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1

Fish, Paul R., Suzanne K. Fish, Austin Long, and Charles Miksicek. "Early Corn Remains from Tumamoc Hill, Southern Arizona." American Antiquity 51, no. 3 (July 1986): 563–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/281752.

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The tandem accelerator mass spectrometer provided critical dating of corn remains in Archaic levels of juxtaposed Archaic and Hohokam occupations on Tumamoc Hill in Tucson, Arizona. This new radiometric technology confirmed an Archaic placement suggested by stratigraphy and artifact distributions. The small sample of intact remains resembles other directly-dated early corn in the Southwest and reinforces an interpretation of preceramic cultivators in the Sonoran Desert.
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Martin, Judith A. "Child Abuse and Neglect: A Guide with Case Studies for Ideating the Child and Family. Edited by Nancy B. Ebeling and Deborah A. Hill. Boston, Mass.: John Wright, PSG, 1983. 394 pp. $27.50." Social Work 30, no. 5 (September 1, 1985): 460. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sw/30.5.460-a.

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KITLV, Redactie. "Book Reviews." New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 68, no. 3-4 (January 1, 1994): 317–407. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/13822373-90002657.

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-Peter Hulme, Stephen Greenblatt, New World Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xviii + 344 pp.-Nigel Rigby, Alan Riach ,The radical imagination: Lectures and talks by Wilson Harris. Liège: Department of English, University of Liège, xx + 126 pp., Mark Williams (eds)-Jonathan White, Rei Terada, Derek Walcott's poetry: American Mimicry. Boston: North-eastern University Press, 1992. ix + 260 pp.-Ray A. Kea, John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400-1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xxxviii + 309 pp.-B.W. Higman, Barbara L. Solow, Slavery and the rise of the Atlantic system. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. viii + 355 pp.-Sidney W. Mintz, Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave acculturation and resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 412 pp.-Karen Fog Olwig, Corinna Raddatz, Afrika in Amerika. Hamburg: Hamburgisches Museum für Völkerkunde, 1992. 264 pp.-Lee Haring, William Bascom, African folktales in the new world. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. xxv + 243 pp.-Frank Jan van Dijk, Dale A. Bisnauth, History of religions in the Caribbean. Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1989. 225 pp.-Gloria Wekker, Philomena Essed, Everyday racism: Reports from women of two cultures. Alameda CA: Hunter House, 1990. xiii + 288 pp.''Understanding everyday racism: An interdisciplinary theory. Newbury Park CA: Sage, 1991. x + 322 pp.-Deborah S. Rubin, Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White women, racism, and history. London: Verso, 1992. xviii + 263 pp.-Michael Hanchard, Peter Wade, Blackness and race mixture: The dynamics of racial identity in Colombia. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993. xv + 415 pp.-Rosalie Schwartz, Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Slaves, sugar, & colonial society: Travel accounts of Cuba, 1801-1899. Wilmington DE: SR Books, 1992. xxvi + 259 pp.-Susan Eckstein, Sandor Halebsky ,Cuba in transition: Crisis and transformation. With Carolee Bengelsdorf, Richard L. Harris, Jean Stubbs & Andrew Zimbalist. Boulder CO: Westview, 1992. xi + 244 pp., John M. Kirk (eds)-Michiel Baud, Andrés L. Mateo, Mito y cultura en la era de Trujillo. Santo Domingo: Librería La Trinitario/Instituto del Libro, 1993. 224 pp.-Edgardo Meléndez, Andrés Serbin, Medio ambiente, seguridad y cooperacíon regional en el Caribe. Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1992. 147 pp.-Dean W. Collinwood, Michael Craton ,Islanders in the stream: A history of the Bahamian people. Volume One: From Aboriginal times to the end of slavery. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. xxxiii + 455 pp., Gail Saunders (eds)-Gary Brana-Shute, Alan A. Block, Masters of paradise: Organized crime and the internal revenue service in the Bahamas. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991. vii + 319 pp.-Michaeline Crichlow, Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican people 1880-1902. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1991. xiv + 300 pp.-Faye V Harrison, Lisa Douglass, The power of sentiment: Love, hierarchy, and the Jamaican family elite. Boulder CO: Westview, 1992. xviii + 298 pp.-Frank Jan van Dijk, Bob Marley, Songs of freedom: From 'Judge Not' to 'Redemption Song.' Kingston: Tuff Gong/Bob Marley Foundation / London : Island Records, 1992 (limited edition). 63 pp. + 4 compact discs.-Riva Berleant-Schiller, Veront M. Satchell, From plots to plantations: Land transactions in Jamaica, 1866-1900. Mona: University of the West Indies, 1990. xiii + 197 pp.-Hymie Rubenstein, Christine Barrow, Family, land and development in St. Lucia. Cave Hill, Barbados: Institute for social and economic studies (ISER), University of the West Indies, 1992. xii + 83 pp.-Bonham C. Richardson, Selwyn Ryan, Social and occupational stratification in contemporary Trinidad and Tobago. St. Augustine, Trinidad: ISER, 1991. xiv + 474 pp.-Bill Maurer, Roland Littlewood, Pathology and identity: The work of Mother Earth in Trinidad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xxii + 322 pp.-Robert Fatton, Jr., Brian Weinstein ,Haiti: The failure of politics. New York: Praeger, 1992. ix + 203 pp., Aaron Segal (eds)-Uli Locher, Michel S. Laguerre, The military and society in Haiti. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. x + 223 pp.-Paul E. Brodwin, Leslie G. Desmangles, The faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. xiii + 218 pp.-Marian Goslinga, Enid Brown, Bibliographical guide to Caribbean mass communication. John A. Lent (comp.). Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. xi + 301 pp.''Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles: An annotated English-language bibliography. Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992. xi + 276 pp.-Jay B. Haviser, F.R. Effert, J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong, curator and archaeologist: A study of his early career (1910-1935). Leiden: Centre of Non-Western studies, University of Leiden, 1992. v + 119 pp.-Hans van Amersfoort, Anil Ramdas, De papegaai, de stier en de klimmende bougainvillea. Essays. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1992.-Ineke van Wetering, Deonarayan, Curse of the Devtas. Paramaribo: J.J. Buitenweg, 1992. v + 103 pp.-Ineke van Wetering, G. Mungra, Hindoestaanse gezinnen in Nederland. Leiden: Centrum voor Onderzoek Maatschappelijke Tegenstellingen, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1990. 313 pp.-J.M.R. Schrils, Alex Reinders, Politieke geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Antillen en Aruba 1950-1993. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1993. 430 pp.-Gert Oostindie, G.J. Cijntje ,Stemmen OK, maar op wie? Delft: Eburon, 1991. 150 pp., A. Nicatia, F. Quirindongo (eds)-Genevieve Escure, Donald Winford, Predication in Caribbean English Creoles. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993, viii + 419 pp.-Jean D'Costa, Lise Winer, Trinidad and Tobago. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993. xi + 369 pp. (plus cassette)
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KITLV, Redactie. "Book Reviews." New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 69, no. 1-2 (January 1, 1995): 143–216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/13822373-90002650.

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-Sidney W. Mintz, Paget Henry ,C.L.R. James' Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. xvi + 287 pp., Paul Buhle (eds)-Allison Blakely, Jan M. van der Linde, Over Noach met zijn zonen: De Cham-ideologie en de leugens tegen Cham tot vandaag. Utrecht: Interuniversitair Instituut voor Missiologie en Oecumenica, 1993. 160 pp.-Helen I. Safa, Edna Acosta-Belén ,Researching women in Latin America and the Caribbean. Boulder CO: Westview, 1993. x + 201 pp., Christine E. Bose (eds)-Helen I. Safa, Janet H. Momsen, Women & change in the Caribbean: A Pan-Caribbean Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Kingston: Ian Randle, 1993. x + 308 pp.-Paget Henry, Janet Higbie, Eugenia: The Caribbean's Iron Lady. London: Macmillan, 1993. 298 pp.-Kathleen E. McLuskie, Moira Ferguson, Subject to others: British women writers and Colonial Slavery 1670-1834. New York: Routledge, 1992. xii + 465 pp.-Samuel Martínez, Senaida Jansen ,Género, trabajo y etnia en los bateyes dominicanos. Santo Domingo: Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, Programa de Estudios se la Mujer, 1991. 195 pp., Cecilia Millán (eds)-Michiel Baud, Roberto Cassá, Movimiento obrero y lucha socialista en la República Dominicana (desde los orígenes hasta 1960). Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1990. 620 pp.-Paul Farmer, Robert Lawless, Haiti's Bad Press. Rochester VT: Schenkman Press, 1992. xxvii + 261 pp.-Bill Maurer, Karen Fog Olwig, Global culture, Island identity: Continuity and change in the Afro-Caribbean Community of Nevis. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993. xi + 239 pp.-Viranjini Munasinghe, Kevin A. Yelvington, Trinidad Ethnicity. Knoxville: University of Tennesee Press, 1993. vii + 296 pp.-Kevin K. Birth, Christine Ho, Salt-water Trinnies: Afro-Trinidadian Immigrant Networks and Non-Assimilation in Los Angeles. New York: AMS Press, 1991. xvi + 237 pp.-Steven Gregory, Andrés Isidoro Pérez y Mena, Speaking with the dead: Development of Afro-Latin Religion among Puerto Ricans in the United States. A study into the Interpenetration of civilizations in the New World. New York: AMS Press, 1991. xvi + 273 pp.-Frank Jan van Dijk, Mihlawhdh Faristzaddi, Itations of Jamaica and I Rastafari (The Second Itation, the Revelation). Miami: Judah Anbesa Ihntahnah-shinahl, 1991.-Derwin S. Munroe, Nelson W. Keith ,The Social Origins of Democratic Socialism in Jamaica. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. xxiv + 320 pp., Novella Z. Keith (eds)-Virginia Heyer Young, Errol Miller, Education for all: Caribbean Perspectives and Imperatives. Washington DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 1992. 267 pp.-Virginia R. Dominguez, Günter Böhm, Los sefardíes en los dominios holandeses de América del Sur y del Caribe, 1630-1750. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1992. 243 pp.-Virginia R. Dominguez, Robert M. Levine, Tropical diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. xvii + 398 pp.-Aline Helg, John L. Offner, An unwanted war: The diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895-1898. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. xii + 306 pp.-David J. Carroll, Eliana Cardoso ,Cuba after Communism. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992. xiii + 148 pp., Ann Helwege (eds)-Antoni Kapcia, Ian Isadore Smart, Nicolás Guillén: Popular Poet of the Caribbean. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. 187 pp.-Sue N. Greene, Moira Ferguson, The Hart Sisters: Early African Caribbean Writers, Evangelicals, and Radicals. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. xi + 214 pp.-Michael Craton, James A. Lewis, The final campaign of the American revolution: Rise and fall of the Spanish Bahamas. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. xi + 149 pp.-David Geggus, Clarence J. Munford, The black ordeal of slavery and slave trading in the French West Indies, 1625-1715. Lewiston NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991. 3 vols. xxii + 1054 pp.-Paul E. Sigmund, Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Guerillas and Revolution in Latin America: A comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. xx + 424 pp.-Robert E. Millette, Patrick A.M. Emmanuel, Elections and Party Systems in the Commonwealth Caribbean, 1944-1991. St. Michael, Barbados: Caribbean Development Research Services, 1992. viii + 111 pp.-Robert E. Millette, Donald C. Peters, The Democratic System in the Eastern Caribbean. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. xiv + 242 pp.-Pedro A. Cabán, Arnold H. Liebowitz, Defining status: A comprehensive analysis of United States Territorial Relations. Boston & Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989. xxii + 757 pp.-John O. Stewart, Stuart H. Surlin ,Mass media and the Caribbean. New York: Gordon & Breach, 1990. xviii + 471 pp., Walter C. Soderlund (eds)-William J. Meltzer, Antonio V. Menéndez Alarcón, Power and television in Latin America: The Dominican Case. Westport CT: Praeger, 1992. 199 pp.
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Vicentim, Marcos Paulo, Robson de Almeida Faria, and André Ferraz. "High-yield kraft pulping of Eucalyptus grandis Hill ex Maiden biotreated by Ceriporiopsis subvermispora under two different culture conditions." Holzforschung 63, no. 4 (July 1, 2009). http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/hf.2009.067.

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AbstractIn the present study, it was evaluated how two different culture conditions for the biotreatment ofEucalyptus grandisbyCeriporiopsis subvermisporaaffect a subsequent high-yield kraft pulping process. Under the varied culture conditions investigated, different extracellular enzyme activities were observed. Manganese-peroxidase (MnP) secretion was 3.7 times higher in cultures supplemented with glucose plus corn-steep liquor (glucose/CSL) as compared to non-supplemented (NS) cultures. The biotreated samples underwent diverse levels of wood component degradation as losses of weight and lignin were increased in glucose/CSL cultures. Mass balances for lignin removal during kraft pulping showed that delignification was facilitated when both biotreated wood samples were cooked. Delignification efficiency did not correlate positively with MnP levels in the cultures. On the other hand, biopulps from NS and glucose/CSL cultures saved 27% and 38% beating time to achieve 28° Schopper-Riegler freeness during refining, respectively. Biopulps disposed of decreased tensile and tear resistances, thus easier refining of the biokraft pulps seems to be a consequence of less resistant fiber walls. Improved beatability of biopulps was tentatively related to short fibers and fines formation during refining. We suggest that to some extent polysaccharide depolymerization occurred during the biotreatment, which also resulted in diminished pulp yields in the case of glucose/CSL cultures.
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"Nancy Netzer, ed., Secular/Sacred, 11th–16th Century: Works from the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Chestnut Hill, Mass.: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2006. Paper. Pp. 121 plus 96 black-and-white and color figures; black-and-white figures. $50. Distributed by the University of Chicago Press." Speculum 82, no. 01 (January 2007): 259–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0038713400006497.

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7

Scholfield, Simon Astley. "A Poetic End." M/C Journal 2, no. 8 (December 1, 1999). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1806.

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Sphincter I hope my good old asshole holds out 60 years it's been mostly OK Tho in Bolivia a fissure operation survived the altiplano hospital -- a little blood, no polyps, occasionally a small hemorrhoid active, eager, receptive to phallus coke bottle, candle, carrot banana & fingers -- Now AIDS makes it shy, but still eager to serve -- out with the dumps, in with the condom'd orgasmic friend -- still rubbery muscular, unashamed wide open for joy But another 20 years who knows, old folks got troubles everywhere -- necks, prostates, stomachs, joints -- Hope the old hole stays young till death, relax -- March 15, 1986, 1:00 PM, Allen Ginsberg Lucky to the end, Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) achieved his first and final wish. Despite the constipation mentioned occasionally in his later poems, the anus of the grand gay father of the Beats remained relatively healthy until his death while other vital organs failed. Ginsberg, who had also described the erectile misfunction of his penis in mid-to-late career poems, died from a heart attack brought on by liver cancer. While the poet fleshed out references to the male anus in at least fifty of his poems, his "Sphincter" comprises the chronological climax in the development of both his anal and erotic verse. The poem was written just months after the beginning of the global media demonisation of Hollywood star Rock Hudson who was found in late 1985 to be both gay and to have died from AIDS complications. Ginsberg's timely "Sphincter" reflects on the poet's survival as an anally-active gay man through both the pre-AIDS and AIDS eras. While criticism of the (homo)eroticism in Ginsberg's verse ranges from utter denial to near hagiography, overall the significance of his musings on male ani has been avoided. The rather anal-retentive Thomas Merrill claims that, "even sophisticated readers of Ginsberg's poetry are apt to be put off, perhaps bored by, his obsession not only with four-letter words, but with the clinical, strikingly nonerotic descriptions of his homosexuality" (24). For the far less uptight John Tytell, on the other hand, "Ginsberg has always reveled in the divinity of his own sexuality, his homosexuality, adorning his own physical propensities and urging the life of the body on his readers" (245). However, "Sphincter" which is an intensely erotic (albeit anti-Romantic) poem, contains none of the expletives (apart from "asshole") nor divine associations used repeatedly by the poet elsewhere to represent the (homo)eroticised male body, and his anus in particular. Six decades of anal health and recovery aside, Ginsberg packs a suggestive lot into his "Sphincter" with the list of objects wielded during the pre-AIDS period as the means to his erotic end. The term "phallus" -- while suggesting the penis and allo-erotic activity -- may also mean dildoes with certain tactile qualities and anus-fitting shapes and sizes ideal for auto-erotic delight. Indeed, the "coke bottle, candle, carrot/banana & fingers" -- with their smooth to slightly rough texture, stiff to pliable constituency, hard to semi-hard density, and rounded pointedness -- offer more reliable potential for sustained anal stimulation than the occasionally tumescent penis. These objects may answer the decades-old queries in "Iron Horse" (1966): "What can I shove up my ass?" and "Oh if only somebody'd come in &/shove som'in up that ass a mine" (432). The bottle and candle are appropriated from a passage in Ginsberg's signature poem, "Howl" (1955), about the "best [male] minds" (126) of the poet's generation, "who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a/package of cigarettes a candle . . . and ended fainting on the wall with/a vision of ultimate cunt and come..." (128). In his "Sphincter", Ginsberg reminisces about the pleasurable insertion into his anus of such props to heterosexual romance. The coke (rather than beer) bottle signifies the contemporary product probably most commodified along with youthful images of (compulsory) heterosexuality in global mass media advertising. Through sodomy with that iconic item of American capitalist cultural imperialism, the poet's jingle valorises his rectum as one of the most fitting and wonderfully subversive "things" that "go better with coke!" As items usually for oral insertion rather than anal penetration, the carrot and banana (and bottle) here play on a subtle metaphor of "receptive"-anus-as-"active"-mouth. Allusions to the (frequently 'cock-hungry') oral-anal configuration of the anus denatus are more explicit in other Ginsberg poems. In "Journal Night Thoughts" (1961) the poet awaits as "a cock throbs I lie still my/mouth in my ass" (271). Ginsberg asks his sexual partner in "Please Master" (1968) to "make me wriggle my rear to eat up the prick trunk", and describes his anus as his "hairmouth" (494). In "Sweet Boy, Gimme Yr Ass" (1974) he desires a young man's "soft mouth asshole" (613). While containing "phallus" and "fingers", there is no tongue nor other oral referent in the rather clean "Sphincter". By contrast, "Iron Horse" (1966) includes the growly request: "Sweet Prince --/open yr ass to my mouth" (433-4). Ginsberg's Pre-AIDS poems frequently celebrate the joining of the uncondomed penis, anus and body fluids in sensational detail. In "This Form of Life Needs Sex" (1961) "joy" comes to mean the very act of joining male anus with penis: "You can joy man to man but the Sperm/comes back in a trickle at dawn/in a toilet on the 45th floor" (285). "Please Master" (1968) includes the demand, "fuck me more violent ... & throb thru five seconds to spurt out your semen heat over & over" (495). In "Love Comes" (1981) the period of the sex act and whether condoms are used is not stated: "I relaxed my inside/loosed the ring in my hide ... He continued to beat/his meat in my meat" (11). The memorial "'What You Up To?'" (1982) recaptures his most scatological unsafe copulation: "That white boy ... one night in 1946/he fucked me naked in the ass/till I smelled brown excrement/staining his cock" (29). While "Sphincter" marks the chronological peak in the development of Ginsberg's erotic poetry, the unbroken line, "unashamed wide open for joy", comprises the structural and thematic climax within the poem itself. This current of anal-erotic joy traces back to "Howl" (1955) with its passage about those men, "who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists/and screamed with joy" (128). Ginsberg has said that he wrote "joy" here instead of the expected "pain" as a reaction to the "James Dickey film Deliverance where [receptive anal sex] is supposed to be the worst thing in the world" (Young 103). In the inter-male rape scene in the 1972 film version of Dickey's 1970 novel, actions indicate that one man uses his penis to penetrate the anus of another who is held at gunpoint and ordered to squeal like a pig throughout the assault. Prior to this the raped man is taunted with female names. The consensual 'safe' gay anal joy exhibited by Ginsberg's "Sphincter" counters such homo-, gyno- and porcine-phobic violence. While the anal-erotic jouissance in poems that preceded "Sphincter" was overshadowed at times by non-reproductive aims and scatological themes, "Sphincter" delivers the explicit message that consensual protected anus-around-penis eroticism (particularly for actively "receptive" men) creates penultimate emotional and physical pleasure. The "phallus/coke bottle, candle, carrot/banana & fingers" leave any specified penis out of the pre-AIDS picture. By contrast, "Now" as Ginsberg states "[in the mid-Eighties age of] AIDS", at a time when auto-eroticism, digital/dildo stimulation and other penetrations without penis mean the safest anal sex, the poet himself celebrates contact with the safe sex penis -- "the condom'd/orgasmic friend" -- for which he is "unashamed wide open for joy". The preceding phrase, "out with the dumps", refers to the expulsing of two combined types of "dumps". Firstly, the mental depression about the end of skin-to-skin anus-penis sex and secondly, defecated matter which brings not only physical relief but an anus open to penetration. Unlike "Sphincter", later poems do not specify whether sexual encounters are 'safe' or 'unsafe'. In "The Guest" (1992) the question of whether condoms are used is open but the consensual status of the encounter is stressed: "I ask permission, he says 'yes,'/I pull his hips up, hold his breast,/spurt my loves deep in his bum" (78). Other poems such as "Violent Collaborations" (written with Peter Hale, 1992) humorously relish sadomasochistic and coprophilic pleasure: "Fuck me & fist me/in your army enlist me/Poop on me when you're at ease" (92). Again there is no specification that condoms are used nor that there is 'unsafe' contact. With its "shy" but "eager" anus and "condom'd/orgasmic friend", "Sphincter" marks not so much an end to 'unsafe' sex as an end to the specification of 'safe' sex in Ginsberg's poetry. No Ginsberg poem specifically addresses his penis (and/or testicles) in the way that "Sphincter" is devoted to his anus. In his poetry he does not epitomise himself as any libidinous body part other than his anal hole. In "Please Master" (1968) the poet conflates his anus with his selfhood when exclaiming: "touch your cock head to my wrinkled self-hole/... please please master fuck me again" (494-5), and "Please call me ... a wet asshole" (495). In Ginsberg's "Sphincter" moreover, his anus synecdochically represents not only his whole person but a type of gay Everyman. His sphincter is "active" and "receptive", "old" and "young", "shy" and "unashamed", and "rubbery" and "muscular". These antithetical qualities also characterise the male body idealised in gay culture (in reaction to media images of decaying 'plague victims') during the AIDS-era. This body is sexually 'versatile' (as both 'bottom' and 'top'), boyish-looking but sexually mature, introspective but assertively 'out', and physically toned but flexible. The "rubbery muscular" qualities of Ginsberg's anus are focal, because -- apart from the "blood" and "hemorrhoid" which evoke colours and shapes -- "Sphincter" contains no other physical representations of his anal orifice nor any of the myriad hyperbolic metaphorisations found in his earlier visceral verses. Anal-roseate associations appear in "A Methedrine Vision in Hollywood" (1965) and "Hiway Poesy" (1966). In the first there is wind of the floral: "one-eyed sparkle, giant glint, any tiny fart/or rose-whiff before roses were/Thought Impossible" (381). In the second, the anus-as-flower manifests through ambiguous layers. The word "rose" may be read as noun, adjective or verb: "Oh that I were young again and the skin in my anus folds/rose" (386). "Kaddish" (1959) draws on topographical metaphors: "a mortal avalanche, whole mountains of homosexuality, Matter-/horns of Cock, Grand Canyons of Asshole" (214). Manifestations of the anus as a cosmic portal or eye appear in several poems, but not in "Sphincter". Ginsberg draws on Yogic beliefs to cast the anus as the source of the enlightening kundalini in "Iron Horse" (1966): "Muladhara sphincter up thru/mind aura/Sahasrarapadma promise/another universe" (435). In the only reference to the anus in the copious footnotes to his Collected Poems, the editors explain 'Muladhara Sphincter' simplisticly as "anal chakra (one of seven bodily centers of spirit energy in Orient [sic] yoga practice)", while 'Sahasrarapadma' is described in detail as "Seventh chakra, 'thousand-petal lotus' at skulltop" (781). Ginsberg, however, seems to have placed his stress on these first and last chakras more equally or in reverse. In "Scatalogical Observations" (1997) he declares, "The Ass knows more than the mind knows" (85-6). In "Journal Night Thoughts" (1961) the poet's anus comprises a universal 'third eye' through which he comes to 'know' and 'see'. This anus/eye in the formulation of "the eye in the center of the moving/mandala -- the/eye in the hand/the eye in the asshole" (267) is later eroticised as "I prostrate my sphincter with my eyes in/the pillow" (271). As we have seen, Ginsberg's erotic poetry frequently features imagery of the sexual orifice that is beyond any man's individual scope and culturally most proscribed from public view. While many passages in his verse evoke the male anus as a subject worthy of versification and visualisation, Ginsberg's "Sphincter" comprises an ode which literally and literarily presents the poet's anus to the audience as a poetic vision in itself. The succinctly anti-analphobic and anti-homophobic "Sphincter" finely balances critical aspects of the ars poetica. Devoid of signature tropes such as the anus/mouth, anus/I and anus/eye, "Sphincter" with its relative lack of euphemism and clever mix of metonymy and metaphor nonetheless merges antithetical themes to relay a profound spiritual message. The poet's ode to his ageing anus matter-of-factly and humorously revels in memories of auto- and allo-erotic 'phallo-morphous' perversity and celebrates the anal-erotic joy in being 'fucked safely' as a personal and political act. As this millennium closes, we could do worse in our 'anal-retentive' culture than following one of the century's wisest poetic ends: "till death, relax". References Deliverance. Dir. John Boorman. U.S.A.: Warner Bros., 1972. Dickey, James. Deliverance. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947-1980. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985. ---. Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992. London: Penguin, 1994. ---. Death and Fame: Poems 1993-1997. London: Penguin, 1999. ---. White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. Merrill, Thomas F. Allen Ginsberg. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1988. Tytell, John. Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Young, Allen. "Allen Young Interviews Allen Ginsberg." 1973. Gay Sunshine Interviews. Ed. Winston Leyland. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1978: 96-128. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. "A Poetic End: Allen Ginsberg's 'Sphincter'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/sphincter.php>. Chicago style: Simon-Astley Scholfield, "A Poetic End: Allen Ginsberg's 'Sphincter'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (199x), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/sphincter.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. (1999) A poetic end: Allen Ginsberg's "Sphincter". M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/sphincter.php> ([your date of access]).
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B2041171012, JULISA WIPASOBYA. "PENGARUH KEADILAN ORGANISASIONAL TERHADAP KINERJA PEGAWAI DI UPT PPD WILAYAH PROVINSI KALIMANTAN BARAT MELALUI KEPUASAN KERJA SEBAGAI VARIABEL MEDIATOR." Equator Journal of Management and Entrepreneurship (EJME) 7, no. 4 (August 2, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.26418/ejme.v7i4.34536.

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Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui dan menganalisis pengaruh keadilan organisasional terhadap kinerja pegawai di UPT PPD Wilayah Provinsi Kalimantan Barat dan melalui kepuasan kerja sebagai variable mediatornya. Populasi penelitian ini adalah seluruh pegawai Kantor di UPT PPD Wilayah Provinsi Kalimantan Barat yang berjumlah 100 orang. Metode pengumpulan data dilakukan dengan kuesioner. Teknik analisis data yang digunakan adalah Path Analysis. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa Keadilan distributif tidak berpengaruh terhadap kepuasan kerja tetapi Keadilan procedural dan interaksional berpengaruh langsung dan signifikan terhadap kepuasan kerja. Temuan penelitian selanjutnya keadilan distributif dan prosedural tidak berpengaruh terhadap kinerja tetapi keadilan interaksional dan kepuasan kerja berpengaruh langsung dan signifikan terhadap kinerja.Kata Kunci : Keadilan Organisasi, Kepuasan Kerja dan Kinerja PegawaiDAFTAR PUSTAKA A.A. Anwar Prabu Mangkunegara. 2009. Managemen Suumber Daya Manusia. Bandung: PT. Remaja Rosdakarya. Adams, J. S. (1963). Toward An Understanding of Inequity. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(5), 422-436. Akram, Hasyim, et.al. (2015). Dampak Keadilan Organisasi terhadap Kepuasan Kerja Perbankan Karyawan di Pakistan. Global Jurnal dari Pengelolaan dan Bisnis Penelitian Sebuah Administrasi dan Pengelolaan: Global Jurnal Inc (USA).Aquiono, P., et al. 1999. Selected Maize Statistics. In World Maize Fact and Trends 1997 per 1998. Mexico: CIMMYT. As’ad, Moh. (2013). Psikologi Industri : Seri Ilmu Sumber Daya Manusia, Yogyakarta: Liberty. Bangun, Wilson. 2012. “Manajemen Sumber Daya Manusia”. Jakarta: Erlangga Bakhshi, A., Kumar, K., & Rani, E. (2009). Organizational justice perceptions as predictor of job satisfaction. International Journal of Business and Management Vol. 4(9), Page 145-154. Budiarto, Yohanes dan Rani Puspita Wardani. 2005. 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The Impact of Fair Performance Appraisal to Employee Motivation and Satisfaction towards Performance Appraisal – A Case of PT. XYZ. International Business Management Program, 2(2), Page 21-28. Dadang, S. (2013). Optimalisasi Otonomi Daerah Kebijakan, Strategi dan Upaya, Jakarta: Yayasan Empat Sembilan. Davis, Keith,dan Newstorm. 1996. Perilaku Dalam Organisasi. Edisi Tujuh. Jakarta: Erlangga. Diab M Salah and Ajlouni T Musa 2015, The Influence Of Training On Employee’s Performance, Organizational Commitment and Quality Of Medical Services at Jordanian Private Hospital, Internasional Journal Of Business and Manajement Vol. 10 No. 2 2015. Farahbod, Farzin dkk, 2013, Impact of Organizational Communication in Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment (Case Study Maskan Bank Guilan), Interdispinary Journal Of Contemporary Research In Business, Vol.5, No.4. Gendro, Wiyono (2011). Merancang Penelitian Bisnis dengan Alat Analisis SPSS 17.0 & Smart PLS 2.0. 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Mullen, Mark. "It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me." M/C Journal 6, no. 1 (February 1, 2003). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2134.

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I remember the first time I saw a dead body. I spawned just before dawn; around me engines were clattering into life, the dim silhouettes of tanks beginning to move out in a steady grinding rumble. I could dimly make out a few other people, the anonymity of their shadowy outlines belied by the names hanging over their heads in a comforting blue. Suddenly, a stream of tracers arced across the sky; explosions sounded nearby, then closer still; a tank ahead of me stopped, turned sluggishly, and fired off a couple of rounds, rocking slightly against the recoil. The radio was filled with talk of Germans in the town, but I couldn’t even see the town. I ran toward what looked like the shattered hulk of a building and dived into what I hoped was a doorway. It was already occupied by another Tommy and together we waited for it to get lighter, listening to the rattle of machine guns, the sharp ping as shells ricocheted off steel, the sickening, indescribable, but immediately recognisable sound when they didn’t. Eventually, the other soldier moved out, but I waited for the sun to peek over the nearby hills. Once I was able to see where I was going, I made straight for the command post on the edge of town, and came across a group of allied soldiers standing in a circle. In the centre of the circle lay a dead German soldier, face up. “Well I’ll be damned,” I said aloud; no one else said anything, and the body abruptly faded. I remember the first time I killed someone. I had barely got the Spit V up to 4000 feet when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something below me. I dropped the left wing and saw a Stuka making a bee-line for the base. I made a hash of the turn, almost stalling, but he obviously had no idea I was there. I saddled-up on his six, dropping down low to avoid fire from his gunner, and opened up on him. I must have hit him at perfect convergence because he disintegrated, pieces of dismembered airframe raining down on the field below. I circled the field, putting all my concentration into making the landing that would make the kill count, then switched off the engine and sat in the cockpit for a moment, heart pounding. As you can tell, I’ve been in the wars lately. The first example is drawn from the launch of Cornered Rat Software’s WWII Online: Blitzkrieg (2001) while the second is based on a short stint playing Warbirds 3 (2002). Both games are examples of one of the most interesting recent developments in computer and video gaming: the increasing popularity and range of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs); other notable examples of historical combat simulation MMOGs include HiTech Creations Aces High (2002) and Jaleco Entertainment’s Fighter Ace 3.5 (2002). For a variety of technical reasons, most popular multiplayer games—particularly first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Doom, Quake, and more recently Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)—are played on player-organised servers that are usually limited to 32 or fewer players; terrain maps are small and rotated every couple of hours on average. MMOGs, by contrast, feature anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of players hosted on a handful of company-run servers. The shared virtual geography of these worlds is huge, extending across tens of thousands of square miles; these worlds are also persistent in that they respond dynamically to the actions of players and continue to do so while individual players are offline. As my opening anecdotes demonstrate, the experience of dealing and receiving virtual death is central to massively multiplayer simulations as it is to so many forms of computer games. Yet for an experience is that is so ubiquitous in computer games (and, some would say, even constitutes their experiential core) death is under-theorised. Mainstream culture tends to see computer and console game mayhem according to a rigid desensitisation argument: the experience of repeatedly killing other players online leads to a gradual erosion of the individual moral sense which makes players more likely to countenance killing people in the real world. Nowhere was this argument more in evidence that in the wake of the murder of fifteen students by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. The discovery that the two boys were enthusiastic players of Id Software’s Doom and Quake resulted in an avalanche of hysterical news stories that charged computer games with a number of evils: eroding kids’ ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, encouraging them to imitate the actions represented in the games, and immuring them to the real-world consequences of violence. These claims were hardly new, and had in fact been directed at any number of violent popular entertainment genres over the years. What was new was the claim that the interactive nature of FPS games rendered them a form of simulated weapons training. What was also striking about the discourse surrounding the Littleton shooting was just how little the journalists covering the story knew about computer, console and arcade games. Nevertheless, their approach to the issue encouraged readers to see games as having real life analogs. Media discussion of the event also reinforced the notion of a connection with military training techniques, making extensive use of Lt. Col. (ret) David Grossman, a former Army ranger and psychologist who led the charge in claiming that games were “mass-murder simulators” (Gittrich, AA06). This controversy over the role of violent computer games in the Columbine murders is part of a larger cultural discourse that adopts the logical fallacy characteristic of moral panics: coincidence equals causation. Yet the impoverished discussion of online death and destruction is also due in no small measure to an entrenched hostility toward popular entertainment as a whole, a hostility that is evident even in the work of some academic critics who study popular culture. Andrew Darley, for example, argues that, never has the flattening of meaning or depth in the traditional aesthetic sense of these words been so pronounced as in the action-simulation genres of the computer game: here, aesthetic experience is tied directly to the purely sensational and allied to tests of physical dexterity (143). In this view, the repeated experience of death is merely a part of the overall texture of a form characterised not so much by narrative as by compulsive repetition. More generally, computer games are seen by many critics as the pernicious, paradigmatic instance of the colonisation of individual consciousness by cultural spectacle. According to this Frankfurt school-influenced critique (most frequently associated with the work of Guy Debord), spectacle serves both to mystify and pacify its audience: The more the technology opens up narrative possibilities, the less there is for the audience to do. [. . .]. When the spectacle conceals the practice of the artists who create it, it [announces]…itself as an expression of a universe beyond human volition and effort (Filewood 24). In supposedly sapping its audience’s critical faculties by bombarding them with a technological assault whose only purpose is to instantiate a deterministic worldview, spectacle is seen by its critics as exemplifying the work of capitalist ideology which teaches people not to question the world around them by establishing, in Althusser’s famous phrase, an “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of their existence” (162). The desensitisation thesis is thus part of a larger discourse that considers computer games paradoxically to be both escapist and as having real-world effects. With regard to online death, neo-Marxism meets neo-Freudianism: players are seen as hooked on the thrill not only of destroying others but also of self-destruction. Death is thus considered the terminus of all narrative possibility, and the participation of individuals in fantasy-death and mayhem is seen to lead inevitably to several kinds of cultural death: the death of “family values,” the death of community, the death of individual responsibility, and—given the characterisation of FPS games in particular as lacking in plot and characterisation—the death of storytelling. However, it is less productive to approach computer, arcade and console games as vehicles for force-feeding content with pre-determined cultural effects than it is to understand them as venues within and around which players stage a variety of theatrical performances. Thus even the bêtes noire of the mainstream media, first-person shooters, serve as vehicles for a variety of interactions ranging from the design of new sounds, graphics and levels, new “skins” for player characters, the formation of “tribes” or “clans” that fight and socialise together, and the creation of elaborate fan fictions. This idea that narrative does not simply “happen” within the immediate experience of playing the game, but is in fact produced by a dynamic interplay of interactions for which the game serves as a focus, also suggests a very different way of looking at the role of death online. Far from being the logical endpoint, the inevitable terminus of all narrative possibility, death becomes the indispensable starting point for narrative. In single-player games, for example, the existence of the simple “save game” function—differing from simply putting the game board to one side in that the save function allows the preservation of the game world in multiple temporal states—generates much of the narrative and dramatic range of computer games. Generally a player saves the game because he or she is facing an obstacle that may result in death; saving the game at that point allows the player to investigate alternatives. Thus, the ever-present possibility of death in the game world becomes the origin of all narratives based on forward investigation. In multiplayer and MMOG environments, where the players have no control over the save game state, it is nevertheless the possibility of a mode of forward projection that gives the experience its dramatic intensity. Flight simulation games in particular are notoriously difficult to master; the experience of serial death, therefore, becomes the necessary condition for honing your flying skills, trying out different tactics in a variety of combat situations, trying similar tactics in different aircraft, and so on. The experience of online death creates a powerful narrative impulse, and not only in those situations where death is serialised and guaranteed. A sizable proportion of the flight sim communities of both Warbirds and Aces High participate in specially designed scenario events that replicate a specific historical air combat event (the Battle of Britain, the Coral Sea, USAAF bomber operations in Europe, etc.) as closely as possible. What makes these scenarios so compelling for many players is that they are generally “one life” events: once the player is dead, they are out for the rest of the event and this creates an intense experience that is completely unlike flying in the everyday free-for-all arenas. The desensitisation thesis notwithstanding, there is little evidence that this narrative investment in death produces a more casual attitude toward real-life death amongst MMOG players. For example, when real-world death intrudes, simulation players often reach for the same rituals of comfort and acknowledgement that are employed offline. Recently, when an Aces High player died unexpectedly of heart failure at the age of 35, his squadron held an elaborate memorial event in his honor. Over a hundred players bailed out over an aerodrome—bailing out is the only way that a player in Aces High can acquire a virtual human body—and lined the edges of the runway as members of the dead player’s squad flew the missing man formation overhead (GrimmCAF). The insistence upon bodily presence in the context of a classic military ceremony marking irrecoverable absence suggests the way in which the connections between real and virtual worlds are experienced by players: as tensions, but also as points where identities are negotiated. This example does not seem to indicate that everyday familiarity with virtual death has dulled the players’ sensibilities to the sorrow and loss accompanying death in the real world. I began this article talking about death in simulation MMOGs for a number of reasons. In the first place, MMOGs are more commonly identified with their role-playing examples (MMORPGs) such as Ultima Online and Everquest, games that focus on virtual community-building and exploration in addition to violence and conquest. By contrast, simulation games tend to be seen as having more in common with first-person shooters like Quake, in the way in which they foreground the experience of serial death. Secondly, it is precisely the connection between simulation and death that makes games in general (as I demonstrated in relation to the media coverage of the Columbine murders) so problematic. In response, I would argue that one of the most interesting aspects of computer games recently has been the degree to which generic distinctions have been breaking down. MMORPGs, which had their roots in the Dungeons and Dragons gaming world, and the text-based world of MUDs and MOOs have since developed sophisticated third-person and even first-person representational styles to facilitate both peaceful character interactions and combat. Likewise, first-person shooters have begun to add role-playing elements (see, for example, Looking Glass Studios’ superb System Shock 2 (1999) or Lucasarts' Jedi Knight series). This trend has also been incorporated into simulation MMOGs: World War II Online includes a rudimentary set of character-tracking features, and Aces High has just announced a more ambitious expansion whose major focus will be the incorporation of role-playing elements. I feel that MMOGs in particular are all evolving towards a state that I would describe as “simulance:” simulations that, while they may be associated with a nominal representational reality, are increasingly about exploring the narrative possibilities, the mechanisms of theatrical engagement for self and community of simulation itself. Increasingly, none of the terms "simulation,” "role-playing" or indeed “game” quite captures the texture of these evolving experiences. In their complex engagement with both scripted and extemporaneous narrative, the players have more in common with period re-enactors; the immersive power of a well-designed flight simulator scenario produces a feeling in players akin to the “period rush” experienced by battlefield re-enactors, the frisson between awareness of playing a role and surrendering completely to the momentary power of its illusory reality. What troubles critics about simulations (and what also blinds them to the narrative complexity in other forms of computer games) is that they are indeed not simply examples of re-enactment —a re-staging of supposedly real events—but a generative form of narrative enactment. Computer games, particularly large-scale online games, provide a powerful set of theatrical tools with which players and player communities can help shape narratives and deepen their own narrative investment. Obviously, they are not isolated from real-world cultural factors that shape and constrain narrative possibility. However, we are starting to see the way in which the games use the idea of virtual death as the generative force for new storytelling frameworks based, in Filewood’s terms, on forward investigation. As games begin to move out of their incunabular state, they may contribute to the re-shaping of culture and consciousness, as other narrative platforms have done. Far from causing the downfall of civilisation, game-based narratives may bring with them a greater cultural awareness of simultaneous narrative possibility, of the past as sets of contingent phenomena, and a greater attention to practical, hands-on experimental problem-solving. It would be ironic, but no great surprise, if a form built around the creative possibilities inherent in serial death in fact made us more attentive to the rich alternative possibilities of living. Works Cited Aces High. HiTech Creations, 2002. http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. By Louis Althusser, trans. Ben Brewster. New York, 1971. 127-86. Barry, Ellen. “Games Feared as Youths’ Basic Training; Industry, Valued as Aid to Soldiers, on Defensive.” The Boston Globe 29 Apr 1999: A1. LexisNexis. Feb. 7, 2003. Cornered Rat Software. World War II Online: Blitzkrieg. Strategy First, 2001. http://www.wwiionline.com/ Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994. 1967. Der Derian, James. “The Simulation Syndrome: From War Games to Game Wars.” Social Text 8.2 (1990): 187-92. Filewood, Alan. “C:\Games\Dramaturgy: The Cybertheatre of Computer Games.” Canadian Theatre Review 81 (Winter 1994): 24-28. Gittrich, Greg. “Expert Differs with Kids over Video Game Effects.” The Denver Post 27 Apr 1999: AA-06. LexisNexis. Feb. 7 2003. GrimmCAF. “MojoCAF’s Memorial Flight.” Aces High BB, 13 Dec. 2002. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... IEntertainment Network. Warbirds III. Simon and Schuster Interactive, 2002.http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=w... Jenkins, Henry, comp. “Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back.” From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1998. 328-41. Lieberman, Joseph I. “The Social Impact of Music Violence.” Statement Before the Governmental Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, 1997. http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberma... Feb. 7 2003. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free, 1997. Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000. Pyro. “AH2 FAQ.” Aces High BB, 29 Jan. 2003. Internet. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... Feb. 8 2003. Links http://www.wwiionline.com/ http://www.idsoftware.com/games/doom/ http://www.hitechcreations.com/ http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=wbiii/content_home.php http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=77265 http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberman/releases/r110697c.html http://www.idsoftware.com/games/wolfenstein http://www.idsoftware.com/games/quake/ http://www.ea.com/eagames/official/moh_alliedassault/home.jsp http://www.jaleco.com/fighterace/index.html http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=72560 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Mullen, Mark. "It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.php>. APA Style Mullen, M., (2003, Feb 26). It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.html
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10

Lawrence, Robert. "Locate, Combine, Contradict, Iterate: Serial Strategies for PostInternet Art." M/C Journal 21, no. 1 (March 14, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1374.

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We (I, Robert Lawrence and, in a rare display of unity, all my online avatars and agents)hereby render and proclaim thisMANIFESTO OF PIECES AND BITS IN SERVICE OF CONTRADICTIONAL AESTHETICSWe start with the simple premise that art has the job of telling us who we are, and that through the modern age doing this job while KEEPING UP with accelerating cultural change has necessitated the invention of something we might call the avant-garde. Along the way there has been an on-again-off-again affair between said avant-garde and technology. We are now in a new phase of the new and the technology under consideration is the Internet.The recent hyperventilating about the term postInternet reflects the artworld’s overdue recognition of the effect of the Internet on the culture at large, and on art as a cultural practice, a market, and a historical process.I propose that we cannot fully understand what the Internet is doing to us through a consideration of what happens on the screen, nor by considering what happens in the physical space we occupy either before or behind the screen. Rather we must critically and creatively fathom the flow of cultural practice between and across these realms. This requires Hybrid art combining both physical and Internet forms.I do not mean to imply that single discipline-based art cannot communicate complexity, but I believe that Internet culture introduces complexities that can only be approached through hybrid practices. And this is especially critical for an art that, in doing the job of “telling us who we are”, wants to address the contradictory ways we now form and promote, or conceal and revise, our multiple identities through online social media profiles inconsistent with our fleshly selves.We need a different way of talking about identity. A history of identity:In the ancient world, individual identity as we understand it did not exist.The renaissance invented the individual.Modernism prioritized and alienated him (sic).Post-Modernism fragmented him/her.The Internet hyper-circulates and amplifies all these modalities, exploding the possibilities of identity.While reducing us to demographic market targets, the Web facilitates mass indulgence in perversely individual interests. The now common act of creating an “online profile” is a regular reiteration of the simple fact that identity is an open-ended hypothesis. We can now live double, or extravagantly multiple, virtual lives. The “me meme” is a ceaseless morph. This is a profound change in how identity was understood just a decade ago. Other historical transformations of identity happened over centuries. This latest and most radical change has occurred in the click of a mouse. Selfhood is now imbued with new complexity, fluidity and amplified contradictions.To fully understand what is actually happening to us, we need an art that engages the variant contracts of the physical and the virtual. We need a Hybrid art that addresses variant temporal and spatial modes of the physical and virtual. We need an art that offers articulations through the ubiquitous web in concert with the distinct perspectives that a physical gallery experience uniquely offers: engagement and removal, reflection and transference. Art that tells us who we are today calls for an aesthetics of contradiction. — Ro Lawrence (and all avatars) 2011, revised 2013, 2015, 2018. The manifesto above grew from an artistic practice beginning in 1998 as I started producing a website for every project that I made in traditional media. The Internet work does not just document or promote the project, nor is it “Netart” in the common sense of creative work restricted to a browser window. All of my efforts with the Internet are directly linked to my projects in traditional media and the web components offer parallel aesthetic voices that augment or overtly contradict the reading suggested by the traditional visual components of each project.This hybrid work grew out of a previous decade of transmedia work in video installation and sculpture, where I would create physical contexts for silent video as a way to remove the video image from the seamless flow of broadcast culture. A video image can signify very differently in a physical context that separates it from the flow of mass media and rather reconnects it to lived physical culture. A significant part of the aesthetic pleasure of this kind of work comes from nuances of dissonance arising from contradictory ways viewers had learned to read the object world and the ways we were then still learning to read the electronic image world. This video installation work was about “relocating” the electronic image, but I was also “locating” the electronic image in another sense, within the boundaries of geographic and cultural location. Linking all my projects to specific geographic locations set up contrasts with the spatial ubiquity of electronic media. In 1998 I amplified this contrast with my addition of extensive Internet components with each installation I made.The Way Things Grow (1998) began as an installation of sculptures combining video with segments of birch trees. Each piece in the gallery was linked to a specific geographic location within driving distance of the gallery exhibiting the work. In the years just before this piece I had moved from a practice of text-augmented video installations to the point where I had reduced the text to small printed handouts that featured absurd Scripts for Performance. These text handouts that viewers could take with them suggested that the work was to be completed by the viewer later outside the gallery. This to-be-continued dynamic was the genesis of a serial form in work going forward from then on. Thematic and narrative elements in the work were serialized via possible actions viewers would perform after leaving the gallery. In the installation for The Way Things Grow, there was no text in the gallery at all to suggest interpretations of this series of video sculptures. Even the titles offered no direct textual help. Rather than telling the viewers something about the work before them in the gallery, the title of each piece led the viewer away from the gallery toward serial actions in the specific geographic locations the works referred to. Each piece was titled with an Internet address.Figure 1: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, video Installation with web components at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/grow.html, 1998.When people went to the web site for each piece they found only a black page referencing a physical horizon with a long line of text that they could scroll to right for meters. Unlike the determinedly embodied work in the gallery, the web components were disembodied texts floating in a black void, but texts about very specific physical locations.Figure 2: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, partial view of webpage at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/growth_variant4.html, 1998.The texts began with the exact longitude and latitude of a geographical site in some way related to birch trees. ... A particularly old or large tree... a factory that turned birch trees into popsicle sticks and medical tongue depressors... etc. The website texts included directions to the site, and absurd scripts for performance. In this way the Internet component transformed the suite of sculptures in the gallery to a series of virtual, and possibly actual, events beyond the gallery. These potential narratives that viewers were invited into comprised an open-ended serial structure. The gallery work was formal, minimal, essentialist. On the web it was social, locative, deconstructive. In both locations, it was located. Here follows an excerpt from the website. GROWTH VARIANT #25: North 44:57:58 by West 93:15:56. On the south side of the Hennepin County Government Center is a park with 9 birch trees. These are urban birches, and they display random scratchings, as well as proclamations of affection expressed with pairs of initials and a “+” –both with and without encircling heart symbols. RECOMMENDED PERFORMANCE: Visit these urban birches once each month. Photograph all changes in their bark made by humans. After 20 years compile a document entitled, "Human Mark Making on Urban Birches, a Visual Study of Specific Universalities". Bring it into the Hennepin County Government Center and ask that it be placed in the archives.An Acre of Art (2000) was a collaborative project with sculptor Mark Knierim. Like The Way Things Grow, this new work, commissioned by the Minneapolis Art Institute, played out in the gallery, in a specific geographic location, and online. In the Art Institute was a gallery installation combining sculptures with absurd combinations of physical rural culture fitting contradictorily into an urban "high art" context. One of the pieces, entitled Landscape (2000), was an 18’ chicken coop faced with a gold picture frame. Inside were two bard rock hens and an iMac. The computer was programmed to stream to the Internet live video from the coop, the world’s first video chicken cam. As a work unfolding across a long stretch of time, the web cam video was a serial narrative without determined division into episodes. The gallery works also referenced a specific acre of agricultural land an hour from the Institute. Here we planted a row of dwarf corn at a diagonal to the mid-western American rural geometric grid of farmland. Visitors to the rural site could sit on “rural art furniture,” contemplate the corn growing, and occasionally witness absurd performances. The third stream of the piece was an extensive website, which playfully theorized the rural/urban/art trialectic. Each of the three locations of the work was exploited to provide a richer transmedia interpretation of the project’s themes than any one venue or medium could. Location Sequence is a serial installation begun in 1999. Each installation has completely different physical elements. The only consistent physical element is 72 segments of a 72” collapsible carpenter's ruler evenly spaced to wrap around the gallery walls. Each of the 72 segments of the ruler displays an Internet web address. Reversing the notion of the Internet as a place of rapid change compared to a more enduring physical world, in this case the Internet components do not change with each new episode of the work, while the physical components transform with each new installation. Thematically, all aspects of the work deal with various shades of meaning of the term "location." Beginning/Middle/End is a 30-year conceptual serial begun in 2002, presenting a series of site-specific actions, objects, or interventions combined with corresponding web pages that collectively negotiate concepts related to time, location, and narrative. Realizing a 30-year project via the web in this manner is a self-conscious contradiction of the culture of the instantaneous that the Internet manifests and propagates.The installation documented here was completed for a one-night event in 2002 with Szilage Gallery in St Petersburg, Florida. Bricks moulded with the URLs for three web sites were placed in a historic brick road with the intention that they would remain there through a historical time frame. The URLs were also projected in light on a creek parallel to the brick road and seen only for several hours. The corresponding web site components speculate on temporal/narrative structures crossing with geographic features, natural and manufactured.Figure 3: Lawrence, Robert, Beginning/Middle/End, site-specific installation with website in conjunction with 30-year series, http://www.h-e-r-e.com/beginning.html, 2002-32.The most recent instalment was done as part of Conflux Festival in 2014 in collaboration with painter Ld Lawrence. White shapes appeared in various public spaces in downtown Manhattan. Upon closer inspection people realized that they were not painted tags or stickers, but magnetic sheets that could be moved or removed. An optical scan tag hidden on the back of each shape directed to a website which encouraged people to move the objects to other locations and send a geo-located photo to the web site to trace the shape's motion through the world. The work online could trace the serial narrative of the physical installation components following the installation during Conflux Festival. Figure 4: Lawrence, Robert w/Lawrence, Ld, Gravity Ace on the Move, site-specific installation with geo-tracking website at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/gravityace/. Completed for Conflux Festival NYC, 2014, as part of Beginning/Middle/End.Dad's Boots (2003) was a multi-sited sculpture/performance. Three different physical manifestations of the work were installed at the same time in three locations: Shirakawa-go Art Festival in Japan; the Phipps Art Center in Hudson, Wisconsin; and at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida. Physical components of the work included silent video projection, digital photography, computer key caps, and my father's boots. Each of these three different installations referred back to one web site. Because all these shows were up at the same time, the work was a distributed synchronous serial. In each installation space the title of the work was displayed as an Internet address. At the website was a series of popup texts suggesting performances focused, however absurdly, on reassessing paternal relationships.Figure 5: Lawrence, Robert, Dad’s Boots, simultaneous gallery installation in Florida, Wisconsin and Japan, with website, 2003. Coincidently, beginning the same time as my transmedia physical/Internet art practice, since 1998 I have had a secret other-life as a tango dancer. I came to this practice drawn by the music and the attraction of an after-dark subculture that ran by different rules than the rest of life. While my life as a tanguero was most certainly an escape strategy, I quickly began to see that although tango was different from the rest of the world, it was indeed a part of this world. It had a place and a time and a history. Further, it was a fascinating history about the interplays of power, class, wealth, race, and desire. Figure 6: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Intervention, site-specific dance interventions with extensive web components, 2007-12.As Marta Savigliano points out in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, “Tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides, positions, risks. It has the experience of domination/resistance from within. …Tango is a language of decolonization. So pick and choose. Improvise... let your feet do the thinking. Be comfortable in your restlessness. Tango” (17). The realization that tango, my sensual escape from critical thought, was actually political came just about the time I was beginning to understand the essential dynamic of contradiction between the physical and Internet streams of my work. Tango Intervention began in 2007. I have now, as of 2018, done tango interventions in over 40 cities. Overall, the project can be seen as a serial performance of contradictions. In each case the physical dance interventions are manifestations of sensual fantasy in public space, and the Internet components recontextualize the public actions as site-specific performances with a political edge, revealing a hidden history or current social situation related to the political economy of tango. These themes are further developed in a series of related digital prints and videos shown here in various formats and contexts.In Tango Panopticon (2009), a “spin off” from the Tango Intervention series, the hidden social issue was the growing video surveillance of public space. The first Tango Panopticon production was Mayday 2009 with people dancing tango under public video surveillance in 15 cities. Mayday 2010 was Tango Panopticon 2.0, with tangointervention.org streaming live cell phone video from 16 simultaneous dance interventions on 4 continents. The public encountered the interventions as a sensual reclaiming of public space. Contradictorily, on the web Tango Panopticon 2.0 became a distributed worldwide action against the growing spectre of video surveillance and the increasing control of public commons. Each intervention team was automatically located on an online map when they started streaming video. Visitors to the website could choose an action from the list of cities or click on the map pins to choose which live video to load into the grid of 6 streaming signals. Visitors to the physical intervention sites could download our free open source software and stream their own videos to tangointervention.org.Figure 7: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0, worldwide synchronous dance intervention with live streaming video and extensive web components, 2010.Tango Panopticon also has a life as a serial installation, initially installed as part of the annual conference of “Digital Resources for Humanities and the Arts” at Brunel University, London. All shots in the grid of videos are swish pans from close-ups of surveillance cameras to tango interveners dancing under their gaze. Each ongoing installation in the series physically adapts to the site, and with each installation more lines of video frames are added until the images become too small to read.Figure 8: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0 (For Osvaldo), video installation based on worldwide dance intervention series with live streaming video, 2011.My new work Equivalence (in development) is quite didactic in its contradictions between the online and gallery components. A series of square prints of clouds in a gallery are titled with web addresses that open with other cloud images and then fade into randomly loading excerpts from the CIA torture manual used at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.Figure 9: Lawrence, Robert, Eauivalence, digital prints, excerpts from CIA Guantanamo Detention Center torture manual, work-in-progress.The gallery images recall Stieglitz’s Equivalents photographs from the early 20th century. Made in the 1920s to 30s, the Equivalents comprise a pivotal change in photographic history, from the early pictorial movement in which photography tried to imitate painting, and a new artistic approach that embraced features distinct to the photographic medium. Stieglitz’s Equivalents merged photographic realism with abstraction and symbolist undertones of transcendent spirituality. Many of the 20th century masters of photography, from Ansel Adams to Minor White, acknowledged the profound influence these photographs had on them. Several images from the Equivalents series were the first photographic art to be acquired by a major art museum in the US, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.My series Equivalence serves as the latest episode in a serial art history narrative. Since the “Pictures Generation” movement in the 1970s, photography has cannibalized its history, but perhaps no photographic body of work has been as quoted as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. A partial list includes: John Baldessari’s series Blowing Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That Are the Same(1973), William Eggleston’s series Wedgwood Blue (1979), John Pfahl’s smoke stack series (1982-89), George Legrady’s Equivalents II(1993), Vik Muniz’sEquivalents(1997), Lisa Oppenheim (2012), and most recently, Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus Series, begun in 2012. Over the course of more than four decades each of these series has presented a unique vision, but all rest on Stieglitz’s shoulders. From that position they make choices about how to operate relative the original Equivalents, ranging from Baldessari and Muniz’s phenomenological playfulness to Eggleston and Smilde’s neo-essentialist approach.My series Equivalence follows along in this serial modernist image franchise. What distinguishes it is that it does not take a single position relative to other Equivalents tribute works. Rather, it exploits its gallery/Internet transmediality to simultaneously assume two contradictory positions. The dissonance of this positioning is one of my main points with the work, and it is in some ways resonant with the contradictions concerning photographic abstraction and representation that Stieglitz engaged in the original Equivalents series almost a century ago.While hanging on the walls of a gallery, Equivalence suggests the same metaphysical intentions as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Simultaneously, in its manifestation on the Internet, my Equivalence series transcends its implied transcendence and claims a very specific time and place –a small brutal encampment on the island of Cuba where the United States abandoned any remaining claim to moral authority. In this illegal prison, forgotten lives drag on invisibly, outside of time, like untold serial narratives without resolution and without justice.Partially to balance the political insistence of Equivalence, I am also working on another series that operates with very different modalities. Following up on the live streaming technology that I developed for my Tango Panopticon public intervention series, I have started Horizon (In Development).Figure 10: Lawrence, Robert, Horizon, worldwide synchronous horizon interventions with live streaming video to Internet, work-in-progress.In Horizon I again use live cell phone video, this time streamed to an infinitely wide web page from live actions around the world done in direct engagement with the horizon line. The performances will begin and automatically come online live at noon in their respective time zone, each added to the growing horizontal line of moving images. As the actions complete, the streamed footage will begin endlessly looping. The project will also stream live during the event to galleries, and then HD footage from the events will be edited and incorporated into video installations. Leading up to this major event day, I will have a series of smaller instalments of the piece, with either live or recorded video. The first of these preliminary versions was completed during the Live Performers Workshop in Rome. Horizon continues to develop, leading to the worldwide synchronous event in 2020.Certainly, artists have always worked in series. However, exploiting the unique temporal dimensions of the Internet, a series of works can develop episodically as a serial work. If that work unfolds with contradictory thematics in its embodied and online forms, it reaches further toward an understanding of the complexities of postInternet culture and identity. ReferencesSaviligliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.
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Hill, Benjamin Mako. "Revealing Errors." M/C Journal 10, no. 5 (October 1, 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2703.

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Introduction In The World Is Not a Desktop, Marc Weisner, the principal scientist and manager of the computer science laboratory at Xerox PARC, stated that, “a good tool is an invisible tool.” Weisner cited eyeglasses as an ideal technology because with spectacles, he argued, “you look at the world, not the eyeglasses.” Although Weisner’s work at PARC played an important role in the creation of the field of “ubiquitous computing”, his ideal is widespread in many areas of technology design. Through repetition, and by design, technologies blend into our lives. While technologies, and communications technologies in particular, have a powerful mediating impact, many of the most pervasive effects are taken for granted by most users. When technology works smoothly, its nature and effects are invisible. But technologies do not always work smoothly. A tiny fracture or a smudge on a lens renders glasses quite visible to the wearer. The Microsoft Windows “Blue Screen of Death” on subway in Seoul (Photo credit Wikimedia Commons). Anyone who has seen a famous “Blue Screen of Death”—the iconic signal of a Microsoft Windows crash—on a public screen or terminal knows how errors can thrust the technical details of previously invisible systems into view. Nobody knows that their ATM runs Windows until the system crashes. Of course, the operating system chosen for a sign or bank machine has important implications for its users. Windows, or an alternative operating system, creates affordances and imposes limitations. Faced with a crashed ATM, a consumer might ask herself if, with its rampant viruses and security holes, she should really trust an ATM running Windows? Technologies make previously impossible actions possible and many actions easier. In the process, they frame and constrain possible actions. They mediate. Communication technologies allow users to communicate in new ways but constrain communication in the process. In a very fundamental way, communication technologies define what their users can say, to whom they say it, and how they can say it—and what, to whom, and how they cannot. Humanities scholars understand the power, importance, and limitations of technology and technological mediation. Weisner hypothesised that, “to understand invisibility the humanities and social sciences are especially valuable, because they specialise in exposing the otherwise invisible.” However, technology activists, like those at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), understand this power of technology as well. Largely constituted by technical members, both organisations, like humanists studying technology, have struggled to communicate their messages to a less-technical public. Before one can argue for the importance of individual control over who owns technology, as both FSF and EFF do, an audience must first appreciate the power and effect that their technology and its designers have. To understand the power that technology has on its users, users must first see the technology in question. Most users do not. Errors are under-appreciated and under-utilised in their ability to reveal technology around us. By painting a picture of how certain technologies facilitate certain mistakes, one can better show how technology mediates. By revealing errors, scholars and activists can reveal previously invisible technologies and their effects more generally. Errors can reveal technology—and its power and can do so in ways that users of technologies confront daily and understand intimately. The Misprinted Word Catalysed by Elizabeth Eisenstein, the last 35 years of print history scholarship provides both a richly described example of technological change and an analysis of its effects. Unemphasised in discussions of the revolutionary social, economic, and political impact of printing technologies is the fact that, especially in the early days of a major technological change, the artifacts of print are often quite similar to those produced by a new printing technology’s predecessors. From a reader’s purely material perspective, books are books; the press that created the book is invisible or irrelevant. Yet, while the specifics of print technologies are often hidden, they are often exposed by errors. While the shift from a scribal to print culture revolutionised culture, politics, and economics in early modern Europe, it was near-invisible to early readers (Eisenstein). Early printed books were the same books printed in the same way; the early press was conceived as a “mechanical scriptorium.” Shown below, Gutenberg’s black-letter Gothic typeface closely reproduced a scribal hand. Of course, handwriting and type were easily distinguishable; errors and irregularities were inherent in relatively unsteady human hands. Side-by-side comparisons of the hand-copied Malmesbury Bible (left) and the black letter typeface in the Gutenberg Bible (right) (Photo credits Wikimedia Commons & Wikimedia Commons). Printing, of course, introduced its own errors. As pages were produced en masse from a single block of type, so were mistakes. While a scribe would re-read and correct errors as they transcribed a second copy, no printing press would. More revealingly, print opened the door to whole new categories of errors. For example, printers setting type might confuse an inverted n with a u—and many did. Of course, no scribe made this mistake. An inverted u is only confused with an n due to the technological possibility of letter flipping in movable type. As print moved from Monotype and Linotype machines, to computerised typesetting, and eventually to desktop publishing, an accidentally flipped u retreated back into the realm of impossibility (Mergenthaler, Swank). Most readers do not know how their books are printed. The output of letterpresses, Monotypes, and laser printers are carefully designed to produce near-uniform output. To the degree that they succeed, the technologies themselves, and the specific nature of the mediation, becomes invisible to readers. But each technology is revealed in errors like the upside-down u, the output of a mispoured slug of Monotype, or streaks of toner from a laser printer. Changes in printing technologies after the press have also had profound effects. The creation of hot-metal Monotype and Linotype, for example, affected decisions to print and reprint and changed how and when it is done. New mass printing technologies allowed for the printing of works that, for economic reasons, would not have been published before. While personal computers, desktop publishing software, and laser printers make publishing accessible in new ways, it also places real limits on what can be printed. Print runs of a single copy—unheard of before the invention of the type-writer—are commonplace. But computers, like Linotypes, render certain formatting and presentation difficult and impossible. Errors provide a space where the particulars of printing make technologies visible in their products. An inverted u exposes a human typesetter, a letterpress, and a hasty error in judgment. Encoding errors and botched smart quotation marks—a ? in place of a “—are only possible with a computer. Streaks of toner are only produced by malfunctioning laser printers. Dust can reveal the photocopied provenance of a document. Few readers reflect on the power or importance of the particulars of the technologies that produced their books. In part, this is because the technologies are so hidden behind their products. Through errors, these technologies and the power they have on the “what” and “how” of printing are exposed. For scholars and activists attempting to expose exactly this, errors are an under-exploited opportunity. Typing Mistyping While errors have a profound effect on media consumption, their effect is equally important, and perhaps more strongly felt, when they occur during media creation. Like all mediating technologies, input technologies make it easier or more difficult to create certain messages. It is, for example, much easier to write a letter with a keyboard than it is to type a picture. It is much more difficult to write in languages with frequent use of accents on an English language keyboard than it is on a European keyboard. But while input systems like keyboards have a powerful effect on the nature of the messages they produce, they are invisible to recipients of messages. Except when the messages contains errors. Typists are much more likely to confuse letters in close proximity on a keyboard than people writing by hand or setting type. As keyboard layouts switch between countries and languages, new errors appear. The following is from a personal email: hez, if there’s not a subversion server handz, can i at least have the root password for one of our machines? I read through the instructions for setting one up and i think i could do it. [emphasis added] The email was quickly typed and, in two places, confuses the character y with z. Separated by five characters on QWERTY keyboards, these two letters are not easily mistaken or mistyped. However, their positions are swapped on German and English keyboards. In fact, the author was an American typing in a Viennese Internet cafe. The source of his repeated error was his false expectations—his familiarity with one keyboard layout in the context of another. The error revealed the context, both keyboard layouts, and his dependence on a particular keyboard. With the error, the keyboard, previously invisible, was exposed as an inter-mediator with its own particularities and effects. This effect does not change in mobile devices where new input methods have introduced powerful new ways of communicating. SMS messages on mobile phones are constrained in length to 160 characters. The result has been new styles of communication using SMS that some have gone so far as to call a new language or dialect called TXTSPK (Thurlow). Yet while they are obvious to social scientists, the profound effects of text message technologies on communication is unfelt by most users who simply see the messages themselves. More visible is the fact that input from a phone keypad has opened the door to errors which reveal input technology and its effects. In the standard method of SMS input, users press or hold buttons to cycle through the letters associated with numbers on a numeric keyboard (e.g., 2 represents A, B, and C; to produce a single C, a user presses 2 three times). This system makes it easy to confuse characters based on a shared association with a single number. Tegic’s popular T9 software allows users to type in words by pressing the number associated with each letter of each word in quick succession. T9 uses a database to pick the most likely word that maps to that sequence of numbers. While the system allows for quick input of words and phrases on a phone keypad, it also allows for the creation of new types of errors. A user trying to type me might accidentally write of because both words are mapped to the combination of 6 and 3 and because of is a more common word in English. T9 might confuse snow and pony while no human, and no other input method, would. Users composing SMS’s are constrained by its technology and its design. The fact that text messages must be short and the difficult nature of phone-based input methods has led to unique and highly constrained forms of communication like TXTSPK (Sutherland). Yet, while the influence of these input technologies is profound, users are rarely aware of it. Errors provide a situation where the particularities of a technology become visible and an opportunity for users to connect with scholars exposing the effect of technology and activists arguing for increased user control. Google News Denuded As technologies become more complex, they often become more mysterious to their users. While not invisible, users know little about the way that complex technologies work both because they become accustomed to them and because the technological specifics are hidden inside companies, behind web interfaces, within compiled software, and in “black boxes” (Latour). Errors can help reveal these technologies and expose their nature and effects. One such system, Google’s News, aggregates news stories and is designed to make it easy to read multiple stories on the same topic. The system works with “topic clusters” that attempt to group articles covering the same news event. The more items in a news cluster (especially from popular sources) and the closer together they appear in time, the higher confidence Google’s algorithms have in the “importance” of a story and the higher the likelihood that the cluster of stories will be listed on the Google News page. While the decision to include or remove individual sources is made by humans, the act of clustering is left to Google’s software. Because computers cannot “understand” the text of the articles being aggregated, clustering happens less intelligently. We know that clustering is primarily based on comparison of shared text and keywords—especially proper nouns. This process is aided by the widespread use of wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters which provide article text used, at least in part, by large numbers of news sources. Google has been reticent to divulge the implementation details of its clustering engine but users have been able to deduce the description above, and much more, by watching how Google News works and, more importantly, how it fails. For example, we know that Google News looks for shared text and keywords because text that deviates heavily from other articles is not “clustered” appropriately—even if it is extremely similar semantically. In this vein, blogger Philipp Lenssen gives advice to news sites who want to stand out in Google News: Of course, stories don’t have to be exactly the same to be matched—but if they are too different, they’ll also not appear in the same group. If you want to stand out in Google News search results, make your article be original, or else you’ll be collapsed into a cluster where you may or may not appear on the first results page. While a human editor has no trouble understanding that an article using different terms (and different, but equally appropriate, proper nouns) is discussing the same issue, the software behind Google News is more fragile. As a result, Google News fails to connect linked stories that no human editor would miss. A section of a screenshot of Google News clustering aggregation showcasing what appears to be an error. But just as importantly, Google News can connect stories that most human editors will not. Google News’s clustering of two stories by Al Jazeera on how “Iran offers to share nuclear technology,” and by the Guardian on how “Iran threatens to hide nuclear program,” seem at first glance to be a mistake. Hiding and sharing are diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. But while it is true that most human editors would not cluster these stories, it is less clear that it is, in fact, an error. Investigation shows that the two articles are about the release of a single statement by the government of Iran on the same day. The spin is significant enough, and significantly different, that it could be argued that the aggregation of those stories was incorrect—or not. The error reveals details about the way that Google News works and about its limitations. It reminds readers of Google News of the technological nature of their news’ meditation and gives them a taste of the type of selection—and mis-selection—that goes on out of view. Users of Google News might be prompted to compare the system to other, more human methods. Ultimately it can remind them of the power that Google News (and humans in similar roles) have over our understanding of news and the world around us. These are all familiar arguments to social scientists of technology and echo the arguments of technology activists. By focusing on similar errors, both groups can connect to users less used to thinking in these terms. Conclusion Reflecting on the role of the humanities in a world of increasingly invisible technology for the blog, “Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory,” Duke English professor Cathy Davidson writes: When technology is accepted, when it becomes invisible, [humanists] really need to be paying attention. This is one reason why the humanities are more important than ever. Analysis—qualitative, deep, interpretive analysis—of social relations, social conditions, in a historical and philosophical perspective is what we do so well. The more technology is part of our lives, the less we think about it, the more we need rigorous humanistic thinking that reminds us that our behaviours are not natural but social, cultural, economic, and with consequences for us all. Davidson concisely points out the strength and importance of the humanities in evaluating technology. She is correct; users of technologies do not frequently analyse the social relations, conditions, and effects of the technology they use. Activists at the EFF and FSF argue that this lack of critical perspective leads to exploitation of users (Stallman). But users, and the technology they use, are only susceptible to this type of analysis when they understand the applicability of these analyses to their technologies. Davidson leaves open the more fundamental question: How will humanists first reveal technology so that they can reveal its effects? Scholars and activists must do more than contextualise and describe technology. They must first render invisible technologies visible. As the revealing nature of errors in printing systems, input systems, and “black box” software systems like Google News show, errors represent a point where invisible technology is already visible to users. As such, these errors, and countless others like them, can be treated as the tip of an iceberg. They represent an important opportunity for humanists and activists to further expose technologies and the beginning of a process that aims to reveal much more. References Davidson, Cathy. “When Technology Is Invisible, Humanists Better Get Busy.” HASTAC. (2007). 1 September 2007 http://www.hastac.org/node/779>. Eisenstein, Elisabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard UP, 1999. Lenssen, Philipp. “How Google News Indexes.” Google Blogscoped. 2006. 1 September 2007 http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-07-28-n49.html>. Mergenthaler, Ottmar. The Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler, Inventor of the Linotype. New ed. New Castle, Deleware: Oak Knoll Books, 1989. Monotype: A Journal of Composing Room Efficiency. Philadelphia: Lanston Monotype Machine Co, 1913. Stallman, Richard M. Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. Boston, Massachusetts: Free Software Foundation, 2002. Sutherland, John. “Cn u txt?” Guardian Unlimited. London, UK. 2002. Swank, Alvin Garfield, and United Typothetae America. Linotype Mechanism. Chicago, Illinois: Dept. of Education, United Typothetae America, 1926. Thurlow, C. “Generation Txt? The Sociolinguistics of Young People’s Text-Messaging.” Discourse Analysis Online 1.1 (2003). Weiser, Marc. “The World Is Not a Desktop.” ACM Interactions. 1.1 (1994): 7-8. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hill, Benjamin Mako. "Revealing Errors." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/01-hill.php>. APA Style Hill, B. (Oct. 2007) "Revealing Errors," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/01-hill.php>.
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12

Campanioni, Chris. "How Bizarre: The Glitch of the Nineties as a Fantasy of New Authorship." M/C Journal 21, no. 5 (December 6, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1463.

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As the ball dropped on 1999, is it any wonder that No Doubt played, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M. live on MTV? Any discussion of the Nineties—and its pinnacle moment, Y2K—requires a discussion of both the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine that has, twenty years later, become normalised in today’s Post Internet culture. By staging failure and inviting the audience to participate, the glitch and the cover call into question the original and the origin story. This breakdown of normative borders has prompted the convergence of previously demarcated media, genres, and cultures, a constellation from which to recognise a stochastic hybrid form. The Cover as a Revelation of Collaborative MurmurBefore Sean Parker collaborated with Shawn Fanning to launch Napster on 1 June 1999, networked file distribution existed as cumbersome text-based programs like Internet Relay Chat and Usenet, servers which resembled bulletin boards comprising multiple categories of digitally ripped files. Napster’s simple interface, its advanced search filters, and its focus on music and audio files fostered a peer-to-peer network that became the fastest growing website in history, registering 80 million users in less than two years.In harnessing the transgressive power of the Internet to force a new mode of content sharing, Napster forced traditional providers to rethink what constitutes “content” at a moment which prefigures our current phenomena of “produsage” (Bruns) and the vast popularity of user-generated content. At stake is not just the democratisation of art but troubling the very idea of intellectual property, which is to say, the very concept of ownership.Long before the Internet was re-routed from military servers and then mainstreamed, Michel Foucault understood the efficacy of anonymous interactions on the level of literature, imagining a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. But what he was asking in 1969 is something we can better answer today, because it seems less germane to call into question the need for an author in a culture in which everyone is writing, producing, and reproducing text, and more effective to think about re-evaluating the notion of a single author, or what it means to write by yourself. One would have to testify to the particular medium we have at our disposal, the Internet’s ultimate permissibility, its provocations for collaboration and co-creation. One would have to surrender the idea that authors own anything besides our will to keep producing, and our desire for change; and to modulate means to resist without negating, to alter without omitting, to enable something new to come forward; the unfolding of the text into the anonymity of a murmur.We should remind ourselves that “to author” all the way down to its Latin roots signifies advising, witnessing, and transferring. We should be reminded that to author something means to forget the act of saying “I,” to forget it or to make it recede in the background in service of the other or others, on behalf of a community. The de-centralisation of Web development and programming initiated by Napster inform a poetics of relation, an always-open structure in which, as Édouard Glissant said, “the creator of a text is effaced, or rather, is done away with, to be revealed in the texture of his creation” (25). When a solid melts, it reveals something always underneath, something at the bottom, something inside—something new and something that was always already there. A cover, too, is both a revival and a reworking, an update and an interpretation, a retrospective tribute and a re-version that looks toward the future. In performing the new, the original as singular is called into question, replaced by an increasingly fetishised copy made up of and made by multiples.Authorial Effacement and the Exigency of the ErrorY2K, otherwise known as the Millennium Bug, was a coding problem, an abbreviation made to save memory space which would disrupt computers during the transition from 1999 to 2000, when it was feared that the new year would become literally unrecognisable. After an estimated $300 billion in upgraded hardware and software was spent to make computers Y2K-compliant, something more extraordinary than global network collapse occurred as midnight struck: nothing.But what if the machine admits the possibility of accident? Implicit in the admission of any accident is the disclosure of a new condition—something to be heard, to happen, from the Greek ad-cadere, which means to fall. In this drop into non-repetition, the glitch actualises an idea about authorship that necessitates multi-user collaboration; the curtain falls only to reveal the hidden face of technology, which becomes, ultimately, instructions for its re-programming. And even as it deviates, the new form is liable to become mainstreamed into a new fashion. “Glitch’s inherently critical moment(um)” (Menkman 8) indicates this potential for technological self-insurgence, while suggesting the broader cultural collapse of generic markers and hierarchies, and its ensuing flow into authorial fluidity.This feeling of shock, this move “towards the ruins of destructed meaning” (Menkman 29) inherent in any encounter with the glitch, forecasted not the immediate horror of Y2K, but the delayed disasters of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Indian Ocean tsunami, Sichuan Province earthquake, global financial crisis, and two international wars that would all follow within the next nine years. If, as Menkman asserts, the glitch, in representing a loss of self-control “captures the machine revealing itself” (30), what also surfaces is the tipping point that edges us toward a new becoming—not only the inevitability of surrender between machine and user, but their reversibility. Just as crowds stood, transfixed before midnight of the new millennium in anticipation of the error, or its exigency, it’s always the glitch I wait for; it’s always the glitch I aim to re-create, as if on command. The accidental revelation, or the machine breaking through to show us its insides. Like the P2P network that Napster introduced to culture, every glitch produces feedback, a category of noise (Shannon) influencing the machine’s future behaviour whereby potential users might return the transmission.Re-Orienting the Bizarre in Fantasy and FictionIt is in the fantasy of dreams, and their residual leakage into everyday life, evidenced so often in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, where we can locate a similar authorial agency. The cult Nineties psycho-noir, and its discontinuous return twenty-six years later, provoke us into reconsidering the science of sleep as the art of fiction, assembling an alternative, interactive discourse from found material.The turning in and turning into in dreams is often described as an encounter with the “bizarre,” a word which indicates our lack of understanding about the peculiar processes that normally happen inside our heads. Dreams are inherently and primarily bizarre, Allan J. Hobson argues, because during REM sleep, our noradrenergic and serotonergic systems do not modulate the activated brain, as they do in waking. “The cerebral cortex and hippocampus cannot function in their usual oriented and linear logical way,” Hobson writes, “but instead create odd and remote associations” (71). But is it, in fact, that our dreams are “bizarre” or is it that the model itself is faulty—a precept premised on the normative, its dependency upon generalisation and reducibility—what is bizarre if not the ordinary modulations that occur in everyday life?Recall Foucault’s interest not in what a dream means but what a dream does. How it rematerialises in the waking world and its basis in and effect on imagination. Recall recollection itself, or Erin J. Wamsley’s “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” “A ‘function’ for dreaming,” Wamsley writes, “hinges on the difficult question of whether conscious experience in general serves any function” (433). And to think about the dream as a specific mode of experience related to a specific theory of knowledge is to think about a specific form of revelation. It is this revelation, this becoming or coming-to-be, that makes the connection to crowd-sourced content production explicit—dreams serve as an audition or dress rehearsal in which new learning experiences with others are incorporated into the unconscious so that they might be used for production in the waking world. Bert O. States elaborates, linking the function of the dream with the function of the fiction writer “who makes models of the world that carry the imprint and structure of our various concerns. And it does this by using real people, or ‘scraps’ of other people, as the instruments of hypothetical facts” (28). Four out of ten characters in a dream are strangers, according to Calvin Hall, who is himself a stranger, someone I’ve never met in waking life or in a dream. But now that I’ve read him, now that I’ve written him into this work, he seems closer to me. Twin Peak’s serial lesson for viewers is this—even the people who seem strangers to us can interact with and intervene in our processes of production.These are the moments that a beginning takes place. And even if nothing directly follows, this transfer constitutes the hypothesised moment of production, an always-already perhaps, the what-if stimulus of charged possibility; the soil plot, or plot line, for freedom. Twin Peaks is a town in which the bizarre penetrates the everyday so often that eventually, the bizarre is no longer bizarre, but just another encounter with the ordinary. Dream sequences are common, but even more common—and more significant—are the moments in which what might otherwise be a dream vision ruptures into real life; these moments propel the narrative.Exhibit A: A man who hasn’t gone outside in a while begins to crumble, falling to the earth when forced to chase after a young girl, who’s just stolen the secret journal of another young girl, which he, in turn, had stolen.B: A horse appears in the middle of the living room after a routine vacuum cleaning and a subtle barely-there transition, a fade-out into a fade-in, what people call a dissolve. No one notices, or thinks to point out its presence. Or maybe they’re distracted. Or maybe they’ve already forgotten. Dissolve.(I keep hitting “Save As.” As if renaming something can also transform it.)C: All the guests at the Great Northern Hotel begin to dance the tango on cue—a musical, without any music.D: After an accident, a middle-aged woman with an eye patch—she was wearing the eye patch before the accident—believes she’s seventeen again. She enrolls in Twin Peaks High School and joins the cheerleading team.E: A woman pretending to be a Japanese businessman ambles into the town bar to meet her estranged husband, who fails to recognise his cross-dressing, race-swapping wife.F: A girl with blond hair is murdered, only to come back as another girl, with the same face and a different name. And brown hair. They’re cousins.G: After taking over her dead best friend’s Meals on Wheels route, Donna Hayward walks in to meet a boy wearing a tuxedo, sitting on the couch with his fingers clasped: a magician-in-training. “Sometimes things can happen just like this,” he says with a snap while the camera cuts to his grandmother, bed-ridden, and the appearance of a plate of creamed corn that vanishes as soon as she announces its name.H: A woman named Margaret talks to and through a log. The log, cradled in her arms wherever she goes, becomes a key witness.I: After a seven-minute diegetic dream sequence, which includes a one-armed man, a dwarf, a waltz, a dead girl, a dialogue played backward, and a significantly aged representation of the dreamer, Agent Cooper wakes up and drastically shifts his investigation of a mysterious small-town murder. The dream gives him agency; it turns him from a detective staring at a dead-end to one with a map of clues. The next day, it makes him a storyteller; all the others, sitting tableside in the middle of the woods become a captive audience. They become readers. They read into his dream to create their own scenarios. Exhibit I. The cycle of imagination spins on.Images re-direct and obfuscate meaning, a process of over-determination which Foucault says results in “a multiplication of meanings which override and contradict each other” (DAE 34). In the absence of image, the process of imagination prevails. In the absence of story, real drama in our conscious life, we form complex narratives in our sleep—our imaginative unconscious. Sometimes they leak out, become stories in our waking life, if we think to compose them.“A bargain has been struck,” says Harold, an under-5 bit player, later, in an episode called “Laura’s Secret Diary.” So that she might have the chance to read Laura Palmer’s diary, Donna Hayward agrees to talk about her own life, giving Harold the opportunity to write it down in his notebook: his “living novel” the new chapter which reads, after uncapping his pen and smiling, “Donna Hayward.”He flips to the front page and sets a book weight to keep the page in place. He looks over at Donna sheepishly. “Begin.”Donna begins talking about where she was born, the particulars of her father—the lone town doctor—before she interrupts the script and asks her interviewer about his origin story. Not used to people asking him the questions, Harold’s mouth drops and he stops writing. He puts his free hand to his chest and clears his throat. (The ambient, wind-chime soundtrack intensifies.) “I grew up in Boston,” he finally volunteers. “Well, actually, I grew up in books.”He turns his head from Donna to the notebook, writing feverishly, as if he’s begun to write his own responses as the camera cuts back to his subject, Donna, crossing her legs with both hands cupped at her exposed knee, leaning in to tell him: “There’s things you can’t get in books.”“There’s things you can’t get anywhere,” he returns, pen still in his hand. “When we dream, they can be found in other people.”What is a call to composition if not a call for a response? It is always the audience which makes a work of art, re-framed in our own image, the same way we re-orient ourselves in a dream to negotiate its “inconsistencies.” Bizarreness is merely a consequence of linguistic limitations, the overwhelming sensory dream experience which can only be re-framed via a visual representation. And so the relationship between the experience of reading and dreaming is made explicit when we consider the associations internalised in the reader/audience when ingesting a passage of words on a page or on the stage, objects that become mental images and concept pictures, a lens of perception that we may liken to another art form: the film, with its jump-cuts and dissolves, so much like the defamiliarising and dislocating experience of dreaming, especially for the dreamer who wakes. What else to do in that moment but write about it?Evidence of the bizarre in dreams is only the evidence of the capacity of our human consciousness at work in the unconscious; the moment in which imagination and memory come together to create another reality, a spectrum of reality that doesn’t posit a binary between waking and sleeping, a spectrum of reality that revels in the moments where the two coalesce, merge, cross-pollinate—and what action glides forward in its wake? Sustained un-hesitation and the wish to stay inside one’s self. To be conscious of the world outside the dream means the end of one. To see one’s face in the act of dreaming would require the same act of obliteration. Recognition of the other, and of the self, prevents the process from being fulfilled. Creative production and dreaming, like voyeurism, depend on this same lack of recognition, or the recognition of yourself as other. What else is a dream if not a moment of becoming, of substituting or sublimating yourself for someone else?We are asked to relate a recent dream or we volunteer an account, to a friend or lover. We use the word “seem” in nearly every description, when we add it up or how we fail to. Everything seems to be a certain way. It’s not a place but a feeling. James, another character on Twin Peaks, says the same thing, after someone asks him, “Where do you want to go?” but before he hops on his motorcycle and rides off into the unknowable future outside the frame. Everything seems like something else, based on our own associations, our own knowledge of people and things. Offline memory consolidation. Seeming and semblance. An uncertainty of appearing—both happening and seeing. How we mediate—and re-materialise—the dream through text is our attempt to re-capture imagination, to leave off the image and better become it. If, as Foucault says, the dream is always a dream of death, its purpose is a call to creation.Outside of dreams, something bizarre occurs. We call it novelty or news. We might even bestow it with fame. A man gets on the wrong plane and ends up halfway across the world. A movie is made into the moment of his misfortune. Years later, in real life and in movie time, an Iranian refugee can’t even get on the plane; he is turned away by UK immigration officials at Charles de Gaulle, so he spends the next sixteen years living in the airport lounge; when he departs in real life, the movie (The Terminal, 2004) arrives in theaters. Did it take sixteen years to film the terminal exile? How bizarre, how bizarre. OMC’s eponymous refrain of the 1996 one-hit wonder, which is another way of saying, an anomaly.When all things are counted and countable in today’s algorithmic-rich culture, deviance becomes less of a statistical glitch and more of a testament to human peculiarity; the repressed idiosyncrasies of man before machine but especially the fallible tendencies of mankind within machines—the non-repetition of chance that the Nineties emblematised in the form of its final act. The point is to imagine what comes next; to remember waiting together for the end of the world. There is no need to even open your eyes to see it. It is just a feeling. ReferencesBruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication 2006: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference, eds. Fay Sudweeks, Herbert Hrachovec, and Charles Ess. Murdoch: School of Information Technology, 2006. 275-84. <https://eprints.qut.edu.au/4863/1/4863_1.pdf>.Foucault, Michel. “Dream, Imagination and Existence.” Dream and Existence. Ed. Keith Hoeller. Pittsburgh: Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, 1986. 31-78.———. “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. Ed. Paul Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1991.Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.Hall, Calvin S. The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966.Hobson, J. Allan. The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered State of Conscious­ness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.Menkman, Rosa. The Glitch Moment(um). Amsterdam: Network Notebooks, 2011.Shannon, Claude Elwood. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379-423.States, Bert O. “Bizarreness in Dreams and Other Fictions.” The Dream and the Text: Essays on Literature and Language. Ed. Carol Schreier Rupprecht. Albany: SUNY P, 1993.Twin Peaks. Dir. David Lynch. ABC and Showtime. 1990-3 & 2017. Wamsley, Erin. “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports 14.3 (2014): 433. “Y2K Bug.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 18 July 2018. <https://www.britannica.com/technology/Y2K-bug>.
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McCosker, Anthony, and Timothy Graham. "Data Publics: Urban Protest, Analytics and the Courts." M/C Journal 21, no. 3 (August 15, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1427.

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This article reflects on part of a three-year battle over the redevelopment of an iconic Melbourne music venue, the Palace-Metro Nightclub (the Palace), involving the tactical use of Facebook Page data at trial. We were invited by the Save the Palace group, Melbourne City Council and the National Trust of Australia to provide Facebook Page data analysis as evidence of the social value of the venue at an appeals trial heard at the Victorian Civil Administration Tribunal (VCAT) in 2016. We take a reflexive ethnographic approach here to explore the data production, collection and analysis processes as these represent and constitute a “data public”.Although the developers won the appeal and were able to re-develop the site, the court accepted the validity of social media data as evidence of the building’s social value (Jinshan Investment Group Pty Ltd v Melbourne CC [2016] VCAT 626, 117; see also Victorian Planning Reports). Through the case, we elaborate on the concept of data publics by considering the “affordising” (Pollock) processes at play when extracting, analysing and visualising social media data. Affordising refers to the designed, deliberate and incidental effects of datafication and highlights the need to attend to the capacities for data collection and processing as they produce particular analytical outcomes. These processes foreground the compositional character of data publics, and the unevenness of data literacies (McCosker “Data Literacies”; Gray et al.) as a factor of the interpersonal and institutional capacity to read and mobilise data for social outcomes.We begin by reconsidering the often-assumed connection between social media data and their publics. Taking onboard theoretical accounts of publics as problem-oriented (Dewey) and dynamically constituted (Kelty), we conceptualise data publics through the key elements of a) consequentiality, b) sufficient connection over time, c) affective or emotional qualities of connection and interaction with the events. We note that while social data analytics may be a powerful tool for public protest, it equally affords use against public interests and introduces risks in relation to a lack of transparency, access or adequate data literacy.Urban Protest and Data Publics There are many examples globally of the use of social media to engage publics in battles over urban development or similar issues (e.g. Fredericks and Foth). Some have asked how social media might be better used by neighborhood organisations to mobilise protest and save historic buildings, cultural landmarks or urban sites (Johnson and Halegoua). And we can only note here the wealth of research literature on social movements, protest and social media. To emphasise Gerbaudo’s point, drawing on Mattoni, we “need to account for how exactly the use of these media reshapes the ‘repertoire of communication’ of contemporary movements and affects the experience of participants” (2). For us, this also means better understanding the role that social data plays in both aiding and reshaping urban protest or arming third sector groups with evidence useful in social institutions such as the courts.New modes of digital engagement enable forms of distributed digital citizenship, which Meikle sees as the creative political relationships that form through exercising rights and responsibilities. Associated with these practices is the transition from sanctioned, simple discursive forms of social protest in petitions, to new indicators of social engagement in more nuanced social media data and the more interactive forms of online petition platforms like change.org or GetUp (Halpin et al.). These technical forms code publics in specific ways that have implications for contemporary protest action. That is, they provide the operational systems and instructions that shape social actions and relationships for protest purposes (McCosker and Milne).All protest and social movements are underwritten by explicit or implicit concepts of participatory publics as these are shaped, enhanced, or threatened by communication technologies. But participatory protest publics are uneven, and as Kelty asks: “What about all the people who are neither protesters nor Twitter users? In the broadest possible sense this ‘General Public’ cannot be said to exist as an actual entity, but only as a kind of virtual entity” (27). Kelty is pointing to the porous boundary between a general public and an organised public, or formal enterprise, as a reminder that we cannot take for granted representations of a public, or the public as a given, in relation to Like or follower data for instance.If carefully gauged, the concept of data publics can be useful. To start with, the notions of publics and publicness are notoriously slippery. Baym and boyd explore the differences between these two terms, and the way social media reconfigures what “public” is. Does a Comment or a Like on a Facebook Page connect an individual sufficiently to an issues-public? As far back as the 1930s, John Dewey was seeking a pragmatic approach to similar questions regarding human association and the pluralistic space of “the public”. For Dewey, “the machine age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated the scope of the indirect consequences [of human association] that the resultant public cannot identify itself” (157). To what extent, then, can we use data to constitute a public in relation to social protest in the age of data analytics?There are numerous well formulated approaches to studying publics in relation to social media and social networks. Social network analysis (SNA) determines publics, or communities, through links, ties and clustering, by measuring and mapping those connections and to an extent assuming that they constitute some form of sociality. Networked publics (Ito, 6) are understood as an outcome of social media platforms and practices in the use of new digital media authoring and distribution tools or platforms and the particular actions, relationships or modes of communication they afford, to use James Gibson’s sense of that term. “Publics can be reactors, (re)makers and (re)distributors, engaging in shared culture and knowledge through discourse and social exchange as well as through acts of media reception” (Ito 6). Hashtags, for example, facilitate connectivity and visibility and aid in the formation and “coordination of ad hoc issue publics” (Bruns and Burgess 3). Gray et al., following Ruppert, argue that “data publics are constituted by dynamic, heterogeneous arrangements of actors mobilised around data infrastructures, sometimes figuring as part of them, sometimes emerging as their effect”. The individuals of data publics are neither subjugated by the logics and metrics of digital platforms and data structures, nor simply sovereign agents empowered by the expressive potential of aggregated data (Gray et al.).Data publics are more than just aggregates of individual data points or connections. They are inherently unstable, dynamic (despite static analysis and visualisations), or vibrant, and ephemeral. We emphasise three key elements of active data publics. First, to be more than an aggregate of individual items, a data public needs to be consequential (in Dewey’s sense of issues or problem-oriented). Second, sufficient connection is visible over time. Third, affective or emotional activity is apparent in relation to events that lend coherence to the public and its prevailing sentiment. To these, we add critical attention to the affordising processes – or the deliberate and incidental effects of datafication and analysis, in the capacities for data collection and processing in order to produce particular analytical outcomes, and the data literacies these require. We return to the latter after elaborating on the Save the Palace case.Visualising Publics: Highlighting Engagement and IntensityThe Palace theatre was built in 1912 and served as a venue for theatre, cinema, live performance, musical acts and as a nightclub. In 2014 the Heritage Council decided not to include the Palace on Victoria’s heritage register and hence opened the door for developers, but Melbourne City Council and the National Trust of Australia opposed the redevelopment on the grounds of the building’s social significance as a music venue. Similarly, the Save the Palace group saw the proposed redevelopment as affecting the capacity of Melbourne CBD to host medium size live performances, and therefore impacting deeply on the social fabric of the local music scene. The Save the Palace group, chaired by Rebecca Leslie and Michael Raymond, maintained a 36,000+ strong Facebook Page and mobilised local members through regular public street protests, and participated in court proceedings in 2015 and February 2016 with Melbourne City Council and National Trust Australia. Joining the protesters in the lead up to the 2016 appeals trial, we aimed to use social media engagement data to measure, analyse and present evidence of the extent and intensity of a sustained protest public. The evidence we submitted had to satisfy VCAT’s need to establish the social value of the building and the significance of its redevelopment, and to explain: a) how social media works; b) the meaning of the number of Facebook Likes on the Save The Palace Page and the timing of those Likes, highlighting how the reach and Likes pick up at significant events; and c) whether or not a representative sample of Comments are supportive of the group and the Palace Theatre (McCosker “Statement”). As noted in the case (Jinshan, 117), where courts have traditionally relied on one simple measure for contemporary social value – the petition – our aim was to make use of the richer measures available through social media data, to better represent sustained engagement with the issues over time.Visualising a protest public in this way raises two significant problems for a workable concept of data publics. The first involves the “affordising” (Pollock) work of both the platform and our data analysis. This concerns the role played by data access and platform affordances for data capture, along with methodological choices made to best realise or draw out the affordances of the data for our purposes. The second concerns the issue of digital and data literacies in both the social acts that help to constitute a data public in the first place, and the capacity to read and write public data to represent those activities meaningfully. That is, Facebook and our analysis constitutes a data public in certain ways that includes potentially opaque decisions or processes. And citizens (protesters or casual Facebook commenters alike) along with social institutions (like the courts) have certain uneven capacity to effectively produce or read public protest-oriented data. The risk here, which we return to in the final section, lies in the potential for misrepresentation of publics through data, exclusions of access and ownership of data, and the uneven digital literacies at each stage of data production, analysis and sensemaking.Facebook captures data about individuals in intricate detail. Its data capture strategies are geared toward targeting for the purposes of marketing, although only a small subset of the data is publicly available through the Facebook Application Programming Interface (API), which is a kind of data “gateway”. The visible page data tells only part of the story. The total Page Likes in February 2016 was 36,828, representing a sizeable number of followers, mainly located in Melbourne but including 45 countries in total and 38 different languages. We extracted a data set of 268,211 engagements with the Page between February 2013 and August 2015. This included 45,393 post Likes and 9,139 Comments. Our strategy was to demarcate a structurally defined “community” (in the SNA sense of that term as delineating clusters of people, activities and links within a broader network), by visualising the interactions of Facebook users with Posts over time, and then examine elements of intensity of engagement. In other words, we “affordised” the network data using SNA techniques to most clearly convey the social value of the networked public.We used a combination of API access and Facebook’s native Insights data and analytics to extract use-data from that Page between June 2013 and December 2015. Analysis of a two-mode or bipartite network consisting of users and Posts was compiled using vosonSML, a package in the R programming language created at Australian National University (Graham and Ackland) and visualised with Gephi software. In this network, the nodes (or vertices) represent Facebook users and Facebook Posts submitted on the Page, and ties (or edges) between nodes represent whether a user has commented on and/or liked a post. For example, a user U might have liked Post A and commented on Post B. Additionally, a weight value is assigned for the Comments ties, indicating how many times a user commented on a particular post (note that users can only like Posts once). We took these actions as demonstrating sufficient connection over time in relation to an issue of common concern.Figure 1: Network visualisation of activity on the Save the Palace Facebook Page, June 2013 to December 2015. The colour of the nodes denotes which ‘community’ cluster they belong to (computed via the Infomap algorithm) and nodes are sized by out-degree (number of Likes/Comments made by users to Posts). The graph layout is computed via the Force Atlas 2 algorithm.Community detection was performed on the network using the Infomap algorithm (Rosvall and Bergstrom), which is suited to large-scale weighted and directed networks (Henman et al.). This analysis reveals two large and two smaller clusters or groups represented by colour differences (Fig. 1). Broadly, this suggests the presence of several clusters amongst a sustained network engaging with the page over the three years. Beyond this, a range of other colours denoting smaller clusters indicates a diversity of activity and actors co-participating in the network as part of a broader community.The positioning of nodes within the network is not random – the visualisation is generated by the Force Atlas 2 algorithm (Jacomy et al.) that spatially sorts the nodes through processes of attraction and repulsion according to the observed patterns of connectivity. As we would expect, the two-dimensional spatial arrangement of nodes conforms to the community clustering, helping us to visualise the network in the form of a networked public, and build a narrative interpretation of “what is going on” in this online social space.Social value for VCAT was loosely defined as a sense of connection, sentiment and attachment to the venue. While we could illustrate the extent of the active connections of those engaging with the Page, the network map does not in itself reveal much about the sentiment, or the emotional attachment to the Save the Palace cause. This kind of affect can be understood as “the energy that drives, neutralizes, or entraps networked publics” (Papacharissi 7), and its measure presents a particular challenge, but also interest, for understanding a data public. It is often measured through sentiment analysis of content, but we targeted reach and engagement events – particular moments that indicated intense interaction with the Page and associated events.Figure 2: Save the Palace Facebook Page: Organic post reach November—December 2014The affective connection and orientation could be demonstrated through two dimensions of post “reach”: average reach across the lifespan of the Page, and specific “reach-events”. Average reach illustrates the sustained engagement with the Page over time. Average un-paid reach for Posts with links (primarily news and legal updates), was 12,015 or 33% of the total follower base – a figure well above the standard for Community Page reach at that time. Reach-events indicated particular points of intensity and illustrates the Page’s ability to resonate publicly. Figure 2 points to one such event in November 2015, when news circulated that the developers were defying stop-work orders and demolishing parts of The Palace. The 100k reach indicated intense and widespread activity – Likes, Shares, Comments – in a short timeframe. We examined Comment activity in relation to specific reach events to qualify this reach event and illustrate the sense of outrage directed toward the developers, and expressions of solidarity toward those attempting to stop the redevelopment. Affordising Data Publics and the Transformative Work of AnalyticsEach stage of deriving evidence of social value through Page data, from building public visibility and online activity to analysis and presentation at VCAT, was affected by the affordising work of the protesters involved (particularly the Page Admins), civil society groups, platform features and data structures and our choices in analysis and presentation. The notion of affordising is useful here because, as Pollock defines the term, it draws attention to the transformative work of metrics, analytics, platform features and other devices that re-package social activity through modes of datafication and analysis. The Save the Palace group mobilised in a particular way so as to channel their activities, make them visible and archival, to capture the resonant effects of their public protest through a platform that would best make that public visible to itself. The growth of the interest in the Facebook Page feeds back on itself reflexively as more people encounter it and participate. Contrary to critiques of “clicktivism”, these acts combine digital-material events and activities that were to become consequential for the public protest – such as the engagement activities around the November 2015 event described in Figure 2.In addition, presenting the research in court introduced particular hurdles, in finding “the meaningful data” appropriate to the needs of the case, “visualizing social data for social purposes”, and the need to be “evocative as well as accurate” (Donath, 16). The visualisation and presentation of the data needed to afford a valid and meaningful expression of the social significance the Palace. Which layout algorithm to use? What scale do we want to use? Which community detection algorithm and colour scheme for nodes? These choices involve challenges regarding legibility of visualisations of public data (McCosker and Wilken; Kennedy et al.).The transformative actions at play in these tactics of public data analysis can inform other instances of data-driven protest or social participation, but also leave room for misuse. The interests of developers, for example, could equally be served by monitoring protesters’ actions through the same data, or by targeting disagreement or ambiguity in the data. Similarly, moves by Facebook to restrict access to Page data will disproportionately affect those without the means to pay for access. These tactics call for further work in ethical principles of open data, standardisation and data literacies for the courts and those who would benefit from use of their own public data in this way.ConclusionsWe have argued through the case of the Save the Palace protest that in order to make use of public social media data to define a data public, multiple levels of data literacy, access and affordising are required. Rather than assuming that public data simply constitutes a data public, we have emphasised: a) the consequentiality of the movement; b) sufficient connection over time; and c) affective or emotional qualities of connection and interaction with public events. This includes the activities of the core members of the Save the Palace protest group, and the tens of thousands who engaged in some way with the Page. It also involves Facebook’s data affordances as these allow for the extraction of public data, alongside our choices in analysis and visualisation, and the court’s capacity and openness to accept all of this as indicative of the social value (connections, sentiment, attachment) it sought for the case. The Senior Member and Member presiding over the case had little knowledge of Facebook or other social media platforms, did not use them, and hence themselves had limited capacity to recognise the social and cultural nuances of activities that took place through the Facebook Page. This does not exclude the use of the data but made it more difficult to present a picture of the relevance and consequence of the data for understanding the social value evident in the contested building. While the court’s acceptance of the analysis as evidence is a significant starting point, further work is required to ensure openness, standardisation and ethical treatment of public data within public institutions like the courts. ReferencesBruns, A., and J. Burgess. “The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc Publics.” 6th European Consortium for Political Research General Conference, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, 25-27 August 2011. 1 Aug. 2018 <http://eprints.qut.edu.au/46515/>.Baym, N.K., and d. boyd. “Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56.3 (2012): 320-329.Dewey, J. The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry. Athens, Ohio: Swallow P, 2016 [1927].Donath, J. The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online. Cambridge: MIT P, 2014.Fredericks, J., and M. 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Raissi. “Online Petitioning and Politics: The Development of Change.org in Australia.” Australian Journal of Political Science (2018). 1 Aug. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2018.1499010>.Henman, P., R. Ackland, and T. Graham. “Community Structure in e-Government Hyperlink Networks.” Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on e-Government (ECEG ’14), 12-13 June 2014, Brasov, Romania.Ito, M. “Introduction.” Networked Publics. Ed. K. Varnelis. Cambridge, MA.: MIT P, 2008. 1-14.Jacomy M., T. Venturini, S. Heymann, and M. Bastian. “ForceAtlas2, a Continuous Graph Layout Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization Designed for the Gephi Software.” PLoS ONE 9.6 (2014): e98679. 1 Aug. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0098679>.Jinshan Investment Group Pty Ltd v Melbourne CC [2016] VCAT 626, 117. 2016. 1 Aug. 2018 <https://bit.ly/2JGRnde>.Johnson, B., and G. 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14

Felton, Emma. "Eat, Drink and Be Civil: Sociability and the Cafe." M/C Journal 15, no. 2 (April 28, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.463.

Full text
Abstract:
Coffee changes people. Moreover, it changes the way they interact with their friends, their fellow citizens and their community. (Ellis 24) On my daily walk around the streets of my neighbourhood, I pass the footpath cafés that have become synonymous with the area. On this particular day, I take a less familiar route and notice a new, small café wedged between a candle shop and an industrial building. At one of the two footpath tables sit a couple with their young child, conveniently (for them) asleep in a stroller. One is reading the Saturday paper, and the other has her nose in a book—coffee, muffins, and newspapers are strewn across the table. I am struck by this tableau of domestic ease and comfort, precisely because it is so domestic and yet the couple and child, with all the accoutrements of a relaxed Saturday morning, are situated outside the spaces of the home. It brings to mind an elegant phrase of Robert Hughes’ about the types of spaces that cities need, where “solitudes may lie together” (cited in Miller 79). I could, of course, also have drawn my attention to other vignettes at the café—for example, people involved in animated or easy conversation—and this would support Hughes’ other dictum, that cities need places where “people can gather and engage in energetic discourse” (79), which is of course another way in which people inhabit and utilise the café. The ascendancy of the café is synonymous with the contemporary city and, as semi-public space, it supports either solitude—through anonymity—or sociability. “Having a coffee” is central to the experience of everyday life in cities, yet it is also an expression of intent that suggests more than simply drinking a café latte or a cappuccino at our favourite neighbourhood café. While coffee aficionados will go the extra distance for a good brew, the coffee transaction is typically more to do with meeting friends, colleagues or connecting with people beyond our personal and professional networks. And under the umbrella of these types of encounters sit a variety of affective, social and civil transactions. In cities characterised by increasing density and cultural difference, and as mobile populations move back and forth across the planet, how we forge and maintain relationships with each other is important for the development of cosmopolitan cultures and social cohesion. It is the contemporary café and its coffee culture that provides the space to support sociability and the negotiation of civil encounters. Sociability, Coffee, and the Café Café culture is emblematic of social and urban change, of the rise of food culture and industries, and “aesthetic” cultures. The proliferation of hospitality and entertainment industries in the form of cafés, bars, restaurants, and other semi-public spaces—such as art galleries—are the consumer-based social spaces in which new forms of sociability and attachment are being nurtured and sustained. It is hardly surprising that people seek out places to meet others—given the transformation in social and kinship relations wrought by social change, globalization and mobile populations—to find their genesis in the city. Despite the decline of familial relations, new social formation produced by conditions such as workforce mobility, flexible work arrangements, the rise of the so-called “creative class” and single person households are flourishing. There are now more single person households in Australia than in any other period, with 1.9 million people living alone in 2006. This figure is predicted to increase to 30.36 per cent of the population by 2026 (ABS). The rapid take-up of apartment living in Australian cities suggests both a desire and necessity for urban living along with its associated amenities, and as a result, more people are living out their lives in the public and semi-public spaces of cities. Maffesoli refers to restructured and emerging social relations as “tribes” which are types of “emotional communities” (after Weber) based upon the affective, life-affirming impulse of “being togetherness” rather than an outmoded, rationalised social structure. For Maffesoli, tribes have strong powers of inclusion and integration and people are connected by shared affinities or lifestyles. Their stamping ground is the city where they gather in its public and semi-public spaces, such as the café, where sociability is expressed through “the exchange of feelings, conversation” (13). In this context, the café facilitates a mode of interaction that is both emotional and rational: while there might be a reason for meeting up, it is frequently driven by a desire for communication that is underpinned by the affective dimension. As a common ritualistic behaviour, “meeting for coffee” facilitates encounters not only with those known to us, but also among relationships that are provisional and contingent. It is among those less familiar that the café is useful as a space for engaging and practicing civil discourse (after Habermas) and where encounters with strangers might be comfortably negotiated. The café’s social codes facilitate the negotiation of less familiar relationships, promoting a sociability that is not as easy to navigate in other spaces of the city. The gesture of “having coffee” is hospitable, and the café’s neutrality as a meeting place is predicated on its function as transitional or liminal space; it is neither domestic, work, nor wholly public space. Its liminality removes inhabitants from the potentially anxious intimacy of the home and offers protection from the unknown of public space. Moreover, the café’s “safety” is further reinforced because it is regulated temporally by its central function as a place of food and beverage consumption: it provides a finite certitude to meetings, with the length of encounter largely being determined by the time it takes to consume a coffee or snack. In this way, the possible complexity or ambiguity associated with meetings with strangers in the more intimate spaces of the home is avoided, and meeting in a café may relieve the onus and anxiety that can be associated with entertaining. Café culture is not a new phenomenon, though its current manifestation differs from its antecedent, the sixteenth-century coffee house. Both the modern café and the coffee house are notable as places of intense sociability where people from all walks of life mingle (Ellis 2004). The diverse clientele of the coffee house is recorded extensively in the diaries of Samuel Pepys and unlike other social institutions of the time, was defined by its inclusivity of men from all walks of life (Ellis 59). Similarly, the espresso bars of the 1950s that appeared in Europe, North America and to a lesser extent Australia became known for their mix of customers from a range of classes, races and cultures, and for the inclusion of women as their patrons (Ellis 233). The wide assortment of people who patronised these espresso bars was noted in Architectural Digest magazine which claimed the new coffee bars as “the greatest social revolution since the launderette in 1954” (Ellis 234). Contemporary café culture continues this egalitarian tradition, with the café assuming importance as a place in which reconfigured social relationships are fostered and maintained. In Australia, the café has replaced the institution of the public house or hotel—the “pub” in Australia—as the traditional meeting place of cultural significance. Not everyone felt at home, or indeed was welcomed in the pub, despite its mythology as a place that was emblematic of “the Australian way of life”. Women, children and “others” who may have felt or may have been legally excluded from the pub are the new beneficiaries of the café’s inclusivity. The social organisation of the pub revolved around the interests of masculine relationships and culture (Fiske et al.) and until the late 1970s, women were excluded by legislation from its public bars. There are many other socio-cultural reasons why women were uncomfortable in the pub, even once legislation was removed. By comparison, the café, despite the bourgeois associations in some of its manifestations, is more democratic space than the pub and this rests to some extent on a greater emphasis placed on disciplined conduct of its patrons. The consumption of alcohol in hotels, combined with a cultural tolerance of excess and with alcohol’s effect of loosening inhibitions, also encourages the loosening of socially acceptable forms of conduct. A wider range of behaviour is tolerated and sanctioned which can present problems for women in particular. The negotiation of gendered relationships in the pub is, therefore, typically of more concern to women than men. In spite of its egalitarianism, and the diversity of patrons welcomed, the café, as a social space, is governed by a set of rules that communicate meaning about who belongs, who doesn’t and how people should behave. The social codes inscribed into café culture contribute to the production and reproduction of different social groups (Bourdieu and Lefebvre) and are reinforced by the café’s choice of aesthetics. Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital accounts for the acquisition of cultural competencies and explains why some people feel comfortable in certain spaces while others feel excluded. Knowledge and skills required in social spaces express both subtle and sometimes not so subtle hierarchies of power and ownership, cutting across gender, ethnic and class divisions. Yet despite this, the relatively low cost of obtaining entry into the café—through the purchase of a drink—gives it greater accessibility than a pub, restaurant, or any other consumer site that is central to sociability and place attachment. In cities characterised by an intensity of change and movement, the café also enables a negotiation of place attachment. A sense of place connectedness, through habitual and regular usage, facilitates social meaning and belonging. People become “regulars” at cafés, patronising one over another, getting to know the staff and perhaps other patrons. The semiotics of the café, its ambience, decor, type of food and drink it sells, all contribute to the kind of fit that helps anchors it in a place. A proliferation of café styles offers scope for individual and collective affinities. While some adopt the latest trends in interior design, others appeal to a differentiated clientele through more varied approaches to design. Critiques of urban café culture, which see it as serving the interests of taste-based bourgeois patterns of consumption, often overlook the diversity of café styles that appeal to, and serve a wide range of, demographic groups. Café styles vary across a design continuum from fashionable minimalist décor, homey, grungy, sophisticated, traditional, corporate (McDonalds and Starbucks) or simply plain with little attention to current décor trends. The growth of café culture is a significant feature of gentrified inner city areas in cities across the world. In Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley in Australia, an inner-city youth entertainment precinct, many cafés have adopted a downmarket or “grunge” aesthetic, appealing to the area’s youth clientele and other marginal groups. Here, décor can suggest a cavalier disregard for bourgeois taste: shabby décor with mismatching tables and chairs and posters and graffiti plastered over windows and walls. Ironically, the community service organisation Mission Australia saw the need to provide for its community in this area; the marginalised, disadvantaged, and disengaged original inhabitants of this gentrified area, and opened a no-frills Café One to cater for them. Civility, Coffee, and the Café One of the distinctive features of cities is that they are places where “we meet with the other” (Barthes 96), and this is in contrast to life in provincial towns and villages where people and families could be known for generations. For the last two decades or so, cities across the world have been undergoing a period of accelerated change, including the rise of Asian mega-cities—and now, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population is urban based. Alongside this development is the movement of people across the world, for work, study, travel or fleeing from conflict and persecution. If Barthes’s statement was apt in the 1980s, it is ever more so now, nearly thirty years later. How strangers live together in cities of unprecedented scale and density raises important questions around social cohesion and the civil life of cities. As well as offering spaces that support a growth in urban sociability, the exponential rise of café culture can be seen as an important factor in the production of urban civilities. Reciprocity is central here, and it is the café’s function as a place of hospitality that adds another dimension to its role in the cultivation of civility and sociability. Café culture requires the acquisition of competencies associated with etiquette and manners that are based upon on notions of hospitality. The protocol required for ordering food and drink and for eating and drinking with others encourages certain types of behaviour such as courtesy, patience, restraint, and tolerance by all participants, including the café staff. The serving of food and drink in a semi-public space in exchange for money is more than a commercial transaction, it also demands the language and behaviour of civility. Conduct such as not talking too loudly, not eavesdropping on others’ conversations, knowing where to look and what to hear, are considered necessary competencies when thrust into close proximity with strangers. More intimately, the techniques of conversation—of listening, responding and sharing information—are practised in the café. It can be instructive to reprise Habermas’s concept of the public sphere (1962) in order to consider how semi-public places such as the café contribute to support the civil life of a city. Habermas’s analysis, grounded in the eighteenth-century city, charted how the coffee house or salon was instrumental to the development of a civilised discourse which contributed to the development of the public sphere across Europe. While a set of political and social structures operating at the time paved the way for the advent of democracy, critical discussion and rational argument was also vital. In other words, democratic values underpin civil discourse and the parallel here is that the space the café provides for civil interaction, particularly in cities marked by cultural and other difference, is unique among public amenities on offer in the city. The “bourgeois public sphere” for Habermas is based on the development of a social mode of interaction which became normative through socio-structural transformation during this period, and the coffee house or salon was a place that enabled a particular form of sociability and communication style. For Habermas, meeting places such as the urban-based coffee house were the heart of sociability, where conversational rules based on reasoned exchange were established; the cultivation of conversation was aimed at the dialogical egalitarian. Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere is essentially and potentially a political one, “conceived […] as the sphere of private people come together as a public” (Johnson 27). It refers to a realm of social life in which something approaching public opinion can be found. I am not claiming that the contemporary café might be the site of political dialogue and civic activism of the type that Habermas suggests. Rather, what is useful here is a recognition that the café facilitates a mode of interaction similar to the one proposed by Habermas—a mode of interaction which has the potential to be distinguished by its “open and inclusive character” (Johnson 22). The expectation of a “patient, willing comprehension of sympathetic fellows” (Johnson 23) refers to the cultivation of the art of conversation based on a reciprocity and is one that requires empathetic listening as well as dialogue. Because the café is a venue where people meet with less familiar others, the practice and techniques of conversation assumes particular significance, borne out in Habermas’s and Ellis’s historical research into café culture. Both scholars attribute the establishment of coffee houses in London to the development of social discourse and urban networking which helped set the ground for conversational rules and exchange and worked towards a democratic culture. In this context, values were challenged and differences revealed but the continued practice of conversation enabled the negotiation of such social diversity. Demonstrations of civility and generosity are straightforward in the café because of its established codes of conduct in an environment focussed upon hospitality. Paying for another’s drink, although not a great expense is a simple gesture of hospitality: “meeting for coffee” has become part of the lingua franca of workplace and business culture and relationships and is weighted with meaning. As cities grow in density, complexity and cultural diversity, citizens are adapting with new techniques of urban living. At a broad level, the café can be seen as supporting the growth in networks of sociability and facilitating the negotiation of civil discourse and behaviour. In the café, to act as a competent citizen, one must demonstrate the ability to be polite, restrained, considerate and civil—that is, to act in accordance with the social situation. This involves an element of self-control and discipline and requires social standards and expectations to become self-monitored and controlled. To be perceived as acting in accordance with the needs of certain social situations, participants bend, limit and regulate their behaviour and affects. In sum, the widespread take up of café culture, based on hospitality and reciprocity, encourages a mode of interaction that has implications for the development of a social and civic ethic. References Australian Bureau of Statistics. "1301.0–Year Book Australia." 2009. 31 Jan. 2012 ‹http://abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/0/916F96F929978825CA25773700169C65?opendocument› Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Ellis, Markum. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004. Fiske, J., B. Hodge, and G. Turner, eds. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1962. -----. The Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. T. McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. Johnson, Pauline. Habermas: Rescuing the Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2006. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Maffesoli, Michel. Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. Trans. D. Smith. London: Sage, 1996. Miller, George. “A City that Works.” Sydney Papers Spring (2001): 77–79.
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15

Hope, Cathy, and Bethaney Turner. "The Right Stuff? The Original Double Jay as Site for Youth Counterculture." M/C Journal 17, no. 6 (September 18, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.898.

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On 19 January 1975, Australia’s first youth station 2JJ (Double Jay) launched itself onto the nation’s airwaves with a NASA-style countdown and You Only Like Me ‘Cause I’m Good in Bed by Australian band Skyhooks. Refused airtime by the commercial stations because of its explicit sexual content, this song was a clear signifier of the new station’s intent—to occupy a more radical territory on Australian radio. Indeed, Double Jay’s musical entrée into the highly restrictive local broadcasting environment of the time has gone on to symbolise both the station’s role in its early days as an enfant terrible of radio (Inglis 376), and its near 40 years as a voice for youth culture in Australia (Milesago, Double Jay). In this paper we explore the proposition that Double Jay functioned as an outlet for youth counterculture in Australia, and that it achieved this even with (and arguably because of) its credentials as a state-generated entity. This proposition is considered via brief analysis of the political and musical context leading to the establishment of Double Jay. We intend to demonstrate that although the station was deeply embedded in “the system” in material and cultural terms, it simultaneously existed in an “uneasy symbiosis” (Martin and Siehl 54) with this system because it consciously railed against the mainstream cultures from which it drew, providing a public and active vehicle for youth counterculture in Australia. The origins of Double Jay thus provide one example of the complicated relationship between culture and counterculture, and the multiple ways in which the two are inextricably linked. As a publicly-funded broadcasting station Double Jay was liberated from the industrial imperatives of Australia’s commercial stations which arguably drove their predisposition for formula. The absence of profit motive gave Double Jay’s organisers greater room to experiment with format and content, and thus the potential to create a genuine alternative in Australia broadcasting. As a youth station Double Jay was created to provide a minority with its own outlet. The Labor government committed to wrenching airspace from the very restrictive Australian broadcasting “system” (Wiltshire and Stokes 2) to provide minority voices with room to speak and to be heard. Youth was identified by the government as one such minority. The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) contributed to this process by enabling young staffers to establish the semi-independent Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) (Webb) and within this a youth station. Not only did this provide a focal point around which a youth collective could coalesce, but the distinct place and identity of Double Jay within the ABC offered its organisers the opportunity to ignore or indeed subvert some of the perceived strictures of the “mothership” that was the ABC, whether in organisational, content and/or stylistic terms. For these and other reasons Double Jay was arguably well positioned to counter the broadcasting cultures that existed alongside this station. It did so stylistically, and also in more fundamental ways, At the same time, however, it “pillaged the host body at random” (Webb) co-opting certain aspects of these cultures (people, scheduling, content, administration) which in turn implicated Double Jay in the material and cultural practices of those mainstream cultures against which it railed. Counterculture on the Airwaves: Space for Youth to Play? Before exploring these themes further, we should make clear that Double Jay’s legitimacy as a “counterculture” organisation is observably tenuous against the more extreme renderings of the concept. Theodore Roszak, for example, requires of counterculture something “so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all” (5). Double Jay was a brainchild of the state: an outcome of the Whitlam Government’s efforts to open up the nation’s airwaves (Davis, Government; McClelland). Further, the supervision of this station was given to the publicly funded Australian national broadcaster, the ABC (Inglis). Any claim Double Jay has to counterculture status then is arguably located in less radical invocations of the term. Some definitions, for example, hold that counterculture contains value systems that run counter to culture, but these values are relational rather than divorced from each other. Kenneth Leech, for example, states that counterculture is "a way of life and philosophy which at central points is in conflict with the mainstream society” (Desmond et al. 245, our emphasis); E.D. Batzell defines counterculture as "a minority culture marked by a set of values, norms and behaviour patterns which contradict those of the dominant society" (116, our emphasis). Both definitions imply that counterculture requires the mainstream to make sense of what it is doing and why. In simple terms then, counterculture as the ‘other’ does not exist without its mainstream counterpoint. The particular values with which counterculture is in conflict are generated by “the system” (Heath and Potter 6)—a system that imbues “manufactured needs and mass-produced desires” (Frank 15) in the masses to encourage order, conformity and consumption. Counterculture seeks to challenge this “system” via individualist, expression-oriented values such as difference, diversity, change, egalitarianism, and spontaneity (Davis On Youth; Leary; Thompson and Coskuner‐Balli). It is these kinds of counterculture values that we demonstrate were embedded in the content, style and management practices within Double Jay. The Whitlam Years and the Birth of Double Jay Double Jay was borne of the Whitlam government’s brief but impactful period in office from 1972 to 1975, after 23 years of conservative government in Australia. Key to the Labor Party’s election platform was the principle of participatory democracy, the purpose of which was “breaking down apathy and maximising active citizen engagement” (Cunningham 123). Within this framework, the Labor Party committed to opening the airwaves, and reconfiguring the rhetoric of communication and media as a space of and for the people (Department of the Media 3). Labor planned to honour this commitment via sweeping reforms that would counter the heavily concentrated Australian media landscape through “the encouragement of diversification of ownership of commercial radio and television”—and in doing so enable “the expression of a plurality of viewpoints and cultures throughout the media” (Department of the Media 3). Minority groups in particular were to be privileged, while some in the Party even argued for voices that would actively agitate. Senator Jim McClelland, for one, declared, “We say that somewhere in the system there must be broadcasting which not only must not be afraid to be controversial but has a duty to be controversial” (Senate Standing Committee 4). One clear voice of controversy to emerge in the 1960s and resonate throughout the 1970s was the voice of youth (Gerster and Bassett; Langley). Indeed, counterculture is considered by some as synonymous with a particular strain of youth culture during this time (Roszak; Leech). The Labor Government acknowledged this hitherto unrecognised voice in its 1972 platform, with Minister for the Media Senator Doug McClelland claiming that his party would encourage the “whetting of the appetite” for “life and experimentation” of Australia’s youth – in particular through support for the arts (160). McClelland secured licenses for two “experimental-type” stations under the auspices of the ABC, with the youth station destined for Sydney via the ABC’s standby transmitter in Gore Hill (ABCB, 2). Just as the political context in early 1970s Australia provided the necessary conditions for the appearance of Double Jay, so too did the cultural context. Counterculture emerged in the UK, USA and Europe as a clear and potent force in the late 1960s (Roszak; Leech; Frank; Braunstein and Doyle). In Australia this manifested in the 1960s and 1970s in various ways, including political protest (Langley; Horne); battles for the liberalisation of censorship (Hope and Dickerson, Liberalisation; Chipp and Larkin); sex and drugs (Dawson); and the art film scene (Hope and Dickerson, Happiness; Thoms). Of particular interest here is the “lifestyle” aspect of counterculture, within which the value-expressions against the dominant culture manifest in cultural products and practices (Bloodworth 304; Leary ix), and more specifically, music. Many authors have suggested that music was pivotal to counterculture (Bloodworth 309; Leech 8), a key “social force” through which the values of counterculture were articulated (Whiteley 1). The youth music broadcasting scene in Australia was extremely narrow prior to Double Jay, monopolised by a handful of media proprietors who maintained a stranglehold over the youth music scene from the mid-50s. This dominance was in part fuelled by the rising profitability of pop music, driven by “the dreamy teenage market”, whose spending was purely discretionary (Doherty 52) and whose underdeveloped tastes made them “immune to any sophisticated disdain of run-of-the-mill” cultural products (Doherty 230-231). Over the course of the 1950s the commercial stations pursued this market by “skewing” their programs toward the youth demographic (Griffen-Foley 264). The growing popularity of pop music saw radio shift from a “multidimensional” to “mono-dimensional” medium according to rock journalist Bruce Elder, in which the “lowest-common-denominator formula of pop song-chat-commercial-pop-song” dominated the commercial music stations (12). Emblematic of this mono-dimensionalism was the appearance of the Top 40 Playlist in 1958 (Griffin-Foley 265), which might see as few as 10–15 songs in rotation in peak shifts. Elder claims that this trend became more pronounced over the course of the 1960s and peaked in 1970, with playlists that were controlled with almost mechanical precision [and] compiled according to American-devised market research methods which tended to reinforce repetition and familiarity at the expense of novelty and diversity. (12) Colin Vercoe, whose job was to sell the music catalogues of Festival Records to stations like 2UE, 2SER and SUW, says it was “an incredibly frustrating affair” to market new releases because of the rigid attachment by commercials to the “Top 40 of endless repeats” (Vercoe). While some air time was given to youth music beyond the Top 40, this happened mostly in non-peak shifts and on weekends. Bill Drake at 2SM (who was poached by Double Jay and allowed to reclaim his real name, Holger Brockmann) played non-Top 40 music in his Sunday afternoon programme The Album Show (Brockmann). A more notable exception was Chris Winter’s Room to Move on the ABC, considered by many as the predecessor of Double Jay. Introduced in 1971, Room to Move played all forms of contemporary music not represented by the commercial broadcasters, including whole albums and B sides. Rock music’s isolation to the fringes was exacerbated by the lack of musical sales outlets for rock and other forms of non-pop music, with much music sourced through catalogues, music magazines and word of mouth (Winter; Walker). In this context a small number of independent record stores, like Anthem Records in Sydney and Archie and Jugheads in Melbourne, appear in the early 1970s. Vercoe claims that the commercial record companies relentlessly pursued the closure of these independents on the grounds they were illegal entities: The record companies hated them and they did everything they could do close them down. When (the companies) bought the catalogue to overseas music, they bought the rights. And they thought these record stores were impinging on their rights. It was clear that a niche market existed for rock and alternative forms of music. Keith Glass and David Pepperell from Archie and Jugheads realised this when stock sold out in the first week of trade. Pepperell notes, “We had some feeling we were doing something new relating to people our own age but little idea of the forces we were about to unleash”. Challenging the “System” from the Inside At the same time as interested individuals clamoured to buy from independent record stores, the nation’s first youth radio station was being instituted within the ABC. In October 1974, three young staffers—Marius Webb, Ron Moss and Chris Winter— with the requisite youth credentials were briefed by ABC executives to build a youth-style station for launch in January 1975. According to Winter “All they said was 'We want you to set up a station for young people' and that was it!”, leaving the three with a conceptual carte blanche–although assumedly within the working parameters of the ABC (Webb). A Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) was formed in order to meet the requirements of the ABC while also creating a clear distinction between the youth station and the ABC. According to Webb “the CRU gave us a lot of latitude […] we didn’t have to go to other ABC Departments to do things”. The CRU was conscious from the outset of positioning itself against the mainstream practices of both the commercial stations and the ABC. The publicly funded status of Double Jay freed it from the shackles of profit motive that enslaved the commercial stations, in turn liberating its turntables from baser capitalist imperatives. The two coordinators Ron Moss and Marius Webb also bypassed the conventions of typecasting the announcer line-up (as was practice in both commercial and ABC radio), seeking instead people with charisma, individual style and youth appeal. Webb told the Sydney Morning Herald that Double Jay’s announcers were “not required to have a frontal lobotomy before they go on air.” In line with the individual- and expression-oriented character of the counterculture lifestyle, it was made clear that “real people” with “individuality and personality” would fill the airwaves of Double Jay (Nicklin 9). The only formula to which the station held was to avoid (almost) all formula – a mantra enhanced by the purchase in the station’s early days of thousands of albums and singles from 10 or so years of back catalogues (Robinson). This library provided presenters with the capacity to circumvent any need for repetition. According to Winter the DJs “just played whatever we wanted”, from B sides to whole albums of music, most of which had never made it onto Australian radio. The station also adapted the ABC tradition of recording live classical music, but instead recorded open-air rock concerts and pub gigs. A recording van built from second-hand ABC equipment captured the grit of Sydney’s live music scene for Double Jay, and in so doing undercut the polished sounds of its commercial counterparts (Walker). Double Jay’s counterculture tendencies further extended to its management style. The station’s more political agitators, led by Webb, sought to subvert the traditional top-down organisational model in favour of a more egalitarian one, including a battle with the ABC to remove the bureaucratic distinction between technical staff and presenters and replace this with the single category “producer/presenter” (Cheney, Webb, Davis 41). The coordinators also actively subverted their own positions as coordinators by holding leaderless meetings open to all Double Jay employees – meetings that were infamously long and fraught, but also remembered as symbolic of the station’s vibe at that time (Frolows, Matchett). While Double Jay assumed the ABC’s focus on music, news and comedy, at times it politicised the content contra to the ABC’s non-partisan policy, ignored ABC policy and practice, and more frequently pushed its contents over the edges of what was considered propriety and taste. These trends were already present in pockets of the ABC prior to Double Jay: in current affairs programmes like This Day Tonight and Four Corners (Harding 49); and in overtly leftist figures like Alan Ashbolt (Bowman), who it should be noted had a profound influence over Webb and other Double Jay staff (Webb). However, such an approach to radio still remained on the edges of the ABC. As one example of Double Jay’s singularity, Webb made clear that the ABC’s “gentleman’s agreement” with the Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasters to ban certain content from airplay would not apply to Double Jay because the station would not “impose any censorship on our people” – a fact demonstrated by the station’s launch song (Nicklin 9). The station’s “people” in turn made the most of this freedom with the production of programmes like Gayle Austin’s Horny Radio Porn Show, the Naked Vicar Show, the adventures of Colonel Chuck Chunder of the Space Patrol, and the Sunday afternoon comic improvisations of Nude Radio from the team that made Aunty Jack. This openness also made its way into the news team, most famously in its second month on air with the production of The Ins and Outs of Love, a candid documentary of the sexual proclivities and encounters of Sydney’s youth. Conservative ABC staffer Clement Semmler described the programme as containing such “disgustingly explicit accounts of the sexual behaviour of young teenagers” that it “aroused almost universal obloquy from listeners and the press” (35). The playlist, announcers, comedy sketches, news reporting and management style of Double Jay represented direct challenges to the entrenched media culture of Australia in the mid 1970s. The Australian National Commission for UNESCO noted at the time that Double Jay was “variously described as political, subversive, offensive, pornographic, radical, revolutionary and obscene” (7). While these terms were understandable given the station’s commitment to experiment and innovation, the “vital point” about Double Jay was that it “transmitted an electronic reflection of change”: What the station did was to zero in on the kind of questioning of traditional values now inherent in a significant section of the under 30s population. It played their music, talked in their jargon, pandered to their whims, tastes, prejudices and societal conflicts both intrinsic and extrinsic. (48) Conclusion From the outset, Double Jay was locked in an “uneasy symbiosis” with mainstream culture. On the one hand, the station was established by federal government and its infrastructure was provided by state funds. It also drew on elements of mainstream broadcasting in multiple ways. However, at the same time, it was a voice for and active agent of counterculture, representing through its content, form and style those values that were considered to challenge the ‘system,’ in turn creating an outlet for the expression of hitherto un-broadcast “ways of thinking and being” (Leary). As Henry Rosenbloom, press secretary to then Labor Minister Dr Moss Cass wrote, Double Jay had the potential to free its audience “from an automatic acceptance of the artificial rhythms of urban and suburban life. In a very real sense, JJ [was] a deconditioning agent” (Inglis 375-6). While Double Jay drew deeply from mainstream culture, its skilful and playful manipulation of this culture enabled it to both reflect and incite youth-based counterculture in Australia in the 1970s. References Australian Broadcasting Control Board. Development of National Broadcasting and Television Services. ABCB: Sydney, 1976. Batzell, E.D. “Counter-Culture.” Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought. Eds. Williams Outhwaite and Tom Bottomore. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 116-119. Bloodworth, John David. “Communication in the Youth Counterculture: Music as Expression.” Central States Speech Journal 26.4 (1975): 304-309. Bowman, David. “Radical Giant of Australian Broadcasting: Allan Ashbolt, Lion of the ABC, 1921-2005.” Sydney Morning Herald 15 June 2005. 15 Sep. 2013 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/news/Obituaries/Radical-giant-of-Australian-broadcasting/2005/06/14/1118645805607.html›. Braunstein, Peter, and Michael William Doyle. Eds. Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s New York: Taylor and Francis, 2002. Brockman, Holger. Personal interview. 8 December 2013. Cheney, Roz. Personal interview. 10 July 2013. Chipp, Don, and John Larkin. Don Chipp: The Third Man. Adelaide: Rigby, 2008. Cunningham, Frank. Theories of Democracy: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. Davis, Fred. On Youth Subcultures: The Hippie Variant. New York: General Learning Press, 1971. Davis, Glyn. "Government Decision‐Making and the ABC: The 2JJ Case." Politics 19.2 (1984): 34-42. Dawson, Jonathan. "JJJ: Radical Radio?." Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 6.1 (1992): 37-44. Department of the Media. Submission by the Department of the Media to the Independent Inquiry into Frequency Modulation Broadcasting. Sydney: Australian Government Publishers, 1974. Desmond, John, Pierre McDonagh, and Stephanie O'Donohoe. “Counter-Culture and Consumer Society.” Consumption Markets & Culture 4.3 (2000): 241-279. Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988. Elder, Bruce. Sound Experiment. Unpublished manuscript, 1988. Australian National Commission for UNESCO. Extract from Seminar on Entertainment and Society, Report on Research Project. 1976. Frolows, Arnold. Personal interview. 10 July 2013. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Gerster, Robin, and Jan Bassett. Seizures of Youth: The Sixties and Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House, 1991. Griffen-Foley, Bridget. Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009. Harding, Richard. Outside Interference: The Politics of Australian Broadcasting. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1979. Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture. New York: Harper Collins, 2004. Hope, Cathy, and Adam Dickerson. “The Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, and the Liberalisation of Film Censorship in Australia”. Screening the Past 35 (2012). 12 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.screeningthepast.com/2012/12/the-sydney-and-melbourne-film-festivals-and-the-liberalisation-of-film-censorship-in-australia/›. Hope, Cathy, and Adam Dickerson. “Is Happiness Festival-Shaped Any Longer? The Melbourne and Sydney Film Festivals and the Growth of Australian Film Culture 1973-1977”. Screening the Past 38 (2013). 12 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/12/‘is-happiness-festival-shaped-any-longer’-the-melbourne-and-sydney-film-festivals-and-the-growth-of-australian-film-culture-1973-1977/›. Horne, Donald. Time of Hope: Australia 1966-72. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980. Inglis, Ken. This Is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1932-1983. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983. Langley, Greg. A Decade of Dissent: Vietnam and the Conflict on the Australian Homefront. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992. Leary, Timothy. “Foreword.” Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. Eds. Ken Goffman and Dan Joy. New York: Villard, 2007. ix-xiv. Leech, Kenneth. Youthquake: The Growth of a Counter-Culture through Two Decades. London: Sheldon Press, 1973. Martin, J., and C. Siehl. "Organizational Culture and Counterculture: An Uneasy Symbiosis. Organizational Dynamics, 12.2 (1983): 52-64. Martin, Peter. Personal interview. 10 July 2014. Matchett, Stuart. Personal interview. 10 July 2013. McClelland, Douglas. “The Arts and Media.” Towards a New Australia under a Labor Government. Ed. John McLaren. Victoria: Cheshire Publishing, 1972. McClelland, Douglas. Personal interview. 25 August 2010. Milesago. “Double Jay: The First Year”. n.d. 8 Oct. 2012 ‹http://www.milesago.com/radio/2jj.htm›. Milesago. “Part 5: 1971-72 - Sundown and 'Archie & Jughead's”. n.d. Keith Glass – A Life in Music. 12 Oct. 2012 ‹http://www.milesago.com/Features/keithglass5.htm›. Nicklin, Lenore. “Rock (without the Roll) around the Clock.” Sydney Morning Herald 18 Jan. 1975: 9. Robinson, Ted. Personal interview. 11 December 2013. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. New York: Anchor, 1969. Semmler, Clement. The ABC - Aunt Sally and Sacred Cow. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1981. Senate Standing Committee on Education, Science and the Arts and Jim McClelland. Second Progress Report on the Reference, All Aspects of Television and Broadcasting, Including Australian Content of Television Programmes. Canberra: Australian Senate, 1973. Thompson, Craig J., and Gokcen Coskuner‐Balli. "Countervailing Market Responses to Corporate Co‐optation and the Ideological Recruitment of Consumption Communities." Journal of Consumer Research 34.2 (2007): 135-152. Thoms, Albie. “The Australian Avant-garde.” An Australian Film Reader. Eds. Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan. Sydney: Currency Press, 1985. 279–280. Vercoe, Colin. Personal interview. 11 Feb. 2014. Walker, Keith. Personal interview. 11 July 2013. Webb, Marius. Personal interview. 5 Feb. 2013. Whiteley, Sheila. The Space between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture. London: Routledge, 1992. Wiltshire, Kenneth, and Charles Stokes. Government Regulation and the Electronic Commercial Media. Monograph M43. Melbourne: Committee for Economic Development of Australia, 1976. Winter, Chris. Personal interview. 16 Mar. 2013.
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16

Hazleden, Rebecca. "Promises of Peace and Passion: Enthusing the Readers of Self-Help." M/C Journal 12, no. 2 (May 13, 2009). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.124.

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The rise of expertise in the lives of women is a complex and prolonged process that began when the old networks through which women had learned from each other were being discredited or destroyed (Ehrenreich and English). Enclosed spaces of expert power formed separately from political control, market logistics and the pressures exerted by their subjects (Rose and Miller). This, however, was not a question of imposing expertise on women and forcing them to adhere to expert proclamations: “the experts could not have triumphed had not so many women welcomed them, sought them out, and … organised to promote their influence” (Ehrenreich and English 28). Women’s continuing enthusiasm for self-help books – and it is mainly women who buy them (Wood) – attests to the fact that they are still welcoming expertise into their lives. This paper argues that a major factor in the popularity of self-help is the reversal of the conventional ‘priestly’ relationship and ethic of confession, in a process of conversion that relies on the enthusiasm and active participation of the reader.Miller and Rose outline four ways in which human behaviour can be transformed: regulation (enmeshing people in a code of standards); captivation (seducing people with charm or charisma); education (training, convincing or persuading people); and conversion (transforming personhood, and ways of experiencing the world so that people understand themselves in fundamentally new ways). Of these four ways of acting upon others, it is conversion that is the most potent, because it changes people at the level of their own subjectivity – “personhood itself is remade” (Miller and Rose 35). While theories of conversion cannot be adequately discussed here, one aspect held in common by theories of religious conversion as well as those from psychological studies of ‘brainwashing’ is enthusiasm. Rambo’s analysis of the stages of religious conversion, for example, includes ‘questing’ in an active and engaged way, and a probable encounter with a passionately enthusiastic believer. Melia and Ryder, in their study of ‘brainwashing,’ state that two of the end stages of conversion are euphoria and proselytising – a point to which I will return in the conclusion. In order for a conversion to occur, then, the reader must be not only intellectually convinced of the truth, but must feel it is an important or vital truth, a truth she needs – in short, the reader must be enthused. The popularity of self-help books coincides with the rise of psy expertise more generally (Rose, "Identity"; Inventing), but self-help putatively offers escape from the experts, whilst simultaneously immersing its readers in expertise. Readers of self-help view themselves as reading sceptically (Simonds), interpretively (Rosenblatt) and resistingly (Fetterly, Rowe). They choose to read books as an educational activity (Dolby), rather than attending counselling or psychotherapy sessions in which they might be subject to manipulation, domination and control by a therapist (Simonds). I have discussed the nature of the advice in relationship manuals elsewhere (Hazleden, "Relationship"; "Pathology"), but the intention of this paper is to investigate the ways in which the authors attempt to enthuse and convert the reader.Best-Selling ExpertiseIn common with other best-selling genres, popular relationship manuals begin trying to enthuse the reader on the covers, which are intended to attract the reader, to establish the professional – or ‘priestly’ – credentials of the author and to assert the merit of the book, presenting the authors as experienced professionally-qualified experts, and advertising their bestseller status. These factors form part of the marketing ‘buzz’ or collective enthusiasm about a particular author or book.As part of the process of establishing themselves in the priestly role, the authors emphasise their professional qualifications and experience. Most authors use the title ‘Dr’ on the cover (Hendrix, McGraw, Forward, Gray, Cowan and Kinder, Schlessinger) or ‘PhD’ after their names (Vedral, DeAngelis, Spezzano). Further claims on the covers include assertions of the prominence of the authors in their field. Typical are DeAngelis’s claim to being “America’s foremost relationships expert,” and Hendrix’s claim to being “the world’s leading marital therapist.” Clinical and professional experience is mentioned, such as Spezzano’s “twenty-three years of counseling experience” (1) and Forward’s experience as “a consultant in many southern California Medical and psychiatric facilities” (iii). The cover of Spezzano’s book claims that he is a “therapist, seminar leader, author, lecturer and visionary leader.” McGraw emphasises his formal qualifications throughout his book, saying, “I had more degrees than a thermometer” (McGraw 6), and he refers to himself throughout as “Dr. Phil,” much like “Dr Laura” (Schlessinger). Facts and SecretsThe authors claim their ideas are based on clinical practice, research, and evidence. One author claims, “In this book, there is a wealth of tried and accurate information, which has worked for thousands of people in my therapeutic practice and seminars over the last two decades” (Spezzano 1). Another claims that he “worked with hundreds of couples in private practice and thousands more in workshops and seminars” and subsequently based his ideas on “research and clinical observations” (Hendrix xviii). Dowling refers to “four years of research … interviewing professionals who work with and study women.” She went to all this trouble because, she assures us, “I wanted facts” (Dowling, dust-jacket, 30).All this is in order to assure the reader of the relevance and build her enthusiasm about the importance of the book. McGraw (226) says he “reviewed case histories of literally thousands and thousands of couples” in order “to choose the right topics” for his book. Spezzano (7) claims that his psychological exercises come from clinical experience, but “more importantly, I have tested them all personally. Now I offer them to you.” This notion of being in possession of important new knowledge of which the reader is unaware is common, and expressed most succinctly by McGraw (15): “I have learned what you know and, more important, what you don't know.” This knowledge may be referred to as ‘secret’ (e.g. DeAngelis), or ‘hidden’ (e.g. Dowling) or as a recent discovery. Readers seem to accept this – they often assume that self-help books spring ‘naturally’ from clinical investigation as new information is ‘discovered’ about the human psyche (Lichterman 432).The Altruistic AuthorOn the assumption that readers will be familiar with other self-help books, some authors find it necessary to explain why they felt motivated to write one themselves. Usually these take the form of a kind of altruistic enthusiasm to share their great discoveries. Cowan and Kinder (xiv) claim that “one of the wonderful, intrinsic rewards of working with someone in individual psychotherapy is the rich and intense relationship that is established, [but] one of the frustrations of individual work is that in a whole lifetime it is impossible to touch more than a few people.” Morgan (26) assures us that “the results of applying certain principles to my marriage were so revolutionary that I had to pass them on in the four lesson Total Woman course, and now in this book.”The authors justify their own addition to an overcrowded genre by delineating what is distinctive about their own book, or what other “books, articles and surveys missed” (Dowling 30) or misinterpreted. Beattie (98-102) devotes several pages to a discussion of Dowling to assert that Dowling’s ‘Cinderella Complex’ is more accurately known as ‘codependency.’ The authors of another book admit that their ideas are not new, but claim to make a unique contribution because they are “writing from a much-needed male point of view” (Cowan and Kinder, back cover). Similarly, Gray suggests “many books are one-sided and unfortunately reinforce mistrust and resentment toward the opposite sex.” This meant that “a definitive guide was needed for understanding how healthy men and women are different,” and he promises “This book provides that vision” (Gray 4,7).Some authors are vehement in attacking other experts’ books as “gripe sessions,” “gobbledegook” (Schlessinger 51, 87), or “ridiculous” (Vedral 282). McGraw (9) writes “it is amazing to me how this country is overflowing with marital therapists, psychiatrists and psychologists, counselors, healers, advice columnists, and self-help authors – and their approach to relationships is usually so embarrassing that I want to turn my head in shame.” His own book, by contrast, will be quite different from anything the reader has heard before, because “it differs from what relationship ‘experts’ tell you” (McGraw 45).Confessions of an Author Because the authors are writing about intimate relationships, they are also keen to establish their credentials on a more personal level. “Loving, losing, learning the lessons, and reloving have been my path” (Carter-Scott 247-248), says one, and another asserts that, “It’s taken me a long time to understand men. It’s been a difficult and often painful journey and I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way in my own relationships” (DeAngelis xvi). The authors are even keen to admit the mistakes they made in their previous relationships. Gray says, “In my previous relationships, I had become indifferent and unloving at difficult times … As a result, my first marriage had been very painful and difficult” (Gray 2). Others describe the feelings of disappointment with their marriages: We gradually changed. I was amazed to realize that Charlie had stopped talking. He had become distant and preoccupied. … Each evening, when Charlie walked in the front door after work, a cloud of gloom and tension floated in with him. That cloud was almost tangible. … this tension cloud permeated our home atmosphere … there was a barrier between us. (Morgan 18)Doyle (14) tells a similar tale: “While my intentions were good, I was clearly on the road to marital hell. … I was becoming estranged from the man who had once made me so happy. Our marriage was in serious trouble and it had only been four years since we’d taken our vows.” The authors relate the bewilderment they felt in these failing relationships: “My confusion about the psychology of love relationships was compounded when I began to have problems with my own marriage. … we gave our marriage eight years of intensive examination, working with numerous therapists. Nothing seemed to help” (Hendrix xvii).Even the process of writing the relationship manual itself can be uncomfortable: This was the hardest and most painful chapter for me to write, because it hit so close to home … I sat down at my computer, typed out the title of this chapter, and burst into tears. … It was the pain of my own broken heart. (DeAngelis 74)The Worthlessness of ExpertiseThus, the authors present their confessional tales in which they have learned important lessons through their own suffering, through the experience of life itself, and not through the intervention of any form of external or professional expertise. Furthermore, they highlight the failure of their professional training. Susan Forward (4) draws a comparison between her professional life as a relationship counsellor and the “Susan who went home at night and twisted herself into a pretzel trying to keep her husband from yelling at her.” McGraw tells of a time when he was counselling a couple, and: Suddenly all I could hear myself saying was blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah. As I sat there, I asked myself, ‘Has anybody noticed over the last fifty years that this crap doesn’t work? Has it occurred to anyone that the vast majority of these couples aren’t getting any better? (McGraw 6)The authors go to some lengths to demonstrate that their new-found knowledge is unlike anything else, and are even prepared to mention the apparent contradiction between the role the author already held as a relationship expert (before they made their important discoveries) and the failure of their own relationships (the implication being that these relationships failed because the authors themselves were not yet beneficiaries of the wisdom contained in their latest books). Gray, for example, talking about his “painful and difficult” first marriage (2), and DeAngelis, bemoaning her “mistakes” (xvi), allude to the failure of their marriage to each other, at a time when both were already well-known relationship experts. Hendrix (xvii) says: As I sat in the divorce court waiting to see the judge, I felt like a double failure, a failure as a husband and as a therapist. That very afternoon I was scheduled to teach a course on marriage and the family, and the next day, as usual, I had several couples to counsel. Despite my professional training, I felt just as confused and defeated as the other men and women who were sitting beside me.Thus the authors present the knowledge they have gained from their experiences as being unavailable through professional marital therapy, relationship counselling, and other self-help books. Rather, the advice they impart is presented as the hard-won outcome of a long and painful process of personal discovery.Peace and PassionOnce the uniqueness of the advice is established, the authors attempt to enthuse the reader by describing the effects of following it. Norwood (Women 4) says her programme led to “the most rewarding years of my life,” and Forward (10) says she “discovered enormous amounts of creativity and energy in myself that hadn't been available to me before.” Gray (268) asserts that, following his discoveries “I personally experienced this inner transformation,” and DeAngelis (126) claims “I am compassionate where I used to be critical; I am patient where I used to be judgmental.” Doyle (23) says, “practicing the principles described in this book has transformed my marriage into a passionate, romantic union.” Similarly, in discussing the effects of her ideas on her marriage, Morgan (26) speaks of “This brand new love between us” that “has given us a brand new life together.” Having established the success of their ideas and techniques on their own lives, the authors go on to relate stories about their successful application to the lives and relationships of their clients. One author writes that “When I began implementing my ideas … The divorce rate in my practice sharply declined, and the couples … reported a much deeper satisfaction in their marriages” (Hendrix xix). Another claims “Repeatedly I have heard people say that they have benefited more from this new understanding of relationships than from years of therapy” (Gray 7). Morgan, describing the effects of her ‘Total Woman’ classes, says: Attending one of the first classes in Miami were wives of the Miami Dolphin football players … it is interesting to note that their team won every game that next season and became the world champions! … Gals, I wouldn’t dream of taking credit for the Superbowl … (Morgan 188)In case we are still unconvinced, the authors include praise and thanks from their inspired clients: “My life has become exciting and wonderful. Thank you,” writes one (Vedral 308). Gray (6) talks of the “thousands of inspirational comments that people have shared” about his advice. Vedral (307) says “I have received thousands of letters from women … thanking me for shining a beam of light on their situations.” If these clients have transformed their lives, the authors claim, so can the reader. They promise that the future will be “exceptional” (Friedman 242) and “wonderful” (Norwood, Women 257). It will consist of “self fulfilment, love, and joy” (Norwood, Women 26), “peace and joy” (Hendrix xx), “freedom and a lifetime of healing, hope and happiness” (Beattie), “peace, relief, joy, and passion that you will never find any other way” (Doyle 62) – in short, “happiness for the rest of your life” (Spezzano 77).SummaryIn order to effect the conversion of their readers, the authors seek to create enthusiasm about their books. First, they appeal to the modern tradition of credentialism, making claims about their formal professional qualifications and experience. This establishes them as credible ‘priests.’ Then they make calculable, factual, evidence-based claims concerning the number of books they have sold, and appeal to the epistemological authority of the methodology involved in establishing the findings of their books. They provide evidence of the efficacy of their own unique methods by relating the success of their ideas when applied to their own lives and relationships, and those of their clients and their readers. The authors also go to some lengths to establish that they have personal experience of relationship problems, especially those the reader is currently presumed to be experiencing. This establishes the ‘empathy’ essential to Rogerian therapy (Rogers), and an informal claim to lay knowledge or insight. In telling their own personal stories, the authors establish an ethic of confession, in which the truth of oneself is sought, unearthed and revealed in “the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage” (Foucault, History 59). At the same time, by claiming that their qualifications were not helpful in solving these personal difficulties, the authors assert that much of their professional training was useless or even harmful, suggesting that they are aware of a general scepticism towards experts (cf. Beck, Giddens), and share these doubts. By implying that it is other experts who are perhaps not to be trusted, they distinguish their own work from anything offered by other relationship experts, thereby circumventing “the paradox of self-help books’ existence” (Cheery) and proliferation. Thus, the authors present their motives as altruistic, whilst perhaps questioning the motives of others. Their own book, they promise, will be the one (finally) that brings a future of peace, passion and joy. Conversion, Enthusiasm and the Reversal of the Priestly RelationshipAlthough power relations between authors and readers are complex, self-help is evidence of power in one of its most efficacious forms – that of conversion. This is a relationship into which one enters voluntarily and enthusiastically, in the name of oneself, for the benefit of oneself. Such power enthuses, persuades, incites, invites, provokes and entices, and it is therefore a strongly subjectifying power, and most especially so because the relationship of the reader to the author is one of choice. Because the reader can choose between authors, and skip or skim sections, she can concentrate on the parts of the therapeutic diagnosis that she believes specifically apply to her. For example, Grodin (414) found it was common for a reader to attach excerpts from a book to a bathroom mirror or kitchen cabinet, and to re-read and underline sections of a book that seemed most relevant. In this way, through her enthusiastic participation, the reader becomes her own expert, her own therapist, in control of certain aspects of the encounter, which nonetheless must always take place on psy terms.In many conversion studies, the final stage involves the assimilation and embodiment of new practices (e.g. Paloutzian et al. 1072), whereby the convert employs or utilises her new truths. I argue that in self-help books, this stage occurs in the reversal of the ‘priestly’ relationship. The ‘priestly’ relationship between client and therapist, is one in which in which the therapist remains mysterious while the client confesses and is known (Rose, "Power"). In the self-help book, however, this relationship is reversed. The authors confess their own ‘sins’ and imperfections, by relating their own disastrous experiences in relationships and wrong-thinking. They are, of course, themselves enthusiastic converts, who are enmeshed within the power that they exercise (cf. Foucault History; Discipline), as these confessions illustrate. The reader is encouraged to go through this process of confession as well, but she is expected to do so privately, and to play the role of priest and confessor to herself. Thus, in a reversal of the priestly relationship, the person who ‘is knowledge’ within the book itself is the author. It is only if the reader takes up the invitation to perform for herself the priestly role that she will become an object of knowledge – and even then, only to herself, albeit through a psy diagnostic gaze provided for her. Of course, this instance of confession to the self still places the individual “in a network of relations of power with those who claim to be able to extract the truth of these confessions through their possession of the keys to interpretation” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 174), but the keys to interpretation are provided to the reader by the author, and left with her for her own safekeeping and future use. As mentioned in the introduction, conversion involves questing in an active and engaged way, and may involve joy and proselytising. Because the relationship must be one of active participation, the enthusiasm of the reader to apply these truths to her own self-understanding is critical. Indeed, the convert is, by her very nature, an enthusiast.ConclusionSelf-help books seek to bring about a transformation of subjectivity from powerlessness to active goal-setting, personal improvement and achievement. This is achieved by a process of conversion that produces particular choices and types of identity, new subjectivities remade through the production of new ethical truths. Self-help discourses endow individuals with new enthusiasms, aptitudes and qualities – and these can then be passed on to others. Indeed, the self-help reader is invited, by means of the author’s confessions, to become, in a limited way, the author’s own therapist – ie, she is invited to perform an examination of the author’s (past) mistakes, to diagnose the author’s (past) condition and to prescribe an appropriate (retrospective) cure for this condition. Through the process of diagnosing the author and the author’s clients, using the psy gaze provided by the author, the reader is rendered an expert in therapeutic wisdom and is converted to a new belief system in which she will become an enthusiastic participant in her own subjectification. ReferencesBeattie, M. 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Women Who Love Too Much: When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He’ll Change. New York: Pocket Books, 1986.Paloutzian, R., J. Richardson, and L. Rambo. “Religious Conversion and Personality Change.” Journal of Personality 67.6 (1999).Ricoeur, P. Oneself as Another. Trans. K. Blamey. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990.Rambo, L. Understanding Conversion. Yale UP, 1993.Rogers, C. On Becoming a Person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.Rosenblatt, L. Literature as Exploration. 5th ed. New York: MLA, 1995.Rose, N. “Identity, Genealogy, History.” In S. Hall and Paul du Gay, eds. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, 1995.———. Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.———. “Power and Subjectivity: Critical History and Psychology.” Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts. 2000. < http://www.academyanalyticarts.org >.———., and P. Miller. “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government.” British Journal of Sociology 43.2 (1992): 173-205.Rowe, Y. “Beyond the Vulnerable Self: The 'Resisting Reader' of Marriage Manuals for Heterosexual Women.” In Kate Bennett, Maryam Jamarani, and Laura Tolton. Rhizomes: Re-Visioning Boundaries conference papers, University of Queensland, 24-25 Feb. 2006.Schlessinger, L. The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. New York, HarperCollins, 2004.Simonds, W. Women and Self-Help Culture: Reading between the Lines. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1992.Spezzano, C. 30 Days to Find Your Perfect Mate: The Step by Step Guide to Happiness and Fulfilment. London: Random House, 1994.Starker, S. Oracle at the Supermarket: The American Preoccupation with Self-Help Books. Oxford: Transaction, 1989.Vedral, J. Get Rid of Him! New York: Warner Books, 1994.Wood, L. “The Gallup Survey: Self-Help Buying Trends.” Publishers Weekly 234 (1988): 33.
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