Communication Today Vol. 6, No. 1, April 2015 Chlumská Gálik Gáliková Hes Hrubec Koubová Krošlák Mendelová Murár Ritzen Solík Zaušková Editorial board Editor Journal Orientation Slavomír Magál Editor-in-Chief Martin Solík Deputy managing editors Dana Petranová Katarína Ďurková Secretary and Online Content Administrator Dáša Mendelová Indexing Process and English Editor Jana Radošinská Technical Editor and Distribution Zuzana Bezáková Advisory board Peter A. Bruck (Research Studios Austria in Wien, Austria) Martin Foret (Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic) Krzysztof Gajdka (University of Economics in Katowice, Poland) Bernd Herzogenrath (Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany) Aleš Hes (Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, Czech Republic) Ladislav Hohoš (Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovak Republic) Denis Jelačić (University of Zagreb, Croatia) Jakub Končelík (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic) Juliána Mináriková (University of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovak Republic) Małgorzata Łuszczak (University of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovak Republic) Jozef Matúš (University of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovak Republic) Nataliya Panasenko (Kiev National Linguistic University, Ukraine) Jiří Pavelka (Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic) Dušan Pavlů (University of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovak Republic) Zbyněk Pitra (Czech Management Association in Prague, Czech Republic) Hana Pravdová (University of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovak Republic) Jacek Pyka (Katowice School of Economics, Poland) Dariusz Rott (Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow, Poland) Ondřej Roubal (University of Finance and Administration in Prague, Czech Republic) Michal Vaněk (VŠB – Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic) Editorial team Ľudmila Čábyová Daniela Kollárová Ján Višňovský Ladislav Volko Norbert Vrabec Anna Zaušková Communication Today is a scientific journal from the mass media and marketing communication field. The journal contains professional scientific reflections on the media, media competencies; it also offers academic discourses on the limits of reality, media thinking, new media, marketing and media relations, new trends in marketing including their types and specifics, psychology and sociology of marketing communication, as well as new knowledge about the structure of media contents, marketing strategies and communication sciences. The professional public is offered an interdisciplinary, focused, targeted discussion in these pages. Communication Today is a reviewed periodical published twice a year. It focuses on theoretical studies, theoretical and empirical studies, research results and their implementation into practice, as well as professional publication reviews. The members of the journal’s editorial board are members of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA). Communication Today is indexed in these databases: Cabell’s Directories, CEJSH, EBSCO, ProQuest,Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory and Index Copernicus. It is currently under the indexing process with ERIH PLUS and ISI. Communication Today Vol. 6, No. 1, April 2015 Publisher Faculty of Mass Media Communication University of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava Námestie Jozefa Herdu 2 917 01 Trnava SLOVAK REPUBLIC IČO: 360 789 13 Price: 1,99 € Published twice a year. ISSN 1338-130X EV 3972/10 Graphic Production Coordinator & Cover Martin Klementis Caricaturist Viktor Kubal Communication Today Editorial Contents Dear Readers, THEORETICAL STUDIES How can the mass media field be studied today? The theories of communication and marketing, the study of audience and media technologies, as well as the semiotics, are not enough to discuss the increasingly complicated and expanding world of mass media in its entirety. It is therefore only natural that our journal, Communication Today, dedicates more and more of its pages to additional scientific areas like philosophy, sociology, economy, and other relevant fields of study. In its sixth year, we can observe that this trend is constant. Our efforts to reflect the interdisciplinary essence of media studies are also connected with the selection of authors’ spectrum, consisting of renowned European scholars. Influence of the Internet on the Cognitive Abilities of Man. Phenomenological and Hermeneutical Approach, Slavomír Gálik - Sabína Gáliková Tolnaiová ............................................................................................ 4 One of the authors is a Dutch economist and politician Jozef M. M. Ritzen who contributed with an essay on talent development. He has been researching the given issue not only from a theoretical point of view, but also in terms of its application in the process of education. The global aspect can be found in Martin Solík’s interview with Marek Hrubec, the Czech director of the Centre of Global Studies, titled as A Critique of Global Injustice. The interview offers a great quantity of information based on global “stereotypical reality” which is rarely communicated in the mass media. University Courses as Goods: How to Optimize Portal Information Architecture using Faceted Search, Peter Murár ......................................................................................................................................... 24 The core of theoretical knowledge included in this issue is represented by a philosophical study, Influence of the Internet on Cognitive Abilities of Man, written by Slavomír Gálik and Sabina Gáliková Tolnaiová as well as a cultural study, Changes in Value Structures and the Importance of Intercultural Communication in Modern Society, by three authors (Aleš Hes, Marie Koubová and Tereza Chlumská). The remaining research studies deal with clearly defined themes and, exactly for that reason, they are able to get to the details of the matter (web architecture and its practical use in educational processes and their online presentation by Peter Murár, innovations’ issues in the field of advertising by Dáša Mendelová and Anna Zaušková as well as another interesting problem – “the right to be forgotten” – that caused an argument with Google in Spain, addressed by Daniel Krošlák). The rich content structure of this issue of Communication Today is completed with reviews as well as information about scientific events and life jubilees. In an effort to reach further international recognition and readership, for the first time in its history, the journal is published entirely in English, which reflects the editorial board’s ambition to raise our periodical to a higher level. Changes in Value Structures and the Importance of Intercultural Communication in Modern Society, Aleš Hes - Marie Koubová - Tereza Chlumská ......................................................................................... 16 RESEARCH STUDIES Innovation in the Slovak Advertising Environment, Dáša Mendelová - Anna Zaušková............................... 38 Practical Implementation of the Right to be Forgotten in the Context of Google Spain Decision, Daniel Krošlák .................................................................................................................................... 58 ESSAY People’s Talents, People’s Welfare: Educational Economics since 1965, Jozef M. M. Ritzen......................... 72 INTERVIEW Global Conflicts and the Macro-regional Modernities. Interview with Marek Hrubec, Martin Solík .............. 82 REVIEWS Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Research, Ondřej Roubal ......................................................... 100 Memes in Digital Culture, Ali Shehzad Zaidi ........................................................................................ 102 Media Research. The Most Frequently Used Methods and Techniques, Petra Adamková .......................... 104 The Structure and Composition of Genres of the English-written Journalism, Jana Radošinská ................ 105 Professor PhDr. Miloš Mistrík, DrSc. TODAY Exceptional Scientific Event Orchestrated under the Baton of the Faculty of Mass Media Communication, Katarína Ďurková ............................................................................................................................. 109 “Explosion of Innovations”: Marketing Identity 2014, Jana Radošinská ................................................. 110 Ivan Stadtrucker (* 1935), Ladislav Volko ............................................................................................111 Viktor Kubal (1923 – 1997), Ladislav Volko .........................................................................................113 2 Communication Today Reviews Reviews promotion that generate the atmosphere of life of boundless possibilities and culture “over choice”. The world of advertising certainly extends the scope of options of consumer decisions, thus enhancing the impression of consumers’ freedom and autonomy. Simultaneously, however, the unlimited offer of the number of alternatives in each choice makes the consumer uncertain and exposed to subjectively experienced risks connected with these choices and their consequences. The consumer choice develops a sense of responsibility which is interlinked with the fear of failure, feeling of guilt resulting from making bad decisions, disappointment and regret. The case of a former east-German company is used by F. Pryor to empirically demonstrate and explain the paradox of growing prosperity and at the same time stagnant or decreasing feeling of happiness in the society. The question is how the consumers are going to cope with the fact that they are left with the constant choice of a growing offer and with the risks connected with the permanent need for consumer decision. Publication Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Research is a successful work, in many respects; it is original and inspiring. As mentioned by editor Pavel Zahrádka, if the objective of this monograph is to bridge the gap between the academic and application spheres in the field of consumer culture (p. 13), then it is successfully fulfilled. I agree with Pavel Zahrádka that the cooperation between the academic and commercial worlds is possibly provided and both areas are related not on a competitive basis but clearly on a complementary one. We wish for a similar project like the one in Denmark where the academic and commercial spheres have been successfully cooperating for years as a part of Innovation Network for Market, Communication and Consumption platform. In examining the use of political memes as a means of social resistance, Shifman describes how Chinese activists use coded language to undercut censorship, citing the example of the song of the Grass Mud Horse, a name with obscene connotations in Chinese (p. 148). Oblique forms of dissent and resistance are hardly peculiar to the internet age but appear throughout history in totalitarian societies. In Shakespeare’s England, for example, criticism of the monarch might take the form of a double entendre embedded in a panegyric. The meme is especially well suited to convey the subtle and complex ideas contained in political dissent, Shifman points out, because they “constitute shared spheres of cultural knowledge” (p. 173). Among the several political meme sensations that Shifman discusses is one that arose from an incident in November 2011 in which a police officer, at the University of California in Davis, pepper-sprayed students as they peacefully protested tuition increases. One meme shows the officer, John Pike, at the signing of the Constitution, pepper-spraying that iconic document as the Founding Fathers look on. The meme underscores the erosion of civil liberties underway in the United States. Another famous meme, emblematic of the Occupy Wall Street movement, represents a ballerina standing poised above Arturo Di Modica’s famous statue of a charging bull. The statue, which embodies the brute power of the market, is located on Broadway next to Bowling Green, New York City’s oldest public park, and has become a popular tourist destination. The ballerina personifies the imagination, grace, humour, irony, and poignancy by means of which art affirms the pre-eminence of human needs over market imperatives. Shifman elaborates on the resonance of the Occupy Wall Street meme “I am the 99 %”: “This meme’s power stems from the way in which its three memetic dimensions of form, content, and stance re-enforce each other. Its message about the agonies of ordinary Americans is conveyed by averagelooking people with serious facial expressions holding similar amateurish-looking signs. This combination of repetition and variation turns the personal to political: Stories about the sick young woman who is unable to afford medication, the single mom who struggles to provide for her son, and the father who cannot send his daughter to college are reframed as particular cases of the same flawed structure. These people’s miseries are not just personal problems; they stem from the systemic economic and political illnesses of their habitat” (p. 134). Although she deems Occupy Wall Street “a memetic success,” Shifman claims that the movement “failed to dent the status quo, let alone generate the economic and political transformation it advocated” (p. 174). Shifman, however, uses the wrong measure to gauge the movement’s success. Occupy Wall Street connected individual predicaments to systemic causes and helped delegitimize capitalism. The movement may well portend an even larger revolt against corporate globalization. Shifman describes the meme as a powerful yet often invisible agent of globalization, one that allows individuals to inscribe their voices in hybrid cultures (p. 151, 154). For Shifman, memes are “socially constructed public discourses” that are “reflections of cultural and social collectives, as well as the individual voices constituting them” (p. 8, 171). As the classical Persian poet Jelaluddin Rumi prompts us: “[D]on’t be satisfied with stories, how things / have gone with others. Unfold / your own myth” (p. 40). Memes in Digital Culture is an indispensable introduction to the cultural and political expression made possible by the digital meme. Mgr. Ondřej Roubal, Ph.D., Faculty of Social Studies, University of Finance and Administration in Prague, Estonská 500, 101 00 Prague 10, Czech Republic Memes in Digital Culture SHIFMAN, L.: Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 2014. 200 p. ISBN 978-0-262-52543-5. Ali Shehzad Zaidi Limor Shifman’s Memes in Digital Culture contributes significantly to the burgeoning field of internet studies, particularly in its treatment of the political uses of the digital meme. Shifman explains that the term meme was borrowed from the biological concept of genetic replication; and that in 1976, Richard Dawkins first used the term “to describe small units of culture that spread from person to person by copying or imitation” such as melodies, catchphrases, and beliefs (p. 2, 9). With the internet in mind, Shifman updates this definition to mean “(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance; (b) that they were created with an awareness of each other; and (c) they were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users” (p. 7). Shifman notes that, through a process of selection and diffusion, memes have become shared social phenomena that can broaden democratic possibilities (p. 18, 144). Shifman traces the study of memetics, namely the study of the replication and evolution of memes, to the nineties when that field began to draw wide interdisciplinary interest (p. 10). She differentiates the meme, “a living and changing entity,” from viral sensations that, though widely spread, do not necessarily spawn derivatives and imitations (p. 56, 58). What makes memes diffusible, according to Shifman, is the extent to which they are “suited to their sociocultural environment” (p. 9). 102 Reviews Other Works Cited: RUMI, J.: The Essential Rumi. (Transl. Coleman Barks). New York : HarperOne, 2004. 416 p. ISBN 9780062509598. Assoc. prof. Ali Shehzad Zaidi, PhD., Department of Humanities, State University of New York at Canton, Canton, New York 13617, USA Communication Today