A new social network has come to the surface called cvltvre.com, introducing a new way for people to interact on a cultural level. Like Facebook and Twitter, the site brings people together in an interconnected manner.
Miriam Peña Pimentel
“You can create personal blogs, profiles and group blogs and group activities,” says Miriam Peña Pimentel, the supervisor of the website and a University of Western Ontario PhD student in Hispanic studies.
Cvltvre.com was launched less than two years ago, and is open to the public. It is one of the projects of The Cultureplex research lab in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities under the guidance of Juan Luis Suarez. Anyone interested in the site can register for a free account, like most social networks.
The website is a cultural directory for museums, events and personal profiles from all around the world. People will come across postings for prospective festivals and theatre productions when they click on the events icon, for example. To help visualize the experience for the culturati – people intensely interested in cultural affairs – cvltvre.com has photo galleries illustrating the countries, places, museums, etc. that are available on the website. The personal blogs provide opinions, commentaries, and reviews of the different sites to be visited.
“We have all these networks, special networks with useful information, and people are really a fan of these things,” Pimentel says. “In Cvltvre, the idea is to have everything in just one place.”
Seven undergraduate and graduate students from Western work on the website daily, keeping it up to date with valid and reliable information, making sure users get the maximum experience. Some of the users associated with cvltvre.com are from Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico and the United States, to name a few.
On the website, people will find different icons that direct them to certain places. For example, some icons include events, sites and sights (a page dedicated to geographical sites, as well as personal “sights”/profiles), and museums.
“We think of Cvltvre as a way to take and exchange ideas, exchange points of views, and talk about cultural events … something useful,” Pimentel says.
