Journal articles on the topic 'Collaborative multi-touch interaction'

Multi-touch spherical displays that enable groups of people to collaboratively interact are increasingly being used in informal learning settings such as museums. Prior research on large flatscreen displays has examined group collaboration patterns in museum settings to inform the design of group learning experiences around these displays. However, previous research has shown differences in how users conceptualize interacting with spherical and flatscreen displays, thereby making it important to separately investigate how groups naturally collaborate around spherical displays in a museum setting. The spherical form factor of the display affords new forms of collaboration: unlike flatscreen displays, spherical displays do not have a definite front or center, thus intrinsically creating both shared and private touch interaction areas on the display based on users' viewing angles or physical arrangements. We conducted a 5-day long field study at a local science museum during which 571 visitors (370 adults and 201 children) in 211 groups interacted with a walk-up-and-use collaborative learning application showing global science data visualizations, on a multi-touch spherical display. We qualitatively analyzed groups' natural collaboration patterns including their physical arrangements (F-formations), their collaboration profiles (e.g., turn-taker or independent), and the nature of group discussion around the display. Our results show that groups often engaged in both independent as well as closely collaborative group explorations when interacting around the sphere: physical spacing between group members around the sphere was strongly linked to the way groups collaborated. It was less common for group members to make and accept suggestions or coordinate touch interactions when they did not share the same fields-of-view or touch interaction space with each other around the sphere. We discuss implications for supporting group collaboration in this context which will inform the design of future walk-up-and-use multi-touch spherical display applications for use in public settings.

AbstractThis paper examines some aspects of physical-digital workspaces, focusing on multi-user, multi-touch technologies and how different workspaces impact collaboration. We introduce the concept of globally collaborative work. We chose to use case studies completed by groups of students in an engineering course to test different workspace modalities: the use of a large multi-touch table top in conjunction with a multi-touch board (vertical), the use of tablets with the multi-touch board, and finally the multi-touch board alone. The evaluation criteria are based on modes of interaction which emerge during globally collaborative work sessions: individual work, communication, coordination, cooperation and collaboration. We hypothesized that the workspaces would influence collaborative activity, expecting to see higher rates of collaboration in the table top environment than in the other two modalities studied. However, results showed less co-building and more cooperative work, as students divided their work and later attempted to negotiate a coherent product built on individual contributions. Lastly, we share a few design recommendations based on these results.

Abstract With the increasing research of multi-modal human-computer interaction technology in aircraft cockpits, the interaction process is developing in a more natural and convenient direction, but the application scenarios of multi-modal interaction are still in a state of continuous exploration. Aiming at the button controls in the human-computer interaction interface, this paper discussed the experience of using ordinary buttons and drop-down buttons in physical button interaction, touch interaction, eye movement interaction, hand-eye cooperation interaction, and gesture interaction, respectively. We conducted an experimental study on five ways of interaction, and collected 15 experts’ subjective satisfaction scores based on task completion and experience process. The results show that different interaction modes have a significant impact on the task completion time, and the task completion time is the fastest when using physical button interaction, touch interaction, and hand-eye collaborative interaction. Experts are most satisfied with physical button interaction and touch interaction in ordinary button interaction, and are most satisfied with hand-eye collaborative interaction in drop-down buttons. The scene of physical button interaction and touch interaction is more suitable for single-click tasks, and the scene of hand-eye collaborative interaction is more suitable for multi-level parameter setting tasks. The research results of this paper are helpful to the interactive function design of button controls.

Abstract : The power of large and interactive surface of Multi-touch Table lies not in the technology as an end but more the means of enable multiple users to efficiently process visually oriented data. This technology offers different orientations for multiple users which also give advantage such as more than one user to input commands directly to the display surface, either via a pen-based device or directly with their fingers. The aptitude to interact directly with one’s manipulation of data provides opportunities for developing richer, more natural of hands-on and further the neutrality of human-computer interaction metaphors. Touch-enabled surfaces are becoming used in various setting such as in education, military and business. It is situated in a variety of work and public places to accommodate sharing information and enriching the interaction on the interface. Adding to this point is that the technology offers a large interactional surface and makes it simpler to support collaborative work. This paper reports on preliminary results from this ongoing research on military decision making, including the significance of multi-touch table application in diversity of domains, namely military and education and last but not least is the fundamental characteristics of Multi-touch Table user-interface functionalities that needed in the development of Multi-touch Table content.

This article and the design fictions it presents are bound up with an ongoing qualitative-ethnographic study with Imazighen, the native people in remote Morocco. This group of people is marked by textual and digital illiteracy. We are in the process of developing multi-modal design fictions that can be used in workshops as a starting point for the co-development of further design fictions that envision the local population's desired digital futures. The design fictions take the form of storyboards, allowing for a non-textual engagement. The current content seeks to explore challenges, potentials, margins, and limitations for the future design of haptic and touch-sensitive technology as a means for interpersonal communication and information procurement. Design fictions provide a way of exposing the locals to possible digital futures so that they can actively engage with them and explore the bounds and confines of their literacy and the extent to which it matters.

With the rapid moving technology and innovation, the current digital technology such as smartphones and tabletop system have become vital necessities to accommodate people’s daily activities. As a more robust alternative to tabletop system, the multi-mobile system is also benefiting humans’ interaction by combining multiple mobile devices to become a shared and larger touch surface display. This paper demonstrates the study on effects of bezels on a multi-mobile system which allows users to perform collaborative drawing task with mobile devices in an ad-hoc manner. Unfortunately, gaps and physical design of the mobile devices between the mobile displays cause inherent design problems to the multi-display structure. Before conducting the experiments, two prototypes have been designed; high-fidelity prototype (without solution) and iterative prototype (with the continuous spatial configuration). Two user studies have been conducted with the prototypes by observing groups of students performing an interactive drawing task and the findings were compared. Results from the first user study show gaps and disjointed objects were observed in the drawing outcomes, while in the second user study, where the Continuous Spatial Configuration was implemented as a solution to this bezel issue, the gaps and spaces between the screens were eliminated by 94.8%. From this study, it is believed that implementing the Continuous Spatial Configuration in the prototype designs can improve the user experience in the context of collaboration beyond the use of expensive tabletops systems.  Â

Contemporary business process modeling tools provide menu-based user interfaces for defining and visualizing process models. Such menu-based interactions have been optimized for applications running on desktop computers, but are limited regarding their use on multi-touch devices. At the same time, the widespread use of mobile devices in daily business life as well as their multi-touch capabilities offer promising perspectives for intuitively defining and changing business process models. Additionally, multi-touch tables will foster collaborative business process modeling based on natural as well as intuitive gestures and interactions. This paper presents the results of an experiment that investigated the way users define and change business process models using multi-touch devices. Based on experiment results, a core gesture set is designed enabling the easy definition and change of business process models with multi-touch devices. Finally, a proof-of-concept implementation of this core gesture set is presented. Overall, gesture-based process modeling and multi-touch devices will foster new ways of (collaborative) business process modeling.

Thanks to technology-pervaded learning environments, digital natives can experiment new engaging ways of learning together at school. In particular, large displays with multi-touch technology hold new opportunities for the learning process, through the dialogic interaction between students and the simultaneous physical interaction with the screen. Our research suggests the use of a context-aware platform with multi-touch displays to support digital storytelling, in order to increase students’ involvement, motivation, and participation. We start our work by designing an application to create fairytales using multi-touch screens, to stimulate new collaboration opportunities during everyday classroom activities. The paper presents the results of an experiment with Interactive WhiteBoards (IWBs), carried out in an Italian primary school.

This comprehensive article examines the evolution and future trajectory of conversational artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on Contact Center AI (CCAI) as a specialized implementation transforming customer service operations. The narrative traces the technological progression from rudimentary rule-based chatbots to sophisticated neural language models powered by transformer architectures and reinforcement learning from human feedback. It explores how CCAI systems leverage advanced capabilities including sentiment analysis, intent recognition, knowledge integration, and multimodal interaction to handle complex customer interactions while maintaining the human touch essential for meaningful engagement. Despite significant advances, several challenges persist in conversational AI deployment, including contextual understanding, bias mitigation, and evaluation metrics. The article addresses critical ethical considerations surrounding transparency, data privacy, and human-AI collaboration, emphasizing the importance of responsible implementation practices. Looking forward, emerging trends such as multi-agent systems, personalization, and proactive engagement promise to redefine human-machine interaction across diverse domains including customer service, healthcare, finance, and education, while raising important questions about authentic communication in an increasingly AI-mediated world.

This paper examines the current generation of displays, as found primarily in smartphones, laptops and tablet computers, from an interaction design perspective. Today’s displays are multifunctional, versatile devices with a standardized, rectangular shape and a standardized interaction. We distinguish two pitfalls. First, they facilitate an interaction that is isolated and detached from the physical environment in which they are used. Second, their multi-touch interface provides users with few tangible clues and handles. From our background in embodied interaction, we establish an alternate, hypothetical vision of displays: the content-specific display. The content-specific display is defined as a display designed for one specific function and one type of on-screen content. We explore this concept in three student projects from the First Year Master’s program at Product Development, University of Antwerp, and present two key themes that emerge from it: causality and transformation. Both themes reside in the field of coupling, a concept well-known within the field of embodied interaction, and aim at a more seamless integration of on-screen content within the physical world. Finally, we discuss how the content-specific display influences the design process of digital products, and how it fosters collaboration between product designers and designers of graphical user interfaces.

Ordinary projection screen is not sensitive to interaction, it cannot meet the demands of teaching, virtual reality, and other applications. Due to the fact that people always use hands to complete a variety of human–computer interaction, the finger-based interactive projection technology is worth being researched. In this paper, an ordinary monocular camera is used to acquire video frame on projection screen, and the touch signal of finger in frame is used as the input of interactive projection system. Because the differences between spatial frequency of common digital camera and the projection screen is small, the frame obtained from camera will contain moire fringe, which needs to be filtered in image frequency domain. Then the difference between current frame edge and previous frame edge is calculated to obtain moving object edge clues. According to these clues, the most possible contour curve is searched in current frame edge, and the curve is fitted by polynomial approximation method. Its curvature integration is used to match with the curvature integration of finger template curve. After that the fingers in the curve are recognized. Because color information is not needed, this method can be used to recognize gloved fingers. Finally, finger shadow is used to judge whether the finger touches projection screen to complete interactive process. The experiments of writing and collaboratively rotating picture on projector screen show that this method can effectively complete interactive operation with the projection screen and can realize the multi-user operation.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> With the increase of sonic life in digital spaces, new platforms for the exhibition of sound are emerging; from multisensory web interfaces, open access databases, apps for playing with sound, to experimental locative and geo-located pieces. From iPods, mobile phones, and noise cancelling headphones, new technological tools are constantly remediating how we listen and relate to the sonic spaces around us. The collaboration between digital humanities, sound studies, locative media and cartography holds many possibilities for challenging silent and text-centric cultures of communication into rich multi-sensory experiences that accommodate diverse knowledges and abilities. By thinking through new modes for staging cultural memory and presenting ephemera like sound, digital mapping tools can facilitate alternative forms of sensory relationships to the social and physical spaces around us.</p><p><i>Tempelhofer: Human Scale</i> is a web-based and locative sound mapping project based in Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld. What was once an airport, military base, and monument of Nazi Germany, the grounds have only recently been transformed into a public park, recreation area, and event space; a blank slate for human potential. On the north side, a Shaolin Temple lies just opposite a mini golf course made up of 18 interactive sculptures designed by local artists. DIY garden communities make up another corner. Recreational activities such as cycling, Segway clubs, and kite flying roam in and around the empty airport runways. A “grillplatz” barbeque area accommodates hundreds of families and youth, emitting thick clouds of smoke that mirror, in a historical juxtaposition, the airplane exhaust of a once operating airport. Bearing the aroma of a new Berlin, Tempelhofer Feld now embodies a melting pot of different foods, activities, and cultures coming into sensory contact. In the shadows of the massive airport structure lies a refugee camp, producing complex questions around heritage, conservation, and the politics of public space.</p><p>Tempelhofer Feld is a space that is highly politicized with its own contentious history and questions of preservation. Originally designed as a cornerstone for Hitler’s “world capital,” the airport sought to “crystalize claims of racial supremacy and world domination through architecture” (Parsloe 2017). Locating a refugee camp on this site not only creates complex associations between past and present but it also illuminates the tensions around living conditions on a site upheld by many strict heritage and conservation bylaws. Tempelhofer Feld is Europe’s largest protected historical monument, meaning complex tensions around preservation/conservation and development/change are consistently playing out. To explore these tensions, my project utilizes mapping technologies to trace how new emerging ephemeral activities are interacting with place, along with its complex politics, preserved history, and cultural memory. These ephemeral activities emerging out of the public spaces of the park produce fascinating tensions between the vital idealism of Berlin’s present and the turbulent history of its recent past. Recycled and reactive spaces like Tempelhofer Feld display the complex tensions between the re-adaptive and ephemeral nature of the park against its permanent state of preservation and commemoration of history. It underscores how charged public spaces in the city can be: “how should Berliners remember the past in a way that will most intelligently inform how they will move forward into the future?” (Malamud 2013).</p><p>The series of sound recordings focus on the quiet, intimate, and ephemeral scale of human activity – from walking, jogging, barbequing, lounging, kite-flying, socializing, gardening. These different sound activities are placed as destinations on a map that can be explored on a web interface as well as through geo-located points when walking through the park. To recreate the locative experience of the park on the web interface, sound clips are set against photographs of the different landscapes of the airport; expansive, barren, and sometimes empty of human activity. The intimacy of these sounds set against the open landscapes is meant to invert a space originally designed for technical infrastructure, transportation, and nationalist domination – a scale in which the individual human body often becomes erased. The question of scale is central to these explorations: how can sound on the intimate human scale be used to invert the scale of a massive airport/urban park? How does sound, with its embodied/sensory functions, invert questions around remote sensing that goes into mapping satellite imagery? What aspects of human sensory experience are erased or go unnoticed through remote, vision-based satellite and mapping technologies?</p><p>Soundscapes embody the complex relationship between human and environment in a complex system of information exchange. To the World Soundscape Project, soundwalking is a method for deep listening and participation in our everyday soundscapes: it involves “not simply a passive monitoring, but an active mental and physical participation in the ongoing composition forever being created” (Truax 1974, 38). This idea that the soundscape is not only something we passively listen to but something we also actively engage in and contribute to is central to the interactivity of this project. Sound can be activated through the user’s touch (on the web, through the mouse and in person, through their location). Different sound nodes can be activated simultaneously, building up a more complex and layered soundscape. By interacting with these different sounds, the user can acoustically design and recompose the soundscape around them, contributing to a greater sense of spatial and aural awareness.</p><p>The ephemeral nature of these activities/happenings is also emphasized through sound’s own elusive materiality, intangibility, and ephemerality. How the temporal and ephemerality of sound can be used as an archival tool to map out the contingent and ephemeral nature of memory is an essential question to this project. In Mark Smith’s theorization of sonic geographies, he states, “if we listen to it, the landscape is not so much a static topography that can be mapped and drawn, [but] a fluid and changing surface that transforms as it is enveloped by different sounds” (Bull and Back 2016, 11). The sonic geography of Tempelhofer Feld therefore represents its transformative and constantly evolving surface. While urban spaces (and its associated cartographic technologies) have dominantly been understood as visual spectacles, sound mapping foregrounds the vital role that sound plays in understanding the everyday cultural, political, and physical spaces around us.</p>

Multi-touch tabletop displays provide a co-located collaborative workspace for multiple users around a physical table. They sit together and perform collaborative interaction to select and manipulate digital contents using their bare fingers. However, these systems bring a new paradigm shift in user interaction and present various challenges to design natural user interfaces respectively. The growing popularity of tabletop displays and their related issues have gained a greater attention among researchers in academia and industry. It creates a need to present an overview of multi-touch tabletop displays. This review paper attempts to present the touch enabling technologies that support in the construction of multi-touch tabletop displays. It also presents the important applications of multi-touch tabletop displays in different domains and their challenging issues in different perspectives. Finally, this paper proposes the future work.

Incorporating authentic tactile interactions into virtual environments presents a notable challenge for the emerging development of soft robotic metamaterials. In this study, a vision‐based approach is introduced to learning proprioceptive interactions by simultaneously reconstructing the shape and touch of a soft robotic metamaterial (SRM) during physical engagements. The SRM design is optimized to the size of a finger with enhanced adaptability in 3D interactions while incorporating a see‐through viewing field inside, which can be visually captured by a miniature camera underneath to provide a rich set of image features for touch digitization. Employing constrained geometric optimization, the proprioceptive process with aggregated multi‐handles is modeled. This approach facilitates real‐time, precise, and realistic estimations of the finger's mesh deformation within a virtual environment. Herein, a data‐driven learning model is also proposed to estimate touch positions, achieving reliable results with impressive R2 scores of 0.9681, 0.9415, and 0.9541 along the x, y, and z axes. Furthermore, the robust performance of the proposed methods in touch‐based human–cybernetic interfaces and human–robot collaborative grasping is demonstrated. In this study, the door is opened to future applications in touch‐based digital twin interactions through vision‐based soft proprioception.

Background: Diet and oral health have a synergistic bidirectional relationship. As a body of knowledge, dietetics, and nutrition has expanded to touch all segments of health care. Collaboration between dietetics and dental professionals is recommended for oral health promotion and disease prevention and intervention.Aim: To assess the knowledge of dietitians regarding diet and oral health in Bangalore, India.Material and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted. A close ended, self-administered 23 item questionnaire was distributed and collected after ten minutes. The data was subjected to statistical analysis. Settings: Different sectors like multi-specialty hospitals, private clinics, educational institutions. Subjects: All the life members of Indian Dietetic Association, Bangalore chapter.Results: 36% felt dietary supplements can prevent oral mucosal diseases and only 12% were aware that high content of fluoride in water leads to abnormal tooth defects. Overall knowledge of dietitians pertaining diet and oral health was 56.48%.Conclusion: Study highlights the deficiency of knowledge of dietitians regarding oral health. The multifaceted interactions between diet and oral health in practice, education and research in both dietetics and dentistry merit detailed delineation.

Screens, as technological but also narrative and social devices, alter reading and writing practices. Users consume vids, read stories on the Web, and produce creative contents on blogs or Web archives, etc. Uses of seriality and transmediality are here discussed, that is watching, reading, and writing as interpreting, as well as respective and reciprocal uses of iteration and interaction (with technologies and with others). A specific figure of users or readers will be defined as a skilful and literate audience: fans on archives (FanFiction.net-FFNet, and Archive of Our Own-AO3). Fans produce serial and transmedia narratives based upon their favourite TV Shows, publish on-line, and often produce discourses or meta-discourse on this writing practice or on writing in general.The broader perspective of reception studies allows us to develop a three-step methodology that develops into a process. The first step is an ethnographic approach based on practices and competencies of users. The second step develops and clarifies the ethnographic dimension into an ethno-narrative approach, which aims at analysing mutual links between signs, texts, and uses of reading and writing. The main question is that of significance and meaning. The third step elaborates upon interactions in a technological and mediated environment. Social, participative, or collaborative and multimodal dimensions of interacting are yet regarded as key elements in reshaping a reading-writing cultural practice. The model proposed is a socio-narrative device, which hangs upon three dimensions: techno-narrative, narratological, and socio-narrative. These three dimensions of a shared narrative universe illustrate the three steps process. Each step also offers specific uses of interacting: an ethnographic approach of fictional expectation, a narrative ethnography of iteration and transformation, and a socio-narrative perspective on dialogism and recognition. A specific but significant example of fans' uses of reading and interacting will illustrate each step of the methodology. This qualitative approach of individual uses aims to be representative of fans' cultural practice (See Appendix 1). We will discuss cultural uses of appropriation. How do reading, interpreting, writing, and rewriting, that is to say interacting, produce meaning, create identities, and build up our relation to others and to the (story)world? Given our interest in embodied and appropriated meanings, appropriation will be revealed as an open cultural process, which can question the conflict and/or the convergence of the old and the new in cultural practices, and the way former and formal dichotomies have to be re-evaluated. We will take an interest in the composition of meaning that unfolds a cultural and critical process, from acknowledgement to recognition, a process where iteration and transformation are no longer opposites but part of a continuum.From Users' Competencies to the Composition of Narrative and Social Skills: A Fictional ExpectationThe pragmatic question of real uses steers our approach toward reading and writing in a mediated environment. Michel de Certeau's work first encourages us to apply his concepts of strategies and tactics to institutional strategies of engaging the audience and to real audience tactics of appropriation or diversion. Real uses are traceable on forums, discussions groups, weblogs, and archives. A model can be built upon digital tracks of use left on fan fiction archives: types of audience, interactions, and types of usage are here considered.Media Types Interaction Types Usage Types Media audienceConsumerSkilfulViewingReadingInformation searchContent production (informative, critical, and creative)Multimedia audienceConsumerSkilful+Online readingE-shoppingSharingRecommendationDiscussionInformative content productionCross-media audienceConsumerSkilful+SerendipityPutting objects in perspectiveNetworkingCritical content productionTransmedia audienceConsumerSkilfulInvolvedPrecursor+Understanding enhanced narrativesValue judgments, evaluationUnderstanding economic dimensions of the media systemCreative content productionTable 1 (Cailler and Masoni Lacroix)Users gear their reading and writing practices toward one medium, or toward multiple media in multi-, cross-, and trans- dimensions. These dimensions engage different and specific kinds of content production, and also the way users think about their relation to the media system. We focus on cumulative uses needed in an evolving media system. Depending on their desire for cultural products issued from creative and entertainment industries, audiences can be consumer-oriented or skilful, but also what we term "involved" or "precursor." Their interactive capacity within these industries allows audiences to produce informative, narrative, discursive, creative (or re-creative), and critical content. An ethnographic approach, based upon uses, understands that accumulating, crossing, and mastering different uses requires available and potential competencies and literacies, which may be immediately usable, or which have to be gained.Figure 1 (Masoni Lacroix and Cailler)The English language enables us to use different words to specify competencies, from ability to skill (when multiple abilities tend towards appropriation), to capability and competency (when multiple skills tend towards cultural practice). This introduces an enhancement process, which describes the way users accumulate and cross competencies to enhance their capability of understanding a multimedia or transmedia system, shaped by multiple semiotic systems and literacies.Abilities and skills represent different literacies that can be distributed in four groups-literacy, graphic literacy, digital literacy and interactive literacy, converging to a core of competencies including cognitive capability, communicative capability, cultural capability and critical capability. Note that critical skills appear below in bold italics. Digital LiteracyTechnical ability / Computational ability / Digital ability or skill Informational skill Visual LiteracyGraphic abilityVisual abilitySemiotic skillSymbolic skill Core of CompetenciesCognitive capabilityCommunicative capabilityCultural capabilityCritical capability Interactive LiteracyInteractional abilitySpectatorial abilityCollective abilityAffective skill LiteracyNarrative ability or skill / Linguistic ability / Reading and interpreting ability / Mimetic and fictional ability Discursive skillTable 2 (Masoni Lacroix and Cailler)Our first illustration exhibits the diversity, even the profuse and confused multiplicity, of cultural influences and preferences of a fan, which he or she comprehends as a whole.Gabihime, born on 6 October in Lafayette, Louisiana, in the United States, joined FFNet in 2001, and last updated her profile in September of 2010. She has written 44 stories for a variety of fandoms, and she belongs to two fandom communities. She has written one story about Twin Peaks (1990-) for an annual fandom gift exchange in 2008. Within Twin Peaks, her favourite and only romantic pair is Audrey Horne and Dale Cooper. Pairing represents a formal and cultural use of fan fiction writing, and also a favourite variation of the original text. Gabihime proposes notes to follow the story:I love Twin Peaks, and I love Audrey Horne particularly, and the rich stilted imagery of the show certainly […] I started watching my favourite season one episodes and reading the script notes for them. When I got to the 4-5 episode break (when Cooper comes back from visiting Jacques's cabin to the delightful sounds of the Icelandic junket roaring at their big shindig and finds Audrey in his bed) I discovered that this scene was originally intended to be left extremely ambiguous.Two main elements can be highlighted. Love founds fans' relation to the characters and the text. Interaction is based on this affect or emotion. Ambiguity, real or presumed, leads to what can be called a fictional expectation. This strong motive to interact within a text means that readers have to fill in the blanks of the text (Jenkins, "Transmedia"). They fill it with their desire for a character, a pairing, and a story. Another illustration of a fan's affective investment, Lynzee005 (see below) specifies that her fiction, "shows what I hope happened in between the scenes to which we were treated in the series."Gabihime does not write fan fiction stories anymore. She has a web site where she posts her stories and links to other fan art, vids, or fiction, as well as a blog where she writes her original fiction, and various meta-narrative and/or meta-discursive productions, including a wiki, Tumblr account, LiveJournal page, and Twitter account.A Narrative Ethnography of Fans' Production Content: Acculturation as Iteration and TransformationWe can briefly focus on another partial but significant example of narratives and discourses of a fan, in the perspective of a qualitative and iterative approach. We will then emphasise that narratives and discourses circulate, in other words that they are written and reformulated in and on different periods and platforms, but also that narratives use iteration and variation (Eco 1985).Lynzee005 was born in 1985 in Canada. She joined FFNet in 2008 and last updated her profile in September 2015. She has a beta profile, which means that she reads and reviews other fans' work-in-progress. We can also clarify that publishing chapter-by-chapter and being re-read on FFNet appears to be a principle of writing and of writing circulation. So, writing reveals an iterative and participative practice.Prior to this updating she wrote:When I read, I look for an emotional connection with the characters and I hope to be genuinely invested in where the story is going. […] I tackle everything in chunks, concentrating on the big issues (consistent characterization, believable plot lines, etc.) before moving down to the smaller ones (spelling, punctuation). Once I finish reading a "chunk," I put it together in the whole and see if it works against the other "chunks," and if not, then I go back and start over.She has written 17 stories for 7 different fandoms. She wrote five stories for Twin Peaks including a crossover with another fandom. She joined AO3 in December 2014 and completed her Twin Peaks trilogy. Her profile no longer underlines this serial process of chunking and dispersal, stressed by Jenkins ("Transmedia"), but only evokes how scenes can be stitched together. She now insists on the outcome of unity or continuity rather than on the process of serialization and fragmentation.Stories about fans, their affective and interpretive relations to a story universe and their uses of reading and writing in and out a fandom, can illustrate a diversity of attachments and interests. We can briefly describe a range of attachments. Attachment to the character, described above, can move towards self-narration, to the exhibit of self both as a person and a character, to a self-distancing, an identity affect. Attachment also has interpretative and critical dimensions. Attached to a narrative universe, attached to storytelling, fans promote a writing normalisation and a narrative format (genre, pairing, tagging, memes, etc.). Every fan seems to iterate and alter this conduct. This appropriation renews self-imposed narrative codes. The use of writing by fans, based on attachments, is both iterative and transformative. The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), AO3's parent apparatus, asserts that derivative fans' work is transformative.According to Umberto Eco's vision of a postmodern aesthetics of seriality, "Something is offered as original and different […] this something is repeating something else that we already know; and […] just because of it we like it" (167). There is an "enjoyment of variations" (174). "Seriality and repetition are not opposed to innovation" (175). Eco claims a dialectic between repetition and innovation, that is to say a: "dialectic between order and novelty -in other words, between scheme and innovation," where "the variation is no longer more appreciable than the scheme" (173). We acknowledge the "inseparable knot of scheme-variation" he is stressing (Eco 180), and we intend to put narrative fragmentation and narration dispersal forward to their reconstruction in a narrative universe as a whole, within the socio-narrative device. The knot illustrates the dialogical principle of exceeding dichotomies that will be discussed hereunder.The plurality of uses and media calls for an accumulation of competencies, which engage users in the process of media acculturation. A "literate" or skilful user should be able to comprehend "the flow of content across multiple media platforms," the media industries' cooperation, "the migratory behavior of media audiences," and the "technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes" that the word convergence manages to describe (Jenkins, Convergence, 3).Acculturation conveys an appropriation process, borrowed from "French" sociology of uses. Audiences become gradually intimate with the context of the evolving media environment. Scholars progressively understand how audiences are familiarizing themselves with competencies until they master literacies, where competencies are gathered. Users become sensitive, as well as mindful of time and space in literacy (Literacy), and of how writing can be spatialised (Graphic Literacy), of how the media space is technologized (Digital Literacy), and of what kind of structural interactions are emerging (Interactive Literacy).Thus, the research question takes shape: "What kind of interactions can users establish with objects that are both technical and cultural?" Which also means: "In a study of effective uses, can the researcher find appropriation logics or tactics in the way users, specifically here readers and writers, improve their cultural practices?" As Davallon and Le Marec furthered it, uses have to be included in a process of cultural growth. Users can cross technical and cultural dimensions of an object in two main ways: They can compare the object with other cultural products they are used to, or they can grasp its novelty when engaging a cognitive and cultural capability of adaptation. Acknowledgment and adaption are part of the social process of cultural growth. In this sense, use can be an integrated activity or a novel one.The model of cultural growth means that different and dispersed uses are progressively entering a meaning-making process. The question of meaning holds together, even unifies, multiple uses of reading and writing in a cultural practice of reading-writing. With this in mind, the core of competencies described above accurately displays the importance of critical skills (semiotic, informational, affective, symbolic, narrative, and discursive) nourishing a critical capability. Critically literate, users are able to question the place to which they have been attributed and the place they can gain, in an evolving (and even uncertain) media system. They can elaborate a critical reflection on their own practices of reading and writing.Two Principles of a Socio-Narrative Device: Dialogism and RecognitionUses of reading and writing online invite us to visualize and think through the convergence of a narrative object (technical, visual, and cultural), its medium and format(s), and the audiences involved. Here, multimodality has to be (re)considered. This is not only a question of different modes but a question of multiplicity in reading and writing uses, that leads us to the way a fan attachment creates his or her participation in the meaning of the text, and more generally leads us to the polyphonic form of writing questions. Dispersed uses converging into a cultural and social practice bring to light dialogical dimensions of writing, in the sense pointed out by Bakhtin in the early 1930s. Dialogism expands the notion of intertextuality to a social practice; enunciation appears polyphonic, and speakers are interacting. Every discourse is oriented to other discourses, interacting and responding to pre-existing discourses addressing the same object. Discourse is always others' discourse and shows a multiple and inter-relational subject.A fan producing meta-narratives or meta-discourses on media and fan fiction is an inter-relational subject. By way of illustration, Slaymesoftly, displays her stories on AO3, on her own Web site, and on specialized archives. She does not justify fan fiction writing through warnings or disclaimers but defines broadly what fiction is and how she uses fiction in her stories. She analyses publishing, describes her universe and the alternative universes that she explores, and depicts how stories become a series. Slaymesoftly can be considered a literate fan, approaching writing with emotion or attachment and critical rationality, or more precisely, leading her attachment to writing with the distance that critical thought allows. She writes "Essays -about writing, vampires, and whatever else I decide to blather on about" on her Web site or on her LiveJournal, where she also joined a community. In the main, Slaymesoftly experiences multiple variations, in the sense of Eco, variations that oppose and tie a character to a canon, or a loving writing object to what could be newly told. Slaymesoftly also exposes the desire for recognition engaged by fans' uses of interaction. This process of mutual recognition, stated in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit highlights and questions fans' attachment, individual identity, and normative foundation. Mutual recognition could strengthen communitarianism or conformism in writing, but it can also offer a way for attachments to be shared, a way to initiate a narrative, and a social practice of dialog.Dialogical dimensions of cultural practices of reading-writing (both in production and reception) design a fragmented narrative universe, unfinished but one, that can be comprehend in a socio-narrative device.Figure 2 (Masoni Lacroix & Cailler)Texts, authors, writers, and readers are not opposed but are part of a socio-narrative continuity. This device crosses three complementary and evolving dimensions of the narrative universe: techno-narrative, socio-narrative (playful, creative, and critical, in their interactivity), and narratological. Uses of literacy generating multimedia, cross-media, and transmedia productions also question the multimodal form of writing and invite us to an iterative, open, dialogical, and interrogative practice of multimodality. A (post)narratological activity opens up to an interrogative practice. This practice dialogs with others' discourse and narrative. The questioning complexity remains open. In a proximate meaning, a transmedia narrative is fragmented, open to incompletion, but enrolled in a continuum (Jenkins, "Transmedia").Looking back, through the overtaken dichotomy between production and reception, a social and narrative process has been described that leads to the reshaping of multiple uses of literacies into cultural practices, and further on, to a cultural and social practice of reading-writing blended into interactivity. Competencies, dictated uses of reading and writing and alterna(rra)tive upsurges (as fans' production content) can be questioned. What can be questioned is either the fragmentation, the incompletion, and the continuity of narratives, that Jenkins no longer brings into conflict ("Transmedia"). This is also what the social and narrative form of dialogism teaches us: dichotomies, as a tool or a structure of thought, appear suspect or no longer significant. There is continuity in the acculturation process, from acknowledgement to recognition, continuity in the multiple uses of interacting, continuity from narrative to discourse, continuity from emotion to writing critically, a transformative continuity in iteration and variation, a polyphonic continuity.ReferencesBakhtin, Michaïl, and V.N. Volosinov. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973.Cailler, Bruno, and Céline Masoni Lacroix. "El 'French Touch' Transmediatico: Un Inventario." Transmediación: Espacios, Reflexiones y Experiencias. Eds. Denis Porto Renó et al. Bogotá, Colombia: Editorial Universidad del Rosario, 2012. 181-98.Davallon, Jean, and Joëlle Le Marec. "L'Usage en son Contexte. Sur les Usages des Interactifs des Céderons des Musées." Réseaux 101 (2000): 173-95.De Certeau, Michel. L'Invention du Quotidien. Paris: Folio Essais, 1990.Eco, Umberto. "Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Postmodern Aesthetics." Daedalus 114 (1985): 161-84.Hegel, G.W.F. Phénoménologie de l'Esprit. Trans. Bernard Bourgeois. Paris: Vrin, 2006.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New York UP, 2006.———. "Transmedia 202: Further Reflections." 2011. <http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html>.Masoni Lacroix, Céline. "Mise en Récit des Fictions de Fans de Séries Télévisées: Variations, Granularité et Réflexivité." Tension narrative et Storytelling. Eds. Nicolas Pélissier and Marc Marti. Paris: L'harmattan, 2014. 83-100.———. "Narrativités 2.0: Fragmentation-Organisation d'un Métadiscours." Cahiers de Narratologie 32 (2017). <http://journals.openedition.org/narratologie/7781>.———, and Bruno Cailler. "Fans versus Universitaires, l'Hypothèse Dialogique de la Transmédialité au sein d'un Dispositif Socio-narratif." Revue française des sciences de l'information et de la communication 7 (2015). <http://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/1662>.———, and Bruno Cailler. "Principes Co-extensifs de la Fiction Sérielle, de la Distribution Diffusée à une Pratique Interprétative Dialogique: une Nouvelle Donne Socio-narrative?" Cahiers de Narratologie 31 (2016). <http://narratologie.revues.org/7576>. TV Show Fandoms ExploredBuffy The Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon).Sherlock (Mark Gatiss & Steven Moffat).Twin Peaks (Mark Frost & David Lynch).Wallander (from Henning Mankell to Philip Martin).

Dalcroze Eurhythmics Music therapists, music educators and community musicians will be familiar with the primacy of enlivening musical consciousness in those with whom they work: clients, patients, learners, participants and fellow musicians. For it is through such consciousness that other types of awareness – of self and other, of time, space and energy, and of one’s environment – may be developed and interpersonal connections, and one’s relationship with music, established and deepened. Music used in this way becomes an adaptive tool, a bridge, a means to some sort of transformation, whether this is understood therapeutically, educationally or – more inclusively – pedagogically. One such resource is Dalcroze Eurhythmics, which foregrounds the role of movement in musical activity and understanding, and the usefulness of exploring and harnessing music-movement relationships in pedagogy, therapy and the performing arts. Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950), who originated and gave his name to this approach, wrote, “Musical consciousness is the result of physical experience” (Jaques-Dalcroze 1921/1967: 39). He highlighted what, for him, was music’s best kept secret, but which was not much acknowledged, understood or used to its full potential in the practices he saw around him at the end of the 19th century: the movement of music and, as a consequence, the role of movement in music cognition. Jaques-Dalcroze and his collaborators, therefore, took a reforming attitude to pedagogy, dance and music making by experimenting with situations in which people could be music, through enacting their musical consciousness somatically and thereby simultaneously engaging thought, emotion, agency and creativity in a psychophysical means of expression. During the first decades of the 20th century, Jaques-Dalcroze developed his philosophy and practice, with the first Dalcroze schools springing up in Europe in the years immediately prior to World War I. To witness a Dalcroze session is one thing. One would normally see a group of people in a large space, in their bare feet, moving to music, either the piano improvisation of a teacher or a recording, or occasionally another instrument, such as a drum. The participants would be responding on their own terms or according to an instruction from the teacher/practitioner. They would be communicating non-verbally, as they made contact with others through vision, touch or via a piece of equipment such as a ball, stick, hoop, rope or a length of elastic, all the time synchronising their movements, dosing their energy and using space according to how the music moves. At times there would be singing or other forms of vocalisation, spontaneous or otherwise; at others the participants might be engaging in creative group work to devise movement sequences in response to a piece of repertoire. One might sense a deep connection between the movers and the music, even the desire to join in. However, to experience a Dalcroze session is quite another thing. As an actor, rather than an observer, one would be called upon to use one’s whole self creatively to analyse and solve problems, express thoughts or moods and react to musical challenges. One’s sensorimotor system would be gradually enlivened through preparatory exercises, bringing vision, hearing, touch and the voice into play, as well as the vestibular system, kinaesthesia, one’s spatial awareness and one’s own felt sense of self, or ‘body schema’. Over time, one would become aware of others in the space, finding ways to share it as participants moved around and engaged with each other. One’s movement – focusing on one part of the body or the whole – would be, to some degree, entrained by the music. One’s individual, or group, response to the music might focus on one parameter – metre, phrasing, harmony – or be more global. From these descriptions it might be possible to appreciate the types of learning typical in Dalcroze contexts as well as the multi-faceted, holistic nature of participants’ experiences, interweaving the personal with the social, the physical with the mental. It might also be evident that such a way of interacting and responding might have more than purely musical benefits. As Jaques-Dalcroze wrote: “Mind and body, intelligence and instinct, must combine to re-educate and rejuvenate the whole nature” (Jaques-Dalcroze 1930: vii). Indeed, his concern for the whole person led practitioners from the beginning to utilise the method in general education as well as in teaching children with special educational needs; an early example was set by Joan Llongueres, a Catalan Dalcroze teacher, who adapted it for blind children (Jaques-Dalcroze 1930). To other similar teachers, Dalcroze Eurhythmics seemed “a way of working half pedagogical and half therapeutic” (Van Deventer 1981: 28), or was “always a therapeutic experience” (Tingey 1973: 60).[1] Therefore, it may be surprising that it is only now that a special journal issue devoted to this topic should appear. Notwithstanding this, there are some outstanding individual studies that have recently made the case for the place of Dalcroze Eurhythmics in preventative medicine, particularly for older people at risk of falling, and also form a backdrop to this issue (Kressig et al. 2005; Trombetti et al. 2010). Dalcroze Eurhythmics is a practice with a long history and widespread geographical reach in the 21st century. Whilst Jaques-Dalcroze used the word ‘method’ (Jaques-Dalcroze 1906), Dalcroze Eurhythmics is not ‘methodical’ in the sense of teachers and students having to move in a set sequence of activities codified in books. Yet in the hands of its exponents, certain fundamental principles and a sense of rigour are maintained which might appear method-like. Another commonly used word is ‘approach’, which resonates with this journal’s name. It is apt in this context as the articles published here describe varied approaches to using the principles of Dalcroze Eurhythmics for different groups with different needs. This adaptability, inherent in the word ‘eurhythmia’, was understood by Percy Broadbent Ingham, who – along with his wife Ethel Haslam Ingham – founded the London School of Dalcroze Eurhythmics in 1913. Ingham, one of Jaques-Dalcroze’s close friends and intermediaries, wrote in his last letter to students: “Try and think of Dalcroze Eurhythmics as being not so much a method as a principle” (Ingham 1930: 3). However we conceptualise Dalcroze Eurhythmics, it is a fact that the practice has been adapted and reconfigured for various purposes throughout its history, a process that continues today. Jaques-Dalcroze spoke of the five fingers of Eurhythmics: “music, movement, the theatre, arts in education and therapy” (Tingey 1973: 60). This interdisciplinarity results from Eurhythmics’ origins in contexts where experiments in holistic pedagogy and the performing arts were deeply interwoven – such as the Geneva Conservatoire and his first, purpose-built school (the Bildungsanstalt Jaques-Dalcroze in Hellerau near Dresden) – and from Jaques-Dalcroze’s own interest in psychology and the philosophy of education. In contrast to Carl Orff, who did not imagine his method having a therapeutic application (Voigt 2013), for Jaques-Dalcroze his method “was always more than an education through and into music or a preparation for artistic work. Rather, it had wellbeing at its core” (Habron 2014: 105). Originally known as ‘les pas Jaques’ (Jaques’ steps), the terms ‘Gymnastique Rythmique’ (rhythmic gymnastics) and ‘la Méthode Jaques-Dalcroze’ soon became synonyms and were used in Jaques-Dalcroze’s own publications. Early in the method’s history, John W. Harvey – concerned that the method should catch on in Britain – coined ‘Eurhythmics’ as a term better suited to a more holistic practice than that suggested by ‘rhythmic gymnastics’ (Ingham 1914). Later Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds and one of Jaques-Dalcroze’s erstwhile English supporters, Harvey stated that the ‘Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze’ was “not a mere refinement of dancing, nor an improved method of music education, but a principle that must have effect upon every part of life” (Harvey et al. 1912: 5). This wider vision of Eurhythmics was reflected some years later by Jaques-Dalcroze with regard to the aptitudes required in the practitioner: “A true teacher should be both psychologist, a physiologist, and artist” (Jaques-Dalcroze 1930: 59), a description that will resonate with many readers, and which emphasises the multifaceted nature of both pedagogy and therapy as well as the points at which they interweave. The research Jaques-Dalcroze’s concern for the development of the whole person permeates his writings, as articulated by Ana Navarro Wagner in this special issue, who argues that whilst his occupation was music, “his preoccupation was the human being”. That is, although Jaques-Dalcroze’s experiments in pedagogy began with solving problems such as expressivity, time keeping and how students used their bodies whilst performing, his thought and practice evolved to encompass a much broader understanding of music’s role in human and social development. In this way, and through his own empirical approach to teaching and learning, he anticipated by generations some influential theories in ethnomusicology, music psychology, music therapy and music education such as the theory of musicking (Small 1998) and the concept of ‘communicative musicality’ (Malloch & Trevarthen 2009). Dalcroze Eurhythmics has recently been theorised with regard to these notions (Habron 2014) and Navarro Wagner’s article develops this line of thought in relation to the wellbeing of children and young people in Dalcroze contexts. A different foreshadowing is explored with regard to Neurologic Music Therapy by Eckart Altenmüller and Daniel Scholz, who outline the ways in which Jaques-Dalcroze’s discoveries about sensorimotor integration prefigure contemporary theories in neuroscience and current practice in neurorehabilitation using music and movement. In many ways, the neurological foundations of Eurhythmics have been hidden in plain sight, as it were, for many years and yet we know that Jaques-Dalcroze carried on extensive correspondence with doctors and psychologists, such as Édouard Claparède, and was influenced by them in his use of medical terminology and his understanding of the body-mind.[2] It has taken 110 years to pick up where Claparède, in 1906, left off when he wrote to Jaques-Dalcroze: “you have arrived, albeit by routes entirely different from those of physiological psychology, at the same conception of the psychological importance of movement as a support for intellectual and affective phenomena” (Bachmann 1991: 17). Sanna Kivijärvi, Katja Sutela and Riikka Ahokas provide a conceptual study of the role of embodiment in music and movement-based education for children and young people with physical or intellectual disabilities. In so doing, they use Dalcroze Eurhythmics as an example of practice. This opens out a philosophical area of debate that is new to Dalcroze Studies and ripe for further investigation, in particular notions of value around the ‘disabled body’ and how we understand the nature of embodied cognition for those with disabilities. The other studies in this volume are all empirical, relying on qualitative and/or quantitative data. Space does not permit detailed introductions and the articles will speak for themselves. What is noteworthy is the continual re-adaptation of Eurhythmics with groups from across the lifespan and in a range of settings: educational, medical and in the community. These research articles give details about the activities designed for the groups in question and provide either robust evidence for the use of Dalcroze Eurhythmics in music therapy and special music education, or the grounds on which to build further studies. The voices of experience Besides research articles, this special issue includes two annotated interviews with senior Rhythmics practitioners: Marie-Laure Bachmann and Eleonore Witoszynskyj. Both worked in the field of special music education and were apprenticed to important figures in the history of music therapy: Claire-Lise Dutoit and Mimi Scheiblauer respectively. Bachmann and Witoszynskyj also undertook other studies besides their Rhythmics trainings, demonstrating how their practical wisdom has developed alongside a commitment to lifelong learning. Together they embody the different traditions of Eurhythmics / Rhythmics training that emerged from Jaques-Dalcroze and Hellerau, and that were unintentionally spurred on by the ‘Dalcroze diaspora’ occasioned by World War I and the closure of the Bildungsanstalt Jaques-Dalcroze. Broadly speaking, one of these traditions became Dalcroze Eurhythmics (Bachmann) and the other, in German-speaking countries, became Rhythmik (Witoszynskyj).[3] Both women share their perspectives on these lineages, including colourful and detailed recollections of their teachers and mentors. There were times during these interviews when words clearly did not suffice and Bachmann and Witoszynskyj took to the floor to move, or sing, or otherwise show what they meant. These moments are mentioned in the transcripts and serve as reminders that, no matter how much material is written in the pursuit of knowledge, the know-how of educators and therapists is largely carried within and passed on (or not) via a pedagogical process. Bachmann and Witoszynskyj are, like all of us, living archives, housing precious storehouses of memory, both of fact and action, which can be accessed in oral histories like these. Kessler-Kakoulidis’s book on Amélie Hoellering (1920-1995), reviewed here by Ludger Kowal-Summek, is another welcome addition to constructing the history of Dalcroze-inspired therapy work. Taken together, all these stories point to a parallel history of music therapy, which is only beginning to be explored, alongside that of more well-known figures such as Altshuler, Alvin, Gaston, Nordoff, Priestley and Robbins. Dalcroze Studies and Open Access The rapidly expanding field of Dalcroze Studies is transdisciplinary, as evidenced by the wide cross-section of scholars, teachers, artists and other practitioners who present and perform at the International Conference of Dalcroze Studies (www.dalcroze-studies.com), now in its third iteration.[4] This special issue is part of that growth and, in a similar way, emerges from a wide spectrum of activity around the globe and from all levels of professional expertise: from doctoral students to eminent neuroscientists, from those implementing Dalcroze principles as students to highly experienced practitioners. Such widespread work, undertaken by such a variety of practitioner-researchers, is a sign of health for Dalcroze Studies and for Dalcroze Eurhythmics as a living practice. This special issue also highlights the power of collaboration between practitioners and specialists in other domains, with some studies providing insights that could only emerge from interdisciplinary investigation. Finally, the fact that this is an online, open access journal is worth noting and celebrating. Many Dalcroze, or Rhythmics, practitioners are not affiliated to academic institutions with access to peer-reviewed journal articles via password-protected databases. In this sense, Approaches is a gift. We offer this special issue in the same spirit, hoping that it will be useful, enlightening, and a source of inspiration not only for Dalcroze practitioners and scholars but also for music therapists, community musicians and music teachers who are exploring the endless resources of the music-movement nexus in their bid to facilitate positive change in individuals’ lives, their local communities and wider society. Acknowledgements My thanks to Dr Selma Landen Odom (Professor Emerita, York University, Toronto) and Dr Liesl Van der Merwe (Associate Professor, North-West University, Potchefstroom) for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this editorial. References Bachmann, M-L. (1991). Dalcroze Today. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habron, J. (2014). ‘Through music and into music’ – through music and into wellbeing: Dalcroze Eurhythmics as music therapy. TD: The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa, Special Edition 10(2), 90-110. Harvey, J. W. et al. (1912). The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze. London: Constable. Ingham, P.B. (1914). ‘The Word ‘Eurhythmics’’. The School Music Review (March 1 1914), 22(262), 215. Ingham, P.B. (1930). Mr Ingham’s last letter. Journal of the Dalcroze Society, November 1930, 3. Jaques-Dalcroze, E. (1906). Gymnastique rythmique (Rhythmic gymnastics), Vol. 1 of Méthode Jaques-Dalcroze: pour le développement de l’instinct rythmique, du sens auditif et du sentiment tonal [Jaques-Dalcroze Method: For the Development of the Rhythmic Instinct, Auditory Sense and Tonal Feeling]. Neuchâtel: Sandoz, Jobin. Jaques-Dalcroze, E. (1921/1967). Rhythm, Music and Education (Revised edition, translated by H. Rubinstein). London: The Dalcroze Society Inc. Jaques-Dalcroze, E. (1930). Eurhythmics, Art and Education, (Edited by C. Cox, translated by F. Rothwell). London: Chatto & Windus. Kressig, R. W., Allali, G., & Beauchet, O. (2005). Long-term practice of Jaques-Dalcroze Eurhythmics prevents age-related increase of gait variability under a dual task. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 53(4), 728-729. Malloch, S., & Trevarthen, C. (Eds.). (2009). Communicative Musicality: Exploring the Basis of Human Companionship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Tingey, N. (Ed.). (1973). Emile Jaques-Dalcroze: A Record of the London School of Dalcroze Eurhythmics and its Graduates at Home and Overseas 1913-1973. London: Dalcroze Teachers Union. Trombetti, A., Hars, M., Herrmann, F. R., Kressig, R. W., Ferrari, S., & Rizzoli, R. (2011 ). Effect of music-based multitask training on gait, balance, and fall risk inelderly people. Archives of Internal Medicine, 171(60), 525-533. Retrieved from http://www.sbms.unibe.ch/meeting_11/Trombetti2011.pdf Van Deventer, A. (1981). Annie van Deventer: The Hague. In H. Van Maanen (Ed.), La Rythmique Jaques-Dalcroze: Yesterday and Today (pp. 24-28). Geneva: FIER. Voigt, M. (2013). Orff Music Therapy: History, principles and further development. Approaches: Music Therapy & Special Music Education, Special Issue 5(2), 97-105.Retrieved from https://approaches.gr/orff-music-therapy-history-principles-and-further-development-melanie-voigt/ Suggested citation: Habron, J. (2016). Dalcroze Eurhythmics in music therapy and special music education. Approaches: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Music Therapy, Special Issue 8(2), 100-104. [1] Italics in original. [2] The letters between Jaques-Dalcroze and Claparède are in the Bibliotheque de Genève and would repay editing and detailed study to illuminate this historical thread within Dalcroze Studies. [3] ‘Rhythmik’ (translated here as ‘Rhythmics’) is also known as ‘Musik und Bewegungspädagogik’ or ‘Rhythmisch-musikalische Erziehung’. Readers will come across different usages in this special issue. [4] For a report of the 2nd International Conference of Dalcroze Studies, see Conlan (this special issue) and for information about the 3rd International Conference of Dalcroze Studies (Quebec City, 2017), see page 111.

Introduction The concept of ‘wellbeing’ is typically thought of in human-centric ways, referring to the affective feelings and bodily sensations that people may have which inform their sense of health, safety, and connection. However, as our everyday lives, identities, relationships, and embodiments become digitised and datafied, ‘wellbeing’ has taken on new practices and meanings. The use of digital technologies such as mobile and wearable devices, social media platforms, and networks of information mediate our interactions with others, as well as the ways we conceptualise what it means to be human, including where the body begins and ends. In turn, digital health technologies and ‘wellness’ cultures such as those promoted on social media sites such as Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook have also shaped our understanding of ‘wellness’ and ‘wellbeing’, their parameters, and how they ought to be practiced and felt (Baker; Lupton Digital Health; Lupton et al.). For millennia, aspects of human bodies have been documented and materialised in a variety of ways to help people understand states of health and illness: including relationships to the environments in which they lived. Indigenous and other non-Western cosmologies have long emphasised the kinds of vibrancies and distributed agencies that are part of reciprocal more-than-human ‘manifestings’ of kinships, and have called for all people to adopt the role of stewards of the ecosystem (Bawaka Country et al.; Hernández et al.; Kimmerer; Rots; Todd; Tynan). In Western cultures, ideas of the human body that reach back to ancient times adopt a perspective that viewed the continuous flows of forces (the four humours) in conjunction with the elements of air, wind, earth, and fire inside and outside the body as contributing to states of health or ill health. It was believed that good health was maintained by ensuring a balance between these factors, including acknowledgement of the role played by climactic, ecological, and celestial conditions (Hartnell; Lagay). A more-than-human approach is beginning to be re-introduced into Western cultures through political activism and academic thinking about the harms to the planet caused by human actions, including global warming and climate crises, loss of habitats and ecological biodiversity, increased incidence of extreme weather events such as bushfires, floods, and cyclones, and emerging novel pathogens affecting the health not only of humans but of other living things (Lewis; Lupton Covid Societies; Lupton Internet of Animals; Neimanis et al.). Contemporary Western more-than-human philosophers argue for the importance of acknowledging our kinship with other living and non-living things as a way of repositioning ourselves within the cosmos and working towards better health and wellbeing for the planet (Abram; Braidotti; Plumwood). As these approaches emphasise, health, wellbeing, and kinship are always imbricated within material-social assemblages of humans and non-digital things which are constantly changing, and thereby generating emergent rather than fixed capacities (Lupton "Human-Centric"; Lupton et al.). In this article, we describe our More-than-Human Wellbeing exhibition. To date, new media, Internet, and communication studies have not devoted as much attention to more-than-human theory. It is this more-than-digital and more-than-human approach to health information and wellbeing that marks out our research program as particularly distinctive. Our research focusses on the many and varied digital and non-digital forms that information about health and bodies takes. We are interested in health data as they are made and form part of the objects and activities of people’s everyday lives and aim to expand the human-centric approach offered in digital health by positioning human health and embodiment as always imbricated within more-than-human ecosystems. We acknowledge that all environments (natural and human-built) are intertwined with humans, and that to a greater or lesser extent, all are configured with and through the often exploitative and extractive practices and ideologies of those living in late modern societies in which people are positioned as superior to and autonomous from other living things. Together with more-than-human scholarship, we take inspiration from work in which arts-based, multisensory, and museum curation methods are employed to draw attention to the intertwining of people and ecologies (Endt-Jones; Howes). Our exhibition was planned as a research translation and engagement project, communicating several of our studies’ findings in arts-based media (Lupton "Embodying"). In what follows, we outline the concepts leading to the creation of our exhibits and describe how these pieces materialise and extend more-than-human concepts of wellbeing and care. Five of the exhibits we created for this exhibition are discussed. They all draw on our research findings across a range of studies, together with more-than-human theory and medical history (Lupton "More-Than-Human"). We describe how we used these pieces to materialise more-than-human concepts of health, wellbeing, and kinship in ways that we hoped would provoke critical thought, affective responses, and open capacities for action for contributing to both human and nonhuman flourishing. The background, thinking, and modes of making leading to the creation of ‘Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities’, ‘Smartphone Fungi’, ‘Hand of Signs’, ‘Silken Anatomies’, and ‘Talking/Flowers’ are explained below. Bodily Curios Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. Reclaimed timber, found objects, resin 3D prints. 2023. Fig. 1: Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. Fig. 2: Detail from Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. The objects we have placed in Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities (figs. 1 and 2) mix together such things from the past as prosthetic human eyeballs and teeth used in medicine and dentistry in earlier eras. This collection of found and manufactured objects, both old and new, draws on the concept of the ‘cabinet of curiosities’, also known as cabinets of wonder, which first became popular in the sixteenth century. Artefacts were assembled together for viewing in a room or a display case. The items were chosen for being notable in some way by the curator, including objects from natural history, antiquities, and religious relics, as well as works of art. These collections, purchased, curated, and assembled by members of the nobility or the wealthy as a marker of refinement, knowledge, or social status, were the precursor of museums (Endt-Jones). We see digital devices such as mobile phones as one of a multitude of ways that operate to document and preserve elements of human embodiment – indeed, as contemporary ‘cabinets of curiosities’. Our cabinet also refers to the tradition of medical museums, which display preserved human organs, body parts, and tissue in glass bottles for pedagogical purposes. Under this model of health, specimens of both ‘ideal’ health and also ‘ill’ health – abnormalities in the flesh – were documented as a means of categorising wellbeing. Museums such as these would often treat diseased and disabled bodies as oddities and artefacts of ‘curiosity’. In this work, we reimagine and wind back this way of thinking, through displaying and drawing attention and curiosity towards signs of the body and the everyday. We are showing that wellbeing is more than a process of categorisation, comparison, or measurement of ‘ideal’ or ‘abnormal’; it is in the traces we leave behind us when we return to the earth. Our information data are human remains, moving as endless constellations of the interior and exterior of the body (Lupton Data Selves). In this artwork, both reclaimed wood and 3D-printed resin were used as a synergy between the natural and synthetic. Taking our cue from the manner of display of these items in medical museums, we have added our own curios, including 3D-printed body organs sprouting fungi (fig. 2), as a way of demonstrating the entanglements between humans and the fungal kingdom. Interspersed among these relics of human bodies is a discarded mobile phone with its screen badly shattered. It is displayed as a more recent antiquated object for making images and collecting, storing, and displaying information and images about human bodies, which itself is subject to disastrous events despite its original high-tech veneer of glossy impermeability. Technologies are more-than-flesh as human-made simulacra of body parts. Our wellbeing is sensed and made sense of through bodies’ entanglements of human and nonhuman. These curios both materialise traces of our bodies and wellbeing and extend our bodies into the physical spaces we inhabit and through which we move. Reading the Traces and Signs Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Smartphone Fungi. Recycled European oak, 3D printed resin, CNC carved plywood. 2023 Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Hand of Signs. Laser-etched walnut and plywood. 2023. Fig. 3: Smartphone Fungi. / Fig. 4: Detail from Smartphone Fungi. Wellbeing is also a process of mark-making, realised through the reciprocal impressions we leave on each other and the world around us. In Smart Phone Fungi (figs. 3 and 4) we capture the idea of ‘recording’ that takes place between people, technologies, and the natural world. It was inspired by a huge tree which members of our team noticed on a bush walk in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney, Australia. Growing from this tree were fungi of similar size and shape to the smartphone that was used to capture the image. In our interpretation, a piece of reclaimed timber was used to represent the tree, itself marked by its human use, and fungal shapes replicating those on the tree were produced using computer numerical controlled (CNC) carving. The central timber post is covered with human and more-than-human traces, such as old tool marks, weather damage, and wood borer holes. Alongside these traces, the CNC-carved fungi forms add a conspicuously digital layer of human intervention. Fig. 5: Hand of Signs. In Hand of Signs (fig. 5), we extend this idea of both organic and digital data traces as something that can be ‘read’ or interpreted. Inspired by the practice of palmistry, this work re-interprets line reading, the historical wooden anatomical model, and human body scanning as ways of reading for signs of wellbeing in past and future. Palm readers interpret people’s character, health, longevity, and other aspects of their lives through the creases and traces of development, wear, and deteriorations in the skin of our hands (Chinn). Life leaves its traces on our palms. The piece also refers to the newer tradition of digitising human bodies (Lupton Quantified Self; Lupton et al.), employing scanning and data visualising technologies, which uses spatial GPS data to deduce patterns of human activity. For both palmistry and in more contemporary monitoring technologies, one’s wellbeing can be deduced through the map: the lines of the palm and the errant traces collected by satellites and sensors. To reflect this relation between mapping and palmistry, our updated anatomical model references both the contours of 3D geospatial data and of the human palm. However, this piece looks to represent more layers of data beyond those captured by GPS data. By using reclaimed wood to construct this human hand model, we are again making an analogy between the marks of growth and life that timber displays and those that the human body bears and develops as people move through more-than-worlds throughout their lifespans. The piece also seeks to draw attention to the various ‘signs’ that have been used across centuries to interpret the current and future health and wellbeing of humans (once markings on or morphologies of the body, now often the digitised visualisations of the internal operations and physical movements of the body that are generated by digital health technologies), superimposing older and newer modes of corporeal knowledge. Layers of Mediation Megan Rose. Silken Anatomies. Digital print on satin and yoryu silk chiffon. 2023. Ash Watson. Talking/Flowers. Collage and digital inkjet on paper. 2023. Fig. 6: Detail from Silken Anatomies. The ways that we come to sense and understand wellbeing are also mediated through the reproductive interplay of natural and technological elements. Silken Anatomies (fig. 6) was inspired by anatomical prints from the Renaissance showing details of the interiors of human bodies and organs together with living things and objects from the natural world. These webs of interconnectivity were thought to be key to wellbeing and health. Produced at scale through metal engraving and woodblock printing, these natural history and compendia took on major importance as part of these educational resources (Kemp; Swan). In an effort to extend the reach of artefacts beyond their tangible presence, libraries globally have sought to create open access digital scans of historic medical and botanical illustrations. The images reconfigured in Silken Anatomies were downloaded from the Wellcome Trust’s online archive and have been reimagined through digital enhancement and sublimation dye techniques. Referencing shrouds, the yoryu silk panels enfold exhibition visitors, who were able to touch and pass through the silks, causing them to billow in response to human movement. We bring together an animal-made material (crafted by silkworms) with more-than-human images featuring both humans and other living creatures. The vibrancies of these beautifully engraved and coloured anatomical images are given a new life and a new feel, both affectively and sensuously, through this piece. We can both see and touch these more-than-human illustrations that speak to us of the early modern natural science visualisations that underpin contemporary digital images of the human body and the more-than-human world. The vibrancies of these beautifully engraved and coloured anatomical plates are given a new life and a new feel, both affectively and sensuously. The digital is returned to the tangible. Fig. 7: Detail from Talking/Flowers. Even in increasingly digitised healthcare environments, paper and other printed materials remain central documents in the landscape of health and wellbeing. Zines are small-scale, DIY, and typically handcrafted publications, which are often made to express creators’ thoughts and feelings about health and wellbeing (Lupton "Health Zines"; Watson and Bennett). Talking/Flowers (fig. 7), a zine of visual and textual work, explores the materialities of health information and healthcare encounters by creatively layering a diverse range of materials: clippings from MRI scans, digitally warped and recoloured images from medical infographics, and found poetry made from research publications. In this way, the zine remixes and reconstitutes key documents of authority in health institutions which continue to take primacy as evidence. While vital in the pipeline of diagnosis and treatment, such documents can become black boxes of meaning, and serve to distance health professionals from consumers and consumers from agentic understandings of their own health. These evidentiary materials are brought together here with other imagery, textures, and recollections of personal experience; the pages also feature leaves, flowers, fungi, and oceanic tones. Oceans, pools, rivers, lakes, and other coastal forms or waterways offer all-consuming sensory spaces in which people can find calm, balance, buoyancy, and connection with the wider world. Aqua tides, purple eddies, and misshapen pearls flow through the pages as the golden thread of the zine’s aesthetic theme. Also featured are three original poems. The first and third poems, ‘talking to a doctor’ and ‘talking to other people’, explore moments of relational vulnerability. The second poem, ‘untitled’, is a found poem made from the conclusions of sociologist Talcott Parsons’s 1975 article on the sick role reconsidered. In each of these poems, information and communication jar the encounters and more-than-human metaphors hold space for complex feelings. The cover similarly merges imagery from botanical and historical medical illustrations with a silver shell, evoking the morphological dimensions that connect the more-than-human. Exhibition visitors were able to turn the pages of the original copy of the zine, and were invited to take a printed copy away with them. Conclusion More-than-Human Wellbeing is an exhibition which aims to expand the horizons of how we understand wellbeing and our entanglements with the world. Our exhibition was designed to draw on our research into the more-than-human dimensions of health and wellbeing in the context of an increasingly digitised and datafied world. We wanted to attune visitors to the relational connections and multisensory ways of knowing that develop with and through people’s encounters and entanglements with creatures, things, and spaces. We sought to demonstrate that in this digital age, in which digital devices and software are often considered the most accurate and insightful ways to monitor and measure health and wellbeing, multisensory and affective engagements with elements of the natural environment remain crucial to understanding our bodies and health. Through engagements with our artworks, we hoped that new capacities for visitors’ learning and thinking about the relational and distributed dimensions of more-than-human wellbeing would be opened. While traditionally thought of as human-centered, we explore human health and wellbeing as interconnected with both the natural and technological. We used materials from the natural world – timber, paper materials, and silk fabric – in our artworks to capture both the multigenerational traces and entanglements between humans and plant matter. Recent works of natural and cultural history have drawn attention to the mysterious and important worlds of the fungi kingdom and its role in supporting and living symbiotically with other life on earth, including humans as well as plants (Sheldrake; Tsing). We also made sure to acknowledge this third kingdom of living things in our artworks. We combined these images and materials from nature with digitised modes of printing and fabrication to highlight the intersections of the digital with the non-digital in representations and sensory feelings of health and wellbeing. We disrupt and make strange signs of traditional human-centric medicine through reconfigurations, bricolage, and re-imaginations of more-than-human wellbeing. As humans we are interconnected with the natural world, and the signs of these meetings can be traced and read. Through our artistic creations, we hope to re-orient people towards this more open way of thinking about wellbeing. Working with arts practices and creative data visualisations, both digital and analogue, we bring to the fore the role that more-than-human agents play in mediating and making these convivial more-than-digital connections. Acknowledgments This research was funded by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (CE200100005) and a Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture collaboration grant. UNSW Library provided financial and curatorial support for the mounting of the exhibition. References Abram, David. "Wild Ethics and Participatory Science: Thinking between the Body and the Breathing Earth." Planet. Volume 1. Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. Eds. Gavin van Horn et al. Center for Humans & Nature Press, 2021. 50-62. 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Introduction Exploring the ways in which children merge education, play and connection in their digital device use, this article critiques the established definitions of the Internet of Things and the Internet of Toys and suggests an alternative. Using evidence emerging from The Internet of Toys: Benefits and Risks of Connected Toys for Children, we deconstruct these traditional terms, and advocate for a revised terminology. Such a reconsideration helps frame children’s use of digital devices and the important roles these play in children’s everyday lives. The Internet of Things is defined by Mascheroni and Holloway as “physical objects that are embedded with electronics, sensors, software and connectivity that support the exchange of data”. These objects have become omnipresent in Western society, resulting in different subsets of the Internet of Things, such as the Internet of Toys. Such connected toys are physical toys that are (just as the Internet of Things is) connected to the Internet through Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi (Mascheroni and Holloway). The features of such toys include network connectivity, sensors and voice/image recognition software, and controllability and programmability via apps on smartphones or tablets (Holloway and Green). CogniToys Dino, Fisher-Price Smart Toy Bear, Skylanders, Hello Barbie, Cloudpets, and Wiggy Piggy Bank are just a few examples of these connected playthings (Ihamäki and Heljakka; Mascheroni and Holloway; Shasha et al.). The ‘Internet of Toys’ category can thus be understood as physical toys with digital features (Ihamäki and Heljakka). However, Ling et al. argue that, “if the item is to be included in the IoT[hings] devices and … if the object is also used for play, then despite its designed purpose, this internet connected item becomes a member of the subset of the IoToys” (Ling et al.). Therefore, the conceptualisation of toys should not be limited to products designed for play. This raises questions about the concept of the Internet of Toys, and whether the distinction between the Internet of Things and the Internet of Toys is (still) relevant. We argue that there is no longer a meaningful distinction to be made between the Internet of Toys and the Internet of Things: instead, all such phrases indicate fragmentary attention to the Internet of Life. The Internet of Life can be defined as: devices which encompass all facets of online connectivity and technological management, and the interpolation of the digital with the everyday. The Research Project In 2018, the Australian Research Council funded a Discovery grant investigating The Internet of Toys: Benefits and Risks of Connected Toys for Children. Initially the project gave each household involved in the case study a Cozmo robot, to see how the toy was used and integrated into the household. The project foundered somewhat as the robot was initially played with but after a short while the children stopped engaging with Cozmo. Researchers believed this was due to novelty, Internet connectivity issues and the overly complicated nature of the toy. Parents had hoped their children would learn to code through using the robot but were not always willing to or capable of helping the child to navigate this aspect of the toy. In this regard Cozmo failed their expectations. After a short hiatus on the project, it was stripped back to its original purpose, to explore how households define Internet-connected toys, and the risks and benefits of playing with them. The qualitative data forming the basis of this article come from the second iteration of the project and interviews conducted in 2021 and 2022. The academics working on this research are increasingly questioning the relevance of these terms in today’s world. Ethnographic (Rinaldo and Guhin) one-on-one interviews with Australian children aged 6–12 have revealed just how diverse the digital technologies they play with have become. Those conversations and technology tours (Plowman) demonstrate the extent to which these digital devices are seamlessly integrated into children’s daily lives. Referring to many digital devices (such as the iPad and other tablets) as “toys”, children appear unaware of the distinction made by adults. Indeed, children mobilise elements of education, communication, self-actualisation, curiosity, and play within all their digital engagements. While parents may still be encouraged to distinguish between the educational use of digital devices and children’s use of such technology for entertainment, the boundary between the two is becoming more and more blurred. The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies that have been implemented within many Australian, English, and American schools expose children to digital devices within multiple contexts, frameworks, and environments, encouraging ubiquity of use. Laptops and tablets originally provided for school and educational purposes are also used for play. Seiter suggested that parents believe that a computer should be used by their children for serious matters such as learning or “purposeful” play, but children’s use patterns convert the tool into the toy. This elision of purpose may be referred to as “edutainment”, or the “toyification of education”, which suggests that education is increasingly reinforced by, and benefits from, “toyish” elements or dimensions (Ihamäki and Heljakka). Tablets offer children a diverse range of digital play options. Touch and swipe technology means that, from before their first birthday, “children are no longer only observants of digital technologies, but they are players and users, with tablets becoming the digital toy of choice” (Fróes 43). This is reinforced in much recent academic literature, with Brito et al., Healey et al., and Nixon and Hateley, for example, referring to tablets as “toys”. This is in line with the evolution of these devices from computer to educational tool to child-friendly toy. Fróes argues that the tablet supports “playful literacy”: “the ability to use, interact, relate, communicate, create, have fun with and challenge digital tools through playful behavior”. Having fun encourages and reassures children while they learn about, and become familiar with, these technologies. This, in turn, supports the valuable skill-building and scaffolding (Verenikina, citing Vygotsky) necessary for when a child begins using a tablet in an educational context once they start school. The omnipresence of screens challenges parents who believe that to be a good parent is to mediate their child’s digital engagement (Page Jeffery). Although the focus on “screen time” (the amount of time that children spend on their screens) is increasingly critiqued (e.g. Livingstone and Blum-Ross), some research suggests that, on average, parents underestimate their child’s daily screen time by more than 60 minutes (Radesky et al.). This conflicts with other research that argues that parents' preferred approach to mediation is setting clear rules regarding media usage, particularly in terms of time spent in device use (Valcke et al.; Brito et al.). Ironically, even though parents voice concern regarding their children’s technology use and digital footprints (Buchanan, Southgate, and Smith), they feel a “necessary culture of care” (Leaver) that may incite them to use their own technology to monitor their children’s data and behaviour. Such strategies can lead to “intimate surveillance” becoming a normalised parenting practice (Mascheroni and Holloway), while modelling to children their caregivers’ own reliance on devices. Hadlington et al. state that tablets may offer a barrier against the offline, “real” world. Children may become immersed in digital engagement, losing awareness of their surroundings, or they may actively use the tablet as a barrier between themselves and their environment. Parents may feel concern that their child is cutting themselves off from the family, potentially undermining family relationships and delaying the development of social skills (Radesky et al.). In contrast, Desjarlais and Willoughby’s article describes how children’s digital activities, for example chatting with friends, can be a useful starting point for social relationships. Hietajarvi et al. could not identify significant negative effects from using chat functions whilst studying, and suggest that digital engagement has a negligible effect on academic progress. While it is possible to characterise tablets and other digital devices as “toys”, this fails to capture the full contribution of such technology in children’s daily lives. Tablets, such as the iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy’s Tab range, function as a significant bridge that connects both children’s and adults’ everyday lives. The Internet of Life While the suggestion of an Internet of Life may require further investigation and refinement, this article proposes to define the term as follows: devices which encompass all facets of online connectivity and technological management, and the interpolation of the digital with the everyday. We argue that there is no longer a meaningful distinction to be made between the Internet of Toys and the Internet of Things: all such phrases indicate fragmentary attention to the Internet of Life. Digital devices cannot be bound by narrow definitions and distinctions between “things” and “toys”. Instead, these devices transcend the boundaries of “toys” and “things”, becoming relevant to all facets of people’s everyday lives. This is increasingly evident in lives of young children, as demonstrated by the one-on-one interviews with Australian child participants (aged 6–12). When asked if they could show the researcher some of their toys, every child produced their tablet, or spoke about it, if it was not within their reach at that time. Defining their tablets as toys, children nonetheless described myriad ways in which they were used: for leisure and entertainment, education, sociality, self-expression, and to satisfy their curiosity amongst others. Parents sometimes wondered at how children navigated technology without seeming to need assistance and noted that children could easily outstrip their parents’ skill level. Even so, parents described their struggle to “allow” their children screen time, finding it difficult to believe that it’s okay for their child to use a device for extended periods of time. Interestingly, when parents were asked if they were willing to model the behaviour they expected of their children—time limits on devices, going outside and playing—they struggled to imagine themselves doing so. As one parent said: “everything's there [on the device]. It's just so hard because everything I do, and need, is there”. This perspective reinforces our assertion that digital devices are inherently and instinctively interwoven within daily life: not toys, not things. Maybe the concept of the Internet of Life will support parents’, educators’, policy-makers’, and academics’ richer appreciation of the multitude of ways in which children use devices. It may also recognise how device use includes the acquisition of life skills, in both digital and IRL (“in real life”) domains. A reframing of digital devices may aid recognition of the benefits and experiences they offer the young (and old). Such a perspective might assuage significant parental guilt and take the sting out of increasingly frequent debates around screen time quality versus quantity (Livingstone and Pothong). This article now addresses some parents’ and children’s comments relating to their engagement with the Internet of Life. Parents’ Perspectives Seeking to explain what parents understand by the concept of play, Hayes (a father of three) suggested: “children entertaining themselves hopefully positively … . [They’re] doing something either physical or educational or it’s benefitting them in some way and having fun and relaxing”, while the mum from a different family, Farida, feels that play is “something that brings about joy, really” (a mother of two). Parents experience challenges in assigning different regulations around digital device usage to children in the same family, reflecting their different circumstances. Thus Bethany, mother to Aiden (11, below) and older sibling Sophie (13), differentiates her approach to regulating her children’s play in digital spaces: With him [Aiden] I don’t feel so bad when he – having a downtime because I know he’s quite active whereas [Sophie] my daughter’s not, she’s the complete opposite and she will sit on there usually, ‘cause she’s chatting to her friend Gemma who’s over east but, she’ll try and sit on there for two or three hours just doing really mundane boring stuff. (Mum, Bethany) Interestingly, for both Sophie and Aiden, their use of digital devices is a reassuring opportunity to retreat. One of the many advantages of chatting online to a distant friend is that it’s a space separate from the everyday contexts of classroom politics. Mum to Bryce (8, male), Farida identifies specific benefits in her son’s digital device use across a range of skills and competencies. [He] has actually improved significantly with his communication skills and his maths skills like his problem-solving and reasoning. Like he’s trying to, for instance, work out how much money he’s got to scam off me to get the things that he wants, adds it all up, works out his amount of money that he’s got to ask for so he can buy all the stuff that he’s looking for. So that has really improved. (Farida) Some parents might see games that teach children how to calculate what they need to achieve what they want as an annoyance due to a trivial extra expense, but Bryce has a range of learning challenges. Consequently, Farida is delighted with the progress she sees: “his trajectory has actually been quite astounding, and I do think that a lot of it is to do with the fact that he’s built up so many of these other skills from his hand eye co-ordination, his communication skills and stuff from digital play”. Children’s Perspectives Children’s own perspectives on their use of digital devices were varied but speak to the development of individual competencies and the managing of important friend- and family-based relationships. So, Aiden (11) characterised his use of such digital media as “calming. Since there’s nothing to really lose in the game or anything, it’s not like ‘oh you stuffed something up, you have to restart the whole thing’.” He adds, as if this is a significant benefit, “it’s more if you stuff something up it’s fine, you can just get it back again”. Aiden is in a children’s elite sport squad and explains “I do football for four hours. Then I have piano lesson for 30 minutes. I’m really tired”. His digital sphere is a welcoming place of safety and relaxation where there are no consequences when things go wrong. For Lisa, also 11, her digital device is for communicating. Explaining that she has “Snapchat, Messages and TikTok and I think that’s it”, Lisa says that she and her friend from school “normally just chat to each other and we’ll chat about what we’re doing”. She adds that sometimes “we’ll roleplay”. As Lisa continues there’s an implicit acknowledgement of the risks around collaborating with others in play spaces. Speaking of her friend, she notes “she used to play this game, Brook Game, and she doesn’t really do it anymore. In Brooking Gaming you roleplay with people and you can do jobs and stuff”. Digital play and device use may be a place of relaxation, but it’s also a place of negotiation and of learning to compromise as a price of sharing experiences with friends. Killian’s (12 years old, male) example of gaming implicates the ways he negotiates autonomy and connection with his older brother. Explaining that “I talk to my friends over Discord which is a social thing and that”, Killian explains how (older brother) “Xander helped me set up the safety settings”. The boys worked together to find a means through which their toys and games allowed them to bypass technical barriers preventing full service on their mobile devices. They had originally thought: “we could text each other” but because their devices were set so they “won’t allow us—Xander had Discord on his phone and—he did. I could text him via that”. A variety of remote communication strategies support Killian’s and Xander’s connected play in different spaces. The interviewer notes, “so you prefer playing individually like that because you just have that one screen to yourself, that solo experience, but still playing together?”, allowing Killian to add “Yes, and also Xander doesn’t hit me every time I do something that Xander doesn’t like”. Killian subsequently identifies himself as something of negotiator, working out the different rules and settings for the different areas in his life. Saying he uses his iPad “kust for stuff I’m interested in, or something that I found out is good, that I want”, he also says he has a workaround for if “the website’s blocked or then—stuff like that—or, I want to watch it at home”. One of the implications of these examples is that parents tend to develop over-arching narratives about their children’s digital device use and compartmentalise concerns, differentiating them from positive aspects of children’s online activities. Children’s experiences, however, speak to lessons around learning skills, managing relationships and conflicts, negotiating autonomy, absence, and different rules in different spaces. In these respects, children’s multifaceted use of digital devices is indeed creating an Internet of Life. Reimagining Children’s Digital Activity Engagement with digital devices and online activities has become a core part of childhood development (Borisova). The reimagining of the concepts of the Internet of Things and the Internet of Toys as the Internet of Life allows children, parents, researchers, and policy-makers to broaden their understanding of what it means to grow up in a digital world. Defining an Internet of Life and conceptualising digital devices as an inherent part of the everyday, allows greater understanding and appreciation of how, what, and why children use such devices, and the potential benefits (and risks) they may afford. This perspective also empowers children’s understandings of what digital devices are, and how the digital environment relates to them, and their daily lives. This article argues for a need to widen understandings of children’s digital device use, including the role that Internet-connected toys play in fostering social and digital literacies, to explore the multifaceted and ubiquitous nature of tablets and other digital devices (Ihamäki and Heljakka). Previous research on children’s digital engagement, along with a large portion of public reporting, has focussed on the risks and harms that children are exposed to, rather than the potential benefits of digital engagement, along with the rights of a child to digital access (CRC; Odgers and Jensen; Third et al.). The Internet of Life recognises that children’s digital engagement includes some exposure to risks, but also reflects the potential benefits that this exposure can have in terms of helping navigate these risks and problem-solving. It allows digital engagement to be reframed as a normal part of daily life and everyday routines, expanding understandings of how children engage with digital devices. Parents and children alike spoke about their tablets and the myriad of ways in which they used them: as a toy, for leisure, entertainment, formal education, sociality, and to satisfy their own curiosities to name but a few. Not only do these devices satisfy parental expectations, in that children can navigate them without assistance, but children can also outstrip a parent’s skill level rapidly. This is pleasing to some parents who do not possess such skills to teach their child. However, parents still struggle to “allow” their children screentime and justify to themselves that it is okay for their child to be on their own device for extended periods of time. The distinction between the overarching Internet of Things and the subset of the Internet of Toys, as well as the categorisation of these devices as “education-only” or “entertainment-only”, does not accurately represent children’s engagement with and use of digital devices. Children’s multi-faceted and multi-layered digital activities offer a complex interplay of motivations and intentions, pleasures and challenges, intrinsic and extrinsic. The Internet of Life encompasses all aspects of digital engagement, allowing a more natural and nuanced understanding of how these devices are used, and the benefits that digital engagement can afford. Acknowledgment This research was funded by ARC Discovery Project DP180103922 – The Internet of Toys: Benefits and Risks of Connected Toys for Children. The Chief Investigators were Dr Donell Holloway and Professor Lelia Green, working with International Partner Investigators Dr Louise Kay, and Professors Jackie Marsh, Giovanna Mascheroni, and Bieke Zaman. Drs Kelly Jaunzems, Carmen Jacques, and Silke Brandsen all worked as Research Officers on this grant. References Borisova, I. Learning through Play: Strengthening Learning through Play in Early Childhood Education Programmes. LEGO Foundation, 2018. <https://www.unicef.org/sites/default/files/2018-12/UNICEF-Lego-Foundation-Learning-through-Play.pdf>. Brito, R., R. Francisco, P. Dias, and S. 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1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. 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