Journal articles on the topic 'Deterministic medium access'

This paper addresses the cooperative random access problem for distributed wireless sensor networks through network utility maximization framework based on persistence probabilistic model. To exploit spatial diversity, we also present a virtual link scheduling policy by employing multi-relay cooperative transmission and interference avoidance. Numerical results illustrate that our proposed cooperative medium access control (MAC) significantly improves the system throughput compared with the one based on deterministic model and the one without cooperative diversity.

Wireless Sensor Networks have become a key enabler for Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) applications; however, to adapt to the derived robust communication requirements, deterministic and scheduled medium access should be used, along with other features, such as channel hopping and frequency diversity. Implementing these mechanisms requires a correct synchronization of all devices in the network, a stage in deployment that can lead to non-operational networks. The present article presents an analysis of such situations and possible solutions, including the common current approaches and recommendations, and proposes a new beacon advertising method based on a specific Trickle Timer for the Medium Access Control (MAC) Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) layer, decoupling from the timers in the network and routing layers. With this solution, improvements in connection success, time to join, and energy consumption can be obtained for the widely extended IEEE802.15.4e standard.

Handshaking is a common technique used to avoid collisions in terrestrial and underwater content-based networks. However, due to the long propagation delay of the underwater acoustic channel, the conventional handshaking mechanism, which only allows one successful handshake and one pair of nodes to communicate per transmission cycle, becomes less effective in underwater acoustic networks. This paper proposes a new distributed scheduling method for underwater acoustic networks that supports multiple handshakes and concurrent transmissions in one transmission cycle for one-hop clusters. A deterministic scheduling algorithm was developed to optimize the sending sequence and time of the source nodes jointly so that the total data transmission time is shortened while avoiding collisions among multiple concurrent transmissions. The deterministic scheduling algorithm can also reduce the scheduling overhead and enables the synchronization of the data concurrent transmissions in a distributed manner via the standard two-way handshaking. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms several conventional underwater medium access control protocols in normalized throughput, packet delivery rate, average end-to-end delay, and average energy consumption.

The proposed StegoFrameOrder (SFO) method enables the transmission of covert data in wireless computer networks exploiting non-deterministic algorithms of medium access (such as the distributed coordination function), especially in IEEE 802.11 networks. Such a covert channel enables the possibility of leaking crucial information outside secured network in a manner that is difficult to detect. The SFO method embeds hidden bits of information in the relative order of frames transmitted by wireless terminals operating on the same radio channel. The paper presents an idea of this covert channel, its implementation, and possible variants. The paper also discusses implementing the SFO method in a real environment and the experiments performed in the real-world scenario.

With the emergence of 5G networks and the stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of Mission-Critical Applications (MCAs), co-existing networks are expected to deliver higher-speed connections, enhanced reliability, and lower latency. IEEE 802.11 networks, which co-exist with 5G, continue to be the access choice for indoor networks. However, traditional IEEE 802.11 networks lack sufficient reliability and they have non-deterministic latency. To dynamically control resources in IEEE 802.11 networks, in this paper we propose a delay-aware approach for Medium Access Control (MAC) management via airtime-based network slicing and traffic shaping, as well as user association while using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). To fulfill the QoS requirements, we use Software-Defined Networking (SDN) for airtime-based network slicing and seamless handovers at the Software-Defined Radio Access Network (SD-RAN), while traffic shaping is done at the Stations (STAs). In addition to throughput, channel utilization, and signal strength, our approach monitors the queueing delay at the Access Points (APs) and uses it for centralized network management. We evaluate our approach in a testbed composed of APs controlled by SD-RAN and SDN controllers, with STAs under different workload combinations. Our results show that, in addition to load balancing flows across APs, our approach avoids the ping-pong effect while enhancing the QoS delivery at runtime. Under varying traffic demands, our approach maintains the queueing delay requirements of 5 ms for most of the experiment run, hence drawing closer to MCA requirements.

The implementation of ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) services offers great potential to improve the level of safety, efficiency and comfort on our roads. Although cooperative traffic safety applications rely heavily on the support for real-time communication, the Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism proposed for the upcoming IEEE 802.11p standard, intended for ITS applications, does not offer deterministic real-time support, that is, the access delay to the common radio channel is not upper bounded. To address this problem, we present a framework for a vehicle-to-infrastructure-based (V2I) communication solution extending IEEE 802.11p by introducing a collision-free MAC phase assigning each vehicle an individual priority based on its geographical position, its proximity to potential hazards and the overall road traffic density. Our solution is able to guarantee the timely treatment of safety-critical data, while minimizing the required length of this real-time MAC phase and freeing bandwidth for best-effort services (targeting improved driving comfort and traffic efficiency). Furthermore, we target fast connection setup, associating a passing vehicle to an RSU (Road Side Unit), and proactive handover between widely spaced RSUs. Our real-time MAC concept is evaluated analytically and by simulation based on a realistic task set from a V2I highway merge assistance scenario.

Traditionally, how to reduce energy consumption has been an issue of utmost importance in wireless sensor networks. Recently, radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting technologies, which scavenge the ambient RF waves, provided us with a new paradigm for such networks. Without replacement or recharge of batteries, an RF energy harvesting wireless sensor network may live an eternal life. Against theoretical expectations, however, energy is scarce in practice and, consequently, structural naiveté has to be within a MAC scheme that supports a sensor node to deliver its data to a sink node. Our practical choice for the MAC scheme is a basic one, rooted in ALOHA, in which a sensor node simply repeats harvesting energy, backing off for a while and transmitting a packet. The basic medium access control (MAC) scheme is not able to perfectly prevent a collision of packets, which in turn deteriorates the throughput. Thus, we derive an exact expression of the throughput that the basic MAC scheme can attain. In various case studies, we then look for a way to enhance the throughput. Using the throughput formula, we reveal that an optimal back-off time, which maximizes the total throughput, is not characterized by the distribution but only by the mean value when the harvest times are deterministic. Also, we confirm that taking proper back-off times is able to improve the throughput even when the harvest times are random. Furthermore, we show that shaping the back-off time so that its variance is increased while its mean remains unchanged can help ameliorate the throughput that the basic MAC scheme is able to achieve.

IntroductionPrimary biliary cholangitis (CBP) is a rare autoimmune cholestatic liver disease, inflammation and progressive destruction of small and medium-sized interlobular ducts, progressing to fibrosis, cirrhosis, and death. Currently, the Brazilian public health system (SUS) offers treatment of the symptoms of cirrhosis, and has no medication with indication for CBP.MethodsScientific technical opinion with systematic review (SR) of available evidence in the databases MEDLINE (Pubmed), LILACS and Cochrane Library (accessed July 2017) on ursodeoxycholic acid (AUDC). Methodological quality was evaluated with AMSTAR and Newcastle Ottawa tools. Meta-analyses were performed in Review Manager® 5.2 in the random effects model. Analysis of the budget impact calculation deterministic model, from the perspective of five years for the SUS.ResultsTen SRs and three cohorts were included. There was no statistically significant difference between AUDC and placebo in outcome. Overall survival was significantly (P <0.001) higher in the AUDC group compared to that predicted by the Mayo model or placebo. Treatment with UCD showed an increase in the long-term transplant-free survival time from the fifth year of treatment, with statistically significant results for years five, eight and ten (p <0.01). There were no statistically significant differences for safety outcomes. Based on the assumptions adopted, the incremental budgetary impact with the incorporation of the AUDC into SUS would be BRL 11.77 million (EUR 2.68 million) in the first year and BRL 98.52 million (EUR 22.45 million) in the accumulated five years, considering a market share of 10 percent per year.ConclusionsDespite the uncertainties in the evidence of effectiveness of the AUDC and the probably underestimated budgetary impact, AUDC was incorporated into the SUS because it is the only alternative with indication for CBP and in use for more than two decades, allowing everyone access to the medicine

AbstractA system built to support management decisions and not only needs to be accurate and well adapted to the requirements of the decision and the variables involved in it, and this happens because a decision is still a human act in any type of business and institution. We can say that a decision support system has a part in it that cannot be determined by any software: the human decision which is not a determinist act. It depends on a lot of variables but also still involves the decision maker intuition and experience. This is why an important problem emerged to be discussed in this paper: the need to implement and develop an in house solution to help management decisions and not only, using existing tools and this with no additional fees. This can be a good opportunity to discover models and solutions. An identified solution using Microsoft Excel and Access is discussed in this paper and a model applied on a case study will be presented. The results of the case study showed a real support in making decisions and a better transparency in manipulating the data, improving also the time needed to collect, transform and present data. The model can be applied in any type of problem that needs a visual presentation of data as well as in situations that need working with a large amount of data, but especially in small and medium size companies.

Small family-owned companies are the most common type of European business structure and are characterised by their orientation to long-term goals. Therefore, they can play an important role in the launching of businesses related to sustainable growth. However, access to finance is difficult for start-ups. Mutual Guarantee Institutions (MGIs) mitigate this problem by facilitating long-term guaranteed loans, but they must assume responsibility for default losses. This paper analyses, as of the end of 2018, the loan default of the portfolio of guarantees formalised by Spanish MGIs with new companies between 2003 and 2012, a period including both economic growth and recession. The objective is to identify the annual evolution and the average global cost of default, as well as the differences in said portfolios according to the purpose of the loan, company size and economic activity. The analysis was developed while considering two scenarios: one determinist, using a ratio method and another stochastic, using an analysis of variance. We found differences in the distribution of defaults for the variables company size and sector of activity. The findings provide relevant information for managers and Public Administrations to improve the distribution of guarantees between Spanish MGIs and public institutions, and their coverage of Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) loan defaults.

We establish mean-field limits for large-scale random-access networks with buffer dynamics and arbitrary interference graphs. Although saturated buffer scenarios have been widely investigated and yield useful throughput estimates for persistent sessions, they fail to capture the fluctuations in buffer contents over time and provide no insight in the delay performance of flows with intermittent packet arrivals. Motivated by that issue, we explore in the present paper random-access networks with buffer dynamics, where flows with empty buffers refrain from competition for the medium. The occurrence of empty buffers thus results in a complex dynamic interaction between activity states and buffer contents, which severely complicates the performance analysis. Hence, we focus on a many-sources regime where the total number of nodes grows large, which not only offers mathematical tractability but is also highly relevant with the densification of wireless networks as the Internet of Things emerges. We exploit timescale separation properties to prove that the properly scaled buffer occupancy process converges to the solution of a deterministic initial value problem and establish the existence and uniqueness of the associated fixed point. This approach simplifies the performance analysis of networks with huge numbers of nodes to a low-dimensional fixed-point calculation. For the case of a complete interference graph, we demonstrate asymptotic stability, provide a simple closed form expression for the fixed point, and prove interchange of the mean-field and steady-state limits. This yields asymptotically exact approximations for key performance metrics, in particular the stationary buffer content and packet delay distributions.

ABSTRACTSoil microorganisms play fundamental roles in cycling of soil carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients, yet we have a poor understanding of how soil microbiomes are shaped by their nutritional and physical environment. In this study, we investigated the successional dynamics of a soil microbiome during 21 weeks of enrichment on chitin and its monomer,N-acetylglucosamine. We examined succession of the soil communities in a physically heterogeneous soil matrix as well as a homogeneous liquid medium. The guiding hypothesis was that the initial species richness would influence the tendency for the selected consortia to stabilize and maintain a relatively constant community structure over time. We also hypothesized that long-term, substrate-driven growth would result in consortia with reduced species richness compared to the parent microbiome and that this process would be deterministic with relatively little variation between replicates. We found that the initial species richness does influence the long-term community stability in both liquid media and soil and that lower initial richness results in a more rapid convergence to stability. Despite use of the same soil inoculum and access to the same major substrate, the resulting community composition differed greatly in soil from that in liquid medium. Hence, distinct selective pressures in soils relative to homogenous liquid media exist and can control community succession dynamics. This difference is likely related to the fact that soil microbiomes are more likely to thrive, with fewer compositional changes, in a soil matrix than in liquid environments.IMPORTANCEThe soil microbiome carries out important ecosystem functions, but interactions between soil microbial communities have been difficult to study due to the high microbial diversity and complexity of the soil habitat. In this study, we successfully obtained stable consortia with reduced complexity that contained species found in the original source soil. These consortia and the methods used to obtain them can be a valuable resource for exploration of specific mechanisms underlying soil microbial community ecology. The results of this study also provide new experimental context to better inform how soil microbial communities are shaped by new environments and how a combination of initial taxonomic structure and physical environment influences stability.

The theme for this issue of M/C is 'renew'. This is a term that could be approached in numerous ways: as a cultural practice, in terms of broader dynamics of change, in terms of the future of the journal. In this piece, however, I'd like to narrow the focus and think about renewal in the context of the concept of 'media' and media theory. This is not to diminish the importance of looking at media in relation to changing technologies, and changing cultural contexts. Indeed, most readers of M/C will no doubt be aware of the dangers of positing media outside of culture in some kind of deterministic relationship. Indeed, the slash in the title of M/C -- which since its first editorial both links and separates the terms 'media' and 'culture' -- is interesting to think about here precisely because the substitution of the 'and' opens up a questioning of the relation between the two terms. While I too want to keep the space between media / culture filled with possibility, in this piece I want to look mainly at one side of the slash and speculate on renewal in the way we relate to ideas of media. Since its first editorial the slash has also been a marker of M/C's project to bridge academic and popular approaches, and work as a cross-over journal. In the hope of not stretching the cross-over too far, I'd like to bring contemporary philosophy into the picture and keep it in the background while thinking about renewal and the concept of 'media'. A key theme in contemporary philosophy has been the attempt to think difference beyond any opposition of the One and the Many (Patton 29-48; Deleuze 38-47). In an effort to think difference in its own terms, philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida have resisted seeing difference as something dependant on, derivative or secondary to a primary point of sameness and identity. In this brief piece, and out of respect of M/C's project, my intention is not to summarise this work in detail. Rather, I want to highlight the existence of this work in order to draw a contrast with the way in which contemporary thinking about media often seems caught up in a dynamic of the One and Many, and to pose the question of a different path for media theory. Having mentioned philosophy, I do want to make the point that 'One or Many Media' is not just an abstract formulation. On the contrary, the present day is a particularly appropriate time to look at this problem. Popular discussion of media issues itself oscillates between an idea of Media dominance (the One) and an idea of multiple media (multimedia). Discussions of convergence frequently invoke a thematics of the One arising out of the Many, or of the Many arising from the One. Medium, Media, the Media. Which one to use? We need only to list these three terms to begin see how the tension between the One and the Multiple has influenced contemporary thinking about media. An obvious tension exists on the level of grammar. 'Media' is the plural of 'Medium'. That is, until we use the term 'the Media' which can be used to refer to the singularity of (a specific area of) the Press. Walter Ong dubs 'medium' "the fugitive singular" to describe this phenomenon (175). To compensate for the increasing use of 'the media' as a singular it is becoming more common to see the term 'mediums' instead of 'media'. A second tension exists on the level of the senses. 'The media', and in some senses a 'medium', conveys the notion of a media form distinct from the senses. As Michael Heim notes, Medium meant conceptual awareness in conjunction with the five senses through which we come to understand things present before us in the environment. This natural sense of media was gradually dissipated during the modern period by man-made extensions and enhancements of the human senses ... . Electronic media gave new meaning to the term. We not only perceive directly with five senses aided by concepts and enhanced by instrumentation, but also are surrounded by a panorama of man-made images and symbols far more complex than can be assimilated directly through the senses and thought processes. Media in the electronic sense of acoustic-optic technology ... appear to do more than augment innate human sensory capacities: the electronic media become themselves complex problems; they become facts of life we must take into account as we live; they become, in short, the media. (47) In this passage, Heim shows how through extension and instrumentation 'the media' comes to occupy a different register of existence. 'The media' in this account are distinct from any general artefact that can serve as a means of communication to us. On this register, 'the media' also develops into the idea of the mass media (see Williams 169). In popular usage this incorporates print and broadcasting areas (usually with a strong journalistic emphasis), and is often personified around a notion of 'the media' as an agent in the contemporary political arena (the fourth estate, the instrument of a media baron). This brings us to a third tension, to do with diversity. The difference between the terms 'Medium', 'Media', 'the Media', is clearly bound up with the issue of diversity and concentration of media. Sean Cubitt argues that a different activation of interactive media, intermedia, or video media, is crucial to restoring an electronic ecology that has been destroyed by the marketplace (207). What the work of theorists like Cubitt reveals is that the problem of diversity and concentration has a conceptual dimension. Framed within an opposition between the One and the Multiple, the diversity in question -- of different senses and orders of media -- is constrained by the dominant idea of the Media. Many theorists and commentators on 'the Mass media' barely acknowledge the existence of video media unless it is seen as a marketplace for the distribution of movies. This process of marginalisation has been so thorough that the contemporary discussion of the Internet or interactive digital media often ignores previous critical discussion of the electronic arts -- as if McLuhan had no connection with Fluxus, or convergence had no links to intermedia experimentation. In a different example, it is becoming common to discuss 'personal media' like laptops and intelligent jewellery (see Beniger; Kay and Goldberg). But if media theory has previously failed to look at T-shirts and other personal effects as media then this is in part due to the dominance of the idea of the mass media in conceptual terms. This dominance leads Umberto Eco to propose an idea of the "multiplication of the media" against the idea of mass media, and prompts him to declare that "all the professors of theory of communications, trained by the texts of twenty years ago (this includes me) should be pensioned off" (149). It could be argued that rather than represent a problem the sliding between these terms is enabling not disabling. From this perspective, the fact that different senses of media collapse or coalesce with one another is appropriate, since (as I hope I've shown) different senses of media are often grounded in other senses. Indeed, we can agree with this argument, and go further to suggest that renewing our relationship to concepts of media involves affirming the interplay of different senses of media. What needs careful consideration here, however, is how we think of different senses of media. For it is very often the case that this question of difference is blocked from discussion when an order of media is used to secure a territory or a foundation for a particular idea of how things should work. From this foundation particular ideas of One-ness/Same-ness or Many-ness can emerge, each of which involves making assumptions about differences between media, and the nature of difference. Examples might include notions of mainstream and alternative, professional and non-professional, 'industry' and 'artistic' ways of working.1 In each case a dominant idea of the media establishes itself as an order against which other practices are defined as secondary, and other senses of media subordinate. Surveying these tensions (grammatical, sensory and diversity) between the terms 'Medium', 'Media', 'the Media', what becomes apparent is that neither of them is able to stand as 'the' primary conceptual term. Attempting to read contemporary developments in light of the One of the mass media means that theory is often left to discuss the fate of an idea, broadcasting, that represents only one way of organising and articulating a medium. Certainly, this approach can yield important results on the level of audience studies and identity politics, and in respect to government policy. Jock Given's work on broadcasting as a "set of technologies, social and cultural practices, cultural forms, industries, institutional forms, words and an idea" usefully contests the idea that broadcasting is dying or has no place in the digital future (46). However, research of this kind is often constrained by its lack of engagement with different orders of media, and its dependence on an idea of the One medium that is now under erasure.2 Attempting to read contemporary developments in light of the One of the mass media means that theory is often left to discuss the fate of an idea, broadcasting, that represents only one way of organising and articulating a medium. Certainly, this approach can yield important results on the level of audience studies and identity politics, and in respect to government policy. Jock Given's work on broadcasting as a "set of technologies, social and cultural practices, cultural forms, industries, institutional forms, words and an idea" usefully contests the idea that broadcasting is dying or has no place in the digital future (46). However, research of this kind is often constrained by its lack of engagement with different orders of media, and its dependence on an idea of the One medium that is now under erasure.2 Exploring the potential of 'Medium' as a primary term leads again into the problem of the One and the Many. The content of every medium may be, as McLuhan said, another medium (8). But we should search for the hidden One that binds together the Many. Indeed, multimedia can precisely be seen in this way: as a term that facilitates the singularising of multiple media. In a historically significant 1977 paper "Personal Dynamic Media" by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, we read that the essence of a medium is very much dependent on the way messages are embedded, changed, and viewed. Although digital computers were originally designed to do arithmetic computation, the ability to simulate the details of any descriptive model means that the computer, viewed as a medium itself, can be all other media if the embedding and viewing methods are sufficiently well provided. (255) It is following this passage that Kay and Goldberg use the term "metamedium" to describe this system, which effectively seals the Many into the One, and compromises any sense that 'multimedia' can fully live up to the idea of multiple media. Situating the term 'media' as a primary term is interesting primarily because Heim deems it the "natural sense of media". There is some value in re-asserting the most general understanding of this idea, which is that any artefact can serve to communicate something to the senses. That said, any exploration of this kind needs to keep a critical eye not just on the McLuhanesque extension of the senses that Heim mentions, but also the imperative that these artefacts must mediate, and function as a means of communication. In other words, any celebration of this conception of media needs to be careful not to naturalise the idea that communication is the transmission of ideal contents. As Derrida's work shows, a complex system is required for a media to work in this way. It is only via a particular system of representation that a medium comes to serve as a vehicle for communication (311-2). As such, we should be wary of designating this idea of media as 'natural'. There are of course other reasons to be cautious with the use of the term 'natural' in this context. Contemporary usage of 'media' show that the human sensorium has already entered a complex cyborg future in which human actions, digital files, data, scripts, can be considered 'media' in a performance work or some other assemblage. Contemporary media theory resolves some of the problems of the terms 'Medium', 'Media', 'the Media' serving as a primary conceptual figure by reading them against one another. Thus, the mass media can be criticised from the point of view of the broader potential of the medium, or transformations in a medium can be tracked through developments in interactive media. Various critical or comparative approaches can be adopted within the nexus defined by these three terms. One important path of investigation for media theory is the investigation of hybrid mixed forms of media as they re-emerge out of more or less well defined definitions of a medium. A concern that can be raised with this approach, however, is that it risks avoiding the problem of the One or Many altogether in the way it posits some media as 'pure' or less hybrid in the first instance. In the difficult process of approaching the problem of One or Many media, media theory may find it worthwhile listen in on discussion of the One or Many opposition in contemporary philosophy. Two terms that find a prominent place in Deleuze's discussion of the multiplicity are "differentiation" and "actualisation". I'd want to suggest that both terms should hold interest for media theorists. For example, in terms of the problem of One or Many Media, we can note that differentiation and actualisation have not always been looked at. Too often, the starting point for theories of media is to begin with a particular order of media, a conception of the One, and then situate multiple practices in relationship to this One. Thus, 'the media' or 'mass media' is able to take the position of centre, with the rest left subordinate. This gesture allows the plural form of 'media' to be dealt with in a reductive way, at the expense of an analysis of supposed plurality. (It also works to detach the discussion of the order of media in question from other academic and non-academic disciplines that may have a great deal to say about the way media work.) A different approach could be to look at the way this dominant order is actualised in the first place. Recognition that a multiplicity of different senses of media pre-exists any single order of media would seem to be a key step towards renewal in media theory. This piece has sought to disturb the way a notion of the One or Many media often works in the space of media theory. Rather than locate this issue in relation to only one definition of media or medium, this approach attempts to differentiate between different senses of media, ranging from those understandings linked to the human sensorium, those related to craft understandings, and those related to the computerised manipulation of media resources. The virtue of this approach is that it tackles head on the issue that there is no one understanding of media that can function as an over-arching term in the present. The human senses, craft, broadcasting, and digital manipulation are all limited in this respect. Any response to this situation needs to engage with this complexity by recognising that some understandings of media exceed the space of a medium. These other understandings can form useful provisional points of counter-actualisation.4 Footnotes Recent Australian government decisions about the differences between digital television and datacasting would be interesting to examine here. In relation to Given's work I'd suggest that a fuller examination of media's digital future needs to elaborate on the relationship between 'the media' and alternative understandings of the term in computing, for example, such as Kay and Goldberg's. In this way, the issue of future conceptions of media can be opened up alongside the issue of a future for the media. Monaco's, "Mediography: In the Middle of Things" is a rare example. In the section 'Levels of the Game' Monaco usefully distinguishes between different orders of media. My thanks to the anonymous M/C reviewers for their useful comments, and also Anna Munster for her suggestions. References Beniger, James R. "Personalisation of Mass Media and the Growth of Pseudo-Community." Communication Research 14.3 (June 1987): 352-71. Cubitt, Sean. Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture. London: Macmillan, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone, 1991. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1986. Eco, Umberto. "The Multiplication of the Media." Travels in Hyper-Reality. Trans. William Weaver. London: Pan, 1986. 145-50. Given, Jock. The Death of Broadcasting: Media's Digital Future. Kensington: U of New South Wales P, 1998. Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1987. Kay, Alan, and Adele Goldberg. "Personal Dynamic Media." A History of Personal Workstations. Ed. Adele Goldberg. New York: ACM/Addison-Wesley, 1988. 254-63. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. Monaco, James. "Mediography: In the Middle of Things." Media Culture. Ed. James Monaco. New York: Delta, 1978. 3-21. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Patton, Paul. Deleuze and the Political. London: Routledge, 2000. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1976. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Steven Maras. "One or Many Media?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/many.php>. Chicago style: Steven Maras, "One or Many Media?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 6 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/many.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Steven Maras. (2000) One or many media? M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(6). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0012/many.php> ([your date of access]).

The Language in the Workplace project, based in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, has for most of its history concentrated on oral interaction in professional and manufacturing organisations. Recently, however, the project team widened its scope to include an introductory investigation of e-mail as a mode of workplace interaction. The ultimate intention is to extend the project's purview to encompass all written modes, thereby allowing a fuller focus on the complex interrelationships between communication media in the workplace. The Problems of Communication In an illuminating recent study, John Durham Peters explores problems that have dogged the notion of 'communication' (the term in this sense originating only in the late nineteenth century) from the time of Plato. The overarching historical problem he discusses is the recurrent desire for complete communication, the illusionary dream of transferring completely and without modification any idea, thought, or intention from one mind to another. There are two further and related problems that are particularly germane to my purposes here. A belief, at one extreme, that communication 'technologies' will interfere with the 'natural' processes of oral face-to-face interaction; together with its obverse, that communications plural (new technologies) will solve the problems of communication singular (self-other relations). A notion that dissemination (communication from one to many)1 is an inferior and distorting mode, inherently deterministic, compared with the openness of (preferably one-on-one) dialogue. Perhaps first formulated in Plato's Phaedrus, this lament has reverberated ever since, radio providing the instance par excellence.2 Yet another problem are the oppositions creating and sustaining these perceived problems, and their resultant social polarisations. Peters argues eloquently that technologies will never solve the differences in intention and reception amongst socially and therefore differentially positioned interlocutors. (Indeed, he counts it as a benefit that human beings cannot exempt themselves from the recognition and negotiation of individual and collective difference.) And he demonstrates that dialogue and dissemination are equally subject to imperfections and benefits. However, the perceptions remain, and that brings its own problems, given that people continue to act on the basis of unrealistic assumptions about communication. Looked at in this context, electronic mail (which Peters does not include in his historical studies) is a particularly fruitful site of investigation. I will focus on discussing the two problems enumerated above with reference to some of the academic and business literature on e-mail in the workplace; a survey conducted in part of a relatively large organisation in Wellington; and a public e-mail forum of primarily scientists and business people concerning New Zealand's future development. Communicative Distortion The first communication technology to be extensively critiqued for its corruption of social intercourse was writing (by Socrates in Phaedrus). Significantly, e-mail has often been characterised, not unreasonably, as a hybrid of speech and writing, and as returning written communication in the workplace toward the 'immediacy' and 'simplicity' of speech. In fact, as many practitioners do not sufficiently appreciate, informality and intimacy in e-mail communication have to be worked at. Efforts are made by some to use friendly salutations; a chatty, colloquial style; typographical representations of body language; and to refrain from tidying up errors and poor expression (which backfires on them when addressing sticklers for correctness, or when, as often happens, the message is full of obscurities and lacunae). When these attempts are not made, receivers impute to the messages the coldness and impersonality of the most functional letters and notes -- and this is only enhanced by the fact that so much e-mail in the workplace is used for directives (instructions and requests) or announcements (more specifically, proclamations; see below). In contrast to the initial reception of some earlier communication technologies, e-mail was widely welcomed at first. It was predicted to usher in a new egalitarian and democratic order of communication by flattening out or even by-passing hierarchical relations (Sproull and Kiesler; any issue of Wired magazine [see Frau-Meigs]). The realisation that other commercial factors were also contributing to this flattening out no doubt helped to dispel the utopian view (Casey; Gee)3. Subsequent literature has given more emphasis to the sinister aspects of e-mail -- its deployment by managers in the surveillance, monitoring, and performance measurement of employees, its capacity to support convenient and efficient reporting regimes, its durability, and its traceability (Brigham and Corbett; Corbett). This historical trajectory in attitudes towards, and uses of, e-mail, together with the potential variation in the readers' interpretations of the writer's feelings, means that people are quite as likely to conceive of e-mail as cold and impersonal as they are to impute to it more positive feelings. This is borne out in the organisational survey carried out as a part of this research. Of the respondents working in what I will call a professional capacity, 50 percent (the same proportion for both male and female) agreed that e-mail creates a friendlier environment, while only a small percentage of the remainder were neutral. Most disagreed. Interestingly, only a third of clerical staff agreed. One can readily speculate that the differences between these two occupational classes were a significant factor with regard to the uses e-mail is put to (more information sharing as equals on the part of professionals). Those who felt that e-mail contributed to a less friendly environment typically referred to the 'loss of personal contact', and to its ability to allow people to distance themselves from others or 'hide behind' the technology. In a somewhat paradoxical twist of this perceived characteristic, it appears that e-mail can reinforce the prevailing power relations in an organisation by giving employees a way of avoiding the (physical) brunt of these relations, and therefore of tolerating them. Employees have the sense that they can approach a superior through e-mail in a way that is both comfortable for the employee (not have to physically encounter their superior or, as one informant put it, "not have to cope with the boss's body language"), and convenient for the superior.4 At the same time, interestingly, respondents to our surveys have generally been adamant that e-mail is not the medium for conflict resolution or discussion of significant or sensitive matters pertaining to a manager's relationship with an individual employee. In the large Wellington service organisation surveyed for this study, 70% of the sample said they never or almost never used e-mail for these purposes. It was notable, however, that for professional employees, where a gender distinction used in the survey, 80% of women were of this view, compared with 60% of men. Indeed, nearly 10% of men reported using e-mail frequently for conflict resolution purposes. In sum, there is the potential in e-mail for a fundamental distortion; one that is seemingly the opposite of the anti-technologists' charge of corruption of communication by writing (but arguably with the same result), and one that very subtly contradictory, appearing to support, the utopianism of the digerati. The conventions of e-mail can allow employees to have a sense of participation and equality while denying them any real power or influence over important matters or directions of the organisation. E-mail, in other words, may allow co-workers to communicate across underlying tensions and conflicts by effectively suppressing conflict. This may have advantages for enabling an organisation's work to continue in the face of inevitable personality differences. It may also damage the chances of sustaining effective workplace relationships, especially if individuals generalise their use of e-mail, rather than selecting strategically from all the communicational resources available to them. Dialogue and Dissemination Notwithstanding the point made earlier in relation to radio about the flexibility of technology as a societal accomplishment (see note 2), e-mail, I suggest, is unique in the extent of its inherent ability to alternate freely between both poles of the dialogue -- dissemination dichotomy. It is equally adept at allowing one to broadcast to many as it is at enabling two or more people to conduct a conversation. What complicates this ambidexterity of e-mail is that, as Peters points out, in contradistinction to the contemporary tendency to valorise the reciprocity and interaction of dialogue, "dialogue can be tyrannical and dissemination can be just" (34). Consequently, one cannot make easy assumptions about the manner in which e-mail is being used. It is tempting, for example, to conclude from the preponderance of e-mail being used for announcements and simple requests that the supposed benefits of dialogue are not being achieved. This conclusion is demonstrably wrong on two related counts: If e-mail is encouraging widespread dissemination of information which could have been held back (and arguably would have been held back in large organisations lacking e-mail's facilitative qualities), then the workforce will be better informed, and hence more able -- and more inclined! -- to engage in dialogue. The uses to which e-mail is put must not be viewed in isolation from the associated use of other media. If communication per se (including dialogue) is increasing, it may be that e-mail (as dissemination) is making that possible. Indeed, our research showed a considerable unanimity of perception that communication overall has significantly increased since the introduction of e-mail. This is not to necessarily claim that the quality of communication has increased (there is a degree of e-mail communication that is regarded as unwanted). But the fact that a majority of respondents reported increases in use or stability of use across almost all media, including face-to-face interaction, suggests that a more communicative climate may be emerging. We need then to be more precise about the genre of announcements when discussing their organisational implications. Responses in focus group discussions indicate that the use of e-mail for homilies or 'feel good' messages from the CEO (rather than making the effort to talk face-to-face to employees) is not appreciated. Proclamations, too, are better delivered off-line. Similarly, instructions are better formulated as requests (i.e. with a dialogic tone). As I noted earlier, clerical staff, who are more likely to be on the receiving end of instructions, were less inclined to agree that e-mail creates a friendlier environment. Similarly, instructions are better formulated as requests (i.e. with a dialogic tone). As I noted earlier, clerical staff, who are more likely to be on the receiving end of instructions, were less inclined to agree that e-mail creates a friendlier environment. Even more than face-to-face, group interaction by e-mail allows certain voices to be ignored. Where, as often, there are multiple responses to a particular message, subsequent contributors can use selective responses to strongly influence the direction of the discussion. An analysis of a lengthy portion of the corpus reveals that certain key participants -- often effectively in alliance with like-minded members who endorse their interventions -- will regularly turn the dialogue back to a preferred thread by swift and judicious responses. The conversation can move very quickly away from a new perspective not favoured by regular respondents. It is also possible for a participant sufficiently well regarded by a number of other members to leave the discussion for a time (as much as two or three weeks) and on their return resurrect their favoured perspective by retrieving and responding to a relatively old message. It is clear from this forum that individual reputation and status can carry as much weight on line as it can in face-to-face discussion. Conclusion Peters points out that since the late nineteenth century, of which the invention of the words 'telepathy' and 'solipsism' are emblematic, 'communication' "has simultaneously called up the dream of instantaneous access and the nightmare of the labyrinth of solitude" (5). The ambivalence shown towards e-mail by many of its users is clearly the result of the history of responses to communications technology, and of the particular flexibility of e-mail, which makes it an example of this technology par excellence. For the sake of the development of their communicational capabilities, it would be a pity if people continued to jump to the conclusions encouraged by dichotomous conceptions of e-mail (intimate/impersonal, democratic/autocratic, etc.), rather than consciously working to develop a reflexive, open, and case-specific relationship with the technology. Footnotes This does not necessarily exclude oral face-to-face: Peters discusses Jesus's presentation of parables to the crowd as an instance of dissemination. The point is not as transparent as it can now seem. As Peters writes: "It is a mistake to equate technologies with their societal applications. For example, 'broadcasting' (one-way dispersion of programming to an audience that cannot itself broadcast) is not inherent in the technology of radio; it was a complex social accomplishment ... . The lack of dialogue owes less to broadcasting technologies than to interests that profit from constituting audiences as observers rather than participants" (34). That is, post-Fordist developments leading to downsizing of middle management, working in teams, valorisation of flexibility ('flexploitation'). There is no doubt an irony here that escapes the individual employee: namely, every other employee is e-mailing the boss 'because it is convenient for the boss', and meanwhile the boss is gritting his or her teeth as an avalanche of e-mail descends. References Brigham, Martin, and J. Martin Corbett. "E-mail, Power and the Constitution of Organisational Reality." New Technology, Work and Employment 12.1 (1997): 25-36. Casey, Catherine. Work, Self and Society: After Industrialism. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Corbett, Martin. "Wired and Emotional." People Management 3.13 (1997): 26-32. Gee, James Paul. "The New Literacy Studies: From 'Socially Situated' to the Work of the Social." Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context. Eds. David Barton et al. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 180-96. Frau-Meigs, Divina. "A Cultural Project Based on Multiple Temporary Consensus: Identity and Community in Wired." New Media and Society 2.2 (2000): 227-44. Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999. Sproull, Lee and Sara Kiesler. Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Derek Wallace. "E-Mail and the Problems of Communication." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/email.php>. Chicago style: Derek Wallace, "E-Mail and the Problems of Communication," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/email.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Derek Wallace. (2000) E-mail and the problems of communication. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/email.php> ([your date of access]).

This time last year we proposed the theme of the 'loop' issue to the M/C collective because it sounded deeply cool, satisfying our poststructuralist posturings about reflexivity and representation, while also tapping into everyday cultural objects and practices. We expected that the 'loop' issue would generate some interesting and varied responses, and it did. We received submissions about music, visual art, language, child development, pop-cultural artefacts, mathematics and culture in general. These explorations of disparate fields seemed, however, to be tied together by a common thread: the concept of "generation" itself. Each article in the 'loop' issue describes a loop that does not simply repeat an original operation, but that through iteration creates new possibilities and new meanings. More recently, when we began the process of putting the 'loop' issue together we found ourselves faced with a problem we had not envisaged: how might we structure the issue to reflect our guiding metaphor? How might we make articles about loops read like a loop? For all its decentredness, the web is ultimately still a linear medium, and one that constructs fairly rigorous and striated hierarchies. Even M/C, which has tried to set itself apart from traditional printed academic journals, is still structurally reminiscent of them. We toyed with the idea of hyperlinking articles or changing the table of contents from a descending list to a circular one. Apart from the inconceivably difficult task of convincing our web-designers to change the table of contents template for a one-off issue, such strategies would not necessarily have the desired effect. Readers could choose not to make use of our designed loop—hypertext would still work against us because readers might jump around in any order they desired. Moreover, the very necessity for the issue to have a "feature article" would straighten out any loop we might construct. An editorially enforced structure, it seemed, was not the answer. So we turned to our contributions. Strangely enough (or perhaps not strangely at all), we found that, read together, they could be perceived as generating their own internal spiralling system of interconnected loops. We as editors have therefore sought to place the contributions in an order that brings out this cyclical reading. The issue's feature article is Laurie Johnson's "Agency, Beyond Strange Cultural Loops"; a highly accessible, gently amusing, and deeply thought-out meditation on the production and analysis of culture. Johnson works his way from the simple concept of infinite loops in computer programs, though the strange loops described by Douglas Hofstader and drawn by M.C Escher in his work Drawing Hands, to what he calls "strange cultural loops", in which the reception of original signs is shaped by what has been seen before. He contends that such loops constitute culture, because the very notion of cultural re-production is impossible without considering agency. Infinite loops are infinite only if we decide them to be, just as culture is recognisable if and how we choose it to be. What makes culture easily graspable in everyday life, yet so difficult to analyse, is that reception is as productive of culture as creation. The first of our two special visual art features is Vince Dziekan's "The Synthetic Image", which is at once an exhibition of 13 digital artists and an exploration of the curatorial process. "The Synthetic Image" is an astounding interactive exhibition/installation which the user is invited to explore via a kind of looped nodal map. Indeed, "The Synthetic Image" immerses the user in three kinds of loops. First, art and critique are drawn together into interlinking loops. Second, a centrifugal hypertextual structure is used to both create and display a narrative space. Third, the metaphor of the loop is used to discuss the synthetic nature of digital art that explores the relationship between the real and the virtual. M/C is extremely proud to present this exhibition in conjunction with the Department of Multimedia and Digital Arts at Monash University, Melbourne. Simone Murray explores cultural production through corporate loops in "Harry Potter, Inc.: Content Recycling for Corporate Strategy". Murray investigates not the first-wave success of the books but the second-wave take up of Harry Potter as a franchisable cultural product with substantial multi-demographic appeal. This is a detailed examination of how America Online-Time Warner (AOL-TW) has linked its corporate strategy to the characteristics of the Harry Potter brand. More than a simple sequential marketing operation, AOL-TW recycles content of the books, film, and soundtracks, in three ways: reusing digital content to sell its own products, licencing significant portions of content to secondary manufacturers, and, finally, using Harry Potter content to stimulate interest in non-Harry Potter AOL-TW products. Content recycling exemplifies current corporate drives toward synergy. In "Mastering the 'Visual Groove': Animated Electric Light Bulb Signs, Locations, and Loops", Margaret Weigel reminds that looping media are not new phenomena, dating from the Victorian era and coming to particular prominence in the looping electric light bulb signs of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Our reactions to electric signs were, she argues, strangely similar to those of many new media: moral panic and debate, leading to acceptance and even fondness. Weigel describes many of these whimsical modernist spectacles, particularly those of Broadway (the "Great White Way") in the early 1900s, and then describes their reception by tourists and locals. While tourists were drawn to the nightly spectacles, locals mastered and integrated the cyclical marketing systems into their daily lives. Greg Hainge's "Platonic Relations: The Problem of the Loop in Contemporary Electronic Music" proposes a way in which looping in electronic music may avoid the banal "Platonic" mode of repetition maligned by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. In electronic music, Hainge argues, this passive approach to the loop conceives of the sampled element as "constitut[ing] an originary identity," the repetition of which constructs "an absolute internal resemblance". Moreover, Platonic looping itself forms a kind of technologically-determinist feedback loop within which the electronic artist finds him- or herself caught. By analysing the way in which electronic artist Kaffe Matthews breaks free of the Platonic mode, Hainge identifies a more "improvisational and dynamic aesthetic" of looping. In "Making Data Flow: On the Implications of Code Loops", Adrian Mackenzie explores and typologises loops in computer code. He argues that computer code has become an object of intense interest in cultural life, perhaps because computer code is at least as generative of meaning as content is supposed to be. Loops are an integral part of the coding process, and are also an interesting way to investigate the generation of meaning through information flows. Mackenzie finds the distinguishing feature of code loops to be their bounding conditions. Different bounding conditions, of course, generate different information flows. Given this, flows can be adapted to different cultural purposes by writers, artists, and hackers interested in exploring different spatio-temporal manifolds. Andrew T. Jacobs, in "Appropriating a Slur: Semantic Looping in the African-American Usage of 'Nigga'", unravels the fascinating rhetorical process by which the highly charged epithet 'nigger' has been reclaimed as 'nigga' by African-Americans. Drawing on rhetorical analysis and African-American sociology, Jacobs argues that co-opting the slur has involved three looping mechanisms—agnominatio, semantic inversion, and chiastic slayingthemselves combined into a looping process which he calls "semantic looping". He concludes that the use of "nigga" is a resistance strategy that functions through both recalling and refuting racism. In "Loops and Fakes and Illusions", Keith Russell investigates the role loops play in the childhood development of social understanding. Not only do loops figure in development, but, as Russell's reading of D.W. Winnicott demonstrates, childhood development itself is a sustaining loop. Following John Dewey, Russell contends that perplexity is the source of intellectual development, and that children exercise their perplexity by puzzling over illusions based around loops. Russell explores how these illusions and fakes demonstrate the tensions and dynamics of social reality, concluding that playing with loops is a lifelong process. Cameron Brown's "Rep-tiles with Woven Horns" is the second of our special visual art features. The title of Brown's article is also the title of the image gracing the cover of this issue. The image itself is particularly suited to the "loop" issue because it is a fractal created by recursion. Brown's article describes the geometry and mathematics behind the image, providing a step-by step demonstration of its creation. We think that even non-mathematicians will follow the logic of the steps involved, and gain a deeper appreciation of both the power and elegance of recursion. As we must, we conclude the 'loop' issue much as we began it, exploring the links between agency and the generative power of the loop. Like Laurie Johnson, Luis O. Arata's "Creation by looping Interactions" questions the creative process involved in M.C. Escher's Drawing Hands, but imagines it as an animated process with two different outcomes. While one outcome is a closed loop—akin to the Platonic looping described by Hainge—generating only itself, the other is an open loop. Open loops, Arata contends, are a form of interaction, a powerful reflexive dialogue of participatory creation. He shows that cutting-edge science is finding the reflexive creativity of open loops to be increasingly important both to practice and theory, concluding that innovation is all the richer for it. Thus, one might say that Johnson and Arata each takes the role of one of the hands in the artwork they both analyse: Escher's Drawing Hands. Within that larger loop, smaller loops are described, and so, like Nietzsche, we find ourselves "insatiably calling out da capo" (56). References Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mitchell, Peta and Rintel, E. Sean. "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/editorial.php>. Chicago Style Mitchell, Peta and Rintel, E. Sean, "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/editorial.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Mitchell, Peta and Rintel, E. Sean. (2002) Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/editorial.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction This paper explores some specific conjunctions that tie together two nations, Japan and the Philippines. Over the past 30 years both have become entwined as a transfer of people, cultures and societies have connected and formed some interesting developments. Relations between both countries have been highly influenced through the deployment of State intervention (historically colonial and post-colonial), as well as through actors’ initiatives, leading to the development of a complex network that links both countries. It is in these relations that I would like to locate a transition between two stages in Japan-Philippine relations. I argue, this is a transition, where marriages of one kind (international marriages), the bonding of social actors from two distinct cultural spheres, gives way to another form of marriage. This transition locates the term marriage as part of an ongoing process and a discursive realm in a larger ‘affective complex’ that has developed. In this paper, I focus on this term ‘affective complex’ as it offers some interesting avenues in order to understand the continuing development of relations between Japan and the Philippines. By ‘affective complex’ I refer to the ‘cultural responses’ that people use in reaction to situations in which they find themselves which are not mediated by language. I suggest that this complex is a product of a specific encounter that exists between two nations as understood and mediated by Japanese actors’ positionings vis-à-vis foreign resident Filipinos. In tracing a moment between Japan and the Philippines, I delineate emerging properties that currently allude to a transition in relations between both countries. I would like to show that the properties of this transition are creating an emergent phenomena, a complex? This is developing through interactions between human actors whose trajectories as transnational migrants and permanent foreign residents are coming under the scrutiny of Japanese State forces in a heavily contested discursive field. This paper focuses upon the nature of the complex that entwines both countries and examines Japan’s particular restructuring of parts of its workforce in an attempt to include foreign migrants. To do this I first offer an outline of my fieldwork and then delineate the complex that ties both countries within present theoretical boundaries. This paper is based on fieldwork which deals with the theme of International Marriages between Japanese and Filipino couples. In the field I have observed the different ways in which Filipinos or Japanese with a connection to the Philippines orientate themselves within Japanese society vis-à-vis the Philippines. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus exclusively on a particular moment in my field: a care-giver course run privately with approval and recognition from local government. This course was offered exclusively for Filipino nationals with permanent residency and a high level of Japanese. As part of a larger field, a number of overlapping themes and patterns were present within the attitudes of those participating in the course. These were cultural responses that social actors carry with them which constitute part of an ‘affective complex’, its gradual emergence and unfolding. To further locate this fieldwork and its theoretical boundaries, I also position this research within current understandings of complexity. Chesters and Welsh have referred to a complex system as being a non-linear, non-deterministic system. However, from my perspective, these parameters are insufficient if institutions, organisations and human actors exhibit linear and deterministic properties (properties that discursively capture, locate and define elements in a system). In my research, I am dealing with actors, in this case Filipinos who are seen first as recipients and then as providers of welfare services. Japanese actors act as suppliers of a service both to long-term residents and to the State. In this case the following question arises: whose ‘complexes’ may be defined by a mixture of both these parameters and how can it be possible to take into account relationships whose existence cuts across them? Could a complex not be any number of these terrains which have emerged through encounters between two countries? Marriage could be a starting point for complexes that can come under scrutiny at a higher level, that of the State forces. In addition, a study of complexity in the Social Sciences focuses on how structures form rather than by focusing on any prior structured existence. Any focus on a complex system is to analyze holistic multiple elements in order to descriptively locate structures, what they penetrate, and what they are penetrated by. Human actors’ actions, strategies and expectations merge under the influence of these structures, while simultaneously influencing them. As elements interact, emergent phenomena (properties that emerge at a higher level) show a system that is process dependent, organic, and always evolving (Arthur 109). Locating Affect Deleuze and Guattari refined the discursive realm to emphasise how spaces of creation, dialogue and the casting of influence are affective, institutional and State-influenced. Within these spaces I locate the existence of ‘affective complexes’ which are discursively constructed and deployed by local actors. I will to argue that international marriages have laid a groundwork in which ‘affect’ itself has become a catalyst, re-orientating perceptions of and toward Filipinos. Following Deleuze, we can understand ‘affect’ as an intensity which, to repeat, is an expression of human relationships not mediated directly through language (Rodriguez). However, I want to suggest ‘affect’ also comes under the scrutiny of, and is discursively appealed to by, State forces as ‘affective capital’. When I refer to ‘affective capital’ I mean the potential labour discursively constructed. This construction is then “projected and tapped” in response to the changing nature of Japan’s labour market – in particular, the shortage of care-givers. This construction itself exists as an ongoing management strategy that deals with certain foreign nationals in Japan. Here, in response to the transformations of service work, ‘affective capital’ is the commoditised value of care inherent the discourse. It is the kernel of ‘affective labour’. This was very clear in my fieldwork, wherein Filipinos were targeted exclusively as the recipients of training in the health-care sector based on an understanding of the form of ‘affect’ that they possess. In this context, ‘affect’ adds intensity to meaning and is used in a wide range of cultural contexts, yet its very essence eludes description, especially when that essence as used by ‘active agents’ may be misconstrued in its deployment or discursively captured. Returning to the Deleuzian interpretation of ‘affect’, it could be interpreted as the outcome of encounters between actors and as such, a ‘mode’ in which becoming can initiate possibilities. I refer to ‘affect’, the deployment of shared, performed, communicated non-verbal ‘content’, as a powerful tool and an essential component in everyday habituated practice. In other areas of my field (not included in this discussion), ‘affect’ deployed by both actors, husband and wife, within and beyond the family, manifests itself as a mode of being. This at times adds to the location of actors’ intentions, be they spoken or performative. In this sense, locating the ‘affect’ in my research has meant observing the way in which Filipinos negotiate the availability of life strategies and opportunities available to them. At the same time, ‘affect’ is also produced by Japanese actors realigning themselves vis-à-vis both foreign actors and social change, as well as by effectuating strategies to emergent situations in Japan such as care management. ‘Affective capital’ is an inherent long-term strategy which has its roots in the cultural resources at the disposal of non-Japanese partners who, over the years, in the short and long term put to use discursively produced ‘affect’. ‘Affect’, produced in reactions to situations, encounters and events, can work in favour of long-term residents who do not have access to the same conditions Japanese may find in the labour sector. From encounters in my fieldwork, the location of ‘affect’ is an asset not just within immediate relationships, but as a possible expression of strategies that have arisen in response to the recognition of reactionary elements in Japanese society. By reactionary elements I refer to the way in which a complex may realign itself when ‘interfered’ with at another level, that of the State. The Japanese State is facing labour shortages in certain sectors due to social change, therefore they must secure other potential sources of labour. Appropriation of human resources locally available has become one Japanese State solution for this labour shortage. As such, ‘affect’ is brought into the capitalist fold in response to labor shortages in the Health Sector. Background The Philippines is a prime example of a nomad nation, where an estimated eight million of the population currently work or live overseas while remitting home (Phillippines Overseas Employment Agency). Post-colonial global conditions in the Asia Pacific region have seen the Philippines cater to external national situations in order to participate in the global labour market. These have been in the form of flows of labour and capital outsourced to those economies which are entangled with the Philippines. In this context, marriage between both countries has come to be made up almost exclusively of Japanese men with Filipina women (Suzuki). These marriages have created nascent partnerships that have formed links within homes in both countries and supported the creation of a complex system tying together both nations. Yet, in the entanglement of what seems to be two economies of desire, some interesting observations can be drawn from what I consider to be the by-products of these marriages. Yet what does this have to do with a marriage? First, I would like to put forward that certain international marriages may have developed within the above discursive framework and, in the case of the Philippines and Japan, defined certain characteristics that I will explain in more detail. Over the past 20 years, Filipinos who came to Japan on entertainment visas or through encounters with Japanese partners in the Philippines have deployed discursively constructed ‘affective capital’ in strategies to secure relationships and a position in both societies. These strategies may be interpreted as being knowledgeable, creative and possessive of the language necessary for negotiating long-term dialogues, not only with partners and surrounding family, but also with Japanese society. These deployments also function as an attempt to secure additional long term benefits which include strengthening ties to the Philippines through increasing a Japanese spouse’s involvement and interest in the Philippines. It is here that Filipinos’ ‘affect’ may be traced back to a previous deployment of categories that influences local Japanese actors’ decisions in offering a course exclusively for Filipino residents. This offers the first hint as to why only Filipinos were targeted. In Japan, secure permanent work for resident Filipinos can be, at times, difficult even when married to a partner with a stable income. The reality of remitting home to support family members and raising a family in Japan is a double burden which cannot be met solely by the spouse’s salary. This is an issue which means actors (in this case, partners) recourse to their ‘affective capital’ in order to secure means towards a livelihood. In this context, marriages have acted as a primary medium entangling both countries. Yet changes in Japan are re-locating ‘possible’ resources that are rationalised as a surplus from these primary encounters. Shifts in Japan’s social landscape have over the past 10 years led to an increasing awareness of the high stakes involved in care for the ageing and invalid in Japanese society. With over 21% of the population now over 65, the care industry has seen a surge in demand for labour, of which there is currently a shortfall (Statistics Bureau Japan). With the Philippines having strategically relocated its economy to accommodate demands for the outsourcing of health care workers and nurses overseas, Japan, realigning its economy to domestic change, has shown a new type of interest (albeit reluctant) in the Philippines. In 2005, changes and reforms to Japan’s Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act successfully curtailed the flow of Filipinos applying to Japan to work as entertainers. This was in part due to pressure from the interventionary power of the U.S: in 2006 the U.S. State department published the Trafficking in Persons Report, which stipulated that Japan had yet to comply in improving the situation of persons trafficked to Japan (U.S. State Department). This watershed reform has become a precursor to the Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement ratified by Japan and the Philippines to promote the ‘trans-border flow of goods, person, services and capital between Japan and the Philippines (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and has now temporarily realigned both economies into a new relationship. Under the terms ‘movement of natural persons’, Filipino candidates for qualified nurses and certified care workers would be allowed a stay of up to three years as nurses, or four for certified care workers (Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Nonetheless, this lip service in showing openness to admit a new category of Filipino is the continuation of a mode of ‘servicing’ within the Japanese nation, albeit under the guise of ‘care work’, and rests upon the capitalist rationalisation of hired workers for Japan’s tertiary sectors. The Philippines, a nation which is positively export-orientated in terms of its human resources in response to care inequalities that exist between nations at a global level (Parreñas 12-30), is now responding to the problematic issue of care that has become a serious concern in Japan. Fieldwork To place these issues in context I want to locate the above issues within a part of my present fieldwork. In 2006, I participated in a privately funded non-profit venture set up for Filipino residents with the aim of training them to be care-givers. The course was validated and acknowledged by the local prefectural government and primarily limited to a group of 20 participants who paid approximately sixty thousand yen ($485) for the three month course including training and text books. One Filipina acquaintance enthusiastically introduced me to the retired bank manager who had set up a fund for the three month care-giver course for Filipina residents. Through interviews with the course providers, one underlying theme in the planning of the course was clear: the core idea that Filipinos have a predisposition to care for the elderly, reflecting Filipino social values no longer existent in Japan. In particular, two Japanese words employed to reflect these views – ‘omoiyari’ (思いやり), meaning “compassion” or “considerateness” and ‘yasashisa’ (優しさ) meaning “kindness toward others” – were reiterated throughout the course as a requisite for dealing with the elderly or those in need of care. One core presupposition underlining the course was that the Philippines still cherishes values which are on the decline in Japan, offering a care ethos based on Christian values ready for deployment in such work. I believe this marks a transition point in how both countries’ relations are moving away from ‘entertainment-based’ care to ‘care within an institutional setting’, such as private nursing homes or hospitals. In both cases, ‘care’ (as it is ironically known in both industries, the deployment of hospitality and attendance), operates as a dynamic of desire within a social field which orientates how residents (i.e. foreign female residents with permanent residency) are used. Yet, why would the Philippines be such an attractor? It is not difficult to see how ‘affect’ is discursively rationalised and deployed and projected onto Philippine society. This ‘affect’ acts as an attractor and belongs to an ‘imagined’ cultural repertoire that Japan has created in response to its turbulent marriage to the Philippines. In this sense, the care course promoted this ‘caring affective side’ of Filipinas here in Japan, and provided a dynamic engagement for potential negotiation, persuasion and tension between ‘local actors’ (course providers and participants) who come under the direct remit of the Japanese State (care institutions, hospitals and nursing homes). I say “tension”, as to date only a handful (three women out of a total of sixty) of those who participated in the course have taken up employment in the care industry. As one participant, a divorcee, commented, the reluctance to seek work as a qualified care worker resided in an economic framework, she says: this is a useful investment, but I don’t know if I can do this work full time to live off and support my families…but it is another arrow in my bow if the situation changes. Yet, for another woman, care work was an extension of something that they were familiar with. She jokingly added with a sigh of resignation: Oh well, this is something we are used to, after all we did nothing but care for our papa-san (husband)! When I discussed these comments with an N.G.O. worker connected to the course she pessimistically summed up what she thought by saying: The problem of care in Japan was until very recently an issue of unpaid work that women have had to bear. In a sense, looking after the aged living at home has been a traditional way to treat people with respect. Yet, here in Japan we have experienced an excessively long period whereby it was de facto that when a woman married into someone’s family, she would care for the husband and his family. Now, this isn’t an individual problem anymore, it’s a societal one. Care is now becoming an institutional practice which is increasing paid work, yet the State works on the assumption that this is low paid work for people who have finished raising their children; hard labour for low wages. All the women have graduated and are licensed to work, yet at 1000 yen (U.S. $8) an hour for psychologically demanding hard labour they will not work, or start and finish realising the demands. Travelling between locations also is also unpaid, so at the most in one day they will work 2-3 hours. It is the worst situation possible for those who choose to work. The above opinion highlights the ambiguities that exist in the constant re-alignment of offering work to foreign residents in the effort to help integrate people into Japan’s tertiary ‘care sector’ in response to the crisis of a lack of manpower. To date most women who trained on this course have not pursued positions within the health sector. This indicates a resistance to the social beliefs that continue to categorise female foreign residents for gendered care work. Through three successive batches of students (sixty women in total) the president, staff and companies who participated in this pilot scheme have been introduced to Filipino residents in Japanese society. In one respect, this has been an opportunity for the course providers to face those who have worked, or continue to work at night. Yet, even this exposure does not reduce the hyper-feminisation of care; rather, it emphasises positions. One male coordinator brazenly mentioned the phrase ashi wo aratte hoshii, meaning ‘we want to give them a clean break’. This expression is pregnant with the connotation that these women have been involved in night work have done or still participate in. These categorisations still do not shake themselves free from previous classifications of female others located in Japanese society; the ongoing legacy that locates Filipinos in a feminised discursive space. As Butler has elucidated, ‘cultural inscriptions’ and ‘political forces with strategic interests’ work to keep the ‘body bounded and constituted’ (Butler 175). It is possible to see that this care course resides within a continuously produced genealogy that tries to constitute bodies. This resides under the rubric of a dominant fantasy that locates the Philippines in Japan as a source of caring and hospitality. Now, those here are relocated under a restructuring industry outsourcing work to those located in the lower tiers of the labour sector. Why other nationals have not been allowed to participate in the course is, I stress, a testimony to this powerful discourse. Major national and international media coverage of both the course and company and those women who found employment has also raised interest in the curious complex that has arisen from this dynamic, including a series of specials aired on Japanese television by NHK (NHK Kaigo no Jinzai ga Nigete iku). This is very reminiscent of a ‘citationary’ network where writings, news items and articles enter into a perpetuating relationship that foments and bolsters the building up of a body of work (Said) to portray Japan’s changing circumstances. As seen from a traced genealogy, initial entanglements between two nations, in conjunction with societal change in Japan, have created a specific moment in both countries’ trajectories. Here, we can see an emergent phenomena and the relocation of a discursive structure. An affective complex can be located that marks a shift in how foreign residents are perceived and on what terms they can participate or contribute to Japanese society. Within this structure, ‘care’ is relocated – or, rather, trapped – and extracted as labour surplus that resides in an antagonistic relationship of domination highlighting how a specific moment existing between two countries can be ‘structured’ by needs in the ‘engaging’ country, in this case Japan. Non-linear elements in a complex system that contest how discursive practices in Japanese society locate foreign residents, within the rubric of an ‘imagined’ ethos of compassion and kindness that emanates from outside of Japan, seem to display ‘affective’ qualities. Yet, are these not projected categories deployed to continue to locate migrant labour (be they permanent or temporary residents) within an ongoing matrix that defines what resources can be discursively produced? However, these categories do not take into account the diverse structures of experience that both Japanese nationals and Filipino nationals experience in Japan (Suzuki). Conclusion In this paper I have briefly delineated a moment which rests between specific trajectories that tie two nations. A complex of marriages brought about within a specific historic post-colonial encounter has contributed to feminising the Philippines: firstly, for women in marriages, and now secondly for ‘potential resources’ available to tackle societal problems in Japan. As I have argued a discursively produced ‘affective complex’ is an authorising source of otherness and could be part of a precursor complex which is now discursively relocating human resources within one country (Japan) as a ‘reluctant source’ of labour, while entering into a new discursive mode of production that shapes attitudes toward others. I also suggest that there is a very specific complex at work here which follows an as of yet faint trajectory that points to the re-organisation of a relationship between Japan and the Philippines. Yet, there are linear elements (macro-level forces rooted in the Japanese State’s approach to care vis-à-vis the Philippines) operating at the fundamental core of this care-giver course that are being constantly challenged and cut across by non-linear elements, that is, human actors and their ambivalence as the beneficiaries/practitioners of such practices. This is the continued feminisation of a highly gendered dynamic that locates labour as and when it sees fit, but through the willing coercion of local agents, with an interest in mediating services through and for the State, for the welfare of the Nation. The desiring-machine that brings together Japan and the Philippines is also one that continues to locate the potential in foreign actors located within Japan’s institutional interpellation for its care market. Within these newly emergent relationships, available political and social capital is being reshaped and imagined in reaction to social change in Japan. By exploring two entangled nations situated within global capitalist production in the twenty-first century, my research points towards new ways of looking at emerged complexes (international marriages) that precludes the reconfigurations of ongoing emerging complexes that discursively locate residents as caregivers, who fall under the jurisdiction and glare of political powers, government subjects and State forces. References Artur, W. Brian. “Complexity and the Economy.” Science 284.2 (1999): 107-109. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Chester, Graeme, and Ian Welsh. “Complexity and Social Movement(s): Process and Emergence in Planetary Action Systems.” Theory, Culture & Society 22.5 (2005): 187-211. Deleuze, Giles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Japan). Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement Press Statement. 29 Nov. 2004. 29 Mar. 2007 http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/philippine/joint0411.html>. NHK Kaigo no Jinzai ga Nigete iku. 介護の人材が逃げて行く (“Care Workers Are Fleeing.”) Televised 11 Mar. 2007. 29 Mar. 2007 http://www.nhk.or.jp/special/onair/070311.html>. Parreñas, Rachel Salazar. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. Philippines Overseas Employment Agency. “Stock Estimates of Filipinos Overseas.” 2 May 2007 http://www.poea.gov.ph/html/statistics.html>. Rodriguez, Encarnación Gutiérrez. “Reading Affect – On the Heterotopian Spaces of Care and Domestic Work in Private Households.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 8 (2007). 2 May 2007 http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/2-07/07-2-11-e.pdf>. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1995. Statistics Bureau and Statistical Research and Training Institute. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (Philippines). 2005. 2 May 2007 http://www.poea.gov.ph/docs/STOCK%20ESTIMATE%202004.xls>. Suzuki, Nobue. “Inside the Home: Power and Negotiation in Filipina-Japanese Marriages.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 33.4 (2004): 481-506. “Trafficking in Persons Report.” U.S. State Department. 2006. 29 Apr. 2007. http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/66086.pdf>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lopez, Mario. "From Bride to Care Worker?: On Complexes, Japan and the Philippines." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/04-lopez.php>. APA Style Lopez, M. (Jun. 2007) "From Bride to Care Worker?: On Complexes, Japan and the Philippines," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/04-lopez.php>.

In an increasingly globalised and networked world, to transmit is to exist. In a sense this has always been the case as transmitting is at the heart of human communication and works on many different levels, including information, knowledge, culture, language, and media. What has changed then is not so much the action of transmitting itself, but rather the speed of transmission, facilitated by increasingly sophisticated transmission tools and widening access to those tools. This in turn has major implications for the volume of transmissions and the ability or inability to process them. In this context of content overload and fierce competition for attention, to transmit effectively becomes vital, whether on a professional, personal, community or global level. The call for papers ‘blurb’ for this ‘transmit’ issue of M/C Journal was written thus, and we have deliberately reproduced it here to draw attention to the somewhat narrow boundaries it inadvertently set in terms of the expectations for the submission of articles for this issue. This initial ‘blurb’ – which could be called a genre of transmission itself – was then followed by an invitation for reflections on ‘transmit’ from all potential angles relating to media and culture. Despite this invitation, the majority of the surprisingly high number of submissions came from a decidedly new media angle, albeit in an excitingly wide variety of approaches. This is not to say that we are disappointed about that – far from it – it fits very well with the kind of journal that M/C has evolved into. However, it does draw attention to the unexpected ‘Chinese whispers’ that can occur between the point of transmission and the reception of what is transmitted, and some of the authors rightfully took us to task over that, which led to some useful self-reflection about the process of transmission. Unfortunately, not all of these authors are represented in this collection, as we had to make some difficult editorial decisions, but we are excited by the quality and creativity now ready for transmission. The cover image, for which we are indebted to the wonderful Miss Jay Paul, represents the continuity of human transmission through ever changing tools of transmission: from ancient rocks to graffiti walls to the ubiquitous blue sky that a certain software company uses to save screens. We have decided to leave the significance of the ants to the reader’s own imagination… What is transmitted then, as well as how the transmitted information is formed, underlines the themes of many of the articles here. Reasons for transmitting information and representations, and transmissions for communication and interpretation are dissected and reassembled. How boundaries are crossed, how new ones are created, and what it may mean when transmitted information is interpreted and misinterpreted, whether electronic or artistic discourses, are some of the important and timely questions and discussions raised. In our feature article, ‘SMS Riot: Transmitting Race on a Sydney Beach, December 2005’, Gerard Goggin discusses one of the most important ‘new’ tools of transmission, the mobile phone, and specifically the practice of ‘texting’. In relation to the Cronulla race riots, he provides some much needed reflection on what he calls a ‘mobile panic’ which followed the events at Cronulla, enthusiastically fanned by the mainstream media. Underlying this was of course a traditional technological determinist sense that the mobile phone itself had caused the riots. Goggin compares this to his current research into the role of mobile phones in the overthrow of the Estrada precidency in the Philippines, or what he calls a ‘coup d’text’. But where in Cronulla the power of texting caused panic, in the Philippines it was celebrated as giving ‘power to the people’. Rather than approaching it in these narrow terms however, Goggin argues that texting should be seen in a wider context and as part of a complex dynamic which combines media – including ‘old’ tools of transmission such as radio and newspapers – politics, culture and technology. Tony Sampson’s article, ‘Senders, Receivers and Deceivers: How Liar Codes Put Noise Back on the Diagram of Transmission’, explores the difficulty of reliability and the anxiety about the potential lack of human control in a web environment, or in some cases the fear of superior human control (in the case of viruses). ‘The ideal system for perpetual communication has also turned out to be the perfect medium for the codes designed to destroy it’. This of course implies human agency, but what causes the anxiety is the anarchic nature and behaviour of liar codes once released unto a networked medium, which by extension threatens the traditional ‘linear’ transmission models of sender-receiver. From a different angle, Danny Beusch’s article is also concerned with reliability on the web or perhaps the lack thereof: along with the creation of new connections, communications and cultures comes the transmitting of fabrications. In ‘Transmitting the Body in Online Interaction’ Beusch examines this falsifying of transmitted information to discuss the importance of what isn’t transmitted. The ability to, and the implications of, transmitting fabricated information and forms has present and future implications, that rely just as much on embodied interaction as disembodied. Beusch’s article examines the social and cultural implications of transmitting information and fabrications online in a way that reveals the continuing influence of “reality” in “play.” In ‘Scenes of Transmission: Youth Culture, MP3 File Sharing and Transferable Strategies of Cultural Practice’, Dale Bradley delves into how the transmission of online information and presentation contributes to cultural crossings and cultural formations. How online transmission not only transgresses cultural borders but develops new formations is a dynamic and current experience. Bradley also considers how it allows previously disconnected and different cultural groups to create new connections. In the same way that many of the other articles’ arguments can be transferred to the transmitting of information across all forms and texts, Bradley poses important questions for future collaborations and developments. Transmitting personal identity is an important part of creating new connections and collaborations in an online environment. In ‘Grid: On Being-as-Transmission and Normativity’, Robert Payne questions the notion that ‘the ease, instantaneity and virtuality of transmission on the Internet produces not rigid structure but flow – a revolutionary fluidity of global interaction but also of personal identity’. The central question (with reference to Judith Butler) is: ‘How can an “I” be transmitted effectively unless via a grid of legibility that regulates what is transmissible?” Payne explores ways for a movement towards an ethically sound fluidity of online identity which may guide us towards a ‘productive uncertainty of being off the grid’. Ben Isakhan, Jason Nelson and Patrick West, in their article, ‘creativity.com: Aladdin’s Cave or Pandora’s Box?’, raise questions about what the world wide web has meant and continues to mean for transmitting creativity, both the form and the message. While their article focuses on what can be transmitted online, their probing ideas can easily be transferred to other forms of creativity and their transmission: what constitutes that creativity and how it is transmitted, received, used and managed. In her article ‘Mapping the Narrative in a Digital Album Cover’, Patti Tsarouhis explores the contrast between analogue and digital transmission by focusing on the rituals involved with the consumption of packaged music. She argues that the traditional album cover and CD cover provide a catalyst to narrative activity on the part of the consumer, or in other words that they are objects to be transmitted, whereas the clickable digital icon is a transmission in itself. Martine Hawkes develops the idea of ‘play’ in artistic terms and how dominant connotations of art for transmitting information or presentations involve pleasure and entertainment. Yet according to Hawkes, art, as a transmitter of information, is as potent a form for history and justice as it is for artistic expression and enjoyment. Such transmitting, through art, can allow forms of communication that cannot be expressed in other ways. While other articles in this issue focus on new ways of transmitting, ‘Transmitting Genocide: Genocide and Art’ focuses more on, not so much ‘new’ but, ‘responsibility-based’ reasons or purposes to transmit. With a similar focus on transmission for socio-political purposes, Kate Milberry explores the Internet as a potential space for social activism. ‘Reconstructing the Internet: How Social Justice Activists Contest Technical Design in Cyberspace’ presents a vision for the future rather than an assessment of effectiveness. The emphasis is on technical design which Milberry sees as having the ability to create a space for an alternate vision of society. Megan Boler rounds this collection off with a discussion of satire as one way of transmitting political messages in a post-9/11 environment characterised by the paradox of tightly controlled ‘mainstream media’ and the informational ‘noise’ of the combined old and new media. Like many other articles in this issue, her central theme is concerned with reliability and effectiveness of communication which appear to be at the heart of transmission. We expect that the next issue of M/C Journal (‘collaborate’) will extent the ideas presented here by elaborating on the role of productive collaboration in the transmission process. Acknowledgements We thank Miss Jay Paul for her work on the cover image, and all the referees for their swift and insightful responses. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Huijser, Henk, and Brooke Collins-Gearing. "Transmit." M/C Journal 9.1 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Huijser, H., and B. Collins-Gearing. (Mar. 2006) "Transmit," M/C Journal, 9(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/01-editorial.php>.

There is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points it connects up, certain relatively free or unbounded points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. (Deleuze, “Foucault” 37) Monty Cantsin: Why do we use a pervert software robot to exploit our collective consensual mind? Letitia: Because we want the thief to be a digital entity. Monty Cantsin: But isn’t this really blasphemic? Letitia: Yes, but god – in our case a meta-cocktail of authorship and copyright – can not be trusted anymore. (Amazon Noir, “Dialogue”) In 2006, some 3,000 digital copies of books were silently “stolen” from online retailer Amazon.com by targeting vulnerabilities in the “Search inside the Book” feature from the company’s website. Over several weeks, between July and October, a specially designed software program bombarded the Search Inside!™ interface with multiple requests, assembling full versions of texts and distributing them across peer-to-peer networks (P2P). Rather than a purely malicious and anonymous hack, however, the “heist” was publicised as a tactical media performance, Amazon Noir, produced by self-proclaimed super-villains Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, and Ubermorgen.com. While controversially directed at highlighting the infrastructures that materially enforce property rights and access to knowledge online, the exploit additionally interrogated its own interventionist status as theoretically and politically ambiguous. That the “thief” was represented as a digital entity or machinic process (operating on the very terrain where exchange is differentiated) and the emergent act of “piracy” was fictionalised through the genre of noir conveys something of the indeterminacy or immensurability of the event. In this short article, I discuss some political aspects of intellectual property in relation to the complexities of Amazon Noir, particularly in the context of control, technological action, and discourses of freedom. Software, Piracy As a force of distribution, the Internet is continually subject to controversies concerning flows and permutations of agency. While often directed by discourses cast in terms of either radical autonomy or control, the technical constitution of these digital systems is more regularly a case of establishing structures of operation, codified rules, or conditions of possibility; that is, of guiding social processes and relations (McKenzie, “Cutting Code” 1-19). Software, as a medium through which such communication unfolds and becomes organised, is difficult to conceptualise as a result of being so event-orientated. There lies a complicated logic of contingency and calculation at its centre, a dimension exacerbated by the global scale of informational networks, where the inability to comprehend an environment that exceeds the limits of individual experience is frequently expressed through desires, anxieties, paranoia. Unsurprisingly, cautionary accounts and moral panics on identity theft, email fraud, pornography, surveillance, hackers, and computer viruses are as commonplace as those narratives advocating user interactivity. When analysing digital systems, cultural theory often struggles to describe forces that dictate movement and relations between disparate entities composed by code, an aspect heightened by the intensive movement of informational networks where differences are worked out through the constant exposure to unpredictability and chance (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning”). Such volatility partially explains the recent turn to distribution in media theory, as once durable networks for constructing economic difference – organising information in space and time (“at a distance”), accelerating or delaying its delivery – appear contingent, unstable, or consistently irregular (Cubitt 194). Attributing actions to users, programmers, or the software itself is a difficult task when faced with these states of co-emergence, especially in the context of sharing knowledge and distributing media content. Exchanges between corporate entities, mainstream media, popular cultural producers, and legal institutions over P2P networks represent an ongoing controversy in this respect, with numerous stakeholders competing between investments in property, innovation, piracy, and publics. Beginning to understand this problematic landscape is an urgent task, especially in relation to the technological dynamics that organised and propel such antagonisms. In the influential fragment, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze describes the historical passage from modern forms of organised enclosure (the prison, clinic, factory) to the contemporary arrangement of relational apparatuses and open systems as being materially provoked by – but not limited to – the mass deployment of networked digital technologies. In his analysis, the disciplinary mode most famously described by Foucault is spatially extended to informational systems based on code and flexibility. According to Deleuze, these cybernetic machines are connected into apparatuses that aim for intrusive monitoring: “in a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long” (“Control and Becoming” 175). Such a constant networking of behaviour is described as a shift from “molds” to “modulation,” where controls become “a self-transmuting molding changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (“Postscript” 179). Accordingly, the crisis underpinning civil institutions is consistent with the generalisation of disciplinary logics across social space, forming an intensive modulation of everyday life, but one ambiguously associated with socio-technical ensembles. The precise dynamics of this epistemic shift are significant in terms of political agency: while control implies an arrangement capable of absorbing massive contingency, a series of complex instabilities actually mark its operation. Noise, viral contamination, and piracy are identified as key points of discontinuity; they appear as divisions or “errors” that force change by promoting indeterminacies in a system that would otherwise appear infinitely calculable, programmable, and predictable. The rendering of piracy as a tactic of resistance, a technique capable of levelling out the uneven economic field of global capitalism, has become a predictable catch-cry for political activists. In their analysis of multitude, for instance, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe the contradictions of post-Fordist production as conjuring forth a tendency for labour to “become common.” That is, as productivity depends on flexibility, communication, and cognitive skills, directed by the cultivation of an ideal entrepreneurial or flexible subject, the greater the possibilities for self-organised forms of living that significantly challenge its operation. In this case, intellectual property exemplifies such a spiralling paradoxical logic, since “the infinite reproducibility central to these immaterial forms of property directly undermines any such construction of scarcity” (Hardt and Negri 180). The implications of the filesharing program Napster, accordingly, are read as not merely directed toward theft, but in relation to the private character of the property itself; a kind of social piracy is perpetuated that is viewed as radically recomposing social resources and relations. Ravi Sundaram, a co-founder of the Sarai new media initiative in Delhi, has meanwhile drawn attention to the existence of “pirate modernities” capable of being actualised when individuals or local groups gain illegitimate access to distributive media technologies; these are worlds of “innovation and non-legality,” of electronic survival strategies that partake in cultures of dispersal and escape simple classification (94). Meanwhile, pirate entrepreneurs Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleische – associated with the notorious Piratbyrn – have promoted the bleeding away of Hollywood profits through fully deployed P2P networks, with the intention of pushing filesharing dynamics to an extreme in order to radicalise the potential for social change (“Copies and Context”). From an aesthetic perspective, such activist theories are complemented by the affective register of appropriation art, a movement broadly conceived in terms of antagonistically liberating knowledge from the confines of intellectual property: “those who pirate and hijack owned material, attempting to free information, art, film, and music – the rhetoric of our cultural life – from what they see as the prison of private ownership” (Harold 114). These “unruly” escape attempts are pursued through various modes of engagement, from experimental performances with legislative infrastructures (i.e. Kembrew McLeod’s patenting of the phrase “freedom of expression”) to musical remix projects, such as the work of Negativland, John Oswald, RTMark, Detritus, Illegal Art, and the Evolution Control Committee. Amazon Noir, while similarly engaging with questions of ownership, is distinguished by specifically targeting information communication systems and finding “niches” or gaps between overlapping networks of control and economic governance. Hans Bernhard and Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com (meaning ‘Day after Tomorrow,’ or ‘Super-Tomorrow’) actually describe their work as “research-based”: “we not are opportunistic, money-driven or success-driven, our central motivation is to gain as much information as possible as fast as possible as chaotic as possible and to redistribute this information via digital channels” (“Interview with Ubermorgen”). This has led to experiments like Google Will Eat Itself (2005) and the construction of the automated software thief against Amazon.com, as process-based explorations of technological action. Agency, Distribution Deleuze’s “postscript” on control has proven massively influential for new media art by introducing a series of key questions on power (or desire) and digital networks. As a social diagram, however, control should be understood as a partial rather than totalising map of relations, referring to the augmentation of disciplinary power in specific technological settings. While control is a conceptual regime that refers to open-ended terrains beyond the architectural locales of enclosure, implying a move toward informational networks, data solicitation, and cybernetic feedback, there remains a peculiar contingent dimension to its limits. For example, software code is typically designed to remain cycling until user input is provided. There is a specifically immanent and localised quality to its actions that might be taken as exemplary of control as a continuously modulating affective materialism. The outcome is a heightened sense of bounded emergencies that are either flattened out or absorbed through reconstitution; however, these are never linear gestures of containment. As Tiziana Terranova observes, control operates through multilayered mechanisms of order and organisation: “messy local assemblages and compositions, subjective and machinic, characterised by different types of psychic investments, that cannot be the subject of normative, pre-made political judgments, but which need to be thought anew again and again, each time, in specific dynamic compositions” (“Of Sense and Sensibility” 34). This event-orientated vitality accounts for the political ambitions of tactical media as opening out communication channels through selective “transversal” targeting. Amazon Noir, for that reason, is pitched specifically against the material processes of communication. The system used to harvest the content from “Search inside the Book” is described as “robot-perversion-technology,” based on a network of four servers around the globe, each with a specific function: one located in the United States that retrieved (or “sucked”) the books from the site, one in Russia that injected the assembled documents onto P2P networks and two in Europe that coordinated the action via intelligent automated programs (see “The Diagram”). According to the “villains,” the main goal was to steal all 150,000 books from Search Inside!™ then use the same technology to steal books from the “Google Print Service” (the exploit was limited only by the amount of technological resources financially available, but there are apparent plans to improve the technique by reinvesting the money received through the settlement with Amazon.com not to publicise the hack). In terms of informational culture, this system resembles a machinic process directed at redistributing copyright content; “The Diagram” visualises key processes that define digital piracy as an emergent phenomenon within an open-ended and responsive milieu. That is, the static image foregrounds something of the activity of copying being a technological action that complicates any analysis focusing purely on copyright as content. In this respect, intellectual property rights are revealed as being entangled within information architectures as communication management and cultural recombination – dissipated and enforced by a measured interplay between openness and obstruction, resonance and emergence (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning” 52). To understand data distribution requires an acknowledgement of these underlying nonhuman relations that allow for such informational exchanges. It requires an understanding of the permutations of agency carried along by digital entities. According to Lawrence Lessig’s influential argument, code is not merely an object of governance, but has an overt legislative function itself. Within the informational environments of software, “a law is defined, not through a statue, but through the code that governs the space” (20). These points of symmetry are understood as concretised social values: they are material standards that regulate flow. Similarly, Alexander Galloway describes computer protocols as non-institutional “etiquette for autonomous agents,” or “conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system” (7). In his analysis, these agreed-upon standardised actions operate as a style of management fostered by contradiction: progressive though reactionary, encouraging diversity by striving for the universal, synonymous with possibility but completely predetermined, and so on (243-244). Needless to say, political uncertainties arise from a paradigm that generates internal material obscurities through a constant twinning of freedom and control. For Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, these Cold War systems subvert the possibilities for any actual experience of autonomy by generalising paranoia through constant intrusion and reducing social problems to questions of technological optimisation (1-30). In confrontation with these seemingly ubiquitous regulatory structures, cultural theory requires a critical vocabulary differentiated from computer engineering to account for the sociality that permeates through and concatenates technological realities. In his recent work on “mundane” devices, software and code, Adrian McKenzie introduces a relevant analytic approach in the concept of technological action as something that both abstracts and concretises relations in a diffusion of collective-individual forces. Drawing on the thought of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, he uses the term “transduction” to identify a key characteristic of technology in the relational process of becoming, or ontogenesis. This is described as bringing together disparate things into composites of relations that evolve and propagate a structure throughout a domain, or “overflow existing modalities of perception and movement on many scales” (“Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action” 201). Most importantly, these innovative diffusions or contagions occur by bridging states of difference or incompatibilities. Technological action, therefore, arises from a particular type of disjunctive relation between an entity and something external to itself: “in making this relation, technical action changes not only the ensemble, but also the form of life of its agent. Abstraction comes into being and begins to subsume or reconfigure existing relations between the inside and outside” (203). Here, reciprocal interactions between two states or dimensions actualise disparate potentials through metastability: an equilibrium that proliferates, unfolds, and drives individuation. While drawing on cybernetics and dealing with specific technological platforms, McKenzie’s work can be extended to describe the significance of informational devices throughout control societies as a whole, particularly as a predictive and future-orientated force that thrives on staged conflicts. Moreover, being a non-deterministic technical theory, it additionally speaks to new tendencies in regimes of production that harness cognition and cooperation through specially designed infrastructures to enact persistent innovation without any end-point, final goal or natural target (Thrift 283-295). Here, the interface between intellectual property and reproduction can be seen as a site of variation that weaves together disparate objects and entities by imbrication in social life itself. These are specific acts of interference that propel relations toward unforeseen conclusions by drawing on memories, attention spans, material-technical traits, and so on. The focus lies on performance, context, and design “as a continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration” (Thrift 295). This later point is demonstrated in recent scholarly treatments of filesharing networks as media ecologies. Kate Crawford, for instance, describes the movement of P2P as processual or adaptive, comparable to technological action, marked by key transitions from partially decentralised architectures such as Napster, to the fully distributed systems of Gnutella and seeded swarm-based networks like BitTorrent (30-39). Each of these technologies can be understood as a response to various legal incursions, producing radically dissimilar socio-technological dynamics and emergent trends for how agency is modulated by informational exchanges. Indeed, even these aberrant formations are characterised by modes of commodification that continually spillover and feedback on themselves, repositioning markets and commodities in doing so, from MP3s to iPods, P2P to broadband subscription rates. However, one key limitation of this ontological approach is apparent when dealing with the sheer scale of activity involved, where mass participation elicits certain degrees of obscurity and relative safety in numbers. This represents an obvious problem for analysis, as dynamics can easily be identified in the broadest conceptual sense, without any understanding of the specific contexts of usage, political impacts, and economic effects for participants in their everyday consumptive habits. Large-scale distributed ensembles are “problematic” in their technological constitution, as a result. They are sites of expansive overflow that provoke an equivalent individuation of thought, as the Recording Industry Association of America observes on their educational website: “because of the nature of the theft, the damage is not always easy to calculate but not hard to envision” (“Piracy”). The politics of the filesharing debate, in this sense, depends on the command of imaginaries; that is, being able to conceptualise an overarching structural consistency to a persistent and adaptive ecology. As a mode of tactical intervention, Amazon Noir dramatises these ambiguities by framing technological action through the fictional sensibilities of narrative genre. Ambiguity, Control The extensive use of imagery and iconography from “noir” can be understood as an explicit reference to the increasing criminalisation of copyright violation through digital technologies. However, the term also refers to the indistinct or uncertain effects produced by this tactical intervention: who are the “bad guys” or the “good guys”? Are positions like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (something like freedom or tyranny) so easily identified and distinguished? As Paolo Cirio explains, this political disposition is deliberately kept obscure in the project: “it’s a representation of the actual ambiguity about copyright issues, where every case seems to lack a moral or ethical basis” (“Amazon Noir Interview”). While user communications made available on the site clearly identify culprits (describing the project as jeopardising arts funding, as both irresponsible and arrogant), the self-description of the artists as political “failures” highlights the uncertainty regarding the project’s qualities as a force of long-term social renewal: Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com had daily shootouts with the global mass-media, Cirio continuously pushed the boundaries of copyright (books are just pixels on a screen or just ink on paper), Ludovico and Bernhard resisted kickback-bribes from powerful Amazon.com until they finally gave in and sold the technology for an undisclosed sum to Amazon. Betrayal, blasphemy and pessimism finally split the gang of bad guys. (“Press Release”) Here, the adaptive and flexible qualities of informatic commodities and computational systems of distribution are knowingly posited as critical limits; in a certain sense, the project fails technologically in order to succeed conceptually. From a cynical perspective, this might be interpreted as guaranteeing authenticity by insisting on the useless or non-instrumental quality of art. However, through this process, Amazon Noir illustrates how forces confined as exterior to control (virality, piracy, noncommunication) regularly operate as points of distinction to generate change and innovation. Just as hackers are legitimately employed to challenge the durability of network exchanges, malfunctions are relied upon as potential sources of future information. Indeed, the notion of demonstrating ‘autonomy’ by illustrating the shortcomings of software is entirely consistent with the logic of control as a modulating organisational diagram. These so-called “circuit breakers” are positioned as points of bifurcation that open up new systems and encompass a more general “abstract machine” or tendency governing contemporary capitalism (Parikka 300). As a consequence, the ambiguities of Amazon Noir emerge not just from the contrary articulation of intellectual property and digital technology, but additionally through the concept of thinking “resistance” simultaneously with regimes of control. This tension is apparent in Galloway’s analysis of the cybernetic machines that are synonymous with the operation of Deleuzian control societies – i.e. “computerised information management” – where tactical media are posited as potential modes of contestation against the tyranny of code, “able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control, not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to people’s real desires” (176). While pushing a system into a state of hypertrophy to reform digital architectures might represent a possible technique that produces a space through which to imagine something like “our” freedom, it still leaves unexamined the desire for reformation itself as nurtured by and produced through the coupling of cybernetics, information theory, and distributed networking. This draws into focus the significance of McKenzie’s Simondon-inspired cybernetic perspective on socio-technological ensembles as being always-already predetermined by and driven through asymmetries or difference. As Chun observes, consequently, there is no paradox between resistance and capture since “control and freedom are not opposites, but different sides of the same coin: just as discipline served as a grid on which liberty was established, control is the matrix that enables freedom as openness” (71). Why “openness” should be so readily equated with a state of being free represents a major unexamined presumption of digital culture, and leads to the associated predicament of attempting to think of how this freedom has become something one cannot not desire. If Amazon Noir has political currency in this context, however, it emerges from a capacity to recognise how informational networks channel desire, memories, and imaginative visions rather than just cultivated antagonisms and counterintuitive economics. As a final point, it is worth observing that the project was initiated without publicity until the settlement with Amazon.com. There is, as a consequence, nothing to suggest that this subversive “event” might have actually occurred, a feeling heightened by the abstractions of software entities. To the extent that we believe in “the big book heist,” that such an act is even possible, is a gauge through which the paranoia of control societies is illuminated as a longing or desire for autonomy. As Hakim Bey observes in his conceptualisation of “pirate utopias,” such fleeting encounters with the imaginaries of freedom flow back into the experience of the everyday as political instantiations of utopian hope. Amazon Noir, with all its underlying ethical ambiguities, presents us with a challenge to rethink these affective investments by considering our profound weaknesses to master the complexities and constant intrusions of control. It provides an opportunity to conceive of a future that begins with limits and limitations as immanently central, even foundational, to our deep interconnection with socio-technological ensembles. References “Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime.” http://www.amazon-noir.com/>. Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia, 1991. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Crawford, Kate. “Adaptation: Tracking the Ecologies of Music and Peer-to-Peer Networks.” Media International Australia 114 (2005): 30-39. Cubitt, Sean. “Distribution and Media Flows.” Cultural Politics 1.2 (2005): 193-214. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. ———. “Control and Becoming.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 169-176. ———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 177-182. Eriksson, Magnus, and Rasmus Fleische. “Copies and Context in the Age of Cultural Abundance.” Online posting. 5 June 2007. Nettime 25 Aug 2007. Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Harold, Christine. OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999. McKenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. ———. “The Strange Meshing of Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action.” Culture, Theory and Critique 47.2 (2006): 197-212. Parikka, Jussi. “Contagion and Repetition: On the Viral Logic of Network Culture.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 7.2 (2007): 287-308. “Piracy Online.” Recording Industry Association of America. 28 Aug 2007. http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php>. Sundaram, Ravi. “Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India.” Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain. Delhi, Sarai Media Lab, 2001. 93-99. http://www.sarai.net>. Terranova, Tiziana. “Communication beyond Meaning: On the Cultural Politics of Information.” Social Text 22.3 (2004): 51-73. ———. “Of Sense and Sensibility: Immaterial Labour in Open Systems.” DATA Browser 03 – Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. Ed. Joasia Krysa. New York: Autonomedia, 2006. 27-38. Thrift, Nigel. “Re-inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification.” Economy and Society 35.2 (2006): 279-306. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Dieter, Michael. "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>. APA Style Dieter, M. (Oct. 2007) "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>.

"Interactivity implies two agencies in conversation, playfully and spontaneously developing a mutual discourse" -- Sandy Stone (11) I. On Interactivity The difference between interactivity as it is performed across the page and the screen, maintains Sandy Stone, is that virtual texts and virtual communities can embody a play ethic (14). Inserted like a mutation into the corporate genome, play ruptures the encyclopaedic desire to follow seamless links to a buried 'meaning' and draws us back to the surface, back into real-time conversation with the machine. Hypertext theorists see this as a tactic of resistance to homogenisation. As we move across a hypertextual reading space, we produce the text in this unfolding now, choosing pathways which form a map in the space of our own memories: where we have been, where we are, where we might yet be. Play is occupying oneself with diversions. II. Space, Time and Composition Reading in time, we create the text in the space of our own memories. Hypertext theorists maintain that the choices we make around every corner, the spontaneity and contingency involved in these choices, are the bringing into being of a (constantly replaced) electronic palimpsest, a virtual geography. The dislocation which occurs as we engage in nodal leaps draws us back to the surface, rupturing our experience of the narrative and bringing us into a blissful experience of possibility. III. War against the Line There is the danger, on the one hand, of being subsumed by the passive subject position demanded by infotainment culture and the desire it encourages to seek the satisfaction of closure by following seamless links to a buried 'meaning'. On the other hand, we risk losing efficiency and control over the unfolding interaction by entering into an exchange which disorientates us with infinite potential. We cannot wildly destratify. The questions we ask must seek to keep the conversation open. In order to establish a new discursive territory within which to understand this relationship, we should view the interface not simply as a transparency which enables interaction with the machine as 'other', but as a text, a finely-wrought behavioural map which "exists at the intersection of political and ideological boundary lands" (Selfe & Selfe 1). As we write, so are we written by the linguistic contact zones of this terrain. Hypertext is thus a process involving the active translation of modes of being into possible becomings across the interface. The geographic 'space' we translate into a hypertext "is imaginational... . We momentarily extend the linear reading act into a third dimension when we travel a link" (Tolva 4). A literal spatial representation would break from the realm of hypertext and become a virtual reality. Thus, the geographic aspect is not inherent to the system itself but is partially translated into the geometry of the medium via our experience and perception (the 'map'), a process describing our 'line of flight' as we evolve in space. Directional flows between time and its traditional subordination to space in representation implode across the present-tense of the screen and time literally surfaces. Our experience of the constantly-replaced electronic palimpsest is one of temporal surrender: "we give in to time, we give way to time, we give in with time"(Joyce 219). In other words, the subject of hypertext subverts the traditional hierarchy and writes for space, producing the 'terrain' in the unfolding now in the Deleuzian sense, not in space as desired by the State. Johnson-Eilola aligns the experience of hypertext with the Deleuzian War Machine, a way of describing the speed and range of virtual movement created when the animal body splices into the realm of technology and opens an active plane of conflict.. The War Machine was invented by the nomads -- it operates by continual deterritorialisation in a tension-limit with State science, what we might call the command-control drive associated with geometric, dynamic thought and the sedentary culture of the Line. It "exemplifies" the avant-garde mentality that hypertext theorists have been associating with the electronic writing space (Moulthrop, "No War Machine" 1). Playing outside. The State desires an end to the resistance to totalisation promulgated by contingent thought and its thermodynamic relationship to space: the speed which assumes a probabilistic, vortical motion, actually drawing smooth space itself. The war machine is thus an open system opposed to classical mechanics via its grounding in active contingencies and spatio-temporal production. The nomad reads and writes for space, creating the temporal text in the space of her own memory, giving way to time and allowing existent points to lapse before the trajectory of flight. Nomad thought is not dependent on any given theory of relationship with the medium, but works via disruption and (re)distribution, the gaps, stutterings and gasp-like expressions experienced when we enter into conversation with the hypertext. The danger is that the war machine might be appropriated by the State, at which point this light-speed communication becomes of the utmost importance in the war against space and time. As speed and efficient retrieval replace real-space across the instantaneity and immediacy of the terminal, the present-time sensory faculties of the individual are marginalised as incidental and she becomes "the virtual equivalent of the well-equipped invalid" (Virilio 5). In other words, as the frame of real-space and present-time disappears, the text of the reader/writer becomes "sutured" into the discourse of the State, the only goal to gain "complete speed, to cover territory in order for the State to subdivide and hold it through force, legislation or consent" (Virilio, qtd. in Johnson-Eilola). This is when the predetermined geometry of hypertext becomes explicit. The progressive subsumption (or "suturing") of the multiple, nomadic self into the discourse of the computer occurs when "the terms of the narrative are heightened, as each 'node' in the hypertext points outwards to other nodes [and] readers must compulsively follow links to arrive at the 'promised plenitude' at the other end of the link" (Johnson-Eilola 391). When we no longer reflect on the frame and move towards complete speed and efficiency, when we stop playing on the surface and no longer concern ourselves with diversion, the war machine has been appropriated by the State. In this case, there is no revolutionary 'outside' to confront in interaction, as all has been marshalled towards closure. Keeping the conversation open means continuously reflecting on the frame. We cannot wildly destratify and lose control entirely by moving in perpetual bewilderment, but we can see the incompleteness of the story, recognising the importance of local gaps and spaces. We can work with the idea that the "dyad of smooth/striated represents not a dialectic but a continuum" (Moulthrop, "Rhizome" 317) that can be turned more complex in its course. Contingency and play reside in the intermezzo, the "dangerous edges, fleeting, attempting to write across the boundaries between in-control and out-of-control" (Johnson-Eilola 393). The war machine exists as at once process and product, the translation between smooth-striated moving in potentia: the nomadic consciousness can recognise this process and live flux as reality itself, or consistency. In sum, we avoid subsumption and appropriation by holding open the function of the text as process in our theorising, in our teaching, in our reading and writing across the hypertextual environment. We can either view hypertext as a tool or product which lends itself to efficient, functional use (to organise information, to control and consume in an encyclopaedic fashion), or we can view it as a process which lends itself to nomadic thought and resistance to totalisation in syncopated flows, in cybernetic fits and starts. This is our much-needed rhetoric of activity. IV. An Alternative Story No matter their theoretical articulation, such claims made for hypertext are fundamentally concerned with escaping the logocentric geometry of regulated time and space. Recent explorations deploying the Deleuzian smooth/striated continuum make explicit the fact that the enemy in this literary 'war' has never been the Line or linearity per se, but "the nonlinear perspective of geometry; not the prison-house of time but the fiction of transcendence implied by the indifferent epistemological stance toward time" (Rosenberg 276). Although the rhizome, the war machine, the cyborg and the nomad differ in their particularities and composition, they all explicitly play on the dislocated, time-irreversible processes of chaos theory, thermodynamics and associated 'liberatory' topological perspectives. Rosenberg's essay makes what I consider to be a very disruptive point: hypertext merely simulates the 'smooth', contingent thought seen to be antithetical to regulated space-time and precise causality due to its fundamental investment in a regulated, controlled and (pre)determined geometry. Such a deceptively smooth landscape is technonarcissistic in that its apparent multiplicity actually prescribes to a totality of command-control. Hypertext theorists have borrowed the terms 'multilinear', 'nonlinear' and 'contingency' from physics to articulate hypertext's resistance to the dominant determinist episteme, a framework exemplified by the term 'dynamics', opposing it to "the irreversible laws characteristic of statistical approximations that govern complex events, exemplified by the term, 'thermodynamics'" (Rosenberg 269). This resistance to the time-reversible, non-contingent and totalised worldview has its ideological origins in the work of the avant-garde. Hypertext theorists are fixated with quasi-hypertextual works that were precursors to the more 'explicitly' revolutionary texts in the electronic writing space. In the works of the avant-garde, contingency is associated with creative freedom and subversive, organic logic. It is obsessively celebrated by the likes of Pynchon, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage. Hypertext theorists have reasoned from this that 'nonlinear' or 'multilinear' access to information is isomorphic with such playful freedom and its contingent, associative leaps. Theorists align this nonsequential reasoning with a certain rogue logic: the 'fluid nature of thought itself' exemplified by the explicitly geographic relationship to space-time of the Deleuzian rhizome and the notion of contingent, probabilistic 'becomings'. Hypertext participates fully in the spatio-temporal dialectic of the avant-garde. As Moulthrop observes, the problem with this is that from a topological perspective, 'linear' and 'multilinear' are identical: "lines are still lines, logos and not nomos, even when they are embedded in a hypertextual matrix" ("Rhizome" 310). The spatio-temporal dislocations which enable contingent thought and 'subversive' logic are simply not sustained through the reading/writing experience. Hypertextual links are not only reversible in time and space, but trace a detached path through functional code, each new node comprising a carefully articulated behavioural 'grammar' that the reader adjusts to. To assume that by following 'links' and engaging in disruptive nodal leaps a reader night be resisting the framework of regulated space-time and determinism is "to ignore how, once the dislocation occurs, a normalcy emerges ... as the hypertext reader acclimates to the new geometry or new sequence of lexias" (Rosenberg 283). Moreover, the searchpath maps which earlier theorists had sensed were antithetical to smooth space actually exemplify the element of transcendent control readers have over the text as a whole. "A reader who can freeze the text, a reader who is aware of a Home button, a reader who can gain an instant, transcendent perspective of the reading experience, domesticates contingencies" (Rosenberg 275). The visual and behavioural grammar of hypertext is one of transcendent control and determined response. Lines are still lines -- regulated, causal and not contingent -- even when they are 'constructed' by an empowered reader. Hypertext is thus invested (at least in part) in a framework of regularity, control and precise function. It is inextricably a part of State apparatus. The problem with this is that the War Machine, which best exemplifies the avant-garde's insurgency against sedentary culture, must be exterior to the State apparatus and its regulated grid at all times. "If we acknowledge this line of critique (which I think we must), then we must seriously reconsider any claims about hypertext fiction as War Machine, or indeed as anything en avant" (Moulthrop, "No War Machine" 5). Although hypertext is not revolutionary, it would be the goal of any avant-garde use of hypertext to find a way to sustain the experience of dislocation that would indicate liberation from the hegemony of geometry. I would like to begin to sketch the possibility of 'contingent interaction' through the dislocations inherent to alternative interfaces later in this story. For the time being, however, we must reassess all our liberation claims. If linearity and multilinearity are identical in terms of geometric relations to space-time, "why should they be any different in terms of ideology", asks Moulthrop ("Rhizome" 310). V. On Interactivity Given Rosenberg's critique against any inherently revolutionary qualities, we must acknowledge that hypermedia "marks not a terminus but a transition," Moulthrop writes ("Rhizome" 317). As a medium of exchange it is neither smooth nor striated, sophist nor socratic, 'work' nor 'text': it is undergoing an increasingly complex phase transition between such states. This landscape also gives rise to stray flows and intensities, 'Unspecified Enemies' which exist at the dangerous fissures and edges. We must accept that we will never escape the system, but we are presented with opportunities to rock the sedentary order from within. As a group of emerging electronic artists see it, the dis-articulation of the point'n'click interface is where interaction becomes reflection on the frame in fits and starts. "We believe that the computer, like everything else, is composed in conflict," explain the editors of electronic magazine I/O/D. "If we are locked in with the military and with Disney, they are locked in not just with us, but with every other stray will-to-power" (Fuller, Interview 2). Along with Adelaide-based group Mindflux, these artists produce hypertext interfaces that involve sensory apparatus and navigational skills that have been marginalised as incidental in the disabling interactive technologies of mainstream multimedia. Sound, movement, proprioception, an element of randomness and assorted other sensory circuits become central to the navigational experience. By enlisting marginalised senses, "we are not proposing to formulate a new paradigm of multimedial correctness," stresses Fuller, "but simply exploring the possibility of more complicated feedback arrangements between the user and the machine" (Fuller, qtd. in Barnet 48). The reader must encounter the 'lexias' contained in the system via the stray flows, intensities, movements, stratas and organs that are not proper to the system but shift across the interface and the surface of her body. In Fuller's electronic magazine, the reader is called upon to converse with the technology outside of the domesticated circuits of sight, dislocating the rigorous hierarchy of feedback devices which privilege the sight-machine and disable contingent interaction in a technonarcissistic fashion. The written information is mapped across a 'fuzzy' sound-based interface, sensitive at every moment to the smallest movements of the reader's fingers on the keys and mouse: the screen itself is black, its swarm of links and hotspots dead to the eye. The reader's movements produce different bleeps and beats, each new track opening different entrances and exits through the information in dependence upon the fluctuating pitch and tempo of her music. Without the aid of searchpaths and bright links, she must move in a state of perpetual readjustment to the technology, attuned not to the information stored behind the interface, but to the real-time sounds her movements produce. What we are calling play, Fuller explains, "is the difference between something that has a fixed grammar on the one hand and something that is continually and openly inventing its own logic on the other" (Fuller & Pope 4). The electronic writing space is not inherently liberatory, and the perpetual process of playing with process across the interface works to widen the 'fissures across the imperium' only for a moment. According to Fuller and Joyce, the 'process of playing with process' simply means complicating the feedback arrangements between the user's body and the machine. "We need to find a way of reading sensually ... rather than, as the interactive artist Graham Weinbren puts it, descending 'into the pit of so-called multimedia, with its scenes of unpleasant 'hotspots,' and 'menus' [that] leaves no room for the possibility of a loss of self, of desire in relation to the unfolding'" remarks Joyce (11). Interactivity which calls upon a mind folded everywhere within the body dislocates the encyclopaedic organisation of data that "preserves a point of privilege from where the eye can frame objects" by enlisting itinerant, diffuse desires in an extended period of readjustment to technology (Fuller & Pope 3). There are no pre-ordained or privileged feedback circuits as the body is seen to comprise a myriad possible elements or fragments of a desiring-machine with the potential to disrupt the flow, to proliferate. Mainstream multimedia's desire for 'informational hygiene' would have us transcend this embodied flux and bureaucratise the body into organs. Information is fed through the circuits of sight in a Pavlovian field of buttons and bright links: interactivity is misconceived as choice-making, when 'response' is a more appropriate concept. When the diffuse desire which thrives on disruption and alternative paradigms is written out in favour of informational hygiene, speed and efficient retrieval replace embodied conversation. "Disembodied [interaction] of this kind is always a con... . The entropic, troublesome flesh that is sloughed off in these fantasies of strongly male essentialism is interwoven with the dynamics of self-processing cognition and intentionality. We see computers as embodied culture, hardwired epistemology" (Fuller 2). Avant-garde hypertext deepens the subjective experience of the human-computer interface: it inscribes itself across the diffuse, disruptive desires of the flesh. Alternative interfaces are not an ideological overhaul enabled by the realm of technê, but a space for localised break-outs across the body. Bifurcations are enacted on the micro level by desiring-machines, across an interface which seeks to dislocate intentionality in conjunction with the marginalised sensory apparatus of the reader, drawing other minds, other organs into localised conversation with command-control. "The user learns kinesthetically and proprioceptively that the boundaries of self are defined less by the skin than by the [local] feedback loops connecting body and simulation in a techno-bio-integrated circuit" (Hayles 72). She oscillates between communication and control, play and restraint: not a nomad but a "human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms" (ATP, 422). VI. Desire Working from across the territory we have covered, we might say that electronic interaction 'liberates' us from neither the Line nor the flesh: at its most experimental, it is nothing less than reading embodied. References Barnet, Belinda. "Storming the Interface: Mindvirus, I/O/D and Deceptive Interaction." Artlink: Australian Contemporary Art Quarterly 17:4 (1997). Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Fuller, Matt and Simon Pope. "Warning: This Computer Has Multiple Personality Disorder." 1993. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.altx.com/wordbombs/popefuller.php>. ---, eds. I/O/D2. Undated. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.pHreak.co.uk/i_o_d/>. Hayles, Katherine N. "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" October Magazine 66 (Fall 1993): 69-91. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. "Control and the Cyborg: Writing and Being Written in Hypertext." Journal of Advanced Composition 13:2 (1993): 381-99. Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext, Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Moulthrop, Stuart. "No War Machine." 1997. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/essays/war_machine.php>. ---. "Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 299-319. Rosenberg, Martin E. "Physics and Hypertext: Liberation and Complicity in Art and Pedagogy." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 268-298. Selfe, Cynthia L., and Richard J. Selfe. "The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones." College Composition and Communication 45.4: 480-504. Stone, Allucquére Roseanne. The War of Desire and Technology. London: MIT Press, 1996. Tolva, John. "Ut Pictura Hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital Word." 1993. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.cs.unc.edu/~barman/HT96/P43/pictura.htm>. Virilio, Paul. "The Third Interval: A Critical Transition." Rethinking Technologies. Ed. Verena Conley. London: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 3-12. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Belinda Barnet. "In the Garden of Forking Paths: Contingency, Interactivity and Play in Hypertext." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php>. Chicago style: Belinda Barnet, "In the Garden of Forking Paths: Contingency, Interactivity and Play in Hypertext," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Belinda Barnet. (1998) In the garden of forking paths: contingency, interactivity and play in hypertext. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Figure 1 The counter-Terrorism advertising campaign of London’s Metropolitan Police commodifies some everyday items such as mobile phones, computers, passports and credit cards as having the potential to sustain terrorist activities. The process of ascribing cultural values and symbolic meanings to some everyday technical gadgets objectifies and situates Terrorism into the everyday life. The police, in urging people to look out for ‘the unusual’ in their normal day-to-day lives, juxtapose the everyday with the unusual, where day-to-day consumption, routines and flows of human activity can seemingly house insidious and atavistic elements. This again is reiterated in the Met police press release: Terrorists live within our communities making their plans whilst doing everything they can to blend in, and trying not to raise suspicions about their activities. (MPA Website) The commodification of Terrorism through uncommon and everyday objects situates Terrorism as a phenomenon which occupies a liminal space within the everyday. It resides, breathes and co-exists within the taken-for-granted routines and objects of ‘the everyday’ where it has the potential to explode and disrupt without warning. Since 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings Terrorism has been narrated through the disruption of mobility, whether in mid-air or in the deep recesses of the Underground. The resonant thread of disruption to human mobility evokes a powerful meta-narrative where acts of Terrorism can halt human agency amidst the backdrop of the metropolis, which is often a metaphor for speed and accelerated activities. If globalisation and the interconnected nature of the world are understood through discourses of risk, Terrorism bears the same footprint in urban spaces of modernity, narrating the vulnerability of the human condition in an inter-linked world where ideological struggles and resistance are manifested through inexplicable violence and destruction of lives, where the everyday is suspended to embrace the unexpected. As a consequence ambient fear “saturates the social spaces of everyday life” (Hubbard 2). The commodification of Terrorism through everyday items of consumption inevitably creates an intertextuality with real and media events, which constantly corrode the security of the metropolis. Paddy Scannell alludes to a doubling of place in our mediated world where “public events now occur simultaneously in two different places; the place of the event itself and that in which it is watched and heard. The media then vacillates between the two sites and creates experiences of simultaneity, liveness and immediacy” (qtd. in Moores 22). The doubling of place through media constructs a pervasive environment of risk and fear. Mark Danner (qtd. in Bauman 106) points out that the most powerful weapon of the 9/11 terrorists was that innocuous and “most American of technological creations: the television set” which provided a global platform to constantly replay and remember the dreadful scenes of the day, enabling the terrorist to appear invincible and to narrate fear as ubiquitous and omnipresent. Philip Abrams argues that ‘big events’ (such as 9/11 and 7/7) do make a difference in the social world for such events function as a transformative device between the past and future, forcing society to alter or transform its perspectives. David Altheide points out that since September 11 and the ensuing war on terror, a new discourse of Terrorism has emerged as a way of expressing how the world has changed and defining a state of constant alert through a media logic and format that shapes the nature of discourse itself. Consequently, the intensity and centralisation of surveillance in Western countries increased dramatically, placing the emphasis on expanding the forms of the already existing range of surveillance processes and practices that circumscribe and help shape our social existence (Lyon, Terrorism 2). Normalisation of Surveillance The role of technologies, particularly information and communication technologies (ICTs), and other infrastructures to unevenly distribute access to the goods and services necessary for modern life, while facilitating data collection on and control of the public, are significant characteristics of modernity (Reiman; Graham and Marvin; Monahan). The embedding of technological surveillance into spaces and infrastructures not only augment social control but also redefine data as a form of capital which can be shared between public and private sectors (Gandy, Data Mining; O’Harrow; Monahan). The scale, complexity and limitations of omnipresent and omnipotent surveillance, nevertheless, offer room for both subversion as well as new forms of domination and oppression (Marx). In surveillance studies, Foucault’s analysis is often heavily employed to explain lines of continuity and change between earlier forms of surveillance and data assemblage and contemporary forms in the shape of closed-circuit television (CCTV) and other surveillance modes (Dee). It establishes the need to discern patterns of power and normalisation and the subliminal or obvious cultural codes and categories that emerge through these arrangements (Fopp; Lyon, Electronic; Norris and Armstrong). In their study of CCTV surveillance, Norris and Armstrong (cf. in Dee) point out that when added to the daily minutiae of surveillance, CCTV cameras in public spaces, along with other camera surveillance in work places, capture human beings on a database constantly. The normalisation of surveillance, particularly with reference to CCTV, the popularisation of surveillance through television formats such as ‘Big Brother’ (Dee), and the expansion of online platforms to publish private images, has created a contradictory, complex and contested nature of spatial and power relationships in society. The UK, for example, has the most developed system of both urban and public space cameras in the world and this growth of camera surveillance and, as Lyon (Surveillance) points out, this has been achieved with very little, if any, public debate as to their benefits or otherwise. There may now be as many as 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain (cf. Lyon, Surveillance). That is one for every fourteen people and a person can be captured on over 300 cameras every day. An estimated £500m of public money has been invested in CCTV infrastructure over the last decade but, according to a Home Office study, CCTV schemes that have been assessed had little overall effect on crime levels (Wood and Ball). In spatial terms, these statistics reiterate Foucault’s emphasis on the power economy of the unseen gaze. Michel Foucault in analysing the links between power, information and surveillance inspired by Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon, indicated that it is possible to sanction or reward an individual through the act of surveillance without their knowledge (155). It is this unseen and unknown gaze of surveillance that is fundamental to the exercise of power. The design and arrangement of buildings can be engineered so that the “surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (Foucault 201). Lyon (Terrorism), in tracing the trajectory of surveillance studies, points out that much of surveillance literature has focused on understanding it as a centralised bureaucratic relationship between the powerful and the governed. Invisible forms of surveillance have also been viewed as a class weapon in some societies. With the advancements in and proliferation of surveillance technologies as well as convergence with other technologies, Lyon argues that it is no longer feasible to view surveillance as a linear or centralised process. In our contemporary globalised world, there is a need to reconcile the dialectical strands that mediate surveillance as a process. In acknowledging this, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have constructed surveillance as a rhizome that defies linearity to appropriate a more convoluted and malleable form where the coding of bodies and data can be enmeshed to produce intricate power relationships and hierarchies within societies. Latour draws on the notion of assemblage by propounding that data is amalgamated from scattered centres of calculation where these can range from state and commercial institutions to scientific laboratories which scrutinise data to conceive governance and control strategies. Both the Latourian and Deleuzian ideas of surveillance highlight the disparate arrays of people, technologies and organisations that become connected to make “surveillance assemblages” in contrast to the static, unidirectional Panopticon metaphor (Ball, “Organization” 93). In a similar vein, Gandy (Panoptic) infers that it is misleading to assume that surveillance in practice is as complete and totalising as the Panoptic ideal type would have us believe. Co-optation of Millions The Metropolitan Police’s counter-Terrorism strategy seeks to co-opt millions where the corporeal body can complement the landscape of technological surveillance that already co-exists within modernity. In its press release, the role of civilian bodies in ensuring security of the city is stressed; Keeping Londoners safe from Terrorism is not a job solely for governments, security services or police. If we are to make London the safest major city in the world, we must mobilise against Terrorism not only the resources of the state, but also the active support of the millions of people who live and work in the capita. (MPA Website). Surveillance is increasingly simulated through the millions of corporeal entities where seeing in advance is the goal even before technology records and codes these images (William). Bodies understand and code risk and images through the cultural narratives which circulate in society. Compared to CCTV technology images, which require cultural and political interpretations and interventions, bodies as surveillance organisms implicitly code other bodies and activities. The travel bag in the Metropolitan Police poster reinforces the images of the 7/7 bombers and the renewed attempts to bomb the London Underground on the 21st of July. It reiterates the CCTV footage revealing images of the bombers wearing rucksacks. The image of the rucksack both embodies the everyday as well as the potential for evil in everyday objects. It also inevitably reproduces the cultural biases and prejudices where the rucksack is subliminally associated with a specific type of body. The rucksack in these terms is a laden image which symbolically captures the context and culture of risk discourses in society. The co-optation of the population as a surveillance entity also recasts new forms of social responsibility within the democratic polity, where privacy is increasingly mediated by the greater need to monitor, trace and record the activities of one another. Nikolas Rose, in discussing the increasing ‘responsibilisation’ of individuals in modern societies, describes the process in which the individual accepts responsibility for personal actions across a wide range of fields of social and economic activity as in the choice of diet, savings and pension arrangements, health care decisions and choices, home security measures and personal investment choices (qtd. in Dee). While surveillance in individualistic terms is often viewed as a threat to privacy, Rose argues that the state of ‘advanced liberalism’ within modernity and post-modernity requires considerable degrees of self-governance, regulation and surveillance whereby the individual is constructed both as a ‘new citizen’ and a key site of self management. By co-opting and recasting the role of the citizen in the age of Terrorism, the citizen to a degree accepts responsibility for both surveillance and security. In our sociological imagination the body is constructed both as lived as well as a social object. Erving Goffman uses the word ‘umwelt’ to stress that human embodiment is central to the constitution of the social world. Goffman defines ‘umwelt’ as “the region around an individual from which signs of alarm can come” and employs it to capture how people as social actors perceive and manage their settings when interacting in public places (252). Goffman’s ‘umwelt’ can be traced to Immanuel Kant’s idea that it is the a priori categories of space and time that make it possible for a subject to perceive a world (Umiker-Sebeok; qtd. in Ball, “Organization”). Anthony Giddens adapted the term Umwelt to refer to “a phenomenal world with which the individual is routinely ‘in touch’ in respect of potential dangers and alarms which then formed a core of (accomplished) normalcy with which individuals and groups surround themselves” (244). Benjamin Smith, in considering the body as an integral component of the link between our consciousness and our material world, observes that the body is continuously inscribed by culture. These inscriptions, he argues, encompass a wide range of cultural practices and will imply knowledge of a variety of social constructs. The inscribing of the body will produce cultural meanings as well as create forms of subjectivity while locating and situating the body within a cultural matrix (Smith). Drawing on Derrida’s work, Pugliese employs the term ‘Somatechnics’ to conceptualise the body as a culturally intelligible construct and to address the techniques in and through which the body is formed and transformed (qtd. in Osuri). These techniques can encompass signification systems such as race and gender and equally technologies which mediate our sense of reality. These technologies of thinking, seeing, hearing, signifying, visualising and positioning produce the very conditions for the cultural intelligibility of the body (Osuri). The body is then continuously inscribed and interpreted through mediated signifying systems. Similarly, Hayles, while not intending to impose a Cartesian dichotomy between the physical body and its cognitive presence, contends that the use and interactions with technology incorporate the body as a material entity but it also equally inscribes it by marking, recording and tracing its actions in various terrains. According to Gayatri Spivak (qtd. in Ball, “Organization”) new habits and experiences are embedded into the corporeal entity which then mediates its reactions and responses to the social world. This means one’s body is not completely one’s own and the presence of ideological forces or influences then inscribe the body with meanings, codes and cultural values. In our modern condition, the body and data are intimately and intricately bound. Outside the home, it is difficult for the body to avoid entering into relationships that produce electronic personal data (Stalder). According to Felix Stalder our physical bodies are shadowed by a ‘data body’ which follows the physical body of the consuming citizen and sometimes precedes it by constructing the individual through data (12). Before we arrive somewhere, we have already been measured and classified. Thus, upon arrival, the citizen will be treated according to the criteria ‘connected with the profile that represents us’ (Gandy, Panoptic; William). Following September 11, Lyon (Terrorism) reveals that surveillance data from a myriad of sources, such as supermarkets, motels, traffic control points, credit card transactions records and so on, was used to trace the activities of terrorists in the days and hours before their attacks, confirming that the body leaves data traces and trails. Surveillance works by abstracting bodies from places and splitting them into flows to be reassembled as virtual data-doubles, and in the process can replicate hierarchies and centralise power (Lyon, Terrorism). Mike Dee points out that the nature of surveillance taking place in modern societies is complex and far-reaching and in many ways insidious as surveillance needs to be situated within the broadest context of everyday human acts whether it is shopping with loyalty cards or paying utility bills. Physical vulnerability of the body becomes more complex in the time-space distanciated surveillance systems to which the body has become increasingly exposed. As such, each transaction – whether it be a phone call, credit card transaction, or Internet search – leaves a ‘data trail’ linkable to an individual person or place. Haggerty and Ericson, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage, describe the convergence and spread of data-gathering systems between different social domains and multiple levels (qtd. in Hier). They argue that the target of the generic ‘surveillance assemblage’ is the human body, which is broken into a series of data flows on which surveillance process is based. The thrust of the focus is the data individuals can yield and the categories to which they can contribute. These are then reapplied to the body. In this sense, surveillance is rhizomatic for it is diverse and connected to an underlying, invisible infrastructure which concerns interconnected technologies in multiple contexts (Ball, “Elements”). The co-opted body in the schema of counter-Terrorism enters a power arrangement where it constitutes both the unseen gaze as well as the data that will be implicated and captured in this arrangement. It is capable of producing surveillance data for those in power while creating new data through its transactions and movements in its everyday life. The body is unequivocally constructed through this data and is also entrapped by it in terms of representation and categorisation. The corporeal body is therefore part of the machinery of surveillance while being vulnerable to its discriminatory powers of categorisation and victimisation. As Hannah Arendt (qtd. in Bauman 91) had warned, “we terrestrial creatures bidding for cosmic significance will shortly be unable to comprehend and articulate the things we are capable of doing” Arendt’s caution conveys the complexity, vulnerability as well as the complicity of the human condition in the surveillance society. Equally it exemplifies how the corporeal body can be co-opted as a surveillance entity sustaining a new ‘banality’ (Arendt) in the machinery of surveillance. Social Consequences of Surveillance Lyon (Terrorism) observed that the events of 9/11 and 7/7 in the UK have inevitably become a prism through which aspects of social structure and processes may be viewed. This prism helps to illuminate the already existing vast range of surveillance practices and processes that touch everyday life in so-called information societies. As Lyon (Terrorism) points out surveillance is always ambiguous and can encompass genuine benefits and plausible rationales as well as palpable disadvantages. There are elements of representation to consider in terms of how surveillance technologies can re-present data that are collected at source or gathered from another technological medium, and these representations bring different meanings and enable different interpretations of life and surveillance (Ball, “Elements”). As such surveillance needs to be viewed in a number of ways: practice, knowledge and protection from threat. As data can be manipulated and interpreted according to cultural values and norms it reflects the inevitability of power relations to forge its identity in a surveillance society. In this sense, Ball (“Elements”) concludes surveillance practices capture and create different versions of life as lived by surveilled subjects. She refers to actors within the surveilled domain as ‘intermediaries’, where meaning is inscribed, where technologies re-present information, where power/resistance operates, and where networks are bound together to sometimes distort as well as reiterate patterns of hegemony (“Elements” 93). While surveillance is often connected with technology, it does not however determine nor decide how we code or employ our data. New technologies rarely enter passive environments of total inequality for they become enmeshed in complex pre-existing power and value systems (Marx). With surveillance there is an emphasis on the classificatory powers in our contemporary world “as persons and groups are often risk-profiled in the commercial sphere which rates their social contributions and sorts them into systems” (Lyon, Terrorism 2). Lyon (Terrorism) contends that the surveillance society is one that is organised and structured using surveillance-based techniques recorded by technologies, on behalf of the organisations and governments that structure our society. This information is then sorted, sifted and categorised and used as a basis for decisions which affect our life chances (Wood and Ball). The emergence of pervasive, automated and discriminatory mechanisms for risk profiling and social categorising constitute a significant mechanism for reproducing and reinforcing social, economic and cultural divisions in information societies. Such automated categorisation, Lyon (Terrorism) warns, has consequences for everyone especially in face of the new anti-terror measures enacted after September 11. In tandem with this, Bauman points out that a few suicidal murderers on the loose will be quite enough to recycle thousands of innocents into the “usual suspects”. In no time, a few iniquitous individual choices will be reprocessed into the attributes of a “category”; a category easily recognisable by, for instance, a suspiciously dark skin or a suspiciously bulky rucksack* *the kind of object which CCTV cameras are designed to note and passers-by are told to be vigilant about. And passers-by are keen to oblige. Since the terrorist atrocities on the London Underground, the volume of incidents classified as “racist attacks” rose sharply around the country. (122; emphasis added) Bauman, drawing on Lyon, asserts that the understandable desire for security combined with the pressure to adopt different kind of systems “will create a culture of control that will colonise more areas of life with or without the consent of the citizen” (123). This means that the inhabitants of the urban space whether a citizen, worker or consumer who has no terrorist ambitions whatsoever will discover that their opportunities are more circumscribed by the subject positions or categories which are imposed on them. Bauman cautions that for some these categories may be extremely prejudicial, restricting them from consumer choices because of credit ratings, or more insidiously, relegating them to second-class status because of their colour or ethnic background (124). Joseph Pugliese, in linking visual regimes of racial profiling and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the aftermath of 7/7 bombings in London, suggests that the discursive relations of power and visuality are inextricably bound. Pugliese argues that racial profiling creates a regime of visuality which fundamentally inscribes our physiology of perceptions with stereotypical images. He applies this analogy to Menzes running down the platform in which the retina transforms him into the “hallucinogenic figure of an Asian Terrorist” (Pugliese 8). With globalisation and the proliferation of ICTs, borders and boundaries are no longer sacrosanct and as such risks are managed by enacting ‘smart borders’ through new technologies, with huge databases behind the scenes processing information about individuals and their journeys through the profiling of body parts with, for example, iris scans (Wood and Ball 31). Such body profiling technologies are used to create watch lists of dangerous passengers or identity groups who might be of greater ‘risk’. The body in a surveillance society can be dissected into parts and profiled and coded through technology. These disparate codings of body parts can be assembled (or selectively omitted) to construct and represent whole bodies in our information society to ascertain risk. The selection and circulation of knowledge will also determine who gets slotted into the various categories that a surveillance society creates. Conclusion When the corporeal body is subsumed into a web of surveillance it often raises questions about the deterministic nature of technology. The question is a long-standing one in our modern consciousness. We are apprehensive about according technology too much power and yet it is implicated in the contemporary power relationships where it is suspended amidst human motive, agency and anxiety. 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