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just.me

Just me and my life and my thoughts and my things, everyday, for everyone interested in..

Wednesday, August 31

.:: Notte della Taranta's VideoBlog!

Maybe most of you won't understand what's this about. I'll try to explain it, in some way.

"La Notte della Taranta" is the largest festival musical in the grecian part of Salento (the last part of Puglia region, in Italy) dedicated to the recovery of the traditional dance called "pizzica salentina" and to its fusion with other musical languages.

The "pizzica" is the traditional music from this area and originally used to accompany the ancient ritual of cure from the imaginary bite of the "tarantola", the dangerous and poisonous spider. The tradition wants that in order to free the victim, usually a woman, the "tamburelli"(small drums) were played incessantly to whirling rhythm until she wasn't free from the charm. An obsessive and repetitive dance was accompanied to the sound of the drums and contributed to exaust the poison.
The obsession of the rhythm in music and the dance survive still today and in this manifestation you can feel it deeply.

Now, the festival, which has been, like every year, in Melpignano (Lecce) since the 12nd to the 27th of August, this year has had a blog and a video blog too! This is absolutely incredible for me, because I still consider the South of Italy a place out of this digitalized world...I don't know if I have to be happy about it, for the incredible chance that offers to the rest of the worl of seeing our incredible traditions, or being scared by the dangerous approaching of the technology to this enchanted world..Anyway, the video blog it's great!

Tuesday, August 30

.:: SMS I love you

My first post after all this time is about a discover I made thanks to Jill's blog.
Treasuremytext is a website that allows you to store SMS from your mobile phone online. They say that the service is free, and it is in fact, but of course you have to pay the cost of a normal SMS for sending it to them (in my case I have to pay the cost of an SMS to England). Does it worth it? With our new hypertech mobiles we have very big memories (I've been months without deleting sms and I still have a lot of free space) and most of them have softwares which allow you to downoload everything on the PC.
Anyway, the interesting thing from my point of you is that at my first year of university I made a project with some other students about the kind of language used in sms, since the goal of the project was a linguistic analysis on a particular kind of text. We created a small database of sms representative of some bands of people (selected by age, sex, level of instruction). The teacher considered our idea very original and it turned out to be a cool project. But of course it was a very small and scholastic one, with narrow perspectives. So the great perspective that I see in a thing like Treasuremytext is that it could represent a huge database of text usable for any kind of sociological or linguistic analysis. It should only have to ask the submitters for some more details (always anonymously) about age, sex and eventually other social details of the writer.
A comment leaved on Jill's post by Luca let me think about another aspect of this service: the chance given us by new technologies of logging almost everything in our life could change our personal memory. And, I dare adding, could switch it in a public memory. Though I think that, if my mother couldn't store an Sms, it's also true that she couldn't neither receive it. We have a lot of things that we can log or store now, but it's true that we also produce a much bigger quantity of "memories". And it's even true that most of our new ways of communicating are fast to disappear ( think about the difference between emails and snail mails: do you keep all the emails you receive? - Me only few. Did your mother used to keep all the mails she received? - Mine most of them). But the shocking thing about blogs and services like Treasuremytext is for me that anyone can read your life. I think are the concept of privacy and public memory to be involved most in this changing.