The Wave of Things
While writing these lines, I am on the bus leaving Berlin. I am vividly replaying last week’s highlights in my mind. Am I ready to leave this city, the city and its spirit, behind? No, I am not, never was. Therein lies the lure of Berlin. The city catches you
‘Hipster’ has become the ultimate sensibility in popular culture in the first decade of the 2000’s. Searching for a real definition of what a ‘hipster’ is, I soon hit the borders of the Internet. It seems that no subculture before had so many haters as the hipster culture. Why is
Music was my first love – and it still is. First and foremost. Music is a certain form of language, it transports ideas and feelings. As I have spent a big amount of my life dealing with languages, linguistics, language teaching and language acquisition (I can communicate more or less
This article is part of a series about memes in popular culture. If you don’t know yet, what memes and memetics are, you will find the answer in part 1 and part 2. One of the most successfully spread memeplexes, which could be seen as a prototype of how culture
This article is part of a series about memes in popular culture. If you don’t know yet, what memes and memetics are, you will find the answer in part 1. Over a long period in human history memes were spread orally. Only the most successful memes survived then. A first
In 1976 Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘meme’ in his book The Selfish Gene and by that caused a revolution in thinking in several fields, most notably in sociobiology and sociology. Although often criticised the term stayed and became a concept to work with. His theory of memetics has since
Throughout Europe many cities are popular for a café/bar-culture, e.g. Vienna, L’viv, Prague, Kraków and Ljubljana, to name only a few. In urban centres people like to spend their spare time in locales to socialise with other people. It is important to point out that “[c]afés are places where we
Spending New Year’s 2013 in Berlin, a city, where I had an amazing time some years ago, I was confronted with my own past. I visited places, bars, streets and the like, where I used to hang around. I drank the beer from ‘back then’ and even smoked the allegedly