.:: Media

"All media as extensions of ourselves serve to provide new transforming vision and awareness."
----> Marshall McLuhan

.:: Pro-Anorexia Websites

"Pro-anorexia websites showcase disturbing photos, commandments on being skinny and more. They normalize and encourage dangerous behavior relating to eating disorders.
Extreme weight loss is applauded and female perfection is measured by the size of a girl's arms, legs and thighs. "
[­ Holly Hoff of the National Eating Disorders Association ]

I'm disgusted! I really couldn't immagine that such websites could exist!

.:: About-Face

Very interesting website :
About-Face promotes positive self-esteem in girls and women of all ages, sizes, races and backgrounds through a spirited approach to media education, outreach and activism.
A San Francisco-based non-profit group, "About-Face aims to combat negative and distorted images of women. " [USA TODAY]

.:: Emergence

The leit-motiv of my last weeks. Have you ever heard about it?
Emergence is the process of deriving some new and coherent structures, patterns and properties in a complex system. Emergent phenomena occur due to the pattern of interactions between the elements of a system over time. They are often unexpected, nontrivial results of relatively simple interactions of relatively simple components.
Think about the aunts...can you get it now?
I've read a really illuminating book by Steven Johnson, "Emergence" and then I've discovered a huge world : smart mobs, netwar, grassroots democracy, etc etc.
So exciting!

.:: An entire novel is being made available by SMS

A Chinese writer, Qian Fuchang, has cut down his novel ('Outside the Fortress Besieged') into bite-sized chunks for transmission by text message.
The novel has sold well in full book form but now, as the BBC reports, "the work has been cut down to 4,200 characters and will be distributed as 60 chapters of 70 characters each.As well as getting the novel in SMS chunks, Chinese mobile phone users can choose to have it read to them over the phone or they can read it themselves on a webpage for mobiles".
Geniale!

.:: A mobile phone for calling only Mom and Dad!

I think my parents are the only persons I don't need to call...they're always calling me!!
Anyway, a really cool invention: with so many students carrying mobiles, cell-phone rules are multiplying at schools, expecially in USA. They are trying to find different ways for turning off student's phones but the problem is not so easy as it seems...
So...why not a cell for just calling mam and dad?
Here we are: a cell phone for grandparents. Sooo funny!

.:: Thoughts..

"Non si può perdere niente se niente in fondo si è mai avuto"...sorry for the Italian.
I'll translate it for you: "You cannot loose anything if you've never really had something"...an italian singer and now also writer, one of my favourites: Vinicio Capossela.
Great singer and great poet.

.:: My first real post

..what to say? First of all, I think it will be better to present my self:
I'm Marina, an italian 20 (almost 21...buhhh!) years old girl. I come from Gravina (south of Italy, Puglia) but I live in Pisa (do you know the tower, don't you? Is the one that all the Japanese people mantain in their photos..;-)).
I'm attending the third year at the University of Pisa in the faculty of "Lettere" (Humanities), degree in Humanities Computing (or Informatic Humanistic, as you prefer)...and I love it! Now I'm studying in Bergen, Norway as a Erasmus student, where I'm indeeping in particular text encoding (XML and TEI) and digital culture, with a wonderful teacher , Jill Walker (I have to thank her for making me discover the blog world).
What else? I love litterature and music and cinema and text encoding and photography and a lot of other things that you'll discover if you follow my blog..c u soon, so.

.:: just me

just me, originally uploaded by marinella83.

Actually my favourite photo :me in Norway through my brother's eyes..lovely. Anyway, that's me.

.:: just me