Digital Young

Sorry, yeah, I know, I haven’t been writing for a loooooooong time. But I was really busy, so I will share some of my projects with you.

As a teaching assistant at Faculty of Letters, I have started an Anthropology Cercle with my students, and here is its blog: www.cerculmihaipop.wordpress.com.

As an organizer of Faculty events, I have done with my students a blog where we present the faculty & what they are doing as students: www.ublitere.srw.ro.

As a researcher, I have finished a major project: Consumption practices of coffee at young people. Romanian space. I cannot reveal you any conclusions or findings, as it is under author rights, so I am sorry at this point.

Still, as a researcher, another article that I wrote was published at: http://w3.aislf.univ-tlse2.fr/gtsc/DOCS_SOCIO/istambul/Actes_AISLF_GT13_Istambul_2008.pdf. It’s a communication that I had about Internet networks that appeared in Bucharest after 90′s.

And now, I have to write an article in English and submit it to an important anthropological review. To accomplish this, I need a native English speaker that would like to read an article about SMS trajectory in Romania & Belgium. So, anyone interested?

In the context of a scientific project, I collaborate as an assistant researcher. It has as theme the nonformal education and its strategies at young people. So, I researched the ways that youngsters – preteens, teens and young adults – learn through ICT’s, learning as a basic process for the appropriation one. So, besides methods like interviews, observation, I used also the method of making videos. The project is not yet finished, but it has a very interesting purpose: projection of a pilot-institution for youngsters, something like a youth center, but just as it should be.

Another research that I talked about in a previous post, when talking about reading practices and ways of purchasing books at youngsters in Bucharest, a mini-study, had a qualitative and quantitative methodology: interviews, observations and questionnaires.

Right now I have two other researches on the way: practices of using spare time (loisir) at young people and practices of coffee consumption. Hope to finish them both very well and to find out interesting things.

Wondering what I have been done so far, as a researcher and a cultural anthropologist, that I am entitled to talk about youngsters, urban culture etc, I thought it would be a good point to describe you, shortly, my researches.

I started with a research about the uses, practices and representations of SMS (Short Message Service) in youth culture. This research took me about 4 years, and it had a complex methodology. First, I have to say that I did a comparative field between Bucharest and Brussels. Why, you might say. Well, I wanted to see if the appropriation of SMS is a youth culture thing, therefore it would be expressed in the same way about everywhere. So, as methods, I started with passive observation in those places that youngsters go. For Bucharest, I talk about commercial centers, urban spaces where they gather, meet and explore, urban transportation. For Brussels, I can add restaurants, cause youngsters in Belgium go to restaurant with their parents.

I continued with participative observation. Meaning, concretely, to use my cell phone and send SMS in the places that I mentioned before, just to see reactions. Being in a youngsters group and socializing with them, I was using my cell phone, talk about my SMS with them etc. They also let me transcript the messages they had in their cell phones, even the most intimate ones.

After that, in-depth interviews and domestic observation, in their homes, showed me the full extension of the phenomenon, but also a distinctive difference between public uses of SMS and domestic ones. I continued with a journal where my subjects of research were writing the messages sent and received, the hour and the place where they were, but also describing the relationship with the recipient and the feelings he/she felt in the moment of reception of a message.

All this data gathered, I use it for my PhD thesis. Which, I hope, will defend in spring.