Cultural “foggy mirrors” or alternative spaces? Blogs as means for shaping the Romanian popular literary criticism

Authors

  • Valentina Marinescu University of Bucharest-Romania

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15847/obsOBS532011501

Keywords:

alternative culture, blogs, popular culture, literary criticism, public arena.

Abstract

Ethnographic studies and survey research are increasingly showing that the Internet has been tightly integrated into the situated social practices of its users. Cyberspace presents a classic environment for filling in gaps through and by virtue of one’s personal psychological repertoire. This is where imagination and imagery are played out. Imagination entails the general cognitive capacity of human beings to fantasize about the nature of others, both people and environments or objects, through ideas, narratives, concepts, explanations, assumptions and beliefs. Imagery refers to the visual representation of imagined objects – namely, assigning them forms. In the context of online communication the role of imagination in generating emotions in cyberspace is even greater than in actual-space. The factual information we have about an online partner is usually more limited than our knowledge an offline partner and our imagination must fill in the gap. The present article tried to explain the ways in which the Romanians make use of blogs to construct an alternative space devoted to literary life. On the basis of official Romanian blogs ranking the present article will analyze a sample of ten culturally/literary personal blogs in order to identify the limits and perspectives offered by this alternative Agora.

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Published

2011-10-03

How to Cite

Marinescu, V. (2011). Cultural “foggy mirrors” or alternative spaces? Blogs as means for shaping the Romanian popular literary criticism. Observatorio (OBS*), 5(3). https://doi.org/10.15847/obsOBS532011501

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 3 (2011)

Section

Articles

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