Before you read any further, we have to agree about certain aspects of humanity. We humans as a species are animals the same way as bonobo’s, sharks and ants.  The genus Homo is part of the tribe Hominini together with the common Chimpanzee and the oversexed Bonobo. This tribe is part of the family of Hominidae together with the lazy Gorilla and the lenient Orang Utan. All these animals share a common ancestor and evolved slowly over time to its present state.

One cannot help noticing that the Dutch have a new King. Even as a republican, I have to admit that the Orange family has done a great job of promoting the Orange monarchy. Willem Alexanders stylized WA logo has been (and still is) displayed on public buildings. Pictures of Maxima and Willem Alexander looking optimistic have been staring us in the face (or next to us staring in a radiant future) from billboards. They had a million or so children attending the “koningsdag” (kingsday) games donned in orange t-shirts with a cartoon king, and a televised opening of the games showing them being nice and friendly surrounded by young children. They have given carefully controlled TV interviews and of course had a day long televised coronation event that gave rise to an endless stream of news items, and allowed them to appear with traditional regalia as well as designer dresses, and parade their young daughters. Last not least, the campaign “went viral” as companies gave away orange crowning “wuppies”, sold orange t-shirts, pastry, flags and peppers, and citizens dutifully dressed up in orange, often reusing the orange they had acquired for sport events like the football championships. In short, from a marketing point of view, the coronation was part of a well used, crossmedial event to market the house of Orange and the monarchy. 

When Reichskanzler Wilhelm Marx accosted the Weimar Germans for the first time via Radio as a mass medium on December 23, 1926, his advisors must have had a certain understanding of the potency of the medium in terms of ‘informing’ the citizens, in those days also referred to as propaganda, not having the current more negative connotation. Since the early days of deploying the medium as a mass medium of information, it rapidly developed into a medium of manipulation and even intimidation, propagating diverse social utopic experiments. Barely seven years after the occurrence, the German National Socialists with Joseph Goebbels as their communications mastermind and herald, understood the potency and relevance of ‘owning’ this medium and letting it work to their advantage. But not just the Nazis understood the power of mass media as a political instrument. It was President Roosevelt who prepared the American people gently for war with his so called fireside radio talks, claiming the United States of America to be ‘The Great Arsenal of Democracy’. Radio had, by then, become the true medium of propaganda. What has become of that ever since? This paper focuses on the topoi and developments of radio from the early days of mass medial propaganda to contemporary new digital media.
Discourse analysis of primary and secondary sources from the past and the present lead to the conclusion that not only traditional radio but also contemporary social media like Twitter and Facebook all carry the same fundamental agency through the topoi to turn a media into a propaganda tools with fundamentals such as envisioning utopia, mass manipulation, fear of isolation and adjacent, as the thread that runs through it, wanting to belong to a group.

One of the most important aspects that makes festivals a ‘time out of time’ experience is the world you live in for the time you are there. Lowlands welcomes you with lighthouses, as if you are coming home after a long trip, Paaspop gives you an all over view on the field when you arrive. Some festivals have the city as a décor , others have fences around it. But all of them have one thing in common; they have an original identity which they want to send out.
This is exactly the thing that interests me as a student of Cultural Studies. How do you define a festival identity and how do you translate that into the field layout? You can see the festival as a person, for example Rabobank Amersfoort Jazz would be a Jazz loving man, interested in talent, quality and new experiences, drinking his beer in the pub. Festival Classique describes itself as a woman, which also returns in the layout as a silhouette of a girl. People, and festivals too, have a personality and express that in their appearance. The appearance of a festival is seen in the advertising up to the field layout. With the use of particular colors, the arrangement of things like stages, food service and toilets, return of artifacts and symbols, names, a new world is made. 
After forming a theory for festival identity analysis the outcome will be combined with a description of field layout and a case study. With this I hope to make a good base in this social-esthetical research to festivals.

While reading Oliver Sacks’ latest book “Hallucinations” it struck me that there might be a resemblance between people dealing with all kinds of hallucinatory experiences and people coping with future developments like augmented reality. In both cases, people are subject to information that isn’t real. Maybe Sacks’ insights may turn out to have predictive value for how we come to terms with the overwhelming amount of virtual sensory information we’re about to allow into our lives. 

Last week I visited Museums and the Web 2013, the annual conference about digital technology and museums. We were invited to give a talk about the results of our social media monitor, which was developed in the context of the project ‘Museumkompas’. But before I explain more about the presentation, I like to tell a little more about a number of other presentations that I attended.

How can your festival experience be something unforgettable? According to Youngworks, ‘doing things together at festivals’ is a high priority of the youngsters this year (M. van der Maal). For example, helping to build the decor at the Solar Weekend Festival or even to perform at Magneet Festival. You can say these are forms of co-creation, which is used at music festivals to get the crowd more involved with the festival and to create an even more memorable experience.

This is part of an extended abstract which was submitted by Marieke and myself to “The 13th International Research Symposium on Service Excellence in Management” which will be held in june 2013.

Social media are rapidly becoming a viable way of service marketing and customer engagement in the hospitality industry. Facebook, for instance, allows restaurants to publish information, multimedia content and engage with their customers e.g., to answer questions or learn about their preferences. Being active on social media has become increasingly important as customers more frequently turn to social media and the Web for restaurant reviews before deciding to visit (Lewis and Chambers, 2000).