INTEGRATION OF CULTURAL IDENTITY IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstract

An actual issue for Romania is the transition towards a knowledge society, including the fundamental component of information society. A powerful form of manifestation is given by the virtual social networks (or just social networks - SNs), Internet sites that give users the ability to create their own profiles and share information/socialize based on common preferences and by the social media, Internet sites where people interact by creating and exchanging information. In direct terms, the social networks and social media amplify and simplify the relationships between people, reduce distances, eliminate frontiers and contribute to globalization, with express fears that they are an important factor for the dissipation and degradation of national identity. Cultural and linguistic diversity are central to the development of knowledge societies, pointing out that local and traditional knowledge can be invaluable for education, art, health, etc.... The thesis of this work is the confirmation of the immanent and immutable character of the cultural identity in social media, regarded as one of the various manifestations of the Romanian people. The subject of study is the Romanian blogosphere, where blogs are classified on one hand in domains based on the topics they show, and on the other hand into categories related to the representation and visibility of culture and cultural identity. Blogs dedicated to social media learning are carefully evaluated. Web crawling is used to gather the data, whereas artificial intelligence and statistics are used for classification and cross-examination. The research shows interesting results, correlated with the empirical knowledge from sociological and anthropological studies.