The Branding Power of Szeklerland. Online Place Branding Tendencies and Identity-Forming Efforts in Szeklerland

Destination branding has always been a complex question. This is especially true if we are talking about Szeklerland as a historical, cultural, and ethnic region, which can be defined in the easiest way through Covasna, Harghita, and Mureş counties of Romania. A well-structured brand in a region can help with its economic development and search for identity, so it is worth looking into branding activities in the region. Despite Szeklerland’s strong identity and reputation, the discourse is extremely divided between Romanian and Hungarian people. There are plenty of brand owners in the region without central management and coherence. There are plenty of amateur and corporate initiatives that are generally poorly organized and serve individual economic purposes. In addition, politicians also play an active role in forming these processes. Although the regional and tourism development strategies of the counties of Szeklerland are similar, and it can be said that the stakeholders are open to the cooperation between the three counties, there were only partial results of regional-level collaboration. The paper follows the activities of online promotional initiatives about Szeklerland and the larger territorial units influencing the region, such as Romania and Transylvania, and the branding narratives created during them.

Affective and Cognitive Dimensions of Trust in Communication

Based on the complexity of communication acts, the paper presents how affective and cognitive aspects are intertwined. First of all, the context of trust and the conditions of its appearance are examined. It is followed by an analysis of trust as an attitude which reveals the difference between contractual approaches and alliances. The relationship between communication and trust is presented by the illocutionary acts. As a result of the analysis, trust can be conceived as a positive attitude of expectation, where one person relies on the assumed good faith, suitability, and sensitivity of the other person, where, although vulnerable, the one who trusts counts on the fact that the trusted person will not abuse his/her position but rather provide assistance to his/her best knowledge in a given area. Cognitive trust is reinforced if the proper data are available, understandable, fit into prior knowledge, and anticipate the possible forms of operation. With affective trust, the issue is not data quality and quantity but rather the way how they are presented.

Project (I)solation – Everyday Life and Media Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The pandemic has placed our relationship with digital media in a new context. Regardless of age, the isolation had significant impact on our everyday routines, of which media use has become a constant factor in one form or another. We may have never tried to use so many new applications in such a short time before, as for many of us media was the only connection to the outside world. However, after the quarantine, there are several questions that may arise following the extreme situation. Were we captured or rather liberated by the online media? What did we learn about online life and our relationship with the media during the epidemic? How could the digital generation adapt itself to the new circumstances? What challenges and problems did Generation Z face during the quarantine? How have young people’s daily routines, media use patterns, news consumption, learning and/or working habits changed? How about their general attitudes towards the media and their effects on them? In the study below, I seek answers to these questions based on the results of an international, interdisciplinary research project called TOGETHER initiated by the University of Pécs (Pécs, Hungary) and Hochschule für Kommunikation und Gestaltung (Stuttgart, Germany).

Trust and Technologies of Sense. VR and Proprioception in Hamlet Encounters

This paper investigates the changing role of media devices in constructing fictive worlds through senses, and the changing relation we have to our senses. The demand for immersion in a virtual visual reality has its precedents, shown for example by the popularity of the kaleidoscope, the peeping box, the Guckkasten, or the panoramas. But while the immersive effect of these illusion spaces was based on visual perception, now we have multisensory interactive spaces that trigger our proprioception (body awareness and feeling of presence). The VR experience Hamlet Encounters offers a unique experience and exemplary use of distance, dislocation, and perception of one’s own senses.

The Psychology of Inclusion on New Media Platforms and the Online Communication

Following the tabooistic and rejective attitude of the 20th century, in the processing and announcement method of the 21st century, there is is a growing emphasis on sharing various life events on the platforms of new media (Web 2.0). Such platforms can be social media sites or one of the file or video sharing pages or blogs. In addition to presenting user habits shaped by the COVID pandemic, which have temporarily changed the online communication, I aim to answer the question of how new media (Web 2.0) becomes the platform of communal loss for users of different ages, genders, social statuses, and diverse Internet usage habits and socialization. I attempt to present the comprehensive picture of the transformation of personal loss into communal grief experience on the different platforms of new media and what supportive acts help the person who shares his/her loss experience in the processing of the events. By means of feedback (reactions, comments, replies with different emoticons), the user’s loss experience “expands” into communal loss experience. In the present research paper, the findings of the international discipline are only applied to Hungary (its current population is 9.6 million), a Central Eastern European country where, according to a representative study published in 2015, there are 5 million Facebook users.

Trend Analysis of Technologies Supporting the Availability of Online Content: From Keyword-Based Search to the Semantic Web

The era of Web 1.0 implied the connection of web-based documents via links, which enabled search engines to scan for information and guarantee the search and availability of webpages. Web 2.0 represented the next evolutionary stage. Known as the collaborative web, the emphasis in this case was on the establishment of services and content by the community. Search options were complemented with labelling and frequently undesirable clickstream analysis coupled with push technology-supported information provision. The semantic web is a revolutionary development, which, in addition to processing information by humans, assures the readability of datasets by machines and facilitates communication between devices. In order to promote data and information processing by machines, the semantic web relies on a special ontology allocating the respective meaning to the given data along with relying on the global indexing and naming schemes of the web. Several ontologies emerged with differing basic guidelines while displaying compatibility to the RDF standard ranging from the more semantic description of bibliographical data in libraries to the description of information gained from social networks and human conversations. While Web 3.0 is often used interchangeably with the semantic web, the former one with its intelligent server function exceeds the semantic web. We have to ask ourselves, however, whether we can rely on the accuracy of the obtained data, and we must explore what progress have libraries – expected to increase reliability – made regarding the implementation of semantic data storage.

The Initiators of Our Everyday Life – Relationship between Coffee and Instagram

In this study, I would like to understand the background of sharing coffee online and get to know why it encourages young people to post their coffee. I analyse the two popular parts of our everyday lives, coffee and Instagram, and their connection points, which are coffee posts as communication tools and their posting and content sharing itself as a form of communication. In my theoretical background, I reflect on the process of coffee becoming a consumer product, the relationships between cafés and the public, and I reflect on the features of Instagram that captivate young people and enable online social rites. Regarding the question of presence, I am looking for the answer to the peculiarities of the relationship between online and offline, the dissonance caused by the simultaneous appearance on the two stages. The aim of the paper is to compare the traditional and the online characteristics of the coffee community and to interpret it as a rite. Based on the theoretical background of digital ethnography, using participatory observation and photomontage techniques, I explore attitudes and motivations among the Generation Z young people in Târgu-Mureş in terms of this activity. These two evocative methods, further interpreting the visuals of Instagram, allow interpretation not only from an aesthetic point of view but also in terms of the analysis of their symbol system, background, and motivations. In my interpretations, the acceptance of manipulation, the attitude of reality, the social characteristics of online coffee communities, the relationships between Instagram visuality and Generation Z media consumption needs, compensation practices that use coffee posts as an excuse and provide insight into the self-reflexive process of coffee post backgrounds are explicated. In my final conclusions, I outline the system of likeability for coffee posts as a feature of competitive, community photography. I refer to the sharing of coffee online as new contexts of parasocial relations, and I also reflect on coffee posts as a self-branding opportunity that can be used as a tool for self-expression.

Argumentation Moods

Argumentation is an act of communication performed by a speaker aiming to persuade a listener to accept or reject a proposition, named thesis, using another proposition, called argument, and a relation between them – the frame of argumentation. Argumentations are evaluated relatively to the pragmatic value of success and to the logical value of correctness. These values are independent of each other – namely, from the success of an argumentation, nothing can be inferred about its correctitude, and reciprocally. In order to establish the correctness of an argumentation, we can classify all argumentations into moods such as the syllogisms. A necessary condition for the correctitude of an argumentation is the validity of its mood. The validity of the argumentative moods is investigated using the reduction method established by Aristotle for syllogistic moods.

Politeness and Insult in Computer Games – From a Pragmatic Point of View

In line with the principle of technological determinism, the linguistic context of computer games influences the (linguistic) behaviour of millions of active gamers. This makes it important to explore gamer communication thoroughly with respect to politeness, too. Indeed, the communication of gamers during games may also affect the users’ off-game communicative situations. The international literature suggests that the quasi-anonymity of online communication and the lack or weakness of sanction make it ruder than offline communication: it involves a higher number of insults or offensive personal remarks. The paper looks at this issue, in particular by a pragmatic – politeness-centred – investigation of a particular kind of online insults. The corpus of analysis is provided by “taunts”, i.e. inbuilt instructions triggering “mocking” remarks of League of Legends (LoL), a multiple-participant online arena game. The authors interpret in-game insults in the framework of speech act theory, the Cooperative Principle (conversational and politeness maxims), face threatening, and a matrix of aims and functions. The paper wishes to be a contribution to cyberpragmatics, a pragmatically-oriented branch of Internet linguistics.