Tiltai

As information technology is becoming a huge part of people’s lives, various genres of folklore are moving online. Old folklore genres are adapting to the changes in people’s lives and are successfully spreading in the online space, while black humour genres on the Internet reflect society, current issues, stereotypes, scandals, and real-life situations. The aim of the article is not only to classify memes (comic units of cultural information), but also to show their relevance and popularity in contemporary society. The paper describes 15 different groups of memes collected from 13 online sources. The analysed works are grouped according to their popularity and the length of their dissemination in the virtual environment (popular, tendentious), and from the most popular examples of this genre, fan-made and political memetic works are distinguished.

Medias make impact on social environment – they influence individual interrelations, communication, approach to oneself and entire world, “insist” on certain stereotypes in different situations. They take active part in socialization of individuals. Socialization is perceived as a continuous lifelong process, in which values, standards, social state, roles and patterns of social behaviour are mastered. The article analyzes impact of media (social agents) in socialization processes of individuals.

The paper presents the corruption issue by highlighting the actual situation of corruption in the Slovak society. This problem has a historical background when after 1993 the Slovak Republic was separated from the Czech Republic. The author offers theoretical attitudes which are necessary to apply in practice for to improve situation in Slovakia. Theoretical information was gained from relevant sources. The author tries to apply official results from Transparency International and other institutes. The media has great effect on public opinion and therefore investigative journalism should be developed which could uncover media property and corruption in the whole society. Journalism should be independent of politicians. It should be objective, full of truthful information with verifiable sources. In the last part of the paper some solutions are suggested which should be applied in practise as they can help to address corruption solutions. In other words, necessary measures may support the healthy environment with social welfare and spur development of the society.

The prospective health care consumers are increasingly using the Internet websites for communication with potential health care service providers and decision-making regarding choice of the travel destination for receiving particular health care services. Therefore, it is important for health care providers to present themselves and their services efficiently online in order to attract foreign patients and thus facilitate medical tourism. The objective of this study is to evaluate the website content of Latvian health care providers who offer services to medical tourists in order to evaluate their status-quo and identify opportunities to improve website design. Authors used the framework by Huerta et al. (2016) as a basis to develop a modified framework suited for medical tourism-related website evaluation. 21 active websites associated with a medical tourism and provision of health care services to foreign patients were identified and selected for analysis. Each website was evaluated using a 10-factor assessment on 4 dimensions that include website accessibility, content, marketing, technology on a scale ranging from 0 to 10. Results: Scores of 21 website evaluation ranged from 54 to 91 point across all 4 dimensions with 80 and above points being considered as excellent result. Conclusions: Study findings indicated that the main improvements should be related to accessibility dimension and enabling text resizing function for improving experience for patients with poor sight, information dimension in terms of developing a separate main level section with information exclusively for foreign patients, and marketing dimension to improve effectiveness of search engine optimization (SEO) for medical tourism related keywords.