THE IRON CAGE OF CULTURE

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A NEW ROLE OF THE CHILDREN’S CULTURAL CENTRE IN BELGRADE AS A GATHERING PLACE FOR EXPERTS IN CHILD CREATIVITY DEVELOPMENT

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BETH KEVAROTH – HOUSE OF THE DEAD

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The Jewish Diaspora has begun back in the classical era with the conquests of the Roman Empire, and has never finished. Since this period, Jews have been populating the Balkan countries. In Serbia, this is particularly characteristic of a later period – the Middle Ages and the New Age, when Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews began to inhabit Serbian cities and towns. Jews were a peaceful urban population, skilled tradesmen and craftsmen, educated people with relatively developed business relationships overseas. Although they have lived for centuries in a different environment, Jews preserved their specific ethnic and religious identity. The Jewish religion is Judaism, and their unconditional respect for the Torah and the Talmud has resulted in preserving essential foundations of the whole system of Jewish customs, rules and regulations, which defined their life in the broadest sense. Therefore Jewish religious and traditional beliefs are universal for all Jews, wherever they live. In Serbia, as in all other countries, Jews have fitted into the environment and shared the fate of their neighbors, but in cultural, religious and traditional terms, they have been a world in itself. The Jewish mourning rites represent a very complex ritual system with a special place in human minds. The “Beth Kevaroth – House of The Dead” is an article about Jewish customs regarding death and burial, based on which one can look at a specific, essentially different culture than the culture of Serbs and other Christian communities, despite some similarities in procedures and even some ideas.

NEW MEDIA: IDENTITY AND GLOBAL CULTURAL ENTITY

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The proccess of spreading knowledge and ideas through new media platforms is erasing the ethnic, cultural, religious, political and any other borders. While the globalists underline benefits from uniting diversity, anti-globalists see the cultural diversity as being slowly extinguished. The global trade or non-commercial brands that are present in the new media override the space as we know it, using a new language of the postmodern era. The integrative and interactive communication proccess is taking place on the new media platforms, accesible equally to individuals and to numerous homogenous symphatizer communities. These new media are considered alternative as long as they have critical approach and the freedom to create new ideas, which is an advantage of financialy independent sites. The possibilities of media communication platforms are overtaking all the other forms of gathering people and making them participate in group actions. Comparing live and electronic communication, we see the trap in the fact that the electronic data are there to stay forever. The idealized self-presentations tend to move the individuals away from their own selves. It’s just as easy to get an emotional support from virtual friends as loosing it. Internet users can either choose to stay anonimous or give it up. Either way they are expanding their personal and cultural identity. The cultural globalization is, together with the technological grounds of the new media, the main condition for all other globalization dimesions. There is an ongoing proccess of creating one global cultural entity covering our distinctiveness and making the borders more permeable than ever.

NARRATION AS A GLOBAL TREND OF JOURNALISTIC DOCUMENTARY FORMS

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The paper critically reviews the role of journalistic documentary forms in contemporary journalism, mainly of global print media, with the intention of achieving top interpretation by using in-depth research and documentary mediation. The focus of the research is on the analysis of narrative in documentary reportage, not only as representative of new documentaristics, but also as a leader of global trends in storytelling, which already rules the media industry. A case study of National Geographic on a representative sample allows an insight into composition and mechanisms of intentionality in the analyzed documentary reportages, from which we can derive explanations for their ways of influence on the mind and emotions of the recipient, with ubiquitous psychagogical features. An immeasurable impact which those features have on the multimillion audiences/readers is also considered here.