Journal articles on the topic 'How to tell if your website is optimized'

Background:At the turn of the year and decade, it is a time when magazine columns and social media channels are full of New Year’s resolutions. We are thinking about weight control, fewer kilos, healthier lifestyles, increased mobility, mental well-being, more time with family and friends, learning new things, etc. For many New Year’s resolution is related to well-being, often a healthier diet and exercise.What if these promises were properly inspired? What if we encouraged people to make especially good decisions supporting musculoskeletal health and do good deeds?The Finnish Rheumatism Association and its partners started this project to encourage people make health promoting new year resolutions and tell them publicly.Objectives:The aim of the project is to promote the musculoskeletal health of the population and to raise citizens’ awareness of musculoskeletal health and illness. The purpose of the project is to inspire people to make promises and do deeds to support of musculoskeletal health. The project utilized people’s tendency to make New Year’s resolutions.Even small actions and everyday life changes are going in the right direction. Anyone can participate and have successful experience.Methods:The project is online atwww.tinjanhuoltamo.fiThe website briefly describes the background of the project. It includes links to additional information and reliable sources, and provides guidance on how people with RMD’s can have a healthier life.The project utilized the social media and participants were encouraged to make #lpromise updates for various social media channels. Campaign started at the beginning of December 2019. The radio campaign focused on Christmas holidays. Promises were made for the New Year´s Eve and some of them during January.We sent materials and tasks every week for online groups and email lists. Tinja’s Service Station acted as a personal trainer but online. We took advantage of a modern, interactive online environment where people shared their habits and experiences.All those who kept their promises till 2/29/2020 participated in a competition, where the prize was the winner’s choice of a welfare event, or a season ticket to a sports club or a local Rheumatism Organisation exercise group.Results:The Service Station turned out to be more interesting than expected. The Facebook group had 450 members and the email-group 75 people. The quantities exceeded our expectations.Physical exercise attracted the promises most. Good second was nutrition.Our social media campaign was not as successful as we had hoped for. It may be that people are too cautious of making public New Year’s Resolutions. The radio campaign managed to bring some more people to the email group, not so many for the Facebook group. It seemed a good idea to expand the campaign from social media to radio. The radio campaign reached people nationwide and there was a small peak in the Rheumatism Association website visits.Conclusion:This was quite nice and different project. It seemed that one act of health easily led to another and created a positive vicious circle. We start the project with good will and without blame. Changing one’s own activities and promoting future health require will and motivation. Motivation was the initiator of the action. A clear and realistic goal setting and a decision to reach the goal helped motivate.At the end of the March we will sum up the final results and pick up good examples for musculoskeletal health actions. It is already certain that we will renew the project at the end of the year. A service station is a great low-threshold place where you can, in a good spirit, get support for your lifestyle changes.Disclosure of Interests:None declared

Advocates of indoor vertical farming have pitched the enterprise as key to the future of food, an opportunity to use technological innovation to increase local food production, bolster urban sustainability, and create a world in which there is “real food” for everyone. At the same time, critics have raised concerns about the costs, energy usage, social impacts, and overall agricultural viability of these efforts, with some insisting that existing low-tech and community-based solutions of the “good food movement” offer a better path forward. Drawing from a mix of participant observation and other qualitative methods, this article examines the work of Square Roots, a Brooklyn-based indoor vertical farming company cofounded by entrepreneur Kimbal Musk and technology CEO Tobias Peggs. In an effort to create a market for what I refer to as “techno-local food,” Square Roots pitches its products as simultaneously “real” and technologically optimized. As a way to build trust in these novel products and better connect consumers with producers, Square Roots leans on transparency as a publicity tool. The company’s Transparency Timeline, for instance, uses photos and a narrative account of a product’s life-cycle to tell its story “from seed-to-store,” allowing potential customers to “know their farmer.” The information Square Roots shares, however, offers a narrow peek into its operations, limiting the view of operational dynamics that could help determine whether the company is actually living up to its promise. The research provides a clear case study of an organization using transparency–publicity as market strategy, illustrating the positive possibilities that such an approach can bring to consumer engagement, while also demonstrating how the tactic can distract from a company’s stated social responsibility goals.

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Electronic health records have become the fulcrum for efforts by institutions to reduce errors, improve safety, reduce cost, and improve compliance with recommended guidelines. In recent times they are also being considered as a potential game changer for improving patient recruitment for clinical trials (CT). Although the use of CDS for clinical care is partially understood, its use for CT patient identification and recruitment is young and a great deal of experimental and theoretical research is needed in this area to optimize the use of CDS tools that personalize patient care by identifying relevant clinical trials and other research interventions. The use of CDS tools for CT recruitment offers a great deal of possibilities, but some initial usage has been disappointing. This may not be surprising because, while the implementation of these interventions is somewhat simple, ensuring that they are embedded into the right point of the care providers workflow is highly complex and may affect many actors in a clinical care setting, including patients, nurses, physicians, clinical coordinators, and investigators. Overcoming the challenges of alerting providers regarding their patient’s eligibility for clinical trials is an important and difficult challenge. Translating that effort into effective recruitment will require understanding of the psychological and workflow barriers and facilitators for how providers respond to automated alerts requesting patient referrals. Evidence from using CDS for clinical care that shows alerts become increasingly ignored over time or with more exposure (1, 2). The features, timing, and method of these alerts are important usability factors that may influence effectiveness of the referral process. Focus group methods capture the shared perspectives of a phenomenon and have been shown to be an effective method for identifying perceptions, attitudes, information needs, and other human factors effecting workflow (3, 4). Our objective was to develop a generalizable method for measuring physician and clinic level factors defining a successful point of care recruitment program in an outpatient care setting. To achieve this we attempted to (a) Characterize provider’s attitudes regarding CTs referrals and research. (b) Identify perceived workflow strategies and facilitators relevant to CT recruitment in primary care. (c) Develop and test a pilot instrument. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: The methods had 3 phases: focus groups, development of item pool, and tool development. Focus group topics were developed by 4 experienced investigators, with training in biomedical informatics, cognitive psychology, human factors, and workflow analysis, based upon a knowledge of the literature. A script was developed and the methods were piloted with a group of 4 clinicians. In all, 16 primary care providers, 5 clinic directors, and 6 staff supervisors participated in 6 focus groups, with an average of 5 participants each, to discuss clinical trial recruitment at the point of care. Focus groups were conducted by the development team. Audio recording were content coded and analyzed to identify themes by consensus of 3 authors. Item Pool generation involved extracting items identified in the focus group analysis, selecting a subset deemed most interesting based on knowledge of the recruitment literature and iteratively writing and refining questions. Instrument development consisted of piloting an initial 7-item questionnaire with a local primary provider sample. Questions were correlated with the item pool and limited to reduce provider burden, based on those that the study team deemed most applicable to information technology supported recruitment. Descriptive statistical analysis was performed on the pilot survey results. An online survey was developed based on the findings of the focus groups and emailed to 127 primary care providers who were invited to participate. In total, 36 questionnaires were completed. This study was approved by the University of Utah Institutional Review Board. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: The results section is organized into 3 sections: (a) Focus groups, (b) Item generation; and (c) Questionnaire pilot. (I) (1) Focus Groups. Themes identified through a qualitative review are presented below with illustrative comments of participants. The diversity of attitudes and willingness to support clinical trial recruitment varied so substantially that no single pattern emerged. Attitudes ranged from enthusiastic support, to interest in some trials to disinterest or distrust in trials in general. Compensation for time spent, which could be monetary, informational, or through professional recognition; and provider relationship with the study team or pre-selection of specific trials by a clinic oversight committee, and importance to providers practice positively affected willingness to help recruit. “I would love to get people into clinical trials as much as possible... If it works for them you are going to help a whole lot of other people.” If we felt like we have done every possible thing that was already established as evidence-based and it didn’t work out, then we would consider the trials. I think that studies are more beneficial for specific specialists... There might be a whole slew of things that I never deal with or don’t care about because it’s not prevalent for my patient population. Local and reputable... A long distance someone asking to do something is just not the same as someone in the trenches with you. The bottom line is how much work is involved at our end and if there is going to be any compensation for that. I think also the providers would like have feedback on what they referred them to. And how did it go? So did we pick the right patient? ... It helps us to know, did they even sign up for the study? Getting your name on a research paper would be nice too. Lack of information regarding trials reduced support for recruitment of patients. Providers stated that they do not know how to quickly find information about studies, nor do they have time to find the information, and therefore cannot efficiently council patients regarding trial participation. Notifications regarding clinical trials that were deemed to be important included: Trial coordinator intention to recruit patients, enrollment of a patient in a clinical drug trial, trial progress and result updates, and reports of effectiveness of provider recruitment efforts. Perceived information needs regarding trials that providers are referring patients to included: trial purpose, design, benefits and risks, potential side effects, intervention details, medication class (mechanism of action), drug interactions with study drug, study timeline, coordinator contact information, link to print off patient handouts, enrollment instructions, and a link to study website. (2) It’s just we don’t know any of the information ... and it can’t take any of our time. ... I don’t have time to research it. Sometimes the patients ask me questions about it and I would like to be in a position where I have some information about it before I am asked. It would be nice to be notified if they [my patients] are enrolled in the trial, when it turns into actual recruitment. I do like to know if they’re in [a trial] so that when they come in for problems, I at least know that they might be on a study medication so I can be safe. I’ll get an ER message, “The patient got admitted. There blood pressure’s, you know, tanked, because they’re on a study drug I didn’t know anything about.” if there’s certain side effects that I need to be watching out for. It would also be good to have a contact person from the study in case we need to notify them of. “this person’s possible having an adverse event. Look into it more.” (3) Provider burden associated with patient recruitment appeared to be a deterrent. These burdens included adding to the providers task list, increasing the time required to complete a visit, and usurpation of control over the patients care plan with the associated effect on provider quality scores. We don’t have time. I mean, we don’t even take a lunch break. I have 15 minutes and now this is taking this many minutes away from my 15 minutes. I am just sick of extra work. We already have so much extra work. It’s just more stuff to do. We are maxed out on stuff to do. Right now, part of our compensation depends on having our patients A1Cs controlled. And so if we’re taking a chance that maybe they’re getting a medicine, maybe they’re not, maybe it’ll help, maybe it won’t, its gonna further delay our ability to get paid. Cause they’re like “I’m not going to let you go mess up my patient and I’m going to have to deal with the consequences is kind of the way they think. If you’re going to put the patient in a study, being able drop them from our registry so we don’t get penalized for a negative outcome [is important]. (4) Patient’s needs were a priority among factors influencing likelihood to help recruitment patients. Providers considered perceived benefit or risk to the patient, such as additional healthcare services, increased monitoring, financial assistance, or access to new treatments when other options have been ineffective, important; as well as continuance of established care that has proven effective, and ethical recruitment that addresses language and mental health to ensure that patients can make decisions regarding study participation. If there’s something great that’s gonna benefit a patient, I would definitely wanna know about it to give them that option. You know that’s what we wanna try to do is make our patients better. Someone who is really well controlled and doing well, I would not tend to put them toward the study. Just keep going with what’s working right now. Sometimes there’s financial incentives for them to participate, so you know, if its a good fit its easy to at least offer that to the patient. They get treatment maybe that they can’t afford. You don’t want to be seen as somebody who's forcing a patient... if their provider is telling them this is a good idea you are more likely to get your patient to do it. I think they have to understand what a clinical trial is, first of all, in that it’s a trial. Right? We’re trying to figure out if a certain treatment is good or not. It may not work. It may work. With many patients, they don’t only have medical problems, but significant mental illness that sometimes interferes a lot with just our treatment of them here for their clinical problems. And so, that probably would interfere with someone’s ability to understand and consent to a trial. And the patients have the right to make that choice. I don’t need to be—I don’t mind influencing them on things I know about, I think are invaluable, but I don’t need to be a barrier to them. (5) Perceived responsibility in trial recruitment varied substantially, from no involvement at all, to prescreening, counseling, or recruiting patients. Some providers felt that they should have the right to say “no” to recruitment of their patients while others believed prescreening was an unnecessary burden, outside of their role as a primary care provider. if someone prescreens and thinks its appropriate and gives me that judgment call to say, do you think it would be a good fit? I think one of them, they sent, and I said, Oh, I don’t think it would be a good fit because of this...So that would be fine. I don’t think I need to be a gatekeeper for studies. I mean, if there’s people that qualify for a study, and there’s a great study that’s been approved, and they can recruit them without me knowing, that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I liked how it was—I could do a simple referral ... someone else figured out the qualifications. if we knew of ongoing studies and if we thought a certain patient may qualify for a certain study, we just contact the coordinator, and then they just take care of the rest. I think that appropriate ... from our perspective, would be, “Are you interested?” “This is the number for a person who can sit with you, talk with you about a trial, tell you everything about it, answer your questions, and then you can make a decision.” I’m not going to let you go mess up my patient and I’m going to have to deal with the consequences. (6) A clinic-implementation approach that systemizes workflow, limits the number of trials providers are asked to recruit for, and minimizes provider time burden is needed. Suggested methods for informing providers of patient clinical trial eligibility included: email, alerts, in-basket messages, texts, phone-calls, and in-person contact. People are so sick of change, change, change, change ... if there’s no stability whatsoever, then people get frustrated and start to burn out. Having my staff remember how to do it correctly and I remember what studies we have going ... it becomes somewhat of a burden... it’s hard for us to remember as we are flying through our day. There just needs to be a clear understanding with those roles... Who does the patient call? We don’t want to look like we don’t know what we are doing. There probably should be a selection committee put together from various people who have stakes in the community, at least who can say, “This would be applicable for xx clinic.” (7) Provider Suggestions Providers had multiple suggestions regarding notification methods. (II) Development of item pool and construction of questionnaire The specific items were constructed from literature review on physician’s attitudes and results from the focus group. The overarching concern was on readability, brief questionnaire size, and relevance. A large item were constructed and then reduced through piloting. (III) Questionnaire Pilot Results: The 7-item pilot questionnaire was completed by 36 physicians (28% response rate). In this section, we report the empirical results. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Discussion Relevance of Methods. Overall, the described methods for determining components for a recruitment program in primary care shows early promise. The focus groups that consisted of providers, staff and administrators resulted in insights as to workflows, attitudes, and clinical processes. These insights significantly varied across clinics. This variation supported the need for an individualized clinic-based approach that will meet local needs. During the course of the study, participants were willing to participate in all activities (although some requested payment). We were able to conduct the focus groups as scheduled and obtained the desired input. The analysis of the focus group transcripts was performed using iterative discussions and did not needed any special adaptation for this area of study. The pilot survey response rate was within the expected for this type of study. Focus groups can rapidly provide rich information regarding attitudes and other factors affecting provider participation at the point of care. However, findings from focus groups must always be confirmed through larger studies. It is important to keep the focus groups small and to hold multiple focus groups to offset the more vocal participants that may influence comments of others. This study shows that using our 3-step approach it is possible to gather important information on clinician’s and staff perceptions and needs to participate in point of care patient recruitment for CT. The focus groups also provide an important step for survey construction. Designing surveys empirically requires multiple validation efforts, which will be conducted in the future. However, we can draw preliminary conclusions from the results of the pilot study which are quite informative and they are discussed below. Near future work will be to expand the response rate through additional local survey and conduct formal psychometric testing and validation both locally and nationally. A final validation will be proposed through the CTSA consortiums. Variation in responses. There was a lack of normal curves in our survey results. This points to the need to target education and recruitment efforts by provider type (with similar perspectives). Identification of these types would be useful. Some specific points regarding variability that should be considered in program design. Preferences for trail recruitment methods. Many trial recruitment notification methods have the potential to be successful when used judiciously and done well, particularly if the trial coordinator/provider relationship is supported by reciprocal benefits to the provider. Consistency in workflow within seems paramount to success. Providers can pull some notifications at a time they choose, while other notifications interrupt and must be used sparingly. Some allow review of multiple patients at the same time, and some foster easy access to the patient’s medical record. Conclusions. The authors recommend that recruitment HIT be customizable at the clinic and provider level by responsibility and interest to allow selection of level of information, delivery method, that is, email, text, in-basket, alert, dashboard, mail; frequency of notification, and an opt out feature. These customizable options will allow for better support of clinic workflow or goals. There is the potential with machine learning technology to monitor provider interactions with trial notifications and for the system to automatically make adjustments to the method and level that best supports each physician. Limitations: The major limitation is the focus on one site only and one delivery system (university based). The low response makes generalization difficult. Efforts to improve the rate are underway. Many populations are under-represented in Utah. Full psychometric analysis was not conducted but will part of the final project.

IntroductionThis article investigates how local studies collections in public libraries can help people explore the experiences of regional Australia. Some of this discovery can be done online, but as not all local studies material has been catalogued, is online or available in a digital format, some of this exploration will need to be onsite at public libraries throughout Australia. This exploration could be combined with other investigations into regional areas. What are local studies collections in public libraries? These collections are defined as beinginclusive of local history and so the local collection should support studies that look at the historical past, both distant and recent, or at current concerns in the community, such as local environmental issues, or plans for the future development of a locality. (Dewe 1–2)This broader look at the context of a place should provide information in a range of formats to help explore an area, and to find out about the history, geography and the environment as well as other local concerns and issues. Local studies collections should contain recent as well as older material. Each local studies collection will be different (McCausland; Bateman; Johnston; Gregg; Heap and Pymm) with some of these differences simply being because each area has a unique collection of stories which can be told about it. Other differences will be in how each public library interprets their remit to collect information and stories about a community, and which stories are included or excluded from the collection. There are budget constraints as well because each public library has to choose how to fund local studies as part of their overall library provision which means there are tensions and competing priorities in what is collected and how it is made available for research as well as information and entertainment. Some areas have more research activity so there is more being written, photographed, drawn, or otherwise recorded about an area, but no matter how small an area is, there is usually new local studies material being continually created.Local Studies CollectionsLocal studies collections are important as they provide key information about an area. For professional scholars, even in social history, the local becomes interesting only within a larger context, however. Local case studies may throw light on wider questions (Reid and Macafee 127).This highlights the value which local studies can contribute as part of research as these collections may provide case studies to explore, or different avenues to investigate. It also shows the importance of information in many local studies collections being brought together so the separate, local information can be connected to other local information. This bringing together can be as a result of research or through an aggregation system such as Trove (“Trove”).Peter Reid and Caroline Macafee have stated that becausethe potential is always there for local history to be pulled into issues of wider concern, it could be said to occupy a liminal space, a borderland between knowledge that is personal, and therefore academically trivial, and knowledge that is generalizable and therefore worthy of scientific attention. (127)This seems a harsh description, but it shows how these collections can be undervalued and that this undervaluing can risk them being overlooked by biographers, historians, and other researchers. Despite this thinking, local studies collections can offer unique and valuable insights into people and places; including for regional areas. The skilled library staff who manage these collections are also key resources in the history of regional areas, as they can help connect the local studies information to other local collections. As well as connecting people to the resources, the unwritten knowledge of staff is a separate and very important resource.How to Discover Local Studies CollectionsA good way to start exploring local studies collections is by searching Trove. Trove had, around the time of writing, “over 457,524,491 Australian and online resources” (online) and is an Australia-wide database, managed by the National Library of Australia. It enables you to search many library catalogues with one search tool which means that you can search once, in one place, rather than by individual library or museum catalogues. Trove brings together metadata including catalogue records, mostly from library catalogues, from organisations who choose to contribute access to their information. Some of the resources you can search for on Trove are in local studies collections in public libraries or held by other organisations which collect local information such as state and national libraries. Start your search by the name of the location which you are exploring. Be as specific as possible, as you can always broaden your search later. If the item has been digitised, or is already digital, you are often able to view or listen to this material online.As well as providing access to library catalogues, many local newspapers have been digitised and are searchable and viewable on Trove. Some newspapers have been digitised up to 1955, while some titles have fewer years available online, and microfilm will need to be used to find more recently produced information. Public libraries often hold the microfilm for their local newspapers. State libraries may hold them as well. This timeline of digital access is important to keep in mind as searching newspapers on Trove is very easy and searching on microfilm is not so appealing because of having to work through each newspaper page by page, microfilm roll by microfilm roll. You need to check the information about what issues of a newspaper have been digitised so you know when you need to start looking at microfilm copies rather than digitised ones. Older newspapers often include syndicated stories, so an event may have occurred in an area you are interested in but be reported in the newspaper from another area. You could also use the Trove API (application programming interface) to explore high volume digitised newspaper or catalogue data (Sherratt).This method of starting with Trove can also be a helpful way to find out which public library is in the area you are looking for, as the name of the organisation which holds the resources is listed online. You can click on a link to take you to their catalogue. While public libraries are often named for the town they are in, you may be looking for a place with a different name, so this method can be helpful. It can also show resources held in other libraries which may relate to the area of your research. Trove Mosaic by Mitchell Whitelaw (online), although an older interface, is a visual way to explore Trove and clearly highlights the different organisations contributing photographs.Libraries include local studies photographs in their social media and a very small number of them are collecting social media about their community (Forsyth et al.). Searching social media for terms such as #flashbackFriday or #throwbackThursday may also provide a way to discover local studies material online, although depending on your research topic, this method could be too haphazard an approach. There are still some local studies blogs to follow (MacRitchie) and searching for these can also provide information about local studies material in public libraries.Public Libraries and Local StudiesYou can also start at the public library. Depending on where in Australia you are searching there are different tools to help find your local public library. Rather than list them all, a useful starting point is to go to your favourite search engine and search for the name of town/suburb followed by public library. This should connect you with information about the local library through the library website, the regional library website (where two or more councils work together to provide a public library service), or via the council website. This is likely to provide sufficient information to be able to contact the library. However, before you contact the library, search the library catalogue. They may even have a separate local studies database for some or all of the local studies collection. This is why is it a good idea to start with Trove, before going to a local library search, as Trove should be aggregating collection information from a variety of sources bringing together the local public library as well as other organisations (sometimes some unexpected ones) which have material of relevance.Work from the State Library of New South Wales had demonstrated that not everything in local studies collection is catalogued (State Library of New South Wales) which makes it impossible to search for everything online. Quite a few (but not all) public libraries have a webpage where they describe their local studies collections and services. This can provide helpful information so that if you do not find something online you can telephone or email the library seeking further information. If the library is nearby you could simply visit it, but it is best to ring or email first if your time is limited, as it can be helpful to make an appointment to ensure that staff will be able to assist you with using the library collection. For searching the catalogues for local studies information, again, be as specific as possible, knowing you can always broaden your search terms. Helpfully, most (but not all) library catalogues have a sort by date option once material has been found, and some even have local studies specific search help. Often you can view or listen to digitised material online, but some libraries only make low resolution images available, which is rarely of good enough quality for research. When you have searched the catalogue or other online local studies database and not found anything, contact the library as they will be able to provide further information.Library staff will help you use their collections. Some public libraries charge a fee for more detailed research, others, quite reasonably, require you to do this more detailed research yourself.There are many variables, and it really depends on what and where you are researching. Perhaps you are looking for a written history of each area you plan to visit when exploring regional areas of Australia, or you might be planning to visit local studies collections to see how they lead you to areas and stories of local interest, or there is a particular research question you want to explore in several regional areas. How local studies books and other materials are written will depend on the time they were written, and the purpose for them. They can depict ideas and priorities which are outdated and/or offensive.Not Everything Is on TroveWhile Trove is a suggested starting place, given that every item in local studies collections is not catalogued, visiting the local public library can be an important step to take. Always check if the local studies area has different opening hours to the rest of the library. If part or all of the local studies collection is in a locked room, visiting the library at a very busy time is unwise as it may make it harder for the staff to assist you as they will have many other priorities and you may not be able to access the collection.Visiting the Library Visiting a public library and looking at how their local studies collection is arranged can help you see the collecting priorities. It also makes it very clear as to which public libraries have prioritised their local studies information. Occasionally the local studies area will be a partnership with both the library and the local family or local history society providing resources or the collection. This can result in different access conditions being applied to different collections.Visiting the collection means you can talk with the library staff about the history of the area as part of your experience of regional Australia. It is interesting to see how different local studies collections are arranged and how the local area is promoted through the collection and any displays or merchandise for sale. Often local publications will be for sale in the library so that you can purchase titles about the history of the area. Some councils commission histories of their areas, other times niche histories will be written by people in the community and the local studies collection can be a helpful way to discover these.Keep in mind that local government boundaries change (Leigh) and this may mean that resources you are looking for could be in a neighbouring area, rather than the location you are exploring. This is another reason to start with Trove.You May Not Be Able to See Everything Even If You Visit...For reasons of preservation you may not be able to see everything in the local studies collection even if you visit. Sometimes you need to watch out for special tours, which may not coincide with your visit to the area. There may be parts of the collection stored but not fully explored by staff, waiting their time in the queue to be catalogued and made available for research. Generally public library staff will be very helpful for you in your research, particularly if you have specific questions about the area.Know about CopyrightKnow the information about duration of copyright as some libraries say on their catalogues that everything which has been digitised is in copyright. This may be accidental as a result of some bulk cataloguing processes linked with digitisation. Stating something is in copyright is not the same as it being in copyright. The Australian Copyright Council has a helpful information sheet on the duration of copyright to help you understand what is in copyright and how long it is likely to continue to be in copyright.ChallengesThere will be collection gaps. The risk of bias is highlighted by the statement that libraries “are not, and have never been, socially or politically neutral institutions” (Gibson et al. 753). There has not been detailed research exploring these collection gaps, so the exact extent of exclusion or omission of information is not yet able to be quantified. There is arenewed professional imperative to position information centers as central locations for social justice work [which] has also turned our attention to the need to preserve materials that support a diverse and pluralistic society … [and] as a duty to steward unexplored histories. (Sheffield 573)Material may not be in the collection because it was not collected, or because it was not created. For example, in the past not everyone could afford a camera which means they may not have photographed or videoed their family, or public events. Not every grave had a headstone so someone may not have their grave recorded. Public libraries recognise these gaps, and in some areas library staff create or commission content to help with these omissions. For example, oral histories can be recorded to include stories which were not available in other ways, and photographs can be taken of current events to make sure a wider exploration of local stories are recorded in the local studies collection.Conclusion (and Opportunities)Grant White states, in relation to local studies that thesurvival of the artefact is only ever significant when it can be accessed by someone who can see meaning in it. The collection is in fact much more than the material sitting upon the shelves, it is access to it. Access which keeps it current in the community memory rather than as a separated, isolated adjunct. It is also the participation of the community in the creation of the collection, feeding it with its experience, reflections and memories. (98)This access is crucial, and with digitisation and digital collecting the access can increasingly be at a distance, without actually visiting a library. This increasing online access, especially through aggregated sites such as Trove, will hopefully enable research exploring the similarities and differences of regional areas, as connections can be made, and not only by people who can afford to travel to different places to do research. Digitisation, digital collecting, effective cataloguing and use of metadata can open up access to collections, just as digital preservation, preservation of other formats and conservation can help make sure that these materials are available into the future. Connecting to skilled staff who manage these collections is another way of exploring access as there will be information not recorded anywhere you can find, but which the staff may know because of their experience and knowledge of the collection as well as their knowledge of the community they work in.If you have been using public library local studies collections for research, it is helpful if you can share this research back with the public library, helping to build their collection for other people who are researching the region, even if they are exploring different topics. It may be a printed book you are providing, but more public libraries are able to accept donations of ebooks, or other online content. This can be a helpful way for you to contribute to the collections which have assisted in your research.ReferencesBateman, Shirley. “Innovation in Local Studies Collections and Programs: How Melbourne Library Service Is Fostering Community Pride.” Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services 25.1 (2012): 12–18.Dewe, Michael. Ed. Local Studies Collection Management. London: Ashgate, 2002.Forsyth, Ellen, Ngarie Macqueen, and Daniel Nitsikopoulos. Contemporary Collecting: Collecting Instagram for Local Studies. ALIA Information Online, 2019.Gibson, Amelia N., Renate L. Chancellor, Nicole A. Cooke, Sarah Park Dahlen, Shari A. Lee, and Yasmeen L. Shorish. “Libraries on the Frontlines: Neutrality and Social Justice.” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 36.8 (2017): 751–66.Gregg, Alison. “Our Heritage: The Role of Archives and Local Studies Collections.” Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services 15.3 (2002): 126–32.Heap, Amy, and Bob Pymm. “Wagga Wagga Women’s Wireless and the Web: Local Studies and New Technologies.” The Australian Library Journal 58.1 (2009): 5–16.Johnston, Clinton. “Capture and Release: Cataloguing Cultural Heritage at Marrickville Library and History Services.” The Australian Library Journal 62.3 (2013): 218–23.Leigh, Carol. “From Filing Cabinet to Cultural Centre: Creating a Community History Centre in Wanneroo Western Australia.” Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services 25.2 (2012): 83–88.MacRitchie, John. “The Manly Art of Local Studies Blogging: A New Approach to Old Stories.” Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services 25.2 (2012): 89–93.McCausland, Sigrid. “Archives for the People: Public Libraries and Archives in New South Wales.” The Australian Library Journal 64.4 (2015): 270.Reid, Peter H., and Caroline Macafee. “The Philosophy of Local Studies in the Interactive Age.” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 39.3 (2007): 126–41.Sheffield, Rebecka T. “More than Acid-Free Folders: Extending the Concept of Preservation to Include the Stewardship of Unexplored Histories.” Library Trends 64.3 (2016): 572.Sherratt, Tim. “Asking Better Questions: History, Trove and the Risks That Count.” Copyfight. Ed. Phillipa McGuinness. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2015. 112–24.State Library of New South Wales. NSW Public Libraries Local Studies Audit. 2014.“Trove.” Trove 7 Apr. 2019 <https://trove.nla.gov.au/>.White, Grant. “Message in a Bottle: Community Memory in the Local Studies Collection.” APLIS 13.3 (2000): 6.Whitelaw, Mitchell. “TroveMosaic: Exploring Trove Images.” TroveMosaic: Exploring Trove Images 7 Apr. 2019 <http://mtchl.net/TroveMosaic/>.

“Communicating deep feeling in linear solid blocks of print felt arcane, a method beyond me” — Audre Lorde in an interview with Adrienne Rich (Lorde 87) How do you disclose? In writing, in spoken words, in movements, in sounds, in the quiet energetic vibration and its trace in discourse? Is disclosure a narrative account of a self, or a poetic fragment, sent into the world outside the sanction of a story or another recognisable form (see fig. 1)?These are the questions that guide my exploration in this essay. I meditate on them from the vantage point of my own self-narrative, as a community performance practitioner and writer, a poet whose artistry, in many ways, relies on the willingness of others to disclose, to open themselves, and yet who feels ambivalent about narrative disclosures. What I share with you, reader, are my thoughts on what some may call compassion fatigue, on boredom, on burn-out, on the inability to be moved by someone’s hard-won right to story her life, to tell his narrative, to disclose her pain. I find it ironic that for as long as I can remember, my attention has often wandered when someone tells me their story—how this cancer was diagnosed, what the doctors did, how she coped, how she garnered support, how she survived, how that person died, how she lived. The story of how addiction took over her life, how she craved, how she hated, how someone sponsored her, listened to her, how she is making amends, how she copes, how she gets on with her life. The story of being born this way, being prodded this way, being paraded in front of doctors just like this, being operated on, being photographed, being inappropriately touched, being neglected, being forgotten, being unloved, being lonely. Listening to these accounts, my attention does wander, even though this is the heart blood of my chosen life—these are the people whose company I seek, with whom I feel comfortable, with whom I make art, with whom I make a life, to whom I disclose my own stories. But somehow, when we rehearse these stories in each others’s company (for rehearsal, polishing, is how I think of storytelling), I drift. In this performance-as-research essay about disclosure, I want to draw attention to what does draw my attention in community art situations, what halts my drift, and allows me to find connection beyond a story that is unique and so special to this individual, but which I feel I have heard so many times. What grabs me, again and again, lies beyond the words, beyond the “I did this… and that… and they did this… and that,” beyond the story of hardship and injury, recovery and overcoming. My moment of connection tends to happen in the warmth of this hand in mine. It occurs in the material connection that seems to well up between these gray eyes and my own deep gaze. I can feel the skin change its electric tonus as I am listening to the uncoiling account. There’s a timbre in the voice that I follow, even as I lose the words. In the moment of verbal disclosure, physical intimacy changes the time and space of encounter. And I know that the people I sit with are well aware of this—it is not lost on them that my attention isn’t wholly focused on the story they are telling, that I will have forgotten core details when next we work together. But they are also aware, I believe, of those moments of energetic connect that happen through, beyond and underneath the narrative disclosure. There is a physical opening occurring here, right now, when I tell this account to you, when you sit by my side and I confess that I can’t always keep the stories of my current community participants straight, that I forget names all the time, that I do not really wish to put together a show with lots of testimony, that I’d rather have single power words floating in space.Figure 1. Image: Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang. Performer: Neil Marcus.”water burns sun”. Burning. 2009. Orientation towards the Frame: A Poetics of VibrationThis essay speaks about how I witness the uncapturable in performance, how the limits of sharing fuel my performance practice. I also look at the artistic processes of community performance projects, and point out traces of this other attention, this poetics of vibration. One of the frames through which I construct this essay is a focus on the formal in practice: on an attention to the shapes of narratives, and on the ways that formal experimentation can open up spaces beyond and beneath the narratives that can sound so familiar. An attention to the formal in community practice is often confused with an elitist drive towards quality, towards a modern or post-modern play with forms that stands somehow in opposition to how “ordinary people” construct their lives. But there are other ways to think about “the formal,” ways to question the naturalness with which stories are told, poems are written, the ease of an “I”, the separation between self and those others (who hurt, or love, or persecute, or free), the embedment of the experience of thought in institutions of thinking. Elizabeth St. Pierre frames her own struggle with burn-out, falling silent, and the need to just keep going even if the ethical issues involved in continuing her research overwhelm her. She charts out her thinking in reference to Michel Foucault’s comments on how to transgress into a realm of knowing that stretches a self, allows it “get free of oneself.”Getting free of oneself involves an attempt to understand the ‘structures of intelligibility’ (Britzman, 1995, p. 156) that limit thought. Foucault (1984/1985) explaining the urgency of such labor, says, ‘There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all’ (p. 8). (St. Pierre 204)Can we think outside the structure of story, outside the habits of thought that make us sense and position ourselves in time and space, in power and knowledge? Is there a way to change the frame, into a different format, to “change our mind”? And even if there is not, if the structures of legibility always contain what we can think, there might be riches in that borderland, the bordercountry towards the intelligible, the places where difference presses close in an uncontained, unstoried way. To think differently, to get free of oneself: all these concerns resonate deeply with me, and with the ways that I wish to engage in community art practice. Like St. Pierre, I try to embrace Deleuzian, post-structuralist approaches to story and self:The collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice. […] To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call myself (moi). I is an order word. (Deleuze and Guattari 84).“I” wish to perform and to write at the moment when the chorus of the voices that make up my “I” press against my skin, from the inside and the outside, query the notion of ‘skin’ as barrier. But can “I” stay in that vibrational moment? This essay will not be an exercise in quotation marks, but it is an essay of many I’s, and—imagine you see this essay performed—I invite the vibration of the hand gestures that mark small breaches in the air next to my head as I speak.Like St. Pierre, I get thrown off those particular theory horses again and again. But curiosity drives me on, and it is a curiosity nourished not by the absence of (language) connection, by isolation, but by the fullness of those movements of touch and density I described above. That materiality of the tearful eye gaze, the electricity of those fine skin hairs, the voice shivering me: these are not essentialist connections that somehow reveal or disclose a person to me, but these matters make the boundaries of “me” and “person” vibrate. Disclose here becomes the density of living itself, the flowing, non-essential process of shaping lives together. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have called this bordering “deterritorialization,” always already bound to the reterritorialisation that allows the naming of the experience. Breath-touch on the limits of territories.This is not a shift from verbal to a privileging of non-verbal communication, finding richness and truth in one and less in the other. Non-verbal communication can be just as conventional as spoken language. When someone’s hand reaches out to touch someone who is upset, that gesture can feel ingrained and predictable, and the chain of caretaking that is initiated by the gesture can even hinder the flow of disclosure the crying or upset person might be engaged in. Likewise, I believe the common form of the circle, one I use in nearly every community session I lead, does not really create more community than another format would engender. The repetition of the circle just has something very comforting, it can allow all participants to drop into a certain kind of ease that is different from the everyday, but the rules of that ease are not open—circles territorialise as much as they de-territorialise: here is an inside, here an outside. There is nothing inherently radical in them. But circles might create a radical shift in communication situations when they break open other encrusted forms—an orientation to a leader, a group versus individual arrangement, or the singularity of islands out in space. Circles brings lots of multiples into contact, they “gather the tribes.” What provisional I’s we extract from them in each instance is our ethical challenge.Bodily Fantasies on the Limit: BurningEven deeply felt inner experiences do not escape the generic, and there is lift available in the vibration between the shared fantasy and the personal fantasy. I lead an artists’ collective, The Olimpias, and in 2008/2009, we created Burning, a workshop and performance series that investigated cell imagery, cancer imagery, environmental sensitivity and healing journeys through ritual-based happenings infused with poetry, dramatic scenes, Butoh and Contact Improvisation dances, and live drawing (see: http://www.olimpias.org/).Performance sites included the Subterranean Arthouse, Berkeley, July and October 2009, the Earth Matters on Stage Festival, Eugene, Oregon, May 2009, and Fort Worden, Port Townsend, Washington State, August 2009. Participants for each installation varied, but always included a good percentage of disabled artists.(see fig. 2).Figure 2. Image: Linda Townsend. Performers: Participants in the Burning project. “Burning Action on the Beach”. Burning. 2009. In the last part of these evening-long performance happenings, we use meditation techniques to shift the space and time of participants. We invite people to lie down or otherwise become comfortable (or to observe in quiet). I then begin to lead the part of the evening that most closely dovetails with my personal research exploration. With a slow and reaching voice, I ask people to breathe, to become aware of the movement of breath through their bodies, and of the hollows filled by the luxuriating breath. Once participants are deeply relaxed, I take them on journeys which activate bodily fantasies. I ask them to breathe in colored lights (and leave the specific nature of the colors to them). I invite participants to become cell bodies—heart cells, liver cells, skin cells—and to explore the properties and sensations of these cell environments, through both internal and external movement. “What is the surface, what is deep inside, what does the granular space of the cell feel like? How does the cell membrane move?” When deeply involved in these explorations, I move through the room and give people individual encounters by whispering to them, one by one—letting them respond bodily to the idea that their cell encounters alchemical elements like gold and silver, lead or mercury, or other deeply culturally laden substances like oil or blood. When I am finished with my individual instruction to each participant, all around me, people are moving gently, undulating, contracting and expanding, their eyes closed and their face full of concentration and openness. Some have dropped out of the meditation and are sitting quietly against a wall, observing what is going on around them. Some move more than others, some whisper quietly to themselves.When people are back in spoken-language-time, in sitting-upright-time, we all talk about the experiences, and about the cultural body knowledges, half-forgotten healing practices, that seem to emerge like Jungian archetypes in these movement journeys. During the meditative/slow movement sequence, some long-standing Olimpias performers in the room had imagined themselves as cancer cells, and gently moved with the physical imagery this brought to them. In my meditation invitations during the participatory performance, I do not invite community participants to move as cancer cells—it seems to me to require a more careful approach, a longer developmental period, to enter this darkly signified state, even though Olimpias performers do by no means all move tragically, darkly, or despairing when entering “cancer movement.” In workshops in the weeks leading up to the participatory performances, Olimpias collaborators entered these experiences of cell movement, different organ parts, and cancerous movement many times, and had time to debrief and reflect on their experiences.After the immersion exercise of cell movement, we ask people how it felt like to lie and move in a space that also held cancer cells, and if they noticed different movement patterns, different imaginaries of cell movement, around them, and how that felt. This leads to rich discussions, testimonies of poetic embodiment, snippets of disclosures, glimpses of personal stories, but the echo of embodiment seems to keep the full, long stories at bay, and outside of the immediacy of our sharing. As I look around myself while listening, I see some hands intertwined, some gentle touches, as people rock in the memory of their meditations.nowyour light shines very brightlybut I want youto knowyour darkness alsorichand beyond fear (Lorde 87)My research aim with these movement meditation sequences is not to find essential truths about human bodily imagination, but to explore the limits of somatic experience and cultural expression, to make artful life experiential and to hence create new tools for living in the chemically saturated world we all inhabit.I need to add here that these are my personal aims for Burning—all associated artists have their own journey, their own reasons for being involved, and there is no necessary consensus—just a shared interest in transformation, the cultural images of disease, disability and addiction, the effects of invasion and touch in our lives, and how embodied poetry can help us live. (see fig. 3). For example, a number of collaborators worked together in the participatory Burning performances at the Subterranean Arthouse, a small Butoh performance space in Berkeley, located in an old shop, complete with an open membrane into the urban space—a shop-window and glass door. Lots of things happen with and through us during these evenings, not just my movement meditations.One of my colleagues, Sadie Wilcox, sets up live drawing scenarios, sketching the space between people. Another artist, Harold Burns, engages participants in contact dance, and invites a crossing of boundaries in and through presence. Neil Marcus invites people to move with him, gently, and blindfolded, and to feel his spastic embodiment and his facility with tender touch. Amber diPietra’s poem about cell movement and the journeys from one to another sounds out in the space, set to music by Mindy Dillard. What I am writing about here is my personal account of the actions I engage in, one facet of these evenings—choreographing participants’ inner experiences.Figure 3. Image: Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang. Performers: Artists in the Burning project. “water burns sun”. Burning. 2009. My desires echo Lorde’s poem: “I want you”—there’s a sensual desire in me when I set up these movement meditation scenes, a delight in an erotic language and voice touch that is not predicated on sexual contact, but on intimacy, and on the borderlines, the membranes of the ear and the skin; ‘to know’—I continue to be intrigued and obsessed, as an artist and as a critic, by the way people envision what goes on inside them, and find agency, poetic lift, in mobilising these knowledges, in reaching from the images of bodies to the life of bodies in the world. ‘your darkness also’—not just the bright light, no, but also the fears and the strengths that hide in the blood and muscle, in the living pulsing shadow of the heart muscle pumping away, in the dark purple lobe of the liver wrapping itself around my middle and purifying, detoxifying, sifting, whatever sweeps through this body.These meditative slow practices can destabilise people. Some report that they experience something quite real, quite deep, and that there is transformation to be gained in these dream journeys. But the framing within which the Burning workshops take place question immediately the “authentic” of this experiential disclosure. The shared, the cultural, the heritage and hidden knowledge of being encultured quickly complicate any essence. This is where the element of formal enframing enters into the immediacy of experience, and into the narration of a stable, autonomous “I.” Our deepest cellular experience, the sounds and movements we listen to when we are deeply relaxed, are still cultured, are still shared, come to us in genres and stable image complexes.This form of presentation also questions practices of self-disclosure that participate in trauma narratives through what Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman has called “impression management” (208). Goffman researched the ways we play ourselves as roles in specific contexts, how we manage acts of disclosure and knowledge, how we deal with stigma and stereotype. Impression management refers to the ways people present themselves to others, using conscious or unconscious techniques to shape their image. In Goffman’s framing of these acts of self-presentation, performance and dramaturgical choices are foregrounded: impression management is an interactive, dynamic process. Disclosure becomes a semiotic act, not a “natural,” unfiltered display of an “authentic” self, but a complex engagement with choices. The naming and claiming of bodily trauma can be part of the repertoire of self-representation, a (stock-)narrative that enables recognition and hence communication. The full traumatic narrative arc (injury, reaction, overcoming) can here be a way to manage the discomfort of others, to navigate potential stigma.In Burning, by-passing verbal self-disclosure and the recitation of experience, by encountering ourselves in dialogue with our insides and with foreign elements in this experiential way, there is less space for people to speak managed, filtered personal truths. I find that these truths tend to either close down communication if raw and direct, or become told as a story in its complete, polished arc. Either form leaves little space for dialogue. After each journey through bodies, cells, through liver and heart, breath and membrane, audience members need to unfold for themselves what they felt, and how that felt, and how that relates to the stories of cancer, environmental toxins and invasion that they know.It is not fair. We should be able to have dialogues about “I am poisoned, I live with environmental sensitivities, and they constrict my life,” “I survived cancer,” “I have multiple sclerosis,” “I am autistic,” “I am addicted to certain substances,” “I am injured by certain substances.” But tragedy tugs at these stories, puts their narrators into the realm of the inviolate, as a community quickly feel sorry for these persons, or else feels attacked by them, in particular if one does not know how to help. Yes, we know this story: we can manage her identity for her, and his social role can click into fixity. The cultural weight of these narratives hinders flow, become heavily stigmatised. Many contemporary writers on the subjects of cancer and personhood recognise the (not always negative) aspects of this stigma, and mobilise them in their narratives. As Marisa Acocella Marchetto in the Cancer-Vixen: A True Story puts it: ‘Play the cancer card!’ (107). The cancer card appears in this graphic novel memoir in the form of a full-page spoof advertisement, and the card is presented as a way to get out of unwanted social obligations. The cancer card is perfectly designed to create the communal cringe and the hasty retreat. If you have cancer, you are beyond the pale, and ordinary rules of behavior do no longer apply. People who experience these life-changing transformational diagnoses often know very well how isolating it can be to name one’s personal story, and many are very careful about how they manage disclosure, and know that if they choose to disclose, they have to manage other people’s discomfort. In Burning, stories of injury and hurt swing in the room with us, all of these stories are mentioned in our performance program, but none of them are specifically given individual voice in our performance (although some participants chose to come out in the sharing circle at the end of the event). No one owns the diagnoses, the identity of “survivor,” and the presence of these disease complexes are instead dispersed, performatively enacted and brought in experiential contact with all members of our temporary group. When you leave our round, you most likely still do not know who has multiple sclerosis, who has substance addiction issues, who is sensitive to environmental toxins.Communication demands territorialisation, and formal experimentation alone, unanchored in lived experience, easily alienates. So how can disclosure and the storytelling self find some lift, and yet some connection, too? How can the Burning cell imaginary become both deep, emotionally rich and formal, pointing to its constructed nature? That’s the question that each of the Olimpias’ community performance experiments begins with.How to Host a Past Collective: Setting Up a CirclePreceding Burning, one of our recent performance investigations was the Anarcha Project. In this multi-year, multi-site project, we revisited gynecological experiments performed on slave women in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1840s, by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology.” We did so not to revictimise historical women as suffering ciphers, or stand helpless at the site of historical injury. Instead, we used art-based methods to investigate the heritage of slavery medicine in contemporary health care inequalities and women’s health care. As part of the project, thousands of participants in multiple residencies across the U.S. shared their stories with the project leaders—myself, Aimee Meredith Cox, Carrie Sandahl, Anita Gonzalez and Tiye Giraud. We collected about two hundred of these fragments in the Anarcha Anti-Archive, a website that tries, frustratingly, to undo the logic of the ordered archive (Cox et al. n.p).The project closed in 2008, but I still give presentations with the material we generated. But what formal methods can I select, ethically and responsibly, to present the multivocal nature of the Anarcha Project, given that it is now just me in the conference room, given that the point of the project was the intersection of multiple stories, not the fetishisation of individual ones? In a number of recent presentations, I used a circle exercise to engage in fragmented, shrouded disclosure, to keep privacies safe, and to find material contact with one another. In these Anarcha rounds, we all take words into our mouths, and try to stay conscious to the nature of this act—taking something into our mouth, rather than acting out words, normalising them into spoken language. Take this into your mouth—transgression, sacrament, ritual, entrainment, from one body to another.So before an Anarcha presentation, I print out random pages from our Anarcha Anti-Archive. A number of the links in the website pull up material through chance procedures (a process implemented by Olimpias collaborator Jay Steichmann, who is interested in digital literacies). So whenever you click that particular link, you get to a different page in the anti-archive, and you can not retrace your step, or mark you place in an unfolding narrative. What comes up are poems, story fragments, images, all sent in in response to cyber Anarcha prompts. We sent these prompts during residencies to long-distance participants who could not physically be with us, and many people, from Wales to Malaysia, sent in responses. I pull up a good number of these pages, combined with some of the pages written by the core collaborators of our project. In the sharing that follows, I do not speak about the heart of the project, but I mark that I leave things unsaid. Here is what I do not say in the moment of the presentation—those medical experiments were gynecological operations without anesthesia, executed to close vaginal fistula that were leaking piss and shit, executed without anesthesia not because it was not available, but because the doctor did not believe that black women felt pain. I can write this down, here, in this essay, as you can now stop for a minute if you need to collect yourself, as you listen to what this narrative does to your inside. You might feel a clench deep down in your torso, like many of us did, a kinesthetic empathy that translates itself across text, time and space, and which became a core choreographic element in our Anarcha poetics.I do not speak about the medical facts directly in a face-to-face presentation where there is no place to hide, no place to turn away. Instead, I point to a secret at the heart of the Anarcha Project, and explain where all the medical and historical data can be found (in the Anarcha Project essay, “Remembering Anarcha,” in the on-line performance studies journal Liminalities site, free and accessible to all without subscription, now frequently used in bioethics education (see: http://www.liminalities.net/4-2). The people in the round, then, have only a vague sense of what the project is about, and I explain why this formal frame appears instead of open disclosure. I ask their permission to proceed. They either give it to me, or else our circle becomes something else, and we speak about performance practices and formal means of speaking about trauma instead.Having marked the space as one in which we agree on a specific framework or rule, having set up a space apart, we begin. One by one, raw and without preamble, people in the circle read what they have been given. The meaning of what they are reading only comes to them as they are reading—they have had little time to familiarise themselves with the words beforehand. Someone reads a poem about being held as a baby by one’s mother, being accepted, even through the writer’s body is so different. Someone reads about the persistence of shame. Someone reads about how incontinence is so often the borderline for independent living in contemporary cultures—up to here, freedom; past this point, at the point of leakage, the nursing home. Someone reads about her mother’s upset about digging up that awful past again. Someone reads about fibroid tumors in African-American women. Someone reads about the Venus Hottentott. Someone begins to cry (most recently at a Feminisms and Rhetorics conference), crying softly, and there is no knowing about why, but there is companionship, and quiet contemplation, and it is ok. These presentations start with low-key chatting, setting up the circle, and end the same way—once we have made our way around, once our fragments are read out, we just sit and talk, no “presentation-mode” emerges, and no one gets up into high drama. We’ve all taken strange things into our mouths, talked of piss and shit and blood and race and oppression and love and survival. Did we get free of ourselves, of the inevitability of narrative, in the attention to articulation, elocution, the performance of words, even if just for a moment? Did we taste the words on our tongues, material physical traces of a different form of embodiment? Container/ConclusionThe poet Anne Carson attended one of our Anarcha presentations, and her comments to us that evening helped to frame our subsequent work for me—she called our work creating a container, a vessel for experience, without sharing the specifics of that experience. I have since explored this image further, thought about amphorae as commemorative vases, thought of earth and clay as materials, thought of the illustrations on ancient vessels, on pattern and form, flow and movement. The vessel as matter: deterritorialising and reterritorialising, familiar and strange, shaping into form, and shaped out of formlessness, fired in the light and baked in the earth’s darkness, hardened only to crumble and crack again with the ages, returning to dust. These disclosures are in time and space—they are not narratives that create an archive or a body of knowledge. They breathe, and vibrate, and press against skin. What can be contained, what leaks, what finds its way through the membrane?These disclosures are traces of life, and I can touch them. I never get bored by them. Come and sit by my side, and we share in this river flow border vessel cell life.ReferencesBritzman, Deborah P. "Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight." Educational Theory 45:2 (1995): 151–165. Burning. The Olimpias Project. Berkley; Eugene; Fort Worden. May-October, 2009Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Vol. 2. The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1985.Goffman, Erving. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor, 1969Kuppers, Petra. “Remembering Anarcha: Objection in the Medical Archive.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 4.2 (2006): n.p. 24 July 2009 < http://liminalities.net/4-2 >.Cox, Aimee Meredith, Tiye Giraud, Anita Gonzales, Petra Kuppers, and Carrie Sandahl. “The Anarcha-Anti-Archive.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 4.2 (2006): n.p. 24 July 2009 < http://liminalities.net/4-2 >.Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984.Marchetto, Marisa Acocella. Cancer Vixen: A True Story. New York: Knopf, 2006.St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. “Circling the Text: Nomadic Writing Practices.” Qualitative Inquiry 3.4 (1997): 403–18.

IntroductionAlt, or alternative, accounts are secondary profiles people use in addition to a main account on a social media platform. They are a kind of automediation, a way of representing the self, that deliberately displays a different identity facet, and addresses a different audience, to what someone considers to be their main account. The term “alt” seems to have originated from videogame culture and been incorporated into understandings of social media accounts. A wiki page about alternate accounts on virtual world Second Life calls an alt “an account used by a resident for something other than their usual activity or to do things in privacy” (n.p.).Studying alts gives an insight into practices of managing and contextualising identities on networked platforms that are visible, persistent, editable, associable (Treem and Leonardi), spreadable, searchable (boyd), shareable (Papacharissi "Without"), and personalised (Schmidt). When these features of social media are understood as limitations that lead to context collapse (Marwick and boyd 122; Wesch 23), performative incoherence (Papacharissi Affective 99), and the risk of overexposure, people respond by developing alternative ways to use platforms.Plenty of scholarship on social media identities claims the self is fragmented, multifaceted, and contextual (Marwick 355; Schmidt 369). But the scholarship on multiple account use on single platforms is still emerging. Joanne Orlando writes for The Conversation that teens increasingly have more than one account on Instagram: “finstas” are “fake” or secondary accounts used to post especially candid photos to a smaller audience, thus they are deployed strategically to avoid the social pressure of looking polished and attractive. These accounts are referred to as “fake” because they are often pseudonymous, but the practice of compartmentalising audiences makes the promise that the photos posted are more authentic, spontaneous, and intimate. Kylie Cardell, Kate Douglas, and Emma Maguire (162) argue that while secondary accounts promise a less constructed version of life, speaking back to the dominant genre of aesthetically pleasing Instagram photos, all social media posts are constructed within the context of platform norms and imagined audiences (Litt & Hargittai 1). Still, secondary accounts are important for revealing these norms (Cardell, Douglas & Maguire 163). The secondary account is particularly prevalent on Twitter, a platform that often brings together multiple audiences into a public profile. In 2015, author Emily Reynolds claimed that Twitter alts were “an appealingly safe space compared to main Twitter where abuse, arguments and insincerity are rife” (n.p.).This paper draws on a survey of Twitter users with alts to argue that the strategic use of pseudonyms, profile photos without faces, locked accounts, and smaller audiences are ways to overcome some of the built-in limitations of social media automediality.Identity Is Multiple Chris Poole, founder of anonymous bulletin board 4chan, believes identity is a fluid concept, and designed his platform as a space in which people could connect over interests, not profiles. Positioning 4chan against real-name platforms, he argues:Your identity is prismatic […] we’re all multifaceted people. Google and Facebook would have you believe that you’re a mirror, that there is one reflection that you have, there is one idea of self. But in fact we’re more like diamonds. You can look at people from any angle and see something totally different, but they’re still the same. (n.p.)Claiming that identities are contextual performances stems from longstanding sociological and philosophical work on identity from theorists like Erving Goffman, who in the 1950s proposed a dramaturgical framework of the self to consider interactions as fundamentally social and performative rather than reflecting one core, essential inner self.Social media profiles allow people to use the language of the platform to represent themselves (Marwick 362), meaning identity performances are framed by platform architecture and features, formal and informal rules, and social ties (Schmidt 369). Social media profiles shape how people can engage in how they represent themselves, argue Shelly Farnham and Elizabeth Churchill, who claim that the assumption that a single, unified online identity is sufficient is a problematic trend in platform design. They argue that when facets of their lives are incompatible, people segment those lives into separate areas in order to maintain social norms and boundaries.Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson consider identity multiplicities to be crucial to automediality, which is built on an aesthetic of bricolage and pastiche rather than understanding subjectivity to be the essence of the self. In her work on automediality and online girlhood, Maguire ("Home"; "Self-Branding" 74) argues that an automedial approach attends to how mediation shapes the way selves can be represented online, claiming that the self is brought into being through these mediation practices.This article understands alt accounts as a type of social media practice that Nick Couldry (52) identifies as presencing: sustaining a public presence with media. I investigate presencing through studying alts as a way to manage separate publics, and the tension between public and private, on Twitter by surveying users who have a main and an alt account. Although research into multiple account use is nascent, Alice Marwick lists maintaining multiple accounts as a tactic to mitigate context collapse, alongside other strategies such as using nicknames, only sharing posts when they are appropriate for multiple audiences, and keeping more personal interactions to private messenger and text message.Ben Light argues that while connection is privileged on social media, disconnective practices like editing out, deleting, unfriending, untagging, rejecting follower requests, and in this case, creating alt accounts, are crucial. Disconnecting from some aspects of the social media experience allows people to stay connected on a particular platform, by negotiating the dynamics that do not appeal to them. While the disconnective practice of presencing through an alt has not been studied in detail, research I discuss in the next section focuses on multi-account use to argue that people who have more than one account on a single platform are aware of their audiences, and want control over which people see which posts.Multi-Platform and Multi-Account UseA conference presentation by Frederic Stutzman and Woodrow Hartzog calls maintaining multiple profiles on a single platform a strategy for boundary regulation, through which access is selectively granted to specific people. Stutzman and Hartzog interviewed 20 people with multiple profiles to determine four main motives for this kind of boundary regulation: privacy, identity management, utility (using one profile for a distinct purpose, like managing a restaurant page), and propriety (conforming to social norms around appropriate disclosure).Writing about multiple profiles on Reddit, Alex Leavitt argues that temporary or “throwaway” accounts give people the chance to disclose sensitive or off-topic information. For example, some women use throwaways when posting to a bra sizing subreddit, so men don’t exploit their main account for sexual purposes. Throwaways are a boundary management technique Leavitt considers beneficial for Redditors, and urges platform designers to consider implementing alternatives to single accounts.Jessa Lingel and Adam Golub also call for platforms to allow for multiple accounts, suggesting Facebook should let users link their profiles at a metadata level and be able to switch between them. They argue that this would be especially beneficial for those who take on specific personas, such as drag queens. In their study of drag queens with more than one Facebook profile, Lingel and Golub suggest that drag queens need to maintain boundaries between fans and friends, but creating a separate business page for their identity as a performer was inadequate for the kind of nuanced personal communication they engaged in with their fans. Drag queens considered this kind of communication relationship maintenance, not self-branding. This demonstrates that drag queens on Facebook are attentive to their audience, which is a common feature of users posting to social media: they have an idea, no matter how accurate, of who they are posting to.Eden Litt and Eszter Hargittai (1) call this perception the imagined audience, which serves as a guide for how to present the self and what to post about when an audience is unknown or not physically present. People in their study would either claim they were posting to no-one in particular, or that they had an audience in mind, whether this was personal ties (close friends, family, specific individuals like a best friend), communal ties (people interested in cleaning tips, local art community, people in Portland), professional ties (colleagues, clients, my radio show audience), and phantasmal ties (people with whom someone has an imaginary relationship, like famous people, brands, animals, and the dead).Based on these studies of boundary regulation, throwaway accounts, separate Facebook pages for fans and friends, and imagined audiences on social media, I designed a short survey that would prompt respondents to reflect on their own practices of negotiating platform limitations through their alt account.Asking Twitter about AltsTo research alts, I asked my own Twitter followers to tell me about theirs. I’ve been tweeting from @emvdn since 2010, and I have roughly 5,500 followers, mostly Melbourne academics, writers, and professionals. This method of asking my own Twitter followers questions builds on a study by Alice Marwick and danah boyd, in which they investigated context collapse on social media by tweeting questions like “who do you tweet to?” and monitoring the replies.I sent out a tweet with a link to the survey on 31 January 2018, and left it open for responses until I submitted this draft article on 18 February 2018:I’m writing about alt (alternative/secondary) accounts on social media. If you have an alt account, on Twitter or elsewhere, could you tell me about it, in survey form? (van der Nagel)The tweet was retweeted 161 times, spreading the survey to other accounts and contexts, and I received a total of 326 responses to the survey. For a full list of survey questions, see Appendix. I asked people to choose one alt (if they had more than one), and answer questions about it, including what prompted them to start the account, how they named it, who the audience is for their main and their alt, and how similar they perceived their main and alt to be. I also asked whether they would like to remain anonymous or be quoted under a pseudonym, which I have followed in this article.Of course, by posting the Twitter survey to my own followers, I am necessarily asking a specific group of people whose alt practices might not be indicative of broader trends. Just like any research done on Twitter, this research attracted a particular group: the results of this survey give a snapshot of the followers of a 29 year old female Melbourne academic, and the wider networks it was retweeted into.Although I asked anyone with more than one account on the same platform to fill out the survey, I’ll be focusing on pseudonymous alts here. Not everyone is pseudonymous on their alt: 61 per cent of respondents said they use a pseudonym, and half (51 per cent) said theirs was locked, or unavailable to the public. Some people have an alt in order to distinguish themselves from their professional account, some are connecting with those who share a specific interest, and others deliberately created an alt to harass and troll others on Twitter. But I regard pseudonymous alts as especially important to this article, as they evidence particular understandings of social media.Asking how people named their alt gave me an insight into how they framed it: as another facet of their identity: “I chose something close, but not too close to my main twitter handle,” or directed towards one particular subject they use the alt for: “I wanted a personal account which would be about all sorts, and one just for women’s sport” (Danielle Warby). Some changed the name of their account often, to further hide the account away: “I have renamed it several times, usually referencing in jokes with friends.”Many alt usernames express that the account is an alternative to a main one: people often said their alt username was their main username with a prefix or suffix like “alt,” “locked,” “NSFW” (Not Safe For Work, adult content), “priv” (short for “private”), or “2”, so if their main account was @emvdn, their alt account might be @emvdn_alt. Some used a username or nickname from another part of their life, used a pop culture reference, or wanted a completely random username, so they used a username generator or simply mashed the keyboard to get a string of random characters. Others used their real name for their alt account: “It’s my name. The point wasn’t to hide, it was to separate/segment conversiations [sic]” (knitmeapony).When asked who their audience was for their main and their alt, most people spoke of a smaller, more intimate audience of close friends or trusted accounts. On Twitter, people with locked accounts must approve followers before they can see their tweets, so it’s likely they are thinking of a specific group. One person said their alt was “locked behind a trust-wall (like a paywall, but you need to pay with a life-long friendship).” A few people said their audience for their alt was just one person: themselves. While their main account was for friends, or just “anyone who wants to follow me” (Brisbane blogger), their alt would simply be for them alone, to privately post and reflect.Asking how similar the main and alt account was led people reflecting on how they used multiple accounts to manage their multifaceted identity. “My alt account is just me unfiltered,” said one anonymous respondent, and another called their accounts “two sides of the same coin. Both me, just public and private versions.” One respondent said, “I would communicate differently in the boardroom from the bedroom. And I guess my alt is more like a private bedroom party, so it doesn’t matter if my bra comes off.”Many people signalled their awareness or experience of harassment when asked about benefits or drawbacks of alt accounts: people started theirs to avoid being harassed, bullied, piled-on, or judged. While an alt account gave people a private, safe channel in which to reach close friends and share intimate parts of their life, they also spoke about difficulties with maintaining more than one account, and potential awkwardness if someone requested to follow them that they did not want to connect with.It seemed that asking about benefits and drawbacks of alts led to articulations of labour—keeping accounts separate, and deciding on who to allow into this private space—but fears about social media more generally also surfaced. Although creating an alt meant people were consciously taking steps to compartmentalise their identity, this did not make them feel completely impervious to harassment, context collapse, and overexposure. “Some dingus will screencap and create drama,” was one potential drawback of having an alt: just because confessions and intimate or sexual photos were shared privately doesn’t mean they will stay private. People were keen to acknowledge that alts involved ongoing labour and platform negotiations.Multiple Identity Facets; Multiple AccountsWhen I released the survey, I was expecting most people to discuss their alt, locked, private account, which existed in contrast to their main, unlocked, professional one. Some people did just that, like Sarah:I worked in the media and needed a place to put my thoughts ABOUT my job/the media that I didn’t want my boss reading – not necessarily negative, just private thoughts I wanted to write somewhere.Wanting to maintain a public presence while still having an intimate space for personal self-disclosure was a common theme, which showed an awareness of imagined audiences, and a desire to disconnect from certain audiences, particularly colleagues and family members. Some didn’t necessarily want an intimate alt, but a targeted one: there were accounts for dog photos, weight loss journeys, fandoms, pregnancies, fetishes, a positive academic advice account using a Barbie doll called @barbie_phd, and one for cataloguing laundromats around London. It also seemed alts were contagious: people regularly admitted they began theirs because a friend had one. “Friends were using alts and it looked like a cool world;” “my friends seemed to be having a good time with it, and I wanted to try something they were interested in;” “wanted to be part of the ‘little twitter’ community.”Fluidities I wasn’t expecting also emerged. One respondent considered both of their accounts to be primary:it’s not clear for me which of my accounts is the “alt”. i had my non-professional one first, but i don’t consider either of them secondary, though the professional one is much more active.Along with those that changed the name of their alt often, L said they “initially kept private to only me to rant, record very private thoughts etc., have since extended it to 3 followers.” Platforms encourage continuous, active, engaged participation with ever-expanding networks of followers and friends. As José van Dijck (12) argues, platforms privilege connections, even as they stress human connectedness and downplay the automated connectivity from which they profit. Twitter’s homepage urges people to “follow your interests. Hear what people are talking about. Join the conversation. See what’s happening in the world right now,” and encourages people to keep adding more connections by featuring a recommendation panel that displays suggestions next to the main feed for “who to follow”, and links to import contacts from Gmail and other address books. In this instance, L’s three followers is an act of resistance, a disconnective practice that only links L with the very specific people they want to be an audience for their private thoughts, not to the extended networks of people L knows.ConclusionThis article has provided further evidence that on social media platforms, people don’t just have one account with their real name that faithfully expresses their one true identity. Even among those with alts, practices vary immensely, with some people using their alt as a quieter, more private space, and others creating a public identity and stream of posts catering to a niche audience.When users understand social media’s visibility, persistence, editability, association, spreadability, searchability, shareability, and personalisation as limitations, they seek ways to compartmentalise their identity facets so they can have access to the conversations, contexts, and audiences they want.There is scope for future research in this area on how alts are created, perceived, and managed, and how they relate to the broader social media landscape and its emphasis on real names, expanding networks, and increasingly sophisticated connections between people, platforms, and data. A larger study encompassing multiple platforms and accounts would reveal wider patterns of use and give more insight into this common, yet understudied, disconnective practice of selective presencing.Referencesboyd, danah. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014.Cardell, Kylie, Kate Douglas, and Emma Maguire. “‘Stories’: Social Media and Ephemeral Narratives as Memoir.” Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir. Eds. Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph. New York: Routledge, 2018. 157–172.Couldry, Nick. Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Cambridge: Polity P, 2012.Farnham, Shelly D., and Elizabeth F. Churchill. “Faceted Identity, Faceted Lives: Social and Technical Issues with Being Yourself Online.” CSCW ’11: Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Hangzhou, China, 19–23 March 2011. 359–68.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990 [1956].Leavitt, Alex. “‘This Is a Throwaway Account’: Temporary Technical Identities and Perceptions of Anonymity in a Massive Online Community.” Presented at the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing conference, Vancouver, Canada, 14–18 March 2015.Light, Ben. Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.Lingel, Jessa, and Adam Golub. “In Face on Facebook: Brooklyn’s Drag Community and Sociotechnical Practices of Online Communication.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20.5 (2015): 536–553.Litt, Eden, and Eszter Hargittai. “The Imagined Audience on Social Network Sites.” Social Media + Society 2.1 (2016).Maguire, Emma. “Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website.” M/C Journal 17.3 (2014). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/821>.———. “Self-Branding, Hotness, and Girlhood in the Video Blogs of Jenna Marbles.” Biography 38.1 (2015): 72–86.Marwick, Alice. “Online Identity.” A Companion to New Media Dynamics. Eds. John Hartley, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 355–64.———, and danah boyd. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media & Society 13.1 (2011): 114–133.Orlando, Joanne. “How Teens Use Fake Instagram Accounts to Relieve the Pressure of Perfection.” The Conversation, 7 Mar. 2018. <http://theconversation.com/how-teens-use-fake-instagram-accounts-to-relieve-the-pressure-of-perfection-92105>.Papacharissi, Zizi. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199999736.001.0001.———. “Without You, I’m Nothing: Performances of the Self on Twitter.” International Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 1989–2006.Poole, Chris. “Prismatic Identity.” Chris Hates Writing 9 Oct. 2013 <http://chrishateswriting.com/post/63564095133/prismatic-identity>.Reynolds, Emily. “Alt Twitter: Where Brutal Honesty Hides behind Pseudonyms.” Gadgette 10 Aug. 2015 <https://www.gadgette.com/2015/08/10/welcome-to-alt-twitter-where-brutal-honesty-hides-behind-pseudonyms/>.Schmidt, Jan-Hinrik. “Practices of Networked Identity.” A Companion to New Media Dynamics. Eds. John Hartley, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 365–74.Second Life Wiki. “Alternate Account.” Second Life Wiki (2018). <http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Alternate_Account>.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 70-95.Stutzman, Frederic D., and Woodrow Hartzog. “Boundary Regulation in Social Media.” CSCW ’12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11–15 February, Seattle, USA (2012).Treem, Jeffrey W., and Paul M. Leonardi. “Social Media Use in Organizations: Exploring the Affordances of Visibility, Editability, Persistence, and Association.” Communication Yearbook 36 (2012): 143–89. Van der Nagel, Emily. “Writing about Alt Accounts.” Twitter 31 Jan. 2018, 4.42 p.m. <https://twitter.com/emvdn/status/958576094713696262>.Van Dijck, José. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.Wesch, Michael. “YouTube and You: Experiences of Self-Awareness in the Context Collapse of the Recording Webcam.” Explorations in Media Ecology 8.2 (2009): 19–34. Appendix: List of Survey QuestionsDemographic informationAll the questions in this survey are optional, so feel free to skip any if you’re not comfortable sharing.How old are you?What is your gender identity?What is your main occupation?What is your city and country of residence?Which social media platforms do you use? Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube, Tencent QQ, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Renren, other?Which social media platforms do you have an alt account on? Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube, Tencent QQ, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Renren, other?Your alt accountThis section asks you to pick one of your alt accounts - for example, your locked account on Twitter separate from your main account, a throwaway on Reddit, or a close-friends-only Facebook account - and tell me about it.Which platform is your alt account on?Is your alt locked (unavailable to the public)? Yes/NoWhat prompted you to start your alt account?Do you use a pseudonym on your alt? Yes/NoDo you use a photo of yourself as the profile image? Yes/NoDo you share photos of yourself on your alt? Yes/NoCan you tell me about how you named your alt?Which account do you use more often? My main/my alt/I use them about the sameWhich has a bigger audience? My main/my alt/They’re about the sameWho is the audience for your main account? Who is the audience for your alt account? What topics would you post about on your alt that you’d never post about on your main? How similar do you think your main and alt accounts are? What are the benefits of having an alt?What are the drawbacks of having an alt? Thank you!If I quote you in my research project, what name/pseudonym would you like me to use? My name/pseudonym is___________ OR I would like to remain anonymous and be assigned a participant number

“As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new”—Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stage of Literacy Technologies When I first relocated to Australia, there was a clear three month delay for cultural products coming from North America to arrive. It was the era of Jurassic Park and for those three months I had a high level of what Bourdieu originally called "cultural capital" amongst a certain age group who were anticipating the breakthrough computer-generated images of the flocking dinosaurs and the menacing intelligence of the raptors. At that time, there was no basketball team named after a dinosaur (Toronto Raptors) and only the first season of an ice-hockey team named after a movie (Anaheim Mighty Ducks). It was 1993 and life apparently was simpler and idyllic. It is a definitive cultural condition in Australia to already possess a great deal of knowledge about a television programme or a film before it has arrived. For film reviewers, they are aware of box office receipts in the United States, other reviewers' comments and the wealth of promotional material that is part of their press kits. For the audience, according to key publicists in Australia, magazines and television rarely now hold to the rule of following the conventions of matching the release date of a given product for their release of a 'feature' article on its stars. The three months gap of knowledge has eroded completely in Australia. In fact, the Internet through websites destroys the organisation of Australian-targetted promotional campaigns for X-Files episodes/movies as fans seek out advanced information well before their domestic release. We already know who not to trust before we experience the actual programme and it produces a fundamentally changed cultural experience. Harry Jay Knowles's website "ain't it cool" has revelled in the infamy of disrupting Hollywood's carefully crafted saturation promotion and ad campaigns. To capture this Australian sensibility that can be labelled 'anticipatory memory', it is worth looking at the most recent example of this phenomenon and its implications. Seinfeld, as millions of people are aware, has completed its concluding season finale. It went to air in North America in May 1998, but its scheduled broadcast in Australia on the Ten Network was August 20th, 1998. The lead-up to the last episode was followed closely by newspapers, magazines and television in Australia, so closely that it became a joke to believe you could watch the programme in August without knowing exactly what was about to happen. Newspapers printed synopses; interviews with stars were regularly reported in magazines and broadcast on television. There was no avoiding the endgame of the series. All of this promotional work was connected to an event that was organised for the North American audience. However, in a synaptic misfiring that is part of the current global cultural economy, we were drawn into the same vortex, the same hype, the same anticipation. The episode has premiered and the Australian Ten Network had constructed an entire network-level promotion for what they have called Sein-off Month. When the programme actually aired, we had lived through an experience that we had already partially played out; it felt a little bit like celebrating the new year three days late and getting one's cues about how to celebrate it from looking at the dance moves from videotaped versions of the American Dick Clark in Times Square. The ritual of watching did occur, but the celebratory quality or the sense of the ecstatic had already been dispersed. Anticipatory memory is not exclusive to Australia. It is a feature of all forms of entertainment that possess large budgets for promotion. Although Australians regularly endure a longer run of publicity than North Americans for something like Armageddon, providing the material for how we should remember programmes is a pervasive pattern of both commercial and non-commercial television promotion throughout the world. John Hartley has described this as part of the "paedocratic regime" of television: in the promotions, we are told not only what we should watch but also how we should enjoy, what parts to revel in and what parts to engage in emotionally. We are heavily guided by the voice-over narrators of these "stings" and "trailers" of either television or film so that whether we are children or not, we are treated as if we are children. In fact, the narrators themselves for these promotions are a small group of incredibly familiar voices, fatherly voices. Australian television networks rarely employ more than two male narrators to tell us authoritatively how to watch. The repercussions of anticipatory memories are manifold, but one of the key effects of this promotional regime which guides our pleasure is that generic patterns that are employed in American television become the standards for other television systems. Thus, the sitcom becomes a formation of audience pleasure that other national broadcasters try to reproduce. This is not to say that these variations on a genre are not genuinely pleasurable and might relate very well to the regional or local cultural landscape; it is more to say that promotion and the construction of anticipatory memories is a critical factor in shaping how humour itself is conceptualised by producers and then reproduced. The continual barrage of anticipatory memories in either film or television makes Australia less susceptible to the hype of promotion -- we are a cynical lot in the Antipodes and turn things upside down for a while. Nevertheless these long demonstrations of what we should enjoy do shift what we in fact consider worthy of producing. References Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: The Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Hartley, John. Politics of Pictures. London: Routledge, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall. "Playing Backwards: Anticipatory Memories in the Antipodes." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.2 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/back.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, "Playing Backwards: Anticipatory Memories in the Antipodes," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 2 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/back.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall. (199x) Playing backwards: anticipatory memories in the antipodes. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(2). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/back.php> ([your date of access]).

An elderly man of my acquaintance once told me that there was nothing much to recommend living beyond 90. Things have changed over the past two decades, however. These days all he'd need is a touch of Viagra, an attitude reorientation, a little bit of manifesting and he'd be feeling as fit as, as, well … as a man in his 60s. Had he been around now, as a knowledgeable nonagenarian, he need not have mourned the passing of the years. Instead, he could have concentrated on becoming daily younger. As Second Youth so blithely trumpets: "In your youth, your mind, body and spirit are capable of great recuperative powers but, as you get older, you believe that those powers diminish. Not true! As long as you have a will -- and a method -- to improve your life, you will find the power to make it happen." Lacking the method? Look no longer… Books entitled RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be? (Roizen 1999) appear at the top of the New York Times best seller list, arguing that some 70-year olds can have the health profile of average 44-year olds within three years of making the right choices. (www.RealAge.com) This is the book's manifesto: The whole point of RealAge is to promote old age. Healthy, vibrant and young old age. RealAge shows you how you can live at eighty with all the energy and vigor of a fifty-five year old, how you can be the ninety year old who still lives on your own, travels and forcefully expresses feisty opinions -- the person who leaves the 'kids' marveling, 'How does she do it?' Having respect for old age means wanting to end the suffering that so often goes along with it. No one wants to be bedridden, afflicted with heart disease, or undergoing cancer treatment. Everyone wants to be able to do all the things he or she has always done and more. [Italics, gendered language, original] (Roizen 1999, p. 10) This website-supported best seller is part of a burgeoning industry which includes Cassel and Vallasi (1999) The Practical Guide to Aging: What Everyone Needs to Know, and Perls and Silver (1999) Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential at Any Age. "‘People have gotten old before, but never this many people and never this many people with such a high level of education … [boomers] will become obsessed with health and prevention of all the infirmities that accompany aging’ predicts Russell." (Wetzstein 1999, citing Russell.) The hypothesis put forward by Russell, by Wetzstein (1999) and by others, is that this is an 'age and stage' issue. It represents a new generational perspective reflective of the mindset and the life experience of the post mid-1940s 'baby boomer'. This website-supported best seller is part of a burgeoning industry which includes Cassel and Vallasi (1999) The Practical Guide to Aging: What Everyone Needs to Know, and Perls and Silver (1999) Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential at Any Age. "‘People have gotten old before, but never this many people and never this many people with such a high level of education … [boomers] will become obsessed with health and prevention of all the infirmities that accompany aging’ predicts Russell." (Wetzstein 1999, citing Russell.) The hypothesis put forward by Russell, by Wetzstein (1999) and by others, is that this is an 'age and stage' issue. It represents a new generational perspective reflective of the mindset and the life experience of the post mid-1940s 'baby boomer'. Boomers refuse to see 40 as middle aged (Wetzstein 1999), and would perish the thought that the Rolling Stones would ever retire. They define 50s as ‘Second youth’. (Gabriel & Molli 1995) They continue to participate in adventure and encounter holidays and subscribe to complementary health care regimes and new age approaches to daily life. They sign up for www.lovinguniversity.net and marvel at how much younger 43-yr old founder Susan Bradley looks on her website than in a recent Who Weekly (2001, p. 71). This baby boomer refusal to age has manifested itself widely in general and specialist consumer magazines, in broadcast TV and radio shows concentrating on good health and super-fitness, and in other elements of popular culture. Even given the hype, however, this new perspective might have long-term beneficial health/medical effects. The aging of the boomer generation may not be accurately predictable from the data collected from other generations with other mindsets. The back cover of Second Youth proclaims: "Desperate and aging far too fast she staked everything on discovering a natural source of Young Women's Hormones. Now, her triumph gives you thirty extra years of Second Youth. Age moved backwards for this woman. Just as it can -- this very month -- for you". (Gabriel & Molli 1995, back cover) Did someone mention snake oil? Or Bluebeard? Coupled with an optimism that allows them to forecast health and happiness into double-digit decades, however, boomers have a demonstrable suspicion of conventional medical ‘authority’ and a willingness to do their own research on health topics of interest. According to Mycek (1999) "In 1998, the [US] bill for homeopathic remedies (chiropractic and massage therapy, vitamins, yoga, herbal remedies, hypnosis, acupuncture) exceeded the total gross domestic product of all [US] hospitals put together." For boomers, a greater emphasis on health is not going to mean more of the same health care products, delivered in the same way. It is going to mean doing things differently. But is this a healthy way for us to look at aging and (shall we mention the word) death? Is our desire/burning commitment to remain indefinitely young and healthy in some way 'sick'? It is eminently reasonable to hypothesise -- as many people approaching their 'middle years' do -- that baby boomers are aiming to reinvent the aging process. (Dychtwald, 1999) The past quarter century has seen the burgeoning growth of preventative/health promotion and complementary health promoting services including nutritionists, naturopaths, chiropractors, rebalancers, meditation teachers, physiotherapists, counsellors and life coaches. The oldest members of the richest, best informed, most numerous generation in history are turning 55. The boomers (born from 1946--1960) can't put off for any longer the fact that -- chronologically -- they are approaching middle age. But what does this mean to a generation with many members who would rather be dead than old? Does the denial of chronological age, and the espousal of 'physiological age' (the premise upon which the RealAge philosophy and empire is built) represent a sick fantasy to avoid accepting our mortality? Baby boomers are a specific, much researched, sociocultural phenomenon. Their aim is to move beyond actuarial projections to re-write expectations of aging. From the self-help movement to the success of the potency drug Viagra, there is ample evidence that boomers have plans and expectations for their own aging processes that differ radically from those adopted by their parents. People born into the prosperity and plenty of the early post-WWII years often police their health attitudes and behaviours in proactive ways. These patterns are likely to impact upon their health profiles in the future and to influence the creation of services tailored to meet different hopes, fears and expectations. Who says Cher can't look young forever? Most health care planning is based on actuarial data that examines past events and extrapolates from these events into the future. However, this is not likely to result in a valid prediction of the health and aging patterns of the boomer generation. Graham May is a futurologist. He suggests that (May 2000), in anticipating the future, we are attempting either to foresee it, to manage it, or to create it. The philosophical distinctions between these perspectives provide different rationales for those who wish to influence the future. Attempts to foresee, or predict, the future – for example by extrapolating trends – presuppose that in some very particular ways the future already exists and/or is closely related to the forces evident in the present and the past. Managing the present with the future in mind accepts that present actions and decisions influence the future, and suggests that the future does not exist and is capable of being influenced by our current choices. The creation of the future – through techniques such as ‘creative visioning’ – works on the basis that once situations that do not exist have been imagined they can be brought into existence. These three approaches, separately and in parallel, offer ways of negotiating the uncertainty and essential unpredictability of the future, and of longevity and fitness. The longevity and second youth approach combines the idea of managing the future and envisioning it: 'the manifestation' approach. Baby boomers have already created a different future for our society. They are credited with re-writing the institutions of marriage (via de factos, divorce, blended families, single parents, older pregnancies); marketing (psychodemographics rather than age, sex, socioeconomic status); religion (the decline of the Church and the rise of new age philosophies, faith healing, angels on demand); education (just-in-time learning, lifelong learning); work practices -- and health. The boomers are also rewriting what aging means for them, and to them. Using popular culture starting points, such as Second Youth and RealAge, it seems that a major boomer project of the next twenty years is working to defy/turn back the aging clock. This project is invested with the hopes, fears, dreams and expectations of millions of citizens in western societies. Boomers are practical, however, as well as ‘just in time’ and they know that a belief that they can do it is half the battle. Let's assume that although many boomers are already fitter and healthier than any generation before them at their age, others may be intending to ‘make a break’ for fitness as an early priority of their retirement. Boomers may also expect their retirement years to be years of health and plenty, and they seem to indicate that they're prepared actively to work with these goals in mind. However, not all will be successful in beating their biology. How do boomers expect to manage their own chronic ailments in the future: arthritis, failing hearing and sight, late onset diabetes, heart disease, incontinence, dementia etc? Will the stem cell implants solve all foreseeable problems? Excluding alternative and complementary medical strategies, the health care industry is one of the biggest sectors of the economy representing 8% GDP (and rising). As indicated by its growing place in popular culture, health is also a hobby, pastime and pleasure – and the contemporary obsession with health is … sick. Although the social advantage to be conferred by living as healthily as possible, and as well as possible, is self-evident, it may require a level of selfishness and self-absorption unparalleled in human history. More to the point, however, this approach to getting older brings problems of its own. Firstly, it is built on a fear of aging, and a wish to deny the aging process which may become more desperate as the years (and they will) take their toll. Far from increasing the pleasure and satisfaction of 'a good age' this dynamic, operating over the decades, is as likely to build frustration, depression and a sense of powerlessness. As a (breast) cancer patient once told me: 'It's bad enough having cancer without everyone else thinking it's my fault for not having a positive enough attitude!' Aging is going to happen -- will we go with the flow - or end up like King Canute, with wet feet, trying to turn back the tide? Secondly, this perspective is counter-productive in fetishising a numerical age. When we're so focused on chronological age, biological age and the celebrating of our first, second and third 'year younger' parties (with fruit and water, please) we're not coming to terms with what's real for us in our ecological niche. Humanity is comprised of sentient, vertebrate, mammals. Far better to know our life cycle, and plan our lives to fit within it, than to pretend it can be revered. Much better to accept that we can be a very fit seventy year old (or a very unfit seventy year old) than to persuade ourselves that 'That's just my chronology, my real age is 44.' I'm sure we'll all be able to tell the difference… If anyone seriously believed the hype of living 26 years younger, you'd have to feel more than sorry for them. You'd have to suspect that maybe, even if they were blissfully unaware of it, they're a little bit sick. I gather that there's a Centre for Positive Aging recently started up in Perth: that's something altogether healthier References Cassel, C. and Vallasi, G. The Practical Guide to Aging: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Dychtwald, K. 'Age power': how the new-old will transform medicine in the 21st century, Geriatrics, vol. 54, no. 12, 1999, 22—7. Gabriel, V. and Molli, J. Second Youth, Melbourne: Bookman Press, 1995. May, G. Worldviews, assumptions and typologies of the future, Journal of Future Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, November, 2000, 37—51 Mycek, S. We’re not in Kansas anymore, Trustee, vol. 52, no. 8, 1999, 20—4 Perls, T. and Silver, M. Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential at Any Age, New York: Basic Books, 1999. Roizen, M. RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be? London: Thorsons, 1999 Wetzstein, C. Boomers’ new quest: to be forever young, Insight on the News, vol. 15, no. 24, 28th June, 1999, 40 Who Weekly Love is in the air, no. 474, 2 April, 2001, 71

Awards, Announcements, and News HarperCollinsCanada announced that Sandy Nichols from Calgary, AB, was the winner of the Illustrate “Alligator Pie “Competition that launched in October 2013. Nichols’ proposal was the unanimous choice of the competition judges, who selected it from more than 60 entries. Nichols has officially signed on with HarperCollinsCanada to illustrate the special anniversary board book edition of Dennis Lee’s famous poem “Alligator Pie.” You may wish to follow Amy’s Marathon (and if so moved, contribute to her fund raiser as well). Amy Mathers’ goal is to raise money for the Canadian Children’s Book Centre (CCBC) to endow a Canadian teen book award to be presented at the yearly Canadian Children’s Literature Awards gala. Amy will collect fundraising pledges for which donors will receive a charitable tax receipt. As stated on her website: "Inspired by Terry Fox’s and Rick Hansen’s Canadian journeys, Amy Mathers decided to honour her passion for reading and Canadian teen literature while working around her physical limitations through a Marathon of Books. Realising that Terry Fox could run a kilometre in six minutes during his Marathon of Hope, she figured out that she could read ten pages in the same amount of time. Thus, on her journey, ten pages will represent one kilometre travelled across Canada. Amy will be reading teen fiction books from every province and territory, exploring Canada and promoting Canadian teen authors and books by finishing a book a day for each day of 2014. She will write a review for each book she reads, and invites people to share their thoughts on the books she reads too." http://amysmarathonofbooks.ca/ Consider attending the upcoming Serendipity conference in Vancouver: Children’s Literature in a Digital Age ( Saturday, March 8 2014 at UBC). Presenters include illustrator Paul Zelinsky, Canadian authors Arthur Slade and Hadley Dyer, two high profile teacher-librarian bloggers John Schumacher (Library Journal) and Travis Jonker (School Library Journal) and author Tim Federle. “From practical advice on using literature-based apps with children to learning how authors and illustrators are using social media and electronic publishing, Serendipity 2014 is a must-attend event for educators, librarians, researchers and literature lovers looking to the future of books for young people.” http://vclr.ca/events-2013-14/serendipity-saturday-march-8-2014/ Saturday, May 3, 2014 is another day to mark on the calendar; the University of British Columbia will host “I Will Be Myself”: Identity in Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Media and Culture. This is a one-day conference showcasing graduate student research that explores, questions, and analyzes the issues surrounding identity in various elements of children’s and young adult literature. Keynote speaker is Dr. Phillip Serrato. The conference fee is very reasonable and includes refreshments and a catered lunch. http://blogs.ubc.ca/iwillbemyself/ For those of you in the Calgary area, plan on attending "When Worlds Collide 2014" from August 8-10, 2014 at the Carriage House Inn. This is a festival for readers, writers, artists and publishers of commercial and literary fiction, including genre, YA, Children’s books, and Poetry. Guests of honor include Diana Gabaldon, Jacqueline Guest, Mark Leslie, D.J. McIntosh and Brandon Sanderson. http://www.whenwordscollide.org/ The 2014 Alberta Readers’ Choice Award (ARCA) has now received 45 titles from a variety of Alberta authors, all vying for a $10,000 prize provided by the Edmonton Public Library (EPL). With this submission list finalized, EPL is now turning to its colleagues across the province for help in shaping a ten-item longlist that will be provided to our jury in February. If you are a staff member in an Alberta library—whether public, academic, government, law, school system or other—we want to hear from you. We’ve set up a poll at the following site: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QXZCCRZ. Please note that we are only counting ballots that have institutional e-mail addresses listed, so please make sure that you’re listing your work e-mail. This vote will remain open until end-of-day, February 5th and results will be made public on Thursday, February 13th.www.epl.ca/2014-ARCA-submissions. The ALAN Review posted the following Calls for Papers and Proposals which may be of interest for those of you working with young adult materials. Fall 2014: Stand Your Ground: Fostering Independent Thought and Action. We believe that, as educators, we sometimes need to be our own best allies as we fight to teach in ways we know to be good and right and true-and increasingly uncommon in an age of commonality. We need to know how to defend our selection of materials and our practices as we stand our ground in the face of scripts and censors, standards and accompanying tests. In this issue, we invite educators to band together and unite around our shared commitment to kids and stories, to offer our own evidence-based support for the innovative work we do in our classrooms and libraries, to celebrate the ways in which we encourage our own students to think independently and act in good conscience, even when the odds feel daunting. Please send manuscripts to: alan-review@uconn.edu . General submissions are also welcome by the deadline of March 31, 2014. The ALAN Review also notes that "Stories from the Field" invites readers to share a story about young adult literature. This section features brief vignettes (approximately 300 words) from practicing teachers and librarians who would like to share their interactions with students, parents, colleagues, and administrators around young adult literature. Please send your stories to:alan-review@uconn.edu. That is it for this time around. Last word (reminder/suggestion): Become actively involved with the National Reading Campaign, celebrating the joy of reading in all kinds of ways. “Tell us why reading matters to you, and learn what you can do for reading! Because when Canada reads, Canada grows.” http://www.nationalreadingcampaign.ca/Gail de VosGail de Vos, an adjunct instructor, teaches courses on Canadian children's literature, Young Adult Literature and Comic Books and Graphic Novels at the School of Library and Information Studies for the University of Alberta and is the author of nine books on storytelling and folklore. She is a professional storyteller and has taught the storytelling course at SLIS for over two decades.

It's the beginning of 2000 and the 21st century is all mapped out. Since we've just had that time at the end of a decade (not to mention the end of the century, as well as the Christian calendar "millennium"), when all the pundits came out to review where we had been and forecast where we are going, we should have expected a profundity of future-casting. But neither the familiar prognostications of the coming apocalypse spewing forth from the Religious Right, nor the usual statistical projections made by "experts" on such things as population growth, world politics, economic cycles, new products and shifting job markets, etc. will provide any help in reading the map we have already drawn up, or translating the directional signs. The future is now. It occupies the same domain as the past. Both are inhabitants of the present moment. History, memory, desire, imagination, the creative instinct, and the impetus to act, unfold and are realised as the future becomes the present. We cannot help but tinker with the universe. The future is what we make it and there are an infinite number of possible timelines. Or maybe not. It's the beginning of 2000 and the 21st century is all mapped out. The Human Genome Project1 is about to decode our physiology. We are preparing for the next evolution of the species. The battle between the cyberneticists and the geneticists for a new and improved version of homo sapiens version 3.0 has just begun. The question of where it will lead is open-ended. Will the insatiable quest for self-improvement lead to enlightenment -- a world with less suffering, hunger, disease, violence, and greed? Or, will we be the makers of our own extinction, and end up as a version of Star Trek's Borg -- the ultimate consumers, assimilating automatons devouring everything they encounter, and utterly devoid of the qualities that make us human? As an example of a hypothetical biological and social future the Borg are an interesting model -- a synthesis of a utopian socialist dream and the capitalist imperative of acquisition in the information age. As organic/cybernetic humanoid machines with one unified mind, equal and undifferentiated, untroubled by ego or id, individual ambitions, desires or passions, loneliness, alienation, or imagination they are the ultimate homogeneous collective. At the same time they are both the perfect corporate entity -- masters of the merger, the hostile takeover ("resistance is futile"), and a mindless population programmed to consume and continually upgrade each and every new technology and product. But the Borg don't invent; they only appropriate. Postmodern androids to the core! And we are presently very busy making new discoveries, creating and inventing, and transforming theories into things which tell us not only what is possible, but probable. One of the determining factors in the course of our future is whether or not our belief in technology over other values turns us into the puppets instead of the puppeteers, slaves to masters of our own invention -- be it HAL, Dr. Frankenstein's monster, or the Terminator. Let us consider some possible future scenarios, based not on fiction, but on what already exists, or is about to do so. Facts No one now disputes that the transformation of stem cells into new body parts, cloning technology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and microchip replacements not only could, but will dramatically change medicine and extend life in the coming century. In strictly medical terms, the implementation of all these technologies will bring about extraordinary relief of both the physical and psychological pain and suffering caused by debilitating, disabling, or disfiguring disease or injuries, not to mention the lives saved, and the genetic diseases prevented. Current research has found that not only stem cells taken from human embryos or fetuses could be directed to grow replacements for ailing hearts, livers or other organs, but that some stem cells taken from adult tissue could be converted into other types of cells -- brain cells becoming blood cells, or bone marrow becoming liver. The application of this technology is dazzling -- transformative biology, and it is just over the horizon2. Recently, scientists announced the creation of the first artificial cornea made from human cells. It could help restore the sight of those with certain kinds of eye damage. At the same time cybernetics is playing an equally important part. In development is a mini-computer that essentially takes over damaged visual functions and projects them onto a screen. One model expected to be ready for market within three years is a version of Geordie's visor in Star Trek: Next Generation. Another is a microchip that is inserted behind the eye3. In his newest book Fuzzy Future: From Society and Science to Heaven in a Chip, University of Southern California electrical engineering professor Bart Kosco, author of Fuzzy Thinking (1993), projects his theories onto everything from smart machines, the politics of genomes (who owns you, your genetic material, that is) and the environment (who owns the sea, or for that matter the air) to the problem of human mortality. Kosco foresees the day when we may be able to download our brains onto a microchip, thus achieving digital immortality via a gradual (fuzzy) transformation in which the brain's "meat" is replaced piece by piece with nanochips that work ever faster, better, and more creatively than old-fashioned neurons and synapses. The use of microchips to repair or replace damaged cells or portions of the brain is one thing, but as a means to greatly increase mental capacity, and gain everlasting life by "leaving your gray matter pickled in a jar" in favour of a computer in your skull is another. Would you still be you? While researchers have currently found new molecules in the brain that play a role in creating memories and learning, it does not ensure wisdom in how we put our knowledge to work. That great benefits await us, in the prevention and treatment of disease and the disintegration due to aging, is not in dispute. Nor is the enhanced capacity of a healthier society in body and mind. What constitutes the latter is. We are still left with ethical questions about the uses of technology, and spiritual and philosophical questions about what it means to be human. What are the political and social ramifications of biotechnology? British television playwright Dennis Potter's last work Cold Lazarus represents the ethical dilemmas of a future world capable of robbing a man's soul against his will. Scientists, whose funding is controlled by one or another governing media megalomaniac, seek to experience the 20th century through the genuine memories of the late Daniel Feeld, whose frozen head they have obtained. Their biochemical experiments are no less despicable than the CEO who wants to broadcast Feeld's "consciousness" worldwide twenty-four hours a day. Political opposition exists only in the form of a clandestine "terrorist" organization known as R.O.N. (Reality Or Nothing). If we were to base our forecasts on the patterns of history, just such a techno-fascist corporate future awaits us. If we are to judge by the dominant values of the present, the economic priorities of the marketplace will overpower the dissenting voices, placing not only the natural environment at risk, but our social environment as well. What will such a society do about the underclasses when smart machines have taken over their work, and they haven't the means to buy our goods, only consume precious resources; that is, when they are no longer "necessary" to the economic system. Will they be technologically phased out or upgraded? Fast Forward Let's not jump too far ahead. Maybe just to 2050. You can grow your own body part replacements, not just internal organs, but muscle, nerve tissue, skin. You can rejuvenate. Living to 120 or longer will not be unusual. The manufacture of body parts will be a big biotech business. Invest now! But will this technology be available to anyone and everyone, or only those who can afford it? Will we have parts kept in cold storage ready and waiting? Organs grown from extractions of our own foetal tissue perhaps. If it is a right not a privilege, how will our society deal with the problems of overpopulation? Will only those over a certain age -- say 80 -- who are viewed as "contributing" or "productive" members of society be eligible for new organs? Or will your lifestyle and health habits be a factor? No new livers for recalcitrant unreformed alcoholics? Will there be a ranking system of qualifications? Who will decide what they will be? Never mind arms and drugs. Consider this black market in the making! Subterranean high-tech operating rooms, organ factories, contraband stem cells, DNA, "smart" nanochips. Fast Forward And what about those microchips for brain functions? Not just for disease but for self-improvement. You might be able to improve your personality the way you can have a face-lift or breast implants. Then again, microchips could replace both pharmacology and psychotherapy in the treatment of mental disease, or merely antisocial or criminally aberrant behaviour, a new form of rehabilitation. As for sheer brain power, there would be no end to your capacity to absorb information, memorize and catalogue it, or to calculate stock market transactions. And just think of the lawsuits bound to jam up the courts, should someone have the misfortune to get a faulty chip, or even one that doesn't live up to expectations. Advertising is bound to promise you the answer to your dreams. The insertion of these parts by choice is one thing, but suppose it is forced on you by a government or a corporation. Or even by a parent while you are too young to fight back, the ones who want their offspring to be a math genius, Olympic athlete, or musical prodigy. Then again, genetic engineering may take care of some of that. Babies to order. By the end of this century you might not even have to have one the old messy way. Or you might not even be allowed to. Your genetically selected child might be grown in a computer-controlled organic womb. No more unwanted pregnancies. No more crack babies, or Downs Syndrome, or spina bifida4. We've been messing around for quite some time with a lot of things we don't know or haven't considered the consequences of in terms of the long term ecological balance of life and all its interdependent systems: cross-species genetic implants in plants and animals; plants altered to kill insects that are food for another creature on the food chain. And so on up the ladder: tomatoes that only look like tomatoes, but aren't really tomatoes any more. A perfect example of surface over substance. While we are so sure of our technological mastery, the actual "apocalypse" may well be of our own making when the forces of nature wreak havoc and pay us back for our abuses and arrogance. Or perhaps it will be nature's way of resetting the balance of things by greatly reducing the human population. Or it just might turn out this way. The newly evolved, genetically and cybernetically enhanced humanoids 3.0 survive and adapt (to 3.5), while the great mass of old humans become an endangered species like the Siberian tiger. Present Tense If you think this is all just science fiction, consider this. Already a number of young men in Silicon Valley or at M.I.T. walk around all day every day with one eye and ear always focused on the little headset computer screen that keeps them perpetually "on-line", plugged in. Do they look a little like the Borg? Well yes. Or, think about this. About a year ago a bill came up in the California state legislature proposing that a microchip be inserted in all newborn infants, like the ones you can put in your dog so you can track her if she gets lost or stolen. Same principle with babies. The bill was defeated. But very soon we will all be locatable, "on-line". No chance of disappearing in the 21st century when the wilderness is about to become another "theme" park, and when, at this very moment, you can be traced every time you use a plastic card or make a phone call. What a scary thought for dissidents, revolutionaries, battered women, or anyone who just wants to "get away from it all". In the 21st century, Huxley's "savages" would have as hard a time surviving or avoiding capture as a wolf in Arizona. How will our civil rights, our human rights be affected at the present rate of invasion into our privacy. Is your body your own? And what about your mind? What exactly will the "right to your life" mean? Will "smart" machines have that right? How will we define a sentient being? And so here we are. The 21st century is all mapped out. Maps can be misread. Maps can be wrong. The place that has been charted can be changed. By a force of nature, or an act of will. Or better still, by an act of conscience or consciousness, for it is an energy force with transformative powers. We could become better in our hearts and souls. We could use our knowledge with grace. Now go out and draw a new map(s). Happy New Century! Footnotes Huge advances in genomics, the science of deciphering the basic genetic pattern of life, were made in 1999, including the complete gene sequence for three microbes, a third of the base pairs in human DNA, along with one complete chromosome, number 22, and a rough draft of the entire human genome is expected by March 2000. For more about the Human Genome Project check out the following Website: http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/ and all its links. Also http://www.turbulence.org/ for Bionet :: Recombinant by Eugene Thacker, an artist's "attempt to assemble a body of discourse surrounding contemporary molecular genetics and biotechnology at the end of the millenium". Science journal editor Floyd E. Bloom optimistically predicts that "although much remains to be done to convert today's results into tomorrow's treatments and tools, the likelihood of success seems high". Researchers in this field are: May Griffith, Research Scientist, University of Ottowa Eye Institute, Professor, Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario Gislin Dagnelie, Researcher, Lions Vision Research and Rehabilitation Center, Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland Dr. Thomas Friberg, Professor, Ophthalmology, Chairman, Department of Ophthalmology, Director of Retina and Vitreous Service, The Eye and Ear Institute of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Dr. Terry Ernest, Professor, Chairman, Ophthalmology and Visual Science, University of Chicago Medical Center, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois A congenital cleft of the vertebral column with hernial protrusion of the meninges (membranes that envelop the brain and spinal cord). Citation reference for this article MLA style: Jacki Apple. "Some Speculation on the Future of the Body and Soul." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.9 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/body.php>. Chicago style: Jacki Apple, "Some Speculation on the Future of the Body and Soul," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 9 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/body.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Jacki Apple. (2000) Some speculation on the future of the body and soul. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(9). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0001/body.php> ([your date of access]).

When I think, rarely, about the articulation of the set of traces that I am leaving, I have the immediate apprehension that it is not the real me that’s out there on the Web. I know the times when I have censored myself (oh problematic concept!) and when I have performed actions to complement—and frequently to confound—a trace. […] Taken globally, the set of traces that we leave in the world does without doubt add up to something. It is through operations on sets of traces that I understand an event that I take part in. (Bowker 23) Over the past decade, Facebook has become integrated into the everyday lives of many of its 1.28 billion active users to the point that Facebook can no longer be considered “new media.” The site is driven by the “disclosures” (Stutzman, Gross and Acquisti) users make on the site—by uploading photos, writing status updates, commenting on posts made by others, sharing news items, entering biographical details, and so on. These digital traces of life are archived by default, persisting indefinitely as etches in Facebook’s servers around the world. Especially for young users who have grown up using Facebook, significant parts of their social and cultural lives have been played out on the site. As spaces in which the persona is enacted and made visible, social network sites like Facebook also effectively capture growing up stories through a chronicle of mediated, transitional experiences: birthdays, graduations, the beginning (and end) of relationships, first jobs, travel, and so on. For these reasons, Facebook also comes to serve as a site of memorialisation for users who have passed away. To mark its tenth anniversary (2014), Facebook drew attention to the great depth and wealth of experiences users had traced upon its pages through the release of one-minute “look back“ videos, chronicling the life of individual users over their time on Facebook. These videos have become short manifestations of the personas presented on the site, crafted through an algorithmic selection of critical moments in the user’s life (as shared on the site) to tell that user’s story. To turn Bowker’s musings in the above quote into a question, what do these sets of traces that we leave in the world add up to? In this article, I undertake a critical reading of Facebook’s look back videos to argue that they serve as the strongest reminder yet about the function of Facebook as memory archive. I draw on several sources: my own analysis of the structure of the videos themselves, the Facebook corporate blog describing the roll out of the videos, and the public campaign played out on YouTube by John Berlin to have a look back video generated for his deceased son. I argue that Facebook comes to serve two critical functions for users, as both the site upon which life narratives are performed and organised, and also the site through which the variously public and private disclosures that constitute a persona are recalled and reflected upon. In setting out these arguments, I divide this paper into three parts: first, a description and reflection upon my own experience of the look back video; second, a consideration of critical moments selected for inclusion in the look back videos by algorithm as persona; and third, a discussion of death and memorialisation, as a sharp example of the significance of the digital traces we leave behind. The Look Back Video Gentle piano music rises as the “camera” pans across an assortment of photos. The flute joins the piano, and you are reminded that you started your Facebook journey in 2006. Here is your first profile picture—you with your arm around one of your good mates when you were twenty years old. Faster now, and here are “your first moments,” presented as images you have shared: March 2008, some of your closest friends who you met during your undergraduate studies, standing around sharing a drink; April 2008, a photo of a friend eating a biscuit, mid-conversation (she’d hate this one); and one last photo from April 2008, the biscuit-eating friend’s ex-boyfriend looking coy (you no longer speak to him, but he is still on your Friends list). Now enter the violins, seventeen seconds in. Things are getting nostalgic. Here are “your most liked posts”: July 2012, “thesis submitted for examination, yo” (46 likes); November 2012, “Trust me, I’m a Doctor… of Philosophy” (98 likes); February 2013, a mess of text announcing that you’ve found a job and you’ll be leaving your hometown (106 likes). Thirty-five seconds in now, and the pace of the music changes—look how far you have come. Here are some photos you have shared: December 2008, you at a bowling alley with your arm around one of your best friends who now lives overseas; October 2009, friends trying to sleep on your couch, being disturbed by the flash of your camera; June 2010, a family shot at your mother’s birthday. The pace quickens now, as we move into the final quarter of the video: September 2010, you on the beach with friends visiting from overseas; October 2011, you with some people you met in Canada whose names you don’t recall; (images now moving faster and faster) November 2011, ice skating with friends; March 2012, a wedding in Hawaii where you were the best man; December 2012, celebrating the conferral of your PhD with two colleagues; and finally July 2013, farewelling colleagues at a going away party. In the final ten seconds, the music reaches its crescendo and the camera pans backwards to reveal a bigger collage of photos of you and your nearest and dearest. Facebook’s trademark “thumbs up”/like symbol signals the end of the retrospective, looking back on the critical moments from the last eight and a half years of your life. Underneath the video, as if signing off a card accompanying a birthday present, is “Mark” (Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, in a faux hand-written font) “and the Facebook Team.” Facebook is you, the note seems to imply; for our anniversary, we present you back to yourself (see fig. 1). On 4 February 2014, the look back video feature was made available to all Facebook users. Some 200 million watched their videos, and more than 50% shared them with their networks (Spiridonov and Bandaru). In other words, around 100 million Facebook users held up their own individually generated look back videos as a record of the persona they had crafted through the site, and shared that persona retrospective with their networks. The videos work in the same way that television news programs piece together memorial clips for celebrities who have passed away, blending emotive music with visuals that conjure up memories and reflections. The first point of difference is that Facebook’s look back videos were intended for the living (although this function shifted as I will explain in a case study towards the end of this piece) to reflect on their own personas presented through the site, and then (about half the time) shared with their networks. The second difference is the technical, automated process of piecing together, rendering, storing, and streaming these videos on a large scale. Spiridonov and Bandaru, two Facebook engineers writing on the site’s Engineering Blog, described the rapid development and rollout of the videos. They explain the enormous pool of technical resources and human capital that were brought to bear on the project, including thirty teams across the company, in just 25 days. They end their explanatory post with an homage to “the things [they] love about Facebook culture” that the project represented for them, including “helping hundreds of millions of people connect with those who are important to them” (Spiridonov and Bandaru). The look back videos also serve a deeper purpose that isn’t addressed explicitly in any explanatory notes or press releases: to demonstrate the great depth of disclosures users make and are implicated in by others on the site. In a one-minute look back video, these disclosures come to serve as the very digital traces that Bowker was interested in, forming a longitudinal record of the persona. Algorithms and Critical Moments Although the explanatory post by Spiridonov and Bandaru did not go into details, the algorithm that determines which photos and status updates go into the look back videos appears to consider the quantity of likes and (potentially) comments on posts, while also seeking to sample disclosures made across the user’s time on the site. The latter consideration works to reinforce the perception of the longitudinal nature of the site’s memory, and the extent to which the life of the user has become entangled with, enmeshed in, and mediated through Facebook. Through the logic of the look back algorithm, critical moments in the user’s life course—those experiences that mark out narratives of growing up—become measured not in terms of their value for individuals, but instead through a quantitative metric of “likes.” While after the initial release of the look back feature, Facebook did provide users with the functionality to alter their videos with some limited control over which images could be featured, the default was determined by the algorithm. Social network sites have come to serve as spaces for reflexive identity work, for the development of personas for young people (boyd; Livingstone; Hodkinson and Lincoln; Lincoln; Robards). The transition towards adulthood is punctuated and shaped by “critical moments” (Thomson et al.) such as moving out of home, dropping out of school, entering a relationship, learning to drive, a death in the family, going clubbing for the first time, and so on. In Giddens’ terms, the “fateful moment” (from which Thomson et al. borrow in conceptualising the critical moment), is “highly consequential for a person’s destiny” (121), and should be understood as distinct from but certainly affecting the inconsequential goings-on of daily life. When these critical moments are articulated and made visible on social network sites like Facebook, and then subsequently archived by way of the persistent nature of these sites, they become key markers in a mediated growing up story for young people. Livingstone points towards the role of these sites for young people who are “motivated to construct identities, to forge new social groupings, and to negotiate alternatives to given cultural meanings” (4). Sharing, discussing, and remembering these critical moments becomes an important activity on social network sites, and thus the look back video serves to neatly capture critical moments in a one minute retrospective. Facebook has also started prompting users to record critical moments through predetermined, normative categories (see fig. 2) such as romance (a first kiss), health (losing weight and not smoking), purchases (buying a house and a car), and civic duty (voting and military service). These disclosure prompts operate at a deeper level to the logic of sharing whatever you are doing right now, and instead feed into that longitudinal memory of the site. As I have argued elsewhere (see Robards) it is clear that not all critical moments are disclosed equally on social network sites. Users may choose not to disclose some critical moments – such as breakups and periods of depression or anxiety – instead preferring to present an “idealised self.” Goffman explains that idealised presentations are aspirational, and that individuals will perform the best version of themselves (44). This isn’t a fake persona or a deception, but simply a presentation of what the individual regards to be the best qualities and appearances, contingent upon what Goffman described as the standards of the region (110). What constitutes an “authentic” persona on Facebook is clearly subjective, and dependent on those region specific standards. In my earlier research on MySpace, the quantity of friends one had was an indicator of popularity, or a quantitative measure of social capital, but over time and with the shift to Facebook this appeared to change, such that smaller networks became more “authentic” (Robards). Similarly, the kinds of disclosures users make on Facebook will vary depending on the conventions of use they have established within their own networks. Importantly, the look back algorithm challenges the user’s capacity to value their own critical moments, or indeed any moments or disclosures that might mark out a narrative of self, and instead chooses moments for the user. In this scenario, at least initially, the look back algorithm co-constructs the retrospective persona summary for the user. Only with effort, and only to a certain extent, can the user exercise curatorial control over that process. Death and Other Conclusions Although the initial function of the look back videos was for users to reflect on their own personas presented through Facebook, users who had lost loved ones quickly sought look back videos for the deceased. John Berlin, a Facebook user who had lost his son Jesse in 2012, tried to access a look back video for his son but was unsuccessful. He posted his plea to YouTube, which received almost three million views, and was eventually successful, after his request “touched the hearts of everyone who heard it” including Facebook staff (Price and DiSclafani). After receiving numerous similar requests, Facebook established a form where people could make have videos for deceased users rendered. In the words of Facebook staff, this was part of the site’s commitment to “preserve legacies on Facebook” (Price and DiSclafani). There is a growing body of research on the digital traces we leave behind after death. Leaver points out that when social media users die, the “significant value of the media traces a user leaves behind” is highlighted. Certainly, this has been the case with the look back videos, further supporting Leaver’s claim. John Berlin’s plea to have his deceased son’s look back video made available to him was presented as a key factor in Facebook’s decision to make these videos available to loved ones. Although the video’s narrative was unchanged (still pitched to users themselves, rather than their loved ones) John Berlin shared his son’s look back video on YouTube to a much wider network than he or his son may have previously imagined. Indeed, Gibson has argued that “digital remains cannot easily be claimed back into a private possessive sphere of ownership” (214). Although Jesse Berlin’s look back video did not reach the millions of viewers his father’s plea reached, on YouTube it still had some 423,000 views, clearly moving beyond Gibson’s “private possessive sphere” (214) to became a very public memorial. Bowker makes the observation that his friends and acquaintances who died before 1992 are sparsely represented online. In 1992, the first widely adopted web browser Mosaic made the Internet accessible for ordinary people in an everyday context. Bowker goes on to explain that his friends who died post-Mosaic “carry on a rich afterlife [… they] still receive email messages; links to their website rot very slowly; their informal thoughts are often captured on list-serv archives, on comments they have left on a website” (23). For Bowker, the rise of the Internet has brought about a “new regime of memory practices” (34). The implications of this new “paradigm of the trace” for Facebook users are only now becoming clear, multiplied in depth and complexity compared to the forms of digital traces Bowker was discussing. The dead, of course, have always left traces—letters, bureaucratic documents, photographs, and so on. There is nothing particularly new about the social and cultural traces that the dead leave behind, only in the way these traces persist and are circulated as the Berlin case study makes clear. The look back video brings the significance of the digital trace into a new light, challenging concepts of personal histories and the longevity of everyday personas. Now that Facebook has developed the infrastructure and the processes for rolling out these look back features, there is the possibility that we will see more in the future. The site already provides annual summaries of the user’s year on Facebook in December. It is possible that look back videos could mark out other moments, too: birthdays, new relationships, potentially even the deaths of loved ones. Might Facebook look back videos – in future forms and iterations, no doubt distinct from the ten-year anniversary video described here – come to serve as a central mechanism for memory, nostalgia, and memorialisation? I don’t have the same kind of apprehension that Bowker expresses in the quote at the top of this article, where he reflects on whether or not it is the “real” him out there on the web. Through Goffman’s dramaturgical lens, I am convinced that there is no single “authentic” persona, but rather many sides to the personas we present to others and to ourselves. The Facebook look back video figures into that presentation and that reflection, albeit through an algorithm that projects a curated set of critical moments back to us. In this sense, these videos become mirrors through which Facebook users experience the personas they have mediated on the site. Facebook is surely aware of this significance, and will no doubt continue to build the importance and depth of the digital traces users inscribe on the site into their plans for the future. References Bowker, Geoffrey C. “The Past and the Internet.” Structures of Participation in Digital Culture. New York: Social Science Research Council, 2007. 20-36. boyd, danah. “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. New York: Routledge, 2011. 39-58. Gibson, Margaret. “Digital Objects of the Dead: Negotiating Electronic Remains.” The Social Construction of Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed. Leen van Brussel and Nico Carpentier. Palgrave, 2014: 212-229. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Hodkinson, Paul, and Sian Lincoln. “Online Journals as Virtual Bedrooms? Young People, Identity and Personal Space.” Young 16.1 (2008): 27-46. Leaver, Tama. “The Social Media Contradiction: Data Mining and Digital Death.” M/C Journal 16.2 (2013). Lincoln, Siân. Youth Culture and Private Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Stutzman, Fred, Robert Capra, and Jamila Thompson. “Factors Mediating Disclosure in Social Network Sites.” Computers in Human Behavior 27.1 (2011): 590-598. Livingstone, Sonia. “Taking Risky Opportunities in Youthful Content Creation: Teenagers' Use of Social Networking Sites for Intimacy, Privacy and Self-Expression.” New Media & Society 10.3 (2008): 393-411. Robards, Brady. “Leaving MySpace, Joining Facebook: ‘Growing Up’ on Social Network Sites.” Continuum 26.3 (2012): 385-398. Thomson, Rachel, et al. “Critical Moments: Choice, Chance and Opportunity in Young People's Narratives of Transition.” Sociology 36.2 (2002): 335-354.

Introduction In October of 2004, La Presse asked its Quebecois reading audience a very simple question: “What is your favourite cookbook and why?” As Marie Marquis reports in her essay “The Cookbooks Quebecers Prefer: More Than Just Recipes,” “two weeks later, 363 e-mail responses had been received” (214). From the answers, it was clear that despite the increase in television cooking shows, Internet cooking sites, and YouTube how-to videos, cookbooks were not only still being used, but that people had strong allegiances to their favourite ones. Marquis’s essay provides concrete evidence that cookbooks are not meaningless objects. Rather, her use of relevant quotations from the survey proves that they are associated with strong memories and have been used to create bonds between individuals and across generations. Moreover, these quotations reveal that individuals use cookbooks to construct personal narratives that they share with others. In her philosophical analysis of foodmaking as a thoughtful practice, Lisa Heldke helps move the discussion of cooking and, consequently of cookbooks, forward by explaining that the age-old dichotomy between theory and practice merges in food preparation (206). Foodmaking, she explains through her example of kneading bread, requires both a theoretical understanding of what makes bread rise and a practical knowledge of the skill required to achieve the desired results. Much as Susan Leonardi argues that recipes need “a recommendation, a context, a point, a reason-to-be” (340), Heldke advocates in “Recipes for Theory Making” that recipes offer us ideas that we need to either accept or refuse. These ideas include, but are not limited to, what makes a good meal, what it means to eat healthy, what it means to be Italian or vegan. Cookbooks can take many forms. As the cover art from academic documents on the nature, role, and value of cooking and cookbooks clearly demonstrates, a “cookbook” may be an ornate box filled with recipe cards (Floyd and Forster) or may be a bunch of random pieces of paper organised by dividers and held together by a piece of elastic (Tye). The Internet has created many new options for recipe collecting and sharing. Websites such as Allrecipes.com and Cooks.com are open access forums where people can easily upload, download, and bookmark favourite foods. Yet, Laura Shapiro argues in Something from the Oven that the mere presence of a cookbook in one’s home does not mean it is actually used. While “popular cookbooks tell us a great deal about the culinary climate of a given period [...] what they can’t convey is a sense of the day-to-day cookery as it [is] genuinely experienced in the kitchens of real life” (xxi). The same conclusion can be applied to recipe websites. Personalised and family cookbooks are much different and much more telling documents than either unpersonalised printed books or Internet options. Family cookbooks can also take any shape or form but I define them as compilations that have been created by a single person or a small group of individuals as she/he/they evolve over time. They can be handwritten or typed and inserted into either an existing cookbook, scrapbooked, or bound in some other way. The Internet may also help here as bookmaking sites such as Blurb.com allow people to make, and even sell, their own printed books. These can be personalised with pictures and scrapbook-like embellishments. The recipes in these personal collections are influenced by contact with other people as well as printed and online publications. Also impacting these works are individual realities such as gender, race, class, and work. Unfortunately, these documents have not been the focus of much academic attention as food scholars generally analyse the texts within them rather than their practical and actual use. In order to properly understand the value and role of personal and family cookbooks in our daily lives, we must move away from generalisations to specific case studies. Only by looking at people in relationship with them, who are actually using and compiling their own recipe collections or opting instead to turn to either printed books or their computers, can we see the importance and value of family cookbooks. In order to address this methodological problem, this essay analyses a number of cookbook-related experiences that I have witnessed and/or been a part of in my own home. By moving away from the theoretical and focusing on the practical, I aim to advance Heldke’s argument that recipe reading, like foodmaking, is a thoughtful practice with important lessons. Learning to Cook and Learning to Live: What Cookbooks Teach Us Once upon a time, a mother and her two, beautiful daughters decided to make chocolate chip cookies. They took out all the bowls and utensils and ingredients they needed. The mother then plopped the two girls down among all of the paraphernalia on the counter. First, they beat the butter using their super cool Kitchen Aid mixer. Then they beat in the sugar. Carefully, they cracked and beat in the eggs. Then they dumped in the flour. They dumped in the baking powder. They dumped in the vanilla. And they dumped in the chocolate chips. Together, they rolled the cookies, placed them on a baking sheet, pat them down with a fork, and placed them in a hot oven. The house smelled amazing! The mother and her daughters were looking forward to eating the cookies when, all of a sudden, a great big dog showed up at the door. The mother ran outside to shoo the dog home yelling, “Go home, now! Go away!” By the time she got back, the cookies had started to burn and the house stank! The mother and her two daughters took all the cookie-making stuff back out. They threw out the ruined cookies. And they restarted. They beat the butter using their super cool Kitchen Aid mixer. Then they beat in the sugar. Carefully, they cracked and beat in the eggs. Then they dumped in the flour. They dumped in the baking powder. They dumped in the vanilla. And they dumped in the chocolate chips. Together, they rolled the cookies, placed them on a baking sheet, pat them down with a fork, and placed them in a hot oven. This story that my oldest daughter and I invented together goes on to have the cookies ruined by a chatty neighbour before finally finding fruition in a batch of successfully baked cookies. This is a story that we tell together as we get her ready for bed. One person is always the narrator who lists the steps while the other makes the sound effects of the beating mixer and the dumping ingredients. Together, we act out the story by rolling the cookies, patting them, and waving our hands in front of our faces when the burnt cookies have stunk up the house. While she takes great pleasure in its narrative, I take greater pleasure in the fact that, at three years of age, she has a rudimentary understanding of how a basic recipe works. In fact, only a few months ago I observed this mixture of knowledge and skill merge when I had to leave her on the counter while I cleaned up a mess on the floor. By the time I got back to her, she had finished mixing the dry ingredients in with the wet ones. I watched her from across the kitchen as she turned off the Kitchen Aid mixer, slowly spooned the flour mixture into the bowl, and turned the machine back on. She watched the batter mix until the flour had been absorbed and then repeated the process. While I am very thankful that she did not try to add the vanilla or the chocolate chips, this experience essentially proves that one can learn through simple observation and repetition. It is true that she did not have a cookbook in front of her, that she did not know the precise measurements of the ingredients being put into the bowl, and that at her age she would not have been able to make this recipe without my help. However, this examples proves Heldke’s argument that foodmaking is a thoughtful process as it is as much about instinct as it is about following a recipe. Once she is able to read, my daughter will be able to use the instincts that she has developed in her illiterate years to help her better understand written recipes. What is also important to note about this scenario is that I did have a recipe and that I was essentially the one in charge. My culinary instincts are good. I have been baking and cooking since I was a child and it is very much a part of my life. We rarely buy cookies or cakes from the store because we make them from scratch. Yet, I am a working mother who does not spend her days in the kitchen. Thus, my instincts need prompting and guidance from written instructions. Significantly, the handwritten recipe I was using that day comes from the personal cookbook that has been evolving since I left home. In their recent works Eat My Words and Baking as Biography, Janet Theophano and Diane Tye analyse homemade, hand-crafted, and personal cookbooks to show that these texts are the means through which we can understand individuals at a given time and in a given place. Theophano, for example, analyses old cookbooks to understand the impact of social networking in identity making. By looking at the types of recipes and number of people who have written themselves into these women’s books, she shows that cookbook creation has always been a social activity that reveals personal and social identity. In a slightly different way, Tye uses her own mother’s recipes to better understand a person she can no longer talk to. Through recipes, she is able to recreate her deceased mother’s life and thus connect with her on a personal and emotional level. Although academics have traditionally ignored cookbooks as being mundane and unprofessional, the work of these recent critics illustrates the extent to which cookbooks provide an important way of understanding society and people’s places within it. While this essay cannot begin to analyse the large content of my cookbook, this one scenario echoes these recent scholarly claims that personal cookbooks are a significant addition to the academic world and must be read thoughtfully, as Heldke argues, for both the recipes’s theory and for the practical applications and stories embedded within them. In this particular example, Karena and I were making a chocolate a chip cake—a recipe that has been passed down from my Oma. It is a complicated recipe because it requires a weight scale rather than measuring cups and because instructions such as “add enough milk to make a soft dough” are far from precise. The recipe is not just a meaningless entry I found in a random book or on a random website but rather a multilayered narrative and an expression of my personal heritage. As Theophano and Tye have argued, recipes are a way to connect with family, friends, and specific groups of people either still living or long gone. Recipes are a way to create and relive memories. While I am lucky that my Oma is still very much alive, I imagine that I will someday use this recipe as a way to reconnect with her. When I serve this cake to my family members, we will surely be reminded of her. We will wonder where this recipe came from, how it is different from other chocolate chip cake recipes, and where she learned to make it. In fact, the recipe already varies considerably between homes. My Oma makes hers in a round pan, my mother in a loaf pan, and I in cupcake moulds. Each person has a different reason for her choice of presentation that is intrinsic to her reality and communicates a specific part of her identity. Thus by sharing this recipe with my daughter, I am not only ensuring that my memories are being passed on but I am also programming into her characteristics and values such as critical thinking, the worthiness of homemade food, and the importance of family time. Karena does not yet have her own cookbook but her preferences mean that some of the recipes in my collection are made more often than others. My cookbook continues to change and grow as I am currently prioritising foods I know my kids will eat. I am also shopping and surfing for children’s recipe books and websites in order to find kid-friendly meals we can make together. In her analysis of children and adolescent cookbooks published between the 1910s and 1950s, Sherrie Inness demonstrates that cookbooks have not only taught children how to cook, but also how to act. Through the titles and instructions (generally aimed at girls), the recipe choices (fluffy deserts for girls and meat dishes for boys), and the illustrations (of girls cooking and boys eating), these cookbooks have been a medium through which society has taught its youth about their future, gendered roles. Much research by critics such as Laura Shapiro, Sonia Cancian, and Inness, to name but a few, has documented this gendered division of labour in the home. However, the literature does not always reflect reality. As this next example demonstrates, men do cook and they also influence family cookbook creation. A while back, my husband spent quite a bit of time browsing through the World Wide Web to find a good recipe for a venison marinade. As an avid “barbecuer,” he has tried and tested a number of marinades and rubs over the years. Thus he knew what he was looking for in a good recipe. He found one, made it, and it was a hit! Just recently, he tried to find that recipe again. Rather than this being a simple process, after all he knew exactly which recipe he was looking for, it took quite a bit of searching before he found it. This time, he was sure to write it down to avoid having to repeat the frustrating experience. Ironically, when I went to put the written recipe into my personal cookbook, I found that he had, in fact, already copied it out. These two handwritten copies of the same recipe are but one place where my husband “speaks out” from, and claims a place within, what I had always considered “my” cookbook. His taste preferences and preferred cooking style is very different from my own—I would never have considered a venison marinade worth finding never mind copying out. By reading his and my recipes together, one can see an alternative to assumed gender roles in our kitchen. This cookbook proves a practice opposite from the conclusion that women cook to serve men which Inness and others have theorised from the cookbooks they have analysed and forces food and gender critics to reconsider stereotypical dichotomies. Another important example is a recipe that has not actually been written down and inserted into my cookbook but it is one my husband and I both take turns making. Years ago, we had found an excellent bacon-cheese dip online that we never managed to find again. Since then, we have been forced to adlib the recipe and it has, in my opinion, never been as good. Both these Internet-recipe examples illustrate the negative drawbacks to using the Internet to find, and store, recipes. Unfortunately, the Internet is not a book. It changes. Links are sometimes broken. Searches do not always yield the same results. Even with recipe-storing sites such as Allrecipes.com and Cooks.com, one must take the time to impute the information and there is no guarantee that the technology will work. While authors such as Anderson and Wagner bemoan that traditional cookbooks only give one version of most recipes, there are so many recipes online that it is sometimes overwhelming and difficult to make a choice. An amateur cook may find comfort in the illustrations and specific instruction, yet one still needs to either have an instinct for what makes a good recipe or needs to be willing to spend time trying them out. Of course the same can be said of regular cookbooks. Having printed texts in one’s home requires the patience to go through them and still requires a sense of suitability and manageability. In both cases, neither an abundance nor a lack of choice can guarantee results. It is true that both the Internet and printed cookbooks such as The Better Homes and Gardens provide numerous, step-by-step instructions and illustrations to help people learn to make food from scratch. Other encyclopedic volumes such as The Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking, like YouTube, videos break recipes down into simple steps and include visual tools to help a nervous cook. Yet there is a big difference between the theory and the practice. What in theory may appear simple still necessitates practice. A botched recipe can be the result of using different brands of ingredients, tools, or environmental conditions. Only practice can teach people how to make a recipe successfully. Furthermore, it is difficult to create an online cookbook that rivals the malleability of the personal cookbooks. It is true that recipe websites such as Cooks.com and Allrecipes.com do allow a person to store favourite recipes found on their websites. However, unless the submitter takes the time to personalise the content, recipes can lose their ties to their origins. Bookmaking sites such as Blurb.com are attractive options that do allow for personalisation. In her essay “Aunty Sylvie’s Sponge Foodmaking, Cookbooks and Nostalgia,” Sian Supski uses her aunt’s Blurb family cookbook to argue that the marvel of the Internet has ensured that important family food memories will be preserved; yet once printed, even these treasures risk becoming static documents. As Supski goes on to admit, she is a nervous cook and one can conclude that even this though this recipe collection is very special, it will never become personal because she will not add to it or modify the content. As the examples in Theophano's and Tye’s works demonstrate, the personal touches, the added comments, and the handwritten alterations on the actual recipes give people authority, autonomy, and independence. Hardcopies of recipes indicate through their tattered, dog-eared, and stained pages which recipes have been tried and have been considered to be worth keeping. While Internet sites frequently allow people to comment on recipes and so allow cooks to filter their options, commenting is not a requirement and the suggestions left by others do not necessarily reflect personal preferences. Although they do continue a social, recipe-networking trend that Theophano argues has always existed in relation to cookbook creation and personal foodways, once online, their anonymity and lack of personal connection strips them of their true potential. This is also true of printed cookbooks. Even those compiled by celebrity chefs such as Rachel Ray and Jamie Oliver cannot guarantee success as individuals still need to try them. These examples of recipe reading and recipe collecting advance Heldke’s argument that theory and practice blend in this activity. Recipes are not static. They change depending on who makes them, where they come from, and on the conditions under which they are executed. As critics, we need to recognise this blending of theory and practice and read recipe collections with this reality in mind. Conclusion Despite the growing number of blogs and recipe websites now available to the average cook, personal cookbooks are still a more useful and telling way to communicate information about ourselves and our foodways. As this reflection on actual experiences clearly demonstrates, personal cookbooks teach us about more than just food. They allow us to connect to the past in order to better understand who we are today in ways that the Internet and modern technology cannot. Just as cooking combines theory and practice, reading personal and family cookbooks allows critics to see how theories about foodmaking and gender play out in actual kitchens by actual people. The nuanced merging of voices within them illustrates that individuals alter over time as they come into contact with others. While printed cookbooks and online recipe sites do provide their own narrative possibilities, the stories that can be read in personal and family cookbooks prove that reading them is a thoughtful practice worthy of academic attention. References All Recipes.com Canada. 2013. 24 Apr. 2013. ‹http://allrecipes.com›. Anderson, L. V. “Cookbooks Are Headed for Extinction—and That’s OK.” Slate.com 18 Jun. 2012. 24 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/the_future_of_cookbooks_they_ll_go_extinct_and_that_s_ok_.html›. Blurb.ca. 2013. 27 May 2013. ‹http://blurb.ca›. Cancian, Sonia. "'Tutti a Tavola!' Feeding the Family in Two Generations of Italian Immigrant Households in Montreal." Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Ed. Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. 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IntroductionTransformation, claims McCracken, is the expression of consumer agency and individual freedom in which consumers, as “co-creators of culture,” are empowered to creatively construct new improved selves (xvi). No longer an “extraordinary event for extraordinary creatures,” transformation today is routine and accessible (McCracken xxi). Contemporary consumer culture encourages individuals to enact these transformations by turning to the market to purchase the resources they require to achieve their desired identity (Ellis et al. 179). This market model of transformation embraces the concept of the marketplace exchange where the one party satisfies the needs of the other in a mutually beneficial exchange relationship. For consumers, the market enables transformation through the purchase and consumption of the desired products and services which support identity building.Critics, however, argue that markets have less positive effects. While it is too simplistic to claim that markets manipulate consumers, marketing exchanges constitute an enduring shaping force on individuals and society (Laczniak and Murphy). Markets shape consumer identities by homogenising them and suppressing their self-expressive capabilities (Kozinets 22). As producers become more powerful, “the market is transformed from a consumer-driven mechanism to a sphere where the producers assimilate consumers’ needs to their own through commercial activity” (Sassatelli 76) (my italics). Marketing and promotion have a persuasive influence and their role in the transformation process is a crucial element in understanding the consumer’s impetus to transform. Consumer identity is of course neither fully a “liberatory act” nor “wholly dictated by the market” (Ellis et al. 182), but there is a relationship between consumer autonomy and the dictates of the market which can be explored through focusing on the transformation of identity through the consumption of cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgery is an important site of enquiry as a social practice which “merges the attention given to the body by an individual person with the values and priorities of the consumer society” (Martinez Lirola and Chovanec 490). The body, as Kathy Davis highlighted, has long been seen as a commodity which can be endlessly transformed (Davis, Reshaping the Female Body), and the market for cosmetic surgery is at the forefront of this commodification process (Aizura 305). What is new, however, is the increasing marketisation and commercialisation of the cosmetic surgery industry combined with rising consumerism in which surgical transformation can be purchased simply as a “lifestyle choice alongside fashion, fitness and therapy” (Elliott 7). In the cosmetic surgery market, “patients” are consumers. Rather than choosing cosmetic surgery in order to feel whole or normal, contemporary consumers see surgery as a grooming practice which is part of a body maintenance routine (Jones).As the cosmetic surgery market becomes progressively more competitive, it relies more and more on marketing and promotion for its survival. The intense rivalry between providers drives them, in some cases, to aggressive and often unethical promotional practices. In the related field of pharmaceuticals for example, marketers have been charged with explicitly manipulating social understanding of disease in order to increase profits (Brennan, Eagle, and Rice 17). Unlike TV make-over shows whose primary purpose is to entertain, or celebrity culture which influences indirectly through example, cosmetic surgery promotion sets out with intent to persuade consumers to choose surgical transformation. Cosmetic surgery is presented to consumers “through the neoliberal prism of choice,” encouraging women (mostly) to choose surgery as a self-improvement practice in order to “feel good or pamper herself” (Gurrieri, Brace-Govan, and Previte 534). In a promotional culture which valorises external values and ‘the new’ (Fatah 1), the cost, risk, and pain of surgery are downplayed as an increasing array of self-transformative possibilities are presented as consumption choices. This scenario sees the impetus to transform as driven as much by marketing imperatives as by consumers’ free choice. Indeed in mobilising the rhetoric of choice, the “autonomous” consumer, it seems, plays into the hands of the cosmetic surgery industry.This paper explores consumer transformation through cosmetic surgery by focusing on the tension between the rhetoric of consumer autonomy, freedom, and choice and that of the industry’s marketing and promotional practices in the United Kingdom (UK). I argue that while the consumer is an active player, expressing their freedom and agency in choosing self-transformation through surgery, that autonomy is influenced and constrained by the marketing and promotional practices of the industry. I focus on the inherent paradox in the discourse of transformation in consumer culture which advocates individual consumer freedom and creativity yet limits these freedoms to “acceptable” bodily forms constructed as the norm by promotional images of the cosmetic surgery industry. To paraphrase Susan Bordo, those promotions which espouse consumer choice and self-determination simultaneously eradicate individual difference and circumscribe choice (Unbearable Weight 250). Here I explore how ideals of autonomy, freedom, and choice are utilised to support consumer surgical transformation. Drawing on market research, professional publications, blogs and industry webpages used by UK consumers as they search for information, I demonstrate how marketing and promotion adopt these ideals to provide a visual reference and a language for consumer transformation, which has the effect of shaping and limiting consumer freedom and creativity. Consumer Transformation as Expression of Freedom Contemporary consumers need not be content just to admire the appearance of celebrities and film stars, but can actively engage in the creative construction of new improved selves through surgical transformation (McCracken). This transformation is often expressed by consumers as a liberatory act, as is illustrated by the women surveyed for a UK Department of Health report. As one respondent explains, “I think it’s just the fact that they can . . . and I think over the years, women have a battle with their bodies, as they change, different ages, they do, they struggle with trying to accept it over different years and the fact that you can, it’s like ‘wow, so what, it’s a bit of money, let’s just change ourselves’” (UK Department of Health 32). Even young consumers see cosmetic surgery as an easily available transformative option, such as this 16-year-old female research respondent who describes surgery as “Things that you don’t really need but you just feel you want to have them” (UK Department of Health 33). As these women attest, cosmetic surgery is seen as an increasingly normal and everyday practice. By rhetorically constructing the possibility of transformation as an expression of individual consumer empowerment (“wow, so what, it’s a bit of money, let’s just change ourselves”), they distance the practice “from negative associations with vanity” and oppression (Tait 131). This postmodern consumer is no dupe or victim but a “conscious subject who modifies their body as a project of identity” (Gibson 51) and for whom cosmetic surgery transformation is “the route to happiness and personal empowerment” (Tait 119). Surgical transformation is not a way to strive narcissistically after “an elusive beauty ideal” (Heyes 93). Instead, it is expressed as something they choose to do just for themselves—which Bordo calls the “for me” argument (“Braveheart, Babe, and the Contemporary Body”). In an increasingly visual culture, the accessibility and affordability of cosmetic surgery enable consumers, who are already accustomed to digitally editing their photographical images, to “edit” their physical bodies. This is candidly expressed by Singaporean blogger Ang Chiew Ting who writes, "When I learnt how to use Photoshop, the things that I edited about myself, those have now all been done in real life through plastic surgery. Whatever I wanted to change about my face, I have done." Yet, as I illustrate later, the emphasis on transformation as empowerment through exercising choice (“Whatever I wanted to change about my face, I have done"), plays into the hands of the industry as it “reproduces the logic of surgical industries” (Tait 121). In the politics of consumption, driven by neo-liberal ideologies, consumer choice is sovereign (Sassatelli 184), and it is in the ability to exercise choice, choosing surgery and taking responsibility for that choice, that agency and empowerment are expressed (Leve, Rubin, and Pusic). Blogger Stella Lee explains her decision as “I don't want to say I encourage plastic surgery, this is just my personal choice. It is like saying if I dye my hair purple then I want everyone to have purple hair too. It is simply just for me only. If you wish to do so, go ahead. If you're satisfied with what you have, go ahead.” This consumer is a “discerning and knowledgeable consumer” who researches information about potential surgical procedures and practitioners (Gimlin, “Imagining” 58) and embraces the ideology of self-determinism (Heyes). Consumers considering surgery may visit recommended doctors, research doctors online, and peruse beauty magazines (Leve, Rubin, and Pusic). Tatler magazine, for example, publishes an annual Beauty and Cosmetic Surgery Guide which celebrates “the newest, niftiest ways to reclaim your face and your figure” (Tatler nd). In taking responsibility for themselves, the contemporary consumer reflects the neoliberal agenda “that promotes empowerment through consumer choice and responsibility for self-care” (Leve, Rubin, and Pusic 131). Yet, consumer information on the suitability of surgery and alternative providers is often partial. As one research respondent recalled, “I just typed it into Google and then worked through whatever came up; you're trying to go for the names of companies that are a bit more reputable” (UK Department of Health 28). Internet searches most frequently identify promotional information from the surgery providers themselves including customer stories and testimonials, which seem informative in nature but which have persuasive intent to influence choice. Therefore although seemingly exerting agency by undertaking a process of search in order to make an informed choice, that choice is made within a promotional context that the consumer may not be fully aware exists.Consumer Transformation as Marketing ImperativeThe aim of marketing and promotion, as medicine meets consumerism, is to secure clients for cosmetic surgery (Mirivel). As a consequence, the discourse of cosmetic surgery is highly persuasive and commercially motivated, promoting the need for surgery by mobilising the existing ideological link between identity and physical appearance for commercial ends (Martinez Lirola and Chovanec 489). Promotional strategies include drawing attention to possible deficiencies in appearance, creating opportunities for surgery by problematising normal bodily states, promising intangible benefits, and normalising surgery by positioning it within a consumerist vision of success. Consumer transformation can be driven by perceived lack, inadequacy, or deficit, where a part of the body or face does not stand up to scrutiny when compared to media images. Marketing and promotion draw attention to this lack and imply that any deficiency in appearance can be remedied by consumption practices such as the purchase of hair dye, make-up, or, more drastically, cosmetic surgery. As one research respondent considering surgery explains, “I think people want to look their best and media portrays ‘perfect’ looking people or they portray a certain image and then because it’s what you see all the time, it almost feels like if you don't look like that, then it’s wrong” (UK Department of Health 18). The influence of media on the impetus to transform is explored elsewhere (see Wegenstein), so is not addressed further here. However, the insecurity which results from such media images is further exploited by the marketing and promotional strategies adopted by cosmetic surgery providers in an increasingly competitive marketplace. This does not go unnoticed by consumers: as one research respondent noted, “They pick out your insecurities as a tactic for making you purchase stuff . . . it was supposed to be a free consultation but they definitely do pressure you into having stuff” (UK Department of Health 19). In this deficiency model of transformation, the cosmetic surgery consumer is insecure, lacking in power and volition, and convinced of her inadequacy. This is exacerbated by the promotional images of models featured on cosmetic surgery websites against which consumers evaluate their own looks in a process of social comparisons (Markey and Markey 210). This reflects Bernadette Wegenstein’s notion of the cosmetic gaze, a circular process whereby “the act of looking at our bodies and those of others is informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies of bodily modification” (2). In comparing themselves with the transformed images on surgery websites, consumers are drawn into a process of comparison that tells them how they should look. At the same time as convincing consumers of their inadequacies, providers also tell consumers that they are in control and can act autonomously to transform themselves. For example, a TV advert for The Hospital Group which shows three smiling “transformed” customers claims “If you’re unhappy with your appearance you could change it. If it affects your confidence you could overcome it. If it makes you feel self-conscious, you could take control with cosmetic surgery or dentistry from The Hospital Group” (my italics). In this way marketers marshal the neo-liberal rhetoric of consumer empowerment to encourage the consumption of cosmetic surgery and normalise the practice through the emphasis on choice. Marketing and promotional messages contribute further to these perceived deficits by problematising “normal” bodily conditions resulting from “normal” life experiences such as ageing and pregnancy. Surgeon Ran Rubinstein, for example, draws attention in his blog to thinning lips as an opportunity for lip augmentation: “Lip augmentation might seem like a trend among the younger crowd, but it’s something that people of any age can benefit from getting. As you get older, some areas of your body thin out while some thicken. You might find that you’re gaining weight around your stomach, while your lips and face are getting thin.” Problematising frames a real or perceived physical state as “as a medical problem that requires a medical solution,” subtly implying that cosmetic surgery is “an unavoidable necessity” which is medically justified (Martinez Lirola and Chovanec 503). For example, Jules’s testimonial for facial fillers frames natural, and even positive, features such as smile lines as problematic: “I smile a lot and noticed some smile lines coming through.” Indeed as medicine has historically defined the female body as “deficient and in need of repair,” cosmetic surgery can be legitimately proposed as a solution for “women’s problems with their appearance” (Davis, “A Dubious Equality” 55). Promotional messages emphasise the intrinsic benefits of external transformation, encouraging consumers to opt for surgery in order to align their external appearance with how they feel inside. Much of this discourse calls on consumers’ perceptions of a disparity between how they feel inside and their external body image (Gibson 54). For example, a testimonial from “Carole Anne 69” claims that facial fillers “make me feel like I’m the best version of myself.” (Note that Carole Anne, like all the women providing testimonials for this website, including Carol 50, Jules 38, or Pamela 59, is defined by her looks and by her age.) Although Gimlin’s research suggests that the notions of the “body reflecting the ‘true’ self or re-creating one’s ‘genuine’ appearance” have become less important (“Too Good” 930), they continue to dominate in customer testimonials on surgery websites. For example, Transform breast enlargement client Rebecca exclaims, “I’m still me, but it has completely transformed how I feel about myself on the inside, how I hold and present myself on the outside.” A typical promotional strategy is to emphasise the intangible benefits of cosmetic surgery, such as happiness or confidence. This is encapsulated in a 2011 print advert for Transform Cosmetic Surgery Group which shows a smiling young girl in a bikini holding a placard which reads, “I’ve just had my breasts done, but the biggest change you’ll see is on my face.” In promising happiness or self-confidence, intangible effects which are impossible to measure, marketers avoid the reality of surgery—where a cut is made, what is added or removed, how many stitches are required. Consumers know the world through shopping (Elliott 43), and marketers draw on this behaviour to associate surgery with any other purchase in the life of a successful consumer. Consumers are encouraged to choose from a gallery of looks, to “Browse through our Before and After Gallery for inspiration,” and the purchase is rendered more accessible through the use of discounts, offers, and incentives, which consumers are accustomed to seeing in familiar shopping contexts. Sales intent can be blatant, such as this appeal to disposable income on Realself.com: “Now that your 2015 taxes are (hopefully) filed and behind you, were you fortunate enough to get a refund? If it just so happens that the government will be returning some of your hard-earned cash, what will you be using it for? Electronic gadgets, an island vacation, a shopping spree . . . or plastic surgery?” Providers reduce perceived risk by implying that interventions such as facial fillers are considered normal practice for others, claiming that “Millions of women choose facial fillers, so that they can age exactly the way they want to” and by providing online interactive tools which consumers can use to manipulate facial features to see the potential effect of surgery (This-is-me.com).ConclusionThe aim of this article was to explore the tension between two different views of transformation, one which emphasised consumer autonomy, freedom, and market choice and the other which claims a more restrictive and manipulative influence of the market and its promotional practices. I argue that McCracken’s explanation of transformation as “the expression of consumer agency and individual freedom” (xvi) offers an overly optimistic view of consumer transformation. In the cosmetic surgery market, the expression of consumer autonomy and freedom rests on the discourse of choice. This same discourse is adopted by surgery providers in their persuasive strategies to secure new clients so that the market’s promotional language (e.g. a whole new you) becomes part of the consumer’s understanding of and articulation of cosmetic surgery transformation. I argue that marketing and promotion work to progress consumers along the path to surgery, by giving them reasons to do so. This is achieved by reflecting existing consumer anxieties as deficiencies, by creating new reasons for surgery by problematising normal conditions, by promising intangible benefits, and by normalising the purchase. These promotional practices also regulate and restrict consumers by presenting visual images of transformation which influence how others understand “the perfect you.” The gallery of looks on surgery websites constrains choice by signifying which looks are desirable, and “before and after” rhetoric emphasises the pivotal role of cosmetic surgery in achieving this transformation. ReferencesAizura, Aren. “Where Health and Beauty Meet: Femininity and Racialisation in Thai Cosmetic Surgery Clinics.” Asian Studies Review 33.3 (2009): 303–17.Bordo, Susan. “Braveheart, Babe, and the Contemporary Body.” 3 June 2016 <www.public.iastate.edu/~jwcwolf/Papers/Bordo>.———. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.Brennan, Ross, Lynn Eagle, and David Rice. “Medicalization and Marketing.” Journal of Macromarketing 30.1 (2010): 8–22.Davis, Kathy. “‘A Dubious Equality’: Men, Women and Cosmetic Surgery.” Body & Society 8.1 (2002): 49–65.———. 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In 2011 The Economist alerted us to the claim that “digital data will flood the planet.” The exponential increase in data such as e-mails, Tweets and Instagram pictures underpins claims that we are living in an age of ‘infoglut’ (Andrejevic) and information superabundance (Internet Live Stats). Several years earlier, Shirky posed this as an issue not of “information overload” but of “filter failure” (Asay). Shirky’s claim suggests that we should not despair in the face of unmanageable volumes of content, but develop ways to make sense of this information – to curate. Reflecting on his experiences of curating the Meltdown Festival, David Byrne addressed the emergence of everyday curating practices: “Nowadays, everything and everyone can be curated. There are curators of socks, menus and dirt bike trails […] Anyone who has come up with a top-ten list is, in effect, a curator. And anyone who clicks ‘Like’ is a curator.” Byrne’s comments on socks and top ten lists captures how curating can be personal. In their discussion of curating as a new literacy practice, Potter and Gilje highlight how “as well as the institutional and professional contexts for such work through the centuries and across cultures, many people have made personal collections of texts and artefacts that have stood for them in the world” (123). The emergence of easily, and often freely, available content curating tools is linked to practices of accessible curating (Good). There has been a proliferation of content curating platforms and tools. Notwithstanding that accessibility and everyday usage are often the hallmark of content curating (for example, see Villi on social curating and user-distributed content), this article specifically focuses on content curating as a service. Defining the content curator as “someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online”, Bhargava in 2009 described content curating as the next big social media job of the future. Popova stresses the importance of authorship and approaching curating as a “form of creative labor in and of itself” and identifies content curators as “human sense-makers” in a culture of “information overload”. By addressing curating ‘content for others’ rather than other curatorship practices such as ‘content for me’ and ‘content about me’, we aim to offer insights into the professional and commercial practices of content curating. Through connecting autoethnographic research with academic literature on the concept of ‘cultural intermediaries’, we identify two ways of understanding professional content curating - connected cultural intermediation, and curating literacies. Researching Content Curators as Creative Labour In his introduction to Curation Nation, Rosenbaum suggests that there is “both amateur and professional curation, and the emergence of amateur or prosumer curators isn’t in any way a threat to professionals” (3). Likewise, we do not see a threat or tension between amateur and professional curating. We are, though keen to address ‘professional’ strategic content curating for an intended audience as a notable difference and departure. To generate detailed insights into the role of the professional content curator we employed an autoethnographic approach. Holt’s review of the literature and his own experiences of autoethnography provide a helpful overview: “autoethnography is a genre of writing and research that connects the personal to the cultural, placing the self within a social context” (2). Specifically, we focus on Couzins’ personal experiences of content curating, his professional practices and his ‘cultural milieu’ (Reed-Danahay). Couzins was a business-to-business journalist for 17 years before starting a content and communications agency that: helps organisations tell their story through curated and created stories; runs a media brand for corporate learning, which features curated content and a weekly curated e-mail; designs and delivers massive open online courses on the Curatr platform (a social learning platform designed for curating content). The research and writing process for our analysis was informed by Anderson’s approach to analytical autoethnography, and from this we stress that Couzins is a full member of the research setting. Our focus on his experiences also resonates with the use of first-hand narratives in media industries research (Holt and Perren). Following preliminary exchanges, including collaborative note taking and face-to-face conversations, Ashton created an interview schedule that was then reviewed and revised with Couzins. This schedule was used as the basis for a semi-structured interview of around 90 minutes. Both authors transcribed and coded the interview data. Through thematic analysis we identified and agreed on five codes: industry developments and business models; relationships with technologies; identifying and sharing information sources; curating literacies; expertise and working with/for clients. This research paper was then co-written. As a conversation with only two participants, our account runs up against the widely stated concern associated with autoethnography of observing too few cultural members and not spending enough time with others (Coffey; Ellis, Adams and Bochner). However, we would argue that the processes of dyadic interviewing underpinned by self-analysis provides accessible and “useful stories” (Ellis, Adams and Bochner). Specifically, Anderson’s five features helped to guide our research and writing from documenting personal experience and providing insider perspectives, to broader generalisation and “theoretical development, refinement, and extension” (387). Indeed, we see this research as complementing and contributing to the large scale survey research undertaken by Liu providing excerpts on how “technology bloggers and other professionals explain the value of curating in a networked world” (20). The major theme emerging from the interview exchange, perhaps not unexpectedly, is how professional content curating revolves around making sense of specific materials. In acting as a bridge between the content and publications of some and its reception by others, literature on cultural intermediaries was identified as a helpful conceptual pointer. The relevance of this concept and literature for exploring professional content curators is illuminated by Smith-Maguire and Matthews’ comments that “cultural intermediaries impact upon notions of what, and thereby who, is legitimate, desirable and worthy, and thus by definition what and who is not” (552). The process of curating content necessarily involves judgements on what is deemed to be desirable and worthy for clients. Scholarship on cultural intermediaries was explicitly explored in the interview and co-writing stages, and the following covers some of the meeting points between our research and this concept. Content Curators as Cultural Intermediaries: Taste, Expertise and Value The concept of cultural intermediaries has been explored by academics in relation to a range of industries. This paper does not necessarily seek to add content curators to the expanding list of occupations analysed through the cultural intermediaries’ lens. There are though a range of questions and prompts from studies on cultural intermediaries helpful for understanding the ways in which content is made sense of and circulated. Smith-Maguire and Matthews’s 2012 article ‘Are We All Cultural Intermediaries Now?’ is particularly helpful for connecting content curating with debates on cultural intermediaries. They consider how cultural intermediaries “effect other’s orientation” (552), and the question they pose is directly relevant for thinking through distinctions in curating ‘for/about me’ and ‘for others’. The following statement by Couzins on a client relationship with a private membership network provides a useful account of what the job of content curating involves: Each week I curate a set of articles or videos on hot topics that have been identified by network members. Once I have identified suitable content I upload links to their website, including a reading time and a short summary. These two elements serve to help members decide whether or not to read it and when to read it. For example, if they have a short train journey they might have time to read a ten-minute article. All articles are tagged so that the curated links become a deeper resource over time and members are alerted by e-mail each week when new links have been published. The reference to “suitable content” highlights how the curator can shape a narrative by intentionally deciding what to keep in and what to leave out. Beyond this choice of what the client is directed to, there is also the importance of the “short summary” and thus how this curated content is packaged and made sense of by the curator for the client. McFall, in her contribution to the Cultural Intermediaries Reader, offers a specific lens for examining the distinctive filtering practice of content curators as acts of ‘economization’. McFall outlines how economization “involves the work of ‘qualifying’ behaviours, organizations and institutions as economic. This is positioned in contrast to the idea that there is some kind of mystery “x-factor” which defines things as inherently economic” (46). McFall explains how “things are rendered (i.e. they become) economic through the actions of producers, governments, research organisations, media, consumers, and so forth. Economization allows for the ways things may, throughout their life cycle, move in and out of being economic” (46). Whilst McFall’s comments recognise how things may be rendered economic through, for example, a ‘top ten list’, we want to specifically examine what this rendering looks like with the ‘professional’ content curator. The act of filtering is one of rendering, and the content that is curated and shared (whether it be articles, videos, links, etc.) becomes economic within this specific context. Whilst there are many organisations that would provide the regular service of producing curated content, two distinctive approaches were revealed in our exchange. The first approach we identify concerns content curating as connected cultural intermediation, and the second approach we identify concerns facilitating curating literacies and co-creation with clients. Connected Cultural Intermediation Connected cultural intermediation refers to how content curators can connect with their own clients and with producers of content. As the following explores, these connections are built around being explicit and open about the content that curators identify and how they filter it. Being open with producers of content was important as these connections could lead to future opportunities for Couzins to identify content for his clients. Couzins addresses the connections he makes in terms of transparency, stating: “you just need to have some more transparency around you as the curator, like who you are, who you represent, why you are doing it, and the scope of what you are looking at.” Part of this involves identifying his impact and influences as a taste-shaper. Couzins remarks, “I'm creating a story […] but my point of view will be based on my interest in what I bring to the curating process.” Transparency was further presented as a part of the process in which judgements and validations are made: “My reputation as a curator is based on what I curate, right? So therefore it has to be as sound as it can be, and I try to be as dispassionate as I can be about this.” These comments capture how transparency is integral for how Couzins establishes his reputation as a content curator. Couzins promotes transparency in content usage by alerting content producers to where content is curated: I also share on Twitter, so they [producers] know it's been shared because they are included in the retweets, for example. I would tell some people that I've linked to their stuff as well, and sometimes I would also say "Thank you," to so and so for linking to that. It's like thanking my supply chain, if you like. Because it's a network. The act of retweeting also operates as a means to develop connections with producers of content. As well as indicating to producers that content is being used, Couzins’ reference to the “supply chain” indicates the importance he invests in establishing connections and the wide circulation of curated content. One approach to content curating as a commercial practice could be to limit access and create a “pay wall” style scenario in which the curated content can only be accessed after a payment. Curated materials could be sent directly to e-mail or uploaded to private websites. For Couzins however, it is access to the flows of content and the connections with others that underpin and enable his content curating commercial practice. It is important for Couzins that curated content is available to the producers, clients and more publicly through his free-to-access website and Twitter feed. The earlier reference to reputation as a curator in part concerned being dispassionate and enabling verification through open and explicit acknowledgements and links. This comment also addresses generating a reputation for “sound” information. The following comments pick this up and point to the need for engaging with different sources: “I have got my own bubble that I operate in, and it's really challenging to get out of that bubble, bring new stuff in, or review what's in there. I find myself sharing stuff quite a lot from certain places, sometimes. You've got to work at that. It's hard.” Working hard to escape from the bubble was part of Couzins’ work to build his reputation. Acknowledging producers is both a way for Couzins to promote transparency around his filtering and a way to foster new sources of content to escape the bubble: “I do build some relationships with some of the producers, because I get to know them, and I thank them, and I say, ‘That's really good,’ so I have a lot of relationships with people just through their content. But it's not a commercial relationship.” Whilst Couzins suggests there may not be a commercial relationship with the producers of content, economic significance can be seen in two ways. Firstly, moving outside of the ‘bubble’ can help the content curator make more diverse contributions and establish a reputation for this. Secondly, these connections can be of benefit to content producers as their material further circulates. Whilst there is no payment to the content producer, Couzins directs this curated content to clients and does not restrict wider public access to it in this curated form. McFall’s comments on economization stress the role of cultural intermediaries in the life cycle of how things “move in and out of being economic.” With content curating there is a ‘rendering’ of content that sees it become significant in new contexts. Here, the obvious relationship may be between Couzins and his clients. The references to transparent relationships and thanking the ‘supply chain’ show that relationships with content producers are also crucial and that the content curator needs to be continually connecting. Curating Literacies and Co-Creation In the earlier discussion of cultural intermediaries we addressed framing and how judgements can shape legitimacy, desirability and worth. With the content curating cultural intermediary practices under discussion here, a different perspective is possible in which subject specialist knowledge and expertise may not necessarily be the primary driver behind clients’ needs. The role of the content curator as cultural intermediary here is still in the rendering of content. However, it does not specifically involve the selecting content but guiding others in the framing and circulation of content. Where the concern of the client is finding appropriate ways to share the materials that they identify, then the content curator may not need subject-specialist knowledge. Here the interest in the content curating service is on the curating processes and practices, rather than content knowledge. Couzins’ account revealed that in some cases the intermediary’s role is not about the selection of material, but in the framing of material already selected by clients for wider engagement: “People internally will decide what to share and tell you why it’s worth looking at. Basically, it’s making them look like they know what they’re talking about, building their credibility.” The content curator role here does not concern selecting content, but offering guidance on how to frame it. As such, there remains a crucial “rendering” role in which the content selected by clients becomes meaningful through the guidance and input of the professional content curator. Our interview exchange also identified another scenario of relationships in which the content curator has little involvement in either selecting or framing content. Part of the commercial activity explored in our interview included supporting staff within a client’s company to showcase their expertise and knowledge through both selecting and framing content. Specifically, as Couzins outlines, this could be undertaken as a bespoke face-to-face service with in-house training: I helped one client put a curation tool into their website enabling them to become the curators. I spent a lot of time talking to them about curation and their role as curators. We split curation into topics of interest – based on the client’s area of expertise - which would be useful both internally for personal/professional development and externally for business development by sharing content relevant for their customers. In this respect, the service provided by the content curator involves the sharing of their own curatorial expertise with clients in order that clients may undertake their own curatorial practice. There is for the client a similar concern with enhancing their social reputation and profile, but this approach stresses the expertise of clients in identifying and responding to their own content curating needs. In part this emphasis on the client’s selection of material is about the challenges of establishing and maintaining legitimacy as a content curator across several fields: “You can't begin to say you're an expert when you are not, because you'll be found out.” More than this though, it was an approach to content curating literacy. As Couzins state, “my view is that if people with the domain expertise have an interest in doing this […] then they should be doing it themselves. If you gave it to me I hold the keys to all your knowledge. Why would you want that?” The content curator and client exchange here is not restricted to gathering interests and then providing content. This scenario sees content curating as accessible, but also sees the curator in their continued role as cultural intermediary--where expertise is about mediation more than content. Returning to McFall’s comments on rendering as how things “move in and out of being economic”, our second understanding of content curating intermediaries directs attention away from what the things/content are to instead how those things move. Conclusion Set within debates and transformations around content and information abundance and filtering, this paper explored how the practices of filtering, finding, and sharing at the heart of content curating have much in common with the work of cultural intermediaries. Specifically, this paper identified two ways of understanding commercial content curating. Firstly, content curating involves the rendering of content, and the ability to succeed here relies on developing connections outside the curator-client dynamic. Secondly, professional content curators can approach their relationships with clients as one of facilitation in which the expertise of the content curating cultural intermediary does not rest with the content, but on the curating and the intermediating. References Anderson, Leon. “Analytical Autoethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35.4 (2006): 373-395. Andrejevic, Mark. Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. London: Routledge, 2013. Asay, Matt. “Problem Is Filter Failure, Not Info Overload.” CNet Jan. 2009. 1 Jun. 2015 ‹http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/shirky-problem-is-filter-failure-not-info-overload/›. Bhargava, Rohit. “Manifesto for the Content Curator: The Next Big Social Media Job of the Future?” 2009. 2 June 2015. ‹http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2009/09/manifestoDforDtheDcontentDcuratorD theDnextDbigDsocialDmediaDjobDofDtheDfutureD.html›. Byrne, David. “David Byrne: A Great Curator Beats Any Big Company’s Algorithm.” New Statesman June 2015. 8 June 2015. ‹http://www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/man-versus-algorithm›. Coffey, Paul. The Ethnographic Self. London: Sage, 1999. The Economist. “Drowning in Numbers.” 2011. 4 June 2015 ‹http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/big-data-0›. Ellis, Carolyn, Adams, Tony E. and Bochner, Arthur P. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12.1 (2011). Good, Robin. “Content Curation Tools Supermap.” Pearl Trees Apr. 2015. 4 June 2015 ‹http://www.pearltrees.com/robingood/content-curating-supermap/id5947231›. Holt, Jennifer, and Alisa Perren. “Introduction: Does the World Really Need One More Field of Study?” Media Industries: History, Theory, and Methods. Eds. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 1-16. Holt, Nicholas, L. “Representation, Legitimation, and Autoethnography: An Autoethnographic Writing Story.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 2.1 (2003): 1-22. Internet Live Stats. 5 June 2015 ‹http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/›. Krysa, Joasia. Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. New York: Autonomedia, 2006. Liu, Sophia B. “Trends in Distributed Curatorial Technology to Manage Data Deluge in a Networked World.” Upgrade: The European Journal for the Informatics Professional 11.4 (2010): 18-24. Matthews, Julian, and Jennifer Smith-Maguire. “Introduction: Thinking with Cultural Intermediaries.” The Cultural Intermediaries Reader. Eds. Julian Matthews and Jennifer Smith-Maguire. London: Sage, 2014. 1-11. McFall, Liz. “The Problem of Cultural Intermediaries in the Economy of Qualities.” The Cultural Intermediaries Reader. Eds. Julian Matthews and Jennifer Smith-Maguire. London: Sage, 2014. 42-51. 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As the ball dropped on 1999, is it any wonder that No Doubt played, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M. live on MTV? Any discussion of the Nineties—and its pinnacle moment, Y2K—requires a discussion of both the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine that has, twenty years later, become normalised in today’s Post Internet culture. By staging failure and inviting the audience to participate, the glitch and the cover call into question the original and the origin story. This breakdown of normative borders has prompted the convergence of previously demarcated media, genres, and cultures, a constellation from which to recognise a stochastic hybrid form. The Cover as a Revelation of Collaborative MurmurBefore Sean Parker collaborated with Shawn Fanning to launch Napster on 1 June 1999, networked file distribution existed as cumbersome text-based programs like Internet Relay Chat and Usenet, servers which resembled bulletin boards comprising multiple categories of digitally ripped files. Napster’s simple interface, its advanced search filters, and its focus on music and audio files fostered a peer-to-peer network that became the fastest growing website in history, registering 80 million users in less than two years.In harnessing the transgressive power of the Internet to force a new mode of content sharing, Napster forced traditional providers to rethink what constitutes “content” at a moment which prefigures our current phenomena of “produsage” (Bruns) and the vast popularity of user-generated content. At stake is not just the democratisation of art but troubling the very idea of intellectual property, which is to say, the very concept of ownership.Long before the Internet was re-routed from military servers and then mainstreamed, Michel Foucault understood the efficacy of anonymous interactions on the level of literature, imagining a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. But what he was asking in 1969 is something we can better answer today, because it seems less germane to call into question the need for an author in a culture in which everyone is writing, producing, and reproducing text, and more effective to think about re-evaluating the notion of a single author, or what it means to write by yourself. One would have to testify to the particular medium we have at our disposal, the Internet’s ultimate permissibility, its provocations for collaboration and co-creation. One would have to surrender the idea that authors own anything besides our will to keep producing, and our desire for change; and to modulate means to resist without negating, to alter without omitting, to enable something new to come forward; the unfolding of the text into the anonymity of a murmur.We should remind ourselves that “to author” all the way down to its Latin roots signifies advising, witnessing, and transferring. We should be reminded that to author something means to forget the act of saying “I,” to forget it or to make it recede in the background in service of the other or others, on behalf of a community. The de-centralisation of Web development and programming initiated by Napster inform a poetics of relation, an always-open structure in which, as Édouard Glissant said, “the creator of a text is effaced, or rather, is done away with, to be revealed in the texture of his creation” (25). When a solid melts, it reveals something always underneath, something at the bottom, something inside—something new and something that was always already there. A cover, too, is both a revival and a reworking, an update and an interpretation, a retrospective tribute and a re-version that looks toward the future. In performing the new, the original as singular is called into question, replaced by an increasingly fetishised copy made up of and made by multiples.Authorial Effacement and the Exigency of the ErrorY2K, otherwise known as the Millennium Bug, was a coding problem, an abbreviation made to save memory space which would disrupt computers during the transition from 1999 to 2000, when it was feared that the new year would become literally unrecognisable. After an estimated $300 billion in upgraded hardware and software was spent to make computers Y2K-compliant, something more extraordinary than global network collapse occurred as midnight struck: nothing.But what if the machine admits the possibility of accident? Implicit in the admission of any accident is the disclosure of a new condition—something to be heard, to happen, from the Greek ad-cadere, which means to fall. In this drop into non-repetition, the glitch actualises an idea about authorship that necessitates multi-user collaboration; the curtain falls only to reveal the hidden face of technology, which becomes, ultimately, instructions for its re-programming. And even as it deviates, the new form is liable to become mainstreamed into a new fashion. “Glitch’s inherently critical moment(um)” (Menkman 8) indicates this potential for technological self-insurgence, while suggesting the broader cultural collapse of generic markers and hierarchies, and its ensuing flow into authorial fluidity.This feeling of shock, this move “towards the ruins of destructed meaning” (Menkman 29) inherent in any encounter with the glitch, forecasted not the immediate horror of Y2K, but the delayed disasters of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Indian Ocean tsunami, Sichuan Province earthquake, global financial crisis, and two international wars that would all follow within the next nine years. If, as Menkman asserts, the glitch, in representing a loss of self-control “captures the machine revealing itself” (30), what also surfaces is the tipping point that edges us toward a new becoming—not only the inevitability of surrender between machine and user, but their reversibility. Just as crowds stood, transfixed before midnight of the new millennium in anticipation of the error, or its exigency, it’s always the glitch I wait for; it’s always the glitch I aim to re-create, as if on command. The accidental revelation, or the machine breaking through to show us its insides. Like the P2P network that Napster introduced to culture, every glitch produces feedback, a category of noise (Shannon) influencing the machine’s future behaviour whereby potential users might return the transmission.Re-Orienting the Bizarre in Fantasy and FictionIt is in the fantasy of dreams, and their residual leakage into everyday life, evidenced so often in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, where we can locate a similar authorial agency. The cult Nineties psycho-noir, and its discontinuous return twenty-six years later, provoke us into reconsidering the science of sleep as the art of fiction, assembling an alternative, interactive discourse from found material.The turning in and turning into in dreams is often described as an encounter with the “bizarre,” a word which indicates our lack of understanding about the peculiar processes that normally happen inside our heads. Dreams are inherently and primarily bizarre, Allan J. Hobson argues, because during REM sleep, our noradrenergic and serotonergic systems do not modulate the activated brain, as they do in waking. “The cerebral cortex and hippocampus cannot function in their usual oriented and linear logical way,” Hobson writes, “but instead create odd and remote associations” (71). But is it, in fact, that our dreams are “bizarre” or is it that the model itself is faulty—a precept premised on the normative, its dependency upon generalisation and reducibility—what is bizarre if not the ordinary modulations that occur in everyday life?Recall Foucault’s interest not in what a dream means but what a dream does. How it rematerialises in the waking world and its basis in and effect on imagination. Recall recollection itself, or Erin J. Wamsley’s “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” “A ‘function’ for dreaming,” Wamsley writes, “hinges on the difficult question of whether conscious experience in general serves any function” (433). And to think about the dream as a specific mode of experience related to a specific theory of knowledge is to think about a specific form of revelation. It is this revelation, this becoming or coming-to-be, that makes the connection to crowd-sourced content production explicit—dreams serve as an audition or dress rehearsal in which new learning experiences with others are incorporated into the unconscious so that they might be used for production in the waking world. Bert O. States elaborates, linking the function of the dream with the function of the fiction writer “who makes models of the world that carry the imprint and structure of our various concerns. And it does this by using real people, or ‘scraps’ of other people, as the instruments of hypothetical facts” (28). Four out of ten characters in a dream are strangers, according to Calvin Hall, who is himself a stranger, someone I’ve never met in waking life or in a dream. But now that I’ve read him, now that I’ve written him into this work, he seems closer to me. Twin Peak’s serial lesson for viewers is this—even the people who seem strangers to us can interact with and intervene in our processes of production.These are the moments that a beginning takes place. And even if nothing directly follows, this transfer constitutes the hypothesised moment of production, an always-already perhaps, the what-if stimulus of charged possibility; the soil plot, or plot line, for freedom. Twin Peaks is a town in which the bizarre penetrates the everyday so often that eventually, the bizarre is no longer bizarre, but just another encounter with the ordinary. Dream sequences are common, but even more common—and more significant—are the moments in which what might otherwise be a dream vision ruptures into real life; these moments propel the narrative.Exhibit A: A man who hasn’t gone outside in a while begins to crumble, falling to the earth when forced to chase after a young girl, who’s just stolen the secret journal of another young girl, which he, in turn, had stolen.B: A horse appears in the middle of the living room after a routine vacuum cleaning and a subtle barely-there transition, a fade-out into a fade-in, what people call a dissolve. No one notices, or thinks to point out its presence. Or maybe they’re distracted. Or maybe they’ve already forgotten. Dissolve.(I keep hitting “Save As.” As if renaming something can also transform it.)C: All the guests at the Great Northern Hotel begin to dance the tango on cue—a musical, without any music.D: After an accident, a middle-aged woman with an eye patch—she was wearing the eye patch before the accident—believes she’s seventeen again. She enrolls in Twin Peaks High School and joins the cheerleading team.E: A woman pretending to be a Japanese businessman ambles into the town bar to meet her estranged husband, who fails to recognise his cross-dressing, race-swapping wife.F: A girl with blond hair is murdered, only to come back as another girl, with the same face and a different name. And brown hair. They’re cousins.G: After taking over her dead best friend’s Meals on Wheels route, Donna Hayward walks in to meet a boy wearing a tuxedo, sitting on the couch with his fingers clasped: a magician-in-training. “Sometimes things can happen just like this,” he says with a snap while the camera cuts to his grandmother, bed-ridden, and the appearance of a plate of creamed corn that vanishes as soon as she announces its name.H: A woman named Margaret talks to and through a log. The log, cradled in her arms wherever she goes, becomes a key witness.I: After a seven-minute diegetic dream sequence, which includes a one-armed man, a dwarf, a waltz, a dead girl, a dialogue played backward, and a significantly aged representation of the dreamer, Agent Cooper wakes up and drastically shifts his investigation of a mysterious small-town murder. The dream gives him agency; it turns him from a detective staring at a dead-end to one with a map of clues. The next day, it makes him a storyteller; all the others, sitting tableside in the middle of the woods become a captive audience. They become readers. They read into his dream to create their own scenarios. Exhibit I. The cycle of imagination spins on.Images re-direct and obfuscate meaning, a process of over-determination which Foucault says results in “a multiplication of meanings which override and contradict each other” (DAE 34). In the absence of image, the process of imagination prevails. In the absence of story, real drama in our conscious life, we form complex narratives in our sleep—our imaginative unconscious. Sometimes they leak out, become stories in our waking life, if we think to compose them.“A bargain has been struck,” says Harold, an under-5 bit player, later, in an episode called “Laura’s Secret Diary.” So that she might have the chance to read Laura Palmer’s diary, Donna Hayward agrees to talk about her own life, giving Harold the opportunity to write it down in his notebook: his “living novel” the new chapter which reads, after uncapping his pen and smiling, “Donna Hayward.”He flips to the front page and sets a book weight to keep the page in place. He looks over at Donna sheepishly. “Begin.”Donna begins talking about where she was born, the particulars of her father—the lone town doctor—before she interrupts the script and asks her interviewer about his origin story. Not used to people asking him the questions, Harold’s mouth drops and he stops writing. He puts his free hand to his chest and clears his throat. (The ambient, wind-chime soundtrack intensifies.) “I grew up in Boston,” he finally volunteers. “Well, actually, I grew up in books.”He turns his head from Donna to the notebook, writing feverishly, as if he’s begun to write his own responses as the camera cuts back to his subject, Donna, crossing her legs with both hands cupped at her exposed knee, leaning in to tell him: “There’s things you can’t get in books.”“There’s things you can’t get anywhere,” he returns, pen still in his hand. “When we dream, they can be found in other people.”What is a call to composition if not a call for a response? It is always the audience which makes a work of art, re-framed in our own image, the same way we re-orient ourselves in a dream to negotiate its “inconsistencies.” Bizarreness is merely a consequence of linguistic limitations, the overwhelming sensory dream experience which can only be re-framed via a visual representation. And so the relationship between the experience of reading and dreaming is made explicit when we consider the associations internalised in the reader/audience when ingesting a passage of words on a page or on the stage, objects that become mental images and concept pictures, a lens of perception that we may liken to another art form: the film, with its jump-cuts and dissolves, so much like the defamiliarising and dislocating experience of dreaming, especially for the dreamer who wakes. What else to do in that moment but write about it?Evidence of the bizarre in dreams is only the evidence of the capacity of our human consciousness at work in the unconscious; the moment in which imagination and memory come together to create another reality, a spectrum of reality that doesn’t posit a binary between waking and sleeping, a spectrum of reality that revels in the moments where the two coalesce, merge, cross-pollinate—and what action glides forward in its wake? Sustained un-hesitation and the wish to stay inside one’s self. To be conscious of the world outside the dream means the end of one. To see one’s face in the act of dreaming would require the same act of obliteration. Recognition of the other, and of the self, prevents the process from being fulfilled. Creative production and dreaming, like voyeurism, depend on this same lack of recognition, or the recognition of yourself as other. What else is a dream if not a moment of becoming, of substituting or sublimating yourself for someone else?We are asked to relate a recent dream or we volunteer an account, to a friend or lover. We use the word “seem” in nearly every description, when we add it up or how we fail to. Everything seems to be a certain way. It’s not a place but a feeling. James, another character on Twin Peaks, says the same thing, after someone asks him, “Where do you want to go?” but before he hops on his motorcycle and rides off into the unknowable future outside the frame. Everything seems like something else, based on our own associations, our own knowledge of people and things. Offline memory consolidation. Seeming and semblance. An uncertainty of appearing—both happening and seeing. How we mediate—and re-materialise—the dream through text is our attempt to re-capture imagination, to leave off the image and better become it. If, as Foucault says, the dream is always a dream of death, its purpose is a call to creation.Outside of dreams, something bizarre occurs. We call it novelty or news. We might even bestow it with fame. A man gets on the wrong plane and ends up halfway across the world. A movie is made into the moment of his misfortune. Years later, in real life and in movie time, an Iranian refugee can’t even get on the plane; he is turned away by UK immigration officials at Charles de Gaulle, so he spends the next sixteen years living in the airport lounge; when he departs in real life, the movie (The Terminal, 2004) arrives in theaters. Did it take sixteen years to film the terminal exile? How bizarre, how bizarre. OMC’s eponymous refrain of the 1996 one-hit wonder, which is another way of saying, an anomaly.When all things are counted and countable in today’s algorithmic-rich culture, deviance becomes less of a statistical glitch and more of a testament to human peculiarity; the repressed idiosyncrasies of man before machine but especially the fallible tendencies of mankind within machines—the non-repetition of chance that the Nineties emblematised in the form of its final act. The point is to imagine what comes next; to remember waiting together for the end of the world. There is no need to even open your eyes to see it. It is just a feeling. ReferencesBruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication 2006: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference, eds. Fay Sudweeks, Herbert Hrachovec, and Charles Ess. Murdoch: School of Information Technology, 2006. 275-84. <https://eprints.qut.edu.au/4863/1/4863_1.pdf>.Foucault, Michel. “Dream, Imagination and Existence.” Dream and Existence. Ed. Keith Hoeller. Pittsburgh: Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, 1986. 31-78.———. “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. Ed. Paul Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1991.Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.Hall, Calvin S. The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966.Hobson, J. Allan. The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered State of Conscious­ness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.Menkman, Rosa. The Glitch Moment(um). Amsterdam: Network Notebooks, 2011.Shannon, Claude Elwood. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379-423.States, Bert O. “Bizarreness in Dreams and Other Fictions.” The Dream and the Text: Essays on Literature and Language. Ed. Carol Schreier Rupprecht. Albany: SUNY P, 1993.Twin Peaks. Dir. David Lynch. ABC and Showtime. 1990-3 & 2017. Wamsley, Erin. “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports 14.3 (2014): 433. “Y2K Bug.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 18 July 2018. <https://www.britannica.com/technology/Y2K-bug>.

Introduction Children are not only born digital, they are fashioned toward a lifestyle that needs them to be digital all the time (Palfrey and Gasser). They click, tap, save, circulate, download, and upload the texts of their lives, their friends’ lives, and the anonymous lives of the people that surround them. They are socialised as Internet consumers ready to participate in digital services targeted to them as they age such as Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube. But they are also fashioned as producers, whereby their lives are sold as content on these same markets. As commodities, the minutiae of their lives become the fodder for online circulation. Paradoxically, we also celebrate these digital behaviours as a means to express identity. Personal profile-building for adults is considered agency-building (Beer and Burrows), and as a consequence, we praise children for mimicking these acts of adult lifestyle. This article reflects on the Kids, Creative Storyworlds, and Wearables project, which involved an ethnographic study with five young children (ages 4-7), who were asked to share their autobiographical stories, creative self-narrations, and predictions about their future mediated lives (Atkins et al.). For this case study, we focus on commercialised forms of children’s automedia, and we compare discussions we had with 6-year old Cayden, a child we met in the study who expresses the desire to make himself famous online, with videos of Jacob, a child vlogger on YouTube’s Kinder Playtime, who clearly influences children like Cayden. We argue that child social influencers need consideration both as autobiographical agents and as child subjects requiring a sheltered approach to their online lives.Automedia Automedia is an emergent genre of autobiography (Smith and Watson Reading 190; “Virtually Me” 78). Broadcasting one’s life online takes many forms (Kennedy “Vulnerability”). Ümit Kennedy argues “Vlogging on YouTube is a contemporary form of autobiography in which individuals engage in a process of documenting their life on a daily or weekly basis and, in doing so, construct[ing] their identity online” (“Exploring”). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson write that “visual and digital modes are projecting and circulating not just new subjects but new notions of subjectivity through the effects of automediality” with the result that “the archive of the self in time, in space and in relation expands and is fundamentally reorganized” (Reading 190). Emma Maguire addresses what online texts “tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to communicate ‘real’ life through media” naming one tool, “automedia”. Further, Julie Rak calls on scholars “to rethink ‘life’ and ‘writing’ as automedia” to further “characterize the enactment of a personal life story in a new media environment.” We define automedia as a genre that involves the practices of creating, performing, sharing, circulating, and (at times) preserving one’s digital life narrative meant for multiple publics. Automedia revises identity formation, embodiment, or corporealities in acts of self-creation (Brophy and Hladki 4). Automedia also emphasizes circulation. As shared digital life texts now circulate through the behaviours of other human subjects, and automatically via algorithms in data assemblages, we contend that automediality currently involves a measure of relinquishing control over perpetually evolving mediatised environments. One cannot control how a shared life narrative will meet a public in the future, which is a revised way of thinking about autobiography. For the sake of this paper, we argue that children’s automedia ought to be considered a creative, autobiographical act, in order to afford child authors who create them the consideration they deserve as agents, now and in the future. Automedial practices often begin when children receive access to a device. The need for a distraction activity is often the reason parents hand a young child a smartphone, iPad, or even a wearable camera (Nansen). Mirroring the lives of parents, children aspire to share representations of their own personal lives in pursuit of social capital. They are often encouraged to use technologies and apps as adults do–to track aspects of self, broadcast life stories and eventually “live share” them—effectively creating, performing, sharing, and at times, seeking to preserve a public life narrative. With this practice, society inculcates children into spheres of device ubiquity, “socializing them to a future digital lifestyle that will involve always carrying a computer in some form” (Atkins et al. 49). Consequently, their representations become inculcated in larger media assemblages. Writing about toddlers, Nansen describes how the “archiving, circulation and reception of these images speaks to larger assemblages of media in which software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun; Gillespie), including young children’s media lives (Ito)” (Nansen). Children, like adult citizens, are increasingly faced with choices “not structured by their own preferences but by the economic imperatives of the private corporations that have recently come to dominate the internet” (Andrejevic). Recent studies have shown that for children and youth in the digital age, Internet fame, often characterized by brand endorsements, is a major aspiration (Uhls and Greenfield, 2). However, despite the ambition to participate as celebrity digital selves, children are also mired in the calls to shield them from exposure to screens through institutions that label these activities detrimental. In many countries, digital “protections” are outlined by privacy commissioners and federal or provincial/state statutes, (e.g. Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada). Consequently, children are often caught in a paradox that defines them either as literate digital agents able to compose or participate with their online selves, or as subjectified wards caught up in commercial practices that exploit their lives for commercial gain.Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables ProjectBoth academic and popular cultural critics continually discuss the future but rarely directly engage the people who will be empowered (or subjugated) by it as young adults in twenty years. To address children’s lack of agency in these discussions, we launched the Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables project to bring children into a dialogue about their own digital futures. Much has been written on childhood agency and participation in culture and mediated culture from the discipline of sociology (James and James; Jenks; Jenkins). In previous work, we addressed the perspective of child autobiographical feature filmmakers to explore issues of creative agency and consent when adult gatekeepers facilitate children in film production (Pedersen and Aspevig “My Eyes”; Pedersen and Aspevig “Swept”). Drawing on that previous work, this project concentrates on children’s automediated lives and the many unique concerns that materialize with digital identity-building. Children are categorised as a vulnerable demographic group necessitating special policy and legislation, but the lives they project as children will eventually become subsumed in their own adult lives, which will almost certainly be treated and mediated in a much different manner in the future. We focused on this landscape, and sought to query the children on their futures, also considering the issues that arise when adult gatekeepers get involved with child social media influencers. In the Storyworlds ethnographic study, children were given a wearable toy, a Vtech smartwatch called Kidizoom, to use over a month’s timeframe to serve as a focal point for ethnographic conversations. The Kidizoom watch enables children to take photos and videos, which are uploaded to a web interface. Before we gave them the tech, we asked them questions about their lives, including What are machines going to be like in the future? Can you imagine yourself wearing a certain kind of computer? Can you tell/draw a story about that? If you could wear a computer that gave you a super power, what would it be? Can you use your imagination to think of a person in a story who would use technology? In answering, many of them drew autobiographical drawings of technical inventions, and cast themselves in the images. We were particularly struck by the comments made by one participant, Cayden (pseudonym), a 6-year-old boy, and the stories he told us about himself and his aspirations. He expressed the desire to host a YouTube channel about his life, his activities, and the wearable technologies his family already owned (e.g. a GroPro camera) and the one we gave him, the Kidizoom smartwatch. He talked about how he would be proud to publically broadcast his own videos on YouTube, and about the role he had been allowed to play in the making of videos about his life (that were not broadcast). To contextualize Cayden’s commentary and his automedial aspirations, we extended our study to explore child social media influencers who broadcast components of their personal lives for the deliberate purpose of popularity and the financial gain of their parents.We selected the videos of Jacob, a child vlogger because we judged them to be representative of the kinds that Cayden watched. Jacob reviews toys through “unboxing videos,” a genre in which a child tells an online audience her or his personal experiences using new toys in regular, short videos on a social media site. Jacob appears on a YouTube channel called Kinder Playtime, which appears to be a parent-run channel that states that, “We enjoy doing these things while playing with our kids: Jacob, Emily, and Chloe” (see Figure 1). In one particular video, Jacob reviews the Kidizoom watch, serving as a child influencer for the product. By understanding Jacob’s performance as agent-driven automedia, as well as being a commercialised, mediatised form of advertising, we get a clearer picture of how the children in the study are coming to terms with their own digital selfhood and the realisation that circulated, life-exposing videos are the expectation in this context.Children are implicated in a range of ways through “family” influencer and toy unboxing videos, which are emergent entertainment industries (Abidin 1; Nansen and Nicoll; Craig and Cunningham 77). In particular, unboxing videos do impact child viewers, especially when children host them. Jackie Marsh emphasizes the digital literacy practices at play here that co-construct viewers as “cyberflâneur[s]” and she states that “this mode of cultural transmission is a growing feature of online practices for this age group” (369). Her stress, however, is on how the child viewer enjoys “the vicarious pleasure he or she may get from viewing the playing of another child with the toy” (376). Marsh writes that her study subject, a child called “Gareth”, “was not interested in being made visible to EvanHD [a child celebrity social media influencer] or other online peers, but was content to consume” the unboxing videos. The concept of the cyberflâneur, then, is fitting as a mediatising co-constituting process of identity-building within discourses of consumerism. However, in our study, the children, and especially Cayden, also expressed the desire to create, host, and circulate their own videos that broadcast their lives, also demonstrating awareness that videos are valorised in their social circles. Child viewers watch famous children perform consumer-identities to create an aura of influence, but viewers simultaneously aspire to become influencers using automedial performances, in essence, becoming products, themselves. Jacob, Automedial Subjects and Social Media InfluencersJacob is a vlogger on YouTube whose videos can garner millions of views, suggesting that he is also an influencer. In one video, he appears to be around the age of six as he proudly sits with folded hands, bright eyes, and a beaming, but partly toothless smile (see Figure 2). He says, “Welcome to Kinder Playtime! Today we have the Kidi Zoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech” (Kinder Playtime). We see the Kidi Zoom unboxed and then depicted in stylized animations amid snippets of Jacob’s smiling face. The voice and hands of a faceless parent guide Jacob as he uses his new wearable toy. We listen to both parent and child describe numerous features for recording and enhancing the wearer’s daily habits (e.g. calculator, calendar, fitness games), and his dad tells him it has a pedometer “which tracks your steps” (Kinder Playtime). But the watch is also used by Jacob to mediate himself and his world. We see that Jacob takes pictures of himself on the tiny watch screen as he acts silly for the camera. He also uses the watch to take personal videos of his mother and sister in his home. The video ends with his father mentioning bedtime, which prompts a “thank you” to VTech for giving him the watch, and a cheerful “Bye!” from Jacob (Kinder Playtime). Figure 1: Screenshot of Kinder Playtime YouTube channel, About page Figure 2: Screenshot of “Jacob,” a child vlogger at Kinder Playtime We chose Jacob for three reasons. First, he is the same age as the children in the Storyworlds study. Second, he reviews the smart watch artifact that we gave to the study children, so there was a common use of automedia technology. Third, Jacob’s parents were involved with his broadcasts, and we wanted to work within the boundaries of parent-sanctioned practices. However, we also felt that his playful approach was a good example of how social media influence overlaps with automediality. Jacob is a labourer trading his public self-representations in exchange for free products and revenue earned through the monetisation of his content on YouTube. It appears that much of what Jacob says is scripted, particularly the promotional statements, like, “Today we have the Kidizoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech. It’s the smartest watch for kids” (Kinder Playtime). Importantly, as an automedial subject Jacob reveals aspects of his self and his identity, in the manner of many child vloggers on public social media sites. His product reviews are contextualised within a commoditised space that provides him a means for the public performance of his self, which, via YouTube, has the potential to reach an enormous audience. YouTube claims to have “over a billion users—almost one-third of all people on the Internet—and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views” (YouTube). Significantly, he is not only filmed by others, Jacob is also a creative practitioner, as Cayden aspired to become. Jacob uses high-tech toys, in this case, a new wearable technology for self-compositions (the smart watch), to record himself, friends, family or simply the goings-on around him. Strapped to his wrist, the watch toy lets him play at being watched, at being quantified and at recording the life stories of others, or constructing automediated creations for himself, which he may upload to numerous social media sites. This is the start of his online automediated life, which will be increasingly under his ownership as he ages. To greater or lesser degrees, he will later be able to curate, add to, and remediate his body of automedia, including his digital past. Kennedy points out that “people are using YouTube as a transformative tool, and mirror, to document, construct, and present their identity online” (“Exploring”). Her focus is on adult vloggers who consent to their activities. Jacob’s automedia is constructed collaboratively with his parents, and it is unclear how much awareness he has of himself as an automedia creator. However, if we don’t afford Jacob the same consideration as we afford adult autobiographers, that the depiction of his life is his own, we will reduce his identity performance to pure artifice or advertisement. The questions Jacob’s videos raise around agency, consent, and creativity are important here. Sidonie Smith asks “Can there be a free, agentic space; and if so, where in the world can it be found?” (Manifesto 188). How much agency does Jacob have? Is there a liberating aspect in the act of putting personal technology into the hands of a child who can record his life, himself? And finally, how would an adult Jacob feel about his childhood self advertising these products online? Is this really automediality if Jacob does not fully understand what it means to publicly tell a mediated life story?These queries lead to concerns over child social media influence with regard to legal protection, marketing ethics, and user consent. The rise of “fan marketing” presents a nexus of stealth marketing to children by other children. Stealth marketing involves participants, in this case, fans, who do not know they are involved in an advertising scheme. For instance, the popular Minecon Minecraft conference event sessions have pushed their audience to develop the skills to become advocates and advertisers of their products, for example by showing audiences how to build a YouTube channel and sharing tips for growing a community. Targeting children in marketing ploys seems insidious. Marketing analyst Sandy Fleisher describes the value of outsourcing marketing to fan labourers:while Grand Theft Auto spent $120 million on marketing its latest release, Minecraft fans are being taught how to create and market promotional content themselves. One [example] is Minecraft YouTuber, SkydoesMinecraft. His nearly 7 million strong YouTube army, almost as big as Justin Bieber’s, means his daily videos enjoy a lot of views; 1,419,734,267 to be precise. While concerns about meaningful consent that practices like this raise have led some government bodies, and consumer and child protection groups to advocate restrictions for children, other critics have questioned the limits placed on children’s free expression by such restrictions. Tech commentator Larry Magid has written that, “In the interest of protecting children, we sometimes deny them the right to access material and express themselves.” Meghan M. Sweeney notes that “the surge in collaborative web models and the emphasis on interactivity—frequently termed Web 2.0—has meant that children are not merely targets of global media organizations” but have “multiple opportunities to be active, critical, and resistant producers”...and ”may be active agents in the production and dissemination of information” (68). Nevertheless, writes Sweeney, “corporate entities can have restrictive effects on consumers” (68), by for example, limiting imaginative play to the choices offered on a Disney website, or limiting imaginative topics to commercial products (toys, video games etc), as in YouTube review videos. Automedia is an important site from which to consider young children’s online practices in public spheres. Jacob’s performance is indeed meant to influence the choice to buy a toy, but it is also meant to influence others in knowing Jacob as an identity. He means to share and circulate his self. Julie Rak recalls Paul John Eakin’s claims about life-writing that the “process does not even occur at the level of writing, but at the level of living, so that identity formation is the result of narrative-building.” We view Jacob’s performance along these lines. Kinder Playtime offers him a constrained, parent-sanctioned (albeit commercialised) space for role-playing, a practice bound up with identity-formation in the life of most children. To think through the legality of recognising Jacob’s automedial content as his life, Rak is also useful: “In Eakin’s work in particular, we can see evidence of John Locke’s contention that identity is the expression of consciousness which is continuous over time, but that identity is also a product, one’s own property which is a legal entity”. We have argued that children are often caught in the paradox that defines them either as literate digital creators composing and circulating their online selves or as subjectified personas caught up in commercial advertising practices that use their lives for commercial gain. However, through close observation of individual children, one who we met and questioned in our study, Cayden, the other who we met through his mediated, commercialized, and circulated online persona, Jacob, we argue that child social influencers need consideration as autobiographical agents expressing themselves through automediality. As children create, edit, and grow digital traces of their lives and selves, how these texts are framed becomes increasingly important, in part because their future adult selves have such a stake in the matter: they are being formed through automedia. Moreover, these children’s coming of age may bring legal questions about the ownership of their automedial products such as YouTube videos, an enduring legacy they are leaving behind for their adult selves. 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Troubled visions of white ash and concrete-grey powder water-logged my mind. Just as I had ‘understood’ and ‘contextualised’ the events of September 11, I witnessed Jules and Gedeon Naudet’s 9/11, the documentary of the events, as they followed the firefighters into Tower One. Their cameras witness death, dense panic and ashen fear. I did not need to see this – it was too intimate and shocking. But it was the drained, grey visage – where the New York streets and people appeared like injured ghosts walking through the falling ruins of a paper mill – that will always stay with me. Not surprisingly I was drawn (safely?) back in time, away from the grey-stained New York streets, when another series of images seismically shifted by memory palate. Aberfan was the archetypal coal mining town, but what made it distinct was tragedy. On the hill above the village, coal waste from the mining process was dumped on water-filled slurry. Heavy rain on October 20, 1966 made way for a better day to follow. The dense rain dislodged the coal tip, and at 9:15, the slurry became a black tidal wave, overwhelming people and buildings in the past. There have been worse tragedies than Aberfan, if there are degrees of suffering. In the stark grey iconography of September 11, there was an odd photocopy of Aberfan, but in the negative. Coal replaced paper. My short piece explores the notion of shared tragedy and media-ted grief, utilising the Welsh mining disaster as a bloodied gauze through which to theorise collective memory and social change. Tragedy on the television A disaster, by definition, is a tragic, unexpected circumstance. Its etymology ties it to astrology and fate. Too often, free flowing emotions of sympathy dissipate with the initial fascination, without confronting the long-term consequences of misfortune. When coal slurry engulfed the school and houses in Aberfan, a small working class community gleaned attention from the London-based media. The Prime Minister and royalty all traveled to Aberfan. Through the medium of television, grief and confusion were conveyed to a viewing public. For the first time, cameras gathered live footage of the trauma as it overwhelmed the Taff Valley. The sludge propelled from the Valley and into the newspapers of the day. A rescue worker remembers, “I was helping to dig the children out when I heard a photographer tell a kiddie to cry for her dear friends, so that he could get a good picture – that taught me silence.” (“The last day before half-term.”) Similarly, a bereaved father remembers that, during that period the only thing I didn’t like was the press. If you told them something, when the paper came out your words were all the wrong way round. (“The last day before half-term.”) When analyzed as a whole, the concerns of the journalists – about intense emotion and (alternatively) censorship of emotion - blocked a discussion of the reasons and meaning of the tragedy, instead concentrating on the form of the news broadcasts. Debates about censorship and journalistic ethics prevented an interpretative, critical investigation of the disaster. The events in Aberfan were not created by a natural catastrophe or an unpredictable or blameless ‘act of God.’ Aberfan’s disaster was preventable, but it became explainable within a coal industry village accustomed to unemployment and work-related ‘accidents.’ Aberfan was not merely a disaster that cost life. It represented a two-fold decline of Britain: industrially and socially. Coal built the industrial matrix of Britain. Perhaps this cost has created what Dean MacCannell described as “the collective guilt of modernised people” (23). Aberfan was distinct from the other great national tragedies in the manner the public perceived the events unfolding in the village. It was the disaster where cameras recorded the unerring screams of grief, the desperate search for a lost – presumed dead – child, and the building anger of a community suffering through a completely preventable ‘accident.’ The cameras – in true A Current Affair style – intruded on grief and privacy. A bereaved father stated that “I’ve got to say this again, if the papers and the press and the television were to leave us alone in the very beginning I think we could have settled down a lot quicker than what we did” (“The last day before half-term.”). This breach of grieving space also allowed those outside the community to share a memory, create a unifying historical bond, and raised some sympathy-triggered money. To actually ‘share’ death and grief at Aberfan through the medium of television led to a reappraisal, however temporary, about the value and costs of industrialisation. The long-term consequences of these revelations are more difficult to monitor. A question I have always asked – and the events of September 11, Bali and the second Gulf War have not helped me – is if a community or nation personally untouched by tragic events experience grief. Sympathy and perhaps empathy are obvious, as is voyeurism and curiosity. But when the bodies are simply unidentified corpses and a saddened community as indistinguishable from any other town, then viewers needs to ponder the rationale and depth of personal feelings. Through the window of television, onlookers become Peeping Toms, perhaps saturated with sympathy and tears, but still Peeping Toms. How has this semiotic synergy continued through popular memory? Too often we sap the feelings of disasters at a distance, and then withdraw when it is no longer fashionable, relevant or in the news. Notions about Wales, the working class and coal mining communities existed in journalists’ minds before they arrived in the village, opened their notebook or spoke to camera. They mobilised ‘the facts’ that suited a pre-existing interpretation. Bereaved parents digging into the dirt for lost children, provide great photographs and footage. This material was ideologically shaped to infantilise the community of Aberfan and, indirectly, the working class. They were exoticised and othered. It is clear from testimony recorded since the event that the pain felt by parents was compounded by television and newspaper reportage. Television allowed “a collective witnessing” (McLean and Johnes, “Remembering Aberfan”) of the disaster. Whether these televisual bystanders actually contributed anything to the healing of the tragedy, or forged an understanding of the brutal work involved in extracting coal, is less clear. There is not a natural, intrinsic sense of community created through television. Actually, it can establish boundaries of difference. Television has provided a record of exploitation, dissent and struggle. Whether an event or programme is read as an expression of unequal power relations or justifiable treatment of the ‘unworthy poor’ is in the hands of the viewer. Class-based inequalities and consciousness are not blinked out with the operation of a remote control. Intervention When I first researched Aberfan in the 1980s, the story was patchy and incomplete. The initial events left journalistic traces of the horror and – later – boredom with the Aberfan tragedy. Because of the thirty year rule on the release of government documents, the cause, motivation and rationale of many decisions from the Aberfan disaster appeared illogical or without context. When searching for new material and interpretations on Aberfan between 1968 and 1996, little exists. The release of documents in January 1997 triggered a wave of changing interpretations. Two committed and outstanding scholars, upon the release of governmental materials, uncovered the excesses and inequalities, demonstrating how historical research can overcome past injustice, and the necessity for recompense in the present. Iain McLean and Martin Johnes claimed a media profile and role in influencing public opinion and changing the earlier interpretations of the tragedy. On BBC radio, Professor McLean stated I think people in the government, people in the Coal Board were extremely insensitive. They treated the people of Aberfan as trouble makers. They had no conception of the depth of trauma suffered (“Aberfan”). McLean and Johnes also created from 1997-2001 a remarkable, well structured and comprehensive website featuring interview material, a database of archival collections and interpretations of the newly-released governmental documents. The Website possessed an agenda of conservation, cataloguing the sources held at the Merthyr Tydfil and Dowlais libraries. These documents hold a crucial function: to ensure that the community of Aberfan is rarely bothered for interviews or morbid tourists returning to the site. The Aberfan disaster has been included in the UK School curriculum and to avoid the small libraries and the Community Centre being overstretched, the Website possesses a gatekeepping function. The cataloguing work by the project’s research officer Martin Johnes has produced something important. He has aligned scholarly, political and social goals with care and success. Iain McLean’s proactive political work also took another direction. While the new governmental papers were released in January 1997, he wrote an article based on the Press Preview of December 1996. This article appeared in The Observer on January 5, 1997. From this strong and timely intervention, The Times Higher Education Supplement commissioned another article on January 17, 1997. Through both the articles and the Web work, McLean and Johnes did not name the individual victims or their parents, and testimony appears anonymously in the Website and their publications. They – unlike the journalists of the time – respected the community of Aberfan, their privacy and their grief. These scholars intervened in the easy ‘sharing’ of the tragedy. They built the first academic study of the Aberfan Disaster, released on the anniversary of the landslide: Aberfan, Government and Disasters. Through this book and their wide-ranging research, it becomes clear that the Labour Government failed to protect the citizens of a safe Labour seat. A bereaved husband and parent stated that I was tormented by the fact that the people I was seeking justice from were my people – a Labour Government, a Labour council, a Labour-nationalised Coal Board (“The last day before half-term”). There is a rationale for this attitude towards the tragedy. The Harold Wilson Labour Governments of 1964-70 were faced with severe balance of payments difficulties. Also, they only held a majority in the house of five, which they were to build to 96 in the 1966 election. While the Welfare State was a construction ‘for’ the working class after the war, the ‘permissive society’ – and resultant social reforms – of the 1960s was ‘for’ middle class consumers. It appeared that the industrial working class was paying for the new white heat of technology. This paradox not only provides a context for the Aberfan disaster but a space for media and cultural studies commentary. Perhaps the most difficult task for those of us working in cultural and media studies is to understand the citizens of history, not only as consumers, spectators or an audience, but how they behave and what they may feel. We need to ask what values and ideas do we share with the ‘audiences,’ ‘citizens’ and ‘spectators’ in our theoretical matrix. At times we do hide behind our Foucaults and Kristevas, our epistemologies and etymology. Raw, jagged emotion is difficult to theorise, and even more complex to commit to the page. To summon any mode of resistive or progressivist politics, requires capturing tone, texture and feeling. This type of writing is hard to achieve from a survey of records. A public intellectual role is rare these days. The conservative media invariably summon pundits with whom they can either agree or pillory. The dissenting intellectual, the diffident voice, is far more difficult to find. Edward Said is one contemporary example. But for every Said, there is a Kissinger. McLean and Johnes, during a time of the Blair Government, reminded a liberal-leaning Labour of earlier mistakes in the handling of a working-class community. In finding origins, causes and effects, the politicisation of history is at its most overt. Path of the slag The coal slurry rolled onto the Welsh village nearly thirty-seven years ago. Aberfan represents more than a symbol of decline or of burgeoning televisual literacy. It demonstrates how we accept mediated death. A ‘disaster’ exposes a moment of insight, a transitory glimpse into other people’s lives. It composes a mobile, dynamic photograph: the viewer is aware that life has existed before the tragedy and will continue after it. The link between popular and collective memory is not as obvious as it appears. All memory is mediated – there is a limit to the sharing. Collective memory seems more organic, connected with an authentic experience of events. Popular memory is not necessarily contextually grounded in social, historical or economic formations but networks diverse times and spaces without an origin or ending. This is a post-authentic memory that is not tethered to the intentions, ideologies or origins of a sender, town or community. To argue that all who have seen photographs or televisual footage of Aberfan ‘share’ an equivalent collective memory to those directly touched by the event, place, family or industry is not only naïve, but initiates a troubling humanism which suggests that we all ‘share’ a common bank of experience. The literacy of tragedy and its reportage was different after October 1966. When reading the historical material from the disaster, it appears that grieving parents are simply devastated puppets lashing out at their puppeteers. Their arguments and interpretation were molded for other agendas. Big business, big government and big unions colluded to displace the voices of citizens (McLean and Johnes “Summary”). Harold Wilson came to office in 1964 with the slogan “13 wasted years.” He promised that – through economic growth – consensus could be established. Affluence through consumer goods was to signal the end of a polarisation between worker and management. These new world symbols, fed by skilled scientific workers and a new ‘technological revolution,’ were – like the industrial revolution – uneven in its application. The Aberfan disaster is situated on the fault line of this transformation. A Welsh working class community seemed out of time and space in 1960s Britain. The scarved women and stocky, strong men appeared to emerge from a different period. The television nation did not share a unified grief, but performed the gulf between England and Wales, centre and periphery, middle and working class, white collar and black collar. Politics saturates television, so that it is no longer possible to see the join. Aberfan’s television coverage is important, because the mend scar was still visible. Literacy in televisual grief was being formed through the event. But if Aberfan did change the ‘national consciousness’ of coal then why did so few southern English citizens support the miners trying to keep open the Welsh pits? The few industries currently operating in this region outside of Cardiff means that the economic clock has stopped. The Beveridge Report in 1943 declared that the great achievement of the Second World War was the sharing of experience, a unity that would achieve victory. The People’s War would create a People’s Peace. Aberfan, mining closures and economic decline destroyed this New Jerusalem. The green and pleasant land was built on black coal. Aberfan is an historical translator of these iconographies. Works Cited Bereaved father. “The last day before half-term.” 1999. 6 April 2003 <http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/chap1.htm>. Bereaved husband and parent. “The last day before half-term.” 1999. 6 April 2003 <http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/chap1.htm>. MacCannell, Dean. Empty Meeting Grounds. London: Routledge, 1992. McLean, Iain. “Aberfan.” 6 April 2003 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/980000/audio/_983056_mclean_ab... ...erfan_21oct_0800.ram>. McLean, Iain, and Martin Johnes. Aberfan: Government and Disasters. Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 2000. McLean, Iain, and Martin Johnes. “Remembering Aberfan.” 1999. 6 April 2003 <http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/remem.htm>. McLean, Iain, and Martin Johnes. “Summary of Research Results.” 1999. 6 April 2003 <http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/eoafinal.htm>. Naudet, Jules, Gedeon Naudet, and James Hanlon. 9/11. New York: Goldfish Pictures and Silverstar Productions, 2001. Rescue worker. “The last day before half-term.” 1999. 6 April 2003 <http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/chap1.htm>. Links http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/980000/audio/_983056_mclean_aberfan_21oct_0800.ram http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/chap1.htm http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/chap1.htm.(1999 http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/eoafinal.htm http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/home.htm http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/remem.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Brabazon, Tara. "Black and Grey" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/07-blackandgrey.php>. APA Style Brabazon, T. (2003, Apr 23). Black and Grey. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/07-blackandgrey.php>

Engagement in any capacity with mainstream media since mid-2001 has meant immersion in the cross-platform, multimedia phenomenon of Harry Potter: Muggle outcast; boy wizard; corporate franchise. Consumers even casually perusing contemporary popular culture could be forgiven for suspecting they have entered a MÃbius loop in which Harry Potter-related media products and merchandise are ubiquitous: books; magazine cover stories; newspaper articles; websites; television specials; hastily assembled author biographies; advertisements on broadcast and pay television; children's merchandising; and theme park attractions. Each of these media commodities has been anchored in and cross-promoted by America Online-Time Warner's (AOL-TW) first instalment in a projected seven-film sequence—Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.1 The marketing campaign has gradually escalated in the three years elapsing between AOL-TW subsidiary Warner Bros' purchase from J.K. Rowling of the film and merchandising rights to the first two Harry Potter books, and the November 2001 world premiere of the film (Sherber 55). As current AOL-TW CEO Richard Parsons accurately forecast, "You're not going to be able to go anywhere without knowing about it. This could be a bigger franchise than Star Wars" (Auletta 50). Yet, AOL-TW's promotional strategy did not limit itself to creating mere awareness of the film's release. Rather, its tactic was to create an all-encompassing environment structured around the immense value of the Harry Potter brand—a "brand cocoon" which consumers do not so much enter and exit as choose to exist within (Klein 2002). In twenty-first-century mass marketing, the art is to target affluent consumers willing to direct their informational, entertainment, and consumption practices increasingly within the "walled garden" of a single conglomerate's content offerings (Auletta 55). Such an idealised modern consumer avidly samples the diversified product range of the parent conglomerate, but does so specifically by consuming multiple products derived from essentially the same content reservoir. Provided a match between consumer desire and brand can be achieved with sufficient accuracy and demographic breadth, the commercial returns are obvious: branded consumers pay multiple times for only marginally differentiated products. The Brand-Conglomerate Nexus Recyclable content has always been embraced by media industries, as cultural commodities such as early films of stage variety acts, Hollywood studio-era literary adaptations, and movie soundtrack LPs attest. For much of the twentieth century, the governing dynamic of content recycling was sequential, in that a content package (be it a novel, stage production or film) would succeed in its home medium and then, depending upon its success and potential for translation across formats, could be repackaged in a subsequent medium. Successful content repackaging may re-energise demand for earlier formatting of the same content (as film adaptations of literary bestsellers reliably increase sales of the originating novel). Yet the cultural industries providing risk capital to back content repackaging formerly required solid evidence that content had achieved immense success in its first medium before contemplating reformulations into new media. The cultural industries radically restructured in the last decades of the twentieth century to produce the multi-format phenomenon of which Harry Potter is the current apotheosis: multiple product lines in numerous corporate divisions are promoted simultaneously, the synchronicity of product release being crucial to the success of the franchise as a whole. The release of individual products may be staggered, but the goal is for products to be available simultaneously so that they work in aggregate to drive consumer awareness of the umbrella brand. Such streaming of content across parallel media formats is in many ways the logical culmination of broader late-twentieth-century developments. Digital technology has functionally integrated what were once discrete media operating platforms, and major media conglomerates have acquired subsidiaries in virtually all media formats on a global scale. Nevertheless, it remains true that the commercial risks inherent in producing, distributing and promoting a cross-format media phenomenon are vastly greater than the formerly dominant sequential approach, massively escalating financial losses should the elusive consumer-brand fit fail to materialise. A key to media corporations' seemingly quixotic willingness to expose themselves to such risk is perhaps best provided by Michael Harkavy, Warner Bros' vice-president of worldwide licensing, in his comments on Warner Music Group's soundtrack for the first Harry Potter film: It will be music for the child in us all, something we hope to take around the world that will take us to the next level of synergy between consumer products, the [AOL-TW cable channel] Cartoon Network, our music, film, and home video groups—building a longtime franchise for Harry as a team effort. (Traiman 51) The relationship between AOL-TW and the superbrand Harry Potter is essentially symbiotic. AOL-TW, as the world's largest media conglomerate, has the resources to exploit fully economies of scale in production and distribution of products in the vast Harry Potter franchise. Similarly, AOL-TW is pre-eminently placed to exploit the economies of scope afforded by its substantial holdings in every form of content delivery, allowing cross-subsidisation of the various divisions and, crucially, cross-promotion of the Harry Potter brand in an endless web of corporate self-referentiality. Yet it is less frequently acknowledged that AOL-TW needs the Harry Potter brand as much as the global commercialisation of Harry Potter requires AOL-TW. The conglomerate seeks a commercially protean megabrand capable of streaming across all its media formats to drive operating synergies between what have historically been distinct commercial divisions ("Welcome"; Pulley; Auletta 55). In light of AOL-TW's record US$54.2b losses in the first quarter of 2002, the long-term viability of the Harry Potter franchise is, if anything, still more crucial to the conglomerate's health than was envisaged at the time of its dot.com-fuelled January 2000 merger (Goldberg 23; "AOL" 35). AOL-TW's Richard Parsons conceptualises Harry Potter specifically as an asset "driving synergy both ways", neatly encapsulating the symbiotic interdependence between AOL-TW and its star franchise: "we use the different platforms to drive the movie, and the movie to drive business across the platforms" ("Harry Potter" 61). Characteristics of the Harry Potter Brand AOL-TW's enthusiasm to mesh its corporate identity with the Harry Potter brand stems in the first instance from demonstrated consumer loyalty to the Harry Potter character: J.K. Rowling's four books have sold in excess of 100m copies in 47 countries and have been translated into 47 languages.2 In addition, the brand has shown a promising tendency towards demographic bracket-creep, attracting loyal adult readers in sufficient numbers to prompt UK publisher Bloomsbury to diversify into adult-targeted editions. As alluring for AOL-TW as this synchronic brand growth is, the real goldmine inheres in the brand's potential for diachronic growth. From her first outlines of the concept, Rowling conceived of the Potter story as a seven-part series, which from a marketing perspective ensures the broadscale re-promotion of the Harry Potter brand on an almost annual basis throughout the current decade. This moreover assists re-release of the first film on an approximately five-year basis to new audiences previously too young to fall within its demographic catchment—the exact strategy of "classic" rebranding which has underwritten rival studio Disney's fortunes.3 Complementing this brand extension is the potential to grow child consumers through the brand as Harry Potter sequels are produced. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone director Chris Columbus spruiks enthusiastically that "the beauty of making these books into films is that with each one, Harry is a year older, so [child actor] Daniel [Radcliffe] can remain Harry as long as we keep making them" (Manelis 111). Such comments suggest the benefits of luring child consumers through the brand as they mature, harnessing their intense loyalty to the child cast and, through the cast, to the brand itself. The over-riding need to be everything to everyone—exciting to new consumers entering the brand for the first time, comfortingly familiar to already seasoned consumers returning for a repeat hit—helps explain the retro-futuristic feel of the first film's production design. Part 1950s suburban Hitchcock, Part Dickensian London, part Cluny-tapestry medievalism, part public school high-Victorianism, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone strives for a commercially serviceable timelessness, in so doing reinforcing just how very twenty-first-century its conception actually is. In franchise terms, this conscious drive towards retro-futurism fuels Harry Potter's "toyetic potential" (Siegel, "Toys" 19). The ease with which the books' complex plots and mise-en-scene lend themselves to subsidiary rights sales and licensed merchandising in part explains Harry Potter's appeal to commercial media. AOL-TW executives in their public comments have consistently stayed on-message in emphasising "magic" as the brand's key aspirational characteristic, and certainly scenes such as the arrival at Hogwarts, the Quidditch match, the hatching of Hagrid's dragon and the final hunt through the school's dungeons serve as brilliant advertisements for AOL-TW's visual effects divisions. Yet the film exploits many of these "magic" scenes to introduce key tropes of its merchandising programme—Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, chocolate frogs, Hogwarts house colours, the sorting hat, Scabbers the rat, Hedwig, the Remembrall—such that it resembles a series of home shopping advertisements with unusually high production values. It is this railroading of the film's narrative into opportunities for consumerist display which leads film critic Cynthia Fuchs to dub the Diagon Alley shopping scene "the film's cagiest moment, at once a familiar activity for school kid viewers and an apt metaphor for what this movie is all about—consumption, of everything in sight." More telling than the normalising of shopping as filmic activity in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is the eclipse of the book's checks on commodity fetishism: its very British sensitivity to class snubs for the large and impecunious Weasley family; the puzzled contempt Hogwarts initiates display for Muggle money; the gentle ribbing at children's obsession with branded sports goods. The casual browser in the Warner Bros store confronted with a plastic, light-up version of the Nimbus 2000 Quidditch broomstick understands that even the most avid authorial commitment to delimiting spin-off merchandise can try the media conglomerate's hand only so far. Constructing the Harry Potter Franchise The film Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone constitutes the indispensable brand anchor for AOL-TW's intricate publicity and sales strategy around Harry Potter. Because content recycling within global media conglomerates is increasingly lead by film studio divisions, the opening weekend box office taking for a brand-anchoring film is crucial to the success of the broader franchise and, by extension, to the corporation as a whole. Critic Thomas Schatz's observation that the film's opening serves as "the "launch site" for its franchise development, establishing its value in all other media markets" (83) highlights the precariousness of such multi-party financial investment all hinging upon first weekend takings. The fact that Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone broke (then standing) box office records with its 16 November 2001 three-day weekend openings in the US and the UK, garnering US$93.2m and GBP16m respectively, constituted the crucial first stage in AOL-TW's brand strategy (Collins 9; Fierman and Jensen 26). But it formed only an initial phase, as subsequent content recycling and cross-promotion was then structured to radiate outwards from this commercial epicentre. Three categories of recycled AOL-TW Harry Potter content are discernible, although they are frequently overlapping and not necessarily sequential. The first category, most closely tied to the film itself, are instances of reused digital content, specifically in the advance publicity trailer viewable on the official website, and downloads of movie clips, film stills and music samples from the film and its soundtrack.4 Secondly, at one remove from the film itself, is AOL-TW's licensing of film "characters, names and related indicia" to secondary manufacturers, creating tie-in merchandise designed to cross-promote the Harry Potter brand and stoke consumer investment (both emotional and financial) in the phenomenon.5 This campaign phase was itself tactically designed with two waves of merchandising release: a September 2000 launch of book-related merchandise (with no use of film-related Harry Potter indicia permitted); and a second, better selling February 2001 release of ancillary products sporting Harry Potter film logos and visual branding which coincided with and reinforced the marketing push specifically around the film's forthcoming release (Sherber 55; Siegel, "From Hype" 24; Lyman and Barnes C1; Martin 5). Finally, and most crucial to the long-term strategy of the parent conglomerate, Harry Potter branding was used to drive consumer take up of AOL-TW products not generally associated with the Harry Potter brand, as a means of luring consumers out of their established technological or informational comfort zones. Hence, the official Harry Potter website is laced with far from accidental offers to trial Internet service provider AOL; TimeWarner magazines Entertainment Weekly, People, and Time ran extensive taster stories about the film and its loyal fan culture (Jensen 56-57; Fierman and Jensen 26-28; "Magic Kingdom" 132-36; Corliss 136; Dickinson 115); AOL-TW's Moviefone bookings service advertised pre-release Harry Potter tickets on its website; and Warner Bros Movie World theme park on the Gold Coast in Australia heavily promoted its Harry Potter Movie Magic Experience. Investment in a content brand on the scale of AOL-TW's outlay of US$1.4m for Harry Potter must not only drive substantial business across every platform of the converged media conglomerate by providing premium content (Grover 66). It must, crucially for the long run, also drive take up and on-going subscriptions to the delivery services owned by the parent corporation. Energising such all-encompassing strategising is the corporate nirvana of seamless synergy: between content and distribution; between the Harry Potter and AOL-TW brands; between conglomerate and consumer. Notes 1. The film, like the first of J.K. Rowling's books, is titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the "metaphysics-averse" US ("Harry Potter" 61). 2. Publishing statistics sourced from Horn and Jones (59), Manelis (110) and Bloomsbury Publishing's Harry Potter website: http://www.bloomsburymagazine.com/harryp.... 3. Interestingly, Disney tangentially acknowledged the extent to which AOL-TW has appropriated Disney's own content recycling strategies. In a film trailer for the Pixar/Disney animated collaboration Monsters, Inc. which screened in Australia and the US before Harry Potter sessions, two monsters play a game of charades to which the answer is transparently "Harry Potter." In the way of such homages from one media giant to another, it nevertheless subtly directs the audience to the Disney product screening in an adjacent cinema. 4. The official Harry Potter film website is http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com. The official site for the soundtrack to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone is: http://www.harrypottersoundtrack.com. 5. J.K. Rowling." A page and a half of non-negotiable "Harry Potter Terms of Use" further spells out prohibitions on use or modification of site content without the explicit (and unlikely) consent of AOL-TW (refer: http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/cmp/te...). References "AOL losses 'sort of a deep disappointment'." Weekend Australian 18-19 May 2002: 35. Auletta, Ken. "Leviathan." New Yorker 29 Oct. 2001: 50-56, 58-61. Collins, Luke. "Harry Potter's Magical $178m Opening." Australian Financial Review 20 Nov. 2001: 9. Corliss, Richard. "Wizardry without Magic." Time 19 Nov. 2001: 136. Dickinson, Amy. "Why Movies make Readers." Time 10 Dec. 2001: 115. Fierman, Daniel, and Jeff Jensen. "Potter of Gold: J.K. Rowling's Beloved Wiz Kid hits Screensand Breaks Records." Entertainment Weekly 30 Nov. 2001: 26-28. Fuchs, Cynthia. "The Harry Hype." PopPolitics.com 19 Nov. 2001: n.pag. Online. Internet. 8 Mar. 2002. Available <http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2001-11-19-harry.shtml>. Goldberg, Andy. "Time Will Tell." Sydney Morning Herald 27-28 Apr. 2002: 23. Grover, Ronald. "Harry Potter and the Marketer's Millstone." Business Week 15 Oct. 2001: 66. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Dir. Chris Columbus. Screenplay by Steve Kloves. Warner Bros, 2001. "Harry Potter and the Synergy Test." Economist 10 Nov. 2001: 61-62. Herman, Edward S., and Robert W. McChesney. The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism. London: Cassell, 1997. Horn, John, and Malcolm Jones. "The Bubble with Harry." The Bulletin/Newsweek 13 Nov. 2001: 58-59. Jensen, Jeff. "Holiday Movie Preview: Potter's Field." Entertainment Weekly 16 Nov. 2001: 56-57. Klein, Naomi. "Naomi KleinNo Logo." The Media Report. ABC Radio National webtranscript. Broadcast in Sydney, 17 Jan. 2002. Online. Internet. 19 Feb. 2002. Available <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8:30/mediarpt/stories/s445871.htm>. Lyman, Rick, and Julian E. Barnes. "The Toy War for Holiday Movies is a Battle Among 3 Heavyweights." New York Times 12 Nov. 2001: C1. "Magic Kingdom." People Weekly 14 Jan. 2002: 132-36. Manelis, Michele. "Potter Gold." Bulletin 27 Nov. 2001: 110-11. Martin, Peter. "Rowling Stock." Weekend Australian 24-25 Nov. 2001: Review, 1, 4-5. Pulley, Brett. "Morning After." Forbes 7 Feb. 2000: 54-56. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Schatz, Thomas. "The Return of the Hollywood Studio System." Conglomerates and the Media. Erik Barnouw et al. New York: New Press, 1997. 73-106. Sherber, Anne. "Licensing 2000 Showcases Harry Potter, Rudolph for Kids." Billboard 8 Jul. 2000: 55. Siegel, Seth M. "Toys & Movies: Always? Never? Sometimes!" Brandweek 12 Feb. 2001: 19. ---. "From Hype to Hope." Brandweek 11 Jun. 2001: 24. Traiman, Steve. "Harry Potter, Powerpuff Girls on A-list at Licensing 2000." Billboard 1 Jul. 2000: 51, 53. "Welcome to the 21st Century." Business Week 24 Jan. 2000: 32-34, 36-38. Links http://www.bloomsburymagazine.com/harrypotter/muggles http://www.harrypottersoundtrack.com http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2001-11-19-harry.shtml http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8:30/mediarpt/stories/s445871.htm http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/cmp/terms.html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Murray, Simone. "Harry Potter, Inc." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php>. Chicago Style Murray, Simone, "Harry Potter, Inc." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Murray, Simone. (2002) Harry Potter, Inc.. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/recycling.php> ([your date of access]).

Online shopping is all the rage these days and the murderabilia industry in particular, which specializes in selling serial killer artifacts, is booming. At Spectre Studios, sculptor David Johnson sells flexible plastic action figures of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy and plans to produce a figure of Jack the Ripper in the future. Although some might think that making action figures of serial killers is tasteless, Johnson hastens to assure the potential consumer that he does have standards: “I wouldn’t do Osama bin Laden . . . I have some personal qualms about that” (Robinson). At Serial Killer Central, you can buy a range of items made by serial killers themselves, including paintings and drawings by Angelo Buono (one of the “Hillside Stranglers”) and Henry Lee Lucas. For the more discerning consumer, Supernaught.com charges a mere $300 for a brick from Dahmer’s apartment building, while a lock of Charles Manson’s hair is a real bargain at $995, shipping and handling not included. The sale of murderabilia is just a small part of the huge serial killer industry that has become a defining feature of American popular culture over the last twenty-five years. This industry is, in turn, a prime example of what Mark Seltzer has described as “wound culture,” consisting of a “public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (1). According to Seltzer, the serial killer is “one of the superstars of our wound culture” (2) and his claim is confirmed by the constant stream of movies, books, magazines, television shows, websites, t-shirts, and a tsunami of ephemera that has given the figure of the serial murderer an unparalleled degree of visibility and fame in the contemporary American public sphere. In a culture defined by celebrity, serial killers like Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy are the biggest stars of all, instantly recognized by the vast majority of Americans. Not surprisingly, murderabilia has been the focus of a sustained critique by the (usually self-appointed) guardians of ‘decency’ in American culture. On January 2, 2003 The John Walsh Show, the daytime television vehicle of the long-time host of America’s Most Wanted, featured an “inside look at the world of ‘murderabilia,’ which involves the sale of artwork, personal effects and letters from well-known killers” (The John Walsh Show Website). Featured guests included Andy Kahan, Director of the Mayor’s Crime Victim Assistance Office in Houston, Texas; ‘Thomas,’ who was horrified to find hair samples from “The Railroad Killer,” the individual who killed his mother, for sale on the Internet; Elmer Wayne Henley, a serial killer who sells his artwork to collectors; Joe, who runs “Serial Killer Central” and sells murderabilia from a wide range of killers, and Harold Schechter, a professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. Despite the program’s stated intention to “look at both sides of the issue,” the show was little more than a jeremiad against the murderabilia industry, with the majority of airtime being given to Andy Kahan and to the relatives of crime victims. The program’s bias was not lost on many of those who visited Joe’s Serial Killer Central site and left messages on the message board on the day The John Walsh Show aired. There were some visitors who shared Walsh’s perspective. A message from “serialkillersshouldnotprofit@aol.com,” for example, stated that “you will rot in hell with these killers,” while “Smithpi@hotmail.com” had a more elaborate critique: “You should pull your site off the net. I just watched the John Walsh show and your [sic] a fucking idiot. I hope your [sic] never a victim, because if you do [sic] then you would understand what all those people were trying to tell you. You [sic] a dumb shit.” Most visitors, however, sympathized with the way Joe had been treated on the show: “I as well [sic] saw you on the John Walsh show, you should [sic] a lot of courage going on such a one sided show, and it was shit that they wouldnt [sic] let you talk, I would have walked off.” But whether the comments were positive or negative, one thing was clear: The John Walsh Show had created a great deal of interest in the Serial Killer Central site. As one of the messages put it, “I think that anything [sic] else he [John Walsh] has put a spark in everyones [sic] curiousity [sic] . . . I have noticed that you have more hits on your page today than any others [sic].” Apparently, even the most explicit rejection and condemnation of serial killer celebrity finds itself implicated in (and perhaps even unwittingly encouraging the growth of) that celebrity. John Walsh’s attack on the murderabilia industry was the latest skirmish in a campaign that has been growing steadily since the late 1990s. One of the campaign’s initial targets was the internet trading site eBay, which was criticized for allowing serial killer-related products to be sold online. In support of such criticism, conservative victims’ rights and pro-death penalty organizations like “Justice For All” organized online petitions against eBay. In November 2000, Business Week Online featured an interview with Andy Kahan in which he argued that the online sale of murderabilia should be suppressed: “The Internet just opens it all up to millions and millions more potential buyers and gives easy access to children. And it sends a negative message to society. What does it say about us? We continue to glorify killers and continue to put them in the mainstream public. That’s not right” (Business Week). Eventually bowing to public pressure, eBay decided to ban the sale of murderabilia items in May 2001, forcing the industry underground, where it continues to be pursued by the likes of John Walsh. Apart from highlighting how far the celebrity culture around serial killers has developed (so that one can now purchase the nail clippings and hair of some killers, as if they are religious icons), focusing on the ongoing debate around the ethics of murderabilia also emphasizes how difficult it is to draw a neat line between those who condemn and those who participate in that culture. Quite apart from the way in which John Walsh’s censoriousness brought more visitors to the Serial Killer Central site, one could also argue that few individuals have done more to disseminate information about violent crime in general and serial murder in particular to mainstream America than John Walsh. Of course, this information is presented in the unimpeachably moral context of fighting crime, but controversial features of America’s Most Wanted, such as the dramatic recreations of crime, pander to the same prurient public interest in crime that the program simultaneously condemns. An ABCNews.Com article on murderabilia inadvertently highlights the difficulty of distinguishing a legitimate from an illegitimate interest in serial murder by quoting Rick Staton, one of the biggest collectors and dealers of murderabilia in the United States, who emphasizes that the people he sells to are not “ghouls and creeps [who] crawl out of the woodwork”, but rather “pretty much your average Joe Blow.” Even his family, Staton goes on to say, who profess to be disgusted by what he does, act very differently in practice: “The minute they step into this room, they are glued to everything in here and they are asking questions and they are genuinely intrigued by it . . . So it makes me wonder: Am I the one who is so abnormal, or am I pretty normal?” (ABCNews.Com). To answer Staton’s question, we need to go back to 1944, when sociologist Leo Lowenthal published an essay entitled “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” an essay he later reprinted as a chapter in his 1961 book, Literature, Popular Culture And Society, under a new title: “The Triumph of Mass Idols.” Lowenthal argues that biographies in popular magazines underwent a striking change between 1901 and 1941, a change that signals the emergence of a new social type. According to Lowenthal, the earlier biographies indicate that American society’s heroes at the time were “idols of production” in that “they stem from the productive life, from industry, business, and natural sciences. There is not a single hero from the world of sports and the few artists and entertainers either do not belong to the sphere of cheap or mass entertainment or represent a serious attitude toward their art” (112-3). Sampling biographies in magazines from 1941, however, Lowenthal reaches a very different conclusion: “We called the heroes of the past ‘idols of production’: we feel entitled to call the present-day magazine heroes ‘idols of consumption’” (115). Unlike the businessmen, industrialists and scientists who dominated the earlier sample, almost every one of 1941’s heroes “is directly, or indirectly, related to the sphere of leisure time: either he does not belong to vocations which serve society’s basic needs (e.g., the worlds of entertainment and sport), or he amounts, more or less, to a caricature of a socially productive agent” (115). Lowenthal leaves his reader in no doubt that he sees the change from “idols of production” to “idols of consumption” as a serious decline: “If a student in some very distant future should use popular magazines of 1941 as a source of information as to what figures the American public looked to in the first stages of the greatest crisis since the birth of the Union, he would come to a grotesque result . . . the idols of the masses are not, as they were in the past, the leading names in the battle of production, but the headliners of the movies, the ball parks, and the night clubs” (116). With Lowenthal in mind, when one considers the fact that the serial killer is generally seen, in Richard Tithecott’s words, as “deserving of eternal fame, of media attention on a massive scale, of groupies” (144), one is tempted to describe the advent of celebrity serial killers as a further decline in the condition of American culture’s “mass idols.” The serial killer’s relationship to consumption, however, is too complex to allow for such a hasty judgment, as the murderabilia industry indicates. Throughout the edition of The John Walsh Show that attacked murderabilia, Walsh showed clips of Collectors, a recent documentary about the industry. Collectors is distributed by a small company named Abject Films and on their website the film’s director, Julian P. Hobbs, discusses some of the multiple connections between serial killing and consumerism. Hobbs points out that the serial killer is connected with consumerism in the most basic sense that he has become a commodity, “a merchandising phenomenon that rivals Mickey Mouse. From movies to television, books to on-line, serial killers are packaged and consumed en-masse” (Abject Films). But as Hobbs goes on to argue, serial killers themselves can be seen as consumers, making any representations of them implicated in the same consumerist logic: “Serial killers come into being by fetishizing and collecting artifacts – usually body parts – in turn, the dedicated collector gathers scraps connected with the actual events and so, too, a documentary a collection of images” (Abject Films). Along with Rick Staton, Hobbs implies that no one can avoid being involved with consumerism in relation to serial murder, even if one’s reasons for getting involved are high-minded. For example, when Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison in 1994, the families of his victims were delighted but his death also presented them with something of a problem. Throughout the short time Dahmer was in prison, there had been persistent rumors that he was in negotiations with both publishers and movie studios about selling his story. If such a deal had ever been struck, legal restrictions would have prevented Dahmer from receiving any of the money; instead, it would have been distributed among his victims’ families. Dahmer’s murder obviously ended this possibility, so the families explored another option: going into the murderabilia business by auctioning off Dahmer’s property, including such banal items as his toothbrush, but also many items he had used in commission of the murders, such as a saw, a hammer, the 55-gallon vat he used to decompose the bodies, and the refrigerator where he stored the hearts of his victims. Although the families’ motives for suggesting this auction may have been noble, they could not avoid participating in what Mark Pizzato has described as “the prior fetishization of such props and the consumption of [Dahmer’s] cannibal drama by a mass audience” (91). When the logic of consumerism dominates, is anyone truly innocent, or are there just varying degrees of guilt, of implication? The reason why it is impossible to separate neatly ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ expressions of interest in famous serial killers is the same reason why the murderabilia industry is booming; in the words of a 1994 National Examiner headline: “Serial Killers Are as American as Apple Pie.” Christopher Sharrett has suggested that: “Perhaps the fetish status of the criminal psychopath . . . is about recognizing the serial killer/mass murderer not as social rebel or folk hero . . . but as the most genuine representative of American life” (13). The enormous resistance to recognizing the representativeness of serial killers in American culture is fundamental to the appeal of fetishizing serial killers and their artifacts. As Sigmund Freud has explained, the act of disavowal that accompanies the formation of a fetish allows a perception (in this case, the Americanness of serial killers) to persist in a different form rather than being simply repressed (352-3). Consequently, just like the sexual fetishists discussed by Freud, although we may recognize our interest in serial killers “as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by [us] as a symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering” (351). On the contrary, we are usually, in Freud’s words, “quite satisfied” (351) with our interest in serial killers precisely because we have turned them into celebrities. It is our complicated relationship with celebrities, affective as well as intellectual, composed of equal parts admiration and resentment, envy and contempt, that provides us with a lexicon through which we can manage our appalled and appalling fascination with the serial killer, contemporary American culture’s ultimate star. References ABCNews.Com. “Killer Collectibles: Inside the World of ‘Murderabilia.” 7 Nov. 2001. American Broadcasting Company. 9 May 2003 http://www.abcnews.com>. AbjectFilms.Com. “Collectors: A Film by Julian P. Hobbs.” Abject Films. 9 May 2003 http://www.abjectfilms.com/collectors.html>. BusinessWeek Online. 20 Nov. 2000. Business Week. 9 May 2003 http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_47/b3708056.htm>. Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” On Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1977. 351-7. The John Walsh Show. Ed. Click Active Media. 2 Jan. 2003. 9 May 2003 http://www.johnwalsh.tv/cgi-bin/topics/today/cgi?id=90>. Lowenthal, Leo. “The Triumph of Mass Idols.” Literature, Popular Culture and Society. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961. 109-40. National Examiner. “Serial Killers Are as American as Apple Pie.” 7 Jun. 1994: 7. Pizzato, Mark. “Jeffrey Dahmer and Media Cannibalism: The Lure and Failure of Sacrifice.” Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sharrett. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999. 85-118. Robinson, Bryan. “Murder Incorporated: Denver Sculptor’s Serial Killer Action Figures Bringing in Profits and Raising Ire.” ABCNews.Com 25 Mar. 2002. American Broadcasting Company. 27 Apr. 2003 http://abcnews.com/>. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Sharrett, Christopher. “Introduction.” Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sharrett. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999. 9-20. Tithecott, Richard. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Schmid, David. "Murderabilia: Consuming Fame." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/10-schmid.php>. APA Style Schmid, D. (Nov. 2004) "Murderabilia: Consuming Fame," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/10-schmid.php>.

If I find out that you have bought a $90 red light sabre, Tara, well there's going to be trouble. -- Kevin Brabazon A few Saturdays ago, my 71-year old father tried to convince me of imminent responsibilities. As I am considering the purchase of a house, there are mortgages, bank fees and years of misery to endure. Unfortunately, I am not an effective Big Picture Person. The lure of the light sabre is almost too great. For 30 year old Generation Xers like myself, it is more than a cultural object. It is a textual anchor, and a necessary component to any future history of the present. Revelling in the aura of the Australian release for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, this paper investigates popular memory, an undertheorised affiliation between popular culture and cultural studies.1 The excitement encircling the Star Wars prequel has been justified in terms of 'hype' or marketing. Such judgements frame the men and women cuing for tickets, talking Yodas and light sabres as fools or duped souls who need to get out more. My analysis explores why Star Wars has generated this enthusiasm, and how cultural studies can mobilise this passionate commitment to consider notions of popularity, preservation and ephemerality. We'll always have Tattooine. Star Wars has been a primary popular cultural social formation for a generation. The stories of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, Yoda, C-3PO and R2D2 offer an alternative narrative for the late 1970s and 1980s. It was a comfort to have the Royal Shakespearian tones of Alec Guinness confirming that the Force would be with us, through economic rationalism, unemployment, Pauline Hanson and Madonna discovering yoga. The Star Wars Trilogy, encompassing A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, was released between 1977 and 1983. These films have rarely slipped from public attention, being periodically 'brought back' through new cinematic and video releases. The currency of Star Wars is matched with the other great popular cultural formations of the post-war period: the James Bond series and Star Trek. One reason for the continued success of these programmes is that other writers, film makers and producers cannot leave these texts alone. Bond survives not only through Pierce Brosnan's good looks, but the 'Hey Baby' antics of Austin Powers. Star Trek, through four distinct series, has become an industry that will last longer than Voyager's passage back from the Delta Quadrant. Star Wars, perhaps even more effectively than the other popular cultural heavyweights, has enmeshed itself into other filmic and televisual programming. Films like Spaceballs and television quizzes on Good News Week keep the knowledge system and language current and pertinent.2 Like Umberto Eco realised of Casablanca, Star Wars is "a living example of living textuality" (199). Both films are popular because of imperfections and intertextual archetypes, forming a filmic quilt of sensations and affectivities. Viewers are aware that "the cliches are talking among themselves" (Eco 209). As these cinematic texts move through time, the depth and commitment of these (con)textual dialogues are repeated and reinscribed. To hold on to a memory is to isolate a moment or an image and encircle it with meaning. Each day we experience millions of texts: some are remembered, but most are lost. Some popular cultural texts move from ephemera to popular memory to history. In moving beyond individual reminiscences -- the personal experiences of our lifetime -- we enter the sphere of popular culture. Collective or popular memory is a group or community experience of a textualised reality. For example, during the Second World War, there were many private experiences, but certain moments arch beyond the individual. Songs by Vera Lynn are fully textualised experiences that become the fodder for collective memory. Similarly, Star Wars provides a sense-making mechanism for the 1980s. Like all popular culture, these texts allow myriad readership strategies, but there is collective recognition of relevance and importance. Popular memory is such an important site because it provides us, as cultural critics, with a map of emotionally resonant sites of the past, moments that are linked with specific subjectivities and a commonality of expression. While Star Wars, like all popular cultural formations, has a wide audience, there are specific readings that are pertinent for particular groups. To unify a generation around cultural texts is an act of collective memory. As Harris has suggested, "sometimes, youth does interesting things with its legacy and creatively adapts its problematic into seemingly autonomous cultural forms" (79). Generation X refers to an age cohort born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Finally cultural studies theorists have found a Grail subculture. Being depthless, ambivalent, sexually repressed and social failures, Xers are a cultural studies dream come true. They were the children of the media revolution. Star Wars is integral to this textualised database. A fan on the night of the first screening corrected a journalist: "we aren't Generation X, we are the Star Wars generation" (Brendon, in Miller 9). An infatuation and reflexivity with the media is the single framework of knowledge in which Xers operate. This shared understanding is the basis for comedy, and particularly revealed (in Australia) in programmes like The Panel and Good News Week. Television themes, lines of film dialogue and contemporary news broadcasts are the basis of the game show. The aesthetics of life transforms television into a real. Or, put another way, "individual lives may be fragmented and confused but McDonald's is universal" (Hopkins 17). A group of textual readers share a literacy, a new way of reading the word and world of texts. Nostalgia is a weapon. The 1990s has been a decade of revivals: from Abba to skateboards, an era of retro reinscription has challenged linear theories of history and popular culture. As Timothy Carter reveals, "we all loved the Star Wars movies when we were younger, and so we naturally look forward to a continuation of those films" (9). The 1980s has often been portrayed as a bad time, of Thatcher and Reagan, cold war brinkmanship, youth unemployment and HIV. For those who were children and (amorphously phrased) 'young adults' of this era, the popular memory is of fluorescent fingerless gloves, Ray Bans, 'Choose Life' t-shirts and bubble skirts. It was an era of styling mousse, big hair, the Wham tan, Kylie and Jason and Rick Astley's dancing. Star Wars action figures gave the films a tangibility, holding the future of the rebellion in our hands (literally). These memories clumsily slop into the cup of the present. The problem with 'youth' is that it is semiotically too rich: the expression is understood, but not explained, by discourses as varied as the educational system, family structures, leisure industries and legal, medical and psychological institutions. It is a term of saturation, where normality is taught, and deviance is monitored. All cultural studies theorists carry the baggage of the Birmingham Centre into any history of youth culture. The taken-for-granted 'youth as resistance' mantra, embodied in Resistance through Rituals and Subculture: The Meaning of Style, transformed young people into the ventriloquist's puppet of cultural studies. The strings of the dancing, smoking, swearing and drinking puppet took many years to cut. The feminist blade of Angela McRobbie did some damage to the fraying filaments, as did Dick Hebdige's reflexive corrections in Hiding in the Light. However, the publications, promotion and pedagogy of Gen X ended the theoretical charade. Gen X, the media sophisticates, played with popular culture, rather than 'proper politics.' In Coupland's Generation X, Claire, one of the main characters believed that "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them." ... We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert -- to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process. (8) Television and film are part of this story telling process. This intense connection generated an ironic and reflexive literacy in the media. Television became the basis for personal pleasures and local resistances, resulting in a disciplined mobilisation of popular cultural surfaces. Even better than the real thing. As the youngest of Generation Xers are now in their late twenties, they have moved from McJobs to careers. Robert Kizlik, a teacher trainer at an American community college expressed horror as the lack of 'commonsensical knowledge' from his new students. He conducted a survey for teachers training in the social sciences, assessing their grasp of history. There was one hundred percent recognition of such names as Madonna, Mike Tyson, and Sharon Stone, but they hardly qualify as important social studies content ... . I wondered silently just what it is that these students are going to teach when they become employed ... . The deeper question is not that we have so many high school graduates and third and fourth year college students who are devoid of basic information about American history and culture, but rather, how, in the first place, these students came to have the expectations that they could become teachers. (n. pag.) Kizlik's fear is that the students, regardless of their enthusiasm, had poor recognition of knowledge he deemed significant and worthy. His teaching task, to convince students of the need for non-popular cultural knowledges, has resulted in his course being termed 'boring' or 'hard'. He has been unable to reconcile the convoluted connections between personal stories and televisual narratives. I am reminded (perhaps unhelpfully) of one of the most famous filmic teachers, Mr Holland. Upon being attacked by his superiors for using rock and roll in his classes, he replied that he would use anything to instil in his students a love of music. Working with, rather than against, popular culture is an obvious pedagogical imperative. George Lucas has, for example, confirmed the Oprahfied spirituality of the current age. Obviously Star Wars utilises fables, myths3 and fairy tales to summon the beautiful Princess, the gallant hero and the evil Empire, but has become something more. Star Wars slots cleanly into an era of Body Shop Feminism, John Gray's gender politics and Rikki Lake's relationship management. Brian Johnson and Susan Oh argued that the film is actually a new religion. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away -- late 1970s California -- the known universe of George Lucas came into being. In the beginning, George created Star Wars. And the screen was without form, and void. And George said, 'Let there be light', and there was Industrial Light and Magic. And George divided the light from the darkness, with light sabres, and called the darkness the Evil Empire.... And George saw that it was good. (14) The writers underestimate the profound emotional investment placed in the trilogy by millions of people. Genesis narratives describe the Star Wars phenomenon, but do not analyse it. The reason why the films are important is not only because they are a replacement for religion. Instead, they are an integrated component of popular memory. Johnson and Oh have underestimated the influence of pop culture as "the new religion" (14). It is not a form of cheap grace. The history of ideas is neither linear nor traceable. There is no clear path from Plato to Prozac or Moses to Mogadon. Obi-Wan Kenobi is not a personal trainer for the ailing spirituality of our age. It was Ewan McGregor who fulfilled the Xer dream to be the young Obi Wan. As he has stated, "there is nothing cooler than being a Jedi knight" (qtd. in Grant 15). Having survived feet sawing in Shallow Grave and a painfully large enema in Trainspotting, there are few actors who are better prepared to carry the iconographic burden of a Star Wars prequel. Born in 1971, he is the Molly Ringwall of the 1990s. There is something delicious about the new Obi Wan, that hails what Hicks described as "a sense of awareness and self- awareness, of detached observation, of not taking things seriously, and a use of subtle dry humour" (79). The metaphoric light sabre was passed to McGregor. The pull of the dark side. When fans attend The Phantom Menace, they tend to the past, as to a loved garden. Whether this memory is a monument or a ruin depends on the preservation of the analogue world in the digital realm. The most significant theoretical and discursive task in the present is to disrupt the dual ideologies punctuating the contemporary era: inevitable technological change and progress.4 Only then may theorists ponder the future of a digitised past. Disempowered groups, who were denied a voice and role in the analogue history of the twentieth century, will have inequalities reified and reinforced through the digital archiving of contemporary life. The Web has been pivotal to the new Star Wars film. Lucasfilm has an Internet division and an official Website. Between mid November and May, this site has been accessed twenty million times (Gallott 15). Other sites, such as TheForce.net and Countdown to Star Wars, are a record of the enthusiasm and passion of fans. As Daniel Fallon and Matthew Buchanan have realised, "these sites represent the ultimate in film fandom -- virtual communities where like-minded enthusiasts can bathe in the aura generated by their favourite masterpiece" (27). Screensavers, games, desktop wallpaper, interviews and photo galleries have been downloaded and customised. Some ephemeral responses to The Phantom Menace have been digitally recorded. Yet this moment of audience affectivity will be lost without a consideration of digital memory. The potentials and problems of the digital and analogue environments need to be oriented into critical theories of information, knowledge, entertainment and pleasure. The binary language of computer-mediated communication allows a smooth transference of data. Knowledge and meaning systems are not exchanged as easily. Classifying, organising and preserving information make it useful. Archival procedures have been both late and irregular in their application.5 Bocher and Ihlenfeldt assert that 2500 new web sites are coming on-line every day ("A Higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio"). The difficulties and problems confronting librarians and archivists who wish to preserve digital information is revealed in the Australian government's PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) Site. Compared with an object in a museum which may lie undisturbed for years in a storeroom, or a book on a shelf, or even Egyptian hieroglyd on the wall of a tomb, digital information requires much more active maintenance. If we want access to digital information in the future, we must plan and act now. (PADI, "Why Preserve Access to Digital Information?") phics carve The speed of digitisation means that responsibility for preserving cultural texts, and the skills necessary to enact this process, is increasing the pressure facing information professionals. An even greater difficulty when preserving digital information is what to keep, and what to release to the ephemeral winds of cyberspace. 'Qualitative criteria' construct an historical record that restates the ideologies of the powerful. Concerns with quality undermine the voices of the disempowered, displaced and decentred. The media's instability through technological obsolescence adds a time imperative that is absent from other archival discussions.6 While these problems have always taken place in the analogue world, there was a myriad of alternative sites where ephemeral material was stored, such as the family home. Popular cultural information will suffer most from the 'blind spots' of digital archivists. While libraries rarely preserve the ephemera of a time, many homes (including mine) preserve the 'trash' of a culture. A red light sabre, toy dalek, Duran Duran posters and a talking Undertaker are all traces of past obsessions and fandoms. Passion evaporates, and interests morph into new trends. These objects remain in attics, under beds, in boxes and sheds throughout the world. Digital documents necessitate a larger project of preservation, with great financial (and spatial) commitments of technology, software and maintenance. Libraries rarely preserve the ephemera -- the texture and light -- of the analogue world. The digital era reduces the number of fan-based archivists. Subsequently forfeited is the spectrum of interests and ideologies that construct the popular memory of a culture. Once bits replace atoms, the recorded world becomes structured by digital codes. Only particular texts will be significant enough to store digitally. Samuel Florman stated that "in the digital age nothing need be lost; do we face the prospect of drowning in trivia as the generations succeed each other?" (n. pag.) The trivia of academics may be the fodder (and pleasures) of everyday life. Digitised preservation, like analogue preservation, can never 'represent' plural paths through the past. There is always a limit and boundary to what is acceptable obsolescence. The Star Wars films suggests that "the whole palette of digital technology is much more subtle and supple; if you can dream it, you can see it" (Corliss 65). This film will also record how many of the dreams survive and are archived. Films, throughout the century, have changed the way in which we construct and remember the past. They convey an expressive memory, rather than an accurate history. Certainly, Star Wars is only a movie. Yet, as Rushkoff has suggested, "we have developed a new language of references and self-references that identify media as a real thing and media history as an actual social history" (32). The build up in Australia to The Phantom Menace has been wilfully joyful. This is a history of the present, a time which I know will, in retrospect, be remembered with great fondness. It is a collective event for a generation, but it speaks to us all in different ways. At ten, it is easy to be amazed and enthralled at popular culture. By thirty, it is more difficult. When we see Star Wars, we go back to visit our memories. With red light sabre in hand, we splice through time, as much as space. Footnotes The United States release of the film occurred on 19 May 1999. In Australia, the film's first screenings were on 3 June. Many cinemas showed The Phantom Menace at 12:01 am, (very) early Thursday morning. The three main players of the GNW team, Paul McDermott, Mikey Robbins and Julie McCrossin, were featured on the cover of Australia's Juice magazine in costumes from The Phantom Menace, being Obi-Wan, Yoda and Queen Amidala respectively. Actually, the National Air and Space Museum had a Star Wars exhibition in 1997, titled "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth". For example, Janet Collins, Michael Hammond and Jerry Wellington, in Teaching and Learning with the Media, stated that "the message is simple: we now have the technology to inform, entertain and educate. Miss it and you, your family and your school will be left behind" (3). Herb Brody described the Net as "an overstuffed, underorganised attic full of pictures and documents that vary wildly in value", in "Wired Science". The interesting question is, whose values will predominate when the attic is being cleared and sorted? This problem is extended because the statutory provision of legal deposit, which obliges publishers to place copies of publications in the national library of the country in which the item is published, does not include CD-ROMs or software. References Bocher, Bob, and Kay Ihlenfeldt. "A Higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio: Effective Use of WebSearch Engines." State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Website. 13 Mar. 1998. 15 June 1999 <http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/dpi/dlcl/lbstat/search2.php>. Brody, Herb. "Wired Science." Technology Review Oct. 1996. 15 June 1999 <http://www.techreview.com/articles/oct96/brody.php>. Carter, Timothy. "Wars Weary." Cinescape 39 (Mar./Apr. 1999): 9. Collins, Janet, Michael Hammond, and Jerry Wellington. Teaching and Learning with Multimedia. London: Routledge, 1997. Corliss, Richard. "Ready, Set, Glow!" Time 18 (3 May 1999): 65. Count Down to Star Wars. 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://starwars.countingdown.com/>. Coupland, Douglas. Generation X. London: Abacus, 1991. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper-Reality. London: Picador, 1987. Fallon, Daniel, and Matthew Buchanan. "Now Screening." Australian Net Guide 4.5 (June 1999): 27. Florman, Samuel. "From Here to Eternity." MIT's Technology Review 100.3 (Apr. 1997). Gallott, Kirsten. "May the Web Be with you." Who Weekly 24 May 1999: 15. Grant, Fiona. "Ewan's Star Soars!" TV Week 29 May - 4 June 1999: 15. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through Rituals. London: Hutchinson, 1976. Harris, David. From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: the Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992. Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light. London: Routledge, 1988. Hopkins, Susan. "Generation Pulp." Youth Studies Australia Spring 1995. Johnson, Brian, and Susan Oh. "The Second Coming: as the Newest Star Wars Film Illustrates, Pop Culture Has Become a New Religion." Maclean's 24 May 1999: 14-8. Juice 78 (June 1999). Kizlik, Robert. "Generation X Wants to Teach." International Journal of Instructional Media 26.2 (Spring 1999). Lucasfilm Ltd. Star Wars: Welcome to the Official Site. 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://www.starwars.com/>. Miller, Nick. "Generation X-Wing Fighter." The West Australian 4 June 1999: 9. PADI. "What Digital Information Should be Preserved? Appraisal and Selection." Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Website. 11 March 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/what.php>. PADI. "Why Preserve Access to Digital Information?" Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Website. <http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/why.php>. Rushkoff, Douglas. Media Virus. Sydney: Random House, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Tara Brabazon. "A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php>. Chicago style: Tara Brabazon, "A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Tara Brabazon. (1999) A red light sabre to go, and other histories of the present. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php> ([your date of access]).

In 1988, historian Nadia Wheatley and indigenous artist Donna Rawlins published their award-winning picture book, My Place, a reinterpretation of Australian national identity and sovereignty prompted by the bicentennial of white settlement. Twenty years later, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) commissioned Penny Chapman’s multi-platform project based on this book. The 13 episodes of the television series begin in 2008, each telling the story of a child at a different point in history, and are accompanied by substantial interactive online content. Issues as diverse as religious difference and immigration, wartime conscription and trauma, and the experiences of Aboriginal Australians are canvassed. The program itself, which has a second series currently in production, introduces child audiences to—and implicates them in—a rich ideological fabric of deeply politicised issues that directly engage with vexed questions of Australian nationhood. The series offers a subversive view of Australian history and society, and it is the child—whether protagonist on the screen or the viewer/user of the content—who is left to discover, negotiate and move beyond often problematic societal norms. As one of the public broadcaster’s keystone projects, My Place signifies important developments in ABC’s construction of multicultural child citizenship. The digitisation of Australian television has facilitated a wave of multi-channel and new media innovation. Though the development of a multi-channel ecology has occurred significantly later in Australia than in the US or Europe, in part due to genre restrictions on broadcasters, all major Australian networks now have at least one additional free-to-air channel, make some of their content available online, and utilise various forms of social media to engage their audiences. The ABC has been in the vanguard of new media innovation, leveraging the industry dominance of ABC Online and its cross-platform radio networks for the repurposing of news, together with the additional funding for digital renewal, new Australian content, and a digital children’s channel in the 2006 and 2009 federal budgets. In line with “market failure” models of broadcasting (Born, Debrett), the ABC was once the most important producer-broadcaster for child viewers. With the recent allocation for the establishment of ABC3, it is now the catalyst for a significant revitalisation of the Australian children’s television industry. The ABC Charter requires it to broadcast programs that “contribute to a sense of national identity” and that “reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community” (ABC Documents). Through its digital children’s channel (ABC3) and its multi-platform content, child viewers are not only exposed to a much more diverse range of local content, but also politicised by an intricate network of online texts connected to the TV programs. The representation of diasporic communities through and within multi-platformed spaces forms a crucial part of the way(s) in which collective identities are now being negotiated in children’s texts. An analysis of one of the ABC’s My Place “projects” and its associated multi-platformed content reveals an intricate relationship between postcolonial concerns and the construction of child citizenship. Multicultural Places, Multi-Platformed Spaces: New Media Innovation at the ABC The 2007 restructure at the ABC has transformed commissioning practices along the lines noted by James Bennett and Niki Strange of the BBC—a shift of focus from “programs” to multi-platform “projects,” with the latter consisting of a complex network of textual production. These “second shift media practices” (Caldwell) involve the tactical management of “user flows structured into and across the textual terrain that serve to promote a multifaceted and prolonged experience of the project” (Bennett and Strange 115). ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s polemic deployment of the “digital commons” trope (Murdock, From) differs from that of his opposite number at the BBC, Mark Thompson, in its emphasis on the glocalised openness of the Australian “town square”—at once distinct from, and an integral part of, larger conversations. As announced at the beginning of the ABC’s 2009 annual report, the ABC is redefining the town square as a world of greater opportunities: a world where Australians can engage with one another and explore the ideas and events that are shaping our communities, our nation and beyond … where people can come to speak and be heard, to listen and learn from each other. (ABC ii)The broad emphasis on engagement characterises ABC3’s positioning of children in multi-platformed projects. As the Executive Producer of the ABC’s Children’s Television Multi-platform division comments, “participation is very much the mantra of the new channel” (Glen). The concept of “participation” is integral to what has been described elsewhere as “rehearsals in citizenship” (Northam). Writing of contemporary youth, David Buckingham notes that “‘political thinking’ is not merely an intellectual or developmental achievement, but an interpersonal process which is part of the construction of a collective, social identity” (179). Recent domestically produced children’s programs and their associated multimedia applications have significant potential to contribute to this interpersonal, “participatory” process. Through multi-platform experiences, children are (apparently) invited to construct narratives of their own. Dan Harries coined the term “viewser” to highlight the tension between watching and interacting, and the increased sense of agency on the part of audiences (171–82). Various online texts hosted by the ABC offer engagement with extra content relating to programs, with themed websites serving as “branches” of the overarching ABC3 metasite. The main site—strongly branded as the place for its targeted demographic—combines conventional television guide/program details with “Watch Now!,” a customised iView application within ABC3’s own themed interface; youth-oriented news; online gaming; and avenues for viewsers to create digital art and video, or interact with the community of “Club3” and associated message boards. The profiles created by members of Club3 are moderated and proscribe any personal information, resulting in an (understandably) restricted form of “networked publics” (boyd 124–5). Viewser profiles comprise only a username (which, the website stresses, should not be one’s real name) and an “avatar” (a customisable animated face). As in other social media sites, comments posted are accompanied by the viewser’s “name” and “face,” reinforcing the notion of individuality within the common group. The tool allows users to choose from various skin colours, emphasising the multicultural nature of the ABC3 community. Other customisable elements, including the ability to choose between dozens of pre-designed ABC3 assets and feeds, stress the audience’s “ownership” of the site. The Help instructions for the Club3 site stress the notion of “participation” directly: “Here at ABC3, we don’t want to tell you what your site should look like! We think that you should be able to choose for yourself.” Multi-platformed texts also provide viewsers with opportunities to interact with many of the characters (human actors and animated) from the television texts and share further aspects of their lives and fictional worlds. One example, linked to the representation of diasporic communities, is the Abatti Pizza Game, in which the player must “save the day” by battling obstacles to fulfil a pizza order. The game’s prefacing directions makes clear the ethnicity of the Abatti family, who are also visually distinctive. The dialogue also registers cultural markers: “Poor Nona, whatsa she gonna do? Now it’s up to you to help Johnny and his friends make four pizzas.” The game was acquired from the Canadian-animated franchise, Angela Anaconda; nonetheless, the Abatti family, the pizza store they operate and the dilemma they face translates easily to the Australian context. Dramatisations of diasporic contributions to national youth identities in postcolonial or settler societies—the UK (My Life as a Popat, CITV) and Canada (How to Be Indie)—also contribute to the diversity of ABC3’s television offerings and the positioning of its multi-platform community. The negotiation of diasporic and postcolonial politics is even clearer in the public broadcaster’s commitment to My Place. The project’s multifaceted construction of “places,” the ethical positioning of the child both as an individual and a member of (multicultural) communities, and the significant acknowledgement of ongoing conflict and discrimination, articulate a cultural commons that is more open-ended and challenging than the Eurocentric metaphor, the “town square,” suggests. Diversity, Discrimination and Diasporas: Positioning the Viewser of My Place Throughout the first series of My Place, the experiences of children within different diasporic communities are the focal point of five of the initial six episodes, the plots of which revolve around children with Lebanese, Vietnamese, Greek, and Irish backgrounds. This article focuses on an early episode of the series, “1988,” which explicitly confronts the cultural frictions between dominant Anglocentric Australian and diasporic communities. “1988” centres on the reaction of young Lily to the arrival of her cousin, Phuong, from Vietnam. Lily is a member of a diasporic community, but one who strongly identifies as “an Australian,” allowing a nuanced exploration of the ideological conflicts surrounding the issue of so-called “boat people.” The protagonist’s voice-over narration at the beginning of the episode foregrounds her desire to win Australia’s first Olympic gold medal in gymnastics, thus mobilising nationally identified hierarchies of value. Tensions between diasporic and settler cultures are frequently depicted. One potentially reactionary sequence portrays the recurring character of Michaelis complaining about having to use chopsticks in the Vietnamese restaurant; however, this comment is contextualised several episodes later, when a much younger Michaelis, as protagonist of the episode “1958,” is himself discriminated against, due to his Greek background. The political irony of “1988” pivots on Lily’s assumption that her cousin “won’t know Australian.” There is a patronising tone in her warning to Phuong not to speak Vietnamese for fear of schoolyard bullying: “The kids at school give you heaps if you talk funny. But it’s okay, I can talk for you!” This encourages child viewers to distance themselves from this fictional parallel to the frequent absence of representation of asylum seekers in contemporary debates. Lily’s assumptions and attitudes are treated with a degree of scepticism, particularly when she assures her friends that the silent Phuong will “get normal soon,” before objectifying her cousin for classroom “show and tell.” A close-up camera shot settles on Phuong’s unease while the children around her gossip about her status as a “boat person,” further encouraging the audience to empathise with the bullied character. However, Phuong turns the tables on those around her when she reveals she can competently speak English, is able to perform gymnastics and other feats beyond Lily’s ability, and even invents a story of being attacked by “pirates” in order to silence her gossiping peers. By the end of the narrative, Lily has redeemed herself and shares a close friendship with Phuong. My Place’s structured child “participation” plays a key role in developing the postcolonial perspective required by this episode and the project more broadly. Indeed, despite the record project budget, a second series was commissioned, at least partly on the basis of the overwhelmingly positive reception of viewsers on the ABC website forums (Buckland). The intricate My Place website, accessible through the ABC3 metasite, generates transmedia intertextuality interlocking with, and extending the diegesis of, the televised texts. A hyperlinked timeline leads to collections of personal artefacts “owned” by each protagonist, such as journals, toys, and clothing. Clicking on a gold medal marked “History” in Lily’s collection activates scrolling text describing the political acceptance of the phrase “multiculturalism” and the “Family Reunion” policy, which assisted the arrival of 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants. The viewser is reminded that some people were “not very welcoming” of diasporic groups via an explicit reference to Mrs Benson’s discriminatory attitudes in the series. Viewsers can “visit” virtual representations of the program’s sets. In the bedroom, kitchen, living room and/or backyard of each protagonist can be discovered familiar and additional details of the characters’ lives. The artefacts that can be “played” with in the multimedia applications often imply the enthusiastic (and apparently desirable) adoption of “Australianness” by immigrant children. Lily’s toys (her doll, hair accessories, roller skates, and glass marbles) invoke various aspects of western children’s culture, while her “journal entry” about Phuong states that she is “new to Australia but with her sense of humour she has fitted in really well.” At the same time, the interactive elements within Lily’s kitchen, including a bowl of rice and other Asian food ingredients, emphasise cultural continuity. The description of incense in another room of Lily’s house as a “common link” that is “used in many different cultures and religions for similar purposes” clearly normalises a glocalised world-view. Artefacts inside the restaurant operated by Lily’s mother link to information ranging from the ingredients and (flexible) instructions for how to make rice paper rolls (“Lily and Phuong used these fillings but you can use whatever you like!”) to a brief interactive puzzle game requiring the arrangement of several peppers in order from least hot to most hot. A selectable picture frame downloads a text box labelled “Images of Home.” Combined with a slideshow of static, hand-drawn images of traditional Vietnamese life, the text can be read as symbolic of the multiplicity of My Place’s target audience(s): “These images would have reminded the family of their homeland and also given restaurant customers a sense of Vietnamese culture.” The social-developmental, postcolonial agenda of My Place is registered in both “conventional” ancillary texts, such as the series’ “making of” publication (Wheatley), and the elaborate pedagogical website for teachers developed by the ACTF and Educational Services Australia (http://www.myplace.edu.au/). The politicising function of the latter is encoded in the various summaries of each decade’s historical, political, social, cultural, and technological highlights, often associated with the plot of the relevant episode. The page titled “Multiculturalism” reports on the positive amendments to the Commonwealth’s Migration Act 1958 and provides links to photographs of Vietnamese migrants in 1982, exemplifying the values of equality and cultural diversity through Lily and Phuong’s story. The detailed “Teaching Activities” documents available for each episode serve a similar purpose, providing, for example, the suggestion that teachers “ask students to discuss the importance to a new immigrant of retaining links to family, culture and tradition.” The empathetic positioning of Phuong’s situation is further mirrored in the interactive map available for teacher use that enables children to navigate a boat from Vietnam to the Australian coast, encouraging a perspective that is rarely put forward in Australia’s mass media. This is not to suggest that the My Place project is entirely unproblematic. In her postcolonial analysis of Aboriginal children’s literature, Clare Bradford argues that “it’s all too possible for ‘similarities’ to erase difference and the political significances of [a] text” (188). Lily’s schoolteacher’s lesson in the episode “reminds us that boat people have been coming to Australia for a very long time.” However, the implied connection between convicts and asylum seekers triggered by Phuong’s (mis)understanding awkwardly appropriates a mythologised Australian history. Similarly in the “1998” episode, the Muslim character Mohammad’s use of Ramadan for personal strength in order to emulate the iconic Australian cricketer Shane Warne threatens to subsume the “difference” of the diasporic community. Nonetheless, alongside the similarities between individuals and the various ethnic groups that make up the My Place community, important distinctions remain. Each episode begins and/or ends with the child protagonist(s) playing on or around the central motif of the series—a large fig tree—with the characters declaring that the tree is “my place.” While emphasising the importance of individuality in the project’s construction of child citizens, the cumulative effect of these “my place” sentiments, felt over time by characters from different socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, builds a multifaceted conception of Australian identity that consists of numerous (and complementary) “branches.” The project’s multi-platformed content further emphasises this, with the website containing an image of the prominent (literal and figurative) “Community Tree,” through which the viewser can interact with the generations of characters and families from the series (http://www.abc.net.au/abc3/myplace/). The significant role of the ABC’s My Place project showcases the ABC’s remit as a public broadcaster in the digital era. As Tim Brooke-Hunt, the Executive Head of Children’s Content, explains, if the ABC didn’t do it, no other broadcaster was going to come near it. ... I don’t expect My Place to be a humungous commercial or ratings success, but I firmly believe ... that it will be something that will exist for many years and will have a very special place. Conclusion The reversion to iconic aspects of mainstream Anglo-Australian culture is perhaps unsurprising—and certainly telling—when reflecting on the network of local, national, and global forces impacting on the development of a cultural commons. However, this does not detract from the value of the public broadcaster’s construction of child citizens within a clearly self-conscious discourse of “multiculturalism.” The transmedia intertextuality at work across ABC3 projects and platforms serves an important politicising function, offering positive representations of diasporic communities to counter the negative depictions children are exposed to elsewhere, and positioning child viewsers to “participate” in “working through” fraught issues of Australia’s past that still remain starkly relevant today.References ABC. Redefining the Town Square. ABC Annual Report. Sydney: ABC, 2009. Bennett, James, and Niki Strange. “The BBC’s Second-Shift Aesthetics: Interactive Television, Multi-Platform Projects and Public Service Content for a Digital Era.” Media International Australia: Incorporating Culture and Policy 126 (2008): 106-19. Born, Georgina. Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. London: Vintage, 2004. boyd, danah. “Why Youth ♥ Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Ed. David Buckingham. Cambridge: MIT, 2008. 119-42. Bradford, Clare. Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2001. Brooke-Hunt, Tim. Executive Head of Children’s Content, ABC TV. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Ultimo Center, 16 Mar. 2010. Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Buckland, Jenny. Chief Executive Officer, Australian Children’s Television Foundation. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford and Dr Nina Weerakkody, ACTF, 2 June 2010. Caldwell, John T. “Second Shift Media Aesthetics: Programming, Interactivity and User Flows.” New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality. Eds. John T. Caldwell and Anna Everett. London: Routledge, 2003. 127-44. Debrett, Mary. “Riding the Wave: Public Service Television in the Multiplatform Era.” Media, Culture & Society 31.5 (2009): 807-27. From, Unni. “Domestically Produced TV-Drama and Cultural Commons.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Eds. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 163-77. Glen, David. Executive Producer, ABC Multiplatform. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Elsternwick, 6 July 2010. Harries, Dan. “Watching the Internet.” The New Media Book. Ed. Dan Harries. London: BFI, 2002. 171-82. Murdock, Graham. “Building the Digital Commons: Public Broadcasting in the Age of the Internet.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Ed. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 213–30. My Place, Volumes 1 & 2: 2008–1888. DVD. ABC, 2009. Northam, Jean A. “Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop-Motion Animation Programmes for Young Children.” Journal for Cultural Research 9.3 (2005): 245-63. Wheatley, Nadia. Making My Place. Sydney and Auckland: HarperCollins, 2010. ———, and Donna Rawlins. My Place, South Melbourne: Longman, 1988.

IntroductionTwo writers, stuck in our university offices, decide to take our thoughts “for a walk” across the page. Writing from Middlesbrough, United Kingdom, and Auckland, New Zealand, we are separated by 18,000 kilometres and 11 hours, and yet here, on the page, our paths meet. How does walking, imaginary or real, affect our thinking? How do the environments through which we move, and the things we see along the way, influence our writing? What role do rhythm and pace play in the process? We invite you to join us on two short walks that reflect on our shared challenges as writers from two different strands of writing studies. Perhaps our paths will intersect, or even overlap, with yours somewhere? Ultimately, we aim to find out what happens when we leave our academic baggage behind, side-stepping dense theoretical arguments and comprehensive literature reviews for a creative-critical exploration. Evija: Let’s admit it, Sophie—I’m stuck. I’ve spent half a day in front of this computer but have hardly typed a line. It’s not just writing. It’s my thinking. I feel like my mind is weighed down by the clutter of thoughts that lead nowhere.Look at my surroundings. My office is crammed with stuff. So many thoughts buried under piles of paper, insisting on their place in the work in which they so obviously do not belong. I also can’t help but feel the magnetic pull of others’ ideas from all the books around me. Each thought, each reference, fights for its place in my work. What an unbearable intertextual mess...Sophie: I think that everyone who has ever tried to write knows exactly what these moments feel like. We can feel so lost, so stuck and blocked. Have you ever noticed that the words that we use about these feelings are intensely visceral? Perhaps that’s why, when the words won’t come, so many of us find it helpful to get up and move our bodies. Evija, shall we leave our desks behind for a while and go for a walk? Would you like to join me?E: Most certainly! Apparently, Friedrich Nietzsche loved to take his mind for a walk (Gros). Ideas, born among books, says Frédéric Gros, “exude the stuffy odour of libraries” (18). Gros describes such books as “grey”: “overloaded with quotations, references, footnotes, explicatory prudence, indefinite refutations” (19). They fail to say anything new and are “crammed”, “stuffed”, and “weighed down”; they are “born of a compilation of the other books” (Gros 19) so also bear their weight. Essentially, we are told, we should think of the books we are writing as “expression[s] of [our] physiology” (Gros 19). If we are shrivelled, stuck, stooped, tense, and tired, so also are our thoughts. Therefore, in order to make your thoughts breathe, walk, and even “dance”, says Nietzsche, you should go outdoors, go up in the mountains.S: As I read what you’ve written here, Evija, I feel as if I’m walking amongst your thoughts, both here on the screen and in my imagination. Sometimes, I’m in perfect step with you. At other times, I want to interrupt, tug on your sleeve and point, and say “Look! Have you seen this, just up ahead?”E: That’s the value of companionship on the road. A shared conversation on the move can lead to a transformation of thought, a conversion, as in the Biblical stories of the roads to Emmaus and Damascus. In fact, we tested the power of walking and talking in rural settings in a series of experimental events organised for academics in Auckland, New Zealand, throughout 2017 (see our blog post on Writing, Writing Everywhere website). It appeared to work very well for writers who had either been “stuck” or in the early stages of drafting. Those who were looking to structure existing thoughts were better off staying put. But walking and talking is an entire other topic (see Anderson) that we should discuss in more depth some other time.Anyway, you’ve brought us to what looks like a forest. Is this where you want us to go?A Walk “into the Woods,” or Getting in the Thick of Free-Writing S: Yes, just follow me. I often walk in the woods close to where I live. Of course, going “into the woods” is itself a metaphor, rich with fairy-tale connotations about creativity. The woods are full of darkness and danger, grandmother’s cottage, wild beasts, witches, poisonous fruits. The woods are where traps are laid, where children wander and get lost, where enchantments befall us. But humans have always been seduced by the woods and what lies in wait there (Maitland). In Jungian terms, losing oneself in darkness is a rite of initiation. By stepping into the woods, we surrender to not knowing, to walking off the path and into the depths of our imagination. I dare you to do that, right now! E: Letting go is not always easy. I keep wanting to respond to your claim by adding scholarly references to important work on the topic. I want to mention the father of the essay, Michel de Montaigne, for whom this form of writing was but “an attempt” (from Old French, “essai”) to place himself in this world, a philosophical and literary adventure that stood very far from the rigidly structured academic essay of the present day (Sturm). We’ve forgotten that writing is a risky undertaking, an exploration of uncharted terrains (Sturm). S: Yes, and in academic thinking, we’re always afraid to ramble. But perhaps rambling is exactly what we need to do. Perhaps we need to start walking without knowing where we’re going ... and see where it takes us. E: Indeed. Instead of going on writing retreats, academics should be sent “into the woods”, where their main task would be to get lost before they even start to think.S: Into the Woods, a reality TV show for academics? But seriously, maybe there is something about walking into the woods—or a landscape different from our habitual one—that symbolises a shift in feeling-state. When I walk into the woods, I purposely place myself in a different world. My senses are heightened. I become acutely aware of each tiny sound—the ticking of the leaves, the wind, the birdsong, the crunch of my feet, the pounding of the blood in my ears. I become less aware of all the difficult parts of myself, my troubles, my stuckness, what weighs on me so heavily. It seems to me that there is a parallel here with a state of consciousness or awareness famously described by the psychologist of optimal experience, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, as “flow”. In flow, “the loss of a sense of self separate from the world around it is sometimes accompanied by a feeling of union with the environment” (Csikszentmihalyi 63), together with pleasure in movement and in the sensory experience of seeing the world. So flow might be one way of thinking about my lived experience of walking in the woods. But this shift has also been described by the psychotherapist Marion Milner as a shift from “narrow thinking” into a “wider” way of looking, listening, feeling, and moving—a feeling state that Milner called the “fat feeling”. She identified this “fat feeling” as characteristic of moments when she experienced intense delight (Milner 15) and she began to experiment with ways in which she could practice it more purposefully.In this sense, walking is a kind of “trick” that I can play upon myself. The shift from office to woods, from sitting at my desk to moving through the world, triggers a shift from preoccupation with the “head stuff” of academic work and into a more felt, bodily way of experiencing. Walking helps me to “get out of my head.”E: So wandering through this thicket becomes a kind of free writing?S: Yes, free writing is like “taking a line for a walk” on the page, words that the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee famously attributed to drawing (Klee 105; see also Raymond). It’s what we’re doing here, wouldn’t you say?Two Lines of Walking: A drawing by Evija. E: Yes—and we don’t know where this walk will lead us. I’m thinking of the many times I have propelled myself into meaningful writing by simply letting the hand do its work and produce written characters on the screen or page. Initially, it looks like nonsense. Then, meaning and order start to emerge.S: Yes, my suggestion is that walking—like writing—frees us up, connects us with the bodily, felt, and pleasurable aspects of the writing process. We need this opportunity to meander, go off at tangents...E: So what qualities do free writing and walking have in common? What is helpful about each of these activities?S: A first guess might be that free writing and walking make use of rhythm. Linguist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva calls the sound, rhythm, and texture of language the “semiotic”. For Kristeva, the “semiotic” (the realm of bodily drives and affects, rhythms, pre-verbal babble) and the “symbolic” (the realm of prescribed language, linguistic structure, grammar, and judgment) do not exist in rigid opposition to one another. Instead, they form a continuum which she calls “signifiance” or signification (Kristeva 22), a “dialectic” (24) of making meaning. According to Kristeva, even the smallest element of symbolic meaning, the phoneme, is involved in “rhythmic, intonational repetitions” (103) so that, as we order phonemes into words and words into sentences, our language pulses with the operations of our bodily, instinctual drives. Kristeva thinks in terms of an “explosion of the semiotic in the symbolic” (69). E: An explosion. I like that!S: Me too.My theory is that, by letting go into that rhythm a little, we’re enabling ourselves to access some of the pre-verbal force that Kristeva talks about. E: So the rhythm of walking helps us to connect with the rhythmic qualities of the semiotic?S: Exactly. We might say that a lot of academic writing tends to privilege the symbolic—both in terms of the style we choose and the way that we structure our arguments. E: And academic convention requires that we make more references here. For example, as we’re discussing “free writing”, we could cite Ken Macrorie or Peter Elbow, the two grandfathers of the method. Or we might scaffold our talks about collaborative writing as a means of scholarly inquiry, with the work of Laurel Richardson or another authority in the field.S: Yes, and all of this is an important part of academic practice, of course. But perhaps when we give ourselves permission to ramble and meander, to loosen up the relationships between what we feel and what we say, we move along the continuum of meaning-making towards the more felt and bodily, and away from the received and prescribed. …S: And I’ve put an ellipsis there to mark that we are moving into another kind of space now. We’re coming to a clearing in the woods. Because at some point in our rambling, we might want to pause and make a few suggestions. Perhaps we come to a clearing, like this one here. We sit down for a while and collect our thoughts.E: Yes. Let’s sit down. And, while you’re resting, let me tell you what this “collecting of thoughts” reminds me of.I’m thinking that we don’t necessarily need to go anywhere to get away from our particular state of mind. A shared cup of coffee or a conversation can have the same effect. Much has already been said about the effects of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs on writing; all rather harmful ways of going “on a trip” (Laing; Klein). In our case, it’s the blank pages of a shared Google Doc that has brought us together, collecting our thoughts on walking and moving us into a different realm, a new world of exciting and strange ideas to be explored. And the idea of mapping out this space by gradually filling its pages with words sets our minds on a journey.S: That’s interesting. The choreographer Twyla Tharp talks about the power of ritual in creating this shift for us into a creative or flow state. It could be lighting a candle or drinking a glass of water. There is a moment when something “clicks”, and we enter the world of creativity.E: Yes, a thing can act as a portal or gateway. And, as I want to show you, the things in the landscape that we walk through can help us to enter imaginary realms.So can I take you for a little walk now? See that winding country road leading through open fields and rolling hills? That’s where we’re going to start.A publicity image, drawn by Evija, for Walking Talking Writing events for academics, organised at the University of Auckland in 2017.A Walk “through the Countryside”, or Traversing the Landscape of ThoughtsE: Sophie, you spoke earlier about the way that experiencing yourself in relation to the environment is important for opening up your imagination. For example, just allowing yourself to be in the woods and noticing how the space pulsates around you is enough to awaken your bodily awareness.But let’s take a stroll along this road and let me explain to you what’s happening for me. You see, I find the woods too distracting and stimulating. When I’m stuck, I crave openness and space like this landscape that we’re walking through right now. S: Too much detail, too many things, overwhelm you?E: Exactly. Here, where the landscape is simple and spacious, my thoughts can breathe. Ideas quietly graze as I move through them. The country road is under my feet and I know exactly where I’m heading – beyond that horizon line in the distance… I need to be able to look far into that hazy distance to get my sense of seeing things “in depth.” All this makes me think of a study by Mia Keinänen in which she surveyed nine Norwegian academics who habitually walk to think (Keinänen). Based on their personal observations, the resulting article provides interesting material about the importance of walking—its rhythm, environment, and so on—on one’s thinking. For one of the academics, being able to see landmarks and thoughts in perspective was the key to being able to see ideas in new ways. There is a “landscape of thinking”, in which thinking becomes a place and environment is a process.For another participant in the study, thoughts become objects populating the landscape. The thinker walks through these object-thoughts, mapping out their connections, pulling some ideas closer, pushing others further away, as if moving through a 3D computer game.S: Hmm. I too think that we tend to project not only thoughts but also the emotions that we ourselves might be experiencing onto the objects around us. The literary critic Suzanne Nalbantian describes this as the creation of “aesthetic objects”, a “mythopoetic” process by which material objects in the external world “change their status from real to ‘aesthetic’ objects” and begin to function as “anchors or receptacles for subjectivity” (Nalbantien 54).Nalbantian uses examples such as Proust’s madeleine or Woolf’s lighthouse to illustrate the ways in which authors of autobiographical fiction invest the objects around them with a particular psychic value or feeling-tone.For me, this might be a tree, or a fallen leaf on the path. For you, Evija, it could be the horizon, or an open field or a vague object, half-perceived in the distance. E: So there’s a kind of equivalence between what we’re feeling and what we’re noticing? S: Yes. And it works the other way around too. What we’re noticing affects our feelings and thoughts. And perhaps it’s really about finding and knowing what works best for us—the landscape that is the best fit for how we want to feel… E: Or how we want to think. Or write. S: That’s it. Of course, metaphor is another way of describing this process. When we create a metaphor, we bring together a feeling or memory inside us with an object in the outside world. The feeling that we carry within us right now finds perfect form in the shape of this particular hillside. A thought is this pebble. A memory is that cloud…E: That’s the method of loci, which Mia Keinänen also refers to (600) in her article about the walking-thinking Norwegian academics. By projecting one’s learnt knowledge onto a physical landscape, one is able to better navigate ideas.S: Although I can’t help thinking that’s all a little cerebral. For me, the process is more immediate and felt. But I’m sure we’re talking about something very similar...E: Well, the anthropologist Tim Ingold, who has written a great deal on walking, in his article “Ways of Mind-Walking: Reading, Writing, Painting” urges us to rethink what imagination might be and the ways that it might relate to the physical environment, our movement through it, and our vision. He quotes James Elkins’s suggestion (in Ingold 15-16) that true “seeing” involves workings of both the eye and the mind in bringing forth images. But Ingold questions the very notion of imagination as a place inhabited by images. From derelict houses, barren fields and crossroads, to trees, stray dogs, and other people, the images we see around us do not represent “the forms of things in the world” (Ingold 16). Instead, they are gateways and “place-holders” for the truer essence of things they seem to represent (16). S: There’s that idea of the thing acting as a gateway or portal again… E: Yes, images—like the ruins of that windmill over there—do not “stand for things” but help us experientially “find” those things (Ingold16). This is one of the purposes of art, which, instead of giving us representations of things in the world, offers us something which is like the things in the world (16)—i.e., experiences.But as we walk, and notice the objects around us, are there specific qualities about the objects themselves that make this process—what you call “projection”—more or less difficult for us?A drawing by Latvian artist Māris Subačs (2016). The text on the image says: “Clouds slowly moving.” Publicity image for Subačs’s exhibition “Baltā Istaba” (The White Room), taken from Latvijas Sabiedriskie Mediji, https://www.lsm.lv/. S: Well, let’s circle back now—on the road and on the page. We’ve talked about the way that you need wide, open spaces, whereas I find myself responding to a range of different environments in different ways. How do you feel now, as we pause here and begin to retrace our steps? E: How do I feel? I’m not sure. Right now, I’m thinking about the way that I respond to art. For example, I would say that life-like images of physical objects in this world (e.g., a realistic painting of a vase with flowers) are harder to perceive with my mind's eye than, let’s say, of an abstract painting. I don’t want to be too tied to the surface details and physicality of the world. What I see in a picture is not the representation of the vase and flowers; what I see are forms that the “inner life force”, to use Ingold’s term, has taken to express itself through (vaseness, flowerness). The more abstract the image, the more of the symbolic or the imaginary it can contain. (Consider the traditional Aboriginal art, as Ingold invites, or the line drawings of Latvian artist Māris Subačs, as I suggest, depicted above.) Things we can observe in this world, says Ingold, are but “outward, sensible forms” that “give shape to the inner generative impulse that is life itself” (17). (This comes from the underlying belief that the phenomenal world itself is all “figmented” (Ingold 17, referring to literary scholar Mary Carruthers).)S: And, interestingly, I don’t recognise this at all! My experiencing of the objects around me feels very different. That tree, this pine cone in my hand, the solidity of this physical form is very helpful in crystallising something that I’m feeling. I enjoy looking at abstract paintings too. I can imagine myself into them. But the thing-ness of things is also deeply satisfying, especially if I can also touch, taste, smell, hold the thing itself. The poet Selima Hill goes for a walk in order to gather objects in a Tupperware box: “a dead butterfly, a yellow pebble, a scrap of blue paper, an empty condom packet.” Later she places an object from these “Tupperware treasures” on her writing desk and uses it “to focus on the kernel of the poem”, concentrating on it “to select the fragments and images she needs” (Taylor). This resonates with me.E: So, to summarise, walking seems to have something to do with seeing, for both of us. S: Yes, and not just seeing but also feeling and experiencing, with all of our senses. E: OK. And walking like appreciating art or writing or reading, has the capacity to take us beyond what shows at surface level, and so a step closer to the “truer” expression of life, to paraphrase Ingold. S: Yes, and the expression that Ingold calls more “true” is what Kristeva would say is the semiotic, the other-than-meaning, the felt and bodily, always bubbling beneath the surface. E: True, true. And although Ingold here doesn’t say how walking facilitates this kind of seeing and experiencing, perhaps we can make some suggestions here.You focused on the rhythm of walking and thinking/writing earlier. But I’m equally intrigued by the effects of speed. S: That resonates for me too. I need to be able to slow down and really experience the world around me. E: Well, did you know that there are scientific studies that suggest a correlation between the speed of walking and the speed of thinking (Jabr; Oppezzo and Schwartz)? The pace of walking, as the movement of our bodies through space, sets a particular temporal relationship with the objects we move past. In turn, this affects our “thinking time”, and our thinking about abstract ideas (Cuelenaere 127, referring to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s ideas).S: That makes sense to me. I noticed that when we were walking through the woods, we had slowed right down and then, as we reached the open road, you seemed to want to go much faster than me…E: Yes, at a steady pace. That’s perhaps not surprising. Because it seems that the speed of our walking is intimately connected with our vision. So if I’m moving through a landscape in which I’m fully immersed, I’m unable to take in everything around me. I choose to rest my eyes on a few select points of interest. S: Or on the horizon…E: Yes. The path that leads through an open field allows me to rest my eyes on the distant horizon. I register the patterns of fields and houses; and perhaps I catch sight of the trees in my peripheral vision. The detailed imagery, if any, gets reduced to geometrical figures and lines.The challenge is to find the right balance between the stimuli provided by the external world and the speed of movement through it.S: So the pace of walking can enable us to see things in a certain way. For you, this is moving quickly, seeing things vaguely, fragmentally and selectively. For me, it’s an opportunity to take my time, find my own rhythm, to slow down and weigh a thought or a thing. I think I’m probably the kind of walker who stops to pick up sticks and shells, and curious stones. I love the rhythm of moving but it isn’t necessarily fast movement. Perhaps you’re a speed walker and I’m a rambler? E: I think both the pace and the rhythm are of equal importance. The movement can be so monotonous that it becomes a meditative process, in which I lose myself. Then, what matters is no longer the destination but the journey itself. It’s like...S: Evija! Stop for a moment! Over here! Look at this! E: You know, that actually broke my train of thought. S: I’m sorry… I couldn’t resist. But Evija, we’ve arrived at the entrance to the woods again. E: And the light’s fading… I should get back to the office.S: Yes, but this time, we can choose which way to go: through the trees and into the half-dark of my creative subconscious or across the wide, open spaces of your imagination. E: And will we walk slowly—or at speed? There’s still so much to say. There are other landscapes and pathways—and pages—that we haven’t even explored yet.S: But I don’t want to stop. I want to keep walking with you.E: Indeed, Sophie, writing is a walk that never ends. ReferencesAnderson, Jon. “Talking whilst Walking: A Geographical Archaeology of Knowledge.” Area 36.3 (2004): 254-261. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi. Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. NewYork: Harper Perennial, 1997.Cuelenaere, Laurence. “Aymara Forms of Walking: A Linguistic Anthropological Reflection on the Relation between Language and Motion.” Language Sciences 33.1 (2011):126-137. Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Gros, Frédéric. The Philosophy of Walking. London: Verso, 2014.Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.———. “Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet.” Journal of Material Culture 9.3 (2004): 315-340.———. Lines: A Brief History. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007.———. “Ways of Mind-Walking: Reading, Writing, Painting.” Visual Studies 25.1 (2010):15-23.Ingold, Tim, and J.L. Vergunst, eds. Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. London: Ashgate, 2008.Jabr, Ferris. “Why Walking Helps Us Think.” The New Yorker, 3 Sep. 2014. 10 Aug. 2018 <https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/walking-helps-us-think>.Keinänen, Mia. “Taking Your Mind for a Walk: A Qualitative Investigation of Walking and Thinking among Nine Norwegian Academics.” Higher Education 71.4 (2016): 593-605. Klee, Paul. Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye. Ed. J. Spiller. Trans. R. Manheim. London: Lund Humphries, 1961. Klein, Richard. Cigarettes Are Sublime. London: Picador, 1995. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.Laing, Olivia. The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink. Edinburgh: Canongate 2013.Macrorie, Ken. Telling Writing. Rochelle Park, N.J.: Hayden Book Company, 1976.Maitland, Sarah. Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairy-Tales. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2012. Milner, Marion (as Joanna Field). A Life of One’s Own. 1934. London: Virago, 1986.Nalbantien, Suzanne. Aesthetic Autobiography. London: Macmillan, 1994.Oppezzo, Marily, and Daniel L. Schwartz. “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 40.4 (2014): 1142-1152.Richardson, Laurel. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. Ed. N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007. 923-948. Sturm, Sean. “Terra (In)cognita: Mapping Academic Writing.” TEXT 16.2 (2012).Taylor, Debbie. “The Selima Hill Method.” Mslexia 6 (Summer/Autumn 2000). Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. New York: Simon Schuster, 2003.Trofimova, Evija. “Academics Go Walking, Talking, Writing*.” Writing, Writing Everywhere, 8 Dec. 2017. 1 Oct. 2018 <http://www.writing.auckland.ac.nz/2017/12/08/academics-go-walking-talking-writing>.

The word “prosthetic” has its origins as a mathematical term. According to scholar Brandon W. Hawk, Plato uses the words prosthesis and prostithenai in Phaedo to mean "addition, add to, to place", and Aristotle uses it in a similar, algebraic sense in the Metaphysics. Later, as the word appears in classical Latin, it is used as a grammatical and rhetorical term, in the sense of a letter or syllable that is added on to a word, usually the addition of a syllable to the beginning of a word, hence pro-thesis (Hawk). This is the sense of the word that was “inherited … by early modern humanists”, says Hawk, but when it appears in Edward Phillips's The New World of English Words: Or, a General Dictionary (1706), we can see how, with advances in technology, it changes from a grammatical/linguistic term into a medical term. What was once word is now made flesh:Prosthesis, a Grammatical Figure, when a Letter or Syllable is added to the beginning of a Word, as Gnatus for natus, tetuli for tuli, &c. In Surgery, Prosthesis is taken for that which fills up what is wanting, as is to beseen in fistulous and hollow Ulcers, filled up with Flesh by that Art: Also themaking of artificial Legs and Arms, when the natural ones are lost.Hawk also points to P. Dionis in Course Chirurg (a 1710 textbook detailing the art of chirurgy, or surgery, as it’s known now), who uses the word to denote one type of surgical operation; that is, prosthesis becomes not a word, but an act that “adds what is deficient”, an act that repairs loss, that “fills up what is wanting”, that fills up what is “hollow”, that “fills up with flesh”. R. Brookes, in his Introduction to Physic and Surgery (1754), is the first to define prosthesis as both an act and also as a separate, material object; it is “an operation by which some instrument is added to supply the Defect of a Part which is wanting, either naturally or accidentally”. It is not until the twentieth century (1900, to be exact), though, that the word begins to refer solely to a device or object that is added on to somehow “supply the defect”, or fill up what which is “wanting”. So etymologically we move from the writer creating a new literary device, to the scientist/doctor acting in order to fix something, then back to the device again, this time as tangible object that fills a gap where there is lack and loss (Hawk).This is how we most often see the word, and so we have the notion of prosthetic used in this medicalised sense, as an "instrument", in relation to people with missing or disfunctional limbs. Having a prosthetic arm or leg in an ableist society instantly marks one as "missing" something, or being "disabled". Wheelchairs and other prosthetic accoutrements also serve as a metonymic shorthand for disability (an example of this might be how, on reserved parking spots in North America, the image on the sign is that of a person in a wheelchair). In the case of deaf people, who are also thought of as "disabled", but whose supposed disability is invisible, hearing aids and cochlear implants (CIs) serve as this kind of visible marker.* Like artificial limbs and wheelchairs, these "instruments" (they are actually called “hearing instruments” by audiologists) are sometimes added on to the purportedly “lacking” body. They are objects that “restore function to” the disabled deaf ear. As such, these devices, like wheelchairs and bionic arms, also serve as a shorthand in American culture, especially in film and visual media, where this kind of obvious, material symbolism is very helpful in efficiently driving narrative along. David L. Mitchell and Sharon T. Snyder call this kind of disability shorthand "narrative prosthesis". In their 2001 book of the same name, they demonstrate that disability and the markers of disability, far from being neglected or omitted (as has been claimed by critics like Sarah Ruiz-Grossman), actually appear in literature and film to the point where they are astonishingly pervasive. Unlike other identities who are vastly underrepresented, Mitchell and Snyder note, images of disability are almost constantly circulated in print and visual media (this is clearly demonstrated in older film studies such as John Schuchman's Hollywood Speaks and Martin Norden's Cinema of Isolation, as well). The reason that this happens, Mitchell and Snyder say, is because almost all narrative is structured around the idea of a flaw in the natural order, the resolution of that flaw, and the restoration of order. This flaw, they show, is more often than not represented by a disabled character or symbol. Disability, then, is a "crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality and analytical insight" (49). And, in the end, all narrative is thus dependent upon some type of disability used as a prosthetic, which serves not only to “fill in” lack, but also to restore and reinforce normalcy. They also state that concepts of, and characters with, disability are therefore used in literature and film primarily as “opportunist metaphorical device(s)” (205). Hearing aids and CIs are great examples of "opportunist" devices used on television and in movies, mostly as props or “add-ons” in visual narratives. This "adding on" is done, more often than not, to the detriment of providing a well rounded narrative about the lived experience of deaf people who use such devices on a daily basis. There are countless examples of this in American television shows and films (in an upward trend since 2000), including many police and crime dramas where a cochlear implant device-as-clue stands in for the dead victim’s identity (Kincheloe "Do Androids"). We see it in movies, most notably in 2018’s A Quiet Place, in which a CI is weaponized and used to defeat the alien monster/Other (as opposed to the deaf heroine doing it by herself) (Kincheloe "Tired Tropes"). In 2019's Toy Story 4, there is a non-signing child who we know is deaf because they wear a CI. In the 2019 animated Netflix series, Undone, the main character wears a CI, and it serves as one of several markers (for her and the viewer) of her possible psychological breakdown.It seems fairly obvious that literal prostheses such as hearing aids and CI devices are used as a form of media shorthand to connote hearing ideas of “deafness”. It also might seem obvious that, as props that reinforce mainstream, ableist narratives, they are there to tell us that, in the end, despite the aesthetic nervousness that disability produces, "things will be okay". It's "fixable". These are prosthetics that are easily identified and easily discussed, debated, and questioned.What is perhaps not so obvious, however, is that American Sign Language (ASL), is also used in media as a narrative prosthetic. Lennard Davis' discussion of Erving Goffman’s idea of “stigma” in Enforcing Normalcy supports the notion that sign language, like hearing aids, is a marker. When seen by the hearing, non-signing observer, sign language "stigmatizes" the signing deaf person (48). In this sense, ASL is, like a hearing aid, a tangible "sign" of deaf identity. I would then argue that ASL is, like hearing aids and CIs, used as a "narrative prosthesis" signifying deafness and disability; its insertion allows ableist narratives to be satisfyingly resolved. Even though ASL is not a static physical device, but a living language and an integral part of deaf lived experience, it is casually employed almost everywhere in media today as a cheap prop, and as such, serves narrative purposes that are not in the best interest of realistic deaf representation. Consider this example: On 13 April 2012, Sir Paul McCartney arranged for a special event at his daughter Stella McCartney’s ivy-covered store in West Hollywood. Stars and friends like Jane Fonda, Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin, Quincy Jones, and Reese Witherspoon sipped cucumber margaritas and nibbled on a spread of vegetarian Mexican appetizers. Afterwards, McCartney took them all to a tent set up on the patio out back, where he proudly introduced a new video, directed by himself. This was the world premiere of the video for "My Valentine", a song from his latest (some might say oddly titled) album, Kisses from the Bottom, a song he had originally written for and sung to new wife Nancy Shevell, at their 2011 wedding.The video is very simply shot in black and white, against a plain grey backdrop. As it begins, the camera fades in on actor Natalie Portman, who is seated, wearing a black dress. She stares at the viewer intently, but with no expression. As McCartney’s voiced-over vocal begins, “What if it rained/We didn’t care…”, she suddenly starts to mouth the words, and using sign language. The lens backs up to a medium shot of her, then closes back in on a tight close up of just her hands signing “my valentine” on her chest. There is then a quick cut to actor Johnny Depp, who is sitting in a similar position, in front of a grey backdrop, staring directly at the camera, also with no expression. There is a fade back to Portman’s face, then to her body, a close up of her signing the word “appear”, and then a cut back to Depp. Now he starts signing. Unlike Portman, he does not mouth the words, but stares ahead, with no facial movement. There is then a series of jump cuts, back and forth, between shots of the two actors’ faces, eyes, mouths, hands. For the solo bridge, there is a closeup on Depp’s hands playing guitar – a cut to Portman’s face, looking down – then to her face with eyes closed as she listens. here is some more signing, we see Depp’s impassive face staring at us again, and then, at the end, the video fades out on Portman’s still figure, still gazing at us as well.McCartney told reporters that Stella had been the one to come up with the idea for using sign language in the video. According to the ASL sign language coach on the shoot, Bill Pugin, the choice to include it wasn’t that far-fetched: “Paul always has an interpreter on a riser with a spot for his concerts and Stella loves sign language, apparently” ("The Guy Who Taught Johnny Depp"). Perhaps she made the suggestion because the second stanza contains the words “I tell myself that I was waiting for a sign…” Regardless, McCartney advised her father to “ring Natalie up and just ask her if she will sign to your song”. Later realizing he wanted another person signing in the video, Paul McCartney asked Johnny Depp to join in, which he did. When asked why he chose those two actors, McCartney said, “Well, they’re just nice people, some friends from way back and they were just very kind to do it”. A week later, they all got together with cinematographer Wally Pfister, who filmed Inception and The Dark Knight, behind the camera. According to the official press release about the video, posted on McCartney’s website, the two actors then "translate[d] the lyrics of the song into sign language – each giving distinctly different performances, making ... compelling viewing" ("Paul McCartney Directs His Own"). The response to the video was quite positive; it immediately went viral on YouTube (the original posting of it got over 15 million views). The album made it to number five on the Billboard charts, with the single reaching number twenty. The album won a 2013 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal album, and the video Best Music Film (“Live Kisses”). McCartney chose to sing that particular song from the album on the award show itself, and four years later, he featured both the song and video as part of his 31 city tour, the 2017 One on One concert, in which he made four million dollars a city. All told the video has served McCartney quite well.But…For whom the sign language? And why? The video is not meant for deaf eyes. When viewed through a deaf lens, it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, “compelling”; it isn’t even comprehensible. It is so bad, in fact, that the video, though signed, is also captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing. To the untrained, “hearing” eye, the signing seems to be providing a “deaf translation” of what is being sung. But it is in fact a pantomime. The actors are quite literally “going through the motions”. One egregious example of this is how, at the end of the video, when Depp thinks he’s signing “valentine”. it looks like he's saying “fuck-heart” (several media sources politely reported that he’d signed “enemy”). Whatever he did, it’s not a sign. In response to criticism of his signing, Depp said nonchalantly, “Apparently, instead of ‘love' I might have said, ‘murder'” ("Johnny Depp Says"). That wasn’t the only point of confusion, though: the way Portman signs “then she appears” was misunderstood by some viewers to be the sign for “tampon”. She actually signed it correctly, but media sources from MTV.com, to the Washington Post, “signsplained” that she had just gotten a bit confused between ASL and BSL signs (even though the BSL for “appears” bears no resemblance to what she did, and the ASL for tampon, while using the same classifier, is also signed quite differently). Part of the problem, according to sign coach Pugin, was that he and Depp “had about fifteen minutes to work on the song. I signed the song for hours sitting on an apple box under the camera for Johnny to be able to peripherally see me for each take. I was his “human cue card”. Johnny’s signing turned out to be more theatrical and ‘abbreviated’ because of the time issue” ("The Guy Who Taught").Portman, perhaps taking more time to rehearse, does a better job, but “theatrical and abbreviated” indeed; the signing was just not good, despite Pugin's coaching. But to hearing eyes, it looks fine; it looks beautiful, it looks poignant and somehow mysterious. It looks the way sign language is “supposed” to look.Remember, the McCartney website claimed that the actors were “translating” the lyrics. Technically speaking, “translation” would mean that the sense of the words to the song were being rendered, fluently, from one language (English) into another (SL), for an audience receptive to the second language. In order to “translate”, the translator needs to be fluent in both of the languages involved. To be clear, what Depp and Portman were doing was not translation. They are hearing people, not fluent in sign language, acting like signers (something that happens with dismaying regularity in the entertainment industry). Depp, to his credit, knew he wasn’t “translating”, in fact, he said "I was only copying what the guy showed me”. “But”, he says, "it was a gas – sign language is apparently very interpretive. It's all kind of different" (italics mine) ("Johnny Depp Passes the Buck"). Other than maybe being an embellishment on that one line, “I tell myself that I was waiting for a sign…”, the sentiments of McCartney’s song have absolutely nothing to do with ASL or deaf people. And he didn’t purposefully place sign language in his video as a way to get his lyrics across to a deaf audience. He’s a musician; it is fairly certain that the thought of appealing to a deaf audience never entered his or his daughter’s mind. It is much more likely that he made the decision to use sign language because of its cool factor; its emo “novelty”. In other words, McCartney used sign language as a prop – as a way to make his song “different”, more “touching”, more emotionally appealing. Sign adds a je ne sais quoi, a little “something”, to the song. The video is a hearing person’s fantasy of what a signing person looks like, what sign language is, and what it does. McCartney used that fantasy, and the sentimentality that it evokes, to sell the song. And it worked. This attitude toward sign language, demonstrated by the careless editing of the video, Depp’s flippant remarks, and the overall attitude that if it’s wrong it’s no big deal, is one that is pervasive throughout the entertainment and advertising industries and indeed throughout American culture in the U.S. That is, there is this notion that sign language is “a gas”. It’s just a “different” thing. Not only is it “different”, but it is also a “thing”, a prop, a little exotic spice you throw into the pot. It is, in other words, a "narrative prosthesis", an "add-on". Once you see this, it becomes glaringly apparent that ASL is not viewed in mainstream American culture as the language of a group of people, but instead is widely used and commodified as a product. The most obvious form of commodification is in the thousands of ASL products, from Precious Moment figurines, to Baby Signing videos, to the ubiquitous “I LOVE YOU” sign seen on everything from coffee mugs to tee shirts, to Nike posters with “Just Do It” in fingerspelling. But the area in which the language is most often commodified (and perhaps most insidiously so) is in the entertainment industry, in visual media, where it is used by writers, directors and actors, not to present an accurate portrait of lived deaf experience and language, but to do what Paul McCartney did, that is, to insert it just to create a “different”, unique, mysterious, exotic, heartwarming spectacle. Far too often, this commodification of the language results in weirdly distorted representations of what deaf people and their language actually are. You can see this everywhere: ASL is a prominent narrative add-on in blockbuster films like the aforementioned A Quiet Place; it is used in the Oscar winning The Shape of Water, and in Wonderstruck, and Baby Driver as well; it is used in the indie horror film Hush; it is used in a lot of films with apes (the Planet of the Apes series and Rampage are two examples); it is displayed on television, mostly in police dramas, in various CSI programs, and in series like The Walking Dead and Castle Rock; it is used in commercials to hawk everything from Pepsi to hotel chains to jewelry to Hormel lunchmeat to fast food (Burger King, Chik Fil A); it is used and commented on in interpreted concerts and music videos and football halftime shows; it is used (often misused) in PSAs for hurricanes and police stops; it is used in social media, from vlogs to cochlear implant activation videos. You can find ASL seemingly everywhere; it is being inserted more and more into the cultural mainstream, but is not appearing as a language. It is used, nine times out of ten, as a decorative ornament, a narrative prop. When Davis discusses the hearing perception of ASL as a marker or visible stigma, he points out that the usual hearing response to observing such stigma is a combination of a Freudian attraction/repulsion (the dominant response being negative). Many times this repulsion results from the appeal to pathos, as in the commercials that show the poor isolated deaf person with the nice hearing person who is signing to them so that they can now be part of the world. The hearing viewer might think to themselves "oh, thank God I'm not deaf!"Davis notes that, in the end, it is not the signer who is the disabled one in this scenario (aside from the fact that many times a signing person is not in fact deaf). The hearing, non signing observer is actually the one “disabled” by their own reaction to the signing “other”. Not only that, but the rhetorical situation itself becomes “disabled”: there is discomfort – wariness of language – laughter – compulsive nervous talking – awkwardness – a desire to get rid of the object. This is a learned response. People habituated, Davis says, do not respond this way (12-13). While people might think that the hearing audience is becoming more and more habituated because ASL is everywhere, the problem is that people are being incorrectly habituated. More often than not, sign language, when enfolded into narratives about hearing people in hearing situations, is put into service as a prop that can mitigate such awkward moments of possible tension and conflict; it is a prosthetic that "fills the gap", allowing an interaction between hearing and deaf people that almost always allows for a positive, "happy" resolution, a return to "normalcy", the very purpose of the "narrative prosthetic" as posited by Mitchell and Snyder. Once we see how ASL is being employed in media mostly as a narrative prosthesis, we can, as Mitchell and Snyder suggest we do (what I hope this essay begins to do), and that is, to begin to “undo the quick repair of disability in mainstream representations and beliefs; to try to make the prosthesis show; to flaunt its imperfect supplementation as an illusion” (8). In other words, if we can scrutinize the shorthand, and dig deeper, seeing the prosthetic for what it is, all of this seemingly exploitative commodification of ASL will be a good thing. Maybe, in “habituating” people correctly, in widening both hearing people’s exposure to ASL and their understanding of its actual role in deaf lived experience, signing will become less of a prosthetic, an object of fetishistic fascination. Maybe hearing people, as they become used to seeing signing people in real signing situations, will be less likely to walk up to deaf people they don’t know and say things like: “Oh, your language is SO beautiful”, or say, “I know sign!” (then fingerspelling the alphabet with agonising slowness and inaccuracy while the deaf person nods politely). However, if the use of ASL as a prosthetic in popular culture and visual media continues to go on unexamined and unquestioned, it will just continue to trivialise a living, breathing language. This trivialisation can in turn continue to reduce the lived experiences of deaf people to a sort of caricature, further reinforcing the negative representations of deaf people in America that are already in place, stereotypes that we have been trying to escape for over 200 years. Note* The word "deaf" is used in this article to denote the entire range of individuals with various hearing losses and language preferences, including Deaf persons and hard of hearing persons, etc. For more on these distinctions please refer to the website entry on this published by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD).ReferencesDavis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy. New York: Verso, 1995."The Guy Who Taught Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman Sign Language." Intimate Excellent: The Fountain Theater Blog. 18 Mar. 2012. <https://intimateexcellent.com/2012/04/18/the-guy-who-taught-johnny-depp-and-natalie-portman-sign-language-in-mccartney-video/>.Fitzgerald, Roisin. "Johnny Depp Says Sign Language Mishap Isn't His Fault." HiddenHearing Blog 14 Apr. 2012. <https://hiddenhearingireland.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/johnny-depp-says-sign-language-mishap-isnt-his-fault/>.Hawk, Brandon W. “Prosthesis: From Grammar to Medicine in the Earliest History of the Word.” Disability Studies Quarterly 38.4 (2018).McCartney, Paul. "My Valentine." YouTube 13 Apr. 2012.McGinnis, Sara. "Johnny Depp Passes the Buck on Sign Language Snafu." sheknows.com 10 May 2012. <https://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/959949/johnny-depp-passes-the-buck-on-sign-language-snafu/>.Miller, Julie. "Paul McCartney on Directing Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman." Vanity Fair 14 Apr. 2012. <https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/04/paul-mccartney-johnny-depp-natalie-portman-my-valentine-music-video-gwyneth-paltrow>.Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disabilities and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. 2000.Norden, Martin. F. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in Movies. Rutgers UP: 1994."Paul McCartney Directs His Own My Valentine Video." paulmccartney.com 14 Apr. 2012. <https://www.paulmccartney.com/news-blogs/news/paul-mccartney-directs-his-own-my-valentine-videos-featuring-natalie-portman-and>.Ruiz-Grossman, Sarah. "Disability Representation Is Seriously Lacking in Television and the Movies: Report." Huffington Post 27 Mar. 2019. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/disability-representation-movies-tv_n_5c9a7b85e4b07c88662cabe7>.Schuchman, J.S. Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry. U Illinois P, 1999.

IntroductionIn regional Australia and New Zealand, museums and art galleries are increasingly becoming primary sites of cultural engagement. They are one of the key tourist attractions for regional towns and expected to generate much needed tourism revenue. In 2017 in New South Wales alone, there were three million visitors to regional galleries and museums (MGNSW 13). However, apart from those (partially) funded by local councils, they are often run on donations, good will, and the enthusiasm of volunteers. Regional museums and galleries provide some paid, and more unpaid, employment for ageing populations. While two-thirds of Australia’s population lives in capital cities, the remainder who live in regional towns are likely to be in the 60+ age cohort because people are choosing to retire away from the bustling, growing cities (ABS). At last count, there were about 3000 museums and galleries in Australia with about 80% of them located in regional areas (Scott). Over the last 40 years, this figure has tripled from the 1000 regional and provincial museums estimated by Peter Piggott in his 1975 report (24). According to a 2014 survey (Shaw and Davidson), New Zealand has about 470 museums and galleries and about 70% are located outside capital cities. The vast majority, 85%, have less than five, full-time paid staff, and more than half of these were run entirely by ageing volunteers. They are entrusted with managing the vast majority of the history and heritage collections of Australia and New Zealand. These ageing volunteers need a diverse range of skills and experience to care for and interpret collections. How do you find the time and budget for professional development for both paid staff and volunteers? Many professional development events are held in capital cities, which are often a significant distance from the regional museum—this adds substantially to the costs of attending and the time commitment required to get there. In addition, it is not uncommon for people working in regional museums to be responsible for everything—from security, collection management, conservation, research, interpretation and public programs to changing the light bulbs. While there are a large number of resources available online, following a manual is often more difficult than learning from other colleagues or learning in a more formal educational or vocational environment where you can receive timely feedback on your work. Further, a foundational level of prior knowledge and experience is often required to follow written instructions. This article will suggest some strategies for low cost professional development and networking. It involves planning, thinking strategically and forming partnerships with others in the region. It is time to harness the power of modern communications technology and use it as a tool for professional development. Some models of professional development in regional areas that have been implemented in the past will also be reviewed. The focus for this article is on training and professional development for workers in regional museums, heritage sites and keeping places. Regional art galleries have not been included because they tend to have separate regional networks and training opportunities. For example, there are professional development opportunities provided through the Art Galleries Association of Australia and their state branches. Regional galleries are also far more likely to have one or more paid staff members (Winkworth, “Fixing the Slums” 2). Regional Museums, Volunteers, and Social CapitalIt is widely accepted that regional museums and galleries enhance social capital and reduce social isolation (Kelly 32; Burton and Griffin 328). However, while working in a regional museum or gallery can help to build friendship networks, it can also be professionally isolating. How do you benchmark what you do against other places if you are two or more hours drive from those places? How do you learn from other colleagues if all your colleagues are also isolated by the ‘tyranny of distance’ and struggling with the same lack of access to training? In 2017 in New South Wales alone, there were 8,629 active volunteers working in regional museums and galleries giving almost five million hours, which Museums and Galleries NSW calculated was worth over $150 million per annum in unpaid labour (MGNSW 1). Providing training and professional development to this group is an investment in Australia’s social and cultural capital.Unlike other community-run groups, the museums and heritage places which have emerged in regional Australia and New Zealand are not part of a national or state branch network. Volunteers who work for the Red Cross, Scouts or Landcare benefit from being part of a national organisation which provides funding, support workers, a website, governance structure, marketing, political advocacy and training (Winkworth, “Let a Thousand Flowers” 11). In Australia and New Zealand, this role is undertaken by the Australian Museums and Galleries Association AMaGA (formerly Museums Australia) and Museums Aotearoa respectively. However, both of these groups operate at the macro policy level, for example organising annual conferences, publishing a journal and developing Indigenous policy frameworks, rather than the local, practical level. In 1995, due to their advocacy work, Landcare Australia received $500 million over five years from the federal government to fund 5000 Landcare groups, which are run by 120,000 volunteers (Oppenheimer 177). They argued successfully that the sustainable development of land resources started at the local level. What do we need to do to convince government of the need for sustainable development of our local and regional museum and heritage resources?Training for Volunteers Working in Regional Museums: The Current SituationAnother barrier to training for regional museum workers is the assumption that the 70:20:10 model of professional development should apply. That is, 70% of one’s professional development is done ‘on the job’ by completing tasks and problem-solving; 20% is achieved by learning from mentors, coaches and role models and 10% is learnt from attending conferences and symposia and enrolling in formal courses of study. However, this model pre-supposes that there are people in your workplace whom you can learn from and who can show you how to complete a task, and that you are not destroying or damaging a precious, unique object if you happen to make a mistake.Some museum volunteers come with skills in research, marketing, administration, customer service or photography, but very few come with specific museum skills like writing exhibition text, registering an acquisition or conserving artefacts. These skills need to be taught. As Kylie Winkworth has written, museum management now requires a [...] skills set, which is not so readily found in small communities, and which in many ways is less rewarding for the available volunteers, who may have left school at 15. We do not expect volunteer librarians to catalogue books, which are in any case of low intrinsic value, but we still expect volunteers in their 70s and 80s to catalogue irreplaceable heritage collections and meet ever more onerous museum standards. That so many volunteers manage to do this is extraordinary. (“Let a Thousand Flowers” 13)Workers in regional museums are constantly required to step outside their comfort zones and learn new skills with minimal professional support. While these challenging experiences can be very rewarding, they are also potentially damaging for our irreplaceable material cultural heritage.Training for museum professionals has been on the agenda of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) since 1947 (Boylan 62). However, until 1996, their work focused on recommending curricula for new museum professionals and did not include life-long learning and on-going professional development. ICOM’s International Committee for the Training of Personnel (ICTOP) and the ICOM Executive has responded to this in their new curricula—ICOM Curricula Guidelines for Professional Museum Development, but this does not address the difficulties staff or volunteers working in regional areas face in accessing training.In some parts of Australia, there are regional support and professional development programs in place. For example, in Queensland, there is the Museum Development Officer (MDO) network. However, because of the geographic size of the state and the spread of the museums, these five regionally based staff often have 60-80 museums or keeping places in their region needing support and so their time and expertise is spread very thinly. It is also predominantly a fee-for-service arrangement. That is, the museums have to pay for the MDO to come and deliver training. Usually this is done by the MDO working with a local museum to apply for a Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF) grant. In Victoria there is a roving curator program where eligible regional museums can apply to have a professional curator come and work with them for a few days to help the volunteers curate exhibitions. The roving curator can also provide advice on “develop[ing] high quality exhibitions for diverse audiences” via email, telephone and networking events. Tasmania operates a similar scheme but their two roving curators are available for up to 25 days of work each year with eligible museums, provided the local council makes a financial contribution. The New South Wales government supports the museum advisor program through which a museum professional will come to your museum for up to 20 days/year to give advice and hands-on training—provided your local council pays $7000, an amount that is matched by the state government—for this service. In 2010, in response to recommendations in the Dunn Report (2007), the Collections Council of Australia (CCA) established a pilot project with the City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in Western Australia and $120,000 in funding from the Myer Foundation to trial the provision of a paid Collections Care Coordinator who would provide free training, expertise and support to local museums in the region. Tragically, CCA was de-funded by the Cultural Ministers Council the same year and the roll-out of a hub and spoke regional model was not supported by government due to the lack of an evidence base (Winkworth, “Let a Thousand Flowers” 18). An evaluation of the trial project would have tested a different model of regional training and added to the evidence base.All these state-based models (except the aborted Collections Care hub in Western Australia) require small regional museums to compete with each other for access to a museum professional and to successfully apply for funding, usually from their local council or state government. If they are successful, the training that is delivered is a one-off, as they are unlikely to get a second slice of the regional pie.An alternative to this competitive, fly-in fly-out, one-off model of professional development is to harness the technology and resources of local libraries and other cultural facilities in regional areas. This is what the Sydney Opera House Trust did in March 2019 to deliver their All about Women program of speakers via live streaming to 37 satellite sites throughout Australia and New Zealand.Harnessing Technology and Using Regional Library Infrastructure to Provide Training: ScenarioImagine the following scenario. It is a Monday morning in a regional library in Dubbo, New South Wales. Dubbo is 391 km or five hours drive by car from the nearest capital city (Sydney) and there are 50 regional museums within a 100 km radius. Ten people are gathered in a meeting room at the library watching a live stream of the keynote speakers who are presenting at their national museums conference. They are from five regional museums where they work as volunteers or part-time paid staff. They cannot afford to pay $2000, or more, to attend the conference, but they are happy to self-fund to drive for an hour or two to link up with other colleagues to listen to the presentations. They make notes and tweet in their questions using the conference twitter handle and hashtag. They have not been exposed to international speakers in the industry before and the ideas presented are fresh and stimulating. When the conference breaks for morning tea, they take a break too and get to know each other over a cuppa (provided free of charge by the library). Just as the networking sessions at conferences are vitally important for the delegates, they are even more important to address social isolation amongst this group. When they reconvene, they discuss their questions and agree to email the presenters with the questions that are unresolved. After the conference keynote sessions finish, the main conference (in the capital city) disperses into parallel sessions, which are no longer available via live stream.To make the two-hour drive more worthwhile and continue their professional development, they have arranged to hold a significance assessment workshop as well. Each museum worker has brought along photographs of one item in their collection that they want to do more research on. Some of them have also brought the object, if it is small and robust enough to travel. They have downloaded copies of Significance 2.0 and read it before they arrived. They started to write significance reports but could not fully understand how to apply some of the criteria. They cannot afford to pay for professional workshop facilitators, but they have arranged for the local studies librarian to give them an hour of free training on using the library’s resources (online and onsite) to do research on the local area and local families. They learn more about Trove, Papers Past and other research tools which are available online. This is hands-on and computer-based skills training using their own laptops/tablets or the ones provided by the library. After the training with the librarian, they break into two groups and read each other’s significance reports and make suggestions. The day finishes with a cuppa at 2.30pm giving them time to drive home before the sun sets. They agree to exchange email addresses so they can keep in touch. All the volunteers and staff who attended these sessions in regional areas feel energised after these meetings. They no longer feel so isolated and like they are working in the dark. They feel supported just knowing that there are other people who are struggling with the same issues and constraints as they are. They are sick of talking about the lack of budget, expertise, training and resources and want to do something with what they have.Bert (fictional name) decides that it is worth capitalising on this success. He emails the people who came to the session in Dubbo to ask them if they would like to do it again but focus on some different training needs. He asks them to choose two of the following three professional development options. First, they can choose to watch and discuss a recording of the keynote presentations from day two of the recent national conference. The conference organisers have uploaded digital recordings of the speakers’ presentations and the question time to the AMaGA website. This is an option for local libraries that do not have sufficient bandwidth to live stream video. The local library technician will help them cast the videos to a large screen. Second, they can each bring an object from their museum collection that they think needs conservation work. If the item is too fragile or big to move, they will bring digital photographs of it instead. Bert consulted their state-based museum and found some specialist conservators who have agreed to Skype or Facetime them in Dubbo free of charge, to give them expert advice about how to care for their objects, and most importantly, what not to do. The IT technician at Dubbo Library can set up their meeting room so that they can cast the Skype session onto a large smart screen TV. One week before the event, they will send a list of their objects and photographs of them to the conservator so that she can prepare, and they can make best use of her time. After this session, they will feel more confident about undertaking small cleaning and flattening treatments and know when they should not attempt a treatment themselves and need to call on the experts. Third, they could choose to have a training session with the council’s grants officer on writing grant applications. As he assesses grant applications, he can tell them what local councils look for in a successful grant application. He can also inform them about some of the grants that might be relevant to them. After the formal training, there will be an opportunity for them to exchange information about the grants they have applied for in the past—sometimes finding out what’s available can be difficult—and work in small groups to critique each other’s grant applications.The group chooses options two and three, as they want more practical skills development. They take a break in the middle of the day for lunch, which gives them the opportunity to exchange anecdotes from their volunteer work and listen to and support each other. They feel validated and affirmed. They have gained new skills and don’t feel so isolated. Before they leave, Alice agrees to get in touch with everyone to organise their next regional training day.Harnessing Technology and Using Regional Library Infrastructure to Provide Training: BenefitsThese scenarios need not be futuristic. The training needs are real, as is the desire to learn and the capacity of libraries to support regional groups. While funding for regional museums has stagnated or declined in recent years, libraries have been surging ahead. In August 2018, the New South Wales Government announced an “historic investment” of $60 million into all 370 public libraries that would “transform the way NSW’s public libraries deliver much-needed services, especially in regional areas” (Smith). Libraries are equipped and charged with the responsibility of enabling local community groups to make best use of their resources. Most state and national museum workers are keen to share their expertise with their regional colleagues: funding and distance are often the only barriers. These scenarios allow national conference keynote speakers to reach a much larger audience than the conference attendees. While this strategy might reduce the number of workers from regional areas who pay to attend conferences, the reality is that due to distance, other volunteer commitments, expense and family responsibilities, they probably would not attend anyway. Most regional museums and galleries and their staff might be asset-rich, but they are cash-poor, and the only way their workers get to attend conferences is if they win a bursary or grant. In 2005, Winkworth said: “the future for community museums is to locate them within local government as an integral part of the cultural, educational and economic infrastructure of the community, just like libraries and galleries” (“Fixing the Slums” 7). Fourteen years on, very little progress has been made in this direction. Those museums which have been integrated into the local council infrastructure, such as at Orange and Wagga Wagga in western New South Wales, are doing much better than those that are still stuck in ‘cultural poverty’ and trying to operate independently.However, the co-location and convergence of museums, libraries and archives is only successful if it is well managed. Helena Robinson has examined the impact on museum collection management and interpretation of five local government funded, converged collecting institutions in Australia and New Zealand and found that the process is complex and does not necessarily result in “optimal” cross-disciplinary expertise or best practice outcomes (14158).ConclusionRobinson’s research, however, did not consider community-based collecting institutions using regional libraries as sites for training and networking. By harnessing local library resources and making better use of existing communications technology it is possible to create regional hubs for professional development and collegiate support, which are not reliant on grants. If the current competitive, fly-in fly-out, self-funded model of providing professional development and support to regional museums continues, then the future for our cultural heritage collections and the dedicated volunteers who care for them is bleak. Alternatively, the scenarios I have described give regional museum workers agency to address their own professional development needs. This in no way removes the need for leadership, advocacy and coordination by national representative bodies such as AMaGA and Museums Aotearoa. If AMaGA partnered with the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) to stream their conference keynote sessions to strategically located regional libraries and used some of their annual funding from the Department of Communication and the Arts to pay for museum professionals to travel to some of those sites to deliver training, they would be investing in the nation’s social and cultural capital and addressing the professional development needs of regional museum workers. This would also increase the sustainability of our cultural heritage collections, which are valuable economic assets.ReferencesAustralian Bureau of Statistics. “2071.0—Census of Population and Housing: Reflecting Australia—Snapshot of Australia, 2016”. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071.0~2016~Main%20Features~Snapshot%20of%20Australia,%202016~2>.Boylan, Patrick. “The Intangible Heritage: A Challenge and an Opportunity for Museums and Museum Professional Training.” International Journal of Intangible Heritage 1 (2006): 53–65.Burton, Christine, and Jane Griffin. “More than a Museum? Understanding How Small Museums Contribute to Social Capital in Regional Communities.” Asia Pacific Journal of Arts & Cultural Management 5.1 (2008): 314–32. 17 Mar. 2019 <http://apjacm.arts.unimelb.edu.au/article/view/32>.Dunn, Anne. The Dunn Report: A Report on the Concept of Regional Collections Jobs. Adelaide: Collections Council of Australia, 2007.ICOM Curricula Guidelines for Professional Museum Development. 2000. <http://museumstudies.si.edu/ICOM-ICTOP/comp.htm>.Kelly, Lynda. “Measuring the Impact of Museums on Their Communities: The Role of the 21st Century Museum.” New Roles and Issues of Museums INTERCOM Symposium (2006): 25–34. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://media.australianmuseum.net.au/media/dd/Uploads/Documents/9355/impact+paper+INTERCOM+2006.bb50ba1.pdf>.Museums and Galleries New South Wales (MGNSW). 2018 NSW Museums and Galleries Sector Census. Museums and Galleries of New South Wales. Data and Insights—Culture Counts. Sydney: MGNSW, 2019. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2018-NSW-Museum-Gallery-Sector-Census.pdf>Oppenheimer, Melanie. Volunteering: Why We Can’t Survive without It. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2008.Pigott, Peter. Museums in Australia 1975. Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections Including the Report of the Planning Committee on the Gallery of Aboriginal Australia. Canberra: Australian Government Printing Service, 1975. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://apo.org.au/node/35268>.Public Sector Commission, Western Australia. 70:20:10 Framework Learning Philosophy. Perth: Government of Western Australia, 2018. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://publicsector.wa.gov.au/centre-public-sector-excellence/about-centre/702010-framework>.Robinson, Helena. “‘A Lot of People Going That Extra Mile’: Professional Collaboration and Cross-Disciplinarity in Converged Collecting Institutions.” Museum Management and Curatorship 31 (2016): 141–58.Scott, Lee. National Operations Manager, Museums Australia, Personal Communication. 22 Oct. 2018.Shaw, Iain, and Lee Davidson, Museums Aotearoa 2014 Sector Survey Report. Wellington: Victoria U, 2014. 17 Mar. 2019 <http://www.museumsaotearoa.org.nz/sites/default/files/documents/museums_aotearoa_sector_survey_2014_report_-_final_draft_oct_2015.pdf>.Smith, Alexandra. “NSW Libraries to Benefit from $60 Million Boost.” Sydney Morning Herald 24 Aug. 2018. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/nsw-libraries-to-benefit-from-60-million-boost-20180823-p4zzdj.html>. Winkworth, Kylie. “Fixing the Slums of Australian Museums; or Sustaining Heritage Collections in Regional Australia.” Museums Australia Conference Paper. Canberra: Museums Australia, 2005. ———. “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom: Museums in Regional Australia.” Understanding Museums—Australian Museums and Museology. Eds. Des Griffin and Leon Paroissien. Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2011. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://nma.gov.au/research/understanding-museums/KWinkworth_2011.html>.

The elaborate cross-media spectacle, ‘Australian Idol,’ ostensibly lays bare the process of creating a pop star. Yet with so much made visible, much is rendered opaque. Specifically, ‘Idol’ is defined by the use of carefully-tuned strategies of publicity and promotion that create, shape and reshape a series of ‘authentic celebrities’ – pop stars whose emergence is sanctified through a seemingly open process of public ratification. Yet, Idol’s main actor is the music industry itself which uses contestants as vehicles for crafting intimate, long-term relationships with consumers. Through an analysis of the process through which various contestants in ‘Australian Idol’ are promoted and sold, it becomes clear that these populist icons are emblematic of an industry reinventing itself in a media environment that presents remarkable challenges and surprising opportunities. Curiously, the debates, strategies and motivations of the public relations industry have received little sustained attention in popular music studies. While much has been written about the contradictions between the rhetoric of rebellion and the complicated realities of corporate success (Frank; Negus), less has been written about the evolution of specific kinds of publicity and the strategies that shape their use in the music industry. This is surprising given the foundational role of public relations strategies within the culture industries generally and the music industry in particular. Specifically, what Turner et. al. define as ‘the promotional culture’ is central to the production and marketing of mainstream popular music. The ‘Idol’ phenomenon offers a rich opportunity to examine how the mainstream of the popular music industry uses distinct and novel marketing strategies in the face of declining sales of compact discs, an advertising environment that is extraordinarily crowded with all manner of competing messages, a steady rate of trade in digital song files and ever more effective competition from video games and DVDs. The ‘Idol’ phenomenon has proved to be a bundle of highly successful strategies for making money from popular music. Selling CDs seems to be almost ancillary to the phenomenon, acting as only one profit centre among many. Indeed, we can track the progress and deployment of specific strategies for shaping the creation of what has become a series of musical celebrities from the start of the first series of ‘Australian Idol’ through a continuous process of strategic publicity. The Attention Economy It has been somewhat hysterically estimated that the average resident of Sydney might be presented with around 3000 commercial messages a day (Lee). It is this kind of communication environment that makes account planners go weak in the knees in both paralysing anxiety and genuine excitement. Many have taken to paying people to go to bars, cafes and clubs to talk up the relative merits of a product to complete strangers in the guise of casual conversation. Similarly, commercial buskers have recently appeared on City Trains to proclaim the virtues of the wares they’ve been contracted to hawk. One can imagine ‘Cockles and Mussels’ has been updated as ‘MP3 Players and Really Cool Footwear.’ These phenomena are variously referred to as ‘viral,’ ‘tipping point,’ ‘word of mouth’ or ‘whisper’ marketing. (Gladwell; Godin; Henry; Lee; Rosen) Regardless of what you call it, the problem inspiring these promotional chats and arias is the same: advertisers can no longer count on getting and holding our attention. As Davenport and Beck, Brody and even Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon have noted, the more taxed public attention gets, the more valuable it becomes. By most industry accounts, the attention economy is an established reality. It represents a significant shift of emphasis away from traditional methods of reaching consumers, instead inspiring new thinking about how to create lasting, flexible and evolving relationships with target audiences. The attention economy is a complicated and often contradictory response to a media environment that appears less and less reliable and to consumers who behaviour is often poorly understood, even mysterious (Elliott and Jankel-Elliott). This challenging backdrop, however, is only the beginning for a seemingly beleaguered music industry. Wherever one looks, from the rise of the very real threat of global piracy to the expansion of the video game industry to mobile phones and hand held players to increasing amounts of money spent on DVDs and ring tones, selling CDs has become almost a sideline. The main event is the profitable use and reuse of the industry’s vast stores of intellectual property through all manner of media, most which didn’t exist ten years ago. Indeed, the ‘Idol’ phenomenon shows us how the music industry has been incorporating its jealously-guarded intellectual property and familiar modes of industrial self-presentation into existing media environments to build long-term relationships with consumers through television, radio, DVDs, CDs, the internet and mobile phones. Further, ‘Idol’s’ producers have supplemented more traditional models of communication by taking direct and explicit account of how and where audiences use a wide variety of media. The broad range of opportunities to participate in ‘Idol’ is central to its success. It demonstrates a willingness on the part of producers to accept the necessity of bending somewhat to the audience’s existing and evolving uses of the media. In short, they are simply not all that fussy about how participation actually happens so long as it does. Producers allow for many kinds of participation in order to constantly offer more specific and more active levels of involvement. ‘Idol’ has transformed consumer relationships within the music industry by coaxing into being ever more intimate, active and reciprocal relationships over the course of the contest by encouraging increasingly specific acts by consumers to complete a continual series of transactions. The Use and Reuse of Celebrity In many quarters, ‘Australian Idol’ has become a byword for bullshit. The competition seems rigged and the contestants are not seen as ‘real’ musicians in large part because their experience appears to be so transparent and so transparently commercial. As the mythology of the music industry has traditionally had it, deserving pop stars are established as celebrities through what is a more or less a linear progression. Early success is based on a carefully constructed sense of authentic cultural production. Credibility is established through a series of contestable affiliations to ostensibly organic music cultures, earned through artistic development and the hard slog of touring and practice (see Maxwell 118). The fraught possibilities of mainstream success continually beckon to ‘real’ musicians as they either ‘crossover’ or remain independent all the while trying to preserve some elusive measure of public honesty. As this mythology was implicitly unavailable to the producers of ‘Idol,’ a different kind of authenticity had to be constructed. Instead of a ‘battles of the bands’ (read: brands) contest, ‘Idol’ producers chose to present ‘unbranded’ aspirants (“Sydney Audition”). These hopefuls are presented as appealingly ambitious or merely optimistic individuals with varying degrees of talent. Those truly blessed, not only with talent but the drive to work it into saleable shape, would be carefully chosen from the multitude and offered an opportunity to make the most of their inherent yet unformed ability. Thus, their authenticity was assumed to be an implicit, inchoate presence, requiring the guiding hand of insiders to reach full flower. Through the facilitation of competition and direction provided in the form of knowledgeable music industry veterans who never tire of giving stern admonitions to indifferent performers who do not take full advantage of the opportunity presented to them, contestants are asked to prove themselves through an extended period of intense self-presentation and recreation. The lengthy televised, but tightly-edited auditions, complete with extensive commentary and the occasional gnashing of teeth on the part of the panel of experts and rejected contestants, demonstrate to us the earnest intent of those involved. Importantly, the authenticity of those proceeding through the contest is never firmly established, but has to be continually and strategically re-established. Each weighty choice of repertoire, wardrobe and performance style can only break them; each successful performance only raises the stakes. This tense maintenance of status as a deserving celebrity runs in tandem with the increasingly attentive and reciprocal relationship between the producers and the audience. The relationship begins with what has proved to be a compelling first act. Thousands of ‘ordinary’ Australians line up outside venues throughout the country, many sleeping in car parks and on footpaths, practising, singing and performing for the mobile camera crews. We are presented with their youthful vigour in all its varied guises. We cannot help but be convinced of the worth of those who survive such a process. The chosen few who are told with a flourish ‘You’re going to Sydney’ are then faced with what appears to be a daunting challenge, to establish themselves in short order as a performer with ‘the X factor’ (“Australian Idol” 14 July 2004). A fine voice and interesting look must be supplemented with those intangible qualities that result in wide public appeal. Yet these qualities are only made available to the public and the performer because of the contest itself. When the public is eventually asked to participate directly, it is to both produce and ratify exactly these ambiguous attributes. More than this, contestants need our help just to survive. Their celebrity is almost shockingly unstable, more fleeting than its surrounding rhetoric and context might suggest and under constant, expected threat. From round to round, favourites can easily become also rans–wild cards who limp out of one round, but storm through the next. The drama can only be heightened, securing our interest by requiring our input. As any advertiser can tell you, an effective campaign must end in action on our part. Through text message and phone voting as well as extensive ‘fan management’ through internet chat rooms and bulletin boards (see Stahl 228; http://au.messages.yahoo.com/australianidol/), our channelled ‘viral’ participation both shapes and completes the meanings of the contest. These active and often inventive relationships (http://au.australianidol.yahoo.com/fancentral/) allow the eventual ‘Idol’ to claim the credibility the means of their success otherwise renders suspect and these activities appear to consummate the relationship. However, the relationship continues well beyond the gala final. In a fascinating re-narration of the first series of ‘Australian Idol,’ Australian Idol: The Winner’s Story aired on the Friday following the final night of the contest. The story of the newly crowned Idol, Guy Sebastian, was presented in an hour long program that showed his home life, his life as a voice teacher in the Adelaide suburbs and his subsequent journey to stardom. The clips depicting his life prior to ‘Idol’ were of ambiguous vintage, cleverly silent on the exact date of production; somehow they were not quite in the past or the future, but floated in some eternal in-between. When his ‘Australian Idol’ experience was chronicled, after the second commercial break, we were allowed to see an intimate portrait of an anxious contestant transformed into ‘Your Australian Idol.’ There could be no doubt of the virtue of Sebastian’s struggles, nor of his well-earned victory. ‘New’ footage began with the sudden sensation reluctantly commenting on other contestants at the original Adelaide cattle call at the prompting of the mobile camera crew and ended with his teary-eyed mother exultant at the final decision as she stood in the front row at the Opera House. Further, not only is the entire run of the first series dramatically recounted in documentary format on the Australian Idol: Greatest Moments DVD, framed by Sebastian’s humble triumph, so are the stories of each member of the Final 12 and the paths they took through the contest. These reiterations serve to reinforce not only Sebastian’s status, but the status of the program itself. They confirm the benevolent success of the industry it so dutifully profiles. We are taken behind the curtain, allowed to see the machinery of stardom grind inevitably to a conclusion, knowing we will be allowed back again when the time is right. Whereas ‘Idol’ is routinely pilloried for its crass commercialism, it remains an unavoidable success. Viewers keep tuning in, advertisers still clamour to sponsor all aspects of the production and the CDs keep selling. Most importantly, the music industry has a showcase for its own operations. The structures of feeling it exists to produce take on a kind of subtle explicitness that ensures their perpetuation. Within an industry faced with threats perceived to be foundational, the creators of ‘Idol’ have produced an audacious and arrogant spectacle. They have made a profitable virtue out of an economic necessity. The expensive and unpredictable process of finding and nurturing new talent has not only been made more reliable, but ‘Idol’ has shown that it can actually turn a profit. The brand of celebrity produced by Idol possesses no mere sheen of populist approval, but embodies that more valuable commodity: popular attention, however reluctant or enthusiastic it may be. References “Australian Idol.” Ten Network, Sydney, 14 July 2004. “Australian Idol: The Winner’s Story.” Ten Network, Sydney, 21 November 2003. Australian Idol: Greatest Moments. Fremantle Media Operations, 2004. Brody, E.W. “The ‘Attention’ Economy.” Public Relations Quarterly 46.3 (2001): 18-21. Davenport, T., and J. Beck. “The Strategy and Structure of Firms in the Attention Economy.” Ivey Business Journal 66.4 (2002): 49–55. Elliott, R., and N. Jankel-Elliott. “Using Ethnography in Strategic Consumer Research.” Qualitative Market Research 6.4 (2003): 215-23. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002. Godin, Seth. Unleashing the Ideavirus. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Henry, Amy. “How Buzz Marketing Works for Teens.” Advertising and Marketing to Children April-June (2003): 3-10. Lee, Julian. “Stealth Marketers Ready to Railroad the Unsuspecting.” Sydney Morning Herald 24-5 July 2004: 3. Maxwell, Ian. “True to the Music: Authenticity, Articulation and Authorship in Sydney Hip-Hop Culture.” Social Semiotics 4.1-2 (1994): 117–37. Negus, Keith. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge, 1999. Negus, Keith. Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. London: Edward Arnold, 1992. Rosen, Emanuel. The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word of Mouth Marketing. London: Harper Collins, 2000. Stahl, Matthew. “A Moment like This: American Idol and Narratives of Meritocracy.” Bad Music: Music We Love to Hate. Eds. C. Washburne and M. Derno. New York: Routledge, 2004. 212–32. “Sydney Auditions: Conditions of Participation in the Australian Idol Audition.” Australian Idol Website 10 June 2004. http://au.australianidol.com.au>. Turner, G., F. Bonner, and P.D. Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Fairchild, Charles. "'Australian Idol' and the Attention Economy." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/09-fairchild.php>. APA Style Fairchild, C. (Nov. 2004) "'Australian Idol' and the Attention Economy," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/09-fairchild.php>.

Introduction Taste is considered a gustatory and physiological sense. It is also something that can be developed over time. In Bourdieu’s work taste is a matter of distinction, and a means of drawing boundaries between groups about what constitutes “good” taste. In this context it is necessary to perform or display tastes over and over again. This then becomes part of a cultural habitus, a code that can be read and understood. In the field of “feeding the family” (DeVault) for respondents in my study, healthy food prepared from scratch became the symbol of appropriate mothering, a means of demonstrating a middle class habitus, distinction, and taste. I use the term “family foodways” to emphasize how feeding the family encapsulates more than buying, preparing, cooking, and serving food, it incorporates the ways in which families practice, perform, and “do” family food. These family foodways are about the family of today, as well as an investment in the family of the future, through the reproduction and reinforcement of cultural values and tastes around food. In the UK, there are divisions between what might be considered appropriate and inappropriate family foodways, and a vilification of alternatives that lack time and effort. Warde identifies four antinomies of taste used by advertisers in the marketing of food: “novelty and tradition,” “health and indulgence,” “economy and extravagance,” and “convenience and care” (174). In relation to family foodways, there are inherent tensions in these antinomies, and for mothers in my study in order to demonstrate “care”, it was necessary to eschew “convenience.” Indeed, the time and effort involved in feeding the family healthy meals prepared from scratch becomes an important symbol of middle class taste and investment in the future. The alternative can be illustrated by reference to the media furore around Jamie Oliver’s comments in a Radio Times interview (that coincided with a TV series and book launch) in which Deans quotes Oliver: "You might remember that scene in [a previous series] of Ministry of Food, with the mum and the kid eating chips and cheese out of Styrofoam containers, and behind them is a massive f****** TV.” Oliver uses cultural markers of taste to highlight how “mum” was breaking the rules and conventions associated with appropriate or aspirational class based family foodways. We assume that the “mum and kid” were using their fingers, and not a knife and fork, and that the meal was not on a plate around a table but instead eaten in front of a “massive f****** TV.” Oliver uses these cultural markers of taste and distinction to commit acts of symbolic violence, defined by Bourdieu and Wacquant, as “the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity” (67), to confer judgement and moral approbation regarding family foodways. In this example, a lack of time and effort is associated with a lack of taste. And although this can be linked with poverty, this is not about a lack of money, as the mother and child are eating in front of a big television. Oliver is therefore drawing attention to how family foodways become cultural markers of taste and distinction. I argue that appropriate family foodways have become significant markers of taste, and draw on qualitative data to emphasise how respondents use these to position themselves as “good” mothers. Indeed, the manner of presenting, serving, and eating food fulfils the social function of legitimising social difference (Bourdieu 6). Indeed, Bourdieu claims that mothers are significant as the convertors of economic capital into cultural capital for their children; they are “sign bearing” carriers of taste (Skeggs 22). In taking time to prepare healthy meals from scratch, sourcing organic and/or local ingredients, accommodating each individual household members food preferences or individual health needs, being able to afford to waste food, to take time over the preparation, and eating of a meal around the table together, are all aspects of an aspirational model of feeding the family. This type of intensive effort around feeding becomes a legitimate means of demonstrating cultural distinction and taste. Research Background This paper draws on data from a qualitative study conducted over nine months in 2011. I carried out a series of asynchronous on-line interviews with seventy-five mostly middle class women and men between the ages of twenty-seven and eighty-five. One third of the respondents were male. Two thirds were parents at different stages in the life course, from those who were new to parenting to grand parents. There was also a range of family types including lone parents, and co-habiting and married couples with children (and step-children). The focus of the inquiry was food over the life course and respondents were invited to write their own autobiographical food narratives. Once respondents agreed to participate, I wrote to them: What I’m really after is your “food story.” Perhaps, this will include your earliest food memories, favourite foods, memorable food occasions, whether your eating habits have changed over time and why this may be. Also, absolutely anything food related that you'd like to share with me. For some, if this proved difficult, we engaged in an on-line interview in which I asked a series of questions centred on how they developed their own eating and cooking habits. I did not set out to question respondents specifically about “healthy” or “unhealthy” foodways and did not mention these terms at all. It was very much an open invitation for them to tell their stories in their words and on their terms. It was the common vocabularies (Mills) across the narratives that I was looking to discover, rather than directing these vocabularies in any particular way. I conducted several levels of analysis on the data and identified four themes on the family, health, the body, and the foodie. This discussion is based on the narratives I identified within the family theme. A Taste for “Healthy” Family Foodways When setting out on this research journey, I anticipated a considerable shift in gender roles within the home and a negotiated family model in which “everything could be negotiated” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim xxi), especially “feeding the family” (De-Vault). Considering the rise of male celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver and the development of a distinct foodie identity (Naccarato and LeBesco, Johnston and Baumann, Cairns et al.), I envisaged that men would be more likely to take on this role. Given women’s roles outside the home, I also envisaged the use of convenience food, ready meals, and take-away food. However, what emerged was that women were highly resistant to any notion of relinquishing the responsibility for “feeding the family” (DeVault). Indeed, the women who were parents were keen to demonstrate how they engaged in preparing healthy, home-cooked meals from scratch for their families, despite having working identities. This commitment to healthy family foodways was used as a means of aligning themselves with an intensive mothering ideology (Hays) and to distance themselves from the alternative. It was a means of drawing distinctions and symbolising taste. When it comes to feeding the family, the “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 167) afforded to mothers who transgress the boundaries of appropriate mothering by feeding their children unhealthy and/or convenience food, meant that mothers in my study only fed their children healthy food. It would be inconceivable for them to admit to anything else. This I consider a consequence of dualist and absolutist approaches to food and foodways, whereby “convenience” food continues to be demonised in family food discourses because it symbolises “lack” on many levels, specifically a lack of care and a lack of taste. This was not something I had anticipated at the beginning of the study; that mothers would not use convenience food and only prepared “healthy” meals was a surprise. This is indicative of the power of healthy food discourses and inappropriate family foodways, as symbolised by the mum feeding her kid “cheese and chips out of a Styrofoam container,” in informing respondents’ food narratives. I gained full ethical approval from my university and all respondents were given pseudonyms. The quotes I use here are taken from the narratives within the family theme and are representative of this theme. I cannot include all respondents’ narratives. I include quotes from Faye, a forty-six year-old Secretary married with one child; Laura, a thirty-five year-old Teaching Assistant, married with two children; Zoe, a forty-four year-old Recruiter, married with two children; Gaby, a fifty-one year old Architect Designer, married with two children; Ophelia, a fifty-three year-old Author, married with two children; Valerie, a forty-six year-old Website Manager, single with one child; and Chloe, a forty-six year old Occupational Health Sex Advisor, co-habiting with two children at home. Cooking “proper” healthy family meals is a skilled practice (Short) and a significant aspect of meaningful family-integration (Moiso et al.). It has symbolic and cultural capital and is indicative of a particular middle class habitus and this relates to taste in its broadest sense. Hence, Faye writes: My mum was a fabulous, creative cook; she loved reading cookery books and took great pride in her cooking. We didn't have a lot of money when we were young, but my mum was a very creative cook and every meal was completely delicious and homemade. Faye, despite working herself, and in common with many women juggling the second shift (Hochschild and Machung), is solely responsible for feeding her family. Indeed, Faye’s comments are strikingly similar to those in DeVault’s research carried out over twenty years ago; one of DeVault’s participants was quoted as saying that, “as soon as I get up on the morning or before I go to bed I’m thinking of what we’re going to eat tomorrow” (56). It is significant that cultural changes in the twenty years since DeVaults’ study were not reflected in respondents’ narratives. Despite women working outside of the home, men moving into the kitchen, and easy access to a whole range of convenience foods, women in my study adhered to “healthy” family foodways as markers of taste and distinction. Two decades later, Faye comments: Oh my goodness! I wake up each morning and the first thing I think about is what are we going to have for supper! It's such a drag, as I can never think of anything new or inspirational, despite the fact that we have lots of lovely cookery books! In many ways, these comments serve to reinforce further the status of “feeding the family” (DeVault) as central to maternal identity and part of delineating distinction and taste. Faye, in contrast to her own mother, has the additional pressure of having to cook new and inspirational food. Indeed, if preparing and purchasing food for herself or her family, Faye writes: I would make a packed lunch of something I really enjoyed eating, that's healthy, balanced and nutritious, with a little treat tucked in! […] I just buy things that are healthy and nutritious and things that might be interesting to appear in [my daughter’s] daily lunch box! However, by “just buying things that are healthy”, Faye is contributing to the notion that feeding the family healthily is easy, natural, care work and part of a particular middle class habitus. Again, this is part of what distinguishes cultural approaches to family foodways. Health and healthiness are part of a neo-liberal approach that is about a taste for the future. It is not about instant gratification, but about safeguarding health. Faye positions herself as the “guardian of health” (Beagan et al. 662). This demonstrates the extent to which the caringscape and healthscape can be intertwined (McKie et al.), as well as how health discourses seep into family foodways, whereby a “good mother” ensures the health of her children through cooking/providing healthy food or by being engaged in emotion (food) work. Faye reiterates this by writing, “if I have time [my cooking skills] […] are very good, if I don't they are rumbled together! But everything I cook is cooked with love!” Hence, this emotion work is not considered work at all, but an expression of love. Hence, in terms of distinction and taste, even when cooking is rushed it is conceptualised in the context of being prepared with love, in opposition to the cultural symbol of the mother and child “eating cheese and chips out of a Styrofoam container.” Convenience “Lacks” Taste In the context of Warde’s care and convenience antinomy, food associated with convenience is considered inappropriate. Cooking a family meal from scratch demonstrates care, convenience food for mothers symbolises “lack” on many levels. This lack of care is interwoven into a symbolic capital that supposes a lack of time, education, cultural capital, economic capital, and therefore a lack of taste. Hence, Laura writes: We never buy cakes and eat very few convenience foods, apart from the odd fish finger in a wrap, or a tin of beans. Ready meals and oven chips don’t appeal to me and I want my kids to grow up eating real food. It is notable that Laura makes the distinction between convenience and “real” food. Similarly, Zoe claims: We eat good interesting food every day at home and a takeaway once in a blue moon (2–3 times a year). Ready meals are unheard of here and we eat out sometimes (once a month). In Gaby’s account she makes reference to: “junk food, synthetic food and really overly creamy/stodgy cheap calorie foods” and claims that this kind of food makes her feel “revolted.” In James’s research she makes connections between “junk food” and “junk families.” In Gaby’s account she has a corporeal reaction to the thought of the type of food associated with cheapness and convenience. Ophelia notes that: After 15 years of daily cooking for my family I have become much more confident and proficient in food and what it really means. Today I balance the weekly meals between vegetarian, pasta, fish and meat and we have a lot of salad. I have been trying to cook less meat, maybe twice or sometimes including a roast at weekends, three times a week. Teens need carbs so I cook them most evenings but I don’t eat carbs myself in the evening now unless it’s a pasta dish we are all sharing. Here, Ophelia is highlighting the balance between her desires and the nutritional needs of her children. The work of feeding the family is complex and incorporates a balance of different requirements. The need to display appropriate mothering through feeding the family healthy meals cooked from scratch, was especially pertinent for women working and living on their own with children, such as Valerie: I am also responsible for feeding my daughter […] I make a great effort to make sure she is getting a balanced diet. To this end I nearly always cook meals from scratch. I use meal planners to get organised. I also have to budget quite tightly and meal planning helps with this. I aim to ensure we eat fish a couple of times a week, chicken a couple of times of week, red meat maybe once or twice and vegetarian once or twice a week. We always sit down to eat together at the table, even if it is just the two of us. It gives us a chance to talk and focus on each other. It is notable that Valerie insists that they sit down to eat at a table. This is a particular aspect of a middle class habitus and one that distinguishes Valerie’s family foodways from others, despite their low income. Hence, “proper” mothering is about cooking “proper” meals from scratch, even or perhaps especially if on a limited budget or having the sole responsibility for childcare. Chloe claims: I like to cook from scratch and meals can take time so I have to plan that around work [...] I use cookbooks for ideas for quick suppers [...] thinking about it I do spend quite a lot of time thinking about what I’m going to cook. I shop with meals in mind for each night of the week [...] this will depend on what’s available in the shops and what looks good, and then what time I get home. Here, food provision is ultimately tied up with class and status and again the provision of good “healthy” food is about good “healthy” parenting. It is about time and the lack of it. A lack of time due to having to work outside of the home and the lack of time to prepare or care about preparing healthy meals from scratch. Convenience food is clearly associated with low socio-economic status, a particular working class habitus and lack of care. Conclusion In an era of heightened neo-liberal individualism, there was little evidence of a “negotiated family model” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim) within respondents’ narratives. Mothers in my study went to great lengths to emphasise that they fed their children “healthy” food prepared from scratch. Feeding the family is a central aspect of maternal identity, with intensive mothering practices (Hays) associated with elite cultural capital and a means of drawing distinctions between groups. Hence, despite working full time or part time, the blurring of boundaries between home and work, and the easy availability of convenience foods, ready-meals, and take-away food, women in my study were committed to feeding the family healthy meals cooked from scratch as a means of differentiating their family foodways from others. Dualist and absolutist approaches to food and foodways means that unhealthy and convenience food and foodways are demonised. They are derided and considered indicative of lack on many levels, especially in terms of lacking taste in its broadest sense. Unhealthy or convenient family foodways are associated with “other” (working class) mothering practices, whereby a lack of care indicates a lack of education, time, money, cultural capital, and taste. There are rigid cultural scripts of mothering, especially for middle class mothers concerned with distancing themselves from the symbol of the mum who feeds her children convenience food, or “cheese and chips out of Styrofoam containers in front of a f***ing big television.” References Beagan, Brenda, Gwen Chapman, Andrea D’Sylva, and Raewyn Bassett. “‘It’s Just Easier for Me to Do It’: Rationalizing the Family Division of Foodwork.” Sociology 42.4 (2008): 653–71. Beck, Ulrich, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Individualization, Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences. London: Sage, 2002. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 2002 [1992]. Cairns, Kate, Josée Johnston, and Shyon Baumann. “Caring about Food: Doing Gender in the Foodie Kitchen.” Gender and Society 24.5 (2010): 591–615. Deans, Jason. “Jamie Oliver Bemoans Chips, Cheese and Giant TVs of Modern-day Poverty.” The Guardian 27 Aug. 2013: 3. DeVault, Marjorie I. Feeding the Family. London: U of Chicago P., 1991. Hays, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1996. Hochschild, Arlie Russell, and Anne Machung, The Second Shift (2nd ed). London: Penguin Books, 2003. James, Allison. “Children’s Food: Reflections on Politics, Policy and Practices.” London: BSA Food Studies Conference, 2010. 3 Dec. 2013. ‹http://www.britsoc.co.uk/media/24962/AllisonJames.ppt‎›. James, Allison, Anne-Trine Kjørholt, and Vebjørg Tingstad. Eds. Children, Food and Identity in Everyday Life, London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Johnston, Josée, and Shyon Baumann. Foodies, Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Kitchen. London: Routledge, 2010. McKie, Linda, Susan Gregory, and Sophia Bowlby. “Shadow Times: The Temporal and Spatial Frameworks and Experiences of Caring and Working.” Sociology 36.4 (2002): 897–924. Mills, Charles Wright. The Sociological Imagination. London: Penguin, 1959. Naccarato, Peter, and Kathleen LeBesco. Culinary Capital. London: Berg, 2012. Short, Frances. Kitchen Secrets: The Meaning of Cooking in Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Skeggs, Beverley. Class, Self and Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Warde, Alan. Consumption, Food and Taste. London: Sage, 1997.

On the morning of Thursday, 4 May 2006, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held an open hearing entitled “Terrorist Use of the Internet.” The Intelligence committee meeting was scheduled to take place in Room 1302 of the Longworth Office Building, a Depression-era structure with a neoclassical façade. Because of a dysfunctional elevator, some of the congressional representatives were late to the meeting. During the testimony about the newest political applications for cutting-edge digital technology, the microphones periodically malfunctioned, and witnesses complained of “technical problems” several times. By the end of the day it seemed that what was to be remembered about the hearing was the shocking revelation that terrorists were using videogames to recruit young jihadists. The Associated Press wrote a short, restrained article about the hearing that only mentioned “computer games and recruitment videos” in passing. Eager to have their version of the news item picked up, Reuters made videogames the focus of their coverage with a headline that announced, “Islamists Using US Videogames in Youth Appeal.” Like a game of telephone, as the Reuters videogame story was quickly re-run by several Internet news services, each iteration of the title seemed less true to the exact language of the original. One Internet news service changed the headline to “Islamic militants recruit using U.S. video games.” Fox News re-titled the story again to emphasise that this alert about technological manipulation was coming from recognised specialists in the anti-terrorism surveillance field: “Experts: Islamic Militants Customizing Violent Video Games.” As the story circulated, the body of the article remained largely unchanged, in which the Reuters reporter described the digital materials from Islamic extremists that were shown at the congressional hearing. During the segment that apparently most captured the attention of the wire service reporters, eerie music played as an English-speaking narrator condemned the “infidel” and declared that he had “put a jihad” on them, as aerial shots moved over 3D computer-generated images of flaming oil facilities and mosques covered with geometric designs. Suddenly, this menacing voice-over was interrupted by an explosion, as a virtual rocket was launched into a simulated military helicopter. The Reuters reporter shared this dystopian vision from cyberspace with Western audiences by quoting directly from the chilling commentary and describing a dissonant montage of images and remixed sound. “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters,” a narrator’s voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults. Then came a recording of President George W. Bush’s September 16, 2001, statement: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” It was edited to repeat the word “crusade,” which Muslims often define as an attack on Islam by Christianity. According to the news reports, the key piece of evidence before Congress seemed to be a film by “SonicJihad” of recorded videogame play, which – according to the experts – was widely distributed online. Much of the clip takes place from the point of view of a first-person shooter, seen as if through the eyes of an armed insurgent, but the viewer also periodically sees third-person action in which the player appears as a running figure wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh, who dashes toward the screen with a rocket launcher balanced on his shoulder. Significantly, another of the player’s hand-held weapons is a detonator that triggers remote blasts. As jaunty music plays, helicopters, tanks, and armoured vehicles burst into smoke and flame. Finally, at the triumphant ending of the video, a green and white flag bearing a crescent is hoisted aloft into the sky to signify victory by Islamic forces. To explain the existence of this digital alternative history in which jihadists could be conquerors, the Reuters story described the deviousness of the country’s terrorist opponents, who were now apparently modifying popular videogames through their wizardry and inserting anti-American, pro-insurgency content into U.S.-made consumer technology. One of the latest video games modified by militants is the popular “Battlefield 2” from leading video game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc of Redwood City, California. Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts, said enthusiasts often write software modifications, known as “mods,” to video games. “Millions of people create mods on games around the world,” he said. “We have absolutely no control over them. It’s like drawing a mustache on a picture.” Although the Electronic Arts executive dismissed the activities of modders as a “mustache on a picture” that could only be considered little more than childish vandalism of their off-the-shelf corporate product, others saw a more serious form of criminality at work. Testifying experts and the legislators listening on the committee used the video to call for greater Internet surveillance efforts and electronic counter-measures. Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source. Ironically, the moment in the movie from which the sound clip is excerpted is one about intelligence gathering. As an agent of Team America, a fictional elite U.S. commando squad, the hero of the film’s all-puppet cast, Gary Johnston, is impersonating a jihadist radical inside a hostile Egyptian tavern that is modelled on the cantina scene from Star Wars. Additional laughs come from the fact that agent Johnston is accepted by the menacing terrorist cell as “Hakmed,” despite the fact that he utters a series of improbable clichés made up of incoherent stereotypes about life in the Middle East while dressed up in a disguise made up of shoe polish and a turban from a bathroom towel. The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists. It wasn’t intended for the purpose what it was portrayed to be by the media. So no I don’t regret making a funny video . . . why should I? The only thing I regret is thinking that news from Reuters was objective and always right. The least they could do is some online research before publishing this. If they label me al-Qaeda just for making this silly video, that makes you think, what is this al-Qaeda? And is everything al-Qaeda? Although Sonic Jihad dismissed his own work as “silly” or “funny,” he expected considerably more from a credible news agency like Reuters: “objective” reporting, “online research,” and fact-checking before “publishing.” Within the week, almost all of the salient details in the Reuters story were revealed to be incorrect. SonicJihad’s film was not made by terrorists or for terrorists: it was not created by “Islamic militants” for “Muslim youths.” The videogame it depicted had not been modified by a “tech-savvy militant” with advanced programming skills. Of course, what is most extraordinary about this story isn’t just that Reuters merely got its facts wrong; it is that a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play. Based on their exchanges in the public record, elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal. This environment of cultural reaction can be used to explain why policy makers’ reaction to terrorists’ use of networked communication and digital media actually tells us more about our own American ideologies about technology and rhetoric in a contemporary information environment. When the experts come forward at the Sonic Jihad hearing to “walk us through the media and some of the products,” they present digital artefacts of an information economy that mirrors many of the features of our own consumption of objects of electronic discourse, which seem dangerously easy to copy and distribute and thus also create confusion about their intended meanings, audiences, and purposes. From this one hearing we can see how the reception of many new digital genres plays out in the public sphere of legislative discourse. Web pages, videogames, and Weblogs are mentioned specifically in the transcript. The main architecture of the witnesses’ presentation to the committee is organised according to the rhetorical conventions of a PowerPoint presentation. Moreover, the arguments made by expert witnesses about the relationship of orality to literacy or of public to private communications in new media are highly relevant to how we might understand other important digital genres, such as electronic mail or text messaging. The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property. To explain embarrassing leaks of infinitely replicable digital files, witness Ron Roughead says, “We’re not even sure that they don’t even hack into the kinds of spaces that hold photographs in order to get pictures that our forces have taken.” Another witness, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and International Affairs, Peter Rodman claims that “any video game that comes out, as soon as the code is released, they will modify it and change the game for their needs.” Thus, the implication of these witnesses’ testimony is that the release of code into the public domain can contribute to political subversion, much as covert intrusion into computer networks by stealthy hackers can. However, the witnesses from the Pentagon and from the government contractor SAIC often present a contradictory image of the supposed terrorists in the hearing transcripts. Sometimes the enemy is depicted as an organisation of technological masterminds, capable of manipulating the computer code of unwitting Americans and snatching their rightful intellectual property away; sometimes those from the opposing forces are depicted as pre-modern and even sub-literate political innocents. In contrast, the congressional representatives seem to focus on similarities when comparing the work of “terrorists” to the everyday digital practices of their constituents and even of themselves. According to the transcripts of this open hearing, legislators on both sides of the aisle express anxiety about domestic patterns of Internet reception. Even the legislators’ own Web pages are potentially disruptive electronic artefacts, particularly when the demands of digital labour interfere with their duties as lawmakers. Although the subject of the hearing is ostensibly terrorist Websites, Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California) bemoans the difficulty of maintaining her own official congressional site. As she observes, “So we are – as members, I think we’re very sensitive about what’s on our Website, and if I retained what I had on my Website three years ago, I’d be out of business. So we know that they have to be renewed. They go up, they go down, they’re rebuilt, they’re – you know, the message is targeted to the future.” In their questions, lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions. Representative Alcee Hastings (D-Florida) compares the polluting power of insurgent bloggers to that of influential online muckrakers from the American political Right. Hastings complains of “garbage on our regular mainstream news that comes from blog sites.” Representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) attempts to project a media-savvy persona by bringing up the “phenomenon of blogging” in conjunction with her questions about jihadist Websites in which she notes how Internet traffic can be magnified by cooperative ventures among groups of ideologically like-minded content-providers: “These Websites, and particularly the most active ones, are they cross-linked? And do they have kind of hot links to your other favorite sites on them?” At one point Representative Wilson asks witness Rodman if he knows “of your 100 hottest sites where the Webmasters are educated? What nationality they are? Where they’re getting their money from?” In her questions, Wilson implicitly acknowledges that Web work reflects influences from pedagogical communities, economic networks of the exchange of capital, and even potentially the specific ideologies of nation-states. It is perhaps indicative of the government contractors’ anachronistic worldview that the witness is unable to answer Wilson’s question. He explains that his agency focuses on the physical location of the server or ISP rather than the social backgrounds of the individuals who might be manufacturing objectionable digital texts. The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries. The residual subtexts in the witnesses’ conjectures about competing cultures of orality and literacy may tell us something about a reactionary rhetoric around videogames and digital culture more generally. According to the experts before Congress, the Middle Eastern audience for these videogames and Websites is limited by its membership in a pre-literate society that is only capable of abortive cultural production without access to knowledge that is archived in printed codices. Sometimes the witnesses before Congress seem to be unintentionally channelling the ideas of the late literacy theorist Walter Ong about the “secondary orality” associated with talky electronic media such as television, radio, audio recording, or telephone communication. Later followers of Ong extend this concept of secondary orality to hypertext, hypermedia, e-mail, and blogs, because they similarly share features of both speech and written discourse. Although Ong’s disciples celebrate this vibrant reconnection to a mythic, communal past of what Kathleen Welch calls “electric rhetoric,” the defence industry consultants express their profound state of alarm at the potentially dangerous and subversive character of this hybrid form of communication. The concept of an “oral tradition” is first introduced by the expert witnesses in the context of modern marketing and product distribution: “The Internet is used for a variety of things – command and control,” one witness states. “One of the things that’s missed frequently is how and – how effective the adversary is at using the Internet to distribute product. They’re using that distribution network as a modern form of oral tradition, if you will.” Thus, although the Internet can be deployed for hierarchical “command and control” activities, it also functions as a highly efficient peer-to-peer distributed network for disseminating the commodity of information. Throughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order. Witness Eric Michael describes the “oral tradition” and the conventions of communal life in the Middle East to emphasise the primacy of speech in the collective discursive practices of this alien population: “I’d like to point your attention to the media types and the fact that the oral tradition is listed as most important. The other media listed support that. And the significance of the oral tradition is more than just – it’s the medium by which, once it comes off the Internet, it is transferred.” The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era. The oral tradition now also has an aspect of rumor. A[n] event takes place. There is an explosion in a city. Rumor is that the United States Air Force dropped a bomb and is doing indiscriminate killing. This ends up being discussed on the street. It ends up showing up in a Friday sermon in a mosque or in another religious institution. It then gets recycled into written materials. Media picks up the story and broadcasts it, at which point it’s now a fact. In this particular case that we were telling you about, it showed up on a network television, and their propaganda continues to go back to this false initial report on network television and continue to reiterate that it’s a fact, even though the United States government has proven that it was not a fact, even though the network has since recanted the broadcast. In this example, many-to-many discussion on the “street” is formalised into a one-to many “sermon” and then further stylised using technology in a one-to-many broadcast on “network television” in which “propaganda” that is “false” can no longer be disputed. This “oral tradition” is like digital media, because elements of discourse can be infinitely copied or “recycled,” and it is designed to “reiterate” content. In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.” The film by SonicJihad is chosen as the final clip by the witnesses before Congress, because it allegedly combines many different types of emotional appeal, and thus it conveniently ties together all of the themes that the witnesses present to the legislators about unreliable oral or rhetorical sources in the Middle East: And there you see how all these products are linked together. And you can see where the games are set to psychologically condition you to go kill coalition forces. You can see how they use humor. You can see how the entire campaign is carefully crafted to first evoke an emotion and then to evoke a response and to direct that response in the direction that they want. Jihadist digital products, especially videogames, are effective means of manipulation, the witnesses argue, because they employ multiple channels of persuasion and carefully sequenced and integrated subliminal messages. To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses. This sharp criticism of the artful use of a presentation style that is “crafted” is ironic, given that the witnesses’ “compilation” of jihadist digital material is staged in the form of a carefully structured PowerPoint presentation, one that is paced to a well-rehearsed rhythm of “slide, please” or “next slide” in the transcript. The transcript also reveals that the members of the House Intelligence Committee were not the original audience for the witnesses’ PowerPoint presentation. Rather, when it was first created by SAIC, this “expert” presentation was designed for training purposes for the troops on the ground, who would be facing the challenges of deployment in hostile terrain. According to the witnesses, having the slide show showcased before Congress was something of an afterthought. Nonetheless, Congressman Tiahrt (R-KN) is so impressed with the rhetorical mastery of the consultants that he tries to appropriate it. As Tiarht puts it, “I’d like to get a copy of that slide sometime.” From the hearing we also learn that the terrorists’ Websites are threatening precisely because they manifest a polymorphously perverse geometry of expansion. For example, one SAIC witness before the House Committee compares the replication and elaboration of digital material online to a “spiderweb.” Like Representative Eshoo’s site, he also notes that the terrorists’ sites go “up” and “down,” but the consultant is left to speculate about whether or not there is any “central coordination” to serve as an organising principle and to explain the persistence and consistency of messages despite the apparent lack of a single authorial ethos to offer a stable, humanised, point of reference. In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.” Of course, to maintain their share of the government market, the Science Applications International Corporation also employs practices of publicity and promotion through the Internet and digital media. They use HTML Web pages for these purposes, as well as PowerPoint presentations and online video. The rhetoric of the Website of SAIC emphasises their motto “From Science to Solutions.” After a short Flash film about how SAIC scientists and engineers solve “complex technical problems,” the visitor is taken to the home page of the firm that re-emphasises their central message about expertise. The maps, uniforms, and specialised tools and equipment that are depicted in these opening Web pages reinforce an ethos of professional specialisation that is able to respond to multiple threats posed by the “global war on terror.” By 26 June 2006, the incident finally was being described as a “Pentagon Snafu” by ABC News. From the opening of reporter Jake Tapper’s investigative Webcast, established government institutions were put on the spot: “So, how much does the Pentagon know about videogames? Well, when it came to a recent appearance before Congress, apparently not enough.” Indeed, the very language about “experts” that was highlighted in the earlier coverage is repeated by Tapper in mockery, with the significant exception of “independent expert” Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology. If the Pentagon and SAIC deride the legitimacy of rhetoric as a cultural practice, Bogost occupies himself with its defence. In his recent book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost draws upon the authority of the “2,500 year history of rhetoric” to argue that videogames represent a significant development in that cultural narrative. Given that Bogost and his Watercooler Games Weblog co-editor Gonzalo Frasca were actively involved in the detective work that exposed the depth of professional incompetence involved in the government’s line-up of witnesses, it is appropriate that Bogost is given the final words in the ABC exposé. As Bogost says, “We should be deeply bothered by this. We should really be questioning the kind of advice that Congress is getting.” Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see. References ABC News. “Terrorist Videogame?” Nightline Online. 21 June 2006. 22 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2105341>. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Game Politics. “Was Congress Misled by ‘Terrorist’ Game Video? We Talk to Gamer Who Created the Footage.” 11 May 2006. http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/285129.html#cutid1>. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. julieb. “David Morgan Is a Horrible Writer and Should Be Fired.” Online posting. 5 May 2006. Dvorak Uncensored Cage Match Forums. http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php/topic,130.0.html>. Mahmood. “Terrorists Don’t Recruit with Battlefield 2.” GGL Global Gaming. 16 May 2006 http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3090>. Morgan, David. “Islamists Using U.S. Video Games in Youth Appeal.” Reuters online news service. 4 May 2006 http://today.reuters.com/news/ArticleNews.aspx?type=topNews &storyID=2006-05-04T215543Z_01_N04305973_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY- VIDEOGAMES.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc= NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2>. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London/New York: Methuen, 1982. Parker, Trey. Online posting. 7 May 2006. 9 May 2006 http://www.treyparker.com>. Plato. “Gorgias.” Plato: Collected Dialogues. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. Shrader, Katherine. “Pentagon Surfing Thousands of Jihad Sites.” Associated Press 4 May 2006. SonicJihad. “SonicJihad: A Day in the Life of a Resistance Fighter.” Online posting. 26 Dec. 2005. Planet Battlefield Forums. 9 May 2006 http://www.forumplanet.com/planetbattlefield/topic.asp?fid=13670&tid=1806909&p=1>. Tapper, Jake, and Audery Taylor. “Terrorist Video Game or Pentagon Snafu?” ABC News Nightline 21 June 2006. 30 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Technology/story?id=2105128&page=1>. U.S. Congressional Record. Panel I of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee, Subject: “Terrorist Use of the Internet for Communications.” Federal News Service. 4 May 2006. Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and the New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Losh, Elizabeth. "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>. APA Style Losh, E. (Oct. 2007) "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>.

What strikes me about the habits of the people who spend so much time on the Net—well, it’s so new that we don't know what will come next—is in fact precisely how niche in character it is. You ask people what nets they are on, and they’re all so specialised! The Argentines on the Argentine Net and so forth. And it’s particularly the Argentines who are not in Argentina. (Anderson, in Gower, par. 5) The preceding quotation, taken from his 1996 interview with Eric Gower, sees Benedict Anderson reflecting on the formation of imagined, transnational communities on the Internet. Anderson is, of course, famous for his work on how nationalism, as an “imagined community,” gets constructed through the shared consumption of print media (6-7, 26-27); although its readers will never all see each other face to face, people consuming a newspaper or novel in a shared language perceive themselves as members of a collective. In this more recent interview, Anderson recognised the specific groupings of people in online communities: Argentines who find themselves outside of Argentina link up online in an imagined diaspora community. Over the course of the last decade and a half since Anderson spoke about Argentinian migrants and diaspora communities, we have witnessed an exponential growth of new forms of digital communication, including social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), Weblogs, micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), and video-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube). Alongside these new means of communication, our current epoch of globalisation is also characterised by migration flows across, and between, all continents. In his book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai recognised that “the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation” have altered the ways the imagination operates. Furthermore, these two pillars, human motion and digital mediation, are in constant “flux” (44). The circulation of people and digitally mediatised content proceeds across and beyond boundaries of the nation-state and provides ground for alternative community and identity formations. Appadurai’s intervention has resulted in increasing awareness of local, transnational, and global networking flows of people, ideas, and culturally hybrid artefacts. In this article, we analyse the various innovative tactics taken up by migrant youth to imagine digital diasporas. Inspired by scholars such as Appadurai, Avtar Brah and Paul Gilroy, we tease out—from a postcolonial perspective—how digital diasporas have evolved over time from a more traditional understanding as constituted either by a vertical relationship to a distant homeland or a horizontal connection to the scattered transnational community (see Safran, Cohen) to move towards a notion of “hypertextual diaspora.” With hypertextual diaspora, these central axes which constitute the understanding of diaspora are reshuffled in favour of more rhizomatic formations where affiliations, locations, and spaces are constantly destabilised and renegotiated. Needless to say, diasporas are not homogeneous and resist generalisation, but in this article we highlight common ways in which young migrant Internet users renew the practices around diaspora connections. Drawing from research on various migrant populations around the globe, we distinguish three common strategies: (1) the forging of transnational public spheres, based on maintaining virtual social relations by people scattered across the globe; (2) new forms of digital diasporic youth branding; and (3) the cultural production of innovative hypertexts in the context of more rhizomatic digital diaspora formations. Before turning to discuss these three strategies, the potential of a postcolonial framework to recognise multiple intersections of diaspora and digital mediation is elaborated. Hypertext as a Postcolonial Figuration Postcolonial scholars, Appadurai, Gilroy, and Brah among others, have been attentive to diasporic experiences, but they have paid little attention to the specificity of digitally mediated diaspora experiences. As Maria Fernández observes, postcolonial studies have been “notoriously absent from electronic media practice, theory, and criticism” (59). Our exploration of what happens when diasporic youth go online is a first step towards addressing this gap. Conceptually, this is clearly an urgent need since diasporas and the digital inform each other in the most profound and dynamic of ways: “the Internet virtually recreates all those sites which have metaphorically been eroded by living in the diaspora” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 396). Writings on the Internet tend to favour either the “gold-rush” mentality, seeing the Web as a great equaliser and bringer of neoliberal progress for all, or the more pessimistic/technophobic approach, claiming that technologically determined spaces are exclusionary, white by default, masculine-oriented, and heteronormative (Everett 30, Van Doorn and Van Zoonen 261). For example, the recent study by Ito et al. shows that young people are not interested in merely performing a fiction in a parallel online world; rather, the Internet gets embedded in their everyday reality (Ito et al. 19-24). Real-life commercial incentives, power hierarchies, and hegemonies also get extended to the digital realm (Schäfer 167-74). Online interaction remains pre-structured, based on programmers’ decisions and value-laden algorithms: “people do not need a passport to travel in cyberspace but they certainly do need to play by the rules in order to function electronically” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 405). We began our article with a statement by Benedict Anderson, stressing how people in the Argentinian diaspora find their space on the Internet. Online avenues increasingly allow users to traverse and add hyperlinks to their personal websites in the forms of profile pages, the publishing of preferences, and possibilities of participating in and affiliating with interest-based communities. Online journals, social networking sites, streaming audio/video pages, and online forums are all dynamic hypertexts based on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding. HTML is the protocol of documents that refer to each other, constituting the backbone of the Web; every text that you find on the Internet is connected to a web of other texts through hyperlinks. These links are in essence at equal distance from each other. As well as being a technological device, hypertext is also a metaphor to think with. Figuratively speaking, hypertext can be understood as a non-hierarchical and a-centred modality. Hypertext incorporates multiplicity; different pathways are possible simultaneously, as it has “multiple entryways and exits” and it “connects any point to any other point” (Landow 58-61). Feminist theorist Donna Haraway recognised the dynamic character of hypertext: “the metaphor of hypertext insists on making connections as practice.” However, she adds, “the trope does not suggest which connections make sense for which purposes and which patches we might want to follow or avoid.” We can begin to see the value of approaching the Internet from the perspective of hypertext to make an “inquiry into which connections matter, why, and for whom” (128-30). Postcolonial scholar Jaishree K. Odin theorised how hypertextual webs might benefit subjects “living at the borders.” She describes how subaltern subjects, by weaving their own hypertextual path, can express their multivocality and negotiate cultural differences. She connects the figure of hypertext with that of the postcolonial: The hypertextual and the postcolonial are thus part of the changing topology that maps the constantly shifting, interpenetrating, and folding relations that bodies and texts experience in information culture. Both discourses are characterised by multivocality, multilinearity, openendedness, active encounter, and traversal. (599) These conceptions of cyberspace and its hypertextual foundations coalesce with understandings of “in-between”, “third”, and “diaspora media space” as set out by postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha and Brah. Bhabha elaborates on diaspora as a space where different experiences can be articulated: “These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation (4). (Dis-)located between the local and the global, Brah adds: “diaspora space is the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ are contested” (205). As youths who were born in the diaspora have begun to manifest themselves online, digital diasporas have evolved from transnational public spheres to differential hypertexts. First, we describe how transnational public spheres form one dimension of the mediation of diasporic experiences. Subsequently, we focus on diasporic forms of youth branding and hypertext aesthetics to show how digitally mediated practices can go beyond and transgress traditional formations of diasporas as vertically connected to a homeland and horizontally distributed in the creation of transnational public spheres. Digital Diasporas as Diasporic Public Spheres Mass migration and digital mediation have led to a situation where relationships are maintained over large geographical distances, beyond national boundaries. The Internet is used to create transnational imagined audiences formed by dispersed people, which Appadurai describes as “diasporic public spheres”. He observes that, as digital media “increasingly link producers and audiences across national boundaries, and as these audiences themselves start new conversations between those who move and those who stay, we find a growing number of diasporic public spheres” (22). Media and communication researchers have paid a lot of attention to this transnational dimension of the networking of dispersed people (see Brinkerhoff, Alonso and Oiarzabal). We focus here on three examples from three different continents. Most famously, media ethnographers Daniel Miller and Don Slater focused on the Trinidadian diaspora. They describe how “de Rumshop Lime”, a collective online chat room, is used by young people at home and abroad to “lime”, meaning to chat and hang out. Describing the users of the chat, “the webmaster [a Trini living away] proudly proclaimed them to have come from 40 different countries” (though massively dominated by North America) (88). Writing about people in the Greek diaspora, communication researcher Myria Georgiou traced how its mediation evolved from letters, word of mouth, and bulletins to satellite television, telephone, and the Internet (147). From the introduction of the Web, globally dispersed people went online to get in contact with each other. Meanwhile, feminist film scholar Anna Everett draws on the case of Naijanet, the virtual community of “Nigerians Living Abroad”. She shows how Nigerians living in the diaspora from the 1990s onwards connected in global transnational communities, forging “new black public spheres” (35). These studies point at how diasporic people have turned to the Internet to establish and maintain social relations, give and receive support, and share general concerns. Establishing transnational communicative networks allows users to imagine shared audiences of fellow diasporians. Diasporic imagination, however, goes beyond singular notions of this more traditional idea of the transnational public sphere, as it “has nowadays acquired a great figurative flexibility which mostly refers to practices of transgression and hybridisation” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Subjects” 208). Below we recognise another dimension of digital diasporas: the articulation of diasporic attachment for branding oneself. Mocro and Nikkei: Diasporic Attachments as a Way to Brand Oneself In this section, we consider how hybrid cultural practices are carried out over geographical distances. Across spaces on the Web, young migrants express new forms of belonging in their dealing with the oppositional motivations of continuity and change. The generational specificity of this experience can be drawn out on the basis of the distinction between “roots” and “routes” made by Paul Gilroy. In his seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Gilroy writes about black populations on both sides of the Atlantic. The double consciousness of migrant subjects is reflected by affiliating roots and routes as part of a complex cultural identification (19 and 190). As two sides of the same coin, roots refer to the stable and continuing elements of identities, while routes refer to disruption and change. Gilroy criticises those who are “more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation which is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes” (19). He stresses the importance of not just focusing on one of either roots or routes but argues for an examination of their interplay. Forming a response to discrimination and exclusion, young migrants in online networks turn to more positive experiences such as identification with one’s heritage inspired by generational specific cultural affiliations. Here, we focus on two examples that cross two continents, showing routed online attachments to “be(com)ing Mocro”, and “be(coming) Nikkei”. Figure 1. “Leipe Mocro Flavour” music video (Ali B) The first example, being and becoming “Mocro”, refers to a local, bi-national consciousness. The term Mocro originated on the streets of the Netherlands during the late 1990s and is now commonly understood as a Dutch honorary nickname for youths with Moroccan roots living in the Netherlands and Belgium. A 2003 song, Leipe mocro flavour (“Crazy Mocro Flavour”) by Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B, familiarised a larger group of people with the label (see Figure 1). Ali B’s song is exemplary for a wider community of youngsters who have come to identify themselves as Mocros. One example is the Marokkanen met Brainz – Hyves (Mo), a community page within the Dutch social networking site Hyves. On this page, 2,200 youths who identify as Mocro get together to push against common stereotypes of Moroccan-Dutch boys as troublemakers and thieves and Islamic Moroccan-Dutch girls as veiled carriers of backward traditions (Leurs, forthcoming). Its description reads, “I assume that this Hyves will be the largest [Mocro community]. Because logically Moroccans have brains” (our translation): What can you find here? Discussions about politics, religion, current affairs, history, love and relationships. News about Moroccan/Arabic Parties. And whatever you want to tell others. Use your brains. Second, “Nikkei” directs our attention to Japanese migrants and their descendants. The Discover Nikkei website, set up by the Japanese American National Museum, provides a revealing description of being and becoming Nikkei: As Nikkei communities form in Japan and throughout the world, the process of community formation reveals the ongoing fluidity of Nikkei populations, the evasive nature of Nikkei identity, and the transnational dimensions of their community formations and what it means to be Nikkei. (Japanese American National Museum) This site was set up by the Japanese American National Museum for Nikkei in the global diaspora to connect and share stories. Nikkei youths of course also connect elsewhere. In her ethnographic online study, Shana Aoyama found that the social networking site Hi5 is taken up in Peru by young people of Japanese heritage as an avenue for identity exploration. She found group confirmation based on the performance of Nikkei-ness, as well as expressions of individuality. She writes, “instead of heading in one specific direction, the Internet use of Nikkei creates a starburst shape of identity construction and negotiation” (119). Mocro-ness and Nikkei-ness are common collective identification markers that are not just straightforward nationalisms. They refer back to different homelands, while simultaneously they also clearly mark one’s situation of being routed outside of this homeland. Mocro stems from postcolonial migratory flows from the Global South to the West. Nikkei-ness relates to the interesting case of the Japanese diaspora, which is little accounted for, although there are many Japanese communities present in North and South America from before the Second World War. The context of Peru is revealing, as it was the first South American country to accept Japanese migrants. It now hosts the second largest South American Japanese diaspora after Brazil (Lama), and Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimoro, is also of Japanese origin. We can see how the importance of the nation-state gets blurred as diasporic youth, through cultural hybridisation of youth culture and ethnic ties, initiates subcultures and offers resistance to mainstream western cultural forms. Digital spaces are used to exert youthful diaspora branding. Networked branding includes expressing cultural identities that are communal and individual but also both local and global, illustrative of how “by virtue of being global the Internet can gift people back their sense of themselves as special and particular” (Miller and Slater 115). In the next section, we set out how youthful diaspora branding is part of a larger, more rhizomatic formation of multivocal hypertext aesthetics. Hypertext Aesthetics In this section, we set out how an in-between, or “liminal”, position, in postcolonial theory terms, can be a source of differential and multivocal cultural production. Appadurai, Bhabha, and Gilroy recognise that liminal positions increasingly leave their mark on the global and local flows of cultural objects, such as food, cinema, music, and fashion. Here, our focus is on how migrant youths turn to hypertextual forms of cultural production for a differential expression of digital diasporas. Hypertexts are textual fields made up of hyperlinks. Odin states that travelling through cyberspace by clicking and forging hypertext links is a form of multivocal digital diaspora aesthetics: The perpetual negotiation of difference that the border subject engages in creates a new space that demands its own aesthetic. This new aesthetic, which I term “hypertext” or “postcolonial,” represents the need to switch from the linear, univocal, closed, authoritative aesthetic involving passive encounters characterising the performance of the same to that of non-linear, multivocal, open, non-hierarchical aesthetic involving active encounters that are marked by repetition of the same with and in difference. (Cited in Landow 356-7) On their profile pages, migrant youth digitally author themselves in distinct ways by linking up to various sites. They craft their personal hypertext. These hypertexts display multivocal diaspora aesthetics which are personal and specific; they display personal intersections of affiliations that are not easily generalisable. In several Dutch-language online spaces, subjects from Dutch-Moroccan backgrounds have taken up the label Mocro as an identity marker. Across social networking sites such as Hyves and Facebook, the term gets included in nicknames and community pages. Think of nicknames such as “My own Mocro styly”, “Mocro-licious”, “Mocro-chick”. The term Mocro itself is often already multilayered, as it is often combined with age, gender, sexual preference, religion, sport, music, and generationally specific cultural affiliations. Furthermore, youths connect to a variety of groups ranging from feminist interests (“Women in Charge”), Dutch nationalism (“I Love Holland”), ethnic affiliations (“The Moroccan Kitchen”) to clothing (the brand H&M), and global junk food (McDonalds). These diverse affiliations—that are advertised online simultaneously—add nuance to the typical, one-dimensional stereotype about migrant youth, integration, and Islam in the context of Europe and Netherlands (Leurs, forthcoming). On the online social networking site Hi5, Nikkei youths in Peru, just like any other teenagers, express their individuality by decorating their personal profile page with texts, audio, photos, and videos. Besides personal information such as age, gender, and school information, Aoyama found that “a starburst” of diverse affiliations is published, including those that signal Japanese-ness such as the Hello Kitty brand, anime videos, Kanji writing, kimonos, and celebrities. Also Nikkei hyperlink to elements that can be identified as “Latino” and “Chino” (Chinese) (104-10). Furthermore, users can show their multiple affiliations by joining different “groups” (after which a hyperlink to the group community appears on the profile page). Aoyama writes “these groups stretch across a large and varied scope of topics, including that of national, racial/ethnic, and cultural identities” (2). These examples illustrate how digital diasporas encompass personalised multivocal hypertexts. With the widely accepted adagio “you are what you link” (Adamic and Adar), hypertextual webs can be understood as productions that reveal how diasporic youths choose to express themselves as individuals through complex sets of non-homogeneous identifications. Migrant youth connects to ethnic origin and global networks in eclectic and creative ways. The concept of “digital diaspora” therefore encapsulates both material and virtual (dis)connections that are identifiable through common traits, strategies, and aesthetics. Yet these hypertextual connections are also highly personalised and unique, offering a testimony to the fluid negotiations and intersections between the local and the global, the rooted and the diasporic. Conclusions In this article, we have argued that migrant youths render digital diasporas more complex by including branding and hypertextual aesthetics in transnational public spheres. Digital diasporas may no longer be understood simply in terms of their vertical relations to a homeland or place of origin or as horizontally connected to a clearly marked transnational community; rather, they must also be seen as engaging in rhizomatic digital practices, which reshuffle traditional understandings of origin and belonging. Contemporary youthful digital diasporas are therefore far more complex in their engagement with digital media than most existing theory allows: connections are hybridised, and affiliations are turned into practices of diasporic branding and becoming. There is a generational specificity to multivocal diaspora aesthetics; this specificity lies in the ways migrant youths show communal recognition and express their individuality through hypertext which combines affiliation to their national/ethnic “roots” with an embrace of other youth subcultures, many of them transnational. These two axes are constantly reshuffled and renegotiated online where, thanks to the technological possibilities of HTML hypertext, a whole range of identities and identifications may be brought together at any given time. We trust that these insights will be of interest in future discussion of online networks, transnational communities, identity formation, and hypertext aesthetics where much urgent and topical work remains to be done. References Adamic, Lada A., and Eytan Adar. “You Are What You Link.” 2001 Tenth International World Wide Web Conference, Hong Kong. 26 Apr. 2010. ‹http://www10.org/program/society/yawyl/YouAreWhatYouLink.htm›. Ali B. “Leipe Mocro Flavour.” ALIB.NL / SPEC Entertainment. 2007. 4 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www3.alib.nl/popupAlibtv.php?catId=42&contentId=544›. Alonso, Andoni, and Pedro J. Oiarzabal. Diasporas in the New Media Age. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2010. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006 (1983). Aoyama, Shana. Nikkei-Ness: A Cyber-Ethnographic Exploration of Identity among the Japanese Peruvians of Peru. Unpublished MA thesis. South Hadley: Mount Holyoke, 2007. 1 Feb. 2010 ‹http://hdl.handle.net/10166/736›. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. Brinkerhoff, Jennifer M. Digital Diasporas: Identity and Transnational Engagement. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: U College London P, 1997. Everett, Anna. Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace. Albany: SUNY, 2009. Fernández, María. “Postcolonial Media Theory.” Art Journal 58.3 (1999): 58-73. Georgiou, Myria. Diaspora, Identity and the Media: Diasporic Transnationalism and Mediated Spatialities. Creskill: Hampton Press, 2006. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Gower, Eric. “When the Virtual Becomes the Real: A Talk with Benedict Anderson.” NIRA Review, 1996. 19 Apr. 2010 ‹http://www.nira.or.jp/past/publ/review/96spring/intervi.html›. Haraway, Donna. Modest Witness@Second Millennium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. Ito, Mizuko, et al. Hanging Out, Messing Out, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. Japanese American National Museum. “Discover Nikkei: Japanese Migrants and Their Descendants.” Discover Nikkei, 2005. 4 Oct. 2010. ‹http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/›. Lama, Abraham. “Home Is Where the Heartbreak Is for Japanese-Peruvians.” Asia Times 16 Oct. 1999. 6 May 2010 ‹http://www.atimes.com/japan-econ/AJ16Dh01.html›. Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0. Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. Leurs, Koen. Identity, Migration and Digital Media. Utrecht: Utrecht University. PhD Thesis, forthcoming. Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. The Internet: An Etnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Mo. “Marokkanen met Brainz.” Hyves, 23 Feb. 2008. 4 Oct. 2010. ‹http://marokkaansehersens.hyves.nl/›. Odin, Jaishree K. “The Edge of Difference: Negotiations between the Hypertextual and the Postcolonial.” Modern Fiction Studies 43.3 (1997): 598-630. Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Diasporic Narratives @ Home Pages: The Future as Virtually Located.” Colonies – Missions – Cultures in the English-Speaking World. Ed. Gerhard Stilz. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001. 396–406. Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Diasporic Subjects and Migration.” Thinking Differently: A Reader in European Women's Studies. Ed. Gabrielle Griffin and Rosi Braidotti. London: Zed Books, 2002. 205–20. Safran, William. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1.1 (1991): 83-99. Schäfer, Mirko T. Bastard Culture! How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2011. Van Doorn, Niels, and Liesbeth van Zoonen. “Theorizing Gender and the Internet: Past, Present, and Future.” Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics. Ed. Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard. London: Routledge. 261-74.

Scores of farm workers on hunger strike in the US. A campaigner for affordable housing abducted in Cape Town. Tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators marching in Istanbul. None of those stories made my daily paper — instead, I read them all this morning on the global Indymedia network. Developments in communication technologies have often enabled new approaches to the production, distribution and reception of news. In this article, using Carey’s analysis of the impacts of the telegraph (1989) and Burnett and Marshall’s discussion of “informational news” (2003) as starting points, I want to offer some examples from the brief history of the Indymedia movement to show how the Net is making possible a significant shift in who gets to make the news. The telegraph offers a number of useful perspectives from which to consider the impacts of the Net, and there are some striking parallels between the dot.com boom of the 1990s and the dot.dash boom of the 19th century. Telegraphy, writes James Carey, “permitted for the first time the effective separation of communication from transportation” (203). The telegraph was not only an instrument of business, but “a thing to think with, an agency for the alteration of ideas” (204). And a consideration of the telegraph offers a number of examples of the relationships between technological form and the nature of news. One such example, in Carey’s analysis, was the impact of the telegraph on the language and nature of journalism. “If the same story were to be understood in the same way from Maine to California,” he writes, “language had to be flattened out and standardised” (210). Local colour was bleached out of news reports to make them saleable in a market unconstrained by geography. “The origins of objectivity,” Carey argues, “may be sought, therefore, in the necessity of stretching language in space over the long lines of Western Union” (210). The telegraph didn’t just affect the quality of news — it greatly increased the quantity of it as well, forcing greater attention to be paid to the management of newsrooms. News became a commodity; not only that, just like cattle or wheat, news was now subject to all the vagaries of any other commodity business, from contracts and price gouging to outright theft (211). And in Western Union, the telegraph made possible the prototype of today’s transnational media firms (201). As the telegraph solved problems of communicating across space, it opened up time as a new arena for expansion. In this sense, the gradual emergence of 24-hour broadcasting schedules is traceable to the impact of the telegraph (Carey 228). A key legacy of this impact is the rise to primacy of CNN and its imitators, offering round-the-clock news coverage made possible by satellite transmission. This too changed the nature of news. As McKenzie Wark has pointed out, a 24-hour continuous news service is not ideally compatible with the established narrative strategies of news. Rather than cutting and shaping events to fit familiar narrative forms, CNN instead introduced an emphasis on what Wark calls “the queer concept of ‘live’ news coverage — an instant audiovisual presence on the site of an event” (38). This focus on speed and immediacy, on being the first on the scene, leads to news that is all event and no process. More than this, it leads at times to revealing moments when CNN-style coverage becomes obvious as a component part of the event it purports to cover. In his analysis of the Tiananmen Square crisis of 1989 Wark argues that the media event appeared as “a positive feedback loop” (22). The Beijing students’ perceptions of Western accounts of their demands and motives became caught up in the students’ own accounts of their own motives, their own demands: Western interpretations of what was happening in Beijing, Wark writes, “fed back into the event itself via a global loop encompassing radio, telephone, and fax vectors. They impacted back on the further unfolding of the event itself” (22). Both the telegraph and the satellite contributed to major shifts in the production, distribution and reception of news. And both made possible new types of media institution, from Western Union and Reuters to CNN. This is not to argue that technologies determine the nature of news or of news organisations, but rather that certain developments are made possible by both the adoption and the adaptation of new technologies. Institutional and cultural factors, of course, affect the nature of news, but technology also both enables and constrains. The medium might not be the message — but it does matter. So with such precedents as those above in mind, what might be the key impacts of the Net on the nature of news? In an important analysis of the online news environment, Robert Burnett and P. David Marshall introduce the concept of “informational news,” defined as “the transformation of journalism and news in Web culture where there is a greater involvement of the user and news hierarchies are in flux” (206). News, they argue, has become “a subset of a wider search for information by Web users” (206) and this “has led to a shift in how we recontextualise news around a much larger search for information” (152). In this analysis, audience members are transformed into researchers. These researchers become comfortable with getting their news from a broader range of sources, while at the same time searching for new ways to hierarchise those sources, to establish some as more legitimate than others. Adding to the complexity are Burnett and Marshall’s observations that new media forms offer enhanced flexibility (with, for example, archival access to news databases, including audio and video, available 24 hours a day), and that online news fosters and caters for new global communities of interest 161-7). When these phenomena are taken together, the result for Burnett and Marshall is “a shifted boundary of what constitutes news” (167). But this concept of informational news is largely cast in terms of reception and consumption: the practices of the new informational news researchers are discussed in terms of information retrieval, not production — even newsgroups and Weblogs are considered as additional sources for information retrieval, rather than as new avenues for new kinds of journalists to develop and publish new kinds of news. Burnett and Marshall are, I believe, right in their identification of changes to the nature of news, and their analysis is an important contribution. But what I want to emphasise in this article is that there is also a corresponding ongoing shift in the boundary of what constitutes newsmakers. The Indymedia movement offers clear examples of this, in its spectacular growth and in its promotion of open publishing models. As a forum for non-professional journalists of all stripes, Indymedia’s development is a vivid example of the shifting boundary around who gets to make the news. By now, many readers of M/C will perhaps be familiar with Indymedia to some degree. But it’s worth briefly reviewing both the scope of the movement and the speed with which it’s developed. The first Indymedia Website was established for the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation meeting in November 1999. Its key feature was offering news coverage supplied by anyone who wanted to contribute, using free software and ideas from the Australian activists who had created the Active network. As events in Seattle gathered pace, the nascent Indymedia drew a claimed 1.5 million hits; this success led to the site being refocussed around several subsequent protests, before local collectives began to appear and form their own Indymedia centres. Within a year, this original Indymedia site was just one of a new network of more than 30. At the time of writing, a little over three years on from the movement’s inception, there are more than 100 Indymedia centres around the world — there are both Israeli and Palestinian Indymedia; Indymedia is established in Mumbai, Jakarta and Buenos Aires; there are centres in Poland, Colombia and South Africa. By any measure, this is a remarkable achievement for a decentralised project run entirely by volunteers and donations. Like any other complex phenomenon, the story of this development can be told in many different ways, each adding a different dimension. Three are especially relevant here. The first version would centre around the Active software developed by Sydney’s Catalyst tech collective. This was devised to create the Active Sydney site, an online hub for Sydney activists to promote events from direct actions to screenings and seminars. Launched in January 1999, Active Sydney was to become a prototype for Indymedia — part events calendar, part meeting place, part street paper. For June of that year, the Active team revised the system for the J18 global day of action. Using this system, anyone could now upload a report, a video clip, a photo or an audio file, and see it instantly added to the emerging narrative of events. It was as easy as sending email. And it ran on open source code. With Catalyst members collaborating online with organisers in Seattle to establish the first site, this system became the basis for Indymedia. While the Active software is no longer the only platform used for Indymedia sites, it made a huge contribution to the movement’s explosive growth (see Arnison, 2001; Meikle, 2002). Another version of the story would place Indymedia within the long traditions of alternative media. John Downing’s work is important here, and his definition of “politically dissident media that offer radical alternatives to mainstream debate” is useful (240). To tell the Indymedia story from this perspective would be to highlight its independence and self-management, and the autonomy of each local editorial collective in running each Indymedia centre. It would be to emphasise Indymedia as a forum for viewpoints which are not usually expressed within the established media’s consensus about what is and isn’t news. And, perhaps most importantly, to tell the Indymedia story as one in the alternative media tradition would be to focus on the extent to which this movement fosters horizontal connections and open participation, in contrast to the vertical flows of the established broadcast and print media (Downing, 1995). A third version would approach Indymedia as part of what cultural studies academic George McKay terms “DiY Culture.” McKay defines this as “a youth-centred and -directed cluster of interests and practices around green radicalism, direct action politics, new musical sounds and experiences”(2). For this version of the story, a useful analogy would be with punk — not with the music so much as with its DIY access principle (“here’s three chords, now form a band”). DIY was the key to Richard Hell’s much-misunderstood lyric “I belong to the blank generation” — the idea of the blank was that you were supposed to fill it in for yourself, rather than sign up to someone else’s agenda. To consider Indymedia as part of this DIY spirit would be to see it as the expression of a blank generation in this fine original sense — not a vacant generation, but one prepared to offer their own self-definitions and to create their own media networks to do it. More than this, it would also be to place Indymedia within the frameworks of independent production and distribution which were the real impact of punk — independent record labels changed music more than any of their records, while photocopied zines opened up new possibilities for self-expression. Just as the real importance of punk wasn't in the individual songs, the importance of Indymedia isn't in this or that news story posted to this or that site. Instead, it's in its DIY ethos and its commitment to establishing new networks. What these three versions of the Indymedia story share is that each highlights an emphasis on access and participation; each stresses new avenues and methods for new people to create news; each shifts the boundary of who gets to speak. And where these different stories intersect is in the concept of open publishing. This is the Net making possible a shift in the production of news, as well as in its reception. Matthew Arnison of Catalyst, who played a key role in developing the Active software, offers a working definition of open publishing which is worth quoting in full: “Open publishing means that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available. Those stories are filtered as little as possible to help the readers find the stories they want. Readers can see editorial decisions being made by others. They can see how to get involved and help make editorial decisions. If they can think of a better way for the software to help shape editorial decisions, they can copy the software because it is free and change it and start their own site. If they want to redistribute the news, they can, preferably on an open publishing site.” (Arnison, 2001) Open publishing has undoubtedly been a big part of the appeal of Indymedia for its many contributors. In fact, one of Indymedia’s slogans is “everyone is a journalist.” If this is a provocation, who and what is it meant to provoke? Obviously, “everyone” is not a journalist — at least not if journalists are seen as employees of news institutions and news businesses, employees with some kind of training in research methods and narrative construction. But to say that “everyone is a journalist” is not to claim that everyone has such institutional affiliation, or that everyone has such training or expertise. Instead, the tactic here seems to be to inflate something out of all proportion in order to draw attention to the core smaller truth that may otherwise go unnoticed. Specifically in this case, what authorises some to be story-tellers and not others? From this perspective, the slogan reads like a claim for difference, a claim that other kinds of expertise and other kinds of know-how also have valid claims on our attention, and that these too can make valid contributions to the more plural media environment made possible — but not guaranteed — by the Net. It’s a claim that the licence to tell stories should be shared around. But developments to this core element — open publishing — point both to an ongoing challenge for the Indymedia movement, and to a possible future which might enable a further significant shift in the nature of Net news. In March 2002, a proposal was circulated to remove the open publishing newswire from the front page of the main site at http://www.indymedia.org/, replacing this with features sourced from local sites around the world. While this was said to have the objective of promoting those local sites to a broader audience, it should also be seen as acknowledgement that Indymedia was struggling against limits to growth. One issue was the large number of items being posted to sites, which meant that even especially well-researched or significant stories would be replaced quickly on the front page; another issue was the persistent trolls and spam which plagued some Indymedia sites. In April 2002, after a voting process in which 15 Indymedia collectives from Brazil to Barcelona voted unanimously in favour of the reform, the open publishing newswire was taken off the front page. Many local Indymedia sites followed suit. Even the Sydney site, which, perhaps because of the history and involvement of the Catalyst group, promotes open publishing rather more than some other Indymedia sites, adopted a features-based front page in August 2002, stating that “promoting certain issues above others” would make the site “more effective.” These developments might signal the eventual demise of the open publishing component. Indymedia might instead become ‘professionalised,’ with greater reliance on de facto staff reporters and more stringent editing, moving closer to existing alternative media outlets. But the new centrality of its news features might also open Indymedia up to a new level of involvement, because those features are given prominence in the site’s central column and can remain on the front page for some weeks. This offers the potential for what Arnison terms “automated open-editing”. This would involve creating the facility for audience members to contribute to sub-editing stories on an Indymedia site: they might, for instance, check facts or add sources; edit spelling, grammar or formatting; nominate a topic area within which a given story could be archived; or translate the story from one language or style to another (Arnison, 2001). Open publishing is one phenomenon in which we can see the Net enabling changes to the nature of news and newsmakers. If open editing were also to work, then it would need to be as simple to operate as the original open publishing newswire. But if this were possible, then open editing might involve not only more new people in the development of informational news, but involve them in new ways, catering for a broader range of abilities and aptitudes than open publishing alone. Like earlier communication technologies, the Net could facilitate new types of media institution — ones built on an open model, which enable a new, more plural, news environment. Works Cited Arnison, Matthew. “Open Publishing Is the Same as Free Software.” 2001. 21 Feb. 2003 <http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openpub.php>. Arnison, Matthew. “Open Editing: A Crucial Part of Open Publishing.” 2002. 21 Feb. 2003 <http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openedit.php>. Burnett, Robert, and P. David Marshall. Web Theory: An Introduction. London & New York: Routledge, 2003. Carey, James. Communication as Culture. New York & London: Routledge, 1989. Downing, John. “Alternative Media and the Boston Tea Party.” Questioning The Media. Eds. John Downing, Ali Mohammadi and Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995. 238-52. McKay, George. “DiY Culture: Notes towards an Intro.” DiY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain. Ed. George McKay. London: Verso, 1998. 1-53. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. New York & London: Routledge, and Annandale: Pluto Press, 2002. Wark, McKenzie. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Links http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openedit.html http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openpub.html http://www.indymedia.org/ http://www.sydney.active.org.au/ Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Meikle, Graham. "Indymedia and The New Net News" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/02-feature.php>. APA Style Meikle, G. (2003, Apr 23). Indymedia and The New Net News. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/02-feature.php>

In a recent gaming anthology, Henry Jenkins cannot help contrasting his son's cramped, urban, media-saturated existence with his own idyllic, semi-rural childhood. After describing his own Huck Finn meanderings over "the spaces of my boyhood" including the imaginary kingdoms of Jungleoca and Freedonia, Jenkins relates his version of his son's experiences: My son, Henry, now 16 has never had a backyard He has grown up in various apartment complexes, surrounded by asphalt parking lots with, perhaps, a small grass buffer from the street… Once or twice, when I became exasperated by my son's constant presence around the house I would … tell him he should go out and play. He would look at me with confusion and ask, where? … Who wouldn't want to trade in the confinement of your room for the immersion promised by today's video games? … Perhaps my son finds in his video games what I found in the woods behind the school, on my bike whizzing down the hills of suburban backstreets, or settled into my treehouse with a good adventure novel intensity of experience, escape from adult regulation; in short, "complete freedom of movement". (Jenkins 1998, 263-265) Games here are connected with a shrinking availability of domestic and public space, and a highly mediated experience of the world. Despite his best intentions, creeping into Jenkins's piece is a sense that games act as a poor substitute for the natural spaces of a "healthy" childhood. Although "Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear", they "offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement" (Jenkins 1998, 266). They emerge, then, as a palliation for the claustrophobic circumstances of contemporary urban life, though they offer only unreal spaces, replete with "lakes of fire … cities in the clouds … [and] dazzling neon-lit Asian marketplaces" (Jenkins 1998, 263), where the work of the childish imagination is already done. Despite Jenkins's assertion that games do offer "complete freedom of movement", it is hard to shake the feeling that he considers his own childhood far richer in exploratory and imaginative opportunities: Let me be clear I am not arguing that video games are as good for kids as the physical spaces of backyard play culture. As a father, I wish that my son would come home covered in mud or with scraped knees rather than carpet burns ... The psychological and social functions of playing outside are as significant as the impact of "sunshine and good exercise" upon our physical well-being. (Jenkins 1998, 266) Throughout the piece, games are framed by a romantic, anti-urban discourse: the expanding city is imagined as engulfing space and perhaps destroying childhood itself, such that "'sacred' places are now occupied by concrete, bricks or asphalt" (Jenkins 1998, 263). Games are complicit in this alienation of space and experience. If this is not quite Paul Virilio's recent dour contention that modern mass media forms work mainly to immobilise the body of the consumer--Virilio, luckily, has managed to escape the body-snatchers--games here are produced as a feeble response to an already-effected urban imprisonment of the young. Strikingly, Jenkins seems concerned about his son's "unhealthy" confinement to private, domestic space, and his inability to imaginatively possess a slice of the world outside. Jenkins's description of his son's confinement to the world of "carpet burns" rather than the great outdoors of "scraped knees" and "mud" implicitly leaves the distinction between domestic and public, internal and external, and even the imagined passivity of the domestic sphere as against the activity of the public intact. For those of us who see games as productive activities, which generate particular, unique kinds of pleasure in their own right, rather than as anaemic replacements for lost spaces, this seems to reduce a central cultural form. For those of us who have at least some sympathy with writers on the urban environment like Raban (1974) and Young (1990), who see the city's theatrical and erotic possibilities, Jenkins's fears might seem to erase the pleasures and opportunities that city life provides. Rather than seeing gamers and children (the two groups only partially overlap) as unwitting agents in their own confinement, we can arrive at a slightly more complex view of the relationship between games and urban space. By looking at the video games arcade as it is situated in urban retail space, we can see how gameplay simultaneously acts to regulate urban space, mediates a unique kind of urban performance, and allows sophisticated representations, manipulations and appropriations of differently conceived urban spaces. Despite being a long-standing feature of the urban and retail environment, and despite also being a key site for the "exhibition" of a by-now central media form, the video game arcade has a surprisingly small literature devoted to it. Its prehistory in pinball arcades and pachinko parlours has been noted (by, for example, Steven Poole 2000) but seldom deeply explored, and its relations with a wider urban space have been given no real attention at all. The arcade's complexity, both in terms of its positioning and functions, may contribute to this. The arcade is a space of conflicting, contradictory uses and tendencies, though this is precisely what makes it as important a space as the cinema or penny theatre before it. Let me explain why I think so. The arcade is always simultaneously a part of and apart from the retail centres to which it tends to attach itself.1 If it is part of a suburban shopping mall, it is often located on the ground floor near the entrance, or is semi-detached as cinema complexes often are, so that the player has to leave the mall's main building to get there, or never enter. If it is part of a city or high street shopping area, it is often in a side street or a street parallel to the main retail thoroughfare, or requires the player to mount a set of stairs into an off-street arcade. At other times the arcade is located in a space more strongly marked as liminal in relation to the city -- the seaside resort, sideshow alley or within the fences of a theme park. Despite this, the videogame arcade's interior is usually wholly or mostly visible from the street, arcade or thoroughfare that it faces, whether this visibility is effected by means of glass walls, a front window or a fully retractable sliding door. This slight distance from the mainstream of retail activity and the visibility of the arcade's interior are in part related to the economics of the arcade industry. Arcade machines involve relatively low margins -- witness the industry's recent feting and embrace of redemption (i.e. low-level gambling) games that offer slightly higher turnovers -- and are hungry for space. At the same time, arcades are dependent on street traffic, relentless technological novelty and their de facto use as gathering space to keep the coins rolling in. A balance must be found between affordability, access and visibility, hence their positioning at a slight remove from areas of high retail traffic. The story becomes more complicated, though, when we remember that arcades are heavily marked as deviant, disreputable spaces, whether in the media, government reports or in sociological and psychological literature. As a visible, public, urban space where young people are seen to mix with one another and unfamiliar and novel technologies, the arcade is bound to give rise to adult anxieties. As John Springhall (1998) puts it: More recent youth leisure… occupies visible public space, is seen as hedonistic and presents problems within the dominant discourse of 'enlightenment' … [T]he most popular forms of entertainment among the young at any given historical moment tend also to provide the focus of the most intense social concern. A new medium with mass appeal, and with a technology best understood by the young… almost invariably attracts a desire for adult or government control (160-161, emphasis mine) Where discourses of deviant youth have also been employed in extending the surveillance and policing of retail space, it is unsurprising that spaces seen as points for the concentration of such deviance will be forced away from the main retail thoroughfares, in the process effecting a particular kind of confinement, and opportunity for surveillance. Michel Foucault writes, in Discipline and Punish, about the classical age's refinements of methods for distributing and articulating bodies, and the replacement of spectacular punishment with the crafting of "docile bodies". Though historical circumstances have changed, we can see arcades as disciplinary spaces that reflect aspects of those that Foucault describes. The efficiency of arcade games in distributing bodies in rows, and side by side demonstrates that" even if the compartments it assigns become purely ideal, the disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular" (Foucault 1977, 143). The efficiency of games from Pong (Atari:1972) to Percussion Freaks (Konami: 1999) in articulating bodies in play, in demanding specific and often spectacular bodily movements and competencies means that "over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex" (Foucault 1977,153). What is extraordinary is the extent to which the articulation of bodies proceeds only through a direct engagement with the game. Pong's instructions famously read only "avoid missing ball for high score"--a whole economy of movement, arising from this effort, is condensed into six words. The distribution and articulation of bodies also entails a confinement in the space of the arcade, away from the main areas of retail trade, and renders occupants easily observable from the exterior. We can see that games keep kids off the streets. On the other hand, the same games mediate spectacular forms of urban performance and allow particular kinds of reoccupation of urban space. Games descended or spun off from Dance Dance Revolution (Konami: 1998) require players to dance, in time with thumping (if occasionally cheesy) techno, and in accordance with on-screen instructions, in more and more complex sequences on lit footpads. These games occupy a lot of space, and the newest instalment (DDR has just issued its "7th Mix") is often installed at the front of street level arcades. When played with flair, games such as these are apt to attract a crowd of onlookers to gather, not only inside, but also on the footpath outside. Indeed games such as these have given rise to websites like http://www.dancegames.com/au which tells fans not only when and where new games are arriving, but whether or not the positioning of arcades and games within them will enable a player to attract attention to their performance. This mediation of cyborg performance and display -- where success both achieves and exceeds perfect integration with a machine in urban space -- is particularly important to Asian-Australian youth subcultures, which are often marginalised in other forums for youthful display, like competitive sport. International dance gamer websites like Jason Ho's http://www.ddrstyle.com , which is emblazoned with the slogan "Asian Pride", explicitly make the connection between Asian youth subcultures and these new kinds of public performance. Games like those in the Time Crisis series, which may seem less innocuous, might be seen as effecting important inversions in the representation of urban space. Initially Time Crisis, which puts a gun in the player's hand and requires them to shoot at human figures on screen, might even be seen to live up to the dire claims made by figures like Dave Grossman that such games effectively train perpetrators of public violence (Grossman 1995). What we need to keep in mind, though, is that first, as "cops", players are asked to restore order to a representation of urban space, and second, that that they are reacting to images of criminality. When criminality and youth are so often closely linked in public discourse (not to mention criminality and Asian ethnicity) these games stage a reversal whereby the young player is responsible for performing a reordering of the unruly city. In a context where the ideology of privacy has progressively marked public space as risky and threatening,2 games like Time Crisis allow, within urban space, a performance aimed at the resolution of risk and danger in a representation of the urban which nevertheless involves and incorporates the material spaces that it is embedded in.This is a different kind of performance to DDR, involving different kinds of image and bodily attitude, that nevertheless articulates itself on the space of the arcade, a space which suddenly looks more complex and productive. The manifest complexity of the arcade as a site in relation to the urban environment -- both regulating space and allowing spectacular and sophisticated types of public performance -- means that we need to discard simplistic stories about games providing surrogate spaces. We reify game imagery wherever we see it as a space apart from the material spaces and bodies with which gaming is always involved. We also need to adopt a more complex attitude to urban space and its possibilities than any narrative of loss can encompass. The abandonment of such narratives will contribute to a position where we can recognise the difference between the older and younger Henrys' activities, and still see them as having a similar complexity and richness. With work and luck, we might also arrive at a material organisation of society where such differing spaces of play -- seen now by some as mutually exclusive -- are more easily available as choices for everyone. NOTES 1 Given the almost total absence of any spatial study of arcades, my observations here are based on my own experience of arcades in the urban environment. Many of my comments are derived from Brisbane, regional Queensland and urban-Australian arcades this is where I live but I have observed the same tendencies in many other urban environments. Even where the range of services and technologies in the arcades are different in Madrid and Lisbon they serve espresso and alcohol (!), in Saigon they often consist of a bank of TVs equipped with pirated PlayStation games which are hired by the hour their location (slightly to one side of major retail areas) and their openness to the street are maintained. 2 See Spigel, Lynn (2001) for an account of the effects and transformations of the ideology of privacy in relation to media forms. See Furedi, Frank (1997) and Douglas, Mary (1992) for accounts of the contemporary discourse of risk and its effects. References Douglas, M. (1992) Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London ; New York : Routledge. Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin,. Furedi, F.(1997) Culture of Fear: Risk-taking and the Morality of Low Expectation. London ; Washington : Cassell. Grossman, D. (1995) On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown. Jenkins, H. (1998) Complete freedom of movement: video games as gendered play spaces. In Jenkins, Henry and Justine Cassell (eds) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat : Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Poole, S. (2000) Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames. London: Fourth Estate. Raban, J. (1974) Soft City. London: Hamilton. Spigel, L. (2001) Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and the Postwar Suburbs. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Springhall, J. (1998) Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics : Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-rap, 1830-1996. New York: St. Martin's Press. Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Websites http://www.yesterdayland.com/popopedia/s... (Time Crisis synopsis and shots) http://www.dancegames.com/au (Site for a network of fans revealing something about the culture around dancing games) http://www.ddrstyle.com (website of Jason Ho, who connects his dance game performances with pride in his Asian identity). http://www.pong-story.com (The story of Pong, the very first arcade game) Games Dance Dance Revolution, Konami: 1998. Percussion Freaks, Konami: 1999. Pong, Atari: 1972. Time Crisis, Namco: 1996. Links http://www.dancegames.com/au http://www.yesterdayland.com/popopedia/shows/arcade/ag1154.php http://www.pong-story.com http://www.ddrstyle.com Citation reference for this article MLA Style Wilson, Jason A.. "Performance, anxiety" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php>. Chicago Style Wilson, Jason A., "Performance, anxiety" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Wilson, Jason A.. (2002) Performance, anxiety. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php> ([your date of access]).

By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be fucking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Sharing food is central to culture. Indeed, according to Montanari, “food is culture” (xii). Ways of sharing knowledge about food, such as the exchange of recipes, give longevity to food sharing. Recipes, an important cultural technology, expand the practice of sharing food beyond specific times and places. The means through which recipes, and information about food, is shared has historically been communicated through whatever medium is available at the time. Cookbooks were among the first printed books, with the first known cookbook published in 1485 at Nuremberg, which set a trend in which cookbooks were published in most of the languages across Western Europe by the mid 16th century (Mennell). Since then, recipe collections have found a comfortable home in new and emerging media, from radio, to television, and now, online. The proliferation of cookbooks and other forms of food-related media “can be interpreted as a reflection of culinary inexperience, if not also incompetence—otherwise why so much reliance on outside advice?” (Belasco 46). Food-related media has also been argued to reflect both what people eat and what they might wish they could eat (Neuhaus, in Belasco). As such, cookbooks, television cooking shows, and food websites help shape our identity and, as Gallegos notes, play “a role in inscribing the self with a sense of place, belonging and achievement” (99). Food writing has expanded beyond the instructional form common to cookbooks and television cooking shows and, according to Hughes, “has insinuated itself into every aspect of the literary imagination” (online) from academic writing through to memoir, fiction, and travel writing. Hughes argues that concerns that people are actually now cooking less that ever, despite this influx of food-related media, miss the point that “food writing is a literary activity […] the best of it does what good writing always does, which is to create an alternative world to the one you currently inhabit” (online). While pragmatic, this argument also reinforces the common perception that food writing is a professional pursuit. It is important to note that while cookbooks and other forms of food-related media are well established as a means for recipes to be communicated, recipes have a longer history of being shared between individuals, that is, within families and communities. In helping to expand recipe-sharing practices, food-related media has also both professionalised and depersonalised this activity. As perhaps a reaction to this, or through a desire to re-establish communal recipe-sharing traditions, blogging, and specifically food blogging, has emerged as a new and viable way for people to share information about food in a non-professional capacity. Blogging has long been celebrated for its capacity to give “ordinary” people a voice (Nilsson). Due to their social nature (Walker Rettberg) and the ability for bloggers to create “networks for sharing ideas, trends and information” (Walker Rettberg 60), blogs are a natural fit for sharing recipes and information about food. Additionally, blogs, like food-related media forms such as cookbooks, are also used as tools for identity building. Blogger’s identities may be closely tied to their offline identity (Baumer, Sueyoshi and Tomlinson), forged through discussions about their everyday lives (Lövheim) or used in a professional capacity (Kedrowicz and Sullivan). Food blogs, broadly defined as blogs primarily focused on food, are one of the most prominent means through which so-called “ordinary” people can share recipes online, and can be seen to challenge perceptions that food writing is a professional activity. They may focus specifically on recipes, restaurant reviews, travel, food ethics, or aesthetic concerns such as food styling and photography. Since food blogs began to appear in the early 2000s, their number has steadily increased, and the community has become more established and structured. In my interview with the writer of the popular blog Chocolate & Zucchini, she noted that when she started blogging about food in 2003 there were perhaps a dozen other food bloggers. Since then, this blogger has become a professional food writer, published author, and recipe developer, while the number of food bloggers has grown dramatically. It is difficult to know the precise number of food blogs—as at July 2012, Technorati ranked more than 16,000 food blogs, including both recipe and restaurant review blogs (online)—but it is clear that they are both increasing in number and have become a common and popular blog genre. For the purposes of this article, food blogs are understood as those blogs that mostly feature recipes. The term “recipe blog” could be used, but food bloggers make little distinction between different topic categories—whether someone writes recipes or reviews, they are referred to as a food blogger. As such, I have used the term “food blog” in keeping with the community’s own terminology and practices. Recipes published on blogs reach a wider audience than those shared between individuals within a family or in a community, but are not as exclusive or professional, in most instances, as traditional food-related media. Blogging allows for the compression of time and space, as people can connect with others from around the world, and respond and reinvigorate posts sometimes several years after they have been written. In this sense, food blogs are more dynamic than cookbooks, with multiple entry points and means for people to discover them—through search engines as well as through traditional word of mouth referrals. This dynamism allows food bloggers to form an active community through which “ordinary” people can share their passion for food and the pleasures of cooking, seek advice, give feedback, and discuss such issues as seasonality, locality, and diet. This article is based on research I conducted on food blogs between 2010 and 2012, which used an ethnographic, cultural studies approach to online community studies to provide a rich description of the food blogging community. It examines how food blogging provides insight into the eating habits of “ordinary” people in a more broad-based manner than traditional food-related media such as cookbooks. It looks at how food blogging has evolved from a subcultural activity to an established and recognised element of the wider food-related media ecology, and in this way has been transformed from a hobbyist activity to a cottage industry. It discusses how food blogs have influenced food-related media and the potential they have to drive food trends. In doing so, this research does not consider the Internet, or online communities, as separate or distinct from offline culture. Instead, it follows Richard Rogers’s argument for a new approach to Internet studies, in which “one is not so much researching the Internet, and its users, as studying culture and society with the Internet” (29). A cultural studies approach is useful for understanding food blogs in a broader historical and cultural context, since it considers the Internet as “a rich arena for thinking about how contemporary culture is constituted” (Hine et al. 2). Food Blogging: From Hobbyist Activity to Cottage Industry Benkler argues that “people have always created their own culture” (296); however, as folk culture has gradually been replaced by mass-produced popular culture, we have come to expect certain production values in culture, and lost confidence in creating or sharing it ourselves, for fear of it not meeting these high standards. Such mass-produced popular culture includes food-related media and recipes, as developing and sharing recipes has become the domain of celebrity chefs. Food blogs are created by “ordinary” people, and in this way continue the tradition of community cookbooks and reflect an increased interest in both the do-it-yourself phenomena, and a resurgence of a desire to share and contribute to folk culture. Jenkins argues that “a thriving culture needs spaces where people can do bad art, get feedback, and get better” (140-1). He notes that the Internet has drastically expanded the availability of these spaces, and argues that: "some of what amateurs create will be surprisingly good, and some artists will be recruited into commercial entertainment or the art world. Much of it will be good enough to engage the interest of some modest public, to inspire someone else to create, to provide new content which, when polished through many hands, may turn into something more valuable down the line" (140-1). Food blogs provide such a space for amateurs to share their creations and get feedback. Additionally, some food bloggers, like the artists to whom Jenkins refers, do create recipes, writing, and images that are “surprisingly good”, and are recruited, not into commercial entertainment or the art world, but into food-related media. Some food bloggers publish cookbooks (for example, Clotilde Dusoulier of Chocolate & Zucchini), or food-related memoirs (for example, Molly Wizenberg of Orangette), and some become food celebrities in their own right, as guests on high profile television shows such as Martha Stewart (Matt Armendariz of mattbites) or with their own cooking shows (Ree Drummond of The Pioneer Woman Cooks). Others, while not reaching these levels of success, do manage to inspire others to create, or recreate their, recipes. Mainstream media has a tendency to suggest that all food bloggers have professional aspirations (see, for example, Phipps). Yet, it is important to note that, many food bloggers are content to remain hobbyists. These food bloggers form the majority of the community, and blog about food because they are interested in food, and enjoy sharing recipes and discussing their interest with like-minded people. In this way, they are contributing to, and engaging with, folk culture within the blogging community. However, this does not mean that they do not have a broader impact on mainstream food-related media. Food-Related Media Response As the food blogging community has grown, food-related media and other industries have responded with attempts to understand, engage with, and manage food bloggers. Food blogs are increasingly recognised as an aspect of the broader food-related media and, as such, provide both competition and opportunities for media and other industries. Just as food blogs offer individuals opportunities for entry into food-related media professions, they also offer media and other industries opportunities to promote products, reach broader audiences, and source new talent. While food bloggers do not necessarily challenge existing food-related media, they increasingly see themselves as a part of it, and expect to be viewed as a legitimate part of the media landscape and as an alternative source of food-related information. As such, they respond positively to the inclusion of bloggers in food-related media and in other food-related environments. Engaging with the food blogging community allows the wider food-related media to subtly regulate blogger behaviour. It can also provide opportunities for some bloggers to be recruited in a professional capacity into food-related media. In a sense, food-related media attempt to “tame” food bloggers by suggesting that if bloggers behave in a way that they deem is acceptable, they may be able to transition into the professional world of food writing. The most notable example of this response to food blogs by food-related media is the decision to publish blogger’s work. While not all food bloggers have professional aspirations, being published is generally viewed within the community as a positive outcome. Food bloggers are sometimes profiled in food-related media, such as in the Good Weekend magazine in The Sydney Morning Herald (Karnikowski), and in MasterChef Magazine, which profiles a different food blogger each month (T. Jenkins). Food bloggers are also occasionally commissioned to write features for food-related media, as Katie Quinn Davies, of the blog What Katie Ate, who is a regular contributor to delicious magazine. Other food bloggers have been published in their own right. These food bloggers have transitioned from hobbyists to professionals, moving beyond blogging spaces into professional food-related media, and they could be, in Abercrombie and Longhurst’s terms, described as “petty producers” (140). As professionals, they have become a sort of “brand”, which their blog supports and promotes. This is not to say they are no longer interested in food or blogging on a personal level, but their relationship to these activities has shifted. For example, Dusoulier has published numerous books, and was one of the first food bloggers to transition into professional food-related media. However, her career in food-related media—as a food writer, recipe developer and author—goes beyond the work of a petty producer. Dusoulier edited the first English-language edition of I Know How To Cook (Mathiot), which, first published in 1932 (in French), has been described as the “bible” of traditional French cookery. Her work revising this classic book reveals that, beyond being a high-profile member of the food blogging community, she is a key figure in wider food culture. Such professional food bloggers achieve a certain level of celebrity both within the food blogging community and in food-related media. This is reflective of broader media trends in which “ordinary” people are “plucked from obscurity to enjoy a highly circumscribed celebrity” (Turner 12), and, in this way, food bloggers challenge the idea that you need to be an “expert” to talk publicly about food. Food Blogging as an Established Genre Food blogs are often included alongside traditional food-related media as another source of food-related information. For example, the site Eat your books, which indexes cookbooks, providing users with an online tool for searching the recipes in the books they own, has begun to index food blogs as well. Likewise, in 2010, the James Beard Foundation announced that their prestigious journalism awards had “mostly abolished separate categories based on publishing platforms”, although they still have an award for best food blog (Fox online). This inclusion reflects how established food blogging has become. Over time, food blogs have co-evolved and converged with food-related media, offering greater diversity of opinion. Ganda Suthivarakom, a food blogger and now director of the SAVEUR website, says that “in 2004, to be a food blogger was to be an outsider in the world of food media. Today, it couldn’t be more different” (online). She argues that “food blogs leveled the playing field […] Instead of a rarefied and inaccessible group of print reviewers having a say, suddenly thousands of voices of varying skill levels and interests chimed in, and the conversation became livelier” (Suthivarakom online). It is worthwhile noting that while there are more voices and more diversity in traditional food-related media, food blogging has also become somewhat of a cliché: it has even been satirised in an episode of The Simpsons (Bailey and Anderson). As food blogging has evolved it has developed into an established and recognised genre, which may be nuanced to the bloggers themselves, but often appears generic to outsiders. Food blogging has, as it were, gone mainstream. As such, the thousands of voices are also somewhat of an echo chamber. In becoming established as a genre, food blogs reflect the gradual convergence of different types of food-related media. Food blogs are part of a wider trend towards user-generated, food-related online content. It could also be argued that reality shows take cues from food blogs in terms of their active audiences and use of social media. MasterChef in particular is supported by a website, a magazine, and active social media channels, reflecting an increasing expectation of audience participation and interactivity in the delivery of food-related information. Food bloggers have also arguably contributed to the increasingly image-driven nature of food-related media. They have also played a key role in the popularity of sharing photos of food through platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. Food Blogs and Food Trends Food blogs, like cookbooks, can be seen to both reflect and shape culture (Gallegos). In addition to providing an archive of what “ordinary” people are cooking on a scale not previously available, they have potential to influence food trends. Food bloggers are essentially food enthusiasts or “foodies”. According to De Solier, “most foodies see themselves as culturalists rather than materialists, people whose self-making is bound up in the acquisition of cultural experiences and knowledge, rather than the accumulation of material things” (16). As foodies, food bloggers are deeply engaged with food, keen to share their knowledge and, due to the essential and convivial nature of food, are afforded many opportunities to do so. As such, food blogs have influence beyond the food blogging community. For example, food bloggers could be seen to be responsible, in part at least, for the current popularity of macarons. These sweet, meringue-based biscuits were featured on the blog A la cuisine! in 2004—one of the earliest examples of the recipe in the food blogging community. Its popularity then steadily grew throughout the community, and has since been featured on high-profile and popular blogs such as David Lebovitz (2005), The Traveller’s Lunchbox (2005), and La Tartine Gourmand (2006). Creating and posting a recipe for macarons became almost a rite of passage for food bloggers. At a food blogging conference I attended in 2011, one blogger confided to me that she did not feel like a proper blogger because she had not yet made macarons. The popularity of macarons then extended beyond the food blogging community. They were the subject of a book, I Love Macarons (Ogita), first published in Japanese in 2006 and then in English in 2009, and featured in a cooking challenge on MasterChef (Byrnes), which propelled their popularity into mainstream food culture. Macarons, which could have once been seen as exclusive, delicate, and expensive (Jargon and Passariello) are now readily available, and can even be purchased at MacDonalds. Beyond the popularity of specific foods, the influence of food bloggers can be seen in the growing interest in where, and how, food is produced, coupled with concerns around food wastage (see, for example, Tristram). Concerns about food production are sometimes countered by the trend of making foods “from scratch,” a popular topic on food blogs, and such trends can also be seen in wider food culture, such as with classes on topics ranging from cheese making to butchering (Severson). These concerns are also evident in the growing interest in organic and ethical produce (Paish). Conclusion Food blogs have demonstrably revitalised an interest in recipe sharing among “ordinary” people. The evolution of food blogs, however, is just one part of the ongoing evolution of food-related media and recipe sharing technologies. Food blogs are also an important part of food culture, and indeed, culture more broadly. They reflect a renewed interest in folk culture and the trend towards “do-it-yourself”, seen in online and offline communities. Beyond this, food blogs provide a useful case study for understanding how our online and offline lives have become intertwined, and showcase the Internet as a part of everyday life. 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This article is a comparison of two remarkably different takes on a single subject, namely the shifting meaning of the word ‘publishing’ brought about by the changes in literacy habits related to Web 2.0. One the one hand, we have Andrew Keen’s much lambasted 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur, which is essentially an attempt to defend traditional gatekeeper models of cultural production by denigrating online, user-generated content. The second is Spin journalist Andy Greenwald’s Nothing Feels Good, focusing on the Emo subculture of the early 2000s and its reliance on Web 2.0 as an integral medium for communication and the accumulation of subcultural capital. What I want to suggest in this article is that these two books, with their contrasting readings of Web 2.0, both tell us something specific about what the word “publishing” means and how it is currently undergoing a significant change brought about by a radical adaptation of literacy practices. What I think both books also do is give us an insight into how those changes are being interpreted, to be rejected on the one hand and applauded on the other. Both books have their faults. Keen’s work can fairly easily be passed off as a sort of cantankerous reminiscence for the legitimacy of an earlier era of publishing, and Greenwald’s Emos have, like all teen subcultures, changed somewhat. Yet what both books portray is an attempt to digest how Web 2.0 has altered perceptions of what constitutes legitimate speaking positions and how that is reflected in the literacy practices that shape the relationships among authors, readers, and the channels through which they interact. Their primary difference is a disparity in the value they place on Web 2.0’s amplification of the Internet’s use as a social and communicative medium. Greenwald embraces it as the facilitator of an open-access dialogue, whereas Keen sees it as a direct threat to other, more traditional, gatekeeper genres. Accordingly, Keen begins his book with a lament that Web 2.0’s “democratization” of media is “undermining truth, souring civic discourse and belittling expertise, experience, and talent … it is threatening the very future of our cultural institutions” (15). He continues, Today’s editors, technicians, and cultural gatekeepers—the experts across an array of fields—are necessary to help us to sift through what’s important and what’s not, what is credible from what is unreliable, what is worth spending our time on as opposed to the white noise that can be safely ignored. (45) As examples of the “white noise,” he lists some of the core features of Web 2.0—blogs, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. The notable similarity between all of these is that their content is user generated and, accordingly, comes from the position of the personal, rather than from a gatekeeper. In terms of their readership, this presents a fundamental shift in an understanding of authenticated speaking positions, one which Keen suggests underwrites reliability by removing the presence of certifiable expertise. He looks at Web 2.0 and sees a mass of low grade, personal content overwhelming traditional benchmarks of quality and accountability. His definition of “publishing” is essentially one in which a few, carefully groomed producers express work seen as relevant to the wider community. The relationship between reader and writer is primarily one sided, mediated by a gatekeeper and rests on the assumption by all involved that the producer has the legitimacy to speak to a large, and largely silent, readership. Greenwald, by contrast, looks at the same genres and comes to a remarkably different and far more positive conclusion. He focuses heavily on the lively message boards of the social networking site Makeoutclub, the shift to a long tail marketing style by key Emo record labels such as Vagrant and Drive-Thru Records and, in particular, the widespread use of LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com) by suburban, Emo fixated teenagers. Of this he writes: The language is inflated, coded as ‘adult’ and ‘poetic’, which often translates into affected, stilted and forced. But if one can accept that, there’s a sweet vulnerability to it. The world of LiveJournal is an enclosed circuit where everyone has agreed to check their cynicism at the sign on screen; it’s a pulsing, swoony realm of inflated emotions, expectations and dialogue. (287) He specifically notes that one cannot read mediums like LiveJournal in the same style as their more traditional counterparts. There is a necessity to adopt a reading style conducive to a dialogue devoid of conventional quality controls. It is also, he notes, a heavily interconnected, inherently social medium: LiveJournals represent the truest and easiest realization of the essential teenage (and artistic) tenet of the importance of a ‘room of one’s own’, and yet the framework of the website is enough to make each individual room interconnected into a mosaic of richly felt lives. (288) Where Keen sees Web 2.0 as a shift way from established cultural forums, Greenwald sees it as an interconnected conversation. His definition of publishing is more fluid, founded on a belief not in the authenticity of a single, validated voice but on the legitimacy of interaction and communication entirely devoid of any gatekeepers. Central to understanding the difference between Greenwald and Keen is the issue or whether or not we accept the legitimacy of personal voices and how we evaluate the kind of reading practices involved in interpreting them. In this respect, Greenwald’s reference to “a room of one’s own” is telling. When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own in 1929, Web 2.0 wasn’t even a consideration, but her work dealt with a similar subject matter, detailing the key role the novel genre played in legitimising women’s voices precisely because it was “young enough to be soft in [their] hands” (74). What would eventually emerge from Woolf’s work was the field of feminist literary criticism, which hit its stride in the mid-eighties. In terms of its understanding of the power relations inherent to cultural production, particularly as they relate to gatekeeping, it’s a rich academic tradition notably lacking in the writing on Web 2.0. For example, Celia Lury’s essay “Reading the Self,” written more than ten years before the popularisation of the internet, looks specifically at the way in which authoritative speaking positions gain their legitimacy not just through the words on the page but through the entire relationships among author, genre, channels of distribution, and readership. She argues that, “to write is to enter into a relationship with a community of readers, and various forms of writing are seen to involve and imply, at any particular time, various forms of relationship” (102). She continues, so far as text is clearly written/read within a particular genre, it can be seen to rest upon a more or less specific set of social relations. It also means that ‘textual relations’—that is, formal techniques, reading strategies and so on—are not held separate from ‘non-textual relations’—such as methods of cultural production and modes of distribution—and that the latter can be seen to help construct ‘literary value.’ (102) The implication is that an appropriation of legitimised speaking positions isn’t done purely by overthrowing or contesting an established system of ‘quality’ but by developing a unique relationship between author, genre, and readership. Textual and non-textual practices blur together to create literary environments and cultural space. The term “publishing” is at the heart of these relationships, describing the literacies required to interpret particular voices and forms of communication. Yet, as Lury writes, literacy habits can vary. Participation in dialogue-driven, user-generated mediums is utterly different from conventional, gatekeeper-driven ones, yet the two can easily co-exist. For instance, reading last year’s Man Booker prize-winner doesn’t stop one from reading, or even writing, blogs. One can enact numerous literacy practices, move between discourses and inhabit varied relationships between genre, reader, and writer. However, with the rise of Web 2.0 a whole range of literacies that used to be defined as “private sphere” or “everyday literacies,” everything from personal conversations and correspondence to book clubs and fanzines, have become far, far more public. In the past these dialogue-based channels of communication have never been in a position where they could be defined as “publishing.” Web 2.0 changes that, moving previously private sphere communication into online public space in a very obvious way. Keen dismisses this shift as a wall of white noise, but Greenwald does something equally interesting. To a large extent, his positive treatment of Web 2.0’s “affected, stilted and forced” user-generated content is validated by his focus on a “Youth” subculture, namely Emo. Indeed, he heavily links the impact of youthful subcultural practices with the internet, writing that Teenage life has always been about self-creation, and its inflated emotions and high stakes have always existed in a grossly accelerated bubble of hypertime. The internet is the most teenage of media because it too exists in this hypertime of limitless limited moments and constant reinvention. If emo is the soundtrack to hypertime, then the web is its greatest vehicle, the secret tunnel out of the locked bedroom and dead-eyed judgmental scenes of youth. (277) In this light, we accept the voices of his Emo subjects because, underneath their low-quality writing, they produce a “sweet vulnerability” and a “dialogue,” which provides them with a “secret tunnel” out of the loneliness of their bedrooms or unsupportive geographical communities. It’s a theme that hints at the degree to which discussions of Web 2.0 are often heavily connected to arguments about generationalism, framed by the field of youth studies and accordingly end up being mined for what Tara Brabazon calls “spectacular youth subcultures” (23). We see some core examples of this in some of the quasi-academic writing on the subject of “Youth.” For example, in his 2005 book XYZ: The New Rules of Generational Warfare, Michael Grose declares Generation Y as “post-literate”: Like their baby boomer parents and generation X before them, generation Ys get their information from a range of sources that include the written and spoken word. Magazines and books are in, but visual communication is more important for this cohort than their parents. They live in a globalised, visual world where images rather than words are universal communication media. The Internet has heightened the use of symbols as a direct communicator. (95) Given the Internet is overwhelmingly a textual medium, it’s hard to tell exactly what Grose’s point is other than to express his confusion over new literacy practices. In a similar vein and in a similar style, Rebecca Huntley writes in her book The World According to Y, In the Y world, a mobile phone is not merely a phone. It is, as described by demographer Bernard Salt, “a personal accessory, a personal communications device and a personal entertainment centre.” It’s a device for work and play, flirtation and sex, friendship and family. For Yers, their phone symbolizes freedom and flexibility. More than that, your mobile phone symbolizes you. (16) Like Keen, Grose and Huntley are trying to understand a shift in publishing and media that has produced new literacy practices. Unlike Keen, Grose and Huntley pin the change on young people and, like Greenwald, they turn a series of new literacy practices into something akin to what Dick Hebdige called “conspicuous consumption” (103). It’s a term he linked to his definition of bricolage as the production of “implicitly coherent, though explicitly bewildering, systems of connection between things which perfectly equip their users to ‘think’ their own world” (103). Thus, young people are differentiated from the rest of the population by their supposedly unique consumption of “symbols” and mobile phones, into which they read their own cryptic meanings and develop their own generational language. Greenwald shows this methodology in action, with the Emo use of things like LiveJournal, Makeoutclub and other bastions of Web 2.0 joining their record collections, ubiquitous sweeping fringes and penchant for accessorised outfits as part of the conspicuous consumption inherent to understandings of youth subculture. The same theme is reflected in Michel de Certeau’s term “tactics” or, more common amongst those studying Web 2.0, Henry Jenkins’s notion of “poaching”. The idea is that people, specifically young people, appropriate particular forms of cultural literacy to redefine themselves and add a sense of value to their voices. De Certeau’s definition of tactics, as a method of resistance “which cannot count on a ‘proper’ (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality” (489), is a prime example of how Web 2.0 is being understood. Young people, Emo or not, engage in a consumption of the Internet, poaching the tools of production to redefine the value of their voices in a style completely acceptable to the neo-Marxist, Birmingham school understanding of youth and subculture as a combination producing a sense of resistance. It’s a narrative highly compatible within the fields of cultural and media studies, which, despite major shifts brought about by people like Ken Gelder, Sarah Thornton, Keith Kahn-Harris and the aforementioned Tara Brabazon, still look heavily for patterns of politicised consumption. The problem, as I think Keen inadvertently suggests, is that the Internet isn’t just about young people and their habits as consumers. It’s about what the word “publishing” actually means and how we think about the interaction among writers, readers, and the avenues through which they interact. The idea that we can pass off the redefinition of literacy practices brought about by Web 2.0 as a subcultural youth phenomena is an easy way of bypassing wider cultural shifts onto a token demographic. It presents Web 2.0 as an issue of “Youth” resisting the hegemony of traditional gatekeepers, which is effectively what Greenwald does. Yet such an approach has a very short shelf life. It’s a little like claiming the telephone or the television set were “youth genres.” The uptake of new technologies will inadvertently impact differently on those who grew up with them as compared to those who grew up without them. Yet ultimately changes in literacy habits are much larger than a generationalist framework can really express, particularly given the first generation of “digital natives” are now in their thirties. There’s a lot of things wrong with Andrew Keen’s book but one thing he does do well is ground the debate about Web 2.0 back to issues of legitimate speaking positions and publishing. That said, he also significantly simplifies those issues when he claims the problem is purely about the decline of traditional gatekeeper models. Responding to Keen’s criticism of him, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig writes, I think it is a great thing when amateurs create, even if the thing they create is not as great as what the professional creates. I want my kids to write. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop reading Hemingway and read only what they write. What Keen misses is the value to a culture that comes from developing the capacity to create—independent of the quality created. That doesn’t mean we should not criticize works created badly (such as, for example, Keen’s book…). But it does mean you’re missing the point if you simply compare the average blog to the NY times (Lessig). What Lessig expresses here is the different, but not mutually exclusive, literacy practices involved in the word “publishing.” Publishing a blog is very different to publishing a newspaper and the way readers react to both will change as they move in and out the differing discursive spaces each occupies. In a recent collaborative paper by Sue Thomas, Chris Joseph, Jess Laccetti, Bruce Mason, Simon Mills, Simon Perril, and Kate Pullinger, they describe this capacity to move across different reading and writing styles as “transliteracy.” They define the term as “the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks” (Thomas et al.). It’s a term that perfectly describes the capacity to move fluidly across discursive environments. Here we return to Greenwald’s use of a framework of youth and subculture. While I have criticised the Birminghamesque fixation on a homogeneous “Youth” demographic enacting resistance through conspicuous consumption, there is good reason to use existing subculture studies methodology as a means of understanding how transliteracies play out in everyday life. David Chaney remarks, the idea of subculture is redundant because the type of investment that the notion of subculture labelled is becoming more general, and therefore the varieties of modes of symbolization and involvement are more common in everyday life. (37) I think the increasing commonality of subcultural practices in everyday life actually makes the idea more relevant, not less. It does, however, make it much harder to pin things on “spectacular youth subcultures.” Yet the focus on “everyday life” is important here, shifting our understanding of “subculture” to the types of literacies played out within localised, personal networks and experiences. As de Certeau has argued, the practice of everyday life is an issue of “a way of thinking invested in a way of acting, an art of combination which cannot be dissociated from an art of using” (Certeau 486). This is as true for our literacy practices as anything else. Whether we choose to label those practices subcultural or not, our ability to interpret, take part in and react to different communicative forums is clearly fundamental to our understanding of the world around us, regardless of our age. Sarah Thornton suggests a useful alternate definition of subculture when she talks about subcultural capital: Subcultural capital is the linchpin of an alternative hierarchy in which the aces of age, gender, sexuality and race are all employed in order to keep the determinations of class, income and occupation at bay (105). This is an understanding that avoids easy narratives of young people and their consumption of Web 2.0 by recognising the complexity with which people’s literacy habits, in the cultural sense, connect to their active participation in the production of meaning. Subcultural capital implies that the framework through which individuals read, interpret, and shift between discursive environments, personalising and building links across the strata of cultural production, is acted out at the local and personal level, rather than purely through the relationship between a producing gatekeeper and a passive, consuming readership. If we recognise the ability for readers to connect multiple mediums, to shift between reading and writing practices, and to seamlessly interpret and digest markedly different assumptions about legitimate speaking voices across genres, our understanding of what it means to “publish” ceases to be an issue of generationalism or conventional mediums being washed away by the digital era. The issue we see in both Keen and Greenwald is an attempt to digest the way Web 2.0 has forced the concept of “publishing” to take on a multiplicity of meanings, played out by individual readers, and imbued with their own unique and interwoven textual and cultural literacy habits. It’s not only Emos who publish livejournals, and it’s incredibly naive to assume gatekeepers have ever really held a monopoly on all aspects of cultural production. What the rise of Web 2.0 has done is simply to bring everyday, private sphere dialogue driven literacies into the public sphere in a very obvious way. The kind of discourses once passed off as resistant youth subcultures are now being shown as common place. Keen is right to suggest that this will continue to impact, sometimes negatively, on traditional gatekeepers. Yet the change is inevitable. As our reading and writing practices alter around new genres, our understandings of what constitutes legitimate fields of publishing will also change. References Brabazon, Tara. From Revolution to Revelation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. de Certeau, Michel. “Practice of Every Day Life.” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Ed. John Story. London: Prentice Hall, 1998. 483–94. Chaney, David. “Fragmented Culture and Subcultures.” After Subculture. Ed. Andy Bennett and Keith Kahn-Harris. Houndsmill: Palgrave McMillian, 2004. 36–48. Greenwald, Andy. Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers and Emo. New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2003. Grose, Michael. XYZ: The New Rules of Generational Warfare. Sydney: Random House, 2005. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen and Co Ltd, 1979. Huntley, Rebecca. The World According to Y. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2006. Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2007. Lessig, Lawrence. “Keen’s ‘The Cult of the Amateur’: BRILLIANT!” Lessig May 31, 2007. Aug. 19 2008 ‹http://www.lessig.org/blog/2007/05/keens_the_cult_of_the_amateur.html>. Lury, Celia. “Reading the Self: Autobiography, Gender and the Institution of the Literary.” Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies. Ed. Sarah. Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey. Hammersmith: HarperCollinsAcademic, 1991. 97–108. Thomas, Sue, Chris Joseph, Jess Laccetti, Bruce Mason, Simon Mills, Simon Perril, and Kate Pullinger. “Transliteracy: Crossing Divides.” First Monday 12.12. (2007). Apr. 1 2008 ‹http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2060/1908>. Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Oxford: Polity Press, 1995. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Frogmore: Triad/Panther Press, 1977.

IntroductionCatastrophe surrounds us perpetually: from the Queensland floods, Christchurch earthquake, global warming, and Global Financial Crisis to social conflicts, psychological breaking points, relationship failures, and crises of understanding. As a consequence of the pervasiveness of catastrophe, its representation saturates our everyday awareness. On a daily basis we encounter stories of people impacted by and coping with natural, economic, ecological, and emotional disasters of all kinds.But what is the relationship between culture, catastrophe, and creativity? Can catastrophe be an impetus for the creative transformation of societies and individuals? Conversely, how can culture moderate, transform, and re-imagine catastrophe? And in the final analysis, how should we conceive of catastrophe; does catastrophe have a bad name? These questions and others have guided us in editing the “catastrophe” issue of M/C Journal. The word catastrophe has been associated with extreme disaster only since the 1700s. In an earlier etymological sense, catastrophe simply connoted “a reversal of what is expected” or, in Western literary history, a defining turn in a drama (Harper). Catastrophe derives from the Greek katastrophe for “an overturning; a sudden end.” As this issue clearly demonstrates, whilst catastrophes vary in scale, context, and meaning, their outcomes are life-changing inversions of the interpersonal, social, or environmental norm. In The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon echoes this definition and argues that catastrophe “can be a source of immense creativity—a shock that opens up political, social, and psychological space for fresh ideas, actions, institutions, and technologies that weren't possible before” (23). According to Homer-Dixon and on a hopeful note, “in any complex adaptive system, breakdown, if limited, can be a key part of that system's long-term resilience and renewal” (308). Indeed, many of the articles in this issue sound a note of hope. Catastrophe and Creativity The impetus for this issue comes from the Catastrophe and Creativity symposium convened at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, in 2012. The symposium brought together artists and researchers from around Australia to engage with the theme “catastrophe.” The organisers encouraged participants to conceptualise catastrophe broadly and creatively: from natural disasters to personal turning points, and from debilitating meltdowns to regenerative solutions. As a result, the topics explored in this issue stretch deeply and widely, and demonstrate the different forms and scales of catastrophe. Many of the 24 articles submitted for possible inclusion in this issue emerged as responses to the symposium theme. Distinct moods and meanings of catastrophe reverberate in the final selection of 12. The articles that shape the issue are intimate, collective, and geographical engagements with and reflections upon cataclysm that move from the highly personal to the global and speak of countries, communities, networks, friends, families, and colleagues. As a collection, the articles re-envision catastrophe as a pathway for creative interventions, artistic responses, community solidarities, social innovations, individual modes of survival and resilience, and environmental justices. In thinking through the relationship between catastrophe and culture, the authors challenge existing discourses and ways of knowing trauma, and offer fresh interpretations and hope. Catastrophe leads to metanoia: a change of perception after a significant crisis. The editors appreciate that there are no hierarchies between interpretations of catastrophe. Instead, the articles represent a dialogue between diverse experiences of pain, disaster, and abuse, as well as different theories about the nature of catastrophe—from the catastrophic loss of millions through genocide to the impact of trauma on an individual’s body and psyche. Part of the challenge of crafting this issue of M/C Journal has been in delineating what constitutes catastrophe. Admittedly we end up with more questions than we started with. Is catastrophe the same as trauma? Is it disaster? When is it apocalypse? Can catastrophe entail all these things? Who is silenced, and who can tell the narratives of catastrophe? How? Despite these unanswerable questions, we can be certain that catastrophe, as described by the authors, foundationally changes the fabric of human and non-human being in the world. The authors leave us with the lingering reverberations and resonances of catastrophe, revealing at the same time how catastrophic events can “reverse the expected” in the true sense of the word. The transformative potential of catastrophe is prominent in the issue. Some authors call for justice, support, inspiration, and resilience—on personal and community levels. The contributions remind us that, after catastrophe, the person, society, or planet will never be the same. Responses to Catastrophe The issue opens with the intimate nature of catastrophes. A feature article by esteemed Canadian academic and poet Lorri Neilsen Glenn takes the form of a lyric essay originally presented as the keynote address at the symposium. Composed of extracts from her book Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry (published here with kind permission of the author and Hagios Press) and reflective interludes, Neilsen combines her acute academic insights with personal experiences of loss to create evocative prose and poetry that, as she says, “grounds our grief in form […] connects us to one another and the worlds.” Her work opens for the reader “complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief.” In this piece, Neilsen speaks of personal catastrophe through lyric inquiry, a method she has described eloquently in the Sage Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. The second feature article is a commentary on Neilsen’s work by the equally esteemed feminist scholar Lekkie Hopkins. In her article, Hopkins explains Neilsen’s journey from literacy researcher to arts-based social science researcher to poet and lyric inquirer. Hopkins uses her reflections on the work of Neilsen in order to draw attention, not only to Neilsen’s “ground-breaking uses of lyric inquiry,” but also to another kind of communal catastrophe which Hopkins calls “the catastrophe of the methodological divide between humanities and the social sciences that runs the risk of creating, for the social sciences, a limiting and limited approach to research.” In her article “Casualties on the Road to Ethical Authenticity,” Kate Rice applies a powerful narrative inquiry to the relationship between catastrophe and ethics. As a playwright experienced in projects dealing with personal catastrophe, Rice nevertheless finds her usual research and writing practice challenged by the specific content of her current project—a play about the murder of innocents—and its focus on the real-life perpetrator. Ambivalent regarding the fascinated human response such catastrophe draws, Rice suggests that spectacle creates “comfort” associated with “processing sympathy into a feeling of self-importance at having felt pain that isn’t yours.” She also argues against a hierarchy of grief, noting that, “when you strip away the circumstances, the essence of loss is the same, whether your loved one dies of cancer, in a car accident, or a natural disaster.” In an article tracing the reverberation of catastrophe over the course of 100 years, Marcella Polain explores the impact of the Armenian Genocide’s 1.5 million deaths. Through a purposefully fragmented, non-linear narrative, Polain evokes with exquisite sensitivity the utter devastation the Genocide wreaked upon one family—her own: “When springs run red, when the dead are stacked tree-high, when ‘everything that could happen has already happened,’ then time is nothing: ‘there is no future [and] the language of civilised humanity is not our language’” (Nichanian 142).The potentiality that can be generated in the aftermath of catastrophe also resonates in an article co-authored by Brenda Downing and Alice Cummins. (A photograph of Downing’s performance aperture is the issue’s cover image.) In their visceral evocation, the catastrophe of childhood rape is explored and enfleshed with a deft and generous touch. Downing, embodying for the reader her experience as researcher, writer, and performer, and Cummins, as Body-Mind Centering® practitioner and artistic director, explore the reciprocity of their collaboration and the performance aperture that they created together. Their collaboration made possible the realisation that “a performance […] could act as a physical, emotional, and intellectual bridge of communication between those who have experienced sexual violence and those who have not.” Maggie Phillips evokes the authoritative yet approachable voice of her 2012 symposium presentation in “Diminutive Catastrophe: Clown’s Play;” her meditation on clowns and clowning as not only a discipline and practice, but also “a state of being.” In response to large-scale catastrophe, and the catastrophic awareness of “the utter meaninglessness of human existence,” the clown offers “a tiny gesture.” As Phillips argues, however, “those fingers brushing dust off a threadbare jacket may speak volumes.” By inducing “miniscule shifts of consciousness” as they “wander across territories designated as sacred and profane with a certain insouciance and privilege,” clowns offer “glimpses of the ineffable.” In “Creativity in an Online Community as a Response to the Chaos of a Breast Cancer Diagnosis,” Cynthia Witney, Lelia Green, Leesa Costello, and Vanessa Bradshaw explore the role of online communities, such as the “Click” website, in providing support and information for women with breast cancer. Importantly, the authors show how these communities can provide a forum for the expression of creativity. Through Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” (53), the authors suggest that “becoming totally involved in the creative moment, so as to lose all track of time” allows women temporary space to “forget the trials and worries of breast cancer.” By providing a forum for women and their supporters to reach out to others in similar situations, online communities, inspired by notions of creativity and flow, can offer “some remedy for catastrophe.” A different impulse pervades Ella Mudie’s insightful examination of the Surrealist city novel. Mudie argues against the elision of historical catastrophe through contemporary practices; specifically, the current reading in the field of psychogeography of Surrealist city dérives (drifts) as playful city walks, or “an intriguing yet ultimately benign method of urban research.” Mudie revisits the Surrealist city novel, evoking the original “praxis of shock” deployed through innovative experiments in novelistic form and content. Binding the theory and practice of Surrealism to the catastrophic event from which it sprang—the Great War—Mudie argues against “domesticating movements” which “dull the awakening power” of such imaginative and desperate revolts against an increasingly mechanised society. Through discussions of natural disasters, the next three articles bring a distinctive architectural, geographical, and ecological stream to the issue. Michael Levine and William Taylor invoke Susan Sontag’s essay “The Imagination of Disaster” in conceptualising approaches to urban recovery and renewal after catastrophic events, as exemplified by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The authors are interested explicitly in the “imagination of disaster” and the “psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding,” which they find absent in Sontag’s account of the representation of urban cataclysms in 1950s and 60s science fiction films. Levine and Taylor’s article points to community ethics and social justice issues that—as they outline through different examples from film—should be at the centre of urban reconstruction initiatives. Interpretations of what is meant by reconstruction will vary substantially and, hence, so should community responses be wide-ranging. Extending the geo-spatial emphasis of Levine and Taylor’s article, Rod Giblett theorises the historical and environmental context of Hurricane Katrina using Walter Benjamin’s productive notion of the “Angel of History.” However, Giblett offers the analogous metaphor of the “Angel of Geography” as a useful way to locate catastrophe in both time (history) and space (geography). In particular, Giblett’s reading of the New Orleans disaster addresses the disruption of the city’s ecologically vital habitats over time. As such, according to Giblett, Katrina was the culmination of a series of smaller environmental catastrophes throughout the history of the city, namely the obliteration of its wetlands. Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” thereby, recognises the unity of temporal events and “sees a single, catastrophic history, not just of New Orleans but preceding and post-dating it.” Giblett’s archaeology of the Hurricane Katrina disaster provides a novel framework for reconceptualising the origins of catastrophes. Continuing the sub-theme of natural disasters, Dale Dominey-Howes returns our attention to Australia, arguing that the tsunami is poised to become the “new Australian catastrophe.” Through an analysis of Australian media coverage of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Dominey-Howes asks provocatively: “Has extensive media coverage resulted in an improved awareness of the catastrophic potential of tsunami for Australians?” After speaking with more than 800 Australians in order to understand popular attitudes towards tsunami, the author responds with a definitive “no.” In his view, Australians are “avoiding or disallowing the reality; they normalise and dramaticise the event. Thus in Australia, to date, a cultural transformation about the catastrophic nature of tsunami has not occurred for reasons that are not entirely clear.” As the final article in the issue, “FireWatch: Creative Responses to Bushfire Catastrophe” gives insights into the real-world experience of managing catastrophes as they occur, in this case, bushfires in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia. Donell Holloway, Lelia Green, and Danielle Brady detail an Australian Research Council funded project that creatively engages with Kimberley residents who “improvise in a creative and intuitive manner” when responding to catastrophe. The authors capture responses from residents in order to redesign an interface that will provide real-time, highly useable information for the management of bushfires in Western Australia. Conclusion This “catastophe” issue of M/C Journal explores, by way of the broad reach of the articles, the relationship between culture, creativity, and catastrophe. Readers will have encountered collective creative responses to bushfire or breast cancer, individual responses to catastrophe, such as childhood rape or genocide, and cultural conceptualisations of catastrophe, for example, in relation to New Orlean’s Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The editors hope that, just like the metanoia that catastrophe can bring about (demonstrated so articulately by Downing and Cummins), readers too will experience a change of their perception of catastrophe, and will come to see catastrophe in its many fascinating iterations. References Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Harper, Douglas. “catastrophe.” Online Etymology Dictionary. 22 Mar. 2013 . Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Melbourne : Text Publishing, 2007. Kazanjian, David, and Marc Nichanian. “Between Genocide and Catastrophe.” Loss. Eds. David Eng and David Kazanjian. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2003. 125–47. Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light. Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Neilsen, Lorri. “Lyric Inquiry.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98.

IntroductionSince its launch in 2005, YouTube has fast become one of the most popular video sharing sites, one of the largest sources of user generated content, and one of the most frequently visited sites globally (Burgess and Green). As YouTube’s popularity has increased, more and more people have taken up the site’s invitation to “Broadcast Yourself.” Vlogging (video blogging) on YouTube has increased in popularity, creating new genres and communities. Vlogging not only allows individuals to create their own mediated content for mass consumption—making it a site for participatory culture (Burgess and Green; Jenkins) and resembling contemporary forms of entertainment such as reality television—but it also allows individuals to engage in narrative and identity forming practices. Through filming their everyday lives, and presenting themselves on camera, YouTubers are engaging in a process of constructing and presenting their identity online. They often form communities around these identities and continue the practice in dialogue and collaboration with their communities of viewers on YouTube. Because of YouTube’s mass global reach, the ability to create one’s own mediated content and the ability to publicly play with and project different self representations becomes a powerful tool allowing YouTubers to publicly challenge social norms and encourage others to do the same. This paper will explore these features of YouTube using the recent “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement, started by NikkieTutorials, as an example. Through a virtual ethnography of the movement as developed by Christine Hine—following the people, dialogue, connections, and narratives that emerged from Nikkie’s original video—this paper will demonstrate that YouTube is not only a tool for self transformation, but has wider potential to transform norms in society. This is achieved mainly through mobilising communities that form around transformative practices, such as makeup transformations, on YouTube. Vlogging as an Identity Forming Practice Vlogging on YouTube is a contemporary form of autobiography in which individuals engage in a process of documenting their life on a daily or weekly basis and, in doing so, constructing their identity online. Although the aim of beauty vlogs is to teach new makeup techniques, demonstrate and review new products, or circulate beauty-related information, the videos include a large amount of self-disclosure. Beauty vloggers reveal intimate things about themselves and actively engage in the practice of self-representation while filming. Beauty vlogging is unique to other vlogging genres as it almost always involves an immediate transformation of the physical self in each video. The vloggers typically begin with their faces bare and “natural” and throughout the course of the video transform their faces into how they want to be seen, and ultimately, who they want to be that day, using makeup. Thus the process of self-representation is multi-dimensional as not only are they presenting the self, but they are also visually constructing the self on camera. The construction of identity that beauty vloggers engage in on YouTube can be likened to what Robert Ezra Park and later Erving Goffman refer to as the construction and performance of a mask. In his work Race and Culture, Park states that the original meaning of the word person is a mask (249). Goffman responds to this statement in his work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, saying the mask is “our truer self, the self we would like to be” (30). Beauty vloggers are engaging in the process of constructing their mask—their truer self and the self they would like to be—both through their performance on YouTube, and through the visual transformation that takes place on camera. Their performance on YouTube not only communicates a desired identity, but through their performance they realise this identity. The process of filming and the visual process of constructing or transforming the self on camera through makeup brings the subject into being. Scholarship in the fields of Life Writing and Digital Media including Autobiography, Automedia and Persona Studies has acknowledged and explored the ways narratives and identities—both online and offline—are constructed, created, shaped, chosen, and invented by the individual/author (Garner; Bridger; Eakin; Maguire; Poletti and Rak; Marshall; Smith and Watson). It is widely accepted that all representations of the self are constructed. Crucially, it is the process of documenting or communicating the self that is identity forming (Richardson; Bridger), as the process, including writing, filming, and posting, brings the subject or self into being (Neuman). The individual embodies their performance and realises the self through it. Park and Goffman argue that we all engage in this process of performing and realising the self through the roles we play in society. The significance of the beauty vlogger performance and transformation is the space in which it occurs and the community that it fosters. YouTube as a Transformative Tool and MirrorThe space in which beauty vloggers play with and transform the self on camera is significant as digital technologies such as YouTube invite exploration of the self. Networked digital media (Meikle and Young) invite multiplicity, heterogeneity, and fragmentation in/of identity performances (Bolter; Gergen; Turkle, "Parallel Lives"). These technologies create opportunities for defining and re-defining the self (Bolter 130), as they allow people to present a more multi-mediated self, using both audio-visual components and text (Papacharissi 643).YouTube, in particular, allows the individual to experiment with the self, and document an ongoing transformation, through film (Kavoori). Many scholars have described this ongoing process of identity construction online using the metaphor of “the mirror” (see Kavoori; Raun; and Procter as recent examples). In his research on trans gender vlogging on YouTube, Tobias Raun explores the theme of the mirror. He describes vlogging as a “transformative medium for working on, producing and exploring the self” (366). He argues the vlog acts as a mirror allowing the individual to try out and assume various identities (366). He writes, the mirroring function of the vlog “invites the YouTuber to assume the shape of a desired identity/representation, constantly assuming and evaluating oneself as an attractive image, trying out different ‘styles of the flesh’ (Butler 177), poses and appearances” (367). In reference to trans gender vlogging, Raun writes, “The vlog seems to serve an important function in the transitioning process, and is an important part of a process of self-invention, serving as a testing ground for experimentations with, and manifestations of (new) identities” (367). The mirror (vlog) gives the individual a place/space to construct and perform their mask (identity), and an opportunity to see the reflection and adjust the mask (identity) accordingly. An important feature of the vlog as a mirror is the fact that it is less like a conventional mirror and more like a window with a reflective surface. On YouTube the vlog always involves an audience, who not only watch the performance, but also respond to it. This is in keeping with Goffman’s assertion that there is always an audience involved in any performance of the self. On YouTube, Raun argues, “the need to represent oneself goes hand in hand with the need to connect and communicate” (Raun 369). Networked digital media such as YouTube are inherently social. They invite participation (Smith; Sauter)and community through community building functions such as the ability to like, subscribe, and comment. Michael Strangelove refers to YouTube as a social space, “as a domain of self-expression, community and public confession” (4). The audience and community are important in the process of identity construction and representation as they serve a crucial role in providing feedback and encouragement, legitimising the identity being presented. As Raun writes, the vlog is an opportunity “for seeing one’s own experiences and thoughts reflected in others” (366). Raun identifies that for the trans gender vloggers in his study, simply knowing there is an audience watching their vlogs is enough to affirm their identity. He writes the vlog can be both “an individual act of self validation and . . . a social act of recognition and encouragement” (368). However, in the case of beauty vlogging the audience do more than watch, they form communities embodying and projecting the performance in everyday life and thus collectively challenge social norms, as seen in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement. Exploring the “The Power of MAKEUP!” MovementOn 10 May 2015, Nikkie, a well-known beauty vlogger, uploaded a video to her YouTube channel NikkieTutorials titled “The Power of MAKEUP!” Nikkie’s video can be watched here. In her video Nikkie challenges “makeup shaming,” arguing that makeup is not only fun, but can “transform” you into who you want to be. Inspired by an episode of the reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race, in which the competing drag queens transform half of their face into “glam” (drag), and leave the other half of their face bare (male), Nikkie demonstrates that anyone can use makeup as a transformative tool. In her video Nikkie mirrors the drag queen transformations, transforming half her face into “glam” and leaving the other half of her face bare, as shown in Figure 1. In only transforming half of her face, Nikkie emphasises the scope of the transformation, demonstrating just how much you can change your appearance using only makeup on your face. Nikkie’s video communicates that both a transformed “glam” image and an “unedited” image of the self are perfectly fine, “there are no rules” and neither representations of the self should bring you shame. Figure 1: thumbnail of Nikkie’s videoNikkie’s video started a movement and spread throughout the beauty community on YouTube as a challenge. Other famous beauty vloggers, and everyday makeup lovers, took on the challenge of creating YouTube videos or posting pictures on Instagram of their faces half bare and half transformed using makeup with the tag #thepowerofmakeupchallenge. Since its release in May 2015, Nikkie’s video has been watched over thirty million times, has been liked over five hundred and thirty thousand times, and has received over twenty three thousand comments, many of which echo Nikkie’s experience of “makeup shaming.” “The power of makeup” video went viral and was picked up not only by the online beauty community but also by mainstream media with articles by Huffington Post, Yahoo.com, Marie Claire, BuzzFeed, DailyLife, POPSUGAR, Enews, Urbanshowbiz, BoredPanda, and kickvick among others. On Instagram, thousands of everyday makeup lovers have recreated the transformation and uploaded their pictures of the finished result. Various hashtags have been created around this movement and can be searched on Instagram including #thepowerofmakeupchallenge, #powerofmakeupchallenge, #powerofmakeup. Nikkie’s Instagram page dedicated to the challenge can be seen here. “The power of makeup” video is a direct reaction against what Nikkie calls “makeup shaming”—the idea that makeup is bad, and the assumption that the leading motivation for using makeup is insecurity. In her video Nikkie also reacts to the idea that the made-up-girl is “not really you,” or worse is “fake.” In the introduction to her video Nikkie says,I’ve been noticing a lot lately that girls have been almost ashamed to say that they love makeup because nowadays when you say you love makeup you either do it because you want to look good for boys, you do it because you’re insecure, or you do it because you don’t love yourself. I feel like in a way lately it’s almost a crime to love doing your makeup. So after last weeks RuPaul’s Drag Race with the half drag half male, I was inspired to show you the power of makeup. I notice a lot that when I don’t wear makeup and I have my hair up in a bun and I meet people and I show them picture of my videos or, or whatever looks I have done, they look at me and straight up tell me “that is not you.” They tell me “that’s funny” because I don’t even look like that girl on the picture. So without any further ado I’m going to do half my face full on glam—I’m truly going to transform one side of my face—and the other side is going to be me, raw, unedited, nothing, me, just me. So let’s do it.In her introduction, Nikkie identifies a social attitude that many of her viewers can relate to, that the made-up face isn’t the “real you.” This idea reveals an interesting contradiction in social attitude. As this issue of Media/Culture highlights, the theme of transformation is increasingly popular in contemporary society. Renovation shows, weight loss shows, and “makeover” shows have increased in number and popularity around the world (Lewis). Tania Lewis attributes this to an international shift towards “the real” on television (447). Accompanying this turn towards “the real,” confession, intimacy, and authenticity are now demanded and consumed as entertainment (Goldthwaite; Dovey; King). Sites such as YouTube are arguably popular because they offer real stories, real lives, and have a core value of authenticity (Strangelove; Wesch; Young; Tolson). The power of makeup transformations are challenging because they juxtapose a transformation against the natural, on the self. By only transforming half their face, the beauty vloggers juxtapose the “makeover” (transformation) with “authenticity” (the natural). The power of makeup movement is therefore caught between two contemporary social values. However, the desire for authenticity, and the lack of acceptance that the transformed image is authentic seems to be the main criticism that the members of this movement receive. Beauty vloggers identify a strong social value that “natural” is “good” and any attempt to alter the natural is taboo. Even in the commercial world “natural beauty” is celebrated and features heavily in the marketing and advertising campaigns of popular beauty, cosmetic, and skincare brands. Consider Maybelline’s emphasis on “natural beauty” in their byline “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.” This is not the way the members of “the power of makeup” movement use and celebrate makeup. They use and celebrate makeup as a transformative and identity forming tool, and their use of makeup is most often criticised for not being natural. In her recreation of Nikkie’s video, Evelina Forsell says “people get upset when I’m not natural.” Like Nikkie, Evelina reveals she often receives the criticism that “the person with a full on face with makeup is not you.” Evelina’s video can be watched here.“The power of makeup” movement and its participants challenge this criticism that the made-up self is not the “real” self. Evelina directly responds to this criticism in her video, stating “when I have a full face of makeup . . . that’s still me, but a more . . . creative me, I guess.” The beauty vloggers in this movement use makeup and YouTube as extensions of the self, as tools for self-expression, self-realisation, and ongoing transformation. Beauty vloggers are demonstrating that makeup is a tool and extension of the self that allows them to explore and play with their self-representations. In the same way that technology enables the individual to extend and “reinvent him/herself online” (Papacharissi 645), so does makeup. And in the same way that technology becomes an extension of the self, or even a second self (Turkle, The Second Self; Vaast) so does makeup. Makeup is a tool and technique of the self. Vlogging is about storytelling (Kavoori), but it is also collective—it’s about telling collective stories (Raun 373) which can be seen in various vlogging genres. As Geert Lovink suggests, YouTube is one of the largest databases of global shared experience. YouTube’s global popularity can be attributed to Strangelove’s assertion that “there’s nothing more interesting to real people . . . than authentic stories told about other real people” (65). Individuals are drawn to Nikkie’s experience, seeing themselves reflected in her story. Famous beauty vloggers on YouTube, and everyday beauty lovers, find community in the collective experience of feeling shame for loving makeup and using makeup to transform and communicate their identity. Effectively, the movement forms communities of practice (Wenger) made up of hundreds of people brought together by the shared value and use of makeup as a transformative tool. The online spaces where these activities take place (mainly on YouTube and Instagram) form affinity spaces (Gee) where the community come together, share information, learn and develop their practice. Hundreds of YouTubers from all over the world took up Nikkie’s invitation to demonstrate the power of makeup by transforming themselves on camera. From well-established beauty vloggers with millions of viewers, to amateur beauty lovers with YouTube channels, many people felt moved by Nikkie’s example and embodied the message, adapting the transformation to suit their circumstances. The movement includes both men and women, children and adults. Some transformations are inspirational such as Shalom Blac’s in which she talks about accepting the scars that are all over her face, but also demonstrates how makeup can make them disappear. Shalom has almost five million views on her “POWER OF MAKEUP” video, and has been labelled “inspirational” by the media. Shalom Blac’s video can be watched here and the media article labelling her as “inspirational” can be viewed here. Others, such as PatrickStarrr, send a powerful message that “It’s okay to be yourself.” Unlike a traditional interpretation of that statement, Patrick is communicating that it is okay to be the self that you construct, on any given day. Patrick also has over four million views on his video which can be watched here. During her transformation, Nikkie points out each feature of her face that she does not like and demonstrates how she can change it using makeup. Nikkie’s video is primarily a tutorial, educating viewers on different makeup techniques that can manipulate the appearance of their natural features into how they would like them to appear. These techniques are also reproduced and embodied through the various contributors to the movement. Thus the tutorial is an educational tool enabling others to use makeup for their own self representations (see Paul A. Soukup for an overview of YouTube as an educational tool). A feminist perspective may deconstruct the empowering, educational intentions of Nikkie’s video, insisting that conceptions of beauty are a social construct (Travis, Meginnis, and Bardari) and should not be re-enforced by encouraging women (and men) to use make-up to feel good. However, this sort of discourse does not appear in the movement, and this paper seeks to analyse the movement as its contributors frame and present it. Rather, “the power of makeup” movement falls within a postfeminist framework celebrating choice, femininity, independence, and the individual construction of modern identity (McRobbie; Butler; Beck, Giddens and Lash). Postfeminism embraces postmodern notions of identity in which individuals are “called up to invent their own structures” (McRobbie 260). Through institutions such as education young women have “become more independent and able,” and “‘dis-embedded’ from communities where gender roles were fixed” (McRobbie 260). Angela McRobbie attributes this to the work of scholars such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck and their emphasis on individualisation and reflexive modernisation. These scholars take a Foucauldian approach to identity construction in the modern age, where the individual must choose their own structures “internally and individualistically” (260), engaging in an ongoing process of self-monitoring and self-improvement, and resulting in the current self-help culture (McRobbie). In addition to being an educational and constructive tool, Nikkie’s video is also an exercise in self-branding and self-promotion(see Marwick; Duffy and Hund; and van Nuenen for scholarship on self-branding). Through her ongoing presence on YouTube, presenting this video in conjunction with her other tutorials, Nikkie is establishing herself as a beauty vlogger/guru. Nikkie lists all of the products that she uses in her transformation below her video with links to where people can buy them. She also lists her social media accounts, ways that people can connect with her, and other videos that people might be interested in watching. There are also prompts to subscribe, both during her video and in the description bar below her video. Nikkie’s transformation is both an ongoing endeavour to create her image and public persona as a beauty vlogger, and a physical transformation on camera. There is also a third transformation that takes place because her vlog is in the public sphere and consequently mobilises a movement. The transformation is of the way people talk about and eventually perceive makeup. Nikkie’s video aims to end makeup shaming and promote makeup as an empowering tool. With each recreation of her video, with each Instagram photo featuring the transformation, and with each mainstream media article featuring the movement, #thepowerofmakeup movement community are transforming the image of the made-up girl—transforming the association of makeup with presenting an inauthentic identity—in society. ConclusionThe “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement, started by NikkieTutorials, demonstrates one way in which people are using YouTube as a transformative tool, and mirror, to document, construct, and present their identity online, using makeup. Through their online transformation the members of the movement not only engage in a process of constructing and presenting their identity, but they form communities who share a love of makeup and its transformative potential. 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We need a clear, unified, and consistent voice to effect the complete dismantling, the abolition, of the mechanisms of animal exploitation.And that will only come from what we say and do, no matter who we are.— Gary L. Francione, animal rights theoristThe history of hashtags is relatively short but littered with the remnants of corporate hashtags which may have seemed a good idea at the time within the confines of the boardroom. It is difficult to understand the rationale behind the use of hashtags as an effective communications tactic in 2019 by corporations when a quick stroll through their recent past leaves behind the much-derided #qantasluxury (Glance), #McDstories (Hill), and #myNYPD (Tran).While hashtags have an obvious purpose in bringing together like-minded publics and facilitating conversation (Kwye et al. 1), they have also regularly been the subject of “hashtag takeovers” by activists and other interested parties, and even by trolls, as the Ecological Society of Australia found in 2015 when their seemingly innocuous #ESA15 hashtag was taken over with pornographic images (news.com.au). Hashtag takeovers have also been used as a dubious marketing tactic, where smaller and less well-known brands tag their products with trending hashtags such as #iphone in order to boost their audience (Social Garden). Hashtags are increasingly used as a way for activists or other interested parties to disrupt a message. It is, I argue, predictable that any hashtag related to an even slightly controversial topic will be subject to some form of activist hashtag takeover, with varying degrees of success.That veganism and the dairy industry should attract such conflict is unsurprising given that the two are natural enemies, with vegans in particular seeming to anticipate and actively engage in the battle for the opposing hashtag.Using a comparative analysis of the #Veganuary and #Februdairy hashtags and how they have been used by both pro-vegan and pro-dairy social media users, this article illustrates that the enthusiastic and well-meaning social media efforts of farmers and dairy supporters have so far been unable to counteract those of well-organised and equally passionate vegan activists. This analysis compares tweets in the first week of the respective campaigns, concluding that organisations, industries and their representatives should be extremely wary of engaging said activists who are not only highly-skilled but are also highly-motivated. Grassroots, ideology-driven activism is a formidable opponent in any public space, let alone when it takes place on the outspoken and unstructured landscape of social media which is sometimes described as the “wild West” (Fitch 5) where anything goes and authenticity and plain-speaking is key (Macnamara 12).I Say Hashtag, You Say Bashtag#Februdairy was launched in 2018 to promote the benefits of dairy. The idea was first mooted on Twitter in 2018 by academic Dr Jude Capper, a livestock sustainability consultant, who called for “28 days, 28 positive dairy posts” (@Bovidiva; Howell). It was a response to the popular Veganuary campaign which aimed to “inspire people to try vegan for January and throughout the rest of the year”, a campaign which had gained significant traction both online and in the traditional media since its inception in 2014 (Veganuary). Hopes were high: “#Februdairy will be one month of dairy people posting, liking and retweeting examples of what we do and why we do it” (Yates). However, the #Februdairy hashtag has been effectively disrupted and has now entered the realm of a bashtag, a hashtag appropriated by activists for their own purpose (Austin and Jin 341).The Dairy Industry (Look Out the Vegans Are Coming)It would appear that the dairy industry is experiencing difficulties in public perception. While milk consumption is declining, sales of plant-based milks are increasing (Kaiserman) and a growing body of health research has questioned whether dairy products and milk in particular do in fact “do a body good” (Saccaro; Harvard Milk Study). In the 2019 review of Canada’s food guide, its first revision since 2007, for instance, the focus is now on eating plant-based foods with dairy’s former place significantly downgraded. Dairy products no longer have their own distinct section and are instead placed alongside other proteins including lentils (Pippus).Nevertheless, the industry has persevered with its traditional marketing and public relations activities, choosing to largely avoid addressing animal welfare concerns brought to light by activists. They have instead focused their message towards countering concerns about the health benefits of milk. In the US, the Milk Processing Education Program’s long-running celebrity-driven Got Milk campaign has been updated with Milk Life, a health focused campaign, featuring images of children and young people living an active lifestyle and taking part in activities such as skateboarding, running, and playing basketball (Milk Life). Interestingly, and somewhat inexplicably, Milk Life’s home page features the prominent headline, “How Milk Can Bring You Closer to Your Loved Ones”.It is somewhat reflective of the current trend towards veganism that tennis aces Serena and Venus Williams, both former Got Milk ambassadors, are now proponents for the plant-based lifestyle, with Venus crediting her newly-adopted vegan diet as instrumental in her recovery from an auto-immune disease (Mango).The dairy industry’s health focus continues in Australia, as well as the use of the word love, with former AFL footballer Shane Crawford—the face of the 2017 campaign Milk Loves You Back, from Lion Dairy and Drinks—focusing on reminding Australians of the reputed nutritional benefits of milk (Dawson).Dairy Australia meanwhile launched their Legendairy campaign with a somewhat different focus, promoting and lauding Australia’s dairy families, and with a message that stated, in a nod to the current issues, that “Australia’s dairy farmers and farming communities are proud, resilient and innovative” (Dairy Australia). This campaign could be perceived as a morale-boosting exercise, featuring a nation-wide search to find Australia’s most legendairy farming community (Dairy Australia). That this was also an attempt to humanise the industry seems obvious, drawing on established goodwill felt towards farmers (University of Cambridge). Again, however, this strategy did not address activists’ messages of suffering animals, factory farms, and newborn calves being isolated from their grieving mothers, and it can be argued that consumers are being forced to make the choice between who (or what) they care about more: animals or the people making their livelihoods from them.Large-scale campaigns like Legendairy which use traditional channels are of course still vitally important in shaping public opinion, with statistics from 2016 showing 85.1% of Australians continue to watch free-to-air television (Roy Morgan, “1 in 7”). However, a focus and, arguably, an over-reliance on traditional platforms means vegans and animal activists are often unchallenged when spreading their message via social media. Indeed, when we consider the breakdown in age groups inherent in these statistics, with 18.8% of 14-24 year-olds not watching any commercial television at all, an increase from 7% in 2008 (Roy Morgan, “1 in 7”), it is a brave and arguably short-sighted organisation or industry that relies primarily on traditional channels to spread their message in 2019. That these large-scale campaigns do little to address the issues raised by vegans concerning animal welfare leaves these claims largely unanswered and momentum to grow.This growth in momentum is fuelled by activist groups such as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) who are well-known in this space, with 5,494,545 Facebook followers, 1.06 million Twitter followers, 973,000 Instagram followers, and 453,729 You Tube subscribers (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). They are also active on Pinterest, a visual-based platform suited to the kinds of images and memes particularly detrimental to the dairy industry. Although widely derided, PETA’s reach is large. A graphic video posted to Facebook on February 13 2019 and showing a suffering cow, captioned “your cheese is not worth this” was shared 1,244 times, and had 4.6 million views in just over 24 hours (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). With 95% of 12-24 year olds in Australia now using social networking sites (Statista), it is little wonder veganism is rapidly growing within this demographic (Bradbury), with The Guardian labelling the rise of veganism unstoppable (Hancox).Activist organisations are joined by prominent and charismatic vegan activists such as James Aspey (182,000 Facebook followers) and Earthling Ed (205,000 Facebook followers) in distributing information and images that are influential and often highly graphic or disturbing. Meanwhile Instagram influencers and You Tube lifestyle vloggers such as Ellen Fisher and FreeLee share information promoting vegan food and the vegan lifestyle (with 650,320 and 785,903 subscribers respectively). YouTube video Dairy Is Scary has over 5 million views (Janus) and What the Health, a follow-up documentary to Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, promoting veganism, is now available on Netflix, which itself has 9.8 million Australian subscribers (Roy Morgan, “Netflix”). BOSH’s plant-based vegan cookbook was the fastest selling cookbook of 2018 (Chiorando).Additionally, the considerable influence of celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, Beyonce, Alicia Silverstone, Zac Efron, and Jessica Chastain, to name just a few, speaking publicly about their vegan lifestyle, encourages veganism to become mainstream and increases its widespread acceptance.However not all the dairy industry’s ills can be blamed on vegans. Rising costs, cheap imports, and other pressures (Lockhart, Donaghy and Gow) have all placed pressure on the industry. Nonetheless, in the battle for hearts and minds on social media, the vegans are leading the way.Qualitative research interviewing new vegans found converting to veganism was relatively easy, yet some respondents reported having to consult multiple resources and required additional support and education on how to be vegan (McDonald 17).Enter VeganuaryUsing a month, week or day to promote an idea or campaign, is a common public relations and marketing strategy, particularly in health communications. Dry July and Ocsober both promote alcohol abstinence, Frocktober raises funds for ovarian cancer, and Movember is an annual campaign raising awareness and funds for men’s health (Parnell). Vegans Matthew Glover and Jane Land were discussing the success of Movember when they raised the idea of creating a vegan version. Their initiative, Veganuary, urging people to try vegan for the month of January, launched in 2014 and since then 500,000 people have taken the Veganuary pledge (Veganuary).The Veganuary website is the largest of its kind on the internet. With vegan recipes, expert advice and information, it provides all the answers to Why go vegan, but it is the support offered to answer How to go vegan that truly sets Veganuary apart. (Veganuary)That Veganuary participants would use social media to discuss and share their experiences was a foregone conclusion. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are all utilised by participants, with the official Veganuary pages currently followed/liked by 159,000 Instagram followers, receiving 242,038 Facebook likes, and 45,600 Twitter followers (Veganuary). Both the Twitter and Instagram sites make effective use of hashtags to spread their reach, not only using #Veganuary but also other relevant hashtags such as #TryVegan, #VeganRecipes, and the more common #Vegan, #Farm, and #SaveAnimals.Februdairy Follows Veganuary, But Only on the CalendarCalling on farmers and dairy producers to create counter content and their own hashtag may have seemed like an idea that would achieve an overall positive response.Agricultural news sites and bloggers spread the word and even the BBC reported on the industry’s “fight back” against Veganuary (BBC). However the hashtag was quickly overwhelmed with anti-dairy activists mobilising online. Vegans issued a call to arms across social media. The Vegans in Australia Facebook group featured a number of posts urging its 58,949 members to “thunderclap” the Februdairy hashtag while the Project Calf anti-dairy campaign declared that Februdairy offered an “easy” way to spread their information (Sandhu).Februdairy farmers and dairy supporters were encouraged to tell their stories, sharing positive photographs and videos, and they did. However this content was limited. In this tweet (fig. 1) the issue of a lack of diverse content was succinctly addressed by an anti-Februdairy activist.Fig. 1: Content challenges. (#Februdairy, 2 Feb. 2019)MethodUtilising Twitter’s advanced search capability, I was able to search for #Veganuary tweets from 1 to 7 January 2019 and #Februdairy tweets from 1 to 7 February 2019. I analysed the top tweets provided by Twitter in terms of content, assessed whether the tweet was pro or anti Veganuary and Februdairy, and also categorised its content in terms of subject matter.Tweets were analysed to assess whether they were on message and aligned with the values of their associated hashtag. Veganuary tweets were considered to be on message if they promoted veganism or possessed an anti-dairy, anti-meat, or pro-animal sentiment. Februdairy tweets were assessed as on message if they promoted the consumption of dairy products, expressed sympathy or empathy towards the dairy industry, or possessed an anti-vegan sentiment. Tweets were also evaluated according to their clarity, emotional impact and coherence. The overall effectiveness of the hashtag was then evaluated based on the above criteria as well as whether they had been hijacked.Results and FindingsOverwhelmingly, the 213 #Veganuary tweets were on message. That is they were pro-Veganuary, supportive of veganism, and positive. The topics were varied and included humorous memes, environmental facts, information about the health benefits of veganism, as well as a strong focus on animals. The number of non-graphic tweets (12) concerning animals was double that of tweets featuring graphic or shocking imagery (6). Predominantly the tweets were focused on food and the sharing of recipes, with 44% of all pro #Veganuary tweets featuring recipes or images of food. Interestingly, a number of well-known corporations tweeted to promote their vegan food products, including Tesco, Aldi, Iceland, and M&S. The diversity of veganism is reflected in the tweets. Organisations used the hashtag to promote their products, including beauty and shoe products, social media influencers promoted their vegan podcasts and blogs, and, interestingly, the Ethiopian Embassy of the United Kingdom tweeted their support.There were 23 (11%) anti-Veganuary tweets. Of these, one was from Dr. Jude Capper, the founder of Februdairy. The others expressed support for farming and farmers, and a number were photographs of meat products, including sausages and fry-ups. One Australian journalist tweeted in favour of meat, stating it was yummy murder. These tweets could be described as entertaining and may perhaps serve as a means of preaching to the converted, but their ability to influence and persuade is negligible.Twitter’s search tool provided access to 141 top #Februdairy tweets. Of these 82 (52%) were a hijack of the hashtag and overtly anti-Februdairy. Vegan activists used the #Februdairy hashtag to their advantage with most of their tweets (33%) featuring non-graphic images of animals. They also tweeted about other subject matters, including environmental concerns, vegan food and products, and health issues related to dairy consumption.As noted by the activists (see fig. 1 above), most of the pro-Februdairy tweets were images of milk or dairy products (41%). Images of farms and farmers were the next most used (26%), followed by images of cows (17%) (see fig. 2). Fig. 2: An activist makes their anti-Februdairy point with a clear, engaging image and effective use of hashtags. (#Februdairy, 6 Feb. 2019)The juxtaposition between many of the tweets was also often glaring, with one contrasting message following another (see fig. 3). Fig. 3: An example of contrasting #Februdairy tweets with an image used by the activists to good effect, making their point known. (#Februdairy, 2 Feb. 2019)Storytelling is a powerful tool in public relations and marketing efforts. Yet, to be effective, high-quality content is required. That many of the Februdairy proponents had limited social media training was evident; images were blurred, film quality was poor, or they failed to make their meaning clear (see fig. 4). Fig. 4: A blurred photograph, reflective of some of the low-quality content provided by Februdairy supporters. (#Februdairy, 3 Feb. 2019)This image was tweeted in support of Februdairy. However the image and phrasing could also be used to argue against Februdairy. We can surmise that the tweeter was suggesting the cow was well looked after and seemingly content, but overall the message is as unclear as the image.While some pro-Februdairy supporters recognised the need for relevant hashtags, often their images were of a low-quality and not particularly engaging, a requirement for social media success. This requirement seems to be better understood by anti-Februdairy activists who used high-quality images and memes to create interest and gain the audience’s attention (see figs. 5 and 6). Fig. 5: An uninspiring image used to promote Februdairy. (#Februdairy, 6 Feb. 2019) Fig. 6: Anti-Februdairy activists made good use of memes, recognising the need for diverse content. (#Februdairy, 3 Feb. 2019)DiscussionWhat the #Februdairy case makes clear, then, is that in continuing its focus on traditional media, the dairy industry has left the battle online to largely untrained, non-social media savvy supporters.From a purely public relations perspective, one of the first things we ask our students to do in issues and crisis communication is to assess the risk. “What can hurt your organisation?” we ask. “What potential issues are on the horizon and what can you do to prevent them?” This is PR101 and it is difficult to understand why environmental scanning and resulting action has not been on the radar of the dairy industry long before now. It seems they have not fully anticipated or have significantly underestimated the emerging issue that public perception, animal cruelty, health concerns, and, ultimately, veganism has had on their industry and this is to their detriment. In Australia in 2015–16 the dairy industry was responsible for 8 per cent (A$4.3 billion) of the gross value of agricultural production and 7 per cent (A$3 billion) of agricultural export income (Department of Agriculture and Water Resources). When such large figures are involved and with so much at stake, it is hard to rationalise the decision not to engage in a more proactive online strategy, seeking to engage their publics, including, whether they like it or not, activists.Instead there are current attempts to address these issues with a legislative approach, lobbying for the introduction of ag-gag laws (Potter), and the limitation of terms such as milk and cheese (Worthington). However, these measures are undertaken while there is little attempt to engage with activists or to effectively counter their claims with a widespread authentic public relations campaign, and reflects a failure to understand the nature of the current online environment, momentum, and mood.That is not to say that the dairy industry is not operating in the online environment, but it does not appear to be a priority, and this is reflected in their low engagement and numbers of followers. For instance, Dairy Australia, the industry’s national service body, has a following of only 8,281 on Facebook, 6,981 on Twitter, and, crucially, they are not on Instagram. Their Twitter posts do not include hashtags and unsurprisingly they have little engagement on this platform with most tweets attracting no more than two likes. Surprisingly they have 21,013 subscribers on YouTube which featured professional and well-presented videos. This demonstrates some understanding of the importance of effective storytelling but not, as yet, trans-media storytelling.ConclusionSocial media activism is becoming more important and recognised as a legitimate voice in the public sphere. Many organisations, perhaps in recognition of this as well as a growing focus on responsible corporate behaviour, particularly in the treatment of animals, have adjusted their behaviour. From Unilever abandoning animal testing practices to ensure Dove products are certified cruelty free (Nussbaum), to Domino’s introducing vegan options, companies who are aware of emerging trends and values are changing the way they do business and are reaping the benefits of engaging with, and catering to, vegans. Domino’s sold out of vegan cheese within the first week and vegans were asked to phone ahead to their local store, so great was the demand. From their website:We knew the response was going to be big after the demand we saw for the product on social media but we had no idea it was going to be this big. (Domino’s Newsroom)As a public relations professional, I am baffled by the dairy industry’s failure to adopt a crisis-based strategy rather than largely rely on the traditional one-way communication that has served them well in the previous (golden?) pre-social media age. However, as a vegan, persuaded by the unravelling of the happy cow argument, I cannot help but hope this realisation continues to elude them.References@bovidiva. “Let’s Make #Februdairy Happen This Year. 28 Days, 28 Positive #dairy Posts. From Cute Calves and #cheese on Crumpets, to Belligerent Bulls and Juicy #beef #burgers – Who’s In?” Twitter post. 15 Jan. 2018. 1 Feb. 2019 <https://twitter.com/bovidiva/status/952910641840447488?lang=en>.Austin, Lucinda L., and Yan Jin. Social Media and Crisis Communication. 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While digital remix practices in music have been researched extensively in the last few years (see recently Jansen; Navas; Pinch and Athanasiades; Väkevä), the specific challenges and skills that are central to remixing are still not well understood (Borschke 90). As writers like Demers, Lessig, and Théberge argue, the fact that remixers rework already existing songs rather than building a track from scratch, often means they are perceived as musical thieves or parasites rather than creative artists. Moreover, as writers like Borschke and Rodgers argue, because remixers make use of digital audio workstations to produce and rework their sounds, their practices tend to be seen as highly automated, offering relatively little by way of musical and creative challenges, especially compared to more traditional (electro)acoustic forms of music-making. An underestimation of skill is problematic, however, because, as my own empirical research shows, creative skills and challenges are important to the way digital remixers themselves experience and value their practice. Drawing from virtual ethnographic research within the online remix communities of Indaba Music, this article argues that, not despite but because remixers start from already existing songs and because they rework these songs with the help of digital audio workstations, a particular set of creative abilities becomes foregrounded, namely: ‘fluency’ and ‘flexibility’ (Gouzouasis; Guilford, “Creativity Research”, Intelligence, “Measurement”). Fluency, the way the concept is used here, refers to the ability to respond to, and produce ideas for, a wide variety of musical source materials, quickly and easily. Flexibility refers to the ability to understand, and adapt these approaches to, the ‘musical affordances’ (Gibson; Windsor and De Bézenac) of the original song, that is: the different musical possibilities and constraints the source material provides. For remixers, fluency and flexibility are not only needed in order to be able to participate in these remix contests, they are also central to the way they value and evaluate each other’s work.Researching Online Remix ContestsAs part of a larger research project on online music practices, between 2011 and 2012, I spent eighteen months conducting virtual ethnographic research (Hine) within several remix competitions hosted on online music community Indaba Music. Indaba is not the only online community where creative works can be exchanged and discussed. For this research, however, I have chosen to focus on Indaba because, other than in a remix community like ccMixter for example, competitions are very much central to the Indaba community, thus making it a good place to investigate negotiations of skills and techniques. Also, unlike a community like ACIDplanet which is tied explicitly to Sony’s audio software program ACID Pro, Indaba is not connected to any particular audio workstation, thus providing an insight into a relatively broad variety of remix practices. During my research on Indaba, I monitored discussions between participants, listened to work that had been uploaded, and talked to remixers via personal messaging. In addition to my daily monitoring, I also talked to 21 remixers more extensively through Skype interviews. These interviews were semi-structured, and lasted between 50 minutes and 3.5 hours, sometimes spread over multiple sessions. During these interviews, remixers not only talked about their practices, they also shared work in progress with me by showing their remixes on screen or by directing a webcam to their instruments while they played, recorded, or mixed their material. All the remixers who participated in these interviews granted me permission to quote them and to use the original nicknames or personal names they use on Indaba in this publication. Besides the online observations and interviews, I also participated in three remix competitions myself, in order to gain a better understanding of what it means to be part of a remix community and to see what kind of challenges and abilities are involved. In the online remix contests of Indaba, professional artists invite remixers to rework a song and share and discuss these works within the community. For the purpose of these contests, artists provide separate audio files (so-called ‘stems’) for different musical elements such as voice, drums, bass, or guitar. Remixers can produce their tracks by rearranging these stems, or they can add new audio material, such as beats, chords, and rhythms, as long as this material is not copyrighted. Remixers generally comply with this rule. During the course of a contest, remixers upload their work to the website and discuss and share the results with other remixers. A typical remix contest draws between 200 or 300 participants. These participants are mostly amateur musicians or semi-professionals in the sense that they do not make a living with their creative practices, but rather participate in these contests as a hobby. A remix contest normally lasts for four or five weeks. After that time, the hosting artist chooses a winner and the remixers move on to another contest, hosted by a different artist and featuring a new song, sometimes from a completely different musical genre. It is partly because of this move from contest to contest that fluency and flexibility can be understood as central abilities within these remix practices. Fluency and flexibility are concepts adopted from the work of Joy Paul Guilford (“Creativity Research”, Intelligence, “Measurement”) who developed them in his creativity research from the 1950s onwards. For Guilford, fluency and flexibility are part of divergent-production abilities, those abilities we need in order to be able to deal with open questions or tasks, in which multiple solutions or answers are possible, in a quick and effective way. Within creativity research, divergent-production abilities have mainly been measured and evaluated quantitatively. In music related studies, for example, researchers have scored and assessed so-called fluency and flexibility factors in the music practices of children and adults and compared them to other creative abilities (Webster). For the purpose of this article, however, I do not wish to approach fluency and flexibility quantitatively. Rather, I would like to show that in online remix practices, fluency and flexibility, as creative abilities, become very much foregrounded. Gouzouasis already alludes to this possibility, pointing out that, in digital music practices, fluency might be more important than the ability to read and write traditional music notation. Gouzouasis’ argument, however, does not refer to a specific empirical case. Also, it does not reflect on how digital musicians themselves consider these abilities central to their own practices. Looking at online remix competitions, however, this last aspect becomes clear.FluencyFor Guilford, ‘fluency’ can be understood as the ability to produce a response, or multiple responses, to an open question or task quickly and easily (“Creativity Research”, Intelligence, “Measurement”). It is about making associations, finding different uses or purposes for certain source materials, and combining separate elements into organised phrases and patterns. Based on this definition, it is not difficult to see a link with remix competitions, in which remixers are asked to come up with a musical response to a given song within a limited time frame. Online remix contests are essentially a form of working on demand. It is the artist who invites the audience to remix a song. It is also the artist who decides which song can be remixed and which audio files can be used for that mix. Remixers who participate in these contests are usually not fans of these artists. Often they do not even know the song before they enter a competition. Instead, they travel from contest to contest, taking on many different remix opportunities. For every competition, then, remixers have to first familiarise themselves with the source material, and then try to come up with a creative response that is not only different from the original, but also different from all the other remixes that have already been uploaded. Remixers do not consider this a problem, but embrace it as a challenge. As Moritz Breit, one of the remixers, explained to me: “I like remixing [on Indaba] because it’s a challenge. You get something and have to make something different out of it, and later people will tell you how you did.” Or as hüpersonique put it: “It’s really a challenge. You hear a song and you say: ‘OK, it’s not my taste. But it’s good quality and if I could do something in my genre that would be very interesting’.” If these remixers consider the competitions to be a challenge, it is mainly because these contests provide an exercise of call and response. On Indaba, remixers apply different tempos, timbres, and sounds to a song, they upload and discuss work in progress, and they evaluate and compare the results by commenting on each other’s work. While remixers officially only need to develop one response, in practice they tend to create multiple ideas which they either combine in a single eclectic mix or otherwise include in different tracks which they upload separately. Remixers even have their own techniques in order to stimulate a variety of responses. Some remixers, for example, told me how they expose themselves to a large number of different songs and artists before they start remixing, in order to pick up different ideas and sounds. Others told me how they prefer not to listen to the original song, as it might diminish their ability to move away from it. Instead, they download only one or two of the original stems (usually the vocals) and start improvising around those sounds, without ever having heard the original song as a whole. As Ola Melander, one of the remixers, explained: “I never listen to it. I just load [the vocals] and the drum tracks. [....] I have to do it [in] my own style. [….] I don’t want that the original influences it, I want to make the chords myself, and figure out what it will sound like.” Or as Stretched Mind explained to me: “I listen to the vocal stem, only that, so no synths, no guitars, just pure vocal stems, nothing else. And I figure out what could fit with that.” On Indaba, being able to respond to, and associate around, the original track is considered to be more important than what Guilford calls ‘elaboration’ (“Measurement” 159). For Guilford, elaboration is the ability to turn a rough outline into a detailed and finished whole. It is basically a form of fine tuning. In the case of remixing, this fine tuning is called ‘mastering’ and it is all about getting exactly the right timbre, dynamics, volume, and balance in a track in order to create a ‘perfect’ sounding mix. On Indaba, only a select group of remixers is actually interested in such a professional form of elaboration. As Moritz Breit told me: “It’s not that you have like a huge bunch of perfectly mastered submissions. So nobody is really expecting that from you.” Indeed, in the comment section remixers tend to say less about audio fidelity than about how they like a certain approach. Even when a critical remark is made about the audio quality of a mix, these criticisms are often preceded or followed by encouraging comments which praise the idea behind the track or applaud the way a remixer has brought the song into a new direction. In short, the comments are often directed more towards fluency than towards elaboration, showing that for many of these remixers the idea of a response, any response, is more important than creating a professional or sellable track.Being able to produce a musical response is also more important on Indaba than having specific musical instrument skills. Most remixers work with digital audio workstations, such as Cubase, Logic Pro, and Pro Tools. These software programs make it possible to manipulate and produce sounds in ways that may include musical instruments, but do not necessarily involve them. As Hugill writes, with these programs “a sound source could be a recording, a live sound, an acoustic instrument, a synthesizer, the human body, etc. In fact, any sounding object can be a sound source” (128). As such, remix competitions tend to draw a large variety of different participants, with a wide range of musical backgrounds and instrument skills. Some remixers on Indaba create their remixes by making use of sample libraries and loops. Others, who have the ability, also add sounds with instruments such as drums, guitars, or violins, which they record with microphones or, in the case of electronic or digital instruments, plug directly into their personal computers. Remixers who are confident about their instrument skills improvise around the original tracks in real-time, while less confident players record short segments, which they then alter and correct afterwards with their audio programs. Within the logic of these digital audio workstation practices, these differences are not significant, as all audio input merely functions as a starting point, needing to be adjusted, layered, combined, and recombined afterwards in order to create the final mix. For the contestants themselves these differences are also not so significant, as contestants are still, in their own ways, involved in the challenge of responding to and associating around the original stems, regardless of the specific techniques or instruments used. The fact that remixers are open to different methods and techniques does not mean, however, that every submission is considered to be as valid as any other. Remixers do have strong opinions about what is a good remix and what is not. Looking at the comments contestants give on each other’s work, and the way they talk about their practices during interviews, it becomes clear that remixers find it important that a remix somehow fits the original source material. As hüpersonique explained: “A lot of [remixes] don’t really match the vocals (…) and then it sounds not that good.” From this perspective, remixers not only need to be fluent, they also need to be flexible towards their source material. FlexibilityFor Guilford, flexibility is the readiness to change direction or method (Intelligence, “Measurement”). It is, as Arnold writes, “facilitated by having a great many tricks in your bag, knowing lots of techniques, [and] having broad experience” (129). In music, flexibility can be understood as the ability to switch easily between different sounds, rhythms, and approaches, in order to achieve a desired musical effect. Guilford distinguishes between two forms of flexibility: ‘spontaneous flexibility’, when a subject chooses himself to switch between different approaches, and ‘adaptive flexibility’ when a switch in approach is necessary or preferred to fit a certain task (“Measurement” 158). While both forms of flexibility can be found on Indaba, adaptive flexibility is seen as a particularly important criterion of being a skilled remixer, as it shows that a remixer is able to understand, and react to, the musical affordances of the original track. The idea that music has affordances is not new. As Windsor and De Bézenac argue, building on Gibson’s original theory of affordances, even in the most free expressive jazz improvisations, there are certain cues that make us understand if a solo is “going with” or “going against” the shared context, and it is these cues that guide a musician through an improvisation (111). The same is true for remix practices. As Regelski argues, any form of music rearranging or appropriation “requires considerable understanding of music’s properties – and the different affordances of those properties” (38). Even when remixers only use one of the original stems, such as the vocals, they need to take into account, for example, the tempo of the song, the intensity of the voice, the chord patterns on which the vocals are based, and the mood or feeling the singer is trying to convey. A skilled remixer, then, builds his or her ideas on top of that so that they strengthen and not diminish these properties. On Indaba, ironic or humoristic remixers too are expected to consider at least some of the basic features of the original track, such as its key or its particular form of musical phrasing. Remixes in which these features are purposely ignored are often not appreciated by the community. As Tim Toz, one of the remixers, explained: “There’s only so much you can do, I think, in the context of a melody plus the way the song was originally sung. […] I hear guys trying to bend certain vocal cadences into other kinds of grooves, and it somehow doesn’t work […], it [begins] to sound unnatural.” On Indaba, remixers complement each other when they find the right approach to the original track. They also critique each other when an approach does not fit the original song, when it does not go along with the ‘feel’ of the track, or when it seem to be out of key or sync with the vocals. By discussing each other’s tracks, remixers not only collectively explore the limits and possibilities of a song, they also implicitly discuss their abilities to hear those possibilities and be able to act on them appropriately. What remixers need in order to be able to do this is what Hugill calls, ‘aural awareness’ (15): the ability to understand how sound works, both in a broad and in-depth way. While aural awareness is important for any musician, remixers are especially reliant on it, as their work is centred around the manipulation and extension of already existing sounds (Hugill). In order to be able to move from contest to contest, remixers need to have a broad understanding of how different musical styles work and the kind of possibilities they afford. At the same time they also need to know, at a more granular level, how sounds interact and how small alterations of chords, timbres, or rhythms can change the overall feel of a track. ConclusionRemix competitions draw participants with a wide variety of musical backgrounds who make use of a broad range of instruments and techniques. The reason such a diverse group is able to participate and compete together is not because these practices do not require musical skill, but rather because remix competitions draw on particular kinds of abilities which are not directly linked to specific methods or techniques. While it might not be necessary to produce a flawless track or to be able to play musical material in real-time, remixers do need to be able to respond to a wide variety of source materials, in a quick and effective way. Also, while it might not be necessary for remixers to be able to produce a song from scratch, they do need to be able to understand, and adapt to, the musical affordances different songs provide. In order to be able to move from contest to contest, as true musical chameleons, remixers need a broad and in-depth understanding of how sound works in different musical contexts and how particular musical responses can be achieved. As soon as remixers upload a track, it is mainly these abilities that will be judged, discussed, and evaluated by the community. In this way fluency and flexibility are not only central abilities in order to be able to participate in these remix competitions, they are also important yardsticks by which remixers measure and evaluate both their own work and the achievements of their peers.AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank Renée van de Vall, Karin Wenz, and Dennis Kersten for their comments on early drafts of this article. Parts of this research have, in an earlier stage, been presented during the IASPM International Conference for the Study of Popular Music in Gijon, Spain 2013. 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Lists and Social MediaLists have long been an ordering mechanism for computer-mediated social interaction. While far from being the first such mechanism, blogrolls offered an opportunity for bloggers to provide a list of their peers; the present generation of social media environments similarly provide lists of friends and followers. Where blogrolls and other earlier lists may have been user-generated, the social media lists of today are more likely to have been produced by the platforms themselves, and are of intrinsic value to the platform providers at least as much as to the users themselves; both Facebook and Twitter have highlighted the importance of their respective “social graphs” (their databases of user connections) as fundamental elements of their fledgling business models. This represents what Mejias describes as “nodocentrism,” which “renders all human interaction in terms of network dynamics (not just any network, but a digital network with a profit-driven infrastructure).”The communicative content of social media spaces is also frequently rendered in the form of lists. Famously, blogs are defined in the first place by their reverse-chronological listing of posts (Walker Rettberg), but the same is true for current social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms are inherently centred around an infinite, constantly updated and extended list of posts made by individual users and their connections.The concept of the list implies a certain degree of order, and the orderliness of content lists as provided through the latest generation of centralised social media platforms has also led to the development of more comprehensive and powerful, commercial as well as scholarly, research approaches to the study of social media. Using the example of Twitter, this article discusses the challenges of such “big data” research as it draws on the content lists provided by proprietary social media platforms.Twitter Archives for ResearchTwitter is a particularly useful source of social media data: using the Twitter API (the Application Programming Interface, which provides structured access to communication data in standardised formats) it is possible, with a little effort and sufficient technical resources, for researchers to gather very large archives of public tweets concerned with a particular topic, theme or event. Essentially, the API delivers very long lists of hundreds, thousands, or millions of tweets, and metadata about those tweets; such data can then be sliced, diced and visualised in a wide range of ways, in order to understand the dynamics of social media communication. Such research is frequently oriented around pre-existing research questions, but is typically conducted at unprecedented scale. The projects of media and communication researchers such as Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, Wood and Baughman, or Lotan, et al.—to name just a handful of recent examples—rely fundamentally on Twitter datasets which now routinely comprise millions of tweets and associated metadata, collected according to a wide range of criteria. What is common to all such cases, however, is the need to make new methodological choices in the processing and analysis of such large datasets on mediated social interaction.Our own work is broadly concerned with understanding the role of social media in the contemporary media ecology, with a focus on the formation and dynamics of interest- and issues-based publics. We have mined and analysed large archives of Twitter data to understand contemporary crisis communication (Bruns et al), the role of social media in elections (Burgess and Bruns), and the nature of contemporary audience engagement with television entertainment and news media (Harrington, Highfield, and Bruns). Using a custom installation of the open source Twitter archiving tool yourTwapperkeeper, we capture and archive all the available tweets (and their associated metadata) containing a specified keyword (like “Olympics” or “dubstep”), name (Gillard, Bieber, Obama) or hashtag (#ausvotes, #royalwedding, #qldfloods). In their simplest form, such Twitter archives are commonly stored as delimited (e.g. comma- or tab-separated) text files, with each of the following values in a separate column: text: contents of the tweet itself, in 140 characters or less to_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet recipient (for @replies) from_user: screen name of the tweet sender id: numerical ID of the tweet itself from_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet sender iso_language_code: code (e.g. en, de, fr, ...) of the sender’s default language source: client software used to tweet (e.g. Web, Tweetdeck, ...) profile_image_url: URL of the tweet sender’s profile picture geo_type: format of the sender’s geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_0: first element of the geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_1: second element of the geographical coordinates created_at: tweet timestamp in human-readable format time: tweet timestamp as a numerical Unix timestampIn order to process the data, we typically run a number of our own scripts (written in the programming language Gawk) which manipulate or filter the records in various ways, and apply a series of temporal, qualitative and categorical metrics to the data, enabling us to discern patterns of activity over time, as well as to identify topics and themes, key actors, and the relations among them; in some circumstances we may also undertake further processes of filtering and close textual analysis of the content of the tweets. Network analysis (of the relationships among actors in a discussion; or among key themes) is undertaken using the open source application Gephi. While a detailed methodological discussion is beyond the scope of this article, further details and examples of our methods and tools for data analysis and visualisation, including copies of our Gawk scripts, are available on our comprehensive project website, Mapping Online Publics.In this article, we reflect on the technical, epistemological and political challenges of such uses of large-scale Twitter archives within media and communication studies research, positioning this work in the context of the phenomenon that Lev Manovich has called “big social data.” In doing so, we recognise that our empirical work on Twitter is concerned with a complex research site that is itself shaped by a complex range of human and non-human actors, within a dynamic, indeed volatile media ecology (Fuller), and using data collection and analysis methods that are in themselves deeply embedded in this ecology. “Big Social Data”As Manovich’s term implies, the Big Data paradigm has recently arrived in media, communication and cultural studies—significantly later than it did in the hard sciences, in more traditionally computational branches of social science, and perhaps even in the first wave of digital humanities research (which largely applied computational methods to pre-existing, historical “big data” corpora)—and this shift has been provoked in large part by the dramatic quantitative growth and apparently increased cultural importance of social media—hence, “big social data.” As Manovich puts it: For the first time, we can follow [the] imaginations, opinions, ideas, and feelings of hundreds of millions of people. We can see the images and the videos they create and comment on, monitor the conversations they are engaged in, read their blog posts and tweets, navigate their maps, listen to their track lists, and follow their trajectories in physical space. (Manovich 461) This moment has arrived in media, communication and cultural studies because of the increased scale of social media participation and the textual traces that this participation leaves behind—allowing researchers, equipped with digital tools and methods, to “study social and cultural processes and dynamics in new ways” (Manovich 461). However, and crucially for our purposes in this article, many of these scholarly possibilities would remain latent if it were not for the widespread availability of Open APIs for social software (including social media) platforms. APIs are technical specifications of how one software application should access another, thereby allowing the embedding or cross-publishing of social content across Websites (so that your tweets can appear in your Facebook timeline, for example), or allowing third-party developers to build additional applications on social media platforms (like the Twitter user ranking service Klout), while also allowing platform owners to impose de facto regulation on such third-party uses via the same code. While platform providers do not necessarily have scholarship in mind, the data access affordances of APIs are also available for research purposes. As Manovich notes, until very recently almost all truly “big data” approaches to social media research had been undertaken by computer scientists (464). But as part of a broader “computational turn” in the digital humanities (Berry), and because of the increased availability to non-specialists of data access and analysis tools, media, communication and cultural studies scholars are beginning to catch up. Many of the new, large-scale research projects examining the societal uses and impacts of social media—including our own—which have been initiated by various media, communication, and cultural studies research leaders around the world have begun their work by taking stock of, and often substantially extending through new development, the range of available tools and methods for data analysis. The research infrastructure developed by such projects, therefore, now reflects their own disciplinary backgrounds at least as much as it does the fundamental principles of computer science. In turn, such new and often experimental tools and methods necessarily also provoke new epistemological and methodological challenges. The Twitter API and Twitter ArchivesThe Open API was a key aspect of mid-2000s ideas about the value of the open Web and “Web 2.0” business models (O’Reilly), emphasising the open, cross-platform sharing of content as well as promoting innovation at the margins via third-party application development—and it was in this ideological environment that the microblogging service Twitter launched and experienced rapid growth in popularity among users and developers alike. As José van Dijck cogently argues, however, a complex interplay of technical, economic and social dynamics has seen Twitter shift from a relatively open, ad hoc and user-centred platform toward a more formalised media business: For Twitter, the shift from being primarily a conversational communication tool to being a global, ad-supported followers tool took place in a relatively short time span. This shift did not simply result from the owner’s choice for a distinct business model or from the company’s decision to change hardware features. Instead, the proliferation of Twitter as a tool has been a complex process in which technological adjustments are intricately intertwined with changes in user base, transformations of content and choices for revenue models. (van Dijck 343)The specifications of Twitter’s API, as well as the written guidelines for its use by developers (Twitter, “Developer Rules”) are an excellent example of these “technological adjustments” and the ways they are deeply interwined with Twitter’s search for a viable revenue model. These changes show how the apparent semantic openness or “interpretive flexibility” of the term “platform” allows its meaning to be reshaped over time as the business models of platform owners change (Gillespie).The release of the API was first announced on the Twitter blog in September 2006 (Stone), not long after the service’s launch but after some popular third-party applications (like a mashup of Twitter with Google Maps creating a dynamic display of recently posted tweets around the world) had already been developed. Since then Twitter has seen a flourishing of what the company itself referred to as the “Twitter ecosystem” (Twitter, “Developer Rules”), including third-party developed client software (like Twitterific and TweetDeck), institutional use cases (such as large-scale social media visualisations of the London Riots in The Guardian), and parasitic business models (including social media metrics services like HootSuite and Klout).While the history of Twitter’s API rules and related regulatory instruments (such as its Developer Rules of the Road and Terms of Use) has many twists and turns, there have been two particularly important recent controversies around data access and control. First, the company locked out developers and researchers from direct “firehose” (very high volume) access to the Twitter feed; this was accompanied by a crackdown on free and public Twitter archiving services like 140Kit and the Web version of Twapperkeeper (Sample), and coincided with the establishment of what was at the time a monopoly content licensing arrangement between Twitter and Gnip, a company which charges commercial rates for high-volume API access to tweets (and content from other social media platforms). A second wave of controversy among the developer community occurred in August 2012 in response to Twitter’s release of its latest API rules (Sippey), which introduce further, significant limits to API use and usability in certain circumstances. In essence, the result of these changes to the Twitter API rules, announced without meaningful consultation with the developer community which created the Twitter ecosystem, is a forced rebalancing of development activities: on the one hand, Twitter is explicitly seeking to “limit” (Sippey) the further development of API-based third-party tools which support “consumer engagement activities” (such as end-user clients), in order to boost the use of its own end-user interfaces; on the other hand, it aims to “encourage” the further development of “consumer analytics” and “business analytics” as well as “business engagement” tools. Implicit in these changes is a repositioning of Twitter users (increasingly as content consumers rather than active communicators), but also of commercial and academic researchers investigating the uses of Twitter (as providing a narrow range of existing Twitter “analytics” rather than engaging in a more comprehensive investigation both of how Twitter is used, and of how such uses continue to evolve). The changes represent an attempt by the company to cement a certain, commercially viable and valuable, vision of how Twitter should be used (and analysed), and to prevent or at least delay further evolution beyond this desired stage. Although such attempts to “freeze” development may well be in vain, given the considerable, documented role which the Twitter user base has historically played in exploring new and unforeseen uses of Twitter (Bruns), it undermines scholarly research efforts to examine actual Twitter uses at least temporarily—meaning that researchers are increasingly forced to invest time and resources in finding workarounds for the new restrictions imposed by the Twitter API.Technical, Political, and Epistemological IssuesIn their recent article “Critical Questions for Big Data,” danah boyd and Kate Crawford have drawn our attention to the limitations, politics and ethics of big data approaches in the social sciences more broadly, but also touching on social media as a particularly prevalent site of social datamining. In response, we offer the following complementary points specifically related to data-driven Twitter research relying on archives of tweets gathered using the Twitter API.First, somewhat differently from most digital humanities (where researchers often begin with a large pre-existing textual corpus), in the case of Twitter research we have no access to an original set of texts—we can access only what Twitter’s proprietary and frequently changing API will provide. The tools Twitter researchers use rely on various combinations of parts of the Twitter API—or, more accurately, the various Twitter APIs (particularly the Search and Streaming APIs). As discussed above, of course, in providing an API, Twitter is driven not by scholarly concerns but by an attempt to serve a range of potentially value-generating end-users—particularly those with whom Twitter can create business-to-business relationships, as in their recent exclusive partnership with NBC in covering the 2012 London Olympics.The following section from Twitter’s own developer FAQ highlights the potential conflicts between the business-case usage scenarios under which the APIs are provided and the actual uses to which they are often put by academic researchers or other dataminers:Twitter’s search is optimized to serve relevant tweets to end-users in response to direct, non-recurring queries such as #hashtags, URLs, domains, and keywords. The Search API (which also powers Twitter’s search widget) is an interface to this search engine. Our search service is not meant to be an exhaustive archive of public tweets and not all tweets are indexed or returned. Some results are refined to better combat spam and increase relevance. Due to capacity constraints, the index currently only covers about a week’s worth of tweets. (Twitter, “Frequently Asked Questions”)Because external researchers do not have access to the full, “raw” data, against which we could compare the retrieved archives which we use in our later analyses, and because our data access regimes rely so heavily on Twitter’s APIs—each with its technical quirks and limitations—it is impossible for us to say with any certainty that we are capturing a complete archive or even a “representative” sample (whatever “representative” might mean in a data-driven, textualist paradigm). In other words, the “lists” of tweets delivered to us on the basis of a keyword search are not necessarily complete; and there is no way of knowing how incomplete they are. The total yield of even the most robust capture system (using the Streaming API and not relying only on Search) depends on a number of variables: rate limiting, the filtering and spam-limiting functions of Twitter’s search algorithm, server outages and so on; further, because Twitter prohibits the sharing of data sets it is difficult to compare notes with other research teams.In terms of epistemology, too, the primary reliance on large datasets produces a new mode of scholarship in media, communication and cultural studies: what emerges is a form of data-driven research which tends towards abductive reasoning; in doing so, it highlights tensions between the traditional research questions in discourse or text-based disciplines like media and communication studies, and the assumptions and modes of pattern recognition that are required when working from the “inside out” of a corpus, rather than from the outside in (for an extended discussion of these epistemological issues in the digital humanities more generally, see Dixon).Finally, even the heuristics of our analyses of Twitter datasets are mediated by the API: the datapoints that are hardwired into the data naturally become the most salient, further shaping the type of analysis that can be done. For example, a common process in our research is to use the syntax of tweets to categorise it as one of the following types of activity: original tweets: tweets which are neither @reply nor retweetretweets: tweets which contain RT @user… (or similar) unedited retweets: retweets which start with RT @user… edited retweets: retweets do not start with RT @user…genuine @replies: tweets which contain @user, but are not retweetsURL sharing: tweets which contain URLs(Retweets which are made using the Twitter “retweet button,” resulting in verbatim passing-along without the RT @user syntax or an opportunity to add further comment during the retweet process, form yet another category, which cannot be tracked particularly effectively using the Twitter API.)These categories are driven by the textual and technical markers of specific kinds of interactions that are built into the syntax of Twitter itself (@replies or @mentions, RTs); and specific modes of referentiality (URLs). All of them focus on (and thereby tend to privilege) more informational modes of communication, rather than the ephemeral, affective, or ambiently intimate uses of Twitter that can be illuminated more easily using ethnographic approaches: approaches that can actually focus on the individual user, their social contexts, and the broader cultural context of the traces they leave on Twitter. ConclusionsIn this article we have described and reflected on some of the sociotechnical, political and economic aspects of the lists of tweets—the structured Twitter data upon which our research relies—which may be gathered using the Twitter API. As we have argued elsewhere (Bruns and Burgess)—and, hopefully, have begun to demonstrate in this paper—media and communication studies scholars who are actually engaged in using computational methods are well-positioned to contribute to both the methodological advances we highlight at the beginning of this paper and the political debates around computational methods in the “big social data” moment on which the discussion in the second part of the paper focusses. One pressing issue in the area of methodology is to build on current advances to bring together large-scale datamining approaches with ethnographic and other qualitative approaches, especially including close textual analysis. More broadly, in engaging with the “big social data” moment there is a pressing need for the development of code literacy in media, communication and cultural studies. In the first place, such literacy has important instrumental uses: as Manovich argues, much big data research in the humanities requires costly and time-consuming (and sometimes alienating) partnerships with technical experts (typically, computer scientists), because the free tools available to non-programmers are still limited in utility in comparison to what can be achieved using raw data and original code (Manovich, 472).But code literacy is also a requirement of scholarly rigour in the context of what David Berry calls the “computational turn,” representing a “third wave” of Digital Humanities. Berry suggests code and software might increasingly become in themselves objects of, and not only tools for, research: I suggest that we introduce a humanistic approach to the subject of computer code, paying attention to the wider aspects of code and software, and connecting them to the materiality of this growing digital world. 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Fig. 1: "Xiao Ming (little Ming) and xiao meng (little sprout/cutie)", satirical take on a popular Chinese textbook character. Shared online Introduction: Cuteness, Online Vernaculars, and Digital FolkloreThis short essay presents some preliminary materials for a discussion of the social circulation of contemporary Chinese vernacular terms among digital media users. In particular, I present the word meng (萌, literally "sprout", recently adopted as a slang term for "cute") as a case in point for a contextual analysis of elements of digital folklore in their transcultural flows, local appropriations, and social practices of signification. One among many other neologisms that enter Mandarin Chinese from seemingly nowhere and gain a widespread popularity in everyday online and offline linguistic practices, meng belongs to a specific genealogy of Japanese animation fansubbing communities, and owes its rapid popularisation to its adaptation to local contexts in different syntactic forms. The resulting inclusion of meng in the changing repertoire of wangluo liuxing ciyu ("words popular on the Internet")—the online vernacular common among Chinese Internet users which is often the target of semantic or structural analyses—is in fact just the last step of processes of networked production and social signification happening across digital media and online platforms.As an anthropologist of media use, I aim to advance the thesis that, in the context of widespread access to digital media, vernacular terms popularised across online platforms and making their way into everyday linguistic interactions are not necessarily the epiphenomena of subcultural formations, nor can they be simply seen as imported aesthetics, or understood through semantic analyses. Rather, “words popular on the Internet” must be understood as part of a local digital folklore, the open repertoire of vernacular content resulting from the daily interaction of users and digital technologies (Lialina & Espenschied 9) in a complex and situated media ecology (Fuller). I argue that the difference between these two approaches is the same passing between a classical structural understanding of signification proposed by Lévi-Strauss and the counter-Copernican revolution proposed by Latour’s quasi-objects proliferating in collectives of actors. Are incredibly pervasive terms like meng actually devoid of meaning, floating signifiers enabling the very possibility of signification? Or are they rather more useful when understood as both signifiers and signifieds, quasi-objects tracing networks and leading to collectives of other hybrids and practices?The materials and observations presented in this essay are part of the data collected for my PhD research on Chinese digital folklore, a study grounded on both ethnographic and archaeological methods. The ethnographic part of my project consists of in-depth interviews, small talk and participant observation of users on several Chinese online platforms such as AcFun, Baidu Tieba, Douban, Sina Weibo and WeChat (Hine). The archaeological part, on the other hand, focuses on the sampling of user-generated content from individual feeds and histories of these online platforms, an approach closer to the user-focused Internet archaeology of Nicholson than to the media archaeology of Parikka. My choice of discussing the term meng as an example is motivated by its pervasiveness in everyday interactions in China, and is supported by my informants identifying it as one of the most popular vernacular terms originating in online interaction. Moreover, as a rather new term jostling its way through the crowded semantic spectrum of cuteness, meng is a good example of the minor aesthetic concepts identified by Ngai as pivotal for judgments of taste in contemporary consumer societies (812). If, as in the words of one of my informants, meng "just means 'cute'," why did it end up on Coca-Cola bottle labels which were then featured in humorous self-portraits with perplexed cats? Fig. 2: "Meng zhu" (Cute leader, play on word on homophone “alliance leader”) special edition Coca-Cola bottle with cat, uploaded on Douban image gallery. Screenshot by the author Cuteness after JapanContemporary Japan is often portrayed as the land of cuteness. Academic explanations of the Japanese fascination with the cute, neotenic and miniaturised abound, tackling the topic from the origins of cute aesthetics in Japanese folkloric characters (Occhi) and their reappearance in commercial phenomena such as Pokémon (Allison), to the role of cuteness as gender performance and normativity (Burdelski & Mitsuhashi) and the "spectacle of kawaii" (Yano 681) as a trans-national strategy of cultural soft power (683). Although the export and localisation of Japanese cultural products across and beyond Asia has been widely documented (Iwabuchi), the discussion has often remained at the level of specific products (comics, TV series, games). Less frequently explored are the repertoires of recontextualised samples, snippets and terms that local audiences piece together after the localisation and consumption of these transnational cultural products. In light of this, is it the case that "the very aesthetic and sensibility that seems to dwell in the playful, the girlish, the infantilized, and the inevitably sexualized" are inevitably adopted after the "widespread distribution and consumption of Japanese cute goods and aesthetics to other parts of the industrial world" (Yano 683)? Or is it rather the case that language precedes aesthetics, and that terms end up reconfigured according to the local discursive contexts in ongoing dialogic and situated negotiations? In other words, what happens when the Japanese word moe (萌え), a slang term "originally referring to the fictional desire for characters of comics, anime, and games or for pop idols” (Azuma 48) is read in its Mandarin Chinese pronunciation meng by amateur translators of anime and manga, picked up by audiences of video streaming websites, and popularised on discussion boards and other online platforms? On a broader level, this is a question of how the vocabularies of specialised fan cultures mutate when they move across language barriers on the vectors of digital media and amateur translations. While in Japanese otaku culture moe indicates a very specific, physically arousing form of aesthetic appreciation that is proper to a devote fan (Azuma 57), the appropriation of the (originally Chinese) logograph by the audiences of dongman (animation and comics) products in Mainland China results in the general propagation of meng as a way of saying 'cute' slightly more fashionable and hip than the regular Mandarin word ke'ai. Does this impact on the semantics or the aesthetics of cuteness in China? These questions have not been ignored by researchers; Chinese academics in particular, who have a first-hand experience of the unpredictable moods of vernacular terms circulating from digital media user cultures to everyday life interactions, appear concerned with finding linguistic explanations or establishing predictors for these rogue terms that seem to ignore lexical rules and traditional etymologies. Liu, for example, tries to explain the popularity of this particular term through Dawkins' neo-Darwinian theorisation of memes as units of cultural transmission, identifying in meng the evolutionary advantages of shortness and memorisability. As simplistic treatments of language, this sort of explanations does not account for the persistence of various other ways of describing general and specific kinds of cuteness in Mandarin Chinese, such as ke'ai, dia or sajiao, as described by Zhang & Kramarae (767). On the other hand, most of the Chinese language research about meng at least acknowledges how the word appears under the sign of a specific media ecology: Japanese comics and animation (dongman) translated and shared online by fan communities, Japanese videogames and movies widely consumed by Chinese young audiences, and the popularisation of Internet access and media literacy across China. It is in this context that this and other neologisms "continuously end up in the latest years' charts of most popular words" (Bai 28, translation by the author), as vernacular Mandarin integrates words from digital media user cultures and online platforms. Similar comparative analyses also recognise that "words move faster than culture" (Huang 15, translation by the author), and that it is now young Chinese digital media users who negotiate their understanding of meng, regardless of the implications of the Japanese moe culture and its aesthetic canons (16). According to Huang, this process indicates on the one hand the openness and curiosity of Chinese youth for Japanese culture, and on the other "the 'borrowist' tendency of the language of Internet culture" (18). It is precisely the speed and the carefree ‘borrowist’ attitude with which these terms are adopted, negotiated and transformed across online platforms which makes it questionable to inscribe them in the classic relationship of generational resistance such as the one that Moore proposes in his treatment of ku, the Chinese word for 'cool' described as the "verbal icon of a youth rebellion that promises to transform some of the older generation's most enduring cultural values" (357). As argued in the following section, meng is definitely not the evolutionary winner in a neo-Darwinian lexical competition between Chinese words, nor occupies a clear role in the semantics of cuteness, nor is it simply deployed as an iconic and rebellious signifier against the cultural values of a previous generation. Rather, after reaching Chinese digital media audiences along the "global wink of pink globalization" (Yano 684) of Japanese animation, comics, movies and videogames, this specific subcultural term diffracts along the vectors of the local media ecology. Specialised communities of translators, larger audiences of Japanese animation streaming websites, larger populations of digital media users and ultimately the public at large all negotiate meng’s meaning and usage in their everyday interactions, while the term quickly becomes just another "word popular on the Internet” listed in end-of-the-year charts, ready to be appropriated by marketing as a local wink to Chinese youth culture. Fig. 3: Baidu image search for 萌 (meng), as of 28 February 2014: the term ‘cute’ elicits neotenic puppies, babies, young girls, teen models, and eroticised Japanese comic characters. Screenshot by the author Everything Meng: Localising and Appropriating CutenessIn the few years since it entered the Chinese vernacular, first as a specialised term adopted by dongman fans and then as a general exclamation for "cute!", meng has been repurposed and adapted to local usages in many different ways, starting from its syntactic function: while in Japanese moe is usually a verb (the action of arousing feelings of passion in the cultivated fan), meng is more frequently used in Chinese as an adjective (cute) and has been quickly compounded in new expressions such as maimeng (literally "to sell cuteness", to act cute), mengwu (cute thing), mengdian (cute selling point), widening the possibilities for its actual usage beyond the specific aesthetic appreciation of female pre-teen anime characters that the word originally refers to. This generalisation of a culturally specific term to the general domain of aesthetic judgments follows local linguistic patterns: for example maimeng (to act cute) is clearly modelled on pre-existing expressions like zhuang ke'ai (acting cute) or sajiao (acting like a spoiled child) which, as Zhang & Kramarae (762) show, are common Mandarin Chinese terms to describe infantilised gender performativity. This connection between being meng and setting up a performance is confirmed by the commentative practices and negotiations around the cuteness of things: as one of my informants quipped regarding a recently popular Internet celebrity: "Some people think that he is meng. But I don't think he's meng, I think he's just posing." Hence, while Japanese moe characters belong to a specific aesthetic canon in the realm of 2D animation, the cuteness that meng indicates in Chinese refers to a much broader scope of content and interactions, in which the semantic distinctions from other descriptors of cuteness are quite blurred, and negotiated in individual use. As another informant put it, commenting on the new WeChat avatar of one of her contacts: "so meng! This is not just ke'ai, this is more ke'ai than ke'ai, it's meng!" Other informants explained meng variably as a more or less performed and faked cuteness, as regular non-specified cuteness, as a higher degree or as a different form of it, evidencing how the term is deployed in both online and offline everyday life interactions according to imitation, personal invention, context and situation, dialogic negotiations, shared literacies, and involvements in specific communities. Moreover, besides using it without the sexual overtones of its Japanese counterpart, my research participants were generally not aware of the process of cross-linguistic borrowing and specialised aesthetic meaning of meng—for most of them, it just meant 'cute', although it did so in very personal ways. These observations do not exclude, however, that meng maintains its linkages to Japanese cultural products and otaku fandom: on the same online platforms where meng was originally borrowed from the lines of fansubbed Japanese anime series, its definition continues to be discussed and compared to its original meaning. The extremely detailed entries on Mengniang Baike (MoeGirl Wiki, http://zh.moegirl.org) testify a devoted effort in collecting and rationalising the Japanese moe aesthetics for an audience of specialised Chinese zhainan (literally 'shut-in guy", the Chinese word for otaku), while Weimeng (Micro-Moe, http://www.weimoe.com) provides a microblogging platform specifically dedicated to sharing dongman content and discuss all things meng. The recent popularity of the word is not lost on the users of these more specialised online platforms, who often voice their discontent with the casual and naive appropriations of uncultured outsiders. A simple search query of the discussion board archives of AcFun, a popular zhainan culture video streaming website, reveals the taste politics at play around these vernacular terms. Here are some complaints, voiced directly by anonymous users of the board, regarding meng: "Now I really detest this meng word, day and night everywhere is meng meng meng and maimeng but do you really understand what do these words mean?" "Don't tell me, alternative people think that watching anime is fashionable; they watch it, learn some new word and use it everywhere. Last time I was playing videogames I heard a girl saying Girl: 'Do you know what does meng mean?' Guy: 'I don't know' Girl: 'You don't even know this! Meng means beautiful, lovely' Fuck your mom's cunt hearing this I wanted to punch through the screen" "Anyway these 'popular words' are all leftovers from our playing around, then a bunch of boons start using them and feel pleased of 'having caught up with fashion', hehe" Fig. 4: "Don't tell me, alternative people think that watching anime is fashionable…", anonymous post commenting on the use of meng on the AcFun message board. Screenshot by the authorConclusion: Do Signifiers Float in Media Ecologies? The choice of examining the networks traced by a slang term signifying cuteness was determined by the conviction that the "minor aesthetics" described by Ngai (812) play an important role in the social construction of taste and judgment in contemporary consumer societies. This is especially significant when discussing digital folklore as the content produced by the everyday interactions of users and digital media: cuteness and the negotiations around its deployment are in fact important features of the repertoires of user-generated content shared and consumed on online platforms. In the case of this essay, the strange collective included green sprouts, textbook illustrations, cats, Japanese anime characters, selfies, and Coke bottle label designs. Summing up the overview of the word meng presented above, and attempting a critical response to Ngai's linkage of the minor aesthetics of cuteness to national contexts which make them "ideologically meaningful" (819), I suggest the recuperation of Lévi-Strauss’ concept of floating signifier as developed in his analysis of Melanesians’ fuzzy notion of mana. This theoretical choice comes almost naturally when dealing with pervasive terms: as Holbraad explains, “part of the original attraction of mana-terms to anthropologists was their peculiarly double universality – their semantic breadth (‘mana is everywhere’, said the native) coupled with their geographical diffusion (‘mana-terms are everywhere’, replied the anthropologist)” (189). Meng seems to be everywhere in China as both a term (in everyday, online and offline interactions) and as cuteness (in popular culture and media), thus making it an apparently perfect candidate for the role of floating signifier. Lévi-Strauss deployed Mauss’ concept as a reinforcement of his structuralist conception of meaning against a surfeit of signifiers (Holbraad 196-197), "a symbol in its pure state, therefore liable to take on any symbolic content whatever [...] a zero symbolic value […] a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains" (Lévi-Strauss 63-64). Moore’s framing of the Chinese ku and the American cool as “basic slang terms” (360) follows the same structuralist logic: extremely pervasive terms lose in meaning and specificity what they gain in supplementary symbolic content (in his case, generational distinction). Yet, as shown through the examples presented in the essay, meng does in no case reach a zero symbolic value—rather, it is “signifier and signified (and more)” (Holbraad 197), meaning different kinds of cuteness and aesthetic judgement across more or less specialised usages, situated contexts, individual understandings and dialogic negotiations. This oversimplified rebuttal to Lévi-Strauss' concept is my attempt to counter several arguments that I believe to be grounded in the structuralist theorisation of series of signifiers and signified: the linkage between aesthetic categories and national contexts (Ngai); the correlation between language and cultural practices or aesthetics (Yano); the semantic analyses of slang terms (Moore, Bai); the memetic explanations of digital folklore (Liu). As briefly illustrated, meng’s popularity does not necessarily convey a specific Japanese aesthetic culture, nor does its adaptation mirror a peculiarly Chinese one; the term does not necessarily define a different form of cuteness, nor does it confront generational values. It could be more useful to conceptualise meng, and other elements of digital folklore, as what Latour calls quasi-objects, strange hybrids existing in different versions and variations across different domains. Understood in this way, meng traces a network leading to: the specialised knowledge of fansubbing communities, the large audiences of video streaming websites, the echo chambers of social networking platforms and participatory media, and the ebbs and flows of popular culture consumption. To conclude, I agree with Yano that "it remains useful for Asia analysts to observe these ebbs and flows as they intersect with political frameworks, economic trends, and cultural values" (687-88). Meng, as scores of other Chinese slang terms that crowd the yearly charts of ‘words popular on the Internet’ might not be here to stay. But digital folklore is, as long as there will be users interacting and negotiating the minor aesthetics of their everyday life on online platforms. The general theoretical aim of this brief discussion of one vernacular term is evidencing how the very idea of a "Internet culture", when understood through the concepts of media ecology, online vernaculars and quasi-objects becomes hard to grasp through simple surveying, encyclopaedic compilations, statistical analyses or linguistic mapping. Even in a brief contextualisation of one simple slang term, what is revealed is in fact a lively bundle of practices: the cross-linguistic borrowing of a specialised aesthetic, its definition on crowdsourced wikis and anonymous discussion boards, the dialogic negotiations regarding its actual usage in situated contexts of everyday life, and the sectorial dynamics of distinction and taste. Yet, meng just means 'cute'.ReferencesAllison, Anne. “Portable Monsters and Commodity Cuteness: Pokémon as Japan’s New Global Power.” Postcolonial Studies 6.3 (2003): 381–95. Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009. Bai, Lin. “Qianxi Wangluo Liuxingyu - Meng [A Brief Analysis of a Popular Internet Term - Meng].” Wuyi Xueyuan Xuebao 31.3 (2012): 28–30. Burdelski, Matthew, and Koji Mitsuhashi. “‘She Thinks You’re Kawaii’: Socializing Affect, Gender, and Relationships in a Japanese Preschool.” Language in Society 39.1 (2010): 65–93. 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Image 1: View from Geodha Sgoilt towards the sea stacks, Uig, Isle of Lewis. Image credit: George Jaramillo.IntroductionOver the cliffs of Mangerstadh on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, is a small plot of land called Geodha Sgoilt that overlooks the North Atlantic Ocean (Image 1). On the site is a small dirt gravel road and the remnants of a World War II listening station. Below, sea stacks rise from the waters, orange and green cliff sides stand in defiance to the crashing waves. An older gentleman began to tell me of what he believed could be located here on the site. A place where visitors could learn of the wonders of St Kilda that contained all types of new storytelling technologies to inspire them. He pointed above the ruined buildings, mentioning that a new road for the visitors’ vehicles and coaches would be built. With his explanations, you could almost imagine such a place on these cliffs. Yet, before that new idea could even be built, this gentleman and his group of locals and incomers had to convince themselves and others that this new heritage centre was something desired, necessary and inevitable in the development of the Western Isles.This article explores the developing relationships that come about through design innovation with community organisations. This was done through a partnership between an academic institution and a non-profit heritage community group as part of growing study in how higher education design research can play an active partner in community group development. It argues for the use of design thinking and innovation in improving strategy and organisational processes within non-profit organisations. In this case, it looks at what role it can play in building and enabling organisational confidence in its mission, as well as, building “beyond the museum”. The new approach to this unique relationship casts new light towards working with complexities and strategies rather than trying to resolve issues from the outset of a project. These enabling relationships are divided into three sections of this paper: First it explores the context of the island community group and “building” heritage, followed by a brief history of St Kilda and its current status, and designation as a World Heritage site. Second, it seeks the value of developing strategy and the introduction of the Institute of Design Innovation (INDI). This is followed by a discussion of the six-month relationship and work that was done that elucidates various methods used and ending with its outcomes. The third section reflects upon the impacts at the relationship building between the two groups with some final thoughts on the partnership, where it can lead, and how this can represent new ways of working together within community groups. Building HeritageCurrent community research in Scotland has shown struggles in understanding issues within community capability and development (Barker 11; Cave 20; Jacuniak-Suda, and Mose 23) though most focus on the land tenure and energy (McMorran 21) and not heritage groups. The need to maintain “resilient” (Steiner 17) communities has shown that economic resilience is of primary importance for these rural communities. Heritage as economic regenerator has had a long history in the United Kingdom. Some of these like the regeneration of Wirksworth in the Peak District (Gordon 20) have had great economic results with populations growing, as well as, development in the arts and design. These changes, though positive, have also adversely impacted the local community by estranging and forcing lower income townspeople to move away due to higher property values and lack of work. Furthermore, current trends in heritage tourism have managed to turn many rural regions into places of historic consumption (Ronström 7) termed “heritagisation” (Edensor 35). There is thus a need for critical reflection within a variety of heritage organisations with the increase in heritage tourism.In particular, existing island heritage organisations face a variety of issues that they focus too much on the artefactual or are too focused to strive for anything beyond the remit of their particular heritage (Jacuniak-Suda, and Mose 33; Ronström 4). Though many factors including funding, space, volunteerism and community capability affect the way these groups function they have commonalities that include organisational methods, volunteer fatigue, and limited interest from community groups. It is within this context that the communities of the Outer Hebrides. Currently, projects within the Highlands and islands focus on particular “grassroots” development (Cave 26; Robertson 994) searching for innovative ways to attract, maintain, and sustain healthy levels of heritage and development—one such group is Ionad Hiort. Ionad Hiort Ionad Hiort is a community non-profit organisation founded in 2010 to assist in the development of a new type of heritage centre in the community of Uig on the Isle of Lewis (“Proposal-Ionad Hiort”). As stated in their website, the group strives to develop a centre on the history and contemporary views of St Kilda, as well as, encouraging a much-needed year-round economic impetus for the region. The development of the group and the idea of a heritage centre came about through the creation of the St Kilda Opera, a £1.5 million, five-country project held in 2007, led by Scotland’s Gaelic Arts agency, Proiseact nan Ealan (Mckenzie). This opera, inspired by the cliffs, people, and history of St Kilda used creative techniques to unite five countries in a live performance with cliff aerobatics and Gaelic singing to present the island narrative. From this initial interest, a commission from the Western Isles council (2010), developed by suggestions and commentary from earlier reports (Jura Report 2009; Rebanks 2009) encouraged a fiercely contentious competition, which saw Ionad Hiort receive the right to develop a remote-access heritage centre about the St Kilda archipelago (Maclean). In 2013, the group received a plot of land from the local laird for the establishment of the centre (Urquhart) thereby bringing it closer to its goal of a heritage centre, but before moving onto this notion of remote-heritage, a brief history is needed on the archipelago. Image 2: Location map of Mangerstadh on the Isle of Lewis and St Kilda to the west, with inset of Scotland. Image credit: © Crown Copyright and Database Right (2017). Ordnance Survey (Digimap Licence).St KildaSt Kilda is an archipelago about 80 kilometres off the coast of the Outer Hebrides in the North Atlantic (Image 2). Over 2000 years of habitation show an entanglement between humans and nature including harsh weather, limited resources, but a tenacity and growth to develop a way of living upon a small section of land in the middle of the Atlantic. St Kilda has maintained a tenuous relationship between the sea, the cliffs and the people who have lived within its territory (Geddes, and Gannon 18). Over a period of three centuries beginning in the eighteenth century an outside influence on the island begin to play a major role, with the loss of a large portion of its small (180) population. This population would later decrease to 100 and finally to 34 in 1930, when it was decided to evacuate the final members of the village in what could best be called a forced eviction.Since the evacuation, the island has maintained an important military presence as a listening station during the Second World War and in its modern form a radar station as part of the Hebridean Artillery (Rocket) Range (Geddes 14). The islands in the last thirty years have seen an increase in tourism with the ownership of the island by the National Trust of Scotland. The UNESCO World Heritage Organisation (UNESCO), who designated St Kilda in 1986 and 2004 as having outstanding universal value, has seen its role evolve from not just protecting (or conserving) world heritage sites, but to strategically understand sustainable tourism of its sites (“St Kilda”). In 2012, UNESCO selected St Kilda as a case study for remote access heritage conservation and interpretation (Hebrides News Today; UNESCO 15). This was partly due to the efforts of 3D laser scanning of the islands by a collaboration between The Glasgow School of Art and Historic Environment Scotland called the Centre for Digital Documentation and Visualisation (CDDV) in 2009.The idea of a remote access heritage is an important aspect as to what Ionad Hiort could do with creating a centre at their site away from St Kilda. Remote access heritage is useful in allowing for sites and monuments to be conserved and monitored “from afar”. It allows for 3D visualisations of sites and provides new creative engagements with a variety of different places (Remondino, and Rizzi 86), however, Ionad Hiort was not yet at a point to even imagine how to use the remote access technology. They first needed a strategy and direction, as after many years of moving towards recognition of proposing the centre at their site in Uig, they had lost a bit of that initial drive. This is where INDI was asked to assist by the Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the regional development organisation for most of rural Scotland. Building ConfidenceINDI is a research institute at The Glasgow School of Art. It is a distributed, creative collective of researchers, lecturers and students specialising in design innovation, where design innovation means enabling creative capabilities within communities, groups and individuals. Together, they address complex issues through new design practices and bespoke community engagement to co-produce “preferable futures” (Henchley 25). Preferable futures are a type of future casting that seeks to strive not just for the probable or possible future of a place or idea, but for the most preferred and collectively reached option for a society (McAra-McWilliam 9). INDI researches the design processes that are needed to co-create contexts in which people can flourish: at work, in organisations and businesses, as well as, in public services and government. The task of innovation as an interactive process is an example of the design process. Innovation is defined as “a co-creation process within social and technological networks in which actors integrate their resources to create mutual value” (Russo‐Spena, and Mele 528). Therefore, innovation works outside of standard consultancy practices; rather it engenders a sense of mutual co-created practices that strive to resolve particular problems. Examples include the work that has looked at creating cultures of innovation within small and medium-sized enterprises (Lockwood 4) where the design process was used to alter organisational support (Image 3). These enterprises tend to emulate larger firms and corporations and though useful in places where economies of scale are present, smaller business need adaptable, resilient and integrated networks of innovation within their organisational models. In this way, innovation functioned as a catalyst for altering the existing organisational methods. These innovations are thus a useful alternative to existing means of approaching problems and building resilience within any organisation. Therefore, these ideas of innovation could be transferred and play a role in enabling new ways of approaching non-profit organisational structures, particularly those within heritage. Image 3: Design Council Double Diamond model of the design process. Image credit: Lockwood.Developing the WorkIonad Hiort with INDI’s assistance has worked together to develop a heritage centre that tries to towards a new definition of heritage and identity through this island centre. Much of this work has been done through local community investigations revolving around workshops and one-on-one talks where narratives and ideas are held in “negative capability” (McAra-McWilliam 2) to seek many alternatives that would be able to work for the community. The initial aims of the partnership were to assist the Uig community realise the potential of the St Kilda Centre. Primarily, it would assist in enabling the capabilities of two themes. The first would be, strategy, for Ionad Hiort’s existing multi-page mission brief. The second would be storytelling the narrative of St Kilda as a complex and entangled, however, its common views are limited to the ‘fall from grace’ or ‘noble savage’ story (Macdonald 168). Over the course of six months, the relationship involved two workshops and three site visits of varying degrees of interaction. An initial gathering had InDI staff meet members of Ionad Hiort to introduce members to each other. Afterwards, INDI ran two workshops over two months in Uig to understand, reflect and challenge Ionad Hiort’s focus on what the group desired. The first workshop focused on the group’s strategy statement. In a relaxed and facilitated space in the Uig Community Hall, the groups used pens, markers, and self-adhesive notes to engage in an open dialogue about the group’s desires. This session included reflecting on what their heritage centre could look like, as well as what their strategy needed to get there. These resulted in a series of drawings of their ‘preferred’ centre, with some ideas showing a centre sitting over the edge of the cliffs or one that had the centre be an integral component of the community. In discussing that session, one of members of the group recalled:I remember his [one of INDI’s staff] interrogation of the project was actually pretty – initially – fairly brutal, right? The first formal session we had talking about strategy and so on. To the extent that I think it would be fair to say he pissed everybody off, right? So much so that he actually prompted us to come back with some fairly hard hitting ripostes, which, after a moment’s silence he then said, ‘That’s it, you’ve convinced me’, and at that point we kind of realised that that’s what he’d been trying to do; he’d been trying to really push us to go further in our articulation of what we were doing and … why we were doing it in this particular way than we had done before. (Participant A, 2016).The group through this session found out that their strategy could be refined into a short mission statement giving a clear focus as to what they wanted and how they wanted to go about doing it. In the end, drawings, charts, stories (Image 4) were drawn to reflect on what the community had discussed. These artefacts became a key role-player in the following months of the development of the group. Image 4: View of group working through their strategy workshop session. Image credit: Fergus Fullarton-Pegg (2014). The second set of workshops and visits involved informal discussion with individual members of the group and community. This included a visit to St Kilda with members from INDI, Ionad Hiort and the Digital Design Studio, which allowed for everyone to understand the immensity of the project and its significance to World Heritage values. The initial aims thus evolved into understanding the context of self-governance for distributed communities and how to develop the infrastructure of development. As discussed earlier, existing development processes are useful, though limited to only particular types of projects, and as exemplified in the Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Western Isles Council commission, it tends to put communities against each other for limited pots of money. This existing system can be innovated upon by becoming creative liaisons, sharing and co-creating from existing studies to help develop more effective processes for the future of Ionad Hiort and their ‘preferable future’. Building RelationshipsWhat the relationship with GSA has done, as a dialogue with the team of people that have been involved, has been to consolidate and clarify our own thinking and to get us to question our own thinking across several different aspects of the whole project. (Participant A, 2016)As the quote states, the main notion of using design thinking has allowed Ionad Hiort to question their thinking and challenge preconceptions of what a “heritage centre” is, by being a critical sounding board that is different from what is provided by consultants and other stakeholders. Prior to meeting INDI, Ionad Hiort may have been able to reach their goal of a strategy, however, it would have taken a few more years. The work, which involved structured and unstructured workshops, meetings, planning events, and gatherings, gave them a structured focus to move ahead with their prospectus planning and bidding. INDI enabled the compression and focus of their strategy making and mission strategy statement over the course of six months into a one-page statement that gave direction to the group and provided the impetus for the development of the prospectus briefs. Furthermore, INDI contributed a sense of contemporary content to the historic story, as well as, enable the community to see that this centre would not just become another gallery with café. The most important outcome has been an effective measure in building relationships in the Outer Hebrides, which shows the changing roles between academic and third sector partnerships. Two key points can be deemed from these developing relationships: The first has been to build a research infrastructure in and across the region that engages with local communities about working with the GSA, including groups in North Uist, Barra and South Uist. Of note is a comment made by one of the participants saying: “It’s exciting now, there’s a buzz about it and getting you [INDI] involved, adding a dimension—we’ve got people who have got an artistic bent here but I think your enthusiasm, your skills, very much complement what we’ve got here.” (Participant B, 2016). Second, the academic/non-profit partnership has encouraged younger people to work and study in the area through a developing programme of student research activity. This includes placing taught masters students with local community members on the South Uist, as well as, PhD research being done on Stornoway. These two outcomes then have given rise to interest in not only how heritage is re-developed in a community, but also, encourages future interest, by staff and students to continue the debate and fashion further developments in the region (GSAmediacentre). Today, the cliffs of Mangerstadh continue to receive the pounding of waves, the blowing wind and the ever-present rain on its rocky granite surface. The iterative stages of work that the two groups have done showcase the way that simple actions can carve, change and evolve into innovative outcomes. The research outcomes show that through this new approach to working with communities we move beyond the consultant and towards an ability of generating a preferable future for the community. In this way, the work that has been created together showcases a case study for further island community development. We do not know what the future holds for the group, but with continued support and maintaining an open mind to creative opportunities we will see that the community will develop a space that moves “beyond the museum”. AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank Ionad Hiort and all the residents of Uig on the Isle of Lewis for their assistance and participation in this partnership. For more information on their work please visit http://www.ionadhiort.org/. The author also thanks the Highlands and Islands Enterprise for financial support in the research and development of the project. Finally, the author thanks the two reviewers who provided critical commentary and critiques to improve this paper. ReferencesBarker, Adam. “Capacity Building for Sustainability: Towards Community Development in Coastal Scotland.” Journal of Environmental Management 75.1 (2005): 11-19. 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Amongst the hundreds of emails that made their way to error@media-culture.org.au over the last ten months, I received the following correspondence: Failure noticeHi. This is the qmail-send program at sv01.wadax.ne.jp.I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.namewithheld@s.vodafone.ne.jp>:210.169.171.135 does not like recipient.Remote host said: 550 Invalid recipient:namewithheld@s.vodafone.ne.jp>Giving up on 210.169.171.135. Email of this sort marks a moment that is paradoxically odd and all too familiar in the digital exchanges of everyday life. The failure message arrives to tell me something “didn’t work out.” This message shows up in my email account looking no different from any other correspondence—only this one hails from the system itself, signalling a failure to communicate. Email from the “mailer-daemon” calls attention to both the logic of the post that governs email (a “letter” sent to an intended address at the intention of some source) and the otherwise invisible logic of informatic protocols, made visible in the system failure of a “permanent error.” In this particular instance, however, the failure notice is itself a kind of error. I never emailed namewithheld@s.vodafone.ne.jp—and by the mailer-daemon’s account, such a person does not exist. It seems that a spammer has exploited an email protocol as a way of covering his tracks: when a deliver-to path fails, the failure notice bounces to a third site. The failure notice marks the successful execution of a qmail protocol, but its arrival at our account is still a species of error. In most circumstances, error yields an invalid result. In calculation, error marks a kind of misstep that not only corrupts the end result, but all steps following the error. One error begets others. But as with the failure notice, error often marks not only the misdirections of a system, but also the system’s internal logic. The failure notice corresponds to a specific category of error—a potential error that the system must predict before it has actually occurred. While the notice signals failure (permanent error), it does so within the successful, efficient operation of a communicative system. What is at issue, then, is less a matter of whether or not error occurs than a system’s ability to handle error as it arises. Control systems attempt to close themselves off to error’s misdirections. If error signals a system failure, the “failure notice” of error foregrounds the degree to which in “societies of control” every error is a fatal error in that Baudrillardian sense—a failure that is subsumed in the operational logic of the system itself (40). Increasingly, the networks of a global marketplace require a rationalisation of processes and an introduction of informatic control systems to minimise wastage and optimise output. An informatic monoculture expresses itself through operational parameters that define communication according to principles of maximum transmission. In effect, in the growing dominance of a network society, we are witnessing the transcendence of a social and cultural system that must suppress at all costs the failure to communicate. This global communication system straddles a paradoxical moment of maximum exchange and maximum control. With growing frequency, social and commercial processes are governed by principles of quality assurance, what Lyotard defined nearly thirty years ago as a “logic of maximum performance” (xxiv). As Six Sigma standards migrate from the world of manufacturing to a wide range of institutions, we find a standard of maximum predictability and minimum error as the latest coin of the realm. Utopia is now an error-free world of 100% efficiency, accuracy, and predictability. This lure of an informatic “monoculture” reduces communication to a Maxwell’s demon for capturing transmission and excluding failure. Such a communicative system establishes a regime of signs that thrives upon the drift and flow of a network of signifiers, but that affirms its power as a system in its voracious incorporation of signs within a chain of signification (Deleuze and Guattari 111-117). Error is cast out as abject, the scapegoat “condemned as that which exceeds the signifying regime’s power of deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 117). Deleuze and Guattari describe this self-cycling apparatus of capture as “a funeral world of terror,” the terror of a black-hole regime that ultimately depends upon a return of the same and insures that everything that circulates communicates…or is cast off as abject (113). This terror marks a relation of control, one that depends upon a circulation of signs but that also insists all flows fall within its signifying regime. To speak of the “terror of information” is more than metaphorical to the extent that this forced binary (terror of signal/error of noise) imposes a kind of violence that demands a rationalisation of all singularities of expression into the functionalities of a quantifiable system. To the extent that systems of information imply systems of control, the violence of information is less metaphor than metonym, as it calls into high relief the scapegoat error—the abject remainder whose silenced line of flight marks the trajectory of the unclean. This cybernetic logic of maximum performance demands that error is either contained within the predictable deviations of a system’s performance, or nullified as outlying and asignifying. Statistics tells us that we are best off ignoring the outlier. This logic of the normal suggests that something very risky occurs when an event or an instance falls outside the scope of predicable variance. In the ascendancy of information, error, deviance, and outlying results cast a long shadow. In Norbert Wiener’s account of informatic entropy, this drift from systematic control marked a form of evil—not a Manichean evil of bad actors, but rather an Augustinian evil: a falling away from the perfection of order (34-36). Information utopia banishes error as a kind of evil—an aberration that is decidedly off the path of order and control. This cybernetic logic functions at all levels, from social systems theory to molecular biology. Our diseases are now described as errors in coding, transcription, or transmission—genetic anomalies, cancerous loop scripts, and neurochemical noise. Mutation figures as an error in reproduction—a straying from faithful replication and a falling away from the Good of order and control. But we should keep in mind that when we speak of “evil” in the context of this cybernetic logic, that evil takes on a specific form. It is the evil of the errant. Or to put it another way: it is the evil of the Sesame Street Muppet, Bert. In 2001, a U.S. high school student named Dino Ignacio created a graphic of the Muppet, Bert, with Osama bin Laden—part of his humorous Website project, “Bert is Evil.” A Pakistani-based publisher scanning the Web for images of bin Laden came across Ignacio’s image and, apparently not recognising the Sesame Street character, incorporated it into a series of anti-American posters. According to Henry Jenkins’s account of the events, in the weeks that followed, “CNN reporters recorded the unlikely sight of a mob of angry protestors marching through the streets chanting anti-American slogans and waving signs depicting Bert and bin Laden” (1-2). As the story of the Bert-sighting spread, new “Bert is evil” Websites sprang up, and Ignacio found himself the unwitting centre of a full-blown Internet phenomenon. Jenkins finds in this story a fascinating example of what he calls convergence culture, the blurring of the line between consumer and producer (3). From a somewhat different critical perspective, Mark Poster reads this moment of misappropriation and misreading as emblematic of global networked culture, in which “as never before, we must begin to interpret culture as multiple cacophonies of inscribed meanings as each cultural object moves across cultural differences” (11). But there is another moral to this story as well, to the extent that the convergence and cacophony described here occur in a moment of error, an errant slippage in which signification escapes its own regime of signs. The informatic (Augustinian) evil of Bert the Muppet showing up at an anti-American rally in Pakistan marks an event-scene in which an “error” not only signifies, but in its cognitive resonance, begins to amplify and replicate. At such moments, the “failure notice” of error signals a creative potential in its own right—a communicative context that escapes systemic control. The error of “evil Bert” introduces noise into this communicative system. It is abject information that marks an aberration within an otherwise orderly system of communication, an error of sorts marking an errant line of flight. But in contrast to the trance-like lure of 100% efficiency and maximum performance, is there not something seductive in these instances of error, as it draws us off our path of intention, leading us astray, pulling us toward the unintended and unforeseen? In its breach of predictable variance, error gives expression to the erratic. As such, “noise” marks a species of error (abject information) that, by failing to signify within a system, simultaneously marks an opening, a poiesis. This asignifying poetics of “noise,” marked by these moments of errant information, simultaneously refuses and exceeds the cybernetic imperative to communicate. This poetics of noise is somewhat reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s discussion of Claude Shannon’s information theory in The Open Work. For Shannon, the gap between signal and selection marks a space of “equivocation,” what Warren Weaver calls “an undesirable … uncertainty about what the message was” (Shannon and Weaver 21). Eco is intrigued by Shannon’s insight that communication is always haunted by equivocation, the uncertainty that the message received was the signal sent (57-58). Roland Barthes also picks up on this idea in S/Z, as N. Katherine Hayles notes in her discussion of information theory and post-structuralism (46). For these writers, equivocation suggests a creative potential in entropy, in that noise is, in Weaver’s words, “spurious information” (Shannon and Weaver 19). Eco elaborates on Shannon and Weaver’s information theory by distinguishing between actual communication (the message sent) and its virtuality (the possible messages received). Eco argues, in effect, that communication reduces information in its desire to actualise signal at the expense of noise. In contrast, poetics generates information by sustaining the equivocation of the text (66-68). It is in this tension between capture and escape marked by the scapegoats of error and noise that I find a potential for a contemporary poetics within a global network society. Error reveals the degree to which everyday life plays itself out within this space of equivocation. As Stuart Moulthrop addressed nearly ten years ago, our frequent encounters with “Error 404” on the Web calls attention to “the importance of not-finding”: that error marks a path in its own right, and not merely a misstep. Without question, this poetics of noise runs contrary to a dominant, cybernetic ideology of efficiency and control. By paying attention to drift and lines of flight, such erratic behaviour finds little favour in a world increasingly defined by protocol and predictable results. But note how in its attempt to capture error within its regime of signs, the logic of maximum performance is not above recuperating the Augustinian evil of error as a form of “fortunate fall.” Even in the Six Sigma world of 100% efficiency, does not corporate R & D mythologise the creative moment that allows error to turn a profit? Post-It Notes® and Silly Putty® present two classic instances in which happenstance, mistake, and error mark a moment in which “thinking outside of the box” saves the day. Error marks a kind of deviation from—and within—this system: a “failure” that at the same time marks a potential, a virtuality. Error calls attention to its etymological roots, a going astray, a wandering from intended destinations. Error, as errant heading, suggests ways in which failure, mutation, spurious information, and unintended results provide creative openings and lines of flight that allow for a reconceptualisation of what can (or cannot) be realised within social and cultural forms. While noise marks a rupture of signification, it also operates within the framework of a cybernetic imperative that constantly attempts to capture the flows that threaten to escape its operational parameters. As networks become increasingly social, this logic of rationalisation and abstraction serves as a dialectical enclosure for an information-based culture industry. But error also suggests a strategy of misdirection, getting a result back other than what one expected, and in doing so turns the cybernetic imperative against itself. “Google-bombing,” for example, creates an informatic structure that plays off of the creative potential of equivocation. Here, error of a Manichean sort introduces noise into an information system to produce unexpected results. Until recently, typing the word “failure” into the search engine Google produced as a top response George Bush’s Webpage at www.whitehouse.gov. By building Webpages in which the text “failure” links to the U.S. President’s page, users “hack” Google’s search algorithm to produce an errant heading. The cybernetic imperative is turned against itself; this strategy of misdirection enacts a “fatal error” that evokes the logic of a system to create an opening for poeisis, play, and the unintended. Information networks, no longer secondary to higher order social and cultural formations, now define the function and logic of social space itself. This culture of circulation creates equivalences by way of a common currency of “information,” such that “viral” distribution defines a social event in its own right, regardless of the content of transmission. While a decade earlier theorists speculated on the emergence of a collective intelligence via global networks, the culture of circulation that has developed online would seem to indicate that “emergence” and circulation are self-justifying events. In the moment of equivocation—not so much beyond good and evil, but rather in the spaces between signal and noise—slippage, error, and misdirection suggest a moment of opening in contrast to the black hole closures of the cybernetic imperative. The violence of an informatic monoculture expresses itself in this moment of insistence that whatever circulates signifies, and that which cannot communicate must be silenced. In such an environment, we would do well to examine these failures to communicate, as well as the ways in which error and noise seduce us off course. In contrast to the terror of an eternal return of the actual, a poetics of noise suggests a virtuality of the network, an opening of the possible in an increasingly networked society. The articles in this issue of M/C Journal approach error from a range of critical and social perspectives. Essays address the ways in which error marks both a misstep and an opening. Throughout this issue, the authors address error as both abject and privileged instance in a society increasingly defined by information networks and systems of control. In our feature article, “Revealing Errors,” Benjamin Mako Hill explores how media theorists would benefit from closer attention to errors as “under-appreciated and under-utilised in their ability to reveal technology around us.” By allowing errors to communicate, he argues, we gain a perspective that makes invisible technologies all the more visible. As such, error provides a productive moment for both interpretive and critical interventions. Two essays in this issue look at the place of error and noise within the work of art. Rather than foregrounding a concept of “medium” that emphasises clear, unimpeded transmission, these authors explore the ways in which the errant and unintended provide for a productive aesthetic in its own right. Using Shannon’s information theory, and in particular his concept of equivocation, Su Ballard’s essay, “Information, Noise, and et al.’s ‘maintenance of social solidarity-instance 5,” explores the productive error of noise in the digital installation art of a New Zealand artists’ collective. Rather than carefully controlling the viewer’s experience, et al.’s installation places the viewer within a field of equivocation, in effect encouraging misreadings and unintended insertions. In a similar vein, Tim Barker’s essay, “Error, the Unforeseen, and the Emergent: The Error of Interactive Media Art” examines the productive error of digital art, both as an expression of artistic intent and as an emergent expression within the digital medium. This “glitch aesthetic” foregrounds the errant and uncontrollable in any work of art. In doing so, Barker argues, error also serves as a measure of the virtual—a field of potential that gestures toward the “unforeseen.” The virtuality of error provides a framework of sorts for two additional essays that, while separated considerably in subject matter, share similar theoretical concerns. Taking up the concept of an asignifying poetics of noise, Christopher Grant Ward’s essay, “Stock Images, Filler Content, and the Ambiguous Corporate Message” explores how the stock image industry presents a kind of culture of noise in its attempt to encourage equivocation rather than control semiotic signal. By producing images that are more virtual than actual, visual filler provides an all-too-familiar instance of equivocation as a field of potential and a Derridean citation of undecidibility. Adi Kuntsman takes a similar theoretic tack in “‘Error: No Such Entry’: Haunted Ethnographies of Online Archives.” Using a database retrieval error message, “no such entry,” Kuntsman reflects upon her ethnographic study of an online community of Russian-Israeli queer immigrants. Error messages, she argues, serve as informatic “hauntings”—erasures that speak of an online community’s complex relation to the construction and archiving of a collective history. In the case of a database retrieval error—as in the mailer-daemon’s notice of the “550” error—the failure of an address to respond to its hailing calls attention to a gap between query and expected response. This slippage in control is, as discussed above, and instance of an Augustinian error. But what of the Manichean—the intentional engagement in strategies of misdirection? In Kimberly Gregson’s “Bad Avatar! Griefing in Virtual Worlds,” she provides a taxonomy of aberrant behaviour in online gaming, in which players distort or subvert orderly play through acts that violate protocol. From the perspective of many a gamer, griefing serves no purpose other than annoyance, since it exploits the rules of play to disrupt play itself. Yet in “Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control,” Michael Dieter calls attention to “how the forces confined as exterior to control (virality, piracy, noncommunication) regularly operate as points of distinction to generate change and innovation.” The Amazon Noir project exploited vulnerabilities in Amazon.com’s Search Inside!™ feature to redistribute thousands of electronic texts for free through peer-to-peer networks. Dieter demonstrates how this “tactical media performance” challenged a cybernetic system of control by opening it up to new and ambiguous creative processes. Two of this issue’s pieces explore a specific error at the nexus of media and culture, and in keeping with Hill’s concept of “revealing errors,” use this “glitch” to lay bare dominant ideologies of media use. In her essay, “Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress,” Elizabeth Losh focuses on a highly public misreading of a Battlefield 2 fan video by experts from the Science Applications International Corporation in their testimony before Congress on digital terrorism. Losh argues that Congress’s willingness to give audience to this misreading is a revealing error in its own right, as it calls attention to the anxiety of experts and power brokers over the control and distribution of information. In a similar vein, in Yasmin Ibrahim’s essay, “The Emergence of Audience as Victims: The Issue of Trust in an Era of Phone Scandals,” explores the revealing error of interactive television gone wrong. Through an examination of recent BBC phone-in scandals, Ibrahim explores how failures—both technical and ethical—challenge an increasingly interactive audience’s sense of trust in the “reality” of mass media. Our final essay takes up the theme of mutation as genetic error. Martin Mantle’s essay, “‘Have You Tried Not Being a Mutant?’: Genetic Mutation and the Acquisition of Extra-ordinary Ability,” explores “normal” and “deviant” bodies as depicted in recent Hollywood retellings of comic book superhero tales. Error, he argues, while signalling the birth of superheroic abilities, marks a site of genetic anxiety in an informatic culture. Mutation as “error” marks the body as scapegoat, signalling all that exceeds normative control. In each of these essays, error, noise, deviation, and failure provide a context for analysis. In suggesting the potential for alternate, unintended outcomes, error marks a systematic misgiving of sorts—a creative potential with unpredictable consequences. As such, error—when given its space—provides an opening for artistic and critical interventions. References “Art Fry, Inventor of Post-It® Notes: ‘One Man’s Mistake is Another’s Inspiration.” InventHelp. 2004. 14 Oct. 2007 http://www.inventhelp.com/articles-for-inventors-art-fry.asp>. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil. Trans. James Benedict. New York: Verso, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3-7. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1987. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. “Googlebombing ‘Failure.’” Official Google Blog. 16 Sep. 2005. 14 Oct. 2007 http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/googlebombing-failure.html>. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1999. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2006. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984. Moulthrop, Stuart. “Error 404: Doubting the Web.” 2000. 14 Oct. 2007 http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/essays/404.html>. Poster, Mark. Information Please. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006. Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1949. “Silly Putty®.” Inventor of the Week. 3 Mar. 2003. 14 Oct. 2007 http://web.mit.edu/Invent/iow/sillyputty.html>. Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 1988. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Nunes, Mark. "Failure Notice." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Nunes, M. (Oct. 2007) "Failure Notice," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/00-editorial.php>.

Introduction: Shock WavesAs I carefully unfold the delicate piece of crisp white paper, three rogue words wildly jump up off the page before sinking deeply into my skin: “Cold and condescending.” A charge of anger surges up my spine, as these words begin to now expand and affectively resonate: “I found the instructor to be cold and condescending.” Somehow, these words impact me both emotionally and physiologically (Brennan 3): my heart beats faster, my body temperature rises, my stomach aches. Yet, despite how awful I feel, I keep on reading, as if compelled by some inexplicable force. It is not long before I devour the entire evaluation—or perhaps it devours me?—reading every last jarring word over and over and over again. And pretty soon, before I can even think about it, I begin to come undone ...How is it possible that an ordinary, everyday object can pull at us, unravel us even? And, how do such objects linger, register intensities, and contribute to our harm or good? In this paper, we draw upon our collective teaching experiences at college and high school level in order to explore how teacher evaluations actively work/ed to orient our bodies in molar and molecular ways (Deleuze and Guattari 3), thereby diminishing or enhancing our capacity to act. We argue that these textual objects are anything but dead and lifeless, and are vitally invested with “thing-power,” which is the “ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennett 6).Rather than producing a linear critique that refuses “affective associations” (Felski para. 6) and the “bodily entanglements of language” (MacLure, Qualitative 1000), we offer up a mobile conversation that pulls readers into an assemblage of (shape)shifting moments they can connect with (Rajchman 4) and question. While we attend to our own affective experiences with teacher evaluations, we wish to disrupt the idea that the self is both autonomous and affectively contained (Brennan 2). Instead, we imagine a self that extends into other bodies, spaces, and things, and highlight how teacher evaluations, as a particular thing, curiously animate (Chen 30) and affect our social worlds—altering our life course for a minute, a day, or perhaps, indefinitely (Stewart 12).* * *“The autobiographical is not the personal. […] Publics presume intimacy” (Berlant, The Female vii). Following Berlant, we propose that our individual narratives are always tangled up in other social bodies and are, therefore, not quite our own. Although we do use the word “I” to recount our specific experiences of teacher evaluations, we by no means wish to suggest that we are self-contained subjects confessing some singular life history or detached truth. Rather, together we examine the tensions, commonalities, possibilities, and threats that encounters with teacher evaluations produce within and around collective bodies (Stewart). We consider the ways in which these material objects seep deeply into our skin, re/animate moving forces (e.g. neoliberalism, patriarchy), and even trigger us emotionally by transporting us back to different times and places (S. Jones 525). And, we write to experiment (Deleuze and Guattari 1; Stewart 1) with the kind of “unpredictable intimacy” that Berlant (Intimacy 281; Structures 191) speaks of. We resist (as best we can) telos-driven tales that do not account for messiness, disorientation, surprise, or wonder (MacLure, Classification 180), as we invite readers to move right along beside (Sedgwick 8) us in this journey to embrace the complexities and implications (Nelson 111; Talburt 93) of teacher evaluations as corporeal matters. The “self” is no match for such affective entanglements (Stewart 58).Getting Un/Stuck “Cold and condescending.” I cannot help but get caught up in these words—no matter how hard I try. A million thoughts begin to bubble up: Am I a good teacher? A bad person? Uncaring? Arrogant? And, just like that, the ordinary turns on me (Stewart 106), triggering intense sensations that refuse to stay buried. What began as my reaction to a teacher evaluation soon becomes something else, somewhere else. Childhood wounds unexpectedly well up—leaking into the present, spreading uncontrollably, causing my body to get stuck in long ago and far away.In a virtual flash (Deleuze and Guattari 94), I am somehow in my grandmother’s kitchen once more, which even now smells of avgolemono soup, warm bread rising, home. Something sparks, as distant memories come flooding back to change my course and set me straight (or so I think). When I was a little girl and could not let something go, my yiayia (grandmother) Vasiliki would tell me, quite simply, to get “unstuck” (ξεκολλά). The Greeks, it seems, know something about the stickiness of affective attachments. Even though it has been over twenty years since my grandmother’s passing, her words, still alive, affectively ring in my ear. Out of some kind of charged habit (Stewart 16), her words now escape my mouth: “ξεκολλά,” I command, “ξεκολλά!” I repeat this phrase so many times that it becomes a mantra, but its magic has sadly lost all effect. No matter what I say or what I do, my body, stuck in repetition, “closes in on itself, unable to transmit its intensities differently” (Grosz 171). In an act of desperation (or perhaps survival), I rip the evaluation to shreds and throw the tattered remains down the trash chute. Yet, my actions prove futile. The evaluation lives on in a kind of afterlife, with its haunting ability to affect where my thoughts will go and what my body can do. And so, my agency—my ability to act, think, become (Deleuze and Guattari 361)—is inextricably twisted up in this evaluation, with its affective capacity to connect many “bodies” at once (both material and semiotic, human and non-human, living and dead).A View from Nowhere?At both college and school-level, formal teacher evaluations promise anonymity. Why is it, though, that students get to be voices without bodies: a voice that does not emerge from a complex, contradictory, and messy body, but rather “from above, from nowhere” (Haraway 589)? Once disembodied, students become god-like (Haraway 589), able to “objectively” dissect, judge, and even criticise teachers, while they themselves receive “panoptic immunity” (MacLure, Classification 168).This immunity has its consequences. Within formal and informal evaluations, students write of and about bodies in ways that often feel violating. Teachers’ bodies become spectacle, and anything goes:“Professor is kinda hot—not bad to look at!”“She dresses like a bag lady. [...] Her hair and clothing need an update.”“There's absolutely nothing redeeming about her as a person [...] but she has nice shoes.”(PrawfsBlog)Amid these affective violations, voices without bodies re/assemble into “voices without organs” (Mazzei 732)—a voice that emanates from an assemblage of bodies, not a singular subject. In this process, patriarchal discourses, as bodies of thought, dangerously spring up and swirl about. The voyeuristic gaze of patriarchy (see de Beauvoir; Mulvey) becomes habitual, shaping our stories, encounters, and sense of self.Female teachers, in particular, cannot deny its pull. The potential to create and/or transmit knowledge turns us into “risky subjects” in need of constant surveillance (Falter 29). Teacher evaluations do their part. As a metaphoric panopticon (see Foucault), they transform female teachers into passive spectacles—objects of the gaze—and students into active spectators who have “all the power to determine our teaching success” (Falter 30). The effects linger, do real damage (Stewart), and cause our pedagogical performances to fail every now and then. After all, a “good” female teacher is also a “good female subject” who is called upon to impart knowledge in ways that do not betray her otherwise feminine or motherly “nature” (Falter 28). This pressure to be both knowledgeable and nurturing, while displaying a “visible fragility [...] a kind of conventional feminine vulnerability” (McRobbie 79), pervades the social and is intense. Although it is not easy to navigate, the fact that unrecognisable bodies are subject to punishment (Butler, Performative 528) helps keep power dynamics firmly in place. These forces permeate my body, as well, making me “cold” and “unfair” in one evaluation and “kind” and “sweet” in another—but rarely smart or intelligent. Like clockwork, this bodily visibility and regulation brings with it never-ending self-critique and self-discipline (Harris 9). Absorbing these swarming intensities, I begin to question my capacity to effectively teach and form relationships with my students. Days later, weeks later, years later, I continue to wonder: if even one student leaves my class feeling “bad,” do I have any business being a teacher? Ugh, the docile, good girl (Harris 19) rears her ugly (or is it pretty?) head once again. TranscorporealityEven though the summer sun invites me in, I spend the whole day at home, in bed, unable to move. At one point, a friend arrives, forcing me to get up and get out. We grab a bite to eat, and it is not long before I confess my deepest fear: that my students are right about me, that these evaluations somehow mark me as a horrible teacher and person. She seems surprised that I would let a few comments defeat me and asks me what this is really all about. I shrug my shoulders, unwilling to go there.Later that night, I find myself re-reading my spring evaluations online. The positive ones electrify the screen, filling me with joy, as the constructive ones get me brainstorming about ways I might do things differently. And while I treasure these comments, I do not focus too much on them. Instead, I spend most of the evening replaying a series of negative tapes over and over in my head. Somewhat defeated, I slip slowly back into my bed and find that it surprisingly offers me a kind of comfort that my friend does not. I wonder, “What body am I now in the arms of” (Chen 202)? The bed and I become “interporous” (Chen 203), intimate even. There is much solace in the darkness of those lively, billowy blue covers: a peculiar solace made possible by these evaluations—a thing which compels me to find comfort somewhere, anywhere, beyond the human body.The GhostAs a high school teacher, I was accustomed to being reviewed. Some reviews were posted onto the website ratemyteacher.com, a platform of anonymously submitted reviews of kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers on easiness, helpfulness, clarity, knowledge, textbook use, and exam difficulty. Others were less official; irate commentary posted on social media platforms or baldly concise characterisations of our teaching styles that circulated among students and bounded back to us as hearsay and whispered asides. In these reviews, our teacher-selves were constructed: One became the easy teacher, the mean teacher, the fun teacher, or the hard-but-good teacher. The teacher who could not control her class; the teacher who controlled her class excessively.Sometimes, we googled ourselves because it was tempting to do so (and near-impossible not to). One day, I searched various forms of my name followed by the name of the school. One of my students, a girl with hot pink streaks in her hair and pointy studs shooting out of her belt and necklaces, had written a complaint on Facebook about a submission of a final writing portfolio. The student wrote on the publicly visible wall of another student in my class, noting how much she still had left to do on the assignment. Dotting the observation with expletives, she bemoaned the portfolio as requiring too much work. Then, she observed that I had an oily complexion and wrote that I was a “dyke.” After I read the comment, I closed my laptop and an icy wave passed through me. That night, I went to dinner with friends. I ruminated aloud over the comments: How could this student—with whom I had thought I had a good relationship—write about me in such a derisive manner? And what, in particular, about my appearance conveyed that I was lesbian? My friends laughed; they found the student’s comments funny and indicative of the blunt astuteness of teenagers. As I thought about the comments, I realised the pain lay in the comments’ specificity. They demonstrated the ability of the student to perceive and observe a bodily attribute about which I was particularly insecure. It made me wonder about the countless other eyes and glances directed at me each day, taking in, noticing, and dissecting my bodily self (McRobbie 63).The next morning, before school, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror and dabbed toner on my skin. Today, I thought, today will be a day in which both my skin texture and my lesson plans will be in good order. After this day, I could no longer bring myself to look this student directly in the eye. I was officious in our interactions. I read her poetry and essays with guarded ambivalence. I decided that I would no longer google myself. I would no longer click on links that were pointedly reviews of me as a teacher.The reviewed-self is a ghost-self. It is a shadow, an underbelly. The comments—perhaps posted in a moment of anger or frustration—linger. Years later, though I have left full-time classroom teaching, I still think about them. I have not recovered from the comments though I should, apparently, have already recuperated from their sharp effects. I wonder if the reviews will ceaselessly follow me, if they will shape the impressions of those who google me, if my reviewed-self will become the first and most formidable impression of those who might come to know me, if my reviewed-self will be the lasting and most formidable way I see myself.Trigger Happy In 2014, a teacher at a California public high school posts a comment on Twitter about wishing to pour coffee on her students. Some of her students this year, she writes, make her “trigger finger itchy” (see Oakley). She already “wants to stab” them a mere two weeks into the school year. “Is that bad?” she asks. One of her colleagues screen-captures her tweets and sends them to the school principal and to a local newspaper. They go viral, resulting in widespread condemnation on the Internet. She is named the “worst teacher ever” by one online media outlet (Parker). The media swarm the school. The reporters interview parents in minivans who are picking up their children from school. One parent, from behind the steering wheel, expresses her disapproval of the teacher. She says, “As a teacher, I think she should be held to a higher accountability than other people” (Louie). In the comments section of an article, a commenter declares that the “mutant should be fired” (Oakley). Others are more forgiving. They cite their boyfriends and sisters who are teachers and who also air grievances, though somewhat less violently and in the privacy of their homes (A. Jones). All teachers have these thoughts, some of the commenters argue, they just are not stupid enough to tweet them.In her own defence, the teacher tells a local paper that she “never expected anyone would take me seriously” (Oakley). As a teacher, she is often “forced to cultivate a ‘third-person consciousness,’ to be an ‘objectified subject’” (Chen 33) on display, so can we really blame her? If she had thought people would take her seriously, “you'd better believe I would have been much more careful with what I've said” (Oakley). The students are the least offended party because, as their teacher had hoped, they do not take her tweets seriously. In fact, they are “laughing it off,” according to a local news channel (Newark Teacher). In a news interview, one female student says she finds the teacher’s tweets humorous. They are fond of this teacher and believe she cares about her students. Seemingly, they do not mind that their teacher—jokingly, of course—harbours homicidal thoughts about them or that she wishes to splash hot coffee in their faces.There is a certain wisdom in the teacher’s observational, if foolhardy, tweeting. In a tweet tagged #secretlyhateyou, the teacher explains that while students may have their own negative feelings towards their teachers, teachers also have such feelings for their students. But, she tweets, “We are just not allowed to show it” (Oakley). At parties and social gatherings, we perform the cheerful educator by leaving our bodies at the door and giving into “the politics of emotion, the unwritten rules that feelings are to be ‘privatised’ and ‘pathologised’ rather than aired” (Thiel 39). At times, we are allowed a certain level of dissatisfaction, an eye roll or shrug of the shoulders, a whimsical, breathy sigh: “Oh you know! Kids today! Instagram! Sexting!” But we cannot express dislike for our own students.One evening, I was on the train with a friend who does not work as a teacher. We observed a pack of teenagers, screaming and grabbing at each other’s cell phones. The friend said, “Aren’t they so fascinating, teenagers?” Grumpily, I disagreed. On that day, no, I was not fascinated by teenagers. My friend responded, shocked, “But don’t you work as a teacher…?” It is an unspoken requirement of the job. We maintain relentless expressions of joy, an earnest wonderment towards those whom we teach. And we are, too, appalled by those who do not exhibit a constant stream of cheerfulness. The teachers’ lunchroom is the repository for “bad” feelings about students, a site of negative feelings that can somehow stick (Ahmed, Happy 29) to those who choose to eat their lunch within this space. Only the most jaded battle-axes would opt to eat in the lunchroom. Good teachers—happy and caring ones—would never choose to eat lunch in this room. Instead, they eat lunch in their classrooms, alone, prepare dutifully for the afternoon’s classes, and try to contain all of their murderous inclinations. But (as the media love to remind us), whether intended or not, our corporeal bodies with all their “unwanted affects” (Brennan 3, 11) have a funny way of “surfacing” (Ahmed, Communities 14).Conclusion: Surging BodiesAffects surge within everyday conversations of teacher evaluations. In fact, it is almost impossible to talk about evaluations without sparking some sort of heated response. Recent New York Times articles echo the more popular sentiments: from the idea that evaluations are gendered and raced (Pratt), to the prevailing notion that students are informed consumers entitled to “the best return out of their educational investments” (Stankiewicz). Evidently, education is big business. So, we take our cues from neoliberal ideologies, as we struggle to make sense of all the fissures and leaks. Teachers’ bodies now become commodified objects within a market model that promises customer satisfaction—and the customer is always right.“Develop a thicker skin,” they say, as if a thicker skin could contain my affects or prevent other affects from seeping in; “my body is and is not mine” (Butler, Precarious 26). Leaky bodies, with their permeable borders (Renold and Mellor 33), affectively flow into all kinds of “things.” Likewise, teacher evaluations, as objects, extend into human bodies, sending eruptive charges that both register within the body and transmit outward into the environment. These charges emerge as upset, judgment, wonder, sadness, confusion, annoyance, pleasure, and everything in between. They embody an intensity that animates our social worlds, working to enhance energies and/or diminish them. Affects, then, do not just come from, and stay within, bodies (Brennan 10). A body, as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 4), is neither self-contained nor disconnected from other bodies, spaces, and things.As a collection of sticky, “material, physiological things” (Brennan 6), teacher evaluations are very much alive: vibrantly shifting and transforming teachers’ affective capacities and life trajectories. Attending to them as such offers a way in which to push back against our own bodily erasure or “the screaming absence in [American] education of any attention to the inner life of teachers” (Taubman 3). While affect itself has become a recent hot-topic across American university campuses (e.g. see “trigger warnings” debates, Halberstam), conversations tend to exclude teachers’ bodies. So, for example, we can talk of creating “safe [classroom] spaces” in order to safeguard students’ feelings. We can even warn learners if material might offend, as well as watch what we say and do in an effort to protect students from any potential trauma. But we cannot, it would seem, matter, too. Instead, we must (if good and caring) be on affective autopilot, where we can only have “good” thoughts about students. We are not really allowed to feel what we feel, express raw emotion, have a body—unless, of course, that body transmits feel-good intensities.And, feeling bad about teacher evaluations ... well, for the most part, that needs to remain a dirty little secret, because, how can you possibly let yourself get so hot and bothered over a thing—a mere object? Yet, teacher evaluations can and do impact our lives, often in ways that are harmful: by inflicting pain, triggering trauma, encouraging sexism and objectification. But maybe, just maybe, they even offer up some good. After all, if teacher evaluations teach us anything, it is this: you are not simply a body, but rather, an “array of bodies” (Bennett 112, emphasis added)—and your body, my body, our bodies “must be heard” (Cixous 880).ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “Happy Objects.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. 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The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger, and Trauma.” Bully Bloggers, 5 Jul. 2014. 26 Dec. 2015 <https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/>.Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-99.Harris, Anita. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 2004.Jones, Allie. “Racist Teacher Tweets ‘Wanna Stab Some Kids,’ Keeps Job.” Gawker, 28 Aug. 2014. 1 Jan. 2016 <http://gawker.com/racist-teacher-tweets-wanna-stab-some-kids-keeps-job-1627914242>.Jones, Stephanie. “Literacies in the Body.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 56.7 (2013): 525-29.Louie, D. “High School Teacher Insults Students, Wishes Them Bodily Harm in Tweets.” ABC Action News 6. 28 Aug. 2014. 1 Jan. 2016 <http://6abc.com/education/teacher-insults-students-wishes-them-bodily-harm-in-tweets/285792/>.MacLure, Maggie. “Qualitative Inquiry: Where Are the Ruins?” Qualitative Inquiry 17.10 (2011): 997-1005.———. “Classification or Wonder? Coding as an Analytic Practice in Qualitative Research.” Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Eds. Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh UP, 2013. 164-83. Mazzei, Lisa. “A Voice without Organs: Interviewing in Posthumanist Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26.6 (2013): 732-40.McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change. London: Sage, 2009.Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 833-44.Nelson, Cynthia D. “Transnational/Queer: Narratives from the Contact Zone.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 21.2 (2005): 109-17.“Newark Teacher Still on the Job after Threatening Tweets.” CBS Local. CBS. 5KPLX, San Francisco, n.d. <http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/video/2939355-newark-teacher-still-on-the-job-after-threatening-tweets/>. Oakley, Doug. “Newark Teacher Who Wrote Nasty, Threatening Tweets Given Reprimand.” San Jose Mercury News, 27 Aug. 2014. 1 Jan. 2016 <http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_26419917/newark-teacher-who-wrote-nasty-threatening-tweets-given>.“Offensive Student Evaluations.” PrawfsBlog, 19 Nov. 2010. 1 Jan 2016 <http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2010/11/offensive-student-evaluations.html>.Parker, Jameson. “Worst Teacher Ever Constantly Tweets about Killing Students, But Is Keeping Her Job.” Addicting Info, 28 Aug. 2014. 1 Jan. 2016 <http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/08/28/worst-teacher-ever-constantly-tweets-about-killing-students-but-is-keeping-her-job/>.Pratt, Carol D. “Teacher Evaluations Could Be Hurting Faculty Diversity at Universities.” The New York Times, 16 Dec. 2015. 17 Dec. 2015 <http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/12/16/is-it-fair-to-rate-professors-online/teacher-evaluations-could-be-hurting-faculty-diversity-at-universities>.Rajchman, John. The Deleuze Connections. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2000.Rate My Teachers.com. 1 Jan. 2016 <http://www.ratemyteachers.com>. Renold, Emma, and David Mellor. “Deleuze and Guattari in the Nursery: Towards an Ethnographic Multisensory Mapping of Gendered Bodies and Becomings.” Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Eds. Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh UP, 2013. 23-41.Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003.Stankiewicz, Kevin. “Ratings of Professors Help College Students Make Good Decisions.” The New York Times, 16 Dec. 2015. 7 Dec. 2015 <http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/12/16/is-it-fair-to-rate-professors-online/ratings-of-professors-help-college-students-make-good-decisions>.Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.Talburt, Susan. “Ethnographic Responsibility without the ‘Real.’” The Journal of Higher Education 57.1 (2004): 80-103.Taubman, Peter. 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Resilience is an interdisciplinary concept that has been interrogated and investigated in a number of fields of research and practice including psychology, climate change, trauma studies, education and disaster planning. This paper considers its position within critical disability studies, popular understandings of disability and the emergence of a disability culture. Patrick Martin-Breen and J. Marty Anderies offer a colloquial definition of resilience as: Bouncing back after stress, enduring greater stress, and being less disturbed by a given amount of stress. … To be resilient is to withstand a large disturbance without, in the end, changing, disintegrating, or becoming permanently damaged; to return to normal quickly; and to distort less in the face of such stresses. (1182) Conversely, Glenn E. Richardson argues that resiliency is a ‘metatheory’ that can best be described as ‘growth or adaptation through disruption rather than to just recover or bounce back’ (1184). He argues that resiliency theory has progressed through several stages, from the recognition of characteristics of resilient individuals to an appreciation of the support structures required beyond the level of the individual. In her memoir Resilience, Ann Deveson describes resilience as a concept that people think they understand until they are called upon to define it. Deveson offers many definitions and examples of resilience throughout her book, beginning with stories about disability, people with disability and their experiences of changing levels of social inclusion and exclusion (632). She paints an evocative picture of a young mother whose five year old son has cerebral palsy giving evidence before a Royal Commission into Human Relationships during a period of significant social change involving the deinstitutionalisation of people with disabilities: A few years earlier, this child with cerebral palsy would have been placed in an institution. His mother might not even have seen him. Now she had care of her child but the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction. (632) During the 1980s a number of large institutions caring for people with developmental impairments and psychiatric illnesses were closed in favour of community care (Clear 652). Although giving an appearance of endorsing equality of disabled people in the community, the ‘hidden agenda’ of this initiative was to cut public expenditure on social services (Ellis 163). As a result, an undue burden fell to women who became primary carers with little support such as the woman Deveson remembers. She questions where this young mother mustered such ‘magnificent resilience’ when she had such little support: When he was born, she had been discharged from the hospital with her baby, a feeding formula and a tiny pink plate for the child’s cleft palate. The only advice she received was to come back later to have the plate refitted. Her general practitioner prescribed her sedatives for depression, and she and her husband found their own way to the Royal Blind society by asking a blind man they saw outside a supermarket. She had only learned accidentally from one of the nurses that her baby was blind. ‘He’s mentally retarded too,’ the nurse had added, almost as an afterthought. (632) Thus Deveson’s consideration of resilience includes both an individual’s response to what could be described as tragedy and the importance of social support and the drive to demand it. Despite her child’s impairment and the lack of community resources made available to her family to cope, this young woman was leading public discussion about the plight of people with disabilities and their families in the hopes the government would intervene to help improve the situation (Deveson 632). Indeed, when it comes to the experience of disability, resilience is implied and generally understood to mean an attribute of the individual. However, as resilience theory has progressed, resilience can no longer be considered as existing exclusively within the domain of an individual’s personal qualities. Environmental support structures are vital in fostering resilience (Wilkes). Despite resiliency theory moving on from the level of the individual, popular discourses of resiliency as an individual’s attribute continue to dominate disability. As such, some critical disability commentators have redefined resilience as a response to a disabling social world. My aim in this paper is to explore this discourse by engaging with ideas about disability and resilience that emerge in popular culture. Despite the changing social position of people with disabilities in the community, notions of resilience are often invoked to describe the experience of people with disability and attributes of successful (often considered ‘inspiring’) people with disability. I begin by offering a definition of resilience as it is bound up in notions of inspiration and usually applied to people with disabilities. The second part of the paper explores disability as a cultural signifier to comment on the ways in which disability offers cultural meanings that may work to reassure nondisabled people of their privileged position. Finally, the paper considers interpretations of disability as a personal tragedy before exploring the emergence of a disability culture that recognises the social and cultural oppression experienced by people with disabilities and reworks definitions of resilience as a response to that oppression. Defining Resilience: Good Outcomes in Spite of Serious Threats Disability is often invoked in stories about resilience. Gillian King, Elizabeth Brown, and Linda Smith argue that a clear link exists between resilience and feeling that life is meaningful. They argue that the experiences of people with disabilities can offer a template for how to develop resilience and cope with life changes (King, Brown and Smith 633). According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, resilience is ‘the action or an act of rebounding or springing back’ (653). King et al add that several concepts are associated with resilience such as hardiness, a sense of coherence and learned optimism (633). Deveson, resilience ‘has come to mean an ability to confront adversity and still find hope and meaning in life’. She comments that it conjures up notions of heroism, endurance and determination (632). Each of these characteristics we might describe as inspirational. It is telling that both Deveson and King et al use people with disabilities as signifiers of resilience in practice. However, Katherine Runswick-Cole and Dan Goodley argue that this definition of resilience has not necessarily been useful to people with disabilities and instead recommend a definition of resilience that Deveson only alludes to. For Runswick-Cole and Goodley resilience can be located in social processes. They argue that a thorough investigation of resilience in the lives of people with disabilities considers the broader social and cultural restrictions placed on top of impairments rather than simply individualising resilience as a character trait of people who can ‘overcome the odds’: An exploration of resilience in the lives of disabled people must, then, focus on what resources are available and who is accessing those resources. Crucially, in seeking to build resilience in the lives of disabled people, this can never simply be a matter of building individual capacity or family support, it must also be a case of challenging social, attitudinal and structural barriers which increase adversity in the lives of disabled people. (634) This is an alternative approach to disability that sees ‘the problem’ located in social structures and inaccessible environments. This so-called social model of disability is based on principles of empowerment and argues that able-bodied mainstream society disables people who have impairments through an inaccessible built environment and the perpetuation of stereotypes and prejudicial attitudes. Disability Dustbins and Inspirational Cripples Arthur Frank, sociologist and author of The Wounded Storyteller, explains that ‘the human body, for all its resilience, is fragile; breakdown is built into it. Bodily predictability, if not the exception, should be regarded as exceptional; contingency ought to be accepted as normative’ (634). Frank argues that we do not want to admit that our bodies are unpredictable and could ‘break down’ at any moment. Those bodies that do break down therefore become representatives of many of the things [the able-bodied, normal world] most fear-tragedy, loss, dark and the unknown. Involuntarily we walk- or more often sit- in the valley of the shadow of death. Contact with us throws up in people's faces the fact of sickness and death in the world … A deformed and paralysed body attacks everyone's sense of well-being and invincibility. (Hunt 186) People with disabilities therefore become loaded cultural signifiers, as Tom Shakespeare argues in Cultural Representations of Disabled People: Dustbins for Disavowal: ‘it is non-disabled people’s embodiment which is the issue: disabled people remind non-disabled people of their own vulnerability’ (139). As a result, people with disabilities are culturally othered. Several disability theorists have argued that this makes the non-disabled feel better about themselves and their tenuous privileged position (Barnes; Ellis; Kumari Campbell; Oliver, Goggin and Newell; Shakespeare). Disability, as a concept, is both everywhere and nowhere. Generally considered a medical experience or personal tragedy, the discipline of critical disability studies has emerged to question why disability is considered an inherently negative experience and if there is more to disability than a body that has something wrong with it. Fiona Kumari Campbell suggests ableism – ‘the network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species typical and therefore essential and fully human’ – is repeatedly performed in our culture. This cultural project is difficult to sustain because by their very nature all bodies are out of control. People with disability are an acute reminder of the temporariness of an able bodied ontology (650). In order to maintain this division and network of beliefs, the idea that disability is a personal tragedy rather than a set of social relations designed to exclude some bodies but not others is culturally reproduced through stereotypes such as the idea that people with disabilities who achieve both ordinary and extraordinary things are sources of inspiration. Resilience as a personal quality is implicated in this stereotype. In a powerful Ramp Up blog that was republished on the ABC’s Drum and the influential popular culture/mummy blogging site website Mamamia, Stella Young takes issues with the media’s framing of disability as inspirational: We all learn how to use the bodies we're born with, or learn to use them in an adjusted state, whether those bodies are considered disabled or not. So that image of the kid drawing a picture with the pencil held in her mouth instead of her hand? That's just the best way for her, in her body, to do it. For her, it's normal. I can't help but wonder whether the source of this strange assumption that living our lives takes some particular kind of courage is the news media, an incredibly powerful tool in shaping the way we think about disability. Most journalists seem utterly incapable of writing or talking about a person with a disability without using phrases like "overcoming disability", "brave", "suffers from", "defying the odds", "wheelchair bound" or, my personal favourite, "inspirational". If we even begin to question the way we're labelled, we slide immediately to the other end of the scale and become "bitter" and "ungrateful". We fail to be what people expect. (610) These phrases, that Young claims the media rely on to isolate people with disabilities, are synonyms for the qualities Deveson attributes to resilient individuals (632). As Beth Haller notes, although disabled activists and academics attempt to progress important political work, the news media continue to frame people with disability as courageous and inspirational simply for living their lives (216). By comparison, disability theorist Irving Zola describes rejecting his leg braces (symbolic of his professional status) electing instead to use a wheelchair: If we lived in a less healthiest, capitalist, and hierarchal society, which spent less time finding ways to exclude and disenfranchise people and more time finding ways to include and enhance the potentialities of everyone, then there wouldn’t have been so much for me to overcome. (654) Harilyn Russo agrees, and in her memoir Don’t Call Me Inspirational highlights the socially created barriers put in her way and the ways these are ignored in favour of individualising social disablement as something inspirational people ‘overcome’: I’ll tell you why I am inspirational: I put up with the barriers, the barricades, the bullshit you put between us to avoid confronting something—probably yourself—and still pay the rent on time and savor dark chocolate. Now that takes real courage. (651) Throughout her book, Russo seeks to ‘overcome disability prejudice’ rather than ‘overcome disability’. Russo establishes herself and her experiences as normal and every day while articulating the tedium she finds in being pigeon holed as inspirational. These authors are constructing a new way of thinking about disability. Michael Oliver first described this as the ‘social model of disability’ in 1981. He sought to overturn the pathologisation of disability by giving people ‘a way of applying the idea that it was society not people with impairments that should be the target for professional intervention and practice’ (Runswick-Cole and Goodley 634). Resilience: A Key Concept Fiona Kumari Campbell questions whether resilience is a useful concept in the context of disability and reflects on its use to obscure “the ‘real’ problem, namely disability oppression” (649). She interrogates traditional definitions of resilience as they draw on notions of good outcomes in spite of risk factors or experiences of severe trauma and calls for an understanding of the interactive and dynamic features of resilience as opposed to ‘individualised psychological attributes’. Thus, individualised notions of resilience as they are implicated in the cultural stories of inspirational people with disabilities are embedded within the ableist relations that Kumari Campbell seeks to expose. In Empowerment, Self-Advocacy and Resilience, Dan Goodley argues that resilience is a key concept that has repeatedly emerged throughout his research into disability and self-advocacy. He draws on the reflections of people with disabilities to offer a re-definition of resilience as a response to a disabling society that includes five interrelated aspects (648). First is resilience as contextual, which recognises resilience as the result of the contexts in which it emerges, including through relationships with others and the experience of disabling and enabling environments. Secondly, resilience complicates preconceived notions about people with disabilities such as the view that they are passive. Goodley’s third feature of resilience is optimism. He notes resistance toward oppression as a key characteristic of optimistic resilience. Goodley again considers the importance of interpersonal relationships and group identity when he argues that the fourth feature of resilience relies on people with disabilities forming relationships with each other and group identities to question their oppression. Finally, Goodley argues ‘resilience is indicative of disablement’ and suggests that people with disability must be resilient in everyday life because we live in a disabling society. Kumari Campbell posits that individualised notions of resilience are a ‘cop out’ designed to ‘distract and defuse the reality of people labouring under very difficult circumstances of which the solution is better access to quality services’. She is hopeful, like Goodley, that resilience can be redefined as a political project, and encourages people with disabilities to develop a critical consciousness and find a new sense of community through art, humour and peer support. Therefore, according to Kumari Campbell and Goodley, resilience can be redefined as a response to social disablement rather than bodily impairment. Disability Culture: Acts of Resilience in a Disabling Society Russo and Zola’s work is part of a disability culture that has emerged in response to narrow ways of understanding disability. Steven Brown emphasises the importance of experience and personal identity in his definition of disability culture: People with disabilities have forged a group identity. We share a common history of oppression and a common bond of resilience. We generate art, music, literature, and other expressions of our lives and our culture, infused from our experience of disability. Most importantly, we are proud of ourselves as people with disabilities. We claim our disabilities with pride as part of our identity. (520) Brown’s definition of disability culture therefore draws on all five of Goodley’s features of resilience. Disability culture is contextual, complicating, optimistic, interpersonal and indicative of disablement. The forging of a group identity reveals the resilience of disability culture as contextual and interpersonal. The creation of art, music, literature and other cultural artefacts reveals resilience as optimistic. The notion that people with disabilities are proud of their identity complicates traditional understandings of disability as a personal tragedy. Brown’s emphasis on the common history of the oppression of people with disabilities, as it initiated the whole disability culture movement, is ‘indicative of disablement’. The bonds of resilience that create the disability cultural movement are a result of the social oppression of people with disabilities (Gill; Martin; Brown; Goodley). Conclusion Whereas people with disabilities going about their every day lives have often been considered inspirational and as possessing resilient qualities, a new disability culture is emerging that repositions the resilience of people with disabilities as a political response to social oppression. Drawing on Runswick-Cole and Goodley’s argument that individualising qualities of resilience in inspirational people with disabilities has not benefitted people with disabilities, this paper sought to reveal the importance of resilience as a response to social oppression. 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