QUOTES PHENOMENON AS A SYMPTOM OF THE LACK OF (CRITICAL) REFLECTION ON THE FACEBOOK SOCIAL NETWORK

The paper critically reviews current understanding of certain cultural phenomena (quotes), considered in the light of complex global communication and media progress, based on the rapid development of new technologies and social networking and through the use of the Internet and the so-called “social networks” such as Facebook. The focus of research has highlighted the appearance of over-quoting, which has almost overwhelmed all social networks substituting the opinions, ritualizing forms of communication in the virtual space and invoking memories of the old cultural phenomena. In this way, users either simulate the traditional patterns of cultural behavior on the network or they quote/adapt suitable experiences leading to deconstruction of their own identity.

CULTURE AND HAPPINESS

The spirit of culture is contained in the Socratic call to self-knowledge, in order to improve our morale, wisdom and wellbeing, which not only brings happiness, but is the true happiness. Culture goes beyond information and knowledge into cognition that contributes to the flourishing of both the individual and social life. The real meaning of culture lies in our stronger, more conscious and alert presence in the world. We have to be aware of the fundamental difference between “having” education or culture as an accumulation of information and knowledge and “being” an educated, cultivated person as a result of reflective, alert and creative living. Culture is a biophilic, generative orientation, as it allows free flow and affirmation of life energies in their multiple expressions and forms. Not until we restitute to culture its original meaning, spirit, and Eros which permeated it from immemorial times, through the educational system and other social channels and institutions, the concept of culture will not be carried across to younger generations in that inspiring meaning and sense, and they will experience it as alien and hostile to their needs, interests, and pursuit of happiness.

THE MEASURE OF CULTURE IN CULTURAL SECTIONS

We live in a time when our lives are saturated with information. We daily receive numerous messages through various media outlets. For example, in the US, during one year, about 200 000 books are published, approximately 70 million hours of programs are broadcast by radio stations and about 58 million hours of television programs are produced. “From the day of your birth until today more information was produced than during all recorded history before you, while half the total number of all scientists in history lives and produces information today.” Every year we publish more books. If you decided to read everything that has been published in one year, you would have to read one book every three minutes, which is about five hundred books a day. This, of course, only refers to the latest world production, and not the classics. Question is how many of the newly published books are read, how and how much the books and culture in general are covered in commentaries, how well the journalists are trained and if they are at all capable of selecting, clarifying and structuring such a horrific amount of information for us at a time of world crisis which has devastated Serbia as well in material, cultural and also media-related sense. A year ago results were published in Serbia of a study conducted by master student of the Faculty of political sciences in Belgrade who investigated the treatment of the book in Serbian media. These results were far from encouraging – apart from Radio Belgrade 2 and special weekend newspaper additions dedicated to book reviews, the book is generally neglected in the Serbian printed media, while the book reports themselves lack the necessary serious approach and deeper pondering. Focus of this paper is monitoring and analysis of cultural contributions in three daily newspapers, the Politika, the Večernje novosti and the Danas over a period 29.09.2012 – 2.10.2012. Its purpose was to show the content of these cultural sections, to make a comparative analysis of their content and quality of content, as well as to pinpoint the basic topics covered and pursue the question if the printed media create contents that raise public attention. The analysis had an empirical and conceptual approach, and covered quantity and quality baselines.

THE CULTURE OF VIRTUAL (UN)REALITY

The Internet could be defined as a semantically floating environment whose codes mirror everyday acts of a subject or social group; such environment is a novelty per se (in the sense of the medium itself), but also concerns the way in which the communication process is being reconstituted. A medium (channel, means) of communication, as far as the Internet is concerned, connects textual audio and visual elements adding interactivity to them – the possibility of influencing the form and content of requested information. The paradox of a subject and an identity lies in the fact that the subject is simultaneously free to set coordinates of his/her presence on the Web by creating his/her personal profile, but at the same time is imprisoned within cyber space of the screen entirely occupying the visual field. So, we have to ask if the `reality` and `copy of reality` are the issue here or are we at the beginning of a new, different reality within which `real` and `virtual` are being increasingly intertwined?

READING THE AMBASSADORS: FUNDAMENTAL NARCISSISM, SUBJECT ANNULMENT, AND YET ANOTHER SKETCH FOR A SELF-DESTRUCTIVE FUNCTION OF THE GAZE

This text was born in the context of preliminary researches of the author in the field of picture analysis in which the function of the gaze itself is a decisive factor in the operation of annulment of the subject of gaze. The text starts from well known theoretic and art history interpretations of the picture The Ambassadors in which Hans Holbein the Younger, in the first half of the sixteeth century, counterposed not only optical nonlinear perspective against the dominant, central geometric perspective but also a geometric (linear, straight) subject to a different one: optical, ex-centric, scopic. The purpose of the paper is to wake up, once again, five centuries later, the static, fixated and focused observer (the symptom and main protagonist of a similarly static, fixated and focused culture of gaze) in order to take a radically different angle. Why? Because in displacing of the Holbein’s observer from the status quo position (by de-centering his gaze, his optical removal from the comfort of a fixed point of observance and his physical moving) the de-centered, excentric observer is offered an opportunity to once again, and every time anew, get actively involved in the historic switch to a different culture of gaze. And a different culture of gaze here implies the kind of culture which, due to a constant overstepping of the limits of the un-culture of gaze, leads us to believe that a different world is possible and leads us to a different perception of the world of the picture and a different perception of the picture of the world – different from the one in which the conservative, atavistic, self-sufficient, patriarchal and “patriotic“ culture keeps us prisoners of a hardened centralistic and stubbornly frontal and undesputably orthodox (straight) view of the world.

STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION OF THE ROLE OF CULTURE AND CULTURAL HERITAGE IN FORMING OF THE NATIONAL BRAND

This paper deals with the national brand as combined thoughts, feelings and images that certain groups can have about their own country or a foreign one. This paper also analyzes how this image is being constructed, as well as many economic and political consequences of a positive national brand that a country can have. Special attention is given on how students, future leaders, see the role of culture and cultural heritage in improving the image of Serbia in the world.

ON HOSPITALITY AND INNOVATION

The role of public hospitality emerges as important space for establishment of stability and change in a given culture. Hospitality in the public sphere is a public presentation of culture from one community to another, or from one prominent individual to another. Ritual of hospitality thus mediates cultural transmissions. Public hospitality, as a form and content of ritual exchange of cultural traits, influences innovative movements of cultural systems. Starting with such an assumption, one of the many possible examinations of the structure, characteristics and the interrelations between hospitality and innovation was undertaken in this theoretical article. Places of public hospitality (places of establishment of symbolic complementarities of two realities – two entities, us or them) and processes of innovation (continuous accumulation of changes) are portrayed based on examination of the mythic in cultures, fragments from history, history of ideas about hospitality and about what is strange, results of recent research of innovation in the fields of evolutionary anthropology and theoretical biology as well as on the hospitality and the critical views of the author. In conclusion, the differences in mastering and acquiring social and physical unknowns through structures and forms of hospitality create qualitative differences in cultural transmissions and in the potential for innovation of a particular community.

(LACK OF) CULTURE IN DIGITAL AGE

Digital language is the language of young generations; they process information very differently from previous generations. There is sufficient evidence to confirm that the impact of digital technology on youth is unjustly neglected and that the educational institutions and the authorities have a serious commitment to research this area. There is no education without communication, but what kind of communication is necessary for educational system in digital age? In the time before the advent of electronic mass media, the teacher was the most important for providing information about the world; he/she was responsible for setting up a student’s system of values as well as society norms. The digital age has brought skills such as assessment, analysis, access, participation and creativity, necessary for solving everyday problems. The global phenomenon of “digital natives” is discussed in a critical analysis and with special attention to their ability to learn in a traditional education system.

CULTURE OF MEDIA OCULARCENTRISM

In the text, the media ocularcentrism is seen as a specific non-cultural self-affirmation by means of replicating the models of media representation. The development of scopic techniques is no longer inspired by the ideal of „Cartesian perspectivism“ but by maintaining fascination for visual exchange. In the post-industrial society, media images produce nothing; they do not construct the truth; they do not show the truth; they are produced as signifiers of monitoring mechanisms. In this way, hyperproduction of media images only confirms that there is a power over things that are in focus, not in declaration of acceptance of a certain interpretation as a civic duty but in agreement to participation in maintainance of monitoring mechanisms.

MEDIA LITERACY AND CULTURE OF THE PRIMARY SCHOOL PUPILS IN NIŠ

This work analyses the relationship between media and education, especially the possibilities of developing the media culture and literacy in institutional education. In the process of developing media culture and literacy, schools have a very important role being the basic educational institutions which are expected to lead a planned and systematic action with the aim of achieving the best effects of media education. In order to find out in which ways schools develop media culture and literacy, what potentials can schools use to develop these processes and if there is a difference in attitudes of students depending on their gender, we have analyzed the attitudes of primary school pupils. The work explains the results of an extensive research implemented on the sample of 142 pupils attending primary schools on the City of Niš territory. The results have confirmed that there is no statistically significant difference between the attitudes of male and female students concerning the school milieu as a favorable environment for development of media culture and literacy, within both teaching process and extracurricular activities.