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Veganism 2.0: Gastromania, nutrition, and digital communication
Get PDFThe vegan population has risen significantly over the past decade, and is expected to continue increasing. Social media are believed to have played a major role in such a rise. According to a Google study (2018), veganism started to spread markedly in 2012, the same year that Instagram became popular, and has then grown in correlation with the expansion of the social network (with over 88 million #vegan posts out of a billion monthly active users and more than 500 million people using the platform daily today). Since 2016 conversations around veganism have increased also on Twitter, reaching nearly 20 million Tweets in 2018 and registering a further growth of 70% in 2019. Moreover, the number of Google searches for veganism has spiked from a popularity rating of just 17 out of 100 in 2008 to 88 in 2018. Functioning both as platforms for sharing and commenting on information and as effective channels for proselytizing, these and other social media have evidently extended the boundaries of the vegan movement, making it become one of the biggest contemporary food trends. This paper aims at identifying and describing the main cultural transformations and forms of life promoted by “veganism 2.0â€, based on a semiotic approach particularly attentive to the analysis of the narrative level and the patemic dimension. To this purpose, the intersections between the so-called “gastromania†and other trends characterising contemporary foodspheres, such as “gastro-anomy†and the “ideology of nutritionism†are taken into account, paying particular attention to the gastronomic discourse in present-day digital mediascapes and the complex dynamics characterising them
A Hauntological Reading of Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca"
No full textThis essay focuses on the way the main characters in Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (1938) cope with the haunting influence of the past and attempts to read their struggle through the theoretical approach developed by Jacques Derrida in his Specters of Marx (1993). This approach, termed 'hauntology' by Derrida himself, revolves around the notion of the 'specter' haunting the present and emphasizes the need to find new ways of responding to it, especially because of the existing ontological failure to do so. The essay complements this reading with the earlier comparable theory of the 'phantom' and 'transgenerational haunting' developed by psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. A 'hauntological' reading of Rebecca through these tools yields results that are significantly different from traditional approaches. Suggesting that the main characters in Rebecca are complete failures in dealing with the specter in a Derridean sense, the essay argues that the novel expects from the discerning reader a more insightful approach and a better potential to understand the specter. It is suggested further that a proper acknowledgement of the specter in Rebecca reaches beyond this particular novel, having subtle but significant implications concerning not only literary analysis but also social and cultural prejudices
The Bulgarian dream - the theoretical-applied frameworks for a possible positive concept (introductory presentation)
No full textThe Bulgarian Dream – a symbiosis of meaning, action and development (positive concept). Identity characteristics, theory of the soul and Bulgarian archetypes. Methodology of understanding – facts, context, interdisciplinary knowledge sharing, consensus matrix and toolkit. Need for a new civilizational philosophy, way of thinking, integrative criteria, the person of the present and the future – parameters for constant investments, transformations and balances, combinations of indices, comparisons and preconditions
Features of communication services, requirements and applications for 6G
Get PDFThe aim of the work is to consider the peculiarities of the candidate types of services in 6G based on the grouping of applications with similar requirements, i.e. based on the link "future applications - priority of specific key performance indicators - type of service". In initial 6G research, one of the main objectives was to identify future applications, their requirements (formulated through key performance indicators) and possible types of services. Due to the ever-increasing variety of requirements, more complex types of services are expected for 6G. The results are related to the analysis of the peculiarities of the functioning of the various communication services. The contributions of the work are related to the in-depth analysis of the relationship between the type of services, applications and requirements in 6G