Digital Young

I always asked myself how time value is managed through communication by SMS. One of the results of my PhD research is the time optimization; this represents one of the most important reasons for the wide spread use of SMS. This is a presentation that I had during one of my classes. The ppt presentation is not so well done visually speaking, so sorry for that. But the content is ok, I guess.

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You have here a presentation that I wrote two years ago and which hasn’t ever been presented to Vodafone. Therefore I can make it available.

I know, I have been really lazy and I haven’t been writing nothing lately. But I do so many institutional stuff that I barely have the time to breathe. So, I would like to present you a project of mine that I have been working to for a year. Here it is the link: www.cerculmihaipop.wordpress.com.

It’s about a cultural anthropology discussion forum. At the Faculty of Letters, there is an ethnology department that I am teaching to. During seminars, I found that me and my students could not finish our discussions and debates, so I thought it would be more useful to create a forum outside normal classes.

Starting from presentations of various ethnological researches (in course of realization or already finished researches) or anthropological documentaries, we discuss, debate and learn. So, last year we talked about various cultural and social realities like “pomana de viu” (people who stage their funerals before dying) and the representations of death associated to this practice, starting from an anthropological movie realized by a Serbian anthropologist, Paun Es. Durlic.

We continued with a discussion about the most reknown Romanian ethnologist, Mihai Pop, and her niece’s research project whose purpose is to re-valorize her grandfather’s image and personality.

Our third session took another turn, when Bogdan Iancu, a young Romanian anthropology researcher, presented to us a documentary about the last professional community that lasted in Romania, “geamgii din Margau” (villagers who produce windows since before communism).

After that, we talked about a ritual that is staged around Easter, in a village near Bucharest. It is called “La Cuci” and consists in a ritual battle. Here is a very expressive picture:

Our next session was extremely interesting; our guest was Valeriu Antonovici who made a documentary about University Square and its memories today. For those who don’t know, this square is known to be the central place where died a lot of people during the ‘89 Revolution. So, our researcher realized a documentary about the things that people remember of this symbolic place. This session was one of the most provocative, as it determined us to ask a lot of questions and to stay really late to debate.

And we finished universitary year with a really steamy topic: the trance through dance. A great specialist in body problematics came to present us and to talk with us about the documentary called “Dances of ecstasy”.

Next year I have a lot of ideas to put in practice. This is just one of the projects that took a lot of time, as you can imagine. But new research projects are in prospect, so I will present them really soon.