Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
International Journal of Education and Literacy Studies, cilt.9, sa.4, ss.207-216, 2021 (Hakemli Dergi)
The social and technological developments experienced have led the 21st century children to digital tools for education, entertainment and communication. The concepts of literacy were also affected by this tendency, and with the spread of extracurricular reading and writing activities, students’ literacy tendencies rapidly began to evolve from paper to screen. The Wattpad is also a text writing and sharing application that children and young people engagedly turn to. In this uncontrolled free platform, thousands of stories written in various forms of expressions on all kinds of subjects are presented to the admiration of children in the developmental age and are quickly consumed by many children and young people who are not yet digitally literate. In this qualitative research, which is designed as a case study, 6 stories that were awarded in 2018 within the scope of the Wattys Awards given by Wattpad each year with user votes were examined within the framework of the concept of violence. The data were obtained through document analysis and they were analyzed with the descriptive analysis method according to Polat’s (2016) classification of “physical violence, sexual violence, emotional violence, economic violence and cyber violence” and analyzed according to the determined codes and categories. The findings show that there are many elements of violence in the stories examined and that these mainly include physical and emotional violence types. The acts of “killing” and “dying” in the physical violence, and the insults aimed at disdaining and ridiculing were the most common forms of emotional violence. The fact that these stories, in which all kinds of violence were encountered, were deemed worthy of awards by the readers, revealed that readers had an interest in violent genres, and Wattpad fed this interest of young readers. For this reason, it is recommended that Wattpad application be used under the family supervision and an editorial application be implemented within Wattpad itself.