Virtual Political Communication in Bulgaria

Social networks are the result of a couple of circumstances such as the current development of communication technology and the improvement of the opportunities for communication, access to new ideas, web-based information, electronic resources and database serving millions of people all over the world. Social networks have increased their public influence, which contain videotaped speeches and presentations. Multimodality has become a characteristic feature of contemporary political virtual communication. Bulgarian politicians appreciate the Internet as a tool for building popularity in its wealth of features, forms, and modes. Communicative tools and techniques have changed. The forms of the Bulgarian political communication found in the virtual environment such as sites, blogs, social networks, video clips, virtual forums, etc. are heterogeneous. Bulgarian citizens accept the Internet as a tool for increased political and social activities. Civil oratory, which is seen as a mechanism for efficient organizing of public events during election campaigns, protests, and demonstrations, is also present in the social networks. The citizens use a combination of verbal and visual elements; they are bloggers and participants in virtual political forums and actively participate in the spread of all kinds of forms of the social networks. They take part in the street demonstrations and organize performances; they ridicule politicians through posters and cartoons published online. Verbal and visual messages of the citizens come to real life during the protests and to virtual life in the social networks. The polyphony of social networks is a manifestation of virtual civil communication where the citizens in their virtual projection as netizens build up a new complex model of communication.

Techno-psychological Aspects of Social Media Behaviors

Social media has become an inevitable part of our lives in the age of network society. People establish multiple identities for themselves, with or without references to the real world, and behave according to those identities. Self-made components of virtual presence are not limited to identities only; many users also create hyper-personalities for themselves with the help of new technologies. Then, the fundamental question becomes： Why do people create self-made identities and hyper-personalities to portray or hide themselves in social media environments？ The answer to this question has certain connections and implications for behaviors of social media users. Therefore, researchers have investigated why some people find social media attractive and attend whenever possible, while others are afraid of social media and hesitate to attend. Positive and negative behaviors of social media users can be classified as braggadocian and preventative. Braggadocian behaviors are related to courageously taking advantage of social media, whereas preventative behaviors are concerned with avoidance of social media. The dominant behavioral pattern of a user depends on what one can achieve through attending or preventing social media. This paper first discusses basic elements of human behavior that drive social media such as altruism, hedonism, connectionism, homophily, multiple identities, memetics, narcissism, and tribalism. Then, it focuses on precautionary elements of human behavior such as avoidance, escape, blocking, fear, hiding, removal, and protectionism. Whether they are attentive or not, one thing is clear： People refrain or enrich their own lives in social media rather than being abused or watching others in industrial media.

Virtualization of Wireless Communication Systems and Its Maximal Ratio Combining Macrodiversity To Extend CDMA Capacity

The concept of virtualization of wireless communication systems is based on the open and scalable hardware platform of software radios in the personal communication network. The base station is divided into four components according to their functions: antenna, IF, baseband, and control, which are connected by the ATM network. Virtualization provides great benefits such as fast handoff and easy realization of different macrodiversity algorithms. Macrodiversity can not be easily realized in conventional cellular systems. An exact analysis is presented for the performance of maximal ratio combining (MRC) macrodiversity in virtualized wireless communication systems. The results show that compared with soft handoff in CDMA systems, MRC can greatly increase the reverse link capacity.