cell phone novels; sort of cliffhangers. To be honest I believe that Julian Assange is not a bad guy as claimed. If Assange is a bad person, I really have difficulty in understanding how Angela Merkel can be good, for instance. Let me tell you how I feel.

Do you know Lisbeth Salander? She is the main character of the three-book novel series "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Swedish researcher-journalist Stieg Larssonn. The last book of the series The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest has not yet been translated and published in Turkish. We are waiting for it. ? I personally consider Julian Assange to be like Lisbeth Salander. They both are children of the digital era. If you ask them "would you give up the television or Internet," 77 percent of the US says "screw television." They already download television shows from online. They do not read daily papers much, yet they believe that they can follow ongoing developments. Is this not correct for those reading the WikiLeaks documents?

Both Assange and Salander are hackers; they unlawfully log in to others' computers. They are assaulters in some way. They both devote their lives to making others also see what they see during their "unlawful" activities. They believe that what they do is right.  WikiLeaks works for a similar purpose. Of course, direct assault is not a concern in this case. Wikileaks provides a well-protected mailbox for those who have the information to uncover a confidential operation or leak information from some certain sources. You put forth what you have at hand. Then a group of journalists makes use of the information in the mailbox and the broadcast begins. And the broadcast continues bit by bit like Chinese torture. Everyone experiences the excitement similar to how they feel when reading a photo romance story. Not a bad trick, right?

Connected with digital webs
But how does this happen? Here comes the globalization part. Being connected to each other through digital webs makes us vulnerable to such unlawful assaults. This is the first thing. Second, the substantial spread of information also is enabled by this connection itself. The Internet in the sense we know it came into our lives in 1990. In 1997, there was no Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube or WikiLeaks. "Then how did we spend time in the evenings in those times?" Mechanisms that facilitate and democratize Internet participation have been invented in the twenty-first century. Currently the number of those participating in this global digital web is estimated to be approximately 2 billion. As much as they grow, the risk of assault, the efficiency of mechanisms like WikiLeaks and the control on such mechanisms naturally will be reinforced.

In this context, for instance, we have to take two parameters into account when seeking to find out how Wikileaks affect politics in Turkey. First is that you must have access to the Internet. The available data suggest that the number of those who can access the Internet is 26.5 million, accounting for approximately for 35 percent of the population. This is pleasing on one hand, but too little to obtain information, on the other hand.  Second, reading in English is of importance, which pulls the ratio down. If you read the issue from this angle, I think that the impact of the Wikileaks occasion will be limited for now. Turkey still remains outside of the digital age. I have not forgotten about Merkel. I will go back to that.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 07.12.2010