Journal articles on the topic 'Goffman’s “total institutions”'

Scholars have identified similarities between collegiate athletics and total institutions for profit-athletes, but few examined the relationship for athletes participating in other sports. Drawing on qualitative data collected from a sample of NCAA Division I athletes participating in four different sports, this study examined how collegiate athletics might approximate a total institution according to Goffman’s 1961 conceptualization. Consistent with Goffman’s conceptualization, athletes experienced 1) an absence of barriers between their spheres of life, 2) insularity of the athletic community, 3) strict schedules, and 4) institutional objectives used to justify totalitarian practices. These aspects of the institution helped to facilitate pervasive surveillance and extensive institutional power and control, aspects of the institution that athletes of all sports types perceived as stressful. These findings suggest that structural aspects of collegiate athletics may operate as ambient strains that could have consequences for athlete well-being, a possibility that should be explored in future research.

By drawing examples from a particular genre of literary work—life-histories—this paper aims to describe, how ‘resistance’, a pervasive feature of total institutions, occurs in a variety of ways in different total institutions. Working within the broad theoretical framework of Goffman’s Asylums (1961), this article will assess the extent and nature of resistance that is possible in each total institution, and the amount of agency each inmate is invested with. It will also explore as to ‘how’ the basic characteristics of total institutions create space for resistance and ‘why’ inmates resist. This will lead to an understating of the ways in which the ‘resisting self’ develops—whether it is a result of the inmates' interaction with other inmates/staff, or is a product of their personal experiences before entering the total institution. The discussion will also seek to establish that depending upon how, why, and against what inmates resist, several types of total institutions differ.

Functioning of the man in extreme conditions posed by some social institutions was a subject of many scientific studies so far. Among them some works are taking the special place E. Goffman and M. Foucault. Every school of the power should be so checking the total structure of action influencing action/ interaction/s other in special cases and of oppositions and dodge with which this action is connected. Using to such a school analytical categories Goffman’s neosymbolic of interactionism in the microsociological aspect and coming from Foucault’s discourse analysis in the macrosocjological aspect a novelty especially in examinations can constitute of total institutions associated with the authority of the state.

This article questions the value of internal inspections of closed institutions by external agencies, drawing on my unanticipated experience of being deeply immersed as a researcher inside a Secure Children’s Home at the time of an inspection. I describe how an ethnographic approach enabled me to see a dramatic change in the staff–young people relations – from adversarial to cooperative – in the presence of outside inspectors. I make sense of this change through an original application, and novel extension, of Goffman’s theorising. I conceptualise the staff and young people as insiders of a ‘total institution’ working together to perform a misleadingly harmonious ‘institutional display’, motivated by a shared sense of institutional identity. I argue that although the potential for insider misrepresentation can be acknowledged, the extent of it cannot be known by outsiders. This finding is of significance for social policy as closed institutions accommodate vulnerable populations and cases of institutional abuses attest the need for external monitoring. This article calls for recognition of the inherent limitation of external face-to-face inspection processes, and research into new methods of assessment.

Denne artikel præsenterer resultaterne fra 9 kvalitative interviews med transpersoner, der enten er eller har været i behandling på den offentlige institution Sexologisk Klinik på Rigshospitalet i København. I Danmark har de to offentlige institutioner Sexologisk Klinik og Sexologisk Center Aalborg monopol på behandling af transpersoner. Klienter der ønsker hormonel eller kropsmodificerende behandling må således gennemgå et udredningsforløb på en af disse institutioner. Artiklen viser, hvordan identiteten transseksuel kan siges at udgøre en institutionel identitet på Sexologisk Klinik, som klienterne aktivt udfordrer, følger eller indretter sig strategisk efter. I artiklen analyserer vi, ved hjælp af Goffmans teoriapparat fra hans analyse om den totale institution, hvordan klienterne gør brug af tilpasningsstrategier i et forsøg på at håndtere de institutionelle identiteter, de tilbydes. Vi viser, at klienterne i udpræget grad anvender, hvad Goffman betegner som en koloniserende tilpasningsstrategi på klinikken og således bestræber sig på at få mest ud af institutionens muligheder ved at omstrukturere deres livshistorier, så de passer til institutionens kriterier for godkendelse til behandling. I analysen benyttes en kombination af symbolsk interaktionisme og socialkonstruktivisme til at undersøge den relationelle karakter af reproduktionen af den institutionelle identitet transseksuel. ENGELSK ABSTRACT: Ida Friis Thing and Viola Marie Skovgaard: Strategies ofadaptation at a sexology clinic: a study of transgenderclients’ negotiation of identity This article presents the results from nine qualitative interviews with transgender clients concerning their experiences with a public healthcare sexology clinic. At this institution transgender clients apply for approval to receive hormonal treatment and body modifying surgery. The article analyses the social process of clientisation in encounters between clients and mental health professionals, which involve the construction of the institutional identity transsexual, that is, some conditions for how the clients might perceive and present themselves. We employ Goffman’s theoretical concepts from his analysis of the total institution to describe how clients adapt to this process of clientisation by making use of a variety of strategies. Some clients are continuingly resisting the institution and the mental health professionals, while other clients adapt fully to the institutional ideology of therapy. However most clients take advantage of possibilities within the institution by creating narratives that correspond with the institutional criteria for the diagnosis transsexual. We employ a combination of the symbolic interactionist and the social constructivist approaches to emphasize the relational character of the reproduction of the institutional identity transsexual. Keywords: Clientisation, Adaptation Strategies, Goffman, Institutional Identities, transgender

Abstract Drawing on Erving Goffman’s analysis of total institutions and his concept of mortification of the self, the present article deals with the process of identity construction and identity loss among refugees and asylum seekers in Hong Kong. We argue that the slow pace of processing of political asylum applications as well as the harsh restrictions imposed on rights to work and the minimal welfare provisions for refugees and asylum seekers in Hong Kong operate as means of isolating them from the broader society. Another consequence of these restrictive conditions becomes manifest in the loss of identity experienced by those who have been stuck in Hong Kong for many years waiting for their applications to be processed. Being unable to preserve the sense of identity they had in their countries of origin, they find themselves deprived of the social and institutional resorts necessary to forge a new one.

This conceptual paper puts forward Goffman’s concept of total institution, a classic of sociology. It is concluded that this concept holds heuristic capacity, notwithstanding the great constraint of the action of its members, which, however, does not determine each actor’s margins of freedom, at least in the study carried out. Even in extreme situations, organisational actors discover or create spaces of (some) autonomy, in which they exercise their (even if highly regulated) freedom beyond the structure of the organisation, a fact that is acknowledged by Goffman himself.

Ghettoisation after the fall of the totalitarian system is having a "chance" to become one way still for the marginalisation and blocking the reconstruction process of healthy relations in the local communities. Of sources of theoretical considerations above ghettoisation it is possible to seek in deliberations E. Fromm concerning authoritarian character, inquiry M. Foucault in relation to idea initiated in seventeenth-century France of "great closing" and of E. Goffman’s sociological examinations of the total institutions concerning the specificity of functioning. Ghettoisation as the new dimension totalisation is becoming part of reality of Polish cities gradually, irrespective of it, whether closed communities /gated communities/ are coming into existence discretionary of their future participants, or in relation to any form of the compulsion putting researchers before the need to develop effective frames teoretical and methodological allowing for their optimum analysing.

The main objective of this article is to combine Juri Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere – including its concepts of boundary, core, and periphery – with Erving Goffman’s theory of the total institution. The purpose is to develop a framework conducive to examining the prison as an object of study, equally emphasizing both its internal as well as external relations. This work positions itself within the contexts of the relative decline of the field of prison ethnography, few or no studies done applying semiotic metalanguage to the prison or the total institution, and none applying the theory of the semiosphere to either. This work is oriented according to an analytical or neutral mode; its point is not to offer a normative programme, but to offer a new description of the research object and a new language of description in which to speak of this object. The secondary objectives of this article include demonstrating that Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere and Goffman’s theory of the total institution are compatible, that Lotman’s theory actually refines Goffman’s original, that Lotman’s theory taken independently and Goffman’s theory as refined by Lotman’s are both compatible with the direction of contemporary prison ethnography, and that the framework presented in this work has the potential to reinvigorate the field of prison ethnography.

This paper applies the concept of total institutions, introduced by Erving Goffman, to the case of special care institutions for people with intellectual disabilities in present-day Russia. These institutions represent a classic type of organization that could be studied through the lenses of the total institutions theory and demonstrate the typical features of such institutions, among them the crowded conditions in which the inmates live, a lack of privacy, universal scheduling of daily routines, strict hierarchy, a system of punishments and privileges as an instrument of control, and exploitation of inmate labour for the benefit of the institution. Drawing upon data generated by participant observation and implementing the analytical frame of symbolic interactionism at the level of routine interactions, this paper questions the 'totality' of the control mechanisms, power relations, and standardization processes found within the special care institutions for people with disabilities. One conclusion is that, although inner life in a total institution is to a certain extent subject to strict official rules, it is not limited to them. This 'total' character is manifested at the level of the structural organization of the institutions, institutional logic, and the staff’s discourses, but not at the level of routine interactions. One factor challenging the totality of these institutions is the emergence of new attitudes to people with disabilities manifested by NGO volunteers, who confront the dominant patriarchal approach. In their practice they implement principles of 'normalization' ideology that helps to enhance the agency of the inmates. This enhanced agency plays an important role in managing the 'totality' in everyday interactions with the staff.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the complexities associated with the trust-building process between participants and researcher in the context of a precarious work environment. Specifically, the paper seeks to discuss issues arising from the power dynamics, mistrust and tensions between different stakeholders in the research (i.e. employers, employees and the researcher), and the implications of such relationships for establishing rapport and trust with research participants. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses the case of the shipping industry and is based upon findings from two research projects. One project examined similarities and differences between the merchant vessel and Goffman’s theoretical conceptualisation of “total institutions” (Goffman, 1961); the other focused on the increasing flexibility of labour in the global labour market, using the case of shipping. Both projects incorporated ethnographic research methods which included three voyages on board merchant vessels, as well as interviews and informal conversations with over 100 participants. Findings The researcher encountered several obstacles throughout the projects, many of which related to the access to the restricted workplace setting of a cargo ship. However, this paper is based on her positioning in the field after permission to access the ship had been granted by the shipping company. It was often challenging to overcome participants’ suspicions of the researcher as being sent by the company to spy on them. The researcher generally managed to overcome such suspicions in the course of her fieldwork by building relationships with participants over time. Nevertheless, these relationships were influenced by the complex power dynamics amongst the different stakeholders in the field. The challenges encountered in the field sites suggest that researchers should be open and fluid in the ways they present themselves in the field. The findings potentially offer useful insights for novice researchers whose research focuses on workplace settings characterised by precariousness of employment and for those conducting shipboard research. Originality/value The main contribution of this paper lies within its ability to shed light on the often-delicate relationships between different stakeholders in a research project, and the influence of these relationships on a researcher’s continuous access to the field. The experiences described in this paper are based on the global shipping industry, but they are also relevant to other closed, isolated and/or restricted research settings. Specifically, experiences described in this paper are similar to those of researchers studying “closed” research environments that are not accessible to the general public; this is particularly the case where a hierarchical work structure controls to some extent the roles played by different stakeholders within the precarious work environment, potentially influencing the way someone from outside the workplace approaches it. These include, for example, government owned establishments such as prisons, mental hospitals as well as privately owned closed business organisations.

The following seminar-paper is about mental asylums as “total institution”. The example of Hall will be used to show the four important aspects of Erving Goffman’s definition of a total institution. Finally, it discusses whether the Psychiatry Hall can be outlined as one.

This paper is based on research which examined the lives of Israeli battered women from the phenomenological aspect. Thirty-five unstructured interviews were carried out in a shelter for battered women. The women’s accounts suggest that the situation of battered women resembles that of inmates of total institutions, as defined by Goffman (1961). Physical barriers are imposed upon them, and they go through a process of mortification of the self which begins soon after the marriage. Compulsory confinement to the house damages the self and diminishes the ability to cope. Furthermore, it cuts the women off from external sources of physical help and moral support. Increased understanding of this harsh reality would benefit the social agencies engaged in helping battered women.

Résumé: L'internat scolaire est une modalité de scolarisation qui offre hébergement et repas. Le temps dans un établissement scolaire est donc amplifié et concerne ce qui est habituellement distinct: l'entretien de la vie, le travail et les loisirs. Cette caractéristique en fait ce que Goffman nomme une institution totale. L'ampleur temporelle de cette emprise et la vie collective intense qui s'ensuit développent, d'une part, des relations personnelles et émotionnelles fortes, d'autre part, des arrangements et des pratiques cachées qui limitent la prégnance de cette institution.

Building on an earlier work (Farrington 1990) that argued that the modern American correctional facility should be viewed as a “somewhat-less-than-total,” as opposed to a truly “total,” institution (Goffman 1961), this article discusses the specific reasons why the contemporary prison is not more fully, more totally, and more effectively separated from the larger social world(s) in which it is situated. It then examines the extent to which the image of the prison as a total institution remains a predominant part of American thinking about prisons and their functions. Finally, it considers the possible ramifications of this apparent disjuncture between objective prison reality and “the myth of the prison as a total institution.”

While it is clear from a small body of scholarly literature that sport and physical activity play important roles in the daily lives of many inmates in diverse prison contexts around the world, there remains relatively little research that sociologically explores the significance of these physical practices in correctional environments. This paper helps to address this gap by examining one of the key tensions in prison sport: its deployment by corrections policymakers and administrators as a form of social control and its simultaneous use by prisoners as a vehicle for resistance and subversion. Situating the research in Goffman’s concept of the total institution, the paper explores how prisoners, though stripped of many resources for self presentation and collective subversion, refashion sport activities, materials, and spaces to their own purposes – and, in doing so, how they resist, in a limited fashion, the prison’s social control aims. More broadly, these findings point to the potential social significance of sport and physical activity as vehicles for the limited expression of agency in situations of extreme deprivation or imposing disciplinary regimes.

This article examines three kinds of social relationship likely to be present when people with dementia are cared for at home by relatives or friends: custodial care, an intimate relationship, and home-life. Using Goffman's three defining aspects of custodial care – routinisation, surveillance and mortification of the self – the paper examines whether these characterised the care of people with dementia at home and, if so, whether they conflicted with the intimate relationship and with home-life. The study involved sustained observations and interviews with 20 people with dementia and their carers in and around London, and qualitative analysis of the data. It was found that all three aspects of custodial care were present although not fully realised, and that they led to difficulties, many of which were associated with the concurrent pursuit of an intimate relationship and home-life. In all cases, daily life was routinised partly to help accomplish care tasks but was found monotonous, while surveillance was usual but restrictive, and prevented both the carers and those with dementia from doing things that they wished to do. Those with dementia were distressed by the denial of their former identities, such as car-driver or home-maker, and by being treated like children. Both the carers and the people with dementia had various ways of balancing custodial care, their intimate relationships and home-life, such as combining routines with other activities, evading surveillance or carrying it out by indirect means, and there were many attempts to maintain some semblance of former identities.

Places Karen Lebacqz and Ronald Barton's ethical perspectives on sexual relations between pastors and their parishioners in the context of congregational processes and dynamics, and advocates the use of social-scientific theories to explain these processes and dynamics. Criticizes recent practical theological works which advocate “thick description” of congregations, contending that “thick description” has failed to unearth the underlying causes of the “sex in the parish” phenomenon. Presents Erving Goffman's theory of total institutions and Rene Girard's theory of scapegoating as useful theories to explain why pastors have sexual relations with their own parishioners.

Ever since Erving Goffman (1962) discovered unexpected social bonding and elaborate social networks among the ‘inmates’ of total institutions, researchers and policy makers have used ‘community’ to refer to those very persons (nursing-home residents, in-patients in psychiatric hospitals, and others incarcerated for diverse disabilities) believed to be ‘its principal victims’ (Hazan 1995: 211). The concept ‘community’ was built upon Tönnies's (1955/1887) concept of Gemeinschaft, which depicted homogeneous groups integrated through multiple social linkages and face-to-face relations. By the 1970s, scholars of community studies called into question the conceptual underpinnings and potentially negative implications of the concept. They reframed ‘community’ as a concept that addressed more refined questions concerning locality, and reserved the term for the social networks that reflected group interests and provided symbolic evidence of identity formation or belonging (Davies 2003). Nonetheless, the term retains prominence for the institutions that provide residential care for people with various disabilities.

This article looks into the establishment and development of two criminal asylums in Norway. Influenced by international psychiatry and a European reorientation of penal law, the country chose to institutionalize insane criminals and criminally insane in separate asylums. Norway’s first criminal asylum was opened in 1895, and a second in 1923, both in Trondheim. Both asylums quickly filled up with patients who often stayed for many years, and some for their entire lives. The official aim of these asylums was to confine and treat dangerous and disruptive lunatics. Goffman postulates that total institutions typically fall short of their official aims. This study examines records of the patients who were admitted to the two Trondheim asylums, in order to see if the official aims were achieved.

Total institutions have undergone profound changes since Erving Goffman published his seminal work Asylums in 1961. This article explores the persistence and transformation of total institutions under late-modern conditions. Based upon empirical research conducted in a female Benedictine monastery, I analyse changes in the physically bounded structure of a total institution. Specifically, I address the trend towards greater permeability and flexibility of enclosed total spaces. Inspired by Georg Simmel’s spatial insights, I examine how boundaries are historically reshaped through changing relations of distance and proximity to wider society, and how these shifts alter the material expression and configuration of power that originally characterised the monastery’s totality. This article claims the ongoing relevance of Goffman’s conceptualisation to accommodate such modifications and illustrates how, in certain cases, adaptations of total institutions to contemporary conditions can be understood as involving the reconfiguration, rather than the dismantling, of totality.

This article seeks to analyse the paradox of freedom and imprisonment, reflecting on the connections between and nuances of intimate partner violence and abuse (IPVA) and women’s imprisonment in the Global South, particularly in Perú. The story follows Maria, a woman serving a 14-year sentence for the homicide of her husband, an act she committed after experiencing 20 years of psychological and physical abuse. I have chosen to focus on her ambivalence towards her experience of IPVA, using Goffman’s (1961) concept of the ‘total institution’; I suggest that Maria was living under a patriarchal and symbolic total institution, a prison-like home (Avni 1991). Following this, while imprisoned for the homicide of her husband, Maria was physically incapacitated in a co-governed, patriarchal, nation-state prison. Nevertheless, simultaneously, in this custodial setting, she found a semi-autonomous path to reinforce her sense of agency and to construct interpersonal relationships that have enabled her to question the preceding patriarchal norms.

Abstract Moving to a continuing care retirement community (CCRC) and living apart together (LAT) as a repartnering form represent new late-life beginnings. A large study on LAT relationships constructed in CCRCs identified envy and jealousy, yet they were not examined in-depth. Envy is wanting something we lack, whereas jealousy is fear of losing something that is ours to another. These emotions are rarely explored in the context of older adults’ relationships. Using Goffman’s framework of (semi)-totalitarian institutions, our aim is to heuristically examine experiences of envy and jealousy from the perspective of residents and staff. In total, thirty semi-structured interviews were conducted in three CCRCs in Israel with ten LAT residents, ten non-LAT residents and ten CCRC staff members, including social workers. Findings refer to kinds of envy, ignoring envy and the development and consequences of LAT-related jealousy and/or envy in CCRCs. The discussion and conclusions address how semi-totalitarian CCRC features influence envy and jealousy experiences. They include implications for social work practice with older adults and their family members regarding adjustment to life in the CCRC and may assist CCRC management and social workers in addressing possible consequences of envy and jealousy.

ABSTRACT Objective: To describe the influence of institutional routines on interpersonal conflicts among institutionalized elderly women. Method: A qualitative study, with an ethnographic framework, performed with 17 elderly women in a Long-Term Care Facility. The field immersion occurred from August 2017 to May 2018. The data were produced by participant observation and fieldnotes and analyzed through the sociocultural perspective with theoretical tools related to the total institutions described by Erving Goffman. Results: External bonds outside the institution and the routines were trigger factors of conflicts in the Long-Term Care Facility. The dissatisfaction with the lack of external bonds was noticed in the impossibility of leaving with family members, receiving visits, objects, money, foods, or attention. The standardization and collectivization of internal routines of basic activities generated dissatisfaction and challenged the elderly women’s tolerance towards the norms. Such situations facilitated interpersonal conflicts in the institutional environment. Conclusion: The conflicts occurred among elderly women and professionals, and among them, from the insubordination of the elderly, based on the idea of reaffirming their individualities.

Abstract Environment affects quality of care. Yet there are very few evaluation methods to address such issues. The SCP model is a user-inclusive, multi-paramentric method for the planning, design and evaluation of psychiatric facilities. Its application to psychiatric wards indicated hiatus between top-down (designers, building commissioning authorities) vs bottom up (patients and staff) understanding of what constitutes a therapeutic environment. That generated the need to investigate the socio-spatial context of psychiatric wards. This research aimed to promote our understanding of psychiatric space in relation to social interaction. Two acute wards in the UK provided the locus. Each was evaluated using the SCP model institutional vs domestic checklist, open-ended interviews with 10 staff and 12 patients and auditing of the spaces. Then, a Space Syntax analysis using depthmap was employed to model social activity inside the wards. The SCP model analysis indicated that the wards, one of them new and purpose built and the other part of an old psychiatric campus soon to be replaced, demonstrated strong institutional features, even compared to previous samples using the same tools. The juxtaposition with space syntax demonstrated that areas mapped as integrated, i.e., socio-friendly, were areas where antisocial behaviours were observed. This could be interpreted by Goffman's theory on total institutions, as institutional spaces might be the context of reverse socio-spatial norms according to Hillier's social logic of space. Thus, institutional spaces could still house mental health provision. Integrated approaches for evaluating healthcare facilities for fit for purpose and social integration need to become part of a healthcare evaluation system. Healthcare provision should be evaluated for ecopsychosocially supportive environments. Key messages The project raised the question of the appropriateness of mental healthcare environments. The spaces for the treatment and care of psychiatric patients might not be fit for their social re-integration.

This article presents an analysis of Amalie Skram’s 1895 novel Professor Hieronimus, with an emphasis on the seclusion aspect of this patient narrative. In the article, I give a close reading of the novel where I make use of insights from theorists from different disciplines, such as Shoshana Felman, Erving Goffman and Giorgio Agamben. The intent of the analysis, is to show how Skram manages to expose the rigid social categories that characterize the total institution in which the novel’s protagonist, Else Kant, claims to be wrongfully lodged. Through a critical assessment of the institutional hierarchy, both social and medical, Amalie Skram makes her novel well-suited for the type of interdisciplinary readings that in the last couples of decades have expanded and become more accessible, thanks in part to the emergence of the field of literature and medicine. This development grants us the opportunity to revisit the works of the Scandinavian literary canon with a fresh theoretical perspective, where fiction bears the potential to articulate aspects of the patient experience that has yet to be encapsulated by theory. This article shows how this phenomenon includes studies that are not limited to this interdisciplinary field alone, meaning that a complex patient narrative such as Skram’s Professor Hieronimus is accessible to a broader theoretical material as well.

The analysis of the oeuvre of the outsider artist Alexander Lobanov (1924–2003) reveals the mechanisms of influence of Soviet visual propaganda. This article examines the total influence of ideology and visual narratives on an artist even when they seem to have been completely excluded from artistic life (in Lobanov’s case, due to his deaf mutism). The author refers to Irving Goffman’s self-presentation theory, the works on political power and its influence by Boris Groys, and the works of psychologists on the peculiarities of compensatory activity in the deaf and mute. The work is relevant as it reflects the importance of outsider artists as part of the art process. The author mostly refers to works by Lobanov in non-Russian and Russian private and institutional collections, as well visual propaganda from the Soviet period. Works by Lobanov and other Soviet outsider artists have not been studied from the perspective chosen by the article’s author. The artist’s oeuvre is examined by Élisabeth Anstett from the discourse point of view, connected with visual images from Soviet propaganda. The author of the article singles out the peculiarities of the appropriation by the outsider artist of the ideological visual narrative, the circle of borrowed images (militarism, hero, Stalin – “the father of nations”), and certain approaches (recurrence, ornamentality, and the presence of text). As a result of an artistic and formalist analysis, the author reveals specific borrowings of approaches and stylistics from the Soviet art (poster, illustration, and easel painting) of the 1930s to the mid‑1950s. Additionally, an important aspect of the study is that the author reveals the peculiar intellectualisation of compensatory mechanisms in the construction of social representation addressing the dominant images of visual Soviet propaganda. The interdisciplinary approach of the research, with certain exceptions, could be used to analyse the creative work of other Soviet outsider artists.

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. The emergence of surveillance societies, the co-optation of bodies in surveillance schemas, as well as the construction of the body through data in everyday transactions, conveys both the vulnerabilities of the human condition as well as its complicity in maintaining the power arrangements in society. Bauman, in citing Jacques Ellul and Hannah Arendt, points out that we suffer a ‘moral lag’ in so far as technology and society are concerned, for often we ruminate on the consequences of our actions and motives only as afterthoughts without realising at this point of existence that the “actions we take are most commonly prompted by the resources (including technology) at our disposal” (91). References Abrams, Philip. Historical Sociology. Shepton Mallet, UK: Open Books, 1982. Altheide, David. “Consuming Terrorism.” Symbolic Interaction 27.3 (2004): 289-308. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Faber & Faber, 1963. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Fear. 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Song dedications are among commercial radio’s most enduring formats. Yet those very few studies which address music radio rarely consider its role within a consumer economy. As John Patrick noted when analysing ABC broadcaster Christopher Lawrence’s popular (and commercially exploited) Swoon genre as a form of nostalgic Utopianism, many music analysts view music listening as constructing a cultural space of other times and places, when romantic love held sway, when the certainties of religion vanquished doubt, and when authentic folk culture gave a sense of belonging to traditional ways of thinking and feeling (133). This “emotional, largely imaginary” space is explicity constructed outside the pragmatic focus and urgent stylings of commercial sponsorship. Patrick cites Flinn on the capacity of music to seemingly transcend social institutions and discourses. But here I will argue that commercial music-radio practice clearly operates within them. More significantly, it does so by very virtue of this capacity for offering transcendence: Music ... has the peculiar ability to ameliorate the social existence it allegedly overrides, and offers in one form or another the sense of something better. Music extends an impression of perfection and integrity in an otherwise imperfect, unintegrated world (Flinn). This study suggests that it is precisely this lack of any perceived connectedness into the social discourses of the day which marks music as available for the occupancy of individual desires, and which targets its various genres for integration into selected sets of social practice. What we do while listening to the radio… Willis (1990), investigating music as a key element of the “symbolic cultural creativity and informal artistry in people’s lives”, discovered multiple appropriations, creolisings and re-accentuations within social use of broadcast music (85). His empirical work provides accounts of the various uses made of broadcast music, including the audio-taping of new music tracks; planned social listening to particular shows or DJs, often combined with extended phone-call discussions with friends; the use of broadcast music as company in periods of social isolation, or its use in structuring daily living or working routines; the preparation of personal master-mixes and exchange of taped compilations or transcribed song lyrics. To these should be added more contemporary updates: digital sound-bite downloading and re-editing via Internet broadcasts; the burning of personally tailored CDs; MP3 collection-building through web-exchange, and the construction of a personalised virtual sensorium for asserting private space in public through the use of the Sony Walkman or Discplayer (Hosokawa, Chambers, Bull). The capacity music broadcast gives for personal engagement within various music sub-cultures needs further work at exactly this active-reception level. Nor has the activity of broadcasters in constructing technologies of reciprocity around mediated intimacy been fully explored. The social formational power, over 75 years, of the song-dedication formula, in compensating what Thompson described as the “non-reciprocal intimacy” of electronic media, is incalculable. Instead of opening spaces for “free association” working pre-discursively on the “physicality of the listening experience”, music-radio talk has been operating to structure those exact spaces: to create regulated activity, and interactivity, where none has been thought to exist. Fixing a self to a favourite track: music and memory From the 1930s to the 1960s, vastly popular “music request programs” encouraged radio listeners to write in to presenters, not only selecting a favourite music play, but describing in detail the social relation mediated for them by the music and lyrics, and the uniquely individualised expressive weight it was claimed was carried – ironically yet significantly, a reference often immediately generalised by the attachment of several other requestors to the particular track. More recently, Richard Mercer’s evening program of Lovesong dedications on Sydney’s MIX 106.5 connected this drive towards social identity work with the escalating sexual-emotional confessionalism of Australian radio talk. Mercer’s format: extended play of the staple love ballads of the “easy listening” mode – carefully selected to highlight the sexual arousal elements of the breathy female performer or the husky-voiced male balladeer – operated from the centre of the newly reciprocal expression of intimacy, made possible by the live call-in capacity of contemporary radio. Listener-callers can now model their identification techniques directly – or so it is made to appear. In fact, the emotional expressiveness and the centrality of the equation between direct listener-caller comment and emotional-interpretive link into music tracks remains problematic, for a number of reasons. How to construct loving sincerity – through the precision of digital editing Firstly, the apparent spontaneity and direct interface which underlie radio’s “live call-in” relations as a discourse of authenticity, are today heavily, if not obviously, compromised, by the production techniques used to guarantee the focus on caller concerns. This is phone-in but not talkback radio – a distinction not made often enough, in either professional production literature or academic analysis of radio practice. While talkback is relatively raw radio, centring on live-to-air talk-relations between callers and hosts (and thus fostering the highly confrontational hosting persona of the “shock-jock”), phone-in radio seeks briefer, more focused comment on topics pre-selected, constantly monitored and re-themed by both host and call-screening staff, who choose which caller comments get to air, and in which order. Lovesong dedications not only follows this more restrictive practice, but intensifies its commodification of the resultant calls, by a consistent top-and-tail editing of caller contributions before broadcast. This acts to heighten the expressiveness of each segment, and to insert the program ident. into the pivotal “bridge” position between caller-voice and music play. The host is thus able to present to listeners a tautly emotional sequence of seemingly spontaneous sentimental expression; but to his sponsors, a talk-flow which interpolates the show’s name fluently into the core of the fused private/public moment. With all the hesitations, over-explanations, initial embarrassment and on-air inexperience of the average caller cut away, what remains looks like this: Host: Hello Carly - I believe you want to dedicate a lovesong to Damien? Caller: Yes that’s right ... it’s our anniversary? Host: How many years ... Caller: Well actually it’s just our first! Host: And you’ve had a great first year together? Caller: Sure have: I love you more than ever Damien ... Host: And Damien: here’s Carly’s Lovesong dedication to you. The perversity of the practice lies in the way the host’s “prompt” cues, with their invitational suspensions, actually direct the caller contributions, not only to their moment of “personalised” emotion, but to the powerful agency of the program itself, always positioned between caller and dedicatee. Further: the fluency of the talk exchange, and especially its expert segue into the music track, conceal the fact that calls are very often being held before broadcast. Between the average call and its broadcast, a listener-caller’s phoned-in experiences and expressed feelings – even their peak-moment of address to their loved one – may be digitally edited, to remove awkward hesitations and intensify the emotionality. A 24-hour call line operates, highly promoted in other programming, allowing selection and sequencing of requests around music availability – including station play-rotation regimes. Even calls received during broadcast can be delayed, edited, and clustered around the – actually quite limited – availability of music tracks (some callers have reported being offered a playlist of only three tracks through which to “personally address” their loved one). Sincerity is fabricated, at the very moment of promoting its authenticity, and absorbed into the “seamless” flow of MIX106.5’s “easy listening” format. “Schmalzy like Oprah: almost Sleepless in Seattle” The Lovesong dedications host – busy elsewhere – plays a very restrained on-air role: often only three dedications per half-hour of programming. While back-to-back music play dominates, Mercer’s vocal performance marks the show with notably atypical radio qualities. The tone is low and subdued, without ranging into the close-in microphone huskiness of the “late-night listening” mode, which usually performs intimacy. Mercer is closer to the “serious music” style of ABC Classic FM announcers, with the male voice remaining in a medium-to-light vocal range. This is tenor rather baritone, with a clear suppression of its stressing, to produce a restrained authority, rather than a DJ exuberant enthusiasm (Montgomery) or an unassailable certainty (Goffman). Mercer and his interstate colleagues use a normal conversational level, with no electronic enhancement into “fullness of tone” as employed by both DJs and talk hosts to amplify their authority. In contrast, the Lovesong dedications voice is carefully, if naturally, dampened in tone – by which I mean as a result of physical voice-production control, rather than by sound-mixing in the broadcast console. Not only is the pitch slightly subdued and intonations compressed rather than stretched, as in the familiar DJ hype, but the dominant intonation is a very unusual terminal rise/slow fall. This provides a male host’s speech with an interestingly tentative note, which deflects or at least suspends power. Under-toned rather than over-toned, it invites sympathetic listening and increased attentiveness, while its suppression of the sorts of powerful masculine authoritativeness more common in male broadcasting (see Hutchby) cues listeners for conversational participation on their own terms, rather than on those dictated by the host. This structured tonal diffidence in the Lovesong hosts’ self-effacing vocality acts as an invitation to self-direction: a pathway to participation. No surprise then that its careful constructedness has been read as the exact opposite: sincerity. What is more surprising is that it has been read as sexually alluring – given its quite marked deviation from norms of high masculinity in relation to vocalisation. Other attempts to render a desirable masculinity at the level of voice have tended to the over-produced baritones of the traditional matinee idol: the “swoon” voice of lush-toned actorly excess, with deep pitch, slow pace, fruity vowels, and long glides – the vocal equivalent of TV comedy’s “Fabio” as kitsch or camped hyper-masculinity. This vocal problem in radio hosting is also endemic to operatic performance, where male vocal range is read as age. Patriarchy reserves deep voices for authority, therefore also reserving the most powerful roles for “older” characters, performed as baritone and base. Lovesong dedications are far more suitably presented by a male host whose vocality matches the sexually-active age profile suited to romantic seduction – and this calls for the tenor voice of a Richard Mercer. The Daily Telegraph’s Sandra Lee (1998) was among many who succumbed to that “mellifluous voice which drips with genuine sincerity, yes genuine, not that contrived radio fakeness, and is soothing enough to make you believe he really care”. Even when Mercer actually shifted in a phone conversation with Lee from his ordinary voice to “The Loooooovvvvve God with a voice so smooth it could be butter”, she remained a believer. No surprise, then, that as the format is franchised from state to state on the commercial networks, much the same vocalisations are reproduced. The host’s performance formula and the callers’ sentimental witness are both safely encoded as “sincere sentimental expressiveness” – while actually audio-processed and digitally edited to produce those qualities. Here, as elsewhere, Lee’s loathed “contrived radio fakeness” continues to work unseen and unexamined, producing in the service of its own commercial imperatives a surprising yet vastly popular reputation for sentimental expressiveness among “ordinary” Australians. Where music-radio analyst Barnard (2002) considers music-request shows as a cynical commercial device for “establishing a link with the audience” (124) – a key requirement of the sponsorship system of commercial broadcasting from its origins to the current day – Lee’s tabloid populism endorses every detail of Lovesong dedications’ techniques for acting upon and reproducing the lush romanticism it sets out to evoke. Between the two views the cultural work of this programming: the mediation and commodification of interpersonal emotional expressiveness in the homes, workplaces, bedrooms and parked cars of listener-callers around the nation, goes unnoticed. Works Cited Barnard, Stephen. Studying radio. London: Arnold, 2002. Barnard, Stephen. On the radio: Music radio in Britain. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989. Bull, M. “The dialectics of walking: Walkman use and the reconstruction of the site of experience.” Consuming culture: power and resistance. Eds. J. Hearn and S. Roseneil, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999. 199-220. Chambers, I. “A miniature history of the Walkman.” New formations, 11 (1990): 1-4. Flinn, C. Strains of Utopia. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992. Goffman, Erving. Forms of talk. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981. Hosokawa, S. “The Walkman effect.” Popular music, 4 (1984):165-180. Hutchby, Ian. Confrontation talk: Arguments, asymmetries and power on talk radio. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996. Lee, Sandra. “When Love God comes to town.” The Daily Telegraph, 30 November 1998: 10. Montgomery, M. “DJ talk.” Media, culture and society, 8.4 (1986): 421-440. Patrick, John. “Swooning on ABC Classic FM.” Australian Journal of Communication (1998) 25.1: 127-138. Thompson, John B. The media and modernity: A social theory of the media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Willis, Paul. Common culture. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990. Willis, Paul. Moving culture – an inquiry into the cultural activities of young people. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1990. Links http://acnielsen.com/ For information on commercial radio ratings Useful site for watching music radio trends http://www.radioandrecords.com/ Ever wondered where radio presenters get that never-ending supply of historical trivia? Now their secrets can be Yours. http://www.jocksjournal.com/ APRA The Australian Performing Rights Association monitors Australian music content on radio – here’s how they do it. http://www.apra.com.au/Dist/DisRad.htm Two Internet broadcast sites offering online music streaming with an Australian bias. http://www.ozchannel.com.au/village-cgi-... http://www.thebasement.com.au/ FARB: The Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters – a useful site for the organisation of commercial radio within Australia. http://www.commercialradio.com.au/index.cfm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Cook, Jackie. "Lovesong Dedications" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovesongdedications.php>. APA Style Cook, J., (2002, Nov 20). Lovesong Dedications. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/lovesongdedications.html