Today's rapid technological development in relation with social networks create efficient information flows in everyday life. It creates conditions for so-called "hypes" that are described as an exponentially growing trend of testing a new product. What factors lies behind a hype and how does it affect people that choose to refrain from new technology?   The purpose of this paper is to study the so called non-users, with a case study that concerns the Pokémon GO game and its hype in the summer of 2016. This case study has the intention to highlight the positive and negative aspects of non-users and other thoughts about hype. The study also intends to investigate what the non-users can contribute in technological development and if it's possible to distinguish between users and non-users in today's society.   The case study has been carried out on the basis of two group interviews; a group that abstained from playing and a group that played Pokémon GO during the hype. A number of issues are discussed and linked against a theoretical framework which also has been used in the analysis in this paper. Based on the results of the case study it appears that nostalgia was a major factor in the hype, many had prior knowledge of the concept and was triggered by it. Nostalgia was also a factor that lead people to refrain from the hype. The game did not meet up to everyone’s expectations regarding the functionality which existed earlier in Pokémon but not now.  It also emerged that the social environment affects both users and non-users in several ways. The investigation of the case study showed that non-users often had to wait for players due to different reasons. This could be while on walks with the player or that users could completely block roads. To be able completely separating non-users and users is complex as the real world is used as the platform of the game. Both previous studies and this paper demonstrates how important it can be to understand non-users. They have the opportunity to present an overall perspective of a product that users might condone. In summary, the future will become more complex in the area, especially with new technologies that make the real world a game field.

Notes on the productivity of nostalgia is a treatise on otherness and memory, framed as entries into the notebook of a no-longer-young man who decides to visit places that have a nostalgic connection to him - places where he grew up, and places where he fell in love -and who is trying to overhaul the notion that you can't look back and move forward at the same time. / [I examensarbetet ingår utställningen "Little father, glorious stump":] The exam work consisted of a three-room installation of sculptural objects, activated by a live sound performance, as well as a 3D animation projected unto one wall of the gallery. / <p>Examensarbetet består av en skriftlig del och en gestaltande del. Alternativ titel anger namnet förden gestaltande delen. </p><p>The master work includes a written essay and a forming part. The alternative title is the name of the forming part.</p>

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

- the market through the campaign RETRO Týden comparing fifteen "retro" packages that were sold during socialistic era fifteen "present" s'

This study explores the visual consumption of food and its meanings through the study of narrative and nostalgia in a selection of five South African cookbooks. The aim of this study is to suggest, through the exploration of various cookbook narratives and the role that nostalgia plays in individual and collective identity formation and maintenance, that food, as symbolic goods, can act as a unifying ideology in the construction of a sense of national identity and nationhood. This is made relevant in a South African context through the analysis of a cross-section of five recent South African cookbooks. These are Shiny happy people (2009) by Neil Roake; Waar vye nog soet is (2009) by Emilia Le Roux and Francois Smuts; Evita’s kossie sikelela (2010) by Evita Bezuidenhout (Pieter-Dirk Uys); Tortoises & tumbleweeds (journey through an African kitchen) (2008) by Lannice Snyman; and South Africa eats (2009) by Phillippa Cheifitz. In order to gain an understanding of cookbooks’ significance in modern culture, it is necessary to understand that cookbooks – as postmodern texts – carry meaning and cultural significance. Through the exploration of cookbooks, as material objects of culture, one is also able to explore non-material items of culture such as the society’s knowledge, beliefs and values. Other key concepts to this study include the global growth of interest in food; the shift from the physical consumption of food to the visual consumption thereof; the roles that consumption, narrative and nostalgia play in constructing and maintaining personal and collective identities; and the role of food as a unifying ideology in the construction of a sense of nationhood. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Visual Arts / unrestricted

The contemporary flâneur is confronted with a radically different world in comparison to the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century during which the idea of the flâneur was conceptualised. The current urban milieu of the flâneur is dominated by consumerism, computer systems and surveillance, and the research posed here explores the flâneur within this environment. The flâneur was originally visualised on the streets and arcades of the city; however, cities do not only exist as buildings and streets and have become global entities that are constituted from the physical and the virtual. Throughout this study reference is primarily made to the work of Francis Alÿs to elucidate theoretical concepts. This study proposes that there is an absence of the teleological goal in the journey of the flâneur and as such, the flâneur wanders the streets without aim; however, in the process creates narratives and leaves traces of his journey. The ubiquity of surveillance in the contemporary metropolis complicates the flâneur's relationship with the latter. Consequently the impact of surveillance on the flâneur and the flâneur's daily wanderings are examined to ascertain its influence on the flâneur in a hyperreal society. In contemporary thinking, the traditional idea of the male flâneur requires reassessment and this research investigates the possibility of the female flâneur and women's presence in the public spaces of the city and the virtual realm of cyberspace. Furthermore, women are intricately linked to consumerism and their experience and position in the city are influenced by being seen as objects of the gaze. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Visual Arts / unrestricted

The aim of the Master thesis is to analyse the functioning and operations of so-called luxury trains (trains of the Orient-Express-type) and to apply the findings to a concrete example of such a train. The theoretical part deals with the railway transport in the Czech Republic, with a special focus on irregular transport and specifics of the functioning and operations of luxury trains. An overview of the most known luxury trains of nowadays in Europe and all over the world is also a part of the theoretical background. The empirical part analyses the concrete example of a luxury train in a feasibility study. The thesis is based not only on theoretical literature and information from electronic sources, but also on personal consultation with experts on railway transport and luxury trains in the Czech Republic.

The 1980s is a formative decade in American history. America sought to reestablish itself as a global power and to reassert the dominant ideology of white, patriarchal capitalism. Likewise, media producers in the 1980s sought to reassert the dominance of the white, male, muscled body in filmic representations. The identity politics of the 1980s and the depictions of the white, muscled body once prominent in the 1980s have been the site of conservative nostalgia for a young, male-dominated, cult audience that is a subset of a larger cultural trend known as retro film culture. This thesis provides historical context behind the populist 1980s B-action films from Cannon Group, Inc that celebrate violent masculinity in filmic representations with white, male action heroes. Equally important is the revival of VHS collecting and how this 1980s-inspired subculture reinforces white, patriarchal capitalism through the cult films they valorize and their capitalistic trading practices despite their claims of oppositionality against mainstream taste and Hollywood films. Lastly, this thesis reveals how a new cycle of contemporary films primarily produced outside of Hollywood reasserts and celebrates the dominance of the white, male, muscled body in filmic representations despite a postmodern and hyperconscious exterior. Overall, I argue how these areas of nostalgia are distinct, yet not unrelated, because they reassert white, patriarchal capitalism through the revival of conservative nostalgia for the 1980s.

Il testo si propone presentare i significati che il concetto di “hipster” dischiude nel contesto storico-sociale contemporaneo. Riferito a formazioni (sub)culturali e a stili di vita alternativi che si insediano in ambienti urbani specifici (quartieri hipster), ma al contempo veicolo di estetiche diffuse su scala globale, l’hipsterismo contemporaneo viene studiato qui per la prima volta con un approccio empirico, che si propone di andare al di là della comune accezione negativa del termine. Per questo sono stati pertanto interpellati i diretti interessati. Nella ricerca si indaga da un lato il rapporto fra i giovani hipster e l’etichetta che spesso li descrive (o scredita), usando il caso dell’hipsterismo per riflettere sul tema più generale del rifiuto delle etichette nei processi di identificazione e riconoscimento contemporanei, in un’atmosfera culturale dove la promozione del soggetto spesso è a rischio di derive individualistiche. Dall’altro mi sono proposto di esplorare i contenuti espressi nella cultura materiale, nelle pratiche sociali e nello stile di vita dei giovani hipster. In particolare, ho messo in relazione questo fenomeno socioculturale con il tema della crisi dell’Occidente contemporaneo: una crisi che è stata di natura economica ma anche culturale, e ho posto l’accento sulle risposte che, attraverso il citazionismo espressivo, le pratiche di riuso e la sensibilità al tema della sostenibilità valorizzano - non senza evidenti contraddizioni - atteggiamenti orientati alla sobrietà all’interno dei quartieri hipster. / The text aims to present the meaning that the concept of "hipster" has in a contemporary historical and social context. Referring to (sub) cultural formations and alternative lifestyles that settled in specific urban environments (hipster neighborhoods), but at the same time looking at widespread aesthetics, contemporary hipsterism is studied here for the first time with an empirical approach, which aims to go beyond the common negative meaning of the term. For this reason, there are interviews with actual hipsters. The research investigates on the one hand the relationship between young hipsters and the label that often describes them (or discredits them), using the case of hipsterism to reflect on the more general topic of refusing labels in contemporary identification and recognition processes, in a cultural atmosphere where the promotion of the subject is often at the risk of individualistic drifts. On the other hand, it explores material culture, social practices, and the lifestyles of young hipsters. In particular, I related this socio-cultural phenomenon to the theme of the crisis of the contemporary West: a crisis that was economic but also cultural. I underlined the responses that enhance, not without contradictions, attitudes oriented to sobriety within the hipster neighborhoods, through “expressive quotationism”, practices of reuse and sensitivity to the theme of sustainability.

“Missing Homes” examines three nineteenth-century authors whose experiences of displacement from home, professions and/or class influenced their literary innovations. Displacement is not a new theme to scholars of nineteenth-century literature, who have established it as a defining experience of an era characterized by financial crises, industrial development, migration and empire. However, scholarship on displacement has often focused on how novels train readers to manage the experience of displacement and has depicted the emotions like nostalgia that arise from it as potentially compensatory or reconciliatory to the dynamics of capitalism. “Missing Homes” departs from these narratives to explore authors who found displacement anything but manageable or liberating and whose works illustrate a more unstable spectrum of emotional responses to displacement and its dire long-term consequences. Attention to these authors, I argue, offers a parallel theory of nostalgia in which the unsettled longing for a place to call home registers political discontent with the relationship between the individual and the collective rather than reconciles the individual to displacement. Departing from critics who have focused primarily on the work performed by metaphors and figures of the domestic, “Missing Homes” engages in biographical readings of the lives, economic circumstances and fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens to show how they pursued fantasies of securing homes that could remove them from undesirable personal, economic and political conditions. The failures of these fantasies reveal how conventional narratives describing how individuals might attain security often fail in the face of collective economic conditions in which attaining objects like a home is both economically challenging and often emotionally unfulfilling. Although the variables of their lives were different, I suggest that these authors’ stories of displacement fail to perform therapeutic or intervening work, because the problem of displacement is rooted in material conditions that narrative innovation alone cannot resolve. Instead, readers should derive from these texts and their failures the need for more collective forms of security.