If you can gather a lot of people around your idea, that means that you can attract social energy, which constantly circulates around the urban body. Another speaker of TEDxKraków 2013 compares this phenomenon to a swarm of insects that revolve around a particular purpose. Anna Nacher points out an interesting coincidence in nature: insects choose what they gather around and so do we. How does that happen? Why some initiatives gain great popularity with little or no promotion and others do not succeed despite expensive marketing and advertising?
Our speaker leads a nomadic life between the Carpathian Mountains, Krakow and the rest of Europe. She is addicted to the mountains, especially those over two thousand meters above sea level. Passion for nomadic life is reflected in her academic and artistic activity that resembles a constant journey between her many interests. Radio listeners will know the voice of Anna’s broadcast “The negatives of pop culture.” Experimental folk lovers – from Magic Carpathians CDs or concerts, which started our as a musical project created in 1998 with Marek Styczyński. Her students will know her from her classes on cyberculture, media theory, cultural studies, gender issues, anthropology and audio-visual concepts, as well as research of sound.
Anna is an assistant professor at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at the Jagiellonian University and co-author of the research project titled “Urban Culture – nodes and flows.” She studied different forms of communication in the city’s social ecosystem as part of her research. As she says “the deeply hidden element of urban culture ” are the things that determine the atmosphere or magic of the city.
In her TEDxKraków talk, she’ll suggest new ways of thinking about communication within Kraków; rather than treating the audience as a scattered unit belonging to different categories based on age, education or identity, it is worth thinking about groups, nodes and associations, that are linked together in very complex networks. You can learn more about Anna’s work from her blog and also find her on Facebook and Twitter.