Journal articles on the topic 'International Broadcasting Association'

Russian TV industry is now undergoing a stage of impetuous reforming. Alongside with the introduction of the digital platform of nation-wide terrestrial broadcasting with free analogue programs other demanded segments of TV market - cable and satellite TV, IPTV, webcasting, mobile TV - are rapidly developing. The article surveys the International Exhibition CSTB’2012, (organized by MIDEXPO and Russian Association of Cable Broadcasting) as an example of the dynamics of the processes in Russian television.

Scholarship has long demonstrated how a focus on women's roles can reveal vital new elements of broadcasting history, adding critical perspectives on institutional, aesthetic, communicatory, and participatory media narratives. This article asks: What happens if we stop looking at the stories of women in broadcasting as “media history”? What other interpretive lenses and disciplinary traditions might we draw on, and how might we insert media fruitfully within them? The work derives from research on the early years of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT) as read from the correspondence of founder Wilhelmina (Lilian) Posthumus-van der Goot (1897–1989), and builds on IAWRT's example to develop methodological considerations for writing entangled transnational histories of gender and broadcasting, absorbing insights from studies of international organizations, collective biographies, and reconsiderations of the archive in the digital age.

The article concerns the first two years (1992-1993) of the formation of commercial broadcasting in Ukraine. It studies the factors that influenced the creation of the first commercial radio stations, which gradually attempted to switch from a “game mode” to the broadcasting business and business entrepreneurship. The activity of the first ten commercial radio companies is studied by means of systematization, content analysis, generalization and other methods. The authors of the article offer the documented time of the first airwaves of each company mentioned (from the authors‟ personal archives). The role that these stations played in the formation of commercial private broadcasting in Ukraine is analyzed. Additional information is given about the creation of the Association of Private Radio Stations in Ukraine which was intended to unite commercial radio stations. The minute of the seminar “Local Radio” is published for the first time. The meeting with the head officers of the radio stations present was organized by the public organization International Media Center – Internews (Ukraine) and by the training center British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC, England) from May 20 to June 3, 1994 in Pushcha-Vodytsia near Kyiv. It was there where they decided to create the association. One of the radio projects of MMC-Internews “Interview from Internews” is examined. It may be considered as the first radio project unifying commercial radio stations, and also the first student radio project at the private radio station in Ukraine. Therefore, the purpose of the article is to study facts and documents (from the authors‟ personal archive) certifying the dialectic progress of Ukrainian commercial broadcasting from the so-called “musical patchwork” to the transformation into a profitable means of mass communication.

The recent zero-priced award of $11–70 billion in digital TV (DTV) licenses by the federal government occurred when auctions had been initiated for non-broadcast licenses and when the seven decade-old regime of ‘public trusteeship’ in broadcasting had become famous for licensee reneging on promised obligations. Policymakers nonetheless declined to auction DTV licenses when enacting the Telecommunications Act of 1996, rejecting a plea from the Senate Majority Leader. This paper provides an overview of the episode and investigates three basic questions. (1) Why does Congress continue a regulatory system that routinely fails to provide the benefits it is supposed to generate? (2) Why did the National Association of Broadcasters propose high definition television as a way of keeping land mobile operators off an unused spectrum? (3) Why did Congress delegate to the FCC the decision to award licenses for digital television broadcasting?

Properties of modern media space as a superposition of the physical, informational and virtual worlds are specified. Different approaches to the concepts of “media space”, “being”, “otherness”, “context” in the postmodern era are generalized. The questions of European unity in the genesis, the main sources of integration in Europe, the causes of the problem of preserving European identity, dialogue and related topics of understanding and problems of European identity in the metamodern era are presented. The interpretation of these concepts of Plotinus, Levinas and the main features of the philosophy of the Kievan Rus is considered. The main treaties and sources of soft law of the Council of Europe in the information sphere and the values that they carry with their content are analyzed. The joint actions of Ukraine, the European Union and the Council of Europe on implementation of transparency of media ownership, broadcasting of territorial communities, public broadcasting, digital broadcasting, information security measures are considered. The content of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and Ukraine and the emphasis on the protection of human rights in the system of international law are analyzed. The need for flexible approaches and a review of public policy in all areas in the context of globalization are emphasized. The main regulatory mechanisms in European cyberspace are presented. Principles and the history of the development of broadcasting of territorial communities in Europe are mentioned. The priorities of the state policy in the informational sphere are emphasized. The problems of development of modern information policy of Ukraine are determined. Directions of improvement of the concept of modern European media space and information policy in the region are proposed.

There are different marketing activities generating money for sport subjects depending on their properties which are offered for commercial exploitation. Marketing consists of different tools and ways how to generate money for sport such as selling of broadcasting (TV) and media rights, sponsorship, merchandising, licensing, ticketing, charities, donations, patronages. From the legal point of view, it is interesting to explore how different marketing tools are regulated. Certain parts of marketing matters are covered by legal rules. In 2011 Commission on Marketing and Advertising of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) issued the latest version of the ICC International Advertising and Marketing Communication Code. The document applies to different forms of sponsorship relating to corporate image, brands, products, activities or events of any kind. It includes sponsorship by both commercial and non-commercial organizations. The basic connection represents association between sports property and sponsor brand as a tool how to transfer image of the sport to the sponsor. The nature of the Code implies good governance in the field of sponsorship. Special attention deserves the principle of respecting the sponsorship property. The Code represents a useful opportunity for companies, business, associations, courts of law, public authorities, self regulatory bodies on national and international level and other institutions which are supposed to solve disputes in sponsorship cases. European Union law together with national legislation of EU members have set up rules for advertising sector of TV broadcast. Television without Frontiers Broadcasting Directive consists with the detailed time and other limitations for different situations. As EU directive does not regulate visual coverage of sponsor logos and other insignia visible during sport competition on TV that means that sponsors and other subjects do not need to respect rules of the directive. In the absence of formal legislation on national and international level the ICC Code represent a very useful tool to handle sponsorship agreements and possible disputes which could arise from them. The Code is designed primarily as an instrument for self-discipline. On the other hand it is also intended for use as an interpretative aid for the parties in the clarification of uncertainties arising under the sponsorship, as well as a reference for courts or arbitrators in sponsorship disputes.

Much conventional scholarship considers “the public” to be in decline in the modern Western world, following a range of cultural developments believed to encourage withdrawal into the private domain. Public Viewing Areas devoted to communicating live events may be interpreted as countering such a trend by attracting audiences to the public sphere. This article examines how the world governing body of association football, FIFA, recently aimed to achieve such an objective by broadcasting the 2010 World Cup at six designated international Fan Fest sites. Drawing on theories of “spectacle” and sociality, the implications of FIFA’s initiative are interrogated by examining whether the environment and surveillance measures characterizing the “global spectacle” facilitated social interaction. In the process, established understandings of the “fall” and “quality” of public life are canvassed to propose how these collective fora might engender “meaningful” public communication beyond crowd assimilation through spatial co-presence and shared mediated imagery alone.

The rapid development of digital technologies has a significant impact on the media market and media systems as a whole. Despite the fact that traditional TV has become the first to have mastered the digital platform and still retains leadership among audiences of different countries, it is also experiencing the pressure of evolutionary technologies. One of these areas is the competitive dynamic development of technological tools to create a virtual reality that completely captures the attention of consumers, especially the younger generation, and plunges them into the space of the surreal world. But is TV actually not familiar with virtual reality or is it just a stereotype, established as a result of the existence of analog TV for several decades in the last century? This author considers the terminological backing of virtual reality and the emergence of this definition as exemplified by cinema and TV, as well as analyzes the signing of the cooperation agreement between the Russian TV channel Digital TV (part of the holding VGTRK) and the largest technology company KROK for the purpose of creating a consortium for the development of virtual reality in the Russian market. The author also addresses the issue of possible consumer awareness manipulation, especially among the younger generation, with the abuses of games and other applications of virtual reality, and reveals dissonance in consumer awareness of the virtual and objective realities in the future. Besides, the trend of development in Russian TV broadcasting is considered, identified in the framework of the International Congress of the National Association of Broadcasters. The author rationalizes the involvement of the younger generation in the world of virtual reality, assuming that it will not only improve the profitability and capitalization of TV as the leading media system, but may also attract target audiences to domestic television viewing.

<p class="Default">This study has been carried out to analyze the National Team of Germany that had been the winner of the 2014 FIFA World Cup as the most successful team for several variables. Data analyzed in this research were gathered from the official web site of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association and the international TV channels broadcasting the competitions. Technic parameters such as shots, accurate shots, corner kicks, offsides, accurate and non-accurate passes, and variances of goals scored in the matches were analyzed according to the goal times and areas. Statistics were registered through SPSS program and the percentages and frequencies were calculated. Germany National Team, the most successful team of the 2014 FIFA World Cup has scored 18 goals with an average of 2.57 goals per match without conceding a goal in the first periods . This statistic is similar to all previous tournaments. All along the tournament, most (%74) of the first 11 players of the teams starting the matches were consisted of players from Bundesliga. Accurate shots’ percentage has been determined as %73.2, the average percentage of possessing the ball as %56.71 and also the percentage of accurate passes as %81.9 out of 4990 pass attempts. As a conclusion, to achieve great results in top level tournaments such as FIFA World Cup, there are important performance indicators to take into consideration. Regarding the success of the German National Soccer Team in the tournament, it is argued that especially possessing the ball, shooting and passing accurately with a high rate along with other performance indicators are the base elements of success.</p><p class="Default"> </p><p class="Default"><strong>Özet</strong></p><p>Bu çalışma, 2014 FIFA Dünya Kupasında ilk sırada yer alarak en başarılı takım olan Almanya Milli futbol takımının farklı değişkenler açısından analiz edilmesi amacıyla yapılmıştır. Araştırma verileri, müsabakaları yayımlayan uluslararası TV kanalından ve FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) resmi internet sitesinden elde edilmiştir. Müsabakalarda, atılan ve yenilen gollerin zaman dilimlerine göre dağılımı, bölgelere göre topa sahip olma yüzdeleri, atılan şut, isabetli şut, köşe vuruşu, ofsayt, başarılı ve başarısız pas sayıları gibi teknik parametrelerin dağılımları analiz edilmiştir. Elde edilen veriler SPSS programında kaydedilmiş, frekans ve yüzde değerleri hesaplanarak yorumlanmıştır. 2014 Dünya kupasının en başarılı takımı olan Almanya Milli takımının, turnuva boyunca maç başına 2.57 gol ortalaması ile attığı 18 golün tüm zaman dilimlerinde benzer dağılımlar gösterdiği ve maçların ilk yarılarında hiç gol yenilmediği belirlenmiştir. Turnuva boyunca maçlara ilk 11’de başlayan futbolcuların büyük çoğunluğunu (%74.0) Bundesliga’da oynayan futbolcular oluşturmaktadır. İsabetli şut atma yüzdesinin %73.2 gibi oldukça önemli bir oranda, 7 maçta yapılan 4990 pas girişiminden %81.9’unun başarılı ve topa sahip olma yüzdesi ortalamasının %56.71 olduğu tespit edilmiştir. Sonuç olarak, Futbol Dünya Kupası gibi üst düzey müsabakaların oynandığı turnuvalarda, başarılı performansa ulaşabilmek için gerekli birçok performans göstergesinin olduğu, Almanya Milli takımının başarısında her maçta yüksek oranda isabetli şut atma, topa sahip olma ve başarılı pas yüzdeleri ile birlikte bu unsurların diğer performans göstergelerini de olumlu yönde etkileyerek başarılı performansın temelini oluşturduğu söylenebilir.</p>

Attention has not hitherto been turned intently to the popularity of particular branches of sports in the research of the history of Estonian sports. It has more intuitively been believed that the most popular branch of sports in the pre-war Republic of Estonia (1918–1940) was football. The conspicuously extensive coverage of football in the periodical press has provided grounds for this belief. Compared to other sports games and the more major individual branches, football had the most international matches at the level of national teams, which attracted thousands of spectators. Estonian clubs annually hosted squads from neighbouring countries. Professional clubs mainly from Central Europe brought thousands of spectators to the stadiums in the latter half of the 1920s and in the early 1930s. Rivalries between squads at home were also of great interest to the public and the media. The other primary ball games, basketball and volleyball, started being played in Estonia some ten years after football, and their position was weaker internationally as well: contacts between countries were infrequent. The international basketball association was established in 1932 and its analogue in volleyball was founded in 1947. Track and field, the largest branch of individual athletics, also could not compete with football in terms of matches and international contacts. This article is the first more serious attempt to compare the popularity of branches of sports in Estonia in the 1920s and 1930s. I compared the more major branches of sports in four categories: the number of participants in the particular branch of sports, the sizes of audiences, their ability to cope economically (balance sheets and revenue reports), and their position in the print media. The fact that there are gaps in the data in both the archives and in periodicals, and that the information for different years does not always match, made comparison of the numbers of participants difficult. The methodology used for ascertaining the number of participants was also not necessarily the same. An adequate comparison to the more important individualsports branches is complicated to arrive at because until 1933, the Eesti Kerge-, Raske- ja Veespordiliit (Estonian Association of Track and Field, Heavy Athletics and Aquatic Sports) was the umbrella organisation for major branches of sports such as track and field, wrestling, weightlifting, boxing, swimming, diving, gymnastics and cycling, whereas the last two sports branches are not even mentioned in the association’s name. Conclusions can nevertheless be drawn concerning the number and proportions of persons active in different branches of sports based on indirect data. I compared the size of the membership of the separate sports associations and the number of participants in the Estonian championships of the three largest sports games (football, basketball, volleyball). Periodicals proved to be the most reliable in ascertaining the numbers of spectators since they unfailingly noted the larger attendance numbers based on spectator ticket information or visual observation. The sketchy information on attendance at competitions in individual sports is a problem, but from the standpoint of this article’s research problem, the fact that before World War II there was not a single large sports arena in Estonia is important. The gymnasiums that were in use accommodated slightly over 500 spectators in total. This means that a thousand and more spectators could gather only at stadiums, where primarily football matches and track and field competitions were held. The print media reported the numbers of spectators at those competitions. I compared the attendance numbers for football and track and field competitions, and calculated the average number of spectators. There are gaps in the balance sheets and revenue reports of the separate sports associations for the period under consideration, yet the Eesti Spordi Keskliit (Central Association of Estonian Sports) published them in its yearbooks for 1935–1939, which makes it possible to draw correct conclusions concerning the economic viability of the separate sports associations. While I used the method of source criticism for the preceding three categories, I studied the representation of branches of sports in print media together with Kristjan Remmelkoor using content analysis. We focused exclusively on print media because that was the primary means of mass communication at that time, and it covered the entire period under consideration, unlike radio, which began broadcasting for the first time in 1926. On the basis of circulation numbers, we selected two dailies with nationwide circulation that were published in Tallinn (Vaba Maa was published only until 1938, thus it was replaced for final comparison with another Tallinn daily paper Uus Eesti) and one daily from southern Estonia for content analysis. We studied the newspaper issues from the years 1921, 1925, 1930, 1935 and 1939. Based on the pilot project, we identified the branches of sports that were reported the most and worked out a methodology on the basis of which to search for and categorise branches of sports. After six months, I carried out a repeat analysis for one month of each year that was under consideration. The repeat analysis covered all four dailies. The results differed by 3.97%. Thereat in comparing the two branches of sports that were reported on most, the difference in football was 0.69% and 0.43% in track and field. It became evident as a result of the study that compared to basketball and volleyball, there were almost four times more football enthusiasts. Compared to the other more popular individual sports, we can indirectly conclude that football was the branch of sports with the largest number of enthusiasts. Football had the most spectators in Estonia in the interwar period because branches of sports practiced in indoor conditions could not fit more than 500 spectators into gymnasiums, since there was no large sports arena. Football had the largest audiences when considering the track and field competitions and football matches held at stadiums. In 1935–1939, the Eesti Jalgpalli Liit (Estonian Football Association) was Estonia’s most prosperous separate sports association. It became evident on the basis of content analysis that the two most widely reported branches of sports in print media were football, and track and field. Thereat the number of reports on track and field grew in the latter half of the 1930s and surpassed the figures for football. At the same time, the number of texts on Estonian football was the largest over the entire period that has been studied. The greatest number of texts on football were in journalistic genres that required absorbed reading, which stood out better in newspapers. Due to these circumstances, football became the most popular branch of sports in Estonia in the interwar period. The Estonian national squad’s international match against Latvia held on 18 June 1940 characterises football’s symbolic capital. This match that took place at Kadriorg stadium at a turning point in history evolved into a nationalist demonstration against the Soviet Union’s occupying regime. The crowd went from the stadium to Kadriorg Palace, where President Konstantin Päts was under the guard of the foreign regime. This match and the events that followed it are etched in the people’s collective memory. They have made their way into many published memoirs and also into belles-lettres, and have been echoed in both poetry and prose.

On April 21—23, 2021, the Russian State Library (RSL) hosted the International scientific and practical conference “Rumyantsev Readings”, which is one of the largest annual library events. The conference traditionally raises issues of preserving and studying the world cultural heritage, promotes intercultural interaction. In 2021, it covered a wide range of issues of theory and practice of library science, bibliography science, and bibliology. The participants are specialists of libraries of all levels, from federal to municipal, and various departmental subordination, museums, archives, higher educational institutions and research institutes from 19 regions of Russia, as well as from the Republic of Belarus, the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Republic of Lithuania and the Republic of Uzbekistan. Broadcasting of the meetings, as well as holding a number of sections and round tables both in face-to-face and zoom-conference format, significantly increased the audience coverage. The Rumyantsev Readings attracted the highest number of remote participants (2,427 connections), that determined the relevance of the conference in modern conditions. Three hundred and one participants attended the conference personally.The rich program included a plenary session, 13 round tables, seminars, and sections. The following sections were organised at the Rumyantsev Readings: “Library in the modern world: accessibility in the period of restrictions”; “Information and bibliographic activity: theory and practice”; “Collectors, researchers, curators. Libraries and museums in the context of history”; “Art Publications in the collections of libraries. Creation, existence, study”; “Specialized collections (printed music and maps) in the library holdings”; “Manuscript sources in the collections of libraries”; “Rare books and book monuments”; “Theory and practice of library science”; “Library classification systems”. As part of the pre-session meeting of the 32nd Section on Library Management and Marketing of the Russian Library Association, there was a round table “Social networking activity of libraries: how to record and report (methodological approaches and solutions)”. There were also the following events: a round table a “The Register of book monuments: government database of recording and registration and scientific research resource”, an expert session “Actual problems of formation of digital competencies of learners in the library and information sphere” and a scientific and practical seminar “Actual heritage” devoted to the 150th birth anniversary of L.B. Khavkina. The publishing house of the Russian State Library “Pashkov Dom” has released the conference proceedings.

The host countries for mega-sporting events aim to become more visible and to be perceived positively by the global audience because of the media coverage around the event. The media’s influence on people’s perceptions is expected to be particularly high if the audience has no direct experience and little prior knowledge of the hosting nation, and thus depends on the media for information. Using a panel survey ( N = 76) with three rounds of data collection, this longitudinal study explores how television viewers’ perceptions of Brazil changed from before the 2014 FIFA World Cup to after this event, and after the 2016 Olympic Games hosted by Brazil. The results indicate that perceptions about topics related to Brazil (e.g. crime risk, standard of living, economic situation) have generally become more negative over time. Further, although associations with Brazil were very positive before the FIFA World Cup, respondents tended to associate more negative ideas with Brazil over time. Surprisingly, the intention to travel to Brazil increased after Brazil hosted the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics. Broader international significance of the findings for both host countries of mega-sporting events and broadcasting countries are discussed.

The article considers a very important factor of His Beatitude Lubomyr Husar (Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church), who actively supported together with his followers, the most positive tendencies towards the development and pacification of Ukraine. The main idea of the article is to analyze, through the prism of the historical processes of creation and existence of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the work of His Beatitude Lyubomyr Guzar, as well as the influence of the phenomenon of the international activities of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church on and its cooperation with the state in various fields. culture, language and national traditions, as well as in the structure of the state and the foreign policy of Ukraine. In addition, the article discusses the great contribution of His Beatitude Lubomyr Husar, as the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church to the development and support of the Ukrainian diaspora abroad, which further contributed to the formation of numerous public associations of foreign Ukrainian in the world's states and linguistic, educational and cultural needs. The activity of public organizations of foreign Ukrainian is aimed at preserving its identity, language, culture and traditions. These activities are also implemented in joint projects of foreign diplomatic institutions of Ukraine and public organizations of foreign Ukrainian, directed, in particular, to scientific and educational projects, issuing periodicals with organizations, preparing and broadcasting television and radio programs, supporting Internet resources, publishing publications on Ukrainian topics. In mass media abroad, improvement of burial places (places of memory) of outstanding Ukrainian graves abroad, organization of children's lags her with the purpose of their acquaintance with the traditions of the Ukrainian language, literature, history of Ukraine, providing educational institutions with the study of the Ukrainian language and cultural centers of print, photo, audio, video production, objects of national symbols, publishing scientific, journalistic, artistic works and collections for communities of foreign Ukrainian, as well as works of foreign Ukrainian, translation of works of Ukrainian literature in foreign languages, popularization of the Ukrainian language, literature ry, culture, history and traditions of the Ukrainian people, including the teaching of the Ukrainian language, as well as other items in the Ukrainian language, fabrication and installation of plaques, dedicated to outstanding figures of Ukrainian history, science and culture and historical events.

This study examines psycholinguistic structure of autobiographical and traumatic narratives representing positive emotional and stressful traumatic life events. The research applied the cross sectional, between subjects design utilizing the independent variables of external agent they, space and time and dependent variable of word number in traumatic narratives for multiple regression analysis. The approval letter to recruit the participants through SONA system in 2015–2016 academic year was obtained from Institutional Review Board of Oklahoma State University (USA). 64 undergraduates of nonclinical setting, females (n=37), males (n=27), mean age was 19.43 (SD=1.37) were recruited. PTSD-8: A Short PTSD Inventory assesses PTSD, the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analyzes traumatic and autobiographical narratives in terms of linguistic units and psychological meaningful categories. The results indicate that there are significant differences between pronoun they as external agent of proposition and psychological categories of negative emotions and anxiety in traumatic and autobiographical narratives. The frequency of these categories is higher in traumatic narratives compared with autobiographical narratives. External agent they, category of time and space taken together significantly contribute to word number in traumatic narrative. There is a negative correlation between focus on the past and word count, and positive correlation between social category and word count in traumatic narrative in nonclinical sample. To sum up, propositional structure of traumatic memory of individuals without PTSD is represented by external agent and context (place and time) taken together. Considering time as a significant negative predictor of creating traumatic narrative, temporal processing without overestimation of time is an important factor of avoiding PTSD. 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My thesis is that new media, starting with analog broadcast and going through digital convergence, blur the line between work time and free time. The technology that we are adopting has transformed free time into potential and actual labour time. At the dawn of the modern age, work shifted from tasked time to measured time. Previously, tasked time intermingled work and leisure according to the vagaries of nature. All this was banished when industrial capitalism instituted the work clock (Mumford 12-8). But now, many have noticed how post-industrial capitalism features a new intermingling captured in such expressions as "24/7" and "multi-tasking." Yet, we are only beginning to understand that media are driving a return to the pre-modern where the hour and the space are both ambiguous, available for either work or leisure. This may be the unfortunate side effect of the much vaunted "interactivity." Do you remember the old American TV show Dobie Gillis (1959-63) which featured the character Maynard G. Krebs? He always shuddered at the mention of the four-letter word "work." Now, American television shows makes it a point that everyone works (even if just barely). Seinfeld was a bold exception in featuring the work-free Kramer; a deliberate homage to the 1940s team of Abbott and Costello. Today, as welfare is turned into workfare, The New York Times scolds even the idle rich to adopt the work ethic (Yazigi). The Forms of Broadcast and Digital Media Are Driving the Merger of Work and Leisure More than the Content It is not just the content of television and other media that is undermining the leisured life; it is the social structure within which we use the media. Broadcast advertisements were the first mode/media combinations that began to recolonise free time for the new consumer economy. There had been a previous buildup in the volume and the ubiquity of advertising particularly in billboards and print. However, the attention of the reader to the printed commercial message could not be controlled and measured. Radio was the first to appropriate and measure its audience's time for the purposes of advertising. Nineteenth century media had promoted a middle class lifestyle based on spending money on home to create a refuge from work. Twentieth century broadcasting was now planting commercial messages within that refuge in the sacred moments of repose. Subsequent to broadcast, home video and cable facilitated flexible work by offering entertainment on a 24 hour basis. Finally, the computer, which juxtaposes image/sound/text within a single machine, offers the user the same proto-interactive blend of entertainment and commercial messages that broadcasting pioneered. It also fulfills the earlier promise of interactive TV by allowing us to work and to shop, in all parts of the day and night. We need to theorise this movement. The theory of media as work needs an institutional perspective. Therefore, I begin with Dallas Smythe's blindspot argument, which gave scholarly gravitas to the structural relationship of work and media (263-299). Horkheimer and Adorno had already noticed that capitalism was extending work into free time (137). Dallas Smythe went on to dissect the precise means by which late capitalism was extending work. Smythe restates the Marxist definition of capitalist labour as that human activity which creates exchange value. Then he considered the advertising industry, which currently approaches200 billion in the USA and realised that a great deal of exchange value has been created. The audience is one element of the labour that creates this exchange value. The appropriation of people's time creates advertising value. The time we spend listening to commercials on radio or viewing them on TV can be measured and is the unit of production for the value of advertising. Our viewing time ipso facto has been changed into work time. We may not experience it subjectively as work time although pundits such as Marie Winn and Jerry Mander suggest that TV viewing contributes to the same physical stresses as actual work. Nonetheless, Smythe sees commercial broadcasting as expanding the realm of capitalism into time that was otherwise set aside for private uses. Smythe's essay created a certain degree of excitement among political economists of media. Sut Jhally used Smythe to explain aspects of US broadcast history such as the innovations of William Paley in creating the CBS network (Jhally 70-9). In 1927, as Paley contemplated winning market share from his rival NBC, he realised that selling audience time was far more profitable than selling programs. Therefore, he paid affiliated stations to air his network's programs while NBC was still charging them for the privilege. It was more lucrative to Paley to turn around and sell the stations' guaranteed time to advertisers, than to collect direct payments for supplying programs. NBC switched to his business model within a year. Smythe/Jhally's model explains the superiority of Paley's model and is a historical proof of Smythe's thesis. Nonetheless, many economists and media theorists have responded with a "so what?" to Smythe's thesis that watching TV as work. Everyone knows that the basis of network television is the sale of "eyeballs" to the advertisers. However, Smythe's thesis remains suggestive. Perhaps he arrived at it after working at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from 1943 to 1948 (Smythe 2). He was part of a team that made one last futile attempt to force radio to embrace public interest programming. This effort failed because the tide of consumerism was too strong. Radio and television were the leading edge of recapturing the home for work, setting the stage for the Internet and a postmodern replication of the cottage industries of pre and proto-industrial worlds. The consequences have been immense. The Depression and the crisis of over-production Cultural studies recognises that social values have shifted from production to consumption (Lash and Urry). The shift has a crystallising moment in the Great Depression of 1929 through 1940. One proposal at the time was to reduce individual work hours in order to create more jobs (see Hunnicut). This proposal of "share the work" was not adopted. From the point of view of the producer, sharing the work would make little difference to productivity. However, from the retailer's perspective each individual worker would accumulate less money to buy products. Overall sales would stagnate or decline. Prominent American economists at the time argued that sharing the work would mean sharing the unemployment. They warned the US government this was a fundamental threat to an economy based on consumption. Only a fully employed laborer could have enough money to buy down the national inventory. In 1932, N. A. Weston told the American Economic Association that: " ...[the labourers'] function in society as a consumer is of equal importance as the part he plays as a producer." (Weston 11). If the defeat of the share the work movement is the negative manifestation of consumerism, then the invasion by broadcast of our leisure time is its positive materialisation. We can trace this understanding by looking at Herbert Hoover. When he was the Secretary of Commerce in 1924 he warned station executives that: "I have never believed that it was possible to advertise through broadcasting without ruining the [radio] industry" (Radio's Big Issue). He had not recognised that broadcast advertising would be qualitatively more powerful for the economy than print advertising. By 1929, Hoover, now President Hoover, approved an economics committee recommendation in the traumatic year of 1929 that leisure time be made "consumable " (Committee on Recent Economic Changes xvi). His administration supported the growth of commercial radio because broadcasting was a new efficient answer to the economists' question of how to motivate consumption. Not so coincidentally network radio became a profitable industry during the great Depression. The economic power that pre-war radio hinted at flourished in the proliferation of post-war television. Advertisers switched their dollars from magazines to TV, causing the demise of such general interest magazines as Life, The Saturday Evening Postet al. Western Europe quickly followed the American broadcasting model. Great Britain was the first, allowing television to advertise the consumer revolution in 1955. Japan and many others started to permit advertising on television. During the era of television, the nature of work changed from manufacturing to servicing (Preston 148-9). Two working parents also became the norm as a greater percentage of the population took salaried employment, mostly women (International Labour Office). Many of the service jobs are to monitor the new global division of labour that allows industrialised nations to consume while emerging nations produce. (Chapter seven of Preston is the most current discussion of the shift of jobs within information economies and between industrialised and emerging nations.) Flexible Time/ Flexible Media Film and television has responded by depicting these shifts. The Mary Tyler Moore Show debuted in September of 1970 (see http://www.transparencynow.com/mary.htm). In this show nurturing and emotional attachments were centered in the work place, not in an actual biological family. It started a trend that continues to this day. However, media representations of the changing nature of work are merely symptomatic of the relationship between media and work. Broadcast advertising has a more causal relationship. As people worked more to buy more, they found that they wanted time-saving media. It is in this time period that the Internet started (1968), that the video cassette recorder was introduced (1975) and that the cable industry grew. Each of these ultimately enhanced the flexibility of work time. The VCR allowed time shifting programs. This is the media answer to the work concept of flexible time. The tired worker can now see her/his favourite TV show according to his/her own flex schedule (Wasser 2001). Cable programming, with its repeats and staggered starting times, also accommodates the new 24/7 work day. These machines, offering greater choice of programming and scheduling, are the first prototypes of interactivity. The Internet goes further in expanding flexible time by adding actual shopping to the vicarious enjoyment of consumerist products on television. The Internet user continues to perform the labour of watching advertising and, in addition, now has the opportunity to do actual work tasks at any time of the day or night. The computer enters the home as an all-purpose machine. Its purchase is motivated by several simultaneous factors. The rhetoric often stresses the recreational and work aspects of the computer in the same breath (Reed 173, Friedrich 16-7). Games drove the early computer programmers to find more "user-friendly" interfaces in order to entice young consumers. Entertainment continues to be the main driving force behind visual and audio improvements. This has been true ever since the introduction of the Apple II, Radio Shack's TRS 80 and Atari 400 personal computers in the 1977-1978 time frame (see http://www.atari-history.com/computers/8bits/400.html). The current ubiquity of colour monitors, and the standard package of speakers with PC computers are strong indications that entertainment and leisure pursuits continue to drive the marketing of computers. However, once the computer is in place in the study or bedroom, its uses fully integrates the user with world of work in both the sense of consuming and creating value. This is a specific instance of what Philip Graham calls the analytical convergence of production, consumption and circulation in hypercapitalism. The streaming video and audio not only captures the action of the game, they lend sensual appeal to the banner advertising and the power point downloads from work. In one regard, the advent of Internet advertising is a regression to the pre-broadcast era. The passive web site ad runs the same risk of being ignored as does print advertising. The measure of a successful web ad is interactivity that most often necessitates a click through on the part of the viewer. Ads often show up on separate windows that necessitate a click from the viewer if only to close down the program. In the words of Bolter and Grusin, click-through advertising is a hypermediation of television. In other words, it makes apparent the transparent relationship television forged between work and leisure. We do not sit passively through Internet advertising, we click to either eliminate them or to go on and buy the advertised products. Just as broadcasting facilitated consumable leisure, new media combines consumable leisure with flexible portable work. The new media landscape has had consequences, although the price of consumable leisure took awhile to become visible. The average work week declined from 1945 to 1982. After that point in the US, it has been edging up, continuously (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics). There is some question whether the computer has improved productivity (Kim), there is little question that the computer is colonising leisure time for multi-tasking. In a population that goes online from home almost twice as much as those who go online from work, almost half use their online time for work based activities other than email. Undoubtedly, email activity would account for even more work time (Horrigan). On the other side of the blur between work and leisure, the Pew Institute estimates that fifty percent use work Internet time for personal pleasure ("Wired Workers"). Media theory has to reengage the problem that Horkheimer/Adorno/Smythe raised. The contemporary problem of leisure is not so much the lack of leisure, but its fractured, non-contemplative, unfulfilling nature. A media critique will demonstrate the contribution of the TV and the Internet to this erosion of free time. References Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Committee on Recent Economic Changes. Recent Economic Changes. Vol. 1. New York: no publisher listed, 1929. Friedrich, Otto. "The Computer Moves In." Time 3 Jan. 1983: 14-24. Graham, Philip. Hypercapitalism: A Political Economy of Informational Idealism. In press for New Media and Society2.2 (2000). Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1944/1987. Horrigan, John B. "New Internet Users: What They Do Online, What They Don't and Implications for the 'Net's Future." Pew Internet and American Life Project. 25 Sep. 2000. 24 Oct. 2001 <http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=22>. Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline. Work without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1988. International Labour Office. Economically Active Populations: Estimates and Projections 1950-2025. Geneva: ILO, 1995. Jhally, Sut. The Codes of Advertising. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. Kim, Jane. "Computers and the Digital Economy." Digital Economy 1999. 8 June 1999. October 24, 2001 <http://www.digitaleconomy.gov/powerpoint/triplett/index.htm>. Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage Publications, 1994. Mander, Jerry. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. New York: Morrow Press, 1978. Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934. Preston, Paschal. Reshaping Communication: Technology, Information and Social Change. London: Sage, 2001. "Radio's Big Issue Who Is to Pay the Artist?" The New York Times 18 May 1924: Section 8, 3. Reed, Lori. "Domesticating the Personal Computer." Critical Studies in Media Communication17 (2000): 159-85. Smythe, Dallas. Counterclockwise: Perspectives on Communication. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unpublished Data from the Current Population Survey. 2001. Wasser, Frederick A. Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 2001. Weston, N.A., T.N. Carver, J.P. Frey, E.H. Johnson, T.R. Snavely and F.D. Tyson. "Shorter Working Time and Unemployment." American Economic Review Supplement 22.1 (March 1932): 8-15. <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8282%28193203%2922%3C8%3ASWTAU%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3>. Winn, Marie. The Plug-in Drug. New York: Viking Press, 1977. "Wired Workers: Who They Are, What They're Doing Online." Pew Internet Life Report 3 Sep. 2000. 24 Oct. 2000 <http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=20>. Yazigi, Monique P. "Shocking Visits to the Real World." The New York Times 21 Feb. 1990. Page unknown. Links http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=20 http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=22 http://www.atari-history.com/computers/8bits/400.html http://www.transparencynow.com/mary.htm http://www.digitaleconomy.gov/powerpoint/triplett/index.htm http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8282%28193203%2922%3C8%3ASWTAU%3 E2.0.CO%3B2-3 Citation reference for this article MLA Style Wasser, Frederick. "Media Is Driving Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Wasser.xml >. Chicago Style Wasser, Frederick, "Media Is Driving Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Wasser.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Wasser, Frederick. (2001) Media Is Driving Work. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Wasser.xml > ([your date of access]).

IntroductionWithin Australia, the approach taken to the ways in which disabled people access television is heavily influenced by legislation and activism from abroad. This is increasingly the case as television moves to online modes of distribution where physical and legislative boundaries are more fluid. While early investigations of the intersections between television and the concept of abroad focused on the impacts of representation and national reputation (Boddy), the introduction of new media technologies saw a shifting focus towards the impact and introduction of new media technologies. Drawing on Chan’s definition of media internationalisation as “the process by which the ownership, structure, production, distribution, or content of a country’s media is influenced by foreign media interests, culture and markets” (Chan 71), this article considers the impacts of legislative and advocacy efforts abroad on Australian television audiences with disabilities accessing subscription Video on Demand (VOD).Subscription (VOD) services have caused a major shift in the way television is used and consumed in Australia. Prior to 2015, there was a small subscription VOD industry operating out of this country. Providers such as Quickflix had limited content and the bulk of VOD services used by Australians related to catch-up television, user-generated videos on YouTube or Vimeo, or accessing Netflix US illegally through virtual private networks (VPNs) and proxy services (Ryall; Lombato and Meese). VOD is distinct in that it is generally streamed over Internet-based online services and is not linear, giving viewers the opportunity to watch the video at any time once the programme is available. Unlike broadcast television, there is no particular government or corporate entity controlling the creation of VOD. These services take advantage of the time-shifted convenience of the medium. In addition, VOD is typically not terrestrial, traversing national boundaries and challenging audience expectations and legislative boundaries. This research is concerned with the subscriber model of VOD in Australia where subscribers pay a fee to gain access to large collections of content.This internationalising of television has also offered the opportunity for people with disabilities that previously excluded them from the practice of television consumption, to participate in this national pastime. On an international level, audio description is becoming more available on VOD than it is on broadcast television, thus allowing disabled people access to television. This article situates the Australian approach to VOD accessibility within a broader international framework to question whether the internationalisation of television has affected the ways in which of content is viewed, both at legislative and public levels. While providers are still governed by national regulations, these regulations are influenced by international legislation. Further, the presence and success of advocacy groups to agitate for change has exacerbated the way accessibility is viewed and defined in Australia. The role of the Accessible Netflix Project, in conjunction with changes in the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) in the USA, has not only reframed accessibility discourse in the US, but also, as companies such as Netflix move abroad, has potentially stimulated a shift in media accessibility standards in Australia.We focus in particular on the impact of three new services – Netflix Australia, Stan, and Presto Entertainment—which entered the Australian market in 2015. At the time, Australia was described as having entered the “streaming wars” and consumers were predicted to be the beneficiaries (Tucker). Despite international moves to improve the accessibility of VOD for disabled consumers, via legislation and advocacy, none of these providers launched with an accessibility policy in place. Even closed captions, whose provision on Australian broadcast television had been mandated via the broadcasting services act since the early 1990s, were conspicuously absent. The absence of audio description was less surprising. With the exception of a 12-week trial on the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in 2012 and a follow up trial on iView in 2015, audio description has never been available to Australian people who are vision impaired.The findings and methodology of this article are based on research into disability and streaming television in Australia, conducted in 2015 and 2016. Funded by the Australian Communications and Consumer Action Network (ACCAN), the 12-month project reviewed national and international policy; surveyed 145 people with disability; and conducted interviews with media professionals, policy advisors, accessibility advocates, and disabled Australian VOD consumers.Accessibility Abroad Impacting on Local Accessibility: The Netflix ModelDespite the lack of a clear accessibility policy, Netflix is in front in terms of accessibility, with captions available for most content. Audio description for some content became available in April 2015 shortly after its Australian launch. The introduction of this accessibility feature has been directly attributed to the advocacy efforts of the Accessible Netflix Project, an international online movement operating out of the US and advocating for improved accessibility of VOD in the US and abroad (Ellis & Kent). Similarly, Chris Mikul, author of Access on Demand, was interviewed as part of this research. He told us that Netflix’s provision of captions was due to the impacts of legislation in the USA, namely the CVAA. The CVAA, which we discuss later in the paper, while having no jurisdiction in Australia, has improved the availability of captions by mandating accessibility abroad. As a result, accessible content is imported into the Australian market. When Netflix introduced audio description on its original programming, the VOD provider described the access feature as an option customers could choose, “just like choosing the soundtrack in a different language” (Wright). However, despite successful trials, other VOD providers have not introduced audio description as a way to compete with Netflix, and there is no legislation in place regarding the provision of audio description in Australia. People with disability, including people with vision impairments, do use VOD and continue to have particular unmet access needs. As the Netflix example illustrates, both legislation and recognition of people with a disability as a key audience demographic will result in a more accessible television environment.Impact of International LegislationThe accessibility of VOD in Australia has been impacted upon by international legislation in three key ways: through comparative bench-marks, or industry expectations; via user-led expectations and awareness of differing policies and products; and also through the introduction of international providers onto the Australian VOD market, and the presence of parallel-import VOD services. While international VOD providers such as Netflix and iTunes have officially launched in Australia, Australian consumers, both prior to and after the official availability, often access the parallel USA versions of such services. Lombato and Meese theorise that the delays in content launches between the US and Australia, and the limitations caused by licensing agreements (reducing the content availability) have prompted the continued use of Netflix US and a “kind of transnational shop-front hopping” (126). This is significant for VOD content accessibility as it emphasises the effect of, and disparities in national legislation, whereby the same company provides accessible content only in locations in which it is subject to legal requirements. Our analysis of international policy regarding the accessibility of VOD has found a varied approach—from a complete absence of accessibility regulations (New Zealand), to a layering of policy through disability discrimination acts alongside new media laws (USA). Additionally, this need to address convergence and new media in media accessibility regulation is currently a subject being discussed at government levels in some countries, primarily in the UK (ATVOD). However, outside of the USA, there remains either a lack of accessibility policies for media, new or old—as is the case in Singapore—or a lack of policies that facilitate accessibility for the VOD market—such as in Australia where a level of accessibility is required for broadcasters and subscription television but not VOD.While these changes and advancements in accessibility are taking place abroad, the space that online businesses occupy is fluid. The accessibility requirements of physical spaces cross national boundaries, and operate across multiple media and technologies, and thus, multiple media laws. For example, Australian television broadcasters are subject to some captioning requirements, yet VOD is not. Furthermore, catch-up VOD services provided by mainstream Australian television broadcasters are not subject to these laws. While legislation that accommodates convergence and the new digital media landscape is logical (ACMA) there remain few examples globally that have made changes to reflect accessibility requirements in this context. The CVAA in the US is perhaps the most effective to date, specifically addressing the issue of access to modern communications for people with disability.The CVAA and CaptioningThe CVAA seeks to ensure that “accessibility laws enacted in the 1980s and 1990s are brought up to date with 21st century technologies, including new digital, broadband, and mobile innovations” (FCC). The CVAA is designed to be forward-thinking and evolve with changing technologies (Varley). As such, the Act has been distinctive in its approach to accessibility for Internet protocol delivered video programming, including VOD. While full accessibility requirements, such as the inclusion of audio description are not addressed, the Act is considered to be the most accessible globally in its requirements for captioning of all content—specifically, English and Spanish—across cable, broadcast, satellite, and VOD content. VOD apps, plug-ins and devices are also required to implement the complete captioning capabilities, with specific requirements for personalised presentation, colour, size, and fonts. This requirement is applied to video programming distributors and to video programming owners. Indeed, programmers are expected to provide captioning compliance certificates, and distributors are required to report a failure to do so. Quality standards have also been established, with an emphasis not simply on the presence of captioning, but also on accuracy, synchronicity, completeness, and appropriate placement of captions. Despite an absence of similar legislation locally, the impacts of these foreign interests will penetrate the Australian market.In Australia, the example set by the CVAA has warranted recommendations by the ACMA and Media Access Australia. In a recent interview, Chris Mikul reinforced the position that, in order for the accessibility of VOD to improve in Australia, a similar Act is needed to the one established in the US. According to Mikul, “The CVAA in the US bridges the gap to some extent with captioning, although it doesn’t venture into online audio description. […] We need something like the CVAA here” (Mikul).Beyond the impact of the CVAA on US VOD programming, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (1990) has been significant in the developing captioning requirements of the CVAA. In 2010, disability advocates seeking more accessible VOD services attempted to prosecute Netflix under the ADA. The National Association for the Deaf (NAD) argued that Netflix discriminated against those with a hearing impairment by not providing closed captions for all content. At this time, the CVAA did not include captioning requirements for VOD providers. Instead, it was argued that online businesses should be considered as a “place” of publication accommodation, and thus subject to the same standards and anti-discrimination laws. Netflix settled out of court in 2012, agreeing to caption 100% of its content by 2014 (Mullin; Wolford). However, a Federal Appeals Court later ruled that Netflix was not a place of public accommodation and therefore did not have to comply with the ruling (Hattem). Notably, during the case Netflix also argued that it should not be required to provide captions, as it was abiding by CVAA requirements at that time.Accessibility Activism and AdvocacyAdvocates for accessibility, such as the NAD, have impacted not only on the legislative framework for VOD in the USA, but also on the international public perception and expectation of accessibility. It is important to note that many of the help forums generated by international VOD providers mix customers from multiple countries, establishing a global space in which requirements, expectations and perceptions are shared. These spaces generate a transnational accessibility, providing an awareness of what provisions are being made in other countries, and where they are not. Orrego-Carmona conducted a study on subtitling for the purpose of language translation and found the globalisation of audio-visual content and international media flows have impacted on the public view of subtitling. Indeed, this finding can be extended to subtitling for people with disability. In the help forums for VOD providers, users identified an awareness of other more accessible media environments (such as whether companies provided closed captions in other countries), the impact of legislation in other countries on accessibility, and how or if international media companies were replicating accessibility standards transnationally. Social media campaigns, instigated in both the UK and the US are significant examples of consumer and public-led activism for accessibility. “LOVEFiLM hates deaf people”, #subtitleit, launched by the Action on Hearing Loss group in the UK, and #withcaptions, were all effective online campaigns launched by individuals and disability activist groups. In early 2014, comedian Mark Thomas, as part of his show 100 Acts of Minor Dissent, placed two large posters at the entrance to the offices of Amazon UK stating "LOVEFiLM hates deaf people." A subsequent petition through change.com attracted 15154 signatures, asking for rental DVDs that were subtitled to be listed, and all streamed content to be subtitled (https://www.change.org/p/lovefilm-amazon-prime-video-amazon-uk-please-list-your-subtitled-rental-dvds-and-subtitle-your-streamed-content). A year later, Amazon increased the subtitling of its content to 40 percent. As of June 2015 the company was working towards 100% subtitling. The petition turned its attention to Sky On Demand, initiated by Jamie Danjoux, a 17-year-old boy with hearing loss (https://www.change.org/p/sky-enable-subtitles-for-ondemand), has attracted 6556 signatures. The social media campaigns #subtitleit and #withcaptions similarly aimed to target both VOD providers and the government, with the aim for both consistent and compulsory captioning across all VOD content. While UK legislation is yet to specifically address VOD captioning, the subject of accessibility and VOD is currently being debated at policy level. It was also successful in gaining commitments from Sky and BT TV to improve subtitles for their VOD and catch-up VOD programming.In the USA, The Accessible Netflix Project and founder Robert Kingett have been significant advocates for the inclusion of audio description on Netflix and other US VOD providers. Further, while the Accessible Netflix Project has a focus on the United States, its prominence and effectiveness has facilitated awareness of the accessibility of VOD transnationally, and the group internally monitors and comments on international examples. This group was integral in persuading Netflix to provide audio descriptions, a move that has impacted on the level of accessibility worldwide.These advocacy efforts abroad have not only included Australian audiences via their invitations to participate in transnational online spaces, but their success also has direct impact on the availability of captions and audio description imported to Australian video on demand consumers. ConclusionThe national borders of television have always been permeable—with content from abroad influencing programming and culture. However, within Australia, borders have been erected around the television culture with long wait times between shows airing abroad and locally. In addition, licencing deals between overseas distributors and pay television have delayed the introduction of VOD until 2015. That year saw the introduction of three VOD providers to the Australian television landscape: Stan, Presto Entertainment, and Netflix Australia. With the introduction of VOD, it is not only international content that has altered television consumption. Overseas providers have established a firm place in the Australia television marketplace. Even before the formal launch of overseas VOD providers, disabled users were accessing content from providers such as Netflix USA via VPNs and tunnelling services, illustrating both the clear demand for VOD content, and demonstrating the multiple ways in which international legislation and provider approaches to accessibility have permeated the Australian television industry.The rapid increase of ways in which we watch television has increased its accessibility. The nature of video on demand—streamed online and nonlinear—means that the content accessed is no longer as restricted by space, time and television. Audiences are able to personalise and modify access, and can use multiple devices, with multiple assistive technologies and aids. This increasingly accessible environment is the result of legislative and advocacy efforts originating in other countries. Efforts to improve captions and introduce audio description, while not originating in Australia, have seen improvements to the availability of accessibility features for disabled Australian television audiences. To return to Chan’s definition of media internationalisation with which we began this article, a concern with television accessibility while not originating in Australia, has taken place due to the influence of “foreign media interests, culture and markets” (Chan 71).However, despite the increased potential for full accessibility, there remains deficits. Captions and audio description, the two main features that support the playback of online video content in an accessible way, are not consistently provided. There are no clear, applicable legislative requirements for VOD accessibility in Australia. This must change. Based on our research, change at government, industry and advocacy levels are required in order for VOD in Australia to become fully accessible. Legislation needs to be introduced that requires a minimum level of accessibility, including audio description accessibility, on broadcast television and VOD. Further, governments should work to ensure that PWD are aware of the accessibility features that are provided across all media. For VOD providers, it should be recognised that a significant portion of the consumer base could be PWD, or their families and friends may wish to share in the activity of VOD. Establishing an understanding of the different accessibility requirements may come from hiring specialised accessibility consultants to make platforms accessible and useable for PWD. For consumers of VOD and advocates of accessibility, participation in advocacy efforts that encourage and demand that VOD providers improve accessibility options have been shown to increase accessibility abroad, and should be applied to the Australian context.ReferencesACMA. Australian Government. Converged Legislative Frameworks: International Approaches. Jul. 2011. 1 Aug. 2016 <http://www.acma.gov.au/theACMA/Library/researchacma/Occasional-papers/coverged-legislative-frameworks-international-approaches>.ATVOD. Provision of Video on Demand Access Services: A Report on the Level of Provision by On Demand. UK: The Authority for Television on Demand, 18 Dec. 2015. 13 May 2016 <http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/on-demand/accesseuropean/AS_survey_report_2015.pdf>.Boddy, William. "U.S. Television Abroad: Market Power and National Introspection." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 15.2 (1994): 45-55.Chan, Joseph Man. "Media Internationalization in China: Processes and Tensions." Journal of Communication 44.3 (1994): 70-88.Ellis, Katie, and Mike Kent. "Accessible Television: The New Frontier in Disability Media Studies Brings Together Industry Innovation, Government Legislation and Online Activism." First Monday 20 (2015). <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6170>.FCC. 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) 2010. USA: Federal Communications Commission. 27 May 2016 <https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/21st-century-communications-and-video-accessibility-act-cvaa>.Hattem, Julian. “Court: Netflix Doesn’t Have to Comply with Disability Law.” The Hill, 3 Apr. 2015. 20 Aug. 2015 <http://thehill.com/policy/technology/237829-court-netflix-doesnt-have-to-comply-with-disability-law>.Lombato, Roman, and James Meese, eds. “Australia: Circumnavigation Goes Mainstream.” Geoblocking and Global Video Culture. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2016.Media Access Australia. “Policy and Expectations: What You Can Expect on Free-to-air Television.” Australia: Media Access Australia, 2013. 27 May 2016 <http://www.mediaaccess.org.au/tv-video/policy-and-expectations>.Mullin, Joe. “Netflix Settles with Deaf-Rights Group, Agrees to Caption All Videos by 2014.” Arstechnica 11 Oct. 2012. 1 Jan. 2014 <http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/netflix-settles-with-deaf-rights-group-agrees-to-caption-all-videos-by-2014/>.Orrego-Carmona, Daniel. “Subtitling, Video Consumption and Viewers.” Translation Spaces 3 (2014): 51-70.Ryall, Jenni. “How Netflix Is Dominating Australia from Abroad.” Mashable Australia 14 Jul. 2014. 14 Sep. 2016 <http://mashable.com/2014/07/14/how-netflix-is-dominating-australia-from-abroad/#kI9Af70FngqW>.Tucker, Harry. “Netflix Leads the Streaming Wars, Followed by Foxtel’s Presto.” News.com.au 24 Jun. 2015. 18 May 2016 <http://www.news.com.au/technology/home-entertainment/tv/netflix-leads- the-streaming-wars-followed-by-foxtels-presto/news story/7adf45dcd7d9486ff47ec5ea5951287f>.Unites States Government. Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. 27 May 2016 <http://www.ada.gov/pubs/adastatute08.htm>.Varley, Alex. “New Access for a New Century: We Sit Down with Karen Peltz Strauss.” Media Access Australia 28 Aug. 2013. 27 May 2016 <http://www.mediaaccess.org.au/latest_news/australian-policy-and-legislation/new-access-for-a- new-century>.Wolford, Josh. “Netflix Will Caption All Streaming Videos by 2014, per Settlement.” WebProNews, 11 Oct. 2012. 1 Jan. 2014 <http://www.webpronews.com/netflix-will-caption-all-streaming-videos-by-2014-per-settlement-2012-10/>.Wright, Tracey. “Netflix Begins Audio Description for Visually Impaired.” Netflix, 14 Apr. 2015. 5 June 2016 <http://blog.netflix.com/2015/04/netflix-begins-audio-description-for.html>.

Theoretical basis Resource-based view (RBV) theory (Barney, 1991; Barney and Mackey, 2016; Nagano, 2020) states that a firm’s tangible and intangible resources can represent a sustainable competitive advantage (SCA), a long-term competitive advantage that is extremely difficult to duplicate by another firm, when it meets four criteria (i.e. not imitable, are rare, valuable and not substitutable). In the context of this case, we believe there are three sources of SCA to be discussed using RBV – the major league soccer (MLS) team player roster, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to exploit this roster and the league’s single-entity structure: • MLS players: it has been widely acknowledged that a firm’s human resource talent, which includes professional soccer players (Omondi-Ochieng, 2019), can be a source of SCA. For example, from an RBV perspective, a player on the Los Angeles Galaxy roster: > cannot play for any other team in any other league at the same time (not imitable and are rare), > would already be a competitive player, as he is acquired to play in the highest professional league in the country (valuable) and > it would be almost impossible to find a clone player matching his exact talent characteristic (not substitutable) anywhere else. Of course, the roster mix of players must be managed by a capable coach who is able to exploit these resources and win championships (Szymanski et al., 2019). Therefore, it is the strategic human resource or talent management strategies of the professional soccer team roster that will enable a team to have the potential for an SCA (Maqueira et al., 2019). • Technology: technology can also be considered a source of SCA. However, this has been a source of contention. The argument is that technology is accessible to any firm that can afford to purchase it. Logically, any MLS team (or for that matter any professional soccer team) can acquire or build an AI system. For many observers, the only obvious constraint is financial resources. As we discuss in other parts of the case study, there is a fan-based assumption that what transpired in major league baseball (MLB) may repeat in the MLS. The movie Moneyball promoted the use of sabermetrics in baseball when making talent selection (as opposed to relying exclusively on scouts), which has now evolved into the norm of using technology-centered sports analytics across all MLB teams. In short, where is the advantage when every team uses technology for talent management? However, if that is the case, why are the MLB teams continuing to use AI and now the National Basketball Association (NBA), National Football League (NFL) and National Hockey League are following suit? We believe RBV theorists have already provided early insights: > “the exploitation of physical technology in a firm often involves the use of socially complex firm resources. Several firms may all possess the same physical technology, but only one of these firms may possess the social relations, cultural traditions, etc., to fully exploit this technology to implementing strategies…. and obtain a sustained competitive advantage from exploiting their physical technology more completely than other firms” (Barney, 1991, p. 110). • MLS League Single-Entity Structure: In contrast to other professional soccer leagues, the MLS has one distinct in-built edge – its ownership structure as a single entity, that is as one legal organization. All of the MLS teams are owned by the MLS, but with franchise operators. The centralization of operations provides the MLS with formidable economies of scale such as when investing in AI technologies for teams. Additionally, this ownership structure accords it leverage in negotiations for its inputs such as for player contracts. The MLS is the single employer of all its players, fully paying all salaries except those of the three marquees “designated players.” Collectively, this edge offers the MLS unparalleled fluidity and speed as a league when implementing changes, securing stakeholder buy-ins and adjusting for tailwinds. The “socially complex firm resources” is the unique talent composition of the professional soccer team and most critically its single entity structure. While every team can theoretically purchase an AI technology talent management system, its application entails use across 30 teams with a very different, complex and unique set of player talents. The MLS single-entity structure though is the resource that supplies the stability required for this human-machine (technology) symbioses to be fully accepted by stakeholders such as players and implemented with precision and speed across the entire league. So, there exists the potential for each MLS team (and the MLS as a league) to acquire SCA even when using “generic” AI technology, as long as other complex firm factors come into play. Research methodology This case relied on information that was widely reported within media, press interviews by MLS officials, announcements by various organizations, journal articles and publicly available information on MLS. All of the names and positions, in this case, are actual persons. Case overview/synopsis MLS started as a story of dreaming large and of quixotic adventure. Back in 1990, the founders of the MLS “sold” the league in exchange for the biggest prize in world soccer – the rights to host the 1994 Fédération Internationale de Football Association World Cup before they even wrote up the business plan. Today, the MLS is the highest-level professional men’s soccer league competition in the USA. That is a major achievement in just over 25-years, as the US hosts a large professional sports market. However, MLS has been unable to attract higher broadcasting value for its matches and break into the highest tier of international professional soccer. The key reason is that MLS matches are not deemed high quality content by broadcasters. To achieve higher quality matches requires many inputs such as soccer specific stadiums, growing the fan base, attracting key investors, league integrity and strong governance, all of which MLS has successfully achieved since its inception. However, attracting high quality playing talent is a critical input the MLS does not have because the league has repeatedly cautioned that it cannot afford them yet to ensure long-term financial sustainability. In fact, to guarantee this trade-off, the MLS is one of the only professional soccer leagues with an annual salary cap. So, the question is: how does MLS increase the quality of its matches (content) using relatively low cost (low quality) talent and still be able to demand higher broadcast revenues? One strategy is for the MLS to use AI playing technology to extract higher quality playing performance from its existing talent like other sports leagues have demonstrated, such as the NFL and NBA. To implement such a radical technology-centric strategy with its players requires the MLS to navigate associated issues such as human-machine symbioses, risking fan acceptance and even altering brand valuation. Complexity academic level The case is written and designed for a graduate-level (MBA) class or an upper-level undergraduate class in areas such as contemporary issues in management, human resource management, talent management, strategic management, sports management and sports marketing. The case is suitable for courses that discuss strategy, talent management, human resource management and brand strategy.

The variable 'genre' aims to identify and compare different types of games, mainly in terms of gameplay differences (i.e., rules and players’ possibilities to interact with a game). Genre is usually coded by using external video game databases, such as those published on journalistic websites. Field of application/theoretical foundation: The variable ‘genre’ is often used in content analyses of video games to identify and compare different types of games. Lynch et al (2016), for example, investigate whether the number of sexualized characters differ between various video game genres (Action, Adventure, Fighting, Platformer, Role-Playing-Game, Shooter). However, the definition and validity of different genre lists is controversially discussed in the literature (e.g., Arsenault, 2009). Most content analytic studies adopt the value of the genre variable for a given game from an external source. Most commonly, scholars use one or more databases published on journalistic video game websites (www.ign.com; www.gamespot.com; www.giantbomb.com), on Wikipedia or the database of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (www.esrb.org). Most of the genre classifications in these databases are based on gameplay characteristics rather than narrative themes. For example, both the game Starcraft as well as Anno 1602 are classified as ‘real-time strategy’ on Wikipedia, regardless of the fact that they have rather different settings (science fiction vs. historic). To ensure that games are classified into a few, clear genre categories (some journalistic genre lists are extremely detailed, see Arsenault, 2009), many content analyses define potential values of the genre variable in a first step (see below). For example, while IGN (www.ign.com) currently categorizes games in 27 different genre categories, studies mostly only differentiate between 9-15 genres (see below). In a second step, the appropriate value of the variable for a given game is coded based on the external sources. Additionally, rules need to be developed that determine how to deal with potential conflicts. At first, if coding is based on multiple sources, it needs to be decided how to deal with potential conflicts between these sources. For example, Hanninger and Thompson (2004) report that “the genre most frequently used” (p. 867) was coded in such cases. In contrast, Lynch and colleagues (2016) prioritized entries in the IGN database and only used additional sources (GiantBomb and Wikipedia) if information was lacking. Moreover, scholars need to decide how to deal with multiple categorizations of a given game in the same database (e.g. Anno 1602 is classified as ‘real-time strategy’ and ‘city-building game’ on Wikipedia). Lynch and colleagues (2016), for instance, coded the first genre from their list which was mentioned in the database. Finally, scholars must also ensure that their shortened list of genres (step 1) is consistent with the potentially more detailed classification approach of external databases or develop a scheme that defines the correspondence between these lists. References/combination with other methods of data collection: Scholars may also use survey methods to classify games in homogeneous groups. For example, experts or players could be asked to evaluate several games on multiple dimensions, such as setting and gameplay mechanics. Subsequent statistical cluster analysis (e.g., hierarchical clustering) could be applied to identify homogeneous groups of games. Moreover, games could be clustered on the basis of their textual descriptions, for example, in Wikipedia articles. Automated methods, such as latent semantic analysis, can be used for this purpose (e.g. Ryan et al., 2015). Example studies Coding material Measure Operationalization Unit(s) of analysis Source(s) (reported reliability of coding) Entry of a game in the video game database published on the journalistic website IGN; if information was unavailable the website GiantBomb as well as Wikipedia were used Genre Predefined list of genres: “action, adventure, casual, children’s entertainment, family entertainment, fighting, flight simulation, horror, platformer, racing, role-playing game (RPG), shooter, sports, strategy, or other/indeterminable” (p. 562) Game Lynch et al., 2016 (reliability not stated) Entry of a game in video game databases published on journalistic websites (IGN, GameSpot, GameFAQs) and the database of the Entertainment Software Rating Board Genre Predefined list of genres: “action, adventure, fighting, racing, role-playing, shooting, simulation, sports, strategy, or trivia” (p. 857) Game Haninger & Thompson, 2004 (reliability not stated) Entry of a game in the video game database of the Entertainment Software Rating Board Genre Predefined list of genres: “adventure, flight simulator, fighting, music, role-playing, racing, shooter, sports, or strategy/puzzle” (p. 65) Game Smith, Lachlan, & Tamborini, 2003 (reliability not stated) References Arsenault, D. (2009). Video Game Genre, Evolution and Innovation. Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture, 3(2), 29. Haninger, K., & Thompson, K. M. (2004). Content and ratings of teen-rated video games. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 160(4), 402–410. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpedi.160.4.402 Lynch, T., Tompkins, J. E., van Driel, I. I., & Fritz, N. (2016). Sexy, Strong, and Secondary: A Content Analysis of Female Characters in Video Games across 31 Years. Journal of Communication, 66(4), 564–584. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12237 Ryan, J. O., Kaltman, E., Mateas, M., & Wardrip-Fruin, N. (2015). What We Talk About When We Talk About Games: Bottom-Up Game Studies Using Natural Language Processing. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 10. Smith, S. L., Lachlan, K. A., & Tamborini, R. (2003). Popular video games: Quantifying the presentation of violence and its context. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 47(1), 58–76. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15506878jobem4701_4

Introduction Since December 2010 the dramatic spectacle of the spread of mass uprisings, civil unrest, and protest across North Africa and the Middle East have been chronicled daily on mainstream media and new media. Broadly speaking, the Arab Spring—as it came to be known—is challenging repressive, corrupt governments and calling for democracy and human rights. The convulsive events linked with these debates have been striking not only because of the rapid spread of historically momentous mass protests but also because of the ways in which the media “have become inextricably infused inside them” enabling the global media ecology to perform “an integral part in building and mobilizing support, co-ordinating and defining the protests within different Arab societies as well as trans-nationalizing them” (Cottle 295). Images of mass protests have been juxtaposed against those of individuals prepared to self-destruct for political ends. Video clips and photographs of the individual suffering of Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation and the Bahraini Abdulhad al-Khawaja’s emaciated body foreground, in very graphic ways, political struggles that larger events would mask or render invisible. Highlighting broad commonalties does not assume uniformity in patterns of protest and media coverage across the region. There has been considerable variation in the global media coverage and nature of the protests in North Africa and the Middle East (Cottle). In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen uprisings overthrew regimes and leaders. In Syria it has led the country to the brink of civil war. In Bahrain, the regime and its militia violently suppressed peaceful protests. As a wave of protests spread across the Middle East and one government after another toppled in front of 24/7 global media coverage, Bahrain became the “Arab revolution that was abandoned by the Arabs, forsaken by the West … forgotten by the world,” and largely ignored by the global media (Al-Jazeera English). Per capita the protests have been among the largest of the Arab Spring (Human Rights First) and the crackdown as brutal as elsewhere. International organizations have condemned the use of military courts to trial protestors, the detaining of medical staff who had treated the injured, and the use of torture, including the torture of children (Fisher). Bahraini and international human rights organizations have been systematically chronicling these violations of human rights, and posting on Websites distressing images of tortured bodies often with warnings about the graphic depictions viewers are about to see. It was in this context of brutal suppression, global media silence, and the reluctance of the international community to intervene, that the Bahraini-Danish human rights activist Abdulhad al-Khawaja launched his “death or freedom” hunger strike. Even this radical action initially failed to interest international editors who were more focused on Egypt, Libya, and Syria, but media attention rose in response to the Bahrain Formula 1 race in April 2012. Pro-democracy activists pledged “days of rage” to coincide with the race in order to highlight continuing human rights abuses in the kingdom (Turner). As Al Khawaja’s health deteriorated the Bahraini government resisted calls for his release (Article 19) from the Danish government who requested that Al Khawaja be extradited there on “humanitarian grounds” for hospital treatment (Fisk). This article does not explore the geo-politics of the Bahraini struggle or the possible reasons why the international community—in contrast to Syria and Egypt—has been largely silent and reluctant to debate the issues. Important as they are, those remain questions for Middle Eastern specialists to address. In this article I am concerned with the overlapping and interpenetration of two ecologies. The first ecology is the ethical framing of a prison hunger strike as a corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction intended to achieve political ends. The second ecology is the operation of global media where international inaction inadvertently foregrounds the political struggles that larger events and discourses surrounding Egypt, Libya, and Syria overshadow. What connects these two ecologies is the body of the hunger striker, turned into a spectacle and mediated via a politics of affect that invites a global public to empathise and so enter into his suffering. The connection between the two lies in the emaciated body of the hunger striker. An Ecological Humanities Approach This exploration of two ecologies draws on the ecological humanities and its central premise of connectivity. The ecological humanities critique the traditional binaries in Western thinking between nature and culture; the political and social; them and us; the collective and the individual; mind, body and emotion (Rose & Robin, Rieber). Such binaries create artificial hierarchies, divisions, and conflicts that ultimately impede the ability to respond to crises. Crises are major changes that are “out of control” driven—primarily but not exclusively—by social, political, and cultural forces that unleash “runaway systems with their own dynamics” (Rose & Robin 1). The ecological humanities response to crises is premised on the recognition of the all-inclusive connectivity of organisms, systems, and environments and an ethical commitment to action from within this entanglement. A founding premise of connectivity, first articulated by anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson, is that the “unit of survival is not the individual or the species, but the organism-and-its-environment” (Rose & Robin 2). This highlights a dialectic in which an organism is shaped by and shapes the context in which it finds itself. Or, as Harries-Jones puts it, relations are recursive as “events continually enter into, become entangled with, and then re-enter the universe they describe” (3). This ensures constantly evolving ecosystems but it also means any organism that “deteriorates its environment commits suicide” (Rose & Robin 2) with implications for the others in the eco-system. Bateson’s central premise is that organisms are simultaneously independent, as separate beings, but also interdependent. Interactions are not seen purely as exchanges but as dynamic, dialectical, dialogical, and mutually constitutive. Thus, it is presumed that the destruction or protection of others has consequences for oneself. Another dimension of interactions is multi-modality, which implies that human communication cannot be reduced to a single mode such as words, actions, or images but needs to be understood in the complexity of inter-relations between these (see Rieber 16). Nor can dissemination be reduced to a single technological platform whether this is print, television, Internet, or other media (see Cottle). The final point is that interactions are “biologically grounded but not determined” in that the “cognitive, emotional and volitional processes” underpinning face-to-face or mediated communication are “essentially indivisible” and any attempt to separate them by privileging emotion at the expense of thought, or vice versa, is likely to be unhealthy (Rieber 17). This is most graphically demonstrated in a politically-motivated hunger strike where emotion and volition over-rides the survivalist instinct. The Ecology of a Prison Hunger Strike The radical nature of a hunger strike inevitably gives rise to medico-ethical debates. Hunger strikes entail the voluntary refusal of sustenance by an individual and, when prolonged, such deprivation sets off a chain reaction as the less important components in the internal body systems shut down to protect the brain until even that can no longer be protected (see Basoglu et al). This extreme form of protest—essentially an act of self-destruction—raises ethical issues over whether or not doctors or the state should intervene to save a life for humanitarian or political reasons. In 1975 and 1991, the World Medical Association (WMA) sought to negotiate this by distinguishing between, on the one hand, the mentally/psychological impaired individual who chooses a “voluntary fast” and, on the other hand, the hunger striker who chooses a form of protest action to secure an explicit political goal fully aware of fatal consequences of prolonged action (see Annas, Reyes). This binary enables the WMA to label the action of the mentally impaired suicide while claiming that to do so for political protesters would be a “misconception” because the “striker … does not want to die” but to “live better” by obtaining certain political goals for himself, his group or his country. “If necessary he is willing to sacrifice his life for his case, but the aim is certainly not suicide” (Reyes 11). In practice, the boundaries between suicide and political protest are likely to be much more blurred than this but the medico-ethical binary is important because it informs discourses about what form of intervention is ethically appropriate. In the case of the “suicidal” the WMA legitimises force-feeding by a doctor as a life-saving act. In the case of the political protestor, it is de-legitimised in discourses of an infringement of freedom of expression and an act of torture because of the pain involved (see Annas, Reyes). Philosopher Michel Foucault argued that prison is a key site where the embodied subject is explicitly governed and where the exercising of state power in the act of incarceration means the body of the imprisoned no longer solely belongs to the individual. It is also where the “body’s range of significations” is curtailed, “shaped and invested by the very forces that detain and imprison it” (Pugliese 2). Thus, prison creates the circumstances in which the incarcerated is denied the “usual forms of protest and judicial safeguards” available outside its confines. The consequence is that when presented with conditions that violate core beliefs he/she may view acts of self-destruction—such as hunger strikes or lip sewing—as one of the few “means of protesting against, or demanding attention” or achieving political ends still available to them (Reyes 11; Pugliese). The hunger strike implicates the state, which, in the act of imprisoning, has assumed a measure of power and responsibility for the body of the individual. If a protest action is labelled suicidal by medical professionals—for instance at Guantanamo—then the force-feeding of prisoners can be legitimised within the WMA guidelines (Annas). There is considerable political temptation to do so particularly when the hunger striker has become an icon of resistance to the state, the knowledge of his/her action has transcended prison confines, and the alienating conditions that prompted the action are being widely debated in the media. This poses a two-fold danger for the state. On the one hand, there is the possibility that the slow emaciation and death while imprisoned, if covered by the media, may become a spectacle able to mobilise further resistance that can destabilise the polity. On the other hand, there is the fear that in the act of dying, and the spectacle surrounding death, the hunger striker would have secured the public attention to the very cause they are championing. Central to this is whether or not the act of self-destruction is mediated. It is far from inevitable that the media will cover a hunger strike or do so in ways that enable the hunger striker’s appeal to the emotions of others. However, when it does, the international scrutiny and condemnation that follows may undermine the credibility of the state—as happened with the death of the IRA member Bobby Sands in Northern Ireland (Russell). The Media Ecology and the Bahrain Arab Spring The IRA’s use of an “ancient tactic ... to make a blunt appeal to sympathy and emotion” in the form of the Sands hunger strike was seen as “spectacularly successful in gaining worldwide publicity” (Willis 1). Media ecology has evolved dramatically since then. Over the past 20 years communication flows between the local and the global, traditional media formations (broadcast and print), and new communication media (Internet and mobile phones) have escalated. The interactions of the traditional media have historically shaped and been shaped by more “top-down” “politics of representation” in which the primary relationship is between journalists and competing public relations professionals servicing rival politicians, business or NGOs desire for media attention and framing issues in a way that is favourable or sympathetic to their cause. However, rapidly evolving new media platforms offer bottom up, user-generated content, a politics of connectivity, and mobilization of ordinary people (Cottle 31). However, this distinction has increasingly been seen as offering too rigid a binary to capture the complexity of the interactions between traditional and new media as well as the events they capture. The evolution of both meant their content increasingly overlaps and interpenetrates (see Bennett). New media technologies “add new communicative ingredients into the media ecology mix” (Cottle 31) as well as new forms of political protests and new ways of mobilizing dispersed networks of activists (Juris). Despite their pervasiveness, new media technologies are “unlikely to displace the necessity for coverage in mainstream media”; a feature noted by activist groups who have evolved their own “carnivalesque” tactics (Cottle 32) capable of creating the spectacle that meets television demands for action-driven visuals (Juris). New media provide these groups with the tools to publicise their actions pre- and post-event thereby increasing the possibility that mainstream media might cover their protests. However there is no guarantee that traditional and new media content will overlap and interpenetrate as initial coverage of the Bahrain Arab Spring highlights. Peaceful protests began in February 2011 but were violently quelled often by Saudi, Qatari and UAE militia on behalf of the Bahraini government. Mass arrests were made including that of children and medical personnel who had treated those wounded during the suppression of the protests. What followed were a long series of detentions without trial, military court rulings on civilians, and frequent use of torture in prisons (Human Rights Watch 2012). By the end of 2011, the country had the highest number of political prisoners per capita of any country in the world (Amiri) but received little coverage in the US. The Libyan uprising was afforded the most broadcast time (700 minutes) followed by Egypt (500 minutes), Syria (143), and Bahrain (34) (Lobe). Year-end round-ups of the Arab Spring on the American Broadcasting Corporation ignored Bahrain altogether or mentioned it once in a 21-page feature (Cavell). This was not due to a lack of information because a steady stream has flowed from mobile phones, Internet sites and Twitter as NGOs—Bahraini and international—chronicled in images and first-hand accounts the abuses. However, little of this coverage was picked up by the US-dominated global media. It was in this context that the Bahraini-Danish human rights activist Abdulhad Al Khawaja launched his “freedom or death” hunger strike in protest against the violent suppression of peaceful demonstrations, the treatment of prisoners, and the conduct of the trials. Even this radical action failed to persuade international editors to cover the Bahrain Arab Spring or Al Khawaja’s deteriorating health despite being “one of the most important stories to emerge over the Arab Spring” (Nallu). This began to change in April 2012 as a number of things converged. Formula 1 pressed ahead with the Bahrain Grand Prix, and pro-democracy activists pledged “days of rage” over human rights abuses. As these were violently suppressed, editors on global news desks increasingly questioned the government and Formula 1 “spin” that all was well in the kingdom (see BBC; Turner). Claims by the drivers—many of who were sponsored by the Bahraini government—that this was a sports event, not a political one, were met with derision and journalists more familiar with interviewing superstars were diverted into covering protests because their political counterparts had been denied entry to the country (Fisk). This combination of media events and responses created the attention, interest, and space in which Al Khawaja’s deteriorating condition could become a media spectacle. The Mediated Spectacle of Al Khawaja’s Hunger Strike Journalists who had previously struggled to interest editors in Bahrain and Al Khawaja’s plight found that in the weeks leading up to the Grand Prix and since “his condition rapidly deteriorated”’ and there were “daily updates with stories from CNN to the Hindustan Times” (Nulla). Much of this mainstream news was derived from interviews and tweets from Al Khawaja’s family after each visit or phone call. What emerged was an unprecedented composite—a diary of witnesses to a hunger strike interspersed with the family’s struggles with the authorities to get access to him and their almost tangible fear that the Bahraini government would not relent and he would die. As these fears intensified 48 human rights NGOs called for his release from prison (Article 19) and the Danish government formally requested his extradition for hospital treatment on “humanitarian grounds”. Both were rejected. As if to provide evidence of Al Khawaja’s tenuous hold on life, his family released an image of his emaciated body onto Twitter. This graphic depiction of the corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction was re-tweeted and posted on countless NGO and news Websites (see Al-Jazeera). It was also juxtaposed against images of multi-million dollar cars circling a race-track, funded by similarly large advertising deals and watched by millions of people around the world on satellite channels. Spectator sport had become a grotesque parody of one man’s struggle to speak of what was going on in Bahrain. In an attempt to silence the criticism the Bahraini government imposed a de facto news blackout denying all access to Al Khawaja in hospital where he had been sent after collapsing. The family’s tweets while he was held incommunicado speak of their raw pain, their desperation to find out if he was still alive, and their grief. They also provided a new source of information, and the refrain “where is alkhawaja,” reverberated on Twitter and in global news outlets (see for instance Der Spiegel, Al-Jazeera). In the days immediately after the race the Danish prime minister called for the release of Al Khawaja, saying he is in a “very critical condition” (Guardian), as did the UN’s Ban-Ki Moon (UN News and Media). The silencing of Al Khawaja had become a discourse of callousness and as global media pressure built Bahraini ministers felt compelled to challenge this on non-Arabic media, claiming Al Khawaja was “eating” and “well”. The Bahraini Prime Minister gave one of his first interviews to the Western media in years in which he denied “AlKhawaja’s health is ‘as bad’ as you say. According to the doctors attending to him on a daily basis, he takes liquids” (Der Spiegel Online). Then, after six days of silence, the family was allowed to visit. They tweeted that while incommunicado he had been restrained and force-fed against his will (Almousawi), a statement almost immediately denied by the military hospital (Lebanon Now). The discourses of silence and callousness were replaced with discourses of “torture” through force-feeding. A month later Al Khawaja’s wife announced he was ending his hunger strike because he was being force-fed by two doctors at the prison, family and friends had urged him to eat again, and he felt the strike had achieved its goal of drawing the world’s attention to Bahrain government’s response to pro-democracy protests (Ahlul Bayt News Agency). Conclusion This article has sought to explore two ecologies. The first is of medico-ethical discourses which construct a prison hunger strike as a corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction to achieve particular political ends. The second is of shifting engagement within media ecology and the struggle to facilitate interpenetration of content and discourses between mainstream news formations and new media flows of information. I have argued that what connects the two is the body of the hunger striker turned into a spectacle, mediated via a politics of affect which invites empathy and anger to mobilise behind the cause of the hunger striker. The body of the hunger striker is thereby (re)produced as a feature of the twin ecologies of the media environment and the self-environment relationship. References Ahlul Bayt News Agency. “Bahrain: Abdulhadi Alkhawaja’s Statement about Ending his Hunger Strike.” (29 May 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://abna.ir/data.asp?lang=3&id=318439›. Al-Akhbar. “Family Concerned Al-Khawaja May Be Being Force Fed.” Al-Akhbar English. (27 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/family-concerned-al-khawaja-may-be-being-force-fed›. Al-Jazeera. “Shouting in the Dark.” Al-Jazeera English. (3 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/2011/08/201184144547798162.html› ——-. “Bahrain Says Hunger Striker in Good Health.” Al-Jazeera English. (27 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/04/2012425182261808.html> Almousawi, Khadija. (@Tublani 2010). “Sad cus I had to listen to dear Hadi telling me how he was drugged, restrained, force fed and kept incommunicado for five days.” (30 April 2012). 3h. Tweet. 1 June 2012. Amiri, Ranni. “Bahrain by the Numbers.” CounterPunch. (December 30-31). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/30/bahrain-by-the-numbers›. Annas, George. “Prison Hunger Strikes—Why the Motive Matters.” Hastings Centre Report. 12.6 (1982): 21-22. ——-. “Hunger Strikes at Guantanamo—Medical Ethics and Human Rights in a ‘Legal Black Hole.’” The New England Journal of Medicine 355 (2006): 1377-92. Article 19. “Bahrain: Forty-Eight Rights Groups Call on King to Free Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, Whose Life is at Risk in Prison.” Article 19. (17 March 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/2982/en/bahrain:-forty-eight-rights-groups-call-on-king-to-free-abdulhadi-al-khawaja,-whose-life-is-at-risk-in-prison›. Arsenault, Chris. “Starving for a Cause.” Al-Jazeera English. (11 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/04/2012410123154923754.html›. British Broadcasting Corporation. “Bahrain activist Khawaja ends hunger strike.” (29 May 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-18239695›. Basoglu, Mustafa.,Yesim Yetimalar, Nevin Gurgor, Secim Buyukcatalbas, and Yaprak Secil. “Neurological Complications of Prolonged Hunger Strike.” European Journal of Neurology 13 (2006): 1089-97. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Granada Publishing, 1973 [1972]. Beresford, David. Ten Men Dead. New York: Atlantic Press, 1987. Bennett, W. Lance. News: The Politics of Illusion. New York: Longman, 2003 Blight, Gary., Sheila Pulham, and Paul Torpey. “Arab Spring: An Interactive Timeline of Middle East Protests.” Guardian. (5 January 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/mar/22/middle-east-protest-interactive-timeline›. Cavell, Colin. “Bahrain: How the US Mainstream Media Turn a Blind Eye to Washington’s Despotic Arab Ally.” Global Researcher. (8 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30176›. CockBurn, Patrick. “Fears Grow for Bahraini Activist on Hunger Strike.” The Independent. (28 April 2012). 1 June 2012. ‹http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/fears-grow-for-bahraini-activist-on-hunger-strike-7685168.html›. Cottle, Simon, and Libby Lester. Eds. Transnational Protests and the Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Der Spiegel Online. “Interview with Bahrain’s Prime Minister: The Opposition are ‘Terrorizing the Rest of the Country.’” (27 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,830045,00.html›. Fairclough, Norman. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Fisher, Marc. “Arab Spring Yields Different Outcomes in Bahrain, Egypt and Libya.” Washington Post and Foreign Policy. (21 December 2011). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/arab-spring-yields-different-outcomes-in-bahrain-egypt-and-libya/2011/12/15/gIQAY6h57O_story.html›. Fisk, Robert. “Bahrain Grand Prix: This is Politics, Not Sport. If the Drivers Can’t See This They are the Pits.” Belfast Telegraph. (21 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/robert-fisk/bahrain-grand-prix-this-is-politics-not-sport-if-drivers-cant-see-that-they-are-the-pits-16148159.html›. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Front Line Defenders. “Bahrain: Authorities Should Provide a ‘Proof of Live’ to Confirm that Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja on Day 78 of Hunger Strike is Still Alive.” (2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.frontlinedefenders.org/node/18153›. Guardian. “Denmark PM to Bahrain: Release Jailed Activist.” (11 April 2012). June 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/10189057›. Hammond, Andrew. “Bahrain ‘Day of Rage’ Planned for Formula One Grand Prix.” Huffington Post. (18 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/bahrain-day-of-rage_n_1433861.html›. Hammond, Andrew, and Al-Jawahiry, Warda. “Game of Brinkmanship in Bahrain over Hunger Strike.” (19 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/game-of-brinkmanship-in-bahrain-over-hunger-strike›. Harries-Jones, Peter. A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Human Rights First. “Human Rights First Awards Prestigious Medal of Liberty to Bahrain Centre for Human Rights.” (26 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/2012/04/26/human-rights-first-awards›. Juris, Jeffrey. Networking Futures. Durham DC: Duke University Press, 2008. Kerr, Simeon. “Bahrain’s Forgotten Uprising Has Not Gone Away.” Financial Times. (20 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1687bcc2-8af2-11e1-912d-00144feab49a.html#axzz1sxIjnhLi›. Lebanon Now. “Bahrain Hunger Striker Not Force-Fed, Hospital Says.” (29 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=391037›. Lobe, Jim. “‘Arab Spring’” Dominated TV Foreign News in 2011.” Nation of Change. (January 3, 2011). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.nationofchange.org/arab-spring-dominated-tv-foreign-news-2011-1325603480›. Nallu, Preethi. “How the Media Failed Abdulhadi.” Jadaliyya. (2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5181/how-the-media-failed-abdulhadi›. Plunkett, John. “The Voice Pips Britain's Got Talent as Ratings War Takes New Twist.” Guardian. (23 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/apr/23/the-voice-britains-got-talent›. Pugliese, Joseph. “Penal Asylum: Refugees, Ethics, Hospitality.” Borderlands. 1.1 (2002). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/pugliese.html›. Reuters. “Protests over Bahrain F1.” (19 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://uk.reuters.com/video/2012/04/19/protests-over-bahrain-f?videoId=233581507›. Reyes, Hernan. “Medical and Ethical Aspects of Hunger Strikes in Custody and the Issue of Torture.” Research in Legal Medicine 19.1 (1998). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/article/other/health-article-010198.htm›. Rieber, Robert. Ed. The Individual, Communication and Society: Essays in Memory of Gregory Bateson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Roberts, David. “Blame Iran: A Dangerous Response to the Bahraini Uprising.” (20 August 2011). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/20/bahraini-uprising-iran› Rose, Deborah Bird and Libby Robin. “The Ecological Humanities in Action: An Invitation.” Australian Humanities Review 31-32 (April 2004). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-April-2004/rose.html›. Russell, Sharman. Hunger: An Unnatural History. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Turner, Maran. “Bahrain’s Formula 1 is an Insult to Country’s Democratic Reformers.” CNN. (20 April 2012). 1 June 2012. ‹http://articles.cnn.com/2012-04-20/opinion/opinion_bahrain-f1-hunger-strike_1_abdulhadi-al-khawaja-bahraini-government-bahrain-s-formula?_s=PM:OPINION›. United Nations News & Media. “UN Chief Calls for Respect of Human Rights of Bahraini People.” (24 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/2012/04/un-chief-calls-respect-of-human-rights-of-bahraini-people›. 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The academic journal is obsolete. In a world where there are more titles than ever, this is a comment on their form – especially the print journal – rather than their quantity. Now that you can get everything online, it doesn’t really matter what journal a paper appears in; certainly it doesn’t matter what’s in the same issue. The experience of a journal is rapidly obsolescing, for both editors and readers. I’m obviously not the first person to notice this (see, for instance, "Scholarly Communication"; "Transforming Scholarly Communication"; Houghton; Policy Perspectives; Teute), but I do have a personal stake in the process. For if the journal is obsolete then it follows that the editor is obsolete, and I am the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. I founded the IJCS and have been sole editor ever since. Next year will see the fiftieth issue. So far, I have been responsible for over 280 published articles – over 2.25 million words of other people’s scholarship … and counting. We won’t say anything about the words that did not get published, except that the IJCS rejection rate is currently 87 per cent. Perhaps the first point that needs to be made, then, is that obsolescence does not imply lack of success. By any standard the IJCS is a successful journal, and getting more so. It has recently been assessed as a top-rating A* journal in the Australian Research Council’s journal rankings for ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), the newly activated research assessment exercise. (In case you’re wondering, M/C Journal is rated B.) The ARC says of the ranking exercise: ‘The lists are a result of consultations with the sector and rigorous review by leading researchers and the ARC.’ The ARC definition of an A* journal is given as: Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/ subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted.Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions. (Appendix I, p. 21; and see p. 4.)Talking of boasting, I love to prate about the excellent people we’ve published in the IJCS. We have introduced new talent to the field, and we have published new work by some of its pioneers – including Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. We’ve also published – among many others – Sara Ahmed, Mohammad Amouzadeh, Tony Bennett, Goran Bolin, Charlotte Brunsdon, William Boddy, Nico Carpentier, Stephen Coleman, Nick Couldry, Sean Cubitt, Michael Curtin, Daniel Dayan, Ben Dibley, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, John Frow, Elfriede Fursich, Christine Geraghty, Mark Gibson, Paul Gilroy, Faye Ginsberg, Jonathan Gray, Lawrence Grossberg, Judith Halberstam, Hanno Hardt, Gay Hawkins, Joke Hermes, Su Holmes, Desmond Hui, Fred Inglis, Henry Jenkins, Deborah Jermyn, Ariel Heryanto, Elihu Katz, Senator Rod Kemp (Australian government minister), Youna Kim, Agnes Ku, Richard E. Lee, Jeff Lewis, David Lodge (the novelist), Knut Lundby, Eric Ma, Anna McCarthy, Divya McMillin, Antonio Menendez-Alarcon, Toby Miller, Joe Moran, Chris Norris, John Quiggin, Chris Rojek, Jane Roscoe, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, John Storey, Su Tong, the late Sako Takeshi, Sue Turnbull, Graeme Turner, William Uricchio, José van Dijck, Georgette Wang, Jing Wang, Elizabeth Wilson, Janice Winship, Handel Wright, Wu Jing, Wu Qidi (Chinese Vice-Minister of Education), Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, Robert Young and Zhao Bin. As this partial list makes clear, as well as publishing the top ‘hegemons’ we also publish work pointing in new directions, including papers from neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, area studies, economics, education, feminism, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. We have sought to represent neglected regions, especially Chinese cultural studies, which has grown strongly during the past decade. And for quite a few up-and-coming scholars we’ve been the proud host of their first international publication. The IJCS was first published in 1998, already well into the internet era, but it was print-only at that time. Since then, all content, from volume 1:1 onwards, has been digitised and is available online (although vol 1:2 is unaccountably missing). The publishers, Sage Publications Ltd, London, have steadily added online functionality, so that now libraries can get the journal in various packages, including offering this title among many others in online-only bundles, and individuals can purchase single articles online. Thus, in addition to institutional and individual subscriptions, which remain the core business of the journal, income is derived by the publisher from multi-site licensing, incremental consortial sales income, single- and back-issue sales (print), pay-per-view, and deep back file sales (electronic). So what’s obsolete about it? In that boasting paragraph of mine (above), about what wonderful authors we’ve published, lies one of the seeds of obsolescence. For now that it is available online, ‘users’ (no longer ‘readers’!) can search for what they want and ignore the journal as such altogether. This is presumably how most active researchers experience any journal – they are looking for articles (or less: quotations; data; references) relevant to a given topic, literature review, thesis etc. They encounter a journal online through its ‘content’ rather than its ‘form.’ The latter is irrelevant to them, and may as well not exist. The Cover Some losses are associated with this change. First is the loss of the front cover. Now you, dear reader, scrolling through this article online, might well complain, why all the fuss about covers? Internet-generation journals don’t have covers, so all of the work that goes into them to establish the brand, the identity and even the ‘affect’ of a journal is now, well, obsolete. So let me just remind you of what’s at stake. Editors, designers and publishers all take a good deal of trouble over covers, since they are the point of intersection of editorial, design and marketing priorities. Thus, the IJCS cover contains the only ‘content’ of the journal for which we pay a fee to designers and photographers (usually the publisher pays, but in one case I did). Like any other cover, ours has three main elements: title, colour and image. Thought goes into every detail. Title I won’t say anything about the journal’s title as such, except that it was the result of protracted discussions (I suggested Terra Nullius at one point, but Sage weren’t having any of that). The present concern is with how a title looks on a cover. Our title-typeface is Frutiger. Originally designed by Adrian Frutiger for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, it is suitably international, being used for the corporate identity of the UK National Health Service, Telefónica O2, the Royal Navy, the London School of Economics , the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Conservative Party of Canada, Banco Bradesco of Brazil, the Finnish Defence Forces and on road signs in Switzerland (Wikipedia, "Frutiger"). Frutiger is legible, informal, and reads well in small copy. Sage’s designer and I corresponded on which of the words in our cumbersome name were most important, agreeing that ‘international’ combined with ‘cultural’ is the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the journal, so they should be picked out (in bold small-caps) from the rest of the title, which the designer presented in a variety of Frutiger fonts (regular, italic, and reversed – white on black), presumably to signify the dynamism and diversity of our content. The word ‘studies’ appears on a lozenge-shaped cartouche that is also used as a design element throughout the journal, for bullet points, titles and keywords. Colour We used to change this every two years, but since volume 7 it has stabilised with the distinctive Pantone 247, ‘new fuchsia.’ This colour arose from my own environment at QUT, where it was chosen (by me) for the new Creative Industries Faculty’s academic gowns and hoods, and thence as a detailing colour for the otherwise monochrome Creative Industries Precinct buildings. There’s a lot of it around my office, including on the wall and the furniture. New Fuchsia is – we are frequently told – a somewhat ‘girly’ colour, especially when contrasted with the Business Faculty’s blue or Law’s silver; its similarity to the Girlfriend/Dolly palette does introduce a mild ‘politics of prestige’ element, since it is determinedly pop culture, feminised, and non-canonical. Image Right at the start, the IJCS set out to signal its difference from other journals. At that time, all Sage journals had calligraphic colours – but I was insistent that we needed a photograph (I have ‘form’ in this respect: in 1985 I changed the cover of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies from a line drawing (albeit by Sydney Nolan) to a photograph; and I co-designed the photo-cover of Cultural Studies in 1987). For IJCS I knew which photo I wanted, and Sage went along with the choice. I explained it in the launch issue’s editorial (Hartley, "Editorial"). That original picture, a goanna on a cattle grid in the outback, by Australian photographer Grant Hobson, lasted ten years. Since volume 11 – in time for our second decade – the goanna has been replaced with a picture by Italian-based photographer Patrick Nicholas, called ‘Reality’ (Hartley, "Cover Narrative"). We have also used two other photos as cover images, once each. They are: Daniel Meadows’s 1974 ‘Karen & Barbara’ (Hartley, "Who"); and a 1962 portrait of Richard Hoggart from the National Portrait Gallery in London (Owen & Hartley 2007). The choice of picture has involved intense – sometimes very tense – negotiations with Sage. Most recently, they were adamant the Daniel Meadows picture, which I wanted to use as the long-term replacement of the goanna, was too ‘English’ and they would not accept it. We exchanged rather sharp words before compromising. There’s no need to rehearse the dispute here; the point is that both sides, publisher and editor, felt that vital interests were at stake in the choice of a cover-image. Was it too obscure; too Australian; too English; too provocative (the current cover features, albeit in the deep background, a TV screen-shot of a topless Italian game-show contestant)? Running Order Beyond the cover, the next obsolete feature of a journal is the running order of articles. Obviously what goes in the journal is contingent upon what has been submitted and what is ready at a given time, so this is a creative role within a very limited context, which is what makes it pleasurable. Out of a limited number of available papers, a choice must be made about which one goes first, what order the other papers should follow, and which ones must be held over to the next issue. The first priority is to choose the lead article: like the ‘first face’ in a fashion show (if you don’t know what I mean by that, see FTV.com. It sets the look, the tone, and the standard for the issue. I always choose articles I like for this slot. It sends a message to the field – look at this! Next comes the running order. We have about six articles per issue. It is important to maintain the IJCS’s international mix, so I check for the country of origin, or failing that (since so many articles come from Anglosphere countries like the USA, UK and Australia), the location of the analysis. Attention also has to be paid to the gender balance among authors, and to the mix of senior and emergent scholars. Sometimes a weak article needs to be ‘hammocked’ between two good ones (these are relative terms – everything published in the IJCS is of a high scholarly standard). And we need to think about disciplinary mix, so as not to let the journal stray too far towards one particular methodological domain. Running order is thus a statement about the field – the disciplinary domain – rather than about an individual paper. It is a proposition about how different voices connect together in some sort of disciplinary syntax. One might even claim that the combination of cover and running order is a last vestige of collegiate collectivism in an era of competitive academic individualism. Now all that matters is the individual paper and author; the ‘currency’ is tenure, promotion and research metrics, not relations among peers. The running order is obsolete. Special Issues An extreme version of running order is the special issue. The IJCS has regularly published these; they are devoted to field-shaping initiatives, as follows: Title Editor(s) Issue Date Radiocracy: Radio, Development and Democracy Amanda Hopkinson, Jo Tacchi 3.2 2000 Television and Cultural Studies Graeme Turner 4.4 2001 Cultural Studies and Education Karl Maton, Handel Wright 5.4 2002 Re-Imagining Communities Sara Ahmed, Anne-Marie Fortier 6.3 2003 The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption John Hartley 7.1 2004 Creative Industries and Innovation in China Michael Keane, John Hartley 9.3 2006 The Uses of Richard Hoggart Sue Owen, John Hartley 10.1 2007 A Cultural History of Celebrity Liz Barry 11.3 2008 Caribbean Media Worlds Anna Pertierra, Heather Horst 12.2 2009 Co-Creative Labour Mark Deuze, John Banks 12.5 2009 It’s obvious that special issues have a place in disciplinary innovation – they can draw attention in a timely manner to new problems, neglected regions, or innovative approaches, and thus they advance the field. They are indispensible. But because of online publication, readers are not held to the ‘project’ of a special issue and can pick and choose whatever they want. And because of the peculiarities of research assessment exercises, editing special issues doesn’t count as research output. The incentive to do them is to that extent reduced, and some universities are quite heavy-handed about letting academics ‘waste’ time on activities that don’t produce ‘metrics.’ The special issue is therefore threatened with obsolescence too. Refereeing In many top-rating journals, the human side of refereeing is becoming obsolete. Increasingly this labour-intensive chore is automated and the labour is technologically outsourced from editors and publishers to authors and referees. You have to log on to some website and follow prompts in order to contribute both papers and the assessment of papers; interactions with editors are minimal. At the IJCS the process is still handled by humans – namely, journal administrator Tina Horton and me. We spend a lot of time checking how papers are faring, from trying to find the right referees through to getting the comments and then the author’s revisions completed in time for a paper to be scheduled into an issue. The volume of email correspondence is considerable. We get to know authors and referees. So we maintain a sense of an interactive and conversational community, albeit by correspondence rather than face to face. Doubtless, sooner or later, there will be a depersonalised Text Management System. But in the meantime we cling to the romantic notion that we are involved in refereeing for the sake of the field, for raising the standard of scholarship, for building a globally dispersed virtual college of cultural studies, and for giving everyone – from unfavoured countries and neglected regions to famous professors in old-money universities – the same chance to get their research published. In fact, these are largely delusional ideals, for as everyone knows, refereeing is part of the political economy of publicly-funded research. It’s about academic credentials, tenure and promotion for the individual, and about measurable research metrics for the academic organisation or funding agency (Hartley, "Death"). The IJCS has no choice but to participate: we do what is required to qualify as a ‘double-blind refereed journal’ because that is the only way to maintain repute, and thence the flow of submissions, not to mention subscriptions, without which there would be no journal. As with journals themselves, which proliferate even as the print form becomes obsolete, so refereeing is burgeoning as a practice. It’s almost an industry, even though the currency is not money but time: part gift-economy; part attention-economy; partly the payment of dues to the suzerain funding agencies. But refereeing is becoming obsolete in the sense of gathering an ‘imagined community’ of people one might expect to know personally around a particular enterprise. The process of dispersal and anonymisation of the field is exacerbated by blind refereeing, which we do because we must. This is suited to a scientific domain of objective knowledge, but everyone knows it’s not quite like that in the ‘new humanities’. The agency and identity of the researcher is often a salient fact in the research. The embedded positionality of the author, their reflexiveness about their own context and room-for-manoeuvre, and the radical contextuality of knowledge itself – these are all more or less axiomatic in cultural studies, but they’re not easily served by ‘double-blind’ refereeing. When refereeing is depersonalised to the extent that is now rife (especially in journals owned by international commercial publishers), it is hard to maintain a sense of contextualised productivity in the knowledge domain, much less a ‘common cause’ to which both author and referee wish to contribute. Even though refereeing can still be seen as altruistic, it is in the service of something much more general (‘scholarship’) and much more particular (‘my career’) than the kind of reviewing that wants to share and improve a particular intellectual enterprise. It is this mid-range altruism – something that might once have been identified as a politics of knowledge – that’s becoming obsolete, along with the printed journals that were the banner and rallying point for the cause. If I were to start a new journal (such as cultural-science.org), I would prefer ‘open refereeing’: uploading papers on an open site, subjecting them to peer-review and criticism, and archiving revised versions once they have received enough votes and comments. In other words I’d like to see refereeing shifted from the ‘supply’ or production side of a journal to the ‘demand’ or readership side. But of course, ‘demand’ for ‘blind’ refereeing doesn’t come from readers; it comes from the funding agencies. The Reading Experience Finally, the experience of reading a journal is obsolete. Two aspects of this seem worthy of note. First, reading is ‘out of time’ – it no longer needs to conform to the rhythms of scholarly publication, which are in any case speeding up. Scholarship is no longer seasonal, as it has been since the Middle Ages (with university terms organised around agricultural and ecclesiastical rhythms). Once you have a paper’s DOI number, you can read it any time, 24/7. It is no longer necessary even to wait for publication. With some journals in our field (e.g. Journalism Studies), assuming your Library subscribes, you can access papers as soon as they’re uploaded on the journal’s website, before the published edition is printed. Soon this will be the norm, just as it is for the top science journals, where timely publication, and thereby the ability to claim first discovery, is the basis of intellectual property rights. The IJCS doesn’t (yet) offer this service, but its frequency is speeding up. It was launched in 1998 with three issues a year. It went quarterly in 2001 and remained a quarterly for eight years. It has recently increased to six issues a year. That too causes changes in the reading experience. The excited ripping open of the package is less of a thrill the more often it arrives. Indeed, how many subscribers will admit that sometimes they don’t even open the envelope? Second, reading is ‘out of place’ – you never have to see the journal in which a paper appears, so you can avoid contact with anything that you haven’t already decided to read. This is more significant than might first appear, because it is affecting journalism in general, not just academic journals. As we move from the broadcast to the broadband era, communicative usage is shifting too, from ‘mass’ communication to customisation. This is a mixed blessing. One of the pleasures of old-style newspapers and the TV news was that you’d come across stories you did not expect to find. Indeed, an important attribute of the industrial form of journalism is its success in getting whole populations to read or watch stories about things they aren’t interested in, or things like wars and crises that they’d rather not know about at all. That historic textual achievement is in jeopardy in the broadband era, because ‘the public’ no longer needs to gather around any particular masthead or bulletin to get their news. With Web 2.0 affordances, you can exercise much more choice over what you attend to. This is great from the point of view of maximising individual choice, but sub-optimal in relation to what I’ve called ‘population-gathering’, especially the gathering of communities of interest around ‘tales of the unexpected’ – novelty or anomalies. Obsolete: Collegiality, Trust and Innovation? The individuation of reading choices may stimulate prejudice, because prejudice (literally, ‘pre-judging’) is built in when you decide only to access news feeds about familiar topics, stories or people in which you’re already interested. That sort of thing may encourage narrow-mindedness. It is certainly an impediment to chance discovery, unplanned juxtaposition, unstructured curiosity and thence, perhaps, to innovation itself. This is a worry for citizenship in general, but it is also an issue for academic ‘knowledge professionals,’ in our ever-narrower disciplinary silos. An in-close specialist focus on one’s own area of expertise need no longer be troubled by the concerns of the person in the next office, never mind the next department. Now, we don’t even have to meet on the page. One of the advantages of whole journals, then, is that each issue encourages ‘macro’ as well as ‘micro’ perspectives, and opens reading up to surprises. This willingness to ‘take things on trust’ describes a ‘we’ community – a community of trust. Trust too is obsolete in these days of performance evaluation. We’re assessed by an anonymous system that’s managed by people we’ll never meet. If the ‘population-gathering’ aspects of print journals are indeed obsolete, this may reduce collegiate trust and fellow-feeling, increase individualist competitiveness, and inhibit innovation. In the face of that prospect, I’m going to keep on thinking about covers, running orders, referees and reading until the role of editor is obsolete too. ReferencesHartley, John. "'Cover Narrative': From Nightmare to Reality." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.2 (2005): 131-137. ———. "Death of the Book?" Symposium of the National Scholarly Communication Forum & Australian Academy of the Humanities, Sydney Maritime Museum, 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.humanities.org.au/Resources/Downloads/NSCF/RoundTables1-17/PDF/Hartley.pdf›. ———. "Editorial: With Goanna." International Journal of Cultural Studies 1.1 (1998): 5-10. ———. "'Who Are You Going to Believe – Me or Your Own Eyes?' New Decade; New Directions." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 5-14. Houghton, John. "Economics of Scholarly Communication: A Discussion Paper." Center for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, 2000. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.caul.edu.au/cisc/EconomicsScholarlyCommunication.pdf›. Owen, Sue, and John Hartley, eds. The Uses of Richard Hoggart. International Journal of Cultural Studies (special issue), 10.1 (2007). Policy Perspectives: To Publish and Perish. (Special issue cosponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Association of American Universities and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable) 7.4 (1998). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.arl.org/scomm/pew/pewrept.html›. "Scholarly Communication: Crisis and Revolution." University of California Berkeley Library. N.d. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Collections/crisis.html›. Teute, F. J. "To Publish or Perish: Who Are the Dinosaurs in Scholarly Publishing?" Journal of Scholarly Publishing 32.2 (2001). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/322/perish5.html›."Transforming Scholarly Communication." University of Houston Library. 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://info.lib.uh.edu/scomm/transforming.htm›.

Introduction Many destinations promote culinary encounters. Foods and beverages, and especially how these will taste in situ, are being marketed as niche travel motivators and used in destination brand building across the globe. While initial usage of the term culinary tourism focused on experiencing exotic cultures of foreign destinations by sampling unfamiliar food and drinks, the term has expanded to embrace a range of leisure travel experiences where the aim is to locate and taste local specialities as part of a pleasurable, and hopefully notable, culinary encounter (Wolf). Long’s foundational work was central in developing the idea of culinary tourism as an active endeavor, suggesting that via consumption, individuals construct unique experiences. Ignatov and Smith’s literature review-inspired definition confirms the nature of activity as participatory, and adds consuming food production skills—from observing agriculture and local processors to visiting food markets and attending cooking schools—to culinary purchases. Despite importing almost all of its foodstuffs and beverages, including some of its water, Singapore is an acknowledged global leader in culinary tourism. Horng and Tsai note that culinary tourism conceptually implies that a transferal of “local or special knowledge and information that represent local culture and identities” (41) occurs via these experiences. This article adds the act of reading to these participatory activities and suggests that, because food writing forms an important component of Singapore’s suite of culinary tourism offerings, taste contributes to the cultural experience offered to both visitors and locals. While Singapore foodways have attracted significant scholarship (see, for instance, work by Bishop; Duruz; Huat & Rajah; Tarulevicz, Eating), Singapore food writing, like many artefacts of popular culture, has attracted less notice. Yet, this writing is an increasingly visible component of cultural production of, and about, Singapore, and performs a range of functions for locals, tourists and visitors before they arrive. Although many languages are spoken in Singapore, English is the national language (Alsagoff) and this study focuses on food writing in English. Background Tourism comprises a major part of Singapore’s economy, with recent figures detailing that food and beverage sales contribute over 10 per cent of this revenue, with spend on culinary tours and cookery classes, home wares such as tea-sets and cookbooks, food magazines and food memoirs additional to this (Singapore Government). This may be related to the fact that Singapore not only promotes food as a tourist attraction, but also actively promotes itself as an exceptional culinary destination. The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) includes food in its general information brochures and websites, and its print, television and cinema commercials (Huat and Rajah). It also mounts information-rich campaigns both abroad and inside Singapore. The 2007 ‘Singapore Seasons’ campaign, for instance, promoted Singaporean cuisine alongside films, design, books and other cultural products in London, New York and Beijing. Touring cities identified as key tourist markets in 2011, the ‘Singapore Takeout’ pop-up restaurant brought the taste of Singaporean foods into closer focus. Singaporean chefs worked with high profile locals in its kitchen in a custom-fabricated shipping container to create and demonstrate Singaporean dishes, attracting public and media interest. In country, the STB similarly actively promotes the tastes of Singaporean foods, hosting the annual World Gourmet Summit (Chaney and Ryan) and Pacific Food Expo, both attracting international culinary professionals to work alongside local leaders. The Singapore Food Festival each July is marketed to both locals and visitors. In these ways, the STB, as well as providing events for visitors, is actively urging Singaporeans to proud of their food culture and heritage, so that each Singaporean becomes a proactive ambassador of their cuisine. Singapore Food Writing Popular print guidebooks and online guides to Singapore pay significantly more attention to Singaporean food than they do for many other destinations. Sections on food in such publications discuss at relative length the taste of Singaporean food (always delicious) as well as how varied, authentic, hygienic and suited-to-all-budgets it is. These texts also recommend hawker stalls and food courts alongside cafés and restaurants (Henderson et al.), and a range of other culinary experiences such as city and farm food tours and cookery classes. This writing describes not only what can be seen or learned during these experiences, but also what foods can be sampled, and how these might taste. This focus on taste is reflected in the printed materials that greet the in-bound tourist at the airport. On a visit in October 2013, arrival banners featuring mouth-watering images of local specialities such as chicken rice and chilli crab marked the route from arrival to immigration and baggage collection. Even advertising for a bank was illustrated with photographs of luscious-looking fruits. The free maps and guidebooks available featured food-focused tours and restaurant locations, and there were also substantial free booklets dedicated solely to discussing local delicacies and their flavours, plus recommended locations to sample them. A website and free mobile app were available that contain practical information about dishes, ingredients, cookery methods, and places to eat, as well as historical and cultural information. These resources are also freely distributed to many hotels and popular tourist destinations. Alongside organising food walks, bus tours and cookery classes, the STB also recommends the work of a number of Singaporean food writers—principally prominent Singapore food bloggers, reviewers and a number of memoirists—as authentic guides to what are described as unique Singaporean flavours. The strategies at the heart of this promotion are linking advertising to useful information. At a number of food centres, for instance, STB information panels provide details about both specific dishes and Singapore’s food culture more generally (Henderson et al.). This focus is apparent at many tourist destinations, many of which are also popular local attractions. In historic Fort Canning Park, for instance, there is a recreation of Raffles’ experimental garden, established in 1822, where he grew the nutmeg, clove and other plants that were intended to form the foundation for spice plantations but were largely unsuccessful (Reisz). Today, information panels not only indicate the food plants’ names and how to grow them, but also their culinary and medicinal uses, recipes featuring them and the related food memories of famous Singaporeans. The Singapore Botanic Gardens similarly houses the Ginger Garden displaying several hundred species of ginger and information, and an Eco(-nomic/logical) Garden featuring many food plants and their stories. In Chinatown, panels mounted outside prominent heritage brands (often still quite small shops) add content to the shopping experience. A number of museums profile Singapore’s food culture in more depth. The National Museum of Singapore has a permanent Living History gallery that focuses on Singapore’s street food from the 1950s to 1970s. This display includes food-related artefacts, interactive aromatic displays of spices, films of dishes being made and eaten, and oral histories about food vendors, all supported by text panels and booklets. Here food is used to convey messages about the value of Singapore’s ethnic diversity and cross-cultural exchanges. Versions of some of these dishes can then be sampled in the museum café (Time Out Singapore). The Peranakan Museum—which profiles the unique hybrid culture of the descendants of the Chinese and South Indian traders who married local Malay women—shares this focus, with reconstructed kitchens and dining rooms, exhibits of cooking and eating utensils and displays on food’s ceremonial role in weddings and funerals all supported with significant textual information. The Chinatown Heritage Centre not only recreates food preparation areas as a vivid indicator of poor Chinese immigrants’ living conditions, but also houses The National Restaurant of Singapore, which translates this research directly into meals that recreate the heritage kopi tiam (traditional coffee shop) cuisine of Singapore in the 1930s, purposefully bringing taste into the service of education, as its descriptive menu states, “educationally delighting the palate” (Chinatown Heritage Centre). These museums recognise that shopping is a core tourist activity in Singapore (Chang; Yeung et al.). Their gift- and bookshops cater to the culinary tourist by featuring quality culinary products for sale (including, for instance, teapots and cups, teas, spices and traditional sweets, and other foods) many of which are accompanied by informative tags or brochures. At the centre of these curated, purchasable collections are a range written materials: culinary magazines, cookbooks, food histories and memoirs, as well as postcards and stationery printed with recipes. Food Magazines Locally produced food magazines cater to a range of readerships and serve to extend the culinary experience both in, and outside, Singapore. These include high-end gourmet, luxury lifestyle publications like venerable monthly Wine & Dine: The Art of Good Living, which, in in print for almost thirty years, targets an affluent readership (Wine & Dine). The magazine runs features on local dining, gourmet products and trends, as well as international epicurean locations and products. Beautifully illustrated recipes also feature, as the magazine declares, “we’ve recognised that sharing more recipes should be in the DNA of Wine & Dine’s editorial” (Wine & Dine). Appetite magazine, launched in 2006, targets the “new and emerging generation of gourmets—foodies with a discerning and cosmopolitan outlook, broad horizons and a insatiable appetite” (Edipresse Asia) and is reminiscent in much of its styling of New Zealand’s award-winning Cuisine magazine. Its focus is to present a fresh approach to both cooking at home and dining out, as readers are invited to “Whip up the perfect soufflé or feast with us at the finest restaurants in Singapore and around the region” (Edipresse Asia). Chefs from leading local restaurants are interviewed, and the voices of “fellow foodies and industry watchers” offer an “insider track” on food-related news: “what’s good and what’s new” (Edipresse Asia). In between these publications sits Epicure: Life’s Refinements, which features local dishes, chefs, and restaurants as well as an overseas travel section and a food memories column by a featured author. Locally available ingredients are also highlighted, such as abalone (Cheng) and an interesting range of mushrooms (Epicure). While there is a focus on an epicurean experience, this is presented slightly more casually than in Wine & Dine. Food & Travel focuses more on home cookery, but each issue also includes reviews of Singapore restaurants. The bimonthly bilingual (Chinese and English) Gourmet Living features recipes alongside a notable focus on food culture—with food history columns, restaurant reviews and profiles of celebrated chefs. An extensive range of imported international food magazines are also available, with those from nearby Malaysia and Indonesia regularly including articles on Singapore. Cookbooks These magazines all include reviews of cookery books including Singaporean examples – and some feature other food writing such as food histories, memoirs and blogs. These reviews draw attention to how many Singaporean cookbooks include a focus on food history alongside recipes. Cookery teacher Yee Soo Leong’s 1976 Singaporean Cooking was an early example of cookbook as heritage preservation. This 1976 book takes an unusual view of ‘Singaporean’ flavours. Beginning with sweet foods—Nonya/Singaporean and western cakes, biscuits, pies, pastries, bread, desserts and icings—it also focuses on both Singaporean and Western dishes. This text is also unusual as there are only 6 lines of direct authorial address in the author’s acknowledgements section. Expatriate food writer Wendy Hutton’s Singapore Food, first published in 1979, reprinted many times after and revised in 2007, has long been recognised as one of the most authoritative titles on Singapore’s food heritage. Providing an socio-historical map of Singapore’s culinary traditions, some one third of the first edition was devoted to information about Singaporean multi-cultural food history, including detailed profiles of a number of home cooks alongside its recipes. Published in 1980, Kenneth Mitchell’s A Taste of Singapore is clearly aimed at a foreign readership, noting the variety of foods available due to the racial origins of its inhabitants. The more modest, but equally educational in intent, Hawkers Flavour: A Guide to Hawkers Gourmet in Malaysia and Singapore (in its fourth printing in 1998) contains a detailed introductory essay outlining local food culture, favourite foods and drinks and times these might be served, festivals and festive foods, Indian, Indian Muslim, Chinese, Nyonya (Chinese-Malay), Malay and Halal foods and customs, followed with a selection of recipes from each. More contemporary examples of such information-rich cookbooks, such as those published in the frequently reprinted Periplus Mini Cookbook series, are sold at tourist attractions. Each of these modestly priced, 64-page, mouthwateringly illustrated booklets offer framing information, such as about a specific food culture as in the Nonya kitchen in Nonya Favourites (Boi), and explanatory glossaries of ingredients, as in Homestyle Malay Cooking (Jelani). Most recipes include a boxed paragraph detailing cookery or ingredient information that adds cultural nuance, as well as trying to describe tastes that the (obviously foreign) intended reader may not have encountered. Malaysian-born Violet Oon, who has been called the Julia Child of Singapore (Bergman), writes for both local and visiting readers. The FOOD Paper, published monthly for a decade from January 1987 was, she has stated, then “Singapore’s only monthly publication dedicated to the CSF—Certified Singapore Foodie” (Oon, Violet Oon Cooks 7). Under its auspices, Oon promoted her version of Singaporean cuisine to both locals and visitors, as well as running cookery classes and culinary events, hosting her own television cooking series on the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, and touring internationally for the STB as a ‘Singapore Food Ambassador’ (Ahmad; Kraal). Taking this representation of flavor further, Oon has also produced a branded range of curry powders, spices, and biscuits, and set up a number of food outlets. Her first cookbook, World Peranakan Cookbook, was published in 1978. Her Singapore: 101 Meals of 1986 was commissioned by the STB, then known as the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board. Violet Oon Cooks, a compilation of recipes from The FOOD Paper, published in 1992, attracted a range of major international as well as Singaporean food sponsors, and her Timeless Recipes, published in 1997, similarly aimed to show how manufactured products could be incorporated into classic Singaporean dishes cooked at home. In 1998, Oon produced A Singapore Family Cookbook featuring 100 dishes. Many were from Nonya cuisine and her following books continued to focus on preserving heritage Singaporean recipes, as do a number of other nationally-cuisine focused collections such as Joyceline Tully and Christopher Tan’s Heritage Feasts: A Collection of Singapore Family Recipes. Sylvia Tan’s Singapore Heritage Food: Yesterday’s Recipes for Today’s Cooks, published in 2004, provides “a tentative account of Singapore’s food history” (5). It does this by mapping the various taste profiles of six thematically-arranged chronologically-overlapping sections, from the heritage of British colonialism, to the uptake of American and Russia foods in the Snackbar era of the 1960s and the use of convenience flavoring ingredients such as curry pastes, sauces, dried and frozen supermarket products from the 1970s. Other Volumes Other food-themed volumes focus on specific historical periods. Cecilia Leong-Salobir’s Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire discusses the “unique hybrid” (1) cuisine of British expatriates in Singapore from 1858 to 1963. In 2009, the National Museum of Singapore produced the moving Wong Hong Suen’s Wartime Kitchen: Food and Eating in Singapore 1942–1950. This details the resilience and adaptability of both diners and cooks during the Japanese Occupation and in post-war Singapore, when shortages stimulated creativity. There is a centenary history of the Cold Storage company which shipped frozen foods all over south east Asia (Boon) and location-based studies such as Annette Tan’s Savour Chinatown: Stories Memories & Recipes. Tan interviewed hawkers, chefs and restaurant owners, working from this information to write both the book’s recipes and reflect on Chinatown’s culinary history. Food culture also features in (although it is not the main focus) more general book-length studies such as educational texts such as Chew Yen Fook’s The Magic of Singapore and Melanie Guile’s Culture in Singapore (2000). Works that navigate both spaces (of Singaporean culture more generally and its foodways) such Lily Kong’s Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food, provide an consistent narrative of food in Singapore, stressing its multicultural flavours that can be enjoyed from eateries ranging from hawker stalls to high-end restaurants that, interestingly, that agrees with that promulgated in the food writing discussed above. Food Memoirs and Blogs Many of these narratives include personal material, drawing on the author’s own food experiences and taste memories. This approach is fully developed in the food memoir, a growing sub-genre of Singapore food writing. While memoirs by expatriate Singaporeans such as Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, produced by major publisher Hyperion in New York, has attracted considerable international attention, it presents a story of Singapore cuisine that agrees with such locally produced texts as television chef and food writer Terry Tan’s Stir-fried and Not Shaken: A Nostalgic Trip Down Singapore’s Memory Lane and the food memoir of the Singaporean chef credited with introducing fine Malay dining to Singapore, Aziza Ali’s Sambal Days, Kampong Cuisine, published in Singapore in 2013 with the support of the National Heritage Board. All these memoirs are currently available in Singapore in both bookshops and a number of museums and other attractions. While underscoring the historical and cultural value of these foods, all describe the unique flavours of Singaporean cuisine and its deliciousness. A number of prominent Singapore food bloggers are featured in general guidebooks and promoted by the STB as useful resources to dining out in Singapore. One of the most prominent of these is Leslie Tay, a medical doctor and “passionate foodie” (Knipp) whose awardwinning ieatŸishootŸipost is currently attracting some 90,000 unique visitors every month and has had over 20,000 million hits since its launch in 2006. An online diary of Tay’s visits to hundreds of Singaporean hawker stalls, it includes descriptions and photographs of meals consumed, creating accumulative oral culinary histories of these dishes and those who prepared them. These narratives have been reorganised and reshaped in Tay’s first book The End of Char Kway Teow and Other Hawker Mysteries, where each chapter tells the story of one particular dish, including recommended hawker stalls where it can be enjoyed. Ladyironchef.com is a popular food and travel site that began as a blog in 2007. An edited collection of reviews of eateries and travel information, many by the editor himself, the site features lists of, for example, the best cafes (LadyIronChef “Best Cafes”), eateries at the airport (LadyIronChef “Guide to Dining”), and hawker stalls (Lim). While attesting to the cultural value of these foods, many articles also discuss flavour, as in Lim’s musings on: ‘how good can chicken on rice taste? … The glistening grains of rice perfumed by fresh chicken stock and a whiff of ginger is so good you can even eat it on its own’. Conclusion Recent Singapore food publishing reflects this focus on taste. Tay’s publisher, Epigram, growing Singaporean food list includes the recently released Heritage Cookbooks Series. This highlights specialist Singaporean recipes and cookery techniques, with the stated aim of preserving tastes and foodways that continue to influence Singaporean food culture today. Volumes published to date on Peranakan, South Indian, Cantonese, Eurasian, and Teochew (from the Chaoshan region in the east of China’s Guangdong province) cuisines offer both cultural and practical guides to the quintessential dishes and flavours of each cuisine, featuring simple family dishes alongside more elaborate special occasion meals. In common with the food writing discussed above, the books in this series, although dealing with very different styles of cookery, contribute to an overall impression of the taste of Singapore food that is highly consistent and extremely persuasive. This food writing narrates that Singapore has a delicious as well as distinctive and interesting food culture that plays a significant role in Singaporean life both currently and historically. It also posits that this food culture is, at the same time, easily accessible and also worthy of detailed consideration and discussion. 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Acknowledgements Research to complete this article was supported by Central Queensland University, Australia, under its Outside Studies Program (OSPRO) and Learning and Teaching Education Research Centre (LTERC). An earlier version of part of this article was presented at the 2nd Australasian Regional Food Networks and Cultures Conference, in the Barossa Valley in South Australia, Australia, 11–14 November 2012. The delegates of that conference and expert reviewers of this article offered some excellent suggestions regarding strengthening this article and their advice was much appreciated. All errors are, of course, my own.

Newspapers and the 7:15 Showing Cinemagoing involves planning. Even in the most impromptu instances, one has to consider meeting places, line-ups and competing responsibilities. One arranges child care, postpones household chores, or rushes to finish meals. One must organise transportation and think about routes, traffic, parking or public transit. And during the course of making plans for a trip to the cinema, whether alone or in the company of others, typically one turns to locate a recent newspaper. Consulting its printed page lets us ascertain locations, a selection of film titles and their corresponding show times. In preparing to feed a cinema craving, we burrow through a newspaper to an entertainment section, finding a tableau of information and promotional appeals. Such sections compile the mini-posters of movie advertisements, with their truncated credits, as well as various reviews and entertainment news. We see names of shopping malls doubling as names of theatres. We read celebrity gossip that may or may not pertain to the film selected for that occasion. We informally rank viewing priorities ranging from essential theatrical experiences to those that can wait for the videotape release. We attempt to assess our own mood and the taste of our filmgoing companions, matching up what we suppose are appropriate selections. Certainly, other media vie to supplant the newspaper's role in cinemagoing; many now access on-line sources and telephone services that offer the crucial details about start times. Nonetheless, as a campaign by the Newspaper Association of America in Variety aimed to remind film marketers, 80% of cinemagoers refer to newspaper listings for times and locations before heading out. The accuracy of that association's statistics notwithstanding, for the moment, the local daily or weekly newspaper has a secure place in the routines of cinematic life. A basic impetus for the newspaper's role is its presentation of a schedule of show times. Whatever the venue -- published, phone or on-line -- it strikes me as especially telling that schedules are part of the ordinariness of cinemagoing. To be sure, there are those who decide what film to see on site. Anecdotally, I have had several people comment recently that they no longer decide what movie to see, but where to see a (any) movie. Regardless, the schedule, coupled with the theatre's location, figures as a point of coordination for travel through community space to a site of film consumption. The choice of show time is governed by countless demands of everyday life. How often has the timing of a film -- not the film itself, the theatre at which it's playing, nor one's financial situation --determined one's attendance? How familiar is the assessment that show times are such that one cannot make it, that the film begins a bit too earlier, that it will run too late for whatever reason, and that other tasks intervene to take precedence? I want to make several observations related to the scheduling of film exhibition. Most generally, it makes manifest that cinemagoing involves an exercise in the application of cinema knowledge -- that is, minute, everyday facilities and familiarities that help orchestrate the ordinariness of cultural life. Such knowledge informs what Michel de Certeau characterises as "the procedures of everyday creativity" (xiv). Far from random, the unexceptional decisions and actions involved with cinemagoing bear an ordering and a predictability. Novelty in audience activity appears, but it is alongside fairly exact expectations about the event. The schedule of start times is essential to the routinisation of filmgoing. Displaying a Fordist logic of streamlining commodity distribution and the time management of consumption, audiences circulate through a machine that shapes their constituency, providing a set time for seating, departure, snack purchases and socialising. Even with the staggered times offered by multiplex cinemas, schedules still lay down a fixed template around which other activities have to be arrayed by the patron. As audiences move to and through the theatre, the schedule endeavours to regulate practice, making us the subjects of a temporal grid, a city context, a cinema space, as well as of the film itself. To be sure, one can arrive late and leave early, confounding the schedule's disciplining force. Most importantly, with or without such forms of evasion, it channels the actions of audiences in ways that consideration of the gaze cannot address. Taking account of the scheduling of cinema culture, and its implication of adjunct procedures of everyday life, points to dimensions of subjectivity neglected by dominant theories of spectatorship. To be the subject of a cinema schedule is to understand one assemblage of the parameters of everyday creativity. It would be foolish to see cinema audiences as cattle, herded and processed alone, in some crude Gustave LeBon fashion. It would be equally foolish not to recognise the manner in which film distribution and exhibition operates precisely by constructing images of the activity of people as demographic clusters and generalised cultural consumers. The ordinary tactics of filmgoing are supplemental to, and run alongside, a set of industrial structures and practices. While there is a correlation between a culture industry's imagined audience and the life that ensues around its offerings, we cannot neglect that, as attention to film scheduling alerts us, audiences are subjects of an institutional apparatus, brought into being for the reproduction of an industrial edifice. Streamline Audiences In this, film is no different from any culture industry. Film exhibition and distribution relies on an understanding of both the market and the product or service being sold at any given point in time. Operations respond to economic conditions, competing companies, and alternative activities. Economic rationality in this strategic process, however, only explains so much. This is especially true for an industry that must continually predict, and arguably give shape to, the "mood" and predilections of disparate and distant audiences. Producers, distributors and exhibitors assess which films will "work", to whom they will be marketed, as well as establish the very terms of success. Without a doubt, much of the film industry's attentions act to reduce this uncertainty; here, one need only think of the various forms of textual continuity (genre films, star performances, etc.) and the economies of mass advertising as ways to ensure box office receipts. Yet, at the core of the operations of film exhibition remains a number of flexible assumptions about audience activity, taste and desire. These assumptions emerge from a variety of sources to form a brand of temporary industry "commonsense", and as such are harbingers of an industrial logic. Ien Ang has usefully pursued this view in her comparative analysis of three national television structures and their operating assumptions about audiences. Broadcasters streamline and discipline audiences as part of their organisational procedures, with the consequence of shaping ideas about consumers as well as assuring the reproduction of the industrial structure itself. She writes, "institutional knowledge is driven toward making the audience visible in such a way that it helps the institutions to increase their power to get their relationship with the audience under control, and this can only be done by symbolically constructing 'television audience' as an objectified category of others that can be controlled, that is, contained in the interest of a predetermined institutional goal" (7). Ang demonstrates, in particular, how various industrially sanctioned programming strategies (programme strips, "hammocking" new shows between successful ones, and counter-programming to a competitor's strengths) and modes of audience measurement grow out of, and invariably support, those institutional goals. And, most crucially, her approach is not an effort to ascertain the empirical certainty of "actual" audiences; instead, it charts the discursive terrain in which the abstract concept of audience becomes material for the continuation of industry practices. Ang's work tenders special insight to film culture. In fact, television scholarship has taken full advantage of exploring the routine nature of that medium, the best of which deploys its findings to lay bare configurations of power in domestic contexts. One aspect has been television time and schedules. For example, David Morley points to the role of television in structuring everyday life, discussing a range of research that emphasises the temporal dimension. Alerting us to the non- necessary determination of television's temporal structure, he comments that we "need to maintain a sensitivity to these micro-levels of division and differentiation while we attend to the macro-questions of the media's own role in the social structuring of time" (265). As such, the negotiation of temporal structures implies that schedules are not monolithic impositions of order. Indeed, as Morley puts it, they "must be seen as both entering into already constructed, historically specific divisions of space and time, and also as transforming those pre-existing division" (266). Television's temporal grid has been address by others as well. Paddy Scannell characterises scheduling and continuity techniques, which link programmes, as a standardisation of use, making radio and television predictable, 'user friendly' media (9). John Caughie refers to the organization of flow as a way to talk about the national particularities of British and American television (49-50). All, while making their own contributions, appeal to a detailing of viewing context as part of any study of audience, consumption or experience; uncovering the practices of television programmers as they attempt to apprehend and create viewing conditions for their audiences is a first step in this detailing. Why has a similar conceptual framework not been applied with the same rigour to film? Certainly the history of film and television's association with different, at times divergent, disciplinary formations helps us appreciate such theoretical disparities. I would like to mention one less conspicuous explanation. It occurs to me that one frequently sees a collapse in the distinction between the everyday and the domestic; in much scholarship, the latter term appears as a powerful trope of the former. The consequence has been the absenting of a myriad of other -- if you will, non-domestic -- manifestations of everyday-ness, unfortunately encouraging a rather literal understanding of the everyday. The impression is that the abstractions of the everyday are reduced to daily occurrences. Simply put, my minor appeal is for the extension of this vein of television scholarship to out-of-home technologies and cultural forms, that is, other sites and locations of the everyday. In so doing, we pay attention to extra-textual structures of cinematic life; other regimes of knowledge, power, subjectivity and practice appear. Film audiences require a discussion about the ordinary, the calculated and the casual practices of cinematic engagement. Such a discussion would chart institutional knowledge, identifying operating strategies and recognising the creativity and multidimensionality of cinemagoing. What are the discursive parameters in which the film industry imagines cinema audiences? What are the related implications for the structures in which the practice of cinemagoing occurs? Vectors of Exhibition Time One set of those structures of audience and industry practice involves the temporal dimension of film exhibition. In what follows, I want to speculate on three vectors of the temporality of cinema spaces (meaning that I will not address issues of diegetic time). Note further that my observations emerge from a close study of industrial discourse in the U.S. and Canada. I would be interested to hear how they are manifest in other continental contexts. First, the running times of films encourage turnovers of the audience during the course of a single day at each screen. The special event of lengthy anomalies has helped mark the epic, and the historic, from standard fare. As discussed above, show times coordinate cinemagoing and regulate leisure time. Knowing the codes of screenings means participating in an extension of the industrial model of labour and service management. Running times incorporate more texts than the feature presentation alone. Besides the history of double features, there are now advertisements, trailers for coming attractions, trailers for films now playing in neighbouring auditoriums, promotional shorts demonstrating new sound systems, public service announcements, reminders to turn off cell phones and pagers, and the exhibitor's own signature clips. A growing focal point for filmgoing, these introductory texts received a boost in 1990, when the Motion Picture Association of America changed its standards for the length of trailers, boosting it from 90 seconds to a full two minutes (Brookman). This intertextuality needs to be supplemented by a consideration of inter- media appeals. For example, advertisements for television began appearing in theatres in the 1990s. And many lobbies of multiplex cinemas now offer a range of media forms, including video previews, magazines, arcades and virtual reality games. Implied here is that motion pictures are not the only media audiences experience in cinemas and that there is an explicit attempt to integrate a cinema's texts with those at other sites and locations. Thus, an exhibitor's schedule accommodates an intertextual strip, offering a limited parallel to Raymond Williams's concept of "flow", which he characterised by stating -- quite erroneously -- "in all communication systems before broadcasting the essential items were discrete" (86-7). Certainly, the flow between trailers, advertisements and feature presentations is not identical to that of the endless, ongoing text of television. There are not the same possibilities for "interruption" that Williams emphasises with respect to broadcasting flow. Further, in theatrical exhibition, there is an end-time, a time at which there is a public acknowledgement of the completion of the projected performance, one that necessitates vacating the cinema. This end-time is a moment at which the "rental" of the space has come due; and it harkens a return to the street, to the negotiation of city space, to modes of public transit and the mobile privatisation of cars. Nonetheless, a schedule constructs a temporal boundary in which audiences encounter a range of texts and media in what might be seen as limited flow. Second, the ephemerality of audiences -- moving to the cinema, consuming its texts, then passing the seat on to someone else -- is matched by the ephemerality of the features themselves. Distributors' demand for increasing numbers of screens necessary for massive, saturation openings has meant that films now replace one another more rapidly than in the past. Films that may have run for months now expect weeks, with fewer exceptions. Wider openings and shorter runs have created a cinemagoing culture characterised by flux. The acceleration of the turnover of films has been made possible by the expansion of various secondary markets for distribution, most importantly videotape, splintering where we might find audiences and multiplying viewing contexts. Speeding up the popular in this fashion means that the influence of individual texts can only be truly gauged via cross-media scrutiny. Short theatrical runs are not axiomatically designed for cinemagoers anymore; they can also be intended to attract the attention of video renters, purchasers and retailers. Independent video distributors, especially, "view theatrical release as a marketing expense, not a profit center" (Hindes & Roman 16). In this respect, we might think of such theatrical runs as "trailers" or "loss leaders" for the video release, with selected locations for a film's release potentially providing visibility, even prestige, in certain city markets or neighbourhoods. Distributors are able to count on some promotion through popular consumer- guide reviews, usually accompanying theatrical release as opposed to the passing critical attention given to video release. Consequently, this shapes the kinds of uses an assessment of the current cinema is put to; acknowledging that new releases function as a resource for cinema knowledge highlights the way audiences choose between and determine big screen and small screen films. Taken in this manner, popular audiences see the current cinema as largely a rough catalogue to future cultural consumption. Third, motion picture release is part of the structure of memories and activities over the course of a year. New films appear in an informal and ever-fluctuating structure of seasons. The concepts of summer movies and Christmas films, or the opening weekends that are marked by a holiday, sets up a fit between cinemagoing and other activities -- family gatherings, celebrations, etc. Further, this fit is presumably resonant for both the industry and popular audiences alike, though certainly for different reasons. The concentration of new films around visible holiday periods results in a temporally defined dearth of cinemas; an inordinate focus upon three periods in the year in the U.S. and Canada -- the last weekend in May, June/July/August and December -- creates seasonal shortages of screens (Rice-Barker 20). In fact, the boom in theatre construction through the latter half of the 1990s was, in part, to deal with those short-term shortages and not some year-round inadequate seating. Configurations of releasing colour a calendar with the tactical manoeuvres of distributors and exhibitors. Releasing provides a particular shape to the "current cinema", a term I employ to refer to a temporally designated slate of cinematic texts characterised most prominently by their newness. Television arranges programmes to capitalise on flow, to carry forward audiences and to counter-programme competitors' simultaneous offerings. Similarly, distributors jostle with each other, with their films and with certain key dates, for the limited weekends available, hoping to match a competitor's film intended for one audience with one intended for another. Industry reporter Leonard Klady sketched some of the contemporary truisms of releasing based upon the experience of 1997. He remarks upon the success of moving Liar, Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997) to a March opening and the early May openings of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997) and Breakdown (Jonathan Mostow, 1997), generally seen as not desirable times of the year for premieres. He cautions against opening two films the same weekend, and thus competing with yourself, using the example of Fox's Soul Food (George Tillman, Jr., 1997) and The Edge (Lee Tamahori, 1997). While distributors seek out weekends clear of films that would threaten to overshadow their own, Klady points to the exception of two hits opening on the same date of December 19, 1997 -- Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997) and Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Though but a single opinion, Klady's observations are a peek into a conventional strain of strategising among distributors and exhibitors. Such planning for the timing and appearance of films is akin to the programming decisions of network executives. And I would hazard to say that digital cinema, reportedly -- though unlikely -- just on the horizon and in which texts will be beamed to cinemas via satellite rather than circulated in prints, will only augment this comparison; releasing will become that much more like programming, or at least will be conceptualised as such. To summarize, the first vector of exhibition temporality is the scheduling and running time; the second is the theatrical run; the third is the idea of seasons and the "programming" of openings. These are just some of the forces streamlining filmgoers; the temporal structuring of screenings, runs and film seasons provides a material contour to the abstraction of audience. Here, what I have delineated are components of an industrial logic about popular and public entertainment, one that offers a certain controlled knowledge about and for cinemagoing audiences. Shifting Conceptual Frameworks A note of caution is in order. I emphatically resist an interpretation that we are witnessing the becoming-film of television and the becoming-tv of film. Underneath the "inversion" argument is a weak brand of technological determinism, as though each asserts its own essential qualities. Such a pat declaration seems more in line with the mythos of convergence, and its quasi-Darwinian "natural" collapse of technologies. Instead, my point here is quite the opposite, that there is nothing essential or unique about the scheduling or flow of television; indeed, one does not have to look far to find examples of less schedule-dependent television. What I want to highlight is that application of any term of distinction -- event/flow, gaze/glance, public/private, and so on -- has more to do with our thinking, with the core discursive arrangements that have made film and television, and their audiences, available to us as knowable and different. So, using empirical evidence to slide one term over to the other is a strategy intended to supplement and destabilise the manner in which we draw conclusions, and even pose questions, of each. What this proposes is, again following the contributions of Ien Ang, that we need to see cinemagoing in its institutional formation, rather than some stable technological, textual or experiential apparatus. The activity is not only a function of a constraining industrial practice or of wildly creative patrons, but of a complex inter-determination between the two. Cinemagoing is an organisational entity harbouring, reviving and constituting knowledge and commonsense about film commodities, audiences and everyday life. An event of cinema begins well before the dimming of an auditorium's lights. The moment a newspaper is consulted, with its local representation of an internationally circulating current cinema, its listings belie a scheduling, an orderliness, to the possible projections in a given location. As audiences are formed as subjects of the current cinema, we are also agents in the continuation of a set of institutions as well. References Ang, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York: Routledge, 1991. Brookman, Faye. "Trailers: The Big Business of Drawing Crowds." Variety 13 June 1990: 48. Caughie, John. "Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics." Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steve Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Hindes, Andrew, and Monica Roman. "Video Titles Do Pitstops on Screens." Variety 16-22 Sep. 1996: 11+. Klady, Leonard. "Hitting and Missing the Market: Studios Show Savvy -- or Just Luck -- with Pic Release Strategies." Variety 19-25 Jan. 1998: 18. Morley, David. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992. Newspaper Association of America. "Before They See It Here..." Advertisement. Variety 22-28 Nov. 1999: 38. Rice-Barker, Leo. "Industry Banks on New Technology, Expanded Slates." Playback 6 May 1996: 19-20. Scannell, Paddy. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1975. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Charles Acland. "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php>. Chicago style: Charles Acland, "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Charles Acland. (2000) Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Mentors play a role in real life, just as they do in fiction. They also feature in reality television, which sits somewhere between the two. In fiction, mentors contribute to the narrative arc by providing guidance and assistance (Vogler 12) to a mentee in his or her life or professional pursuits. These exchanges are usually characterized by reciprocity, the need for mutual recognition (Gadamer 353) and involve some kind of moral question. They dramatise the possibilities of mentoring in reality, to provide us with a greater understanding of the world, and our human interaction within it. Reality television offers a different perspective. Like drama it uses the plot device of a mentor character to heighten the story arc, but instead of focusing on knowledge-based portrayals (Gadamer 112) of the mentor and mentee, the emphasis is instead on the mentee’s quest for ascension. In attempting to transcend their unknownness (Boorstin) contestants aim to penetrate an exclusive creative class (Florida). Populated by celebrity chefs, businessmen, entertainers, fashionistas, models, socialites and talent judges (to name a few), this class seemingly adds authenticity to ‘competitions’ and other formats. While the mentor’s role, on the surface, is to provide divine knowledge and facilitate the journey, a different agenda is evident in the ways carefully scripted (Booth) dialogue heightens the drama through effusive praise (New York Daily News) and “tactless” (Woodward), humiliating (Hirschorn; Winant 69; Woodward) and cruel sentiments. From a screen narrative point of view, this takes reality television as ‘storytelling’ (Aggarwal; Day; Hirschorn; “Reality Writer”; Rupel; Stradal) into very different territory. The contrived and later edited (Crouch; Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) communication between mentor and mentee not only renders the relationship disingenuous, it compounds the primary ethical concerns of associated Schadenfreude (Balasubramanian, Forstie and van den Scott 434; Cartwright), and the severe financial inequality (Andrejevic) underpinning a multi-billion dollar industry (Hamilton). As upward mobility and instability continue to be ubiquitously portrayed in 21st century reality entertainment under neoliberalism (Sender 4; Winant 67), it is with increasing frequency that we are seeing the systematic reinvention of the once significant cultural and historical role of the mentor. Mentor as Fictional Archetype and Communicator of ThemesDepictions of mentors can be found across the Western art canon. From the mythological characters of Telemachus’ Athena and Achilles’ Chiron, to King Arthur’s Merlin, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Jim Hawkins’ Long John Silver, Frodo’s Gandalf, Batman’s Alfred and Marty McFly’s Doc Emmett Brown (among many more), the dramatic energy of the teacher, expert or supernatural aid (Vogler 39) has been timelessly powerful. Heroes, typically, engage with a mentor as part of their journey. Mentor types range extensively, from those who provide motivation, inspiration, training or gifts (Vogler), to those who may be dark or malevolent, or have fallen from grace (such as Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 1987, or the ex-tribute Haymitch in The Hunger Games, 2012). A good drama usually complicates the relationship in some way, exploring initial reluctance from either party, or instances of tragedy (Vogler 11, 44) which may prevent the relationship achieving its potential. The intriguing twist of a fallen or malevolent mentor additionally invites the audience to morally analyze the ways the hero responds to what the mentor provides, and to question what our teachers or superiors tell us. In television particularly, long running series such as Mad Men have shown how a mentoring relationship can change over time, where “non-rational” characters (Buzzanell and D’Enbeau 707) do not necessarily maintain reciprocity or equality (703) but become subject to intimate, ambivalent and erotic aspects.As the mentor in fiction has deep cultural roots for audiences today, it is no wonder they are used, in a variety of archetypal capacities, in reality television. The dark Simon Cowell (of Pop Idol, American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent, America’s Got Talent and The X-Factor series) and the ‘villainous’ (Byrnes) Michelin-starred Marco Pierre White (Hell’s Kitchen, The Chopping Block, Marco Pierre White’s Kitchen Wars, MasterChef Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) provide reality writers with much needed antagonism (Rupel, Stradal). Those who have fallen from grace, or allowed their personal lives to play out in tabloid sagas such as Britney Spears (Marikar), or Caitlyn Jenner (Bissinger) provide different sources of conflict and intrigue. They are then counterbalanced with or repackaged as the good mentor. Examples of the nurturer who shows "compassion and empathy" include American Idol’s Paula Abdul (Marche), or the supportive Jennifer Hawkins in Next Top Model (Thompson). These distinctive characters help audiences to understand the ‘reality’ as a story (Crouch; Rupel; Stradal). But when we consider the great mentors of screen fiction, it becomes clear how reality television has changed the nature of story. The Karate Kid I (1984) and Good Will Hunting (1998) are two examples where mentoring is almost the exclusive focus, and where the experience of the characters differs greatly. In both films an initially reluctant mentor becomes deeply involved in the mentee’s project. They act as a special companion to the hero in the face of isolation, and, significantly, reveal a tragedy of their own, providing a nexus through which the mentee can access a deeper kind of truth. Not only are they flawed and ordinary people (they are not celebrities within the imagined worlds of the stories) who the mentee must challenge and learn to truly respect, they are “effecting and important” (Maslin) in reminding audiences of those hidden idiosyncrasies that open the barriers to friendship. Mentors in these stories, and many others, communicate themes of class, culture, talent, jealousy, love and loss which inform ideas about the ethical treatment of the ‘other’ (Gadamer). They ultimately prove pivotal to self worth, human confidence and growth. Very little of this thematic substance survives in reality television (see comparison of plots and contrasting modes of human engagement in the example of The Office and Dirty Jobs, Winant 70). Archetypally identifiable as they may be, mean judges and empathetic supermodels as characters are concerned mostly with the embodiment of perfection. They are flawless, untouchable and indeed most powerful when human welfare is at stake, and when the mentee before them faces isolation (see promise to a future ‘Rihanna’, X-Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 1 and Tyra Banks’ Next Top Model tirade at a contestant who had not lived up to her potential, West). If connecting with a mentor in fiction has long signified the importance of understanding of the past, of handing down tradition (Gadamer 354), and of our fascination with the elder, wiser other, then we can see a fundamental shift in narrative representation of mentors in reality television stories. In the past, as we have opened our hearts to such characters, as a facilitator to or companion of the hero, we have rehearsed a sacred respect for the knowledge and fulfillment mentors can provide. In reality television the ‘drama’ may evoke a fleeting rush of excitement at the hero’s success or failure, but the reality belies a pronounced distancing between mentor and mentee. The Creative Class: An Aspirational ParadigmThemes of ascension and potential fulfillment are also central to modern creativity discourse (Runco; Runco 672; United Nations). Seen as the driving force of the 21st century, creativity is now understood as much more than art, capable of bringing economic prosperity (United Nations) and social cohesion to its acme (United Nations xxiii). At the upper end of creative practice, is what Florida called “the creative class: a fast growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce” (on whose expertise corporate profits depend), in industries ranging “from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts” (Florida). Their common ethos is centered on individuality, diversity, and merit; eclipsing previous systems focused on ‘shopping’ and theme park consumerism and social conservatism (Eisinger). While doubts have since been raised about the size (Eisinger) and financial practices (Krätke 838) of the creative class (particularly in America), from an entertainment perspective at least, the class can be seen in full action. Extending to rich housewives, celebrity teen mothers and even eccentric duck hunters and swamp people, the creative class has caught up to the more traditional ‘star’ actor or music artist, and is increasingly marketable within world’s most sought after and expensive media spaces. Often reality celebrities make their mark for being the most outrageous, the cruelest (Peyser), or the weirdest (Gallagher; Peyser) personalities in the spotlight. Aspiring to the creative class thus, is a very public affair in television. Willing participants scamper for positions on shows, particularly those with long running, heavyweight titles such as Big Brother, The Bachelor, Survivor and the Idol series (Hill 35). The better known formats provide high visibility, with the opportunity to perform in front of millions around the globe (Frere-Jones, Day). Tapping into the deeply ingrained upward-mobility rhetoric of America, and of Western society, shows are aided in large part by 24-hour news, social media, the proliferation of celebrity gossip and the successful correlation between pop culture and an entertainment-style democratic ideal. As some have noted, dramatized reality is closely tied to the rise of individualization, and trans-national capitalism (Darling-Wolf 127). Its creative dynamism indeed delivers multi-lateral benefits: audiences believe the road to fame and fortune is always just within reach, consumerism thrives, and, politically, themes of liberty, egalitarianism and freedom ‘provide a cushioning comfort’ (Peyser; Pinter) from the domestic and international ills that would otherwise dispel such optimism. As the trials and tests within the reality genre heighten the seriousness of, and excitement about ascending toward the creative elite, show creators reproduce the same upward-mobility themed narrative across formats all over the world. The artifice is further supported by the festival-like (Grodin 46) symbology of the live audience, mass viewership and the online voting community, which in economic terms, speaks to the creative power of the material. Whether through careful manipulation of extra media space, ‘game strategy’, or other devices, those who break through are even more idolized for the achievement of metamorphosing into a creative hero. For the creative elite however, who wins ‘doesn’t matter much’. Vertical integration is the priority, where the process of making contestants famous is as lucrative as the profits they will earn thereafter; it’s a form of “one-stop shopping” as the makers of Idol put it according to Frere-Jones. Furthermore, as Florida’s measures and indicators suggested, the geographically mobile new creative class is driven by lifestyle values, recreation, participatory culture and diversity. Reality shows are the embodiment this idea of creativity, taking us beyond stale police procedural dramas (Hirschorn) and racially typecast family sitcoms, into a world of possibility. From a social equality perspective, while there has been a notable rise in gay and transgender visibility (Gamson) and stories about lower socio-economic groups – fast food workers and machinists for example – are told in a way they never were before, the extent to which shows actually unhinge traditional power structures is, as scholars have noted (Andrejevic and Colby 197; Schroeder) open to question. As boundaries are nonetheless crossed in the age of neoliberal creativity, the aspirational paradigm of joining a new elite in real life is as potent as ever. Reality Television’s Mentors: How to Understand Their ‘Role’Reality television narratives rely heavily on the juxtaposition between celebrity glamour and comfort, and financial instability. As mentees put it ‘all on the line’, storylines about personal suffering are hyped and molded for maximum emotional impact. In the best case scenarios mentors such as Caitlyn Jenner will help a trans mentee discover their true self by directing them in a celebrity-style photo shoot (see episode featuring Caitlyn and Zeam, Logo TV 2015). In more extreme cases the focus will be on an adopted contestant’s hopes that his birth mother will hear him sing (The X Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 11 Part 1), or on a postal clerk’s fear that elimination will mean she has to go back “to selling stamps” (The X Factor US - Season 2 Episode 11 Part 2). In the entrepreneurship format, as Woodward pointed out, it is not ‘help’ that mentees are given, but condescension. “I have to tell you, my friend, that this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. You don’t have a clue about how to set up a business or market a product,” Woodward noted as the feedback given by one elite businessman on The Shark Tank (Woodward). “This is a five million dollar contract and I have to know that you can go the distance” (The X Factor US – Season 2 Episode 11, Part 1) Britney Spears warned to a thirteen-year-old contestant before accepting her as part of her team. In each instance the fictitious premise of being either an ‘enabler’ or destroyer of dreams is replayed and slightly adapted for ongoing consumer interest. This lack of shared experience and mutual recognition in reality television also highlights the overt, yet rarely analyzed focus on the wealth of mentors as contrasted with their unstable mentees. In the respective cases of The X Factor and I Am Cait, one of the wealthiest moguls in entertainment, Cowell, reportedly contracts mentors for up to $15 million per season (Nair); Jenner’s performance in I Am Cait was also set to significantly boost the Kardashian empire (reportedly already worth $300 million, Pavia). In both series, significant screen time has been dedicated to showing the mentors in luxurious beachside houses, where mentees may visit. Despite the important social messages embedded in Caitlyn’s story (which no doubt nourishes the Kardashian family’s generally more ersatz material), the question, from a moral point of view becomes: would these mentors still interact with that particular mentee without the money? Regardless, reality participants insist they are fulfilling their dreams when they appear. Despite the preplanning, possibility of distress (Australia Network News; Bleasby) and even suicide (Schuster), as well as the ferocity of opinion surrounding shows (Marche) the parade of a type of ‘road of trials’ (Vogler 189) is enough to keep a huge fan base interested, and hungry for their turn to experience the fortune of being touched by the creative elite; or in narrative terms, a supernatural aid. ConclusionThe key differences between reality television and artistic narrative portrayals of mentors can be found in the use of archetypes for narrative conflict and resolution, in the ways themes are explored and the ways dialogue is put to use, and in the focus on and visibility of material wealth (Frere-Jones; Peyser). These differences highlight the political, cultural and social implications of exchanging stories about potential fulfillment, for stories about ascension to the creative class. Rather than being based on genuine reciprocity, and understanding of human issues, reality shows create drama around the desperation to penetrate the inner sanctum of celebrity fame and fortune. In fiction we see themes based on becoming famous, on gender transformation, and wealth acquisition, such as in the films and series Almost Famous (2000), The Bill Silvers Show (1955-1959), Filthy Rich (1982-1983), and Tootsie (1982), but these stories at least attempt to address a moral question. Critically, in an artistic - rather than commercial context – the actors (who may play mentees) are not at risk of exploitation (Australia Network News; Bleasby; Crouch). Where actors are paid and recognized creatively for their contribution to an artistic work (Rupel), the mentee in reality television has no involvement in the ways action may be set up for maximum voyeuristic enjoyment, or manipulated to enhance scandalous and salacious content which will return show and media profits (“Reality Show Fights”; Skeggs and Wood 64). The emphasis, ironically, from a reality production point of view, is wholly on making the audience believe (Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) that the content is realistic. This perhaps gives some insight as to why themes of personal suffering and instability are increasingly evident across formats.On an ethical level, unlike the knowledge transferred through complex television plots, or in coming of age films (as cited above) about the ways tradition is handed down, and the ways true mentors provide altruistic help in human experience; in reality television we take away the knowledge that life, under neoliberalism, is most remarkable when one is handpicked to undertake a televised journey featuring their desire for upward mobility. The value of the mentoring in these cases is directly proportionate to the financial objectives of the creative elite.ReferencesAggarwal, Sirpa. “WWE, A&E Networks, and Simplynew Share Benefits of White-Label Social TV Solutions at the Social TV Summit.” Arktan 25 July 2012. 1 August 2014 <http://arktan.com/wwe-ae-networks-and-simplynew-share-benefits-of-white-label-social-tv-solutions-at-the-social-tv-summit/>. 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Introduction In November 2020, upon learning that the company’s Covid-19 vaccine trial had been successful, the head of Pfizer’s Vaccine Research and Development, Kathrin Jansen, celebrated with champagne – “some really good stuff” (Cohen). Bubbles seem to go naturally with celebration, and champagne is fundamentally associated with bubbles. Yet, until the late-seventeenth century, champagne was a still wine, and it only reached the familiar levels of bubbliness in the late-nineteenth century (Harding). During this period and on into the early twentieth century, “champagne” was in many ways created, defined, and defended. A “champagne bubble” was created, within which the “nature” of champagne was contested and constructed. Champagne today is the result of hundreds of years of labour by many sorts of bubble-makers: those who make the bubbly drink, and those who construct, maintain, and defend the champagne bubble. In this article, I explore some elements of the champagne bubble, in order to understand both its fragility and rigidity over the years and today. Creating the Champagne Bubble – the Labour of Centuries It is difficult to separate the physical from the mythical as regards champagne. Therefore the categorisations below are always overlapping, and embedded in legal, political, economic, and socio-cultural factors. Just as assemblage – the mixing of wine from different grapes – is an essential element of champagne wine, the champagne bubble may be called heterogeneous assemblage. Indeed, the champagne bubble, as we will see below, is a myriad of different sorts of bubbles, such as terroir, appellation, myth and brand. And just as any assemblage, its heterogeneous elements exist and operate in relation to each other. Therefore the “champagne bubble” discussed here is both one and many, all of its elements fundamentally interconnected, constituting that “one” known as “champagne”. It is not my intention to be comprehensive of all the elements, historical and contemporary. Indeed, that would not be possible within such a short article. Instead, I seek to demonstrate some of the complexity of the champagne bubble, noting the elaborate labour that has gone into its creation. The Physical Champagne and Champagne – from Soil to Bubbles Champagne means both a legally protected geographical area (Champagne), and the wine (here: champagne) produced in this area from grapes defined as acceptable: most importantly pinot noir, pinot meunier (“black” grapes), and chardonnay (“white” grape). The method of production, too, is regulated and legally protected: méthode champenoise. Although the same method is used in numerous locations, these must be called something different: metodo classico (Italy), método tradicional (Spain), Methode Cap Classique (South Africa). The geographical area of Champagne was first legally defined in 1908, when it only included the areas of Marne and Aisne, leaving out, most importantly, the area of Aube. This decision led to severe unrest and riots, as the Aube vignerons revolted in 1911, forcing the inclusion of “zone 2”: Aube, Haute-Marne, and Seine-et-Marne (Guy). Behind these regulations was a surge in fraudulent production in the early twentieth century, as well as falling wine prices resulting from increasing supply of cheap wines (Colman 18). These first appellations d’origine had many consequences – they proved financially beneficial for the “zone 1”, but less so for the “zone 2”. When both these areas were brought under the same appellation in 1927, the financial benefits were more limited – but this may have been due to the Great Depression triggered in 1929 (Haeck et al.). It is a long-standing belief that the soil and climate of Champagne are key contributors to the quality of champagne wines, said to be due to “conditions … most suitable for making this type of wine” (Simon 11). Already in the end of the nineteenth century, the editor of Vigneron champenois attributed champagne’s quality to “a fortunate combination of … chalky soil … [and] unrivalled exposure [to the sun]” (Guy 119) among other things. Factors such as soil and climate, commonly included in and expressed through the idea of terroir, undoubtedly influence grapes and wines made thereof, but the extent remains unproven. Indeed, terroir itself is a very contested concept (Teil; Inglis and Almila). It is also the case that climate change has had, and will continue to have, devastating effects on wine production in many areas, while benefiting others. The highly successful English sparkling wine production, drawing upon know-how from the Champagne area, has been enabled by the warming climate (Inglis), while Champagne itself is at risk of becoming too hot (Robinson). Champagne is made through a process more complicated than most wines. I present here the bare bones of it, to illustrate the many challenges that had to be overcome to enable its production in the scale we see today. Freshly picked grapes are first pressed and the juice is fermented. Grape juice contains natural yeasts and therefore will ferment spontaneously, but fermentation can also be started with artificial yeasts. In fermentation, alcohol and carbon dioxide (CO2) are formed, but the latter usually escapes the liquid. The secret of champagne is its second fermentation, which happens in bottles, after wines from different grapes and/or vineyards have been blended for desired characteristics (assemblage). For the second fermentation, yeast and sugar are added. As the fermentation happens inside a bottle, the CO2 that is created does not escape, but dissolves into the wine. The average pressure inside a champagne bottle in serving temperature is around 5 bar – 5 times the pressure outside the bottle (Liger-Belair et al.). The obvious challenge this method poses has to do with managing the pressure. Exploding bottles used to be a common problem, and the manner of sealing bottles was not very developed, either. Seventeenth-century developments in bottle-making, and using corks to seal bottles, enabled sparkling wines to be produced in the first place (Leszczyńska; Phillips 137). Still today, champagne comes in heavy-bottomed bottles, sealed with characteristically shaped cork, which is secured with a wire cage known as muselet. Scientific innovations, such as calculating the ideal amount of sugar for the second fermentation in 1836, also helped to control the amount of gas formed during the second fermentation, thus making the behaviour of the wine more predictable (Leszczyńska 265). Champagne is characteristically a “manufactured” wine, as it involves several steps of interference, from assemblage to dosage – sugar added for flavour to most champagnes after the second fermentation (although there are also zero dosage champagnes). This lends champagne particularly suitable for branding, as it is possible to make the wine taste the same year after year, harvest after harvest, and thus create a distinctive and recognisable house style. It is also possible to make champagnes for different tastes. During the nineteenth century, champagnes of different dosage were made for different markets – the driest for the British, the sweetest for the Russians (Harding). Bubbles are probably the most striking characteristic of champagne, and they are enabled by the complicated factors described above. But they are also formed when the champagne is poured in a glass. Natural impurities on the surface of the glass provide channels through which the gas pockets trapped in the wine can release themselves, forming strains of rising bubbles (Liger-Belair et al.). Champagne glasses have for centuries differed from other wine glasses, often for aesthetic reasons (Harding). The bubbles seem to do more than give people aesthetic pleasure and sensory experiences. It is often claimed that champagne makes you drunk faster than other drinks would, and there is, indeed, some (limited) research showing that this may well be the case (Roberts and Robinson; Ridout et al.). The Mythical Champagne – from Dom Pérignon to Modern Wonders Just as the bubbles in a champagne glass are influenced by numerous forces, so the metaphorical champagne bubble is subject to complex influences. Myth-creation is one of the most significant of these. The origin of champagne as sparkling wine is embedded in the myth of Dom Pérignon of Hautvillers monastery (1638–1715), who according to the legend would have accidentally developed the bubbles, and then enthusiastically exclaimed “I am drinking the stars!” (Phillips 138). In reality, bubbles are a natural phenomenon provoked by winter temperatures deactivating the fermenting yeasts, and spring again reactivating them. The myth of Dom Pérignon was first established in the nineteenth century and quickly embraced by the champagne industry. In 1937, Moët et Chandon launched a premium champagne called Dom Pérignon, which enjoys high reputation until this day (Phillips). The champagne industry has been active in managing associations connected with champagne since the nineteenth century. Sparkling champagnes had already enjoyed fashionability in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century, both in the French Court, and amongst the British higher classes. In the second half of the nineteenth century, champagne found ever increasing markets abroad, and the clientele was not aristocratic anymore. Before the 1860s, champagne’s association was with high status celebration, as well as sexual activity and seduction (Harding; Rokka). As the century went on, and champagne sales radically increased, associations with “modernity” were added: “hot-air balloons, towering steamships, transcontinental trains, cars, sports, and other ‘modern’ wonders were often featured in quickly proliferating champagne advertising” (Rokka 280). During this time, champagne grew both drier and more sparkling, following consumer tastes (Harding). Champagne’s most important markets in later nineteenth century included the UK, where the growing middle classes consumed champagne for both celebration and hospitality (Harding), the US, where (upper) middle-class women were served champagne in new kinds of consumer environments (Smith; Remus), and Russia, where the upper classes enjoyed sweeter champagne – until the Revolution (Phillips 296). The champagne industry quickly embraced the new middle classes in possession of increasing wealth, as well as new methods of advertising and marketing. What is remarkable is that they managed to integrate enormously varied cultural thematics and still retain associations with aristocracy and luxury, while producing and selling wine in industrial scale (Harding; Rokka). This is still true today: champagne retains a reputation of prestige, despite large-scale branding, production, and marketing. Maintaining and Defending the Bubble: Formulas, Rappers, and the Absolutely Fabulous Tipplers The falling wine prices and increasing counterfeit wines coincided with Europe’s phylloxera crisis – the pest accidentally brought over from North America that almost wiped out all Europe’s vineyards. The pest moved through Champagne in the 1890s, killing vines and devastating vignerons (Campbell). The Syndicat du Commerce des vins de Champagne had already been formed in 1882 (Rokka 280). Now unions were formed to fight phylloxera, such as the Association Viticole Champenoise in 1898. The 1904 Fédération Syndicale des Vignerons was formed to lobby the government to protect the name of Champagne (Leszczyńska 266) – successfully, as we have seen above. The financial benefits from appellations were certainly welcome, but short-lived. World War I treated Champagne harshly, with battle lines stuck through the area for years (Guy 187). The battle went on also in the lobbying front. In 1935, a new appellation regime was brought into law, which came to be the basis for all European systems, and the Comité National des appellations d'origine (CNAO) was founded (Colman 1922). Champagne’s protection became increasingly international, and continues to be so today under EU law and trade deals (European Commission). The post-war recovery of champagne relied on strategies used already in the “golden years” – marketing and lobbying. Advertising continued to embrace “luxury, celebration, transport (extending from air travel to the increasingly popular automobile), modernity, sports” (Guy 188). Such advertisement must have responded accurately to the mood of post-war, pre-depression Europe. Even in the prohibition US it was known that the “frivolous” French women might go as far as bathe in champagne, like the popular actress Mistinguett (Young 63). Curiously, in the 1930s Soviet Russia, “champagne” (not produced in Champagne) was declared a sign of good living, symbolising the standard of living that any Soviet worker had access to (at least in theory) (Gronow). Today, the reputation of champagne is fiercely defended in legal terms. This is not only in terms of protection against other sparkling wine making areas, but also in terms of exploitation of champagne’s reputation by actors in other commercial fields, and even against mass market products containing genuine champagne (Mahy and d’Ath; Schneider and Nam). At the same time, champagne has been widely “democratised” by mass production, enabled partly by increasing mechanisation and scientification of champagne production from the 1950s onwards (Leszczyńska 266). Yet champagne retains its association with prestige, luxury, and even royalty. This has required some serious adaptation and flexibility. In what follows, I look into three cultural phenomena that illuminate processes of such adaptation: Formula One (F1) champagne spraying, the 1990s sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, and the Cristal racism scandal in 2006. The first champagne bottle is said to have been presented to F1 grand prix winner in Champagne in 1950 (Wheels24). Such a gesture would have been fully in line with champagne’s association with cars, sport, and modernity. But what about the spraying? Surely that is not in line with the prestige of the wine? The first spraying is attributed to Jo Siffert in 1966 and Dan Gurney in 1967, the former described as accidental, the latter as a spontaneous gesture of celebration (Wheels24; Dobie). Moët had become the official supplier of F1 champagnes in 1966, and there are no signs that the new custom would have been problematic for them, as their sponsorship continued until 1999, after which Mumm sponsored the sport for 15 years. Today, the champagne to be popped and sprayed is Chanson, in special bottles “coated in the same carbon fibre that F1 cars are made of” (Wheels24). Such an iconic status has the spraying gained that it features in practically all TV broadcasts concerning F1, although non-alcoholic substitute is used in countries where sale of alcohol is banned (Barker et al., “Quantifying”; Barker et al., “Alcohol”). As disturbing as the champagne spraying might look for a wine snob, it is perfectly in line with champagne’s marketing history and entrepreneurial spirit shown since the nineteenth century. Nor is it unheard of to let champagne spray. The “art” of sabrage, opening champagne bottle with a sable, associated with glamour, spectacle, and myth – its origin is attributed to Napoleon and his officers – is perfectly acceptable even for the snob. Sparkling champagne was always bound up with joy and celebration, not a solemn drink, and the champagne bubble was able to accommodate middle classes as well as aristocrats. This brings us to our second example, the British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous. The show, first released in 1992, featured two women, “Eddy” (Jennifer Saunders) and “Patsy” (Joanna Lumley), who spent their time happily smoking, taking drugs, and drinking large quantities of “Bolly” (among other things). Bollinger champagne may have initially experienced “a bit of a shock” for being thus addressed, but soon came to see the benefits of fame (French). In 2005, they hired PR support to make better use of the brand’s “Ab Fab” recognisability, and to improve its prestige reputation in order to justify their higher price range (Cann). Saunders and Lumley were warmly welcomed by the Bollinger house when filming for their champagne tour Absolutely Champers (2017). It is befitting indeed that such controversial fame came from the UK, the first country to discover sparkling champagne outside France (Simon 48), and where the aspirational middle classes were keen to consume it already in the nineteenth century (Harding). More controversial still is the case of Cristal (made by Louis Roederer) and the US rap world. Enthusiastically embraced by the “bling-bling” world of (black) rappers, champagne seems to fit their ethos well. Cristal was long favoured as both a drink and a word in rap lyrics. But in 2006, the newly appointed managing director at the family owned Roederer, Frédéric Rouzaud, made comments considered racist by many (Woodland). Rouzard told in an interview with The Economist that the house observed the Cristal-rap association “with curiosity and serenity”. He reportedly continued: “but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business”. It was indeed those two brands that the rapper Jay-Z replaced Cristal with, when calling for a boycott on Cristal. It would be easy to dismiss Rouzard’s comments as snobbery, or indeed as racism, but they merit some more reflection. Cristal is the premium wine of a house that otherwise does not enjoy high recognisability. While champagne’s history involves embracing new sorts of clientele, and marketing flexibly to as many consumer groups as possible (Rokka), this was the first spectacular crossing of racial boundaries. It was always the case that different houses and their different champagnes were targeted at different clienteles, and it is apparent that Cristal was not targeted at black rap artists. Whereas Bollinger was able to turn into a victory the questionable fame brought by the white middle-class association of Absolutely Fabulous, the more prestigious Cristal considered the attention of the black rapper world more threatening and acted accordingly. They sought to defend their own brand bubble, not the larger champagne bubble. Cristal’s reputation seems to have suffered little – its 2008 vintage, launched in 2018, was the most traded wine of that year (Schultz). Jay-Z’s purchase of his own champagne brand (Armand de Brignac, nicknamed Ace of Spades) has been less successful reputation-wise (Greenburg). It is difficult to break the champagne bubble, and it may be equally difficult to break into it. Conclusion In this article, I have looked into the various dilemmas the “bubble-makers” of Champagne encountered when fabricating what is today known as “champagne”. There have been moments of threat to the bubble they formed, such as in the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and eras of incomparable success, such as from the 1860s to 1880s. The discussion has demonstrated the remarkable flexibility with which the makers and defenders of champagne have responded to challenges, and dealt with material, socio-cultural, economic, and other problems. It feels appropriate to end with a note on the current challenge the champagne industry faces: Covid-19. The pandemic hit champagne sales exceptionally hard, leaving around 100 million bottles unsold (Micallef). This was not very surprising, given the closure of champagne-selling venues, banning of public and private celebrations, and a general mood not particularly prone to (or even likely to frown upon) such light-hearted matters as glamour and champagne. Champagne has survived many dramatic drops in sales during the twentieth century, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the post-financial crisis collapse in 2009. Yet they seem to be able to make astonishing recoveries. 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Introduction Presidents “define who Americans are—often by declaring who they aren’t”, and “by their very utterances […] have shaped our sense of who we are as Americans” (Stuckey, front cover). This advocacy of some groups and policies to the exclusion of others has been facilitated in the United States’ political culture by the country music industry. Indeed, President Richard Nixon said of country music that it “radiates a love of this nation—a patriotism,” adding that it “makes America a better country” (Bufwack and Oermann 328). Country music’s ardent support of American military conflict, including Vietnam, has led to its long-term support of Republican candidates. There has been a general lack of scholarly interest, however, in how country music has promoted Republican definitions of what it means to be an American. Accordingly, we have two primary objectives. First, we will demonstrate that Republicans, aided by country music, have used the theme of defence of “country,” especially post-9/11, to attempt to intimidate detractors. Secondly, Republicans have questioned the love of “country,” or “patriotism,” of their electoral opponents just as country musicians have attempted to silence their own critics. This research is timely in that little has been done to merge Presidential advocacy and country music; furthermore, with the election of a new President mere days away, it is important to highlight the tendencies toward intolerance that both conservatism and country music have historically shared. Defence of ‘Country’ After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush addressed the nation before a Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001. During this speech, the president threatened the international community and raised the spectre of fear in Americans both while drawing distinctions between the United States and its enemies. This message was reflected and reinforced by several patriotic anthems composed by country artists, thus enhancing its effect. In his remarks before Congress, Bush challenged the international community: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists;” thus “advocating some groups to the exclusion of others” on the international stage (20 September 2001). With these words, the President expanded the definition of the United States’ enemies to include not only those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but also anyone who refused to support him. Republican Senator John McCain’s hawkishness regarding the attacks mirrored the President’s. “There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” McCain said the next morning on ABC (American Broadcasting Company) News. Within a month he made clear his priority: “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. Later he yelled to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!” (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/17/america/mccain.php). Bush’s address also encouraged Americans at home to “be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat” (20 September 2001). The subtle “us vs. them” tension here is between citizens and those who would threaten them. Bush added that “freedom and fear” had always “been at war” and “God is not neutral between them” (20 September 2001) suggesting a dualism between God and Satan with God clearly supporting the cause of the United States. Craig Allen Smith’s research refers to this as Bush’s “angel/devil jeremiad.” The President’s emphasis on fear, specifically the fear that the American way of life was being assailed, translated into public policy including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act. This strategic nomenclature strengthened the power of the federal government and has been used by Republicans to suggest that if a candidate or citizen is not a terrorist then what does he/she have to fear from the government? The impact of Bush’s rhetoric of fear has of late been evaluated by scholars who have termed it “melodrama” in international affairs (Anker; Sampert and Treiberg). To disseminate his message for Americans to support his defence of “country,” Bush needed look no further than country music. David Firestein, a State Department diplomat and published authority on country music, asserted that the Bush team “recognised the power of country music as a political communication device” (86). The administration’s appeal to country music is linked to what Firestein called the “honky-tonk gap” which delineates red states and blue states. In an analysis of census data, Radio-Locator’s comprehensive listing by state of country music radio stations, and the official 2004 election results, he concluded that If you were to overlay a map of the current country music fan base onto the iconic red-and-blue map of the United States, you would find that its contours coincide virtually identically with those of the red state region. (84) And country musicians were indeed powerful in communicating the Republican message after 9/11. Several country musicians tapped into Bush’s defence of country rhetoric with a spate of songs including Alan Jackson’s Where Were You? (When the World Stopped Turning), Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (the Angry American), and Darryl Worley’s Have You Forgotten? to name a few. Note how well the music parallels Bush’s attempt to define Americans. For instance, one of the lines from Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (the Angry American) speaks of those who have given their lives so that other Americans may rest peacefully. This sentiment is reiterated by the theme of Worley’s Have You Forgotten? in which he talks of spending time with soldiers who have no doubts about why they are at war. Both songs implicitly indict the listener for betraying United States soldiers if his/her support for the Iraqi war wanes or, put in Bush terms, the listener would become a supporter of “terrorism.” Country music’s appeal to middle-America’s red state conservatism has made the genre a natural vehicle for supporting the defence of country. Indeed, country songs have been written about every war in United States history; most expressing support for the conflict and the troops as opposed to protesting the United States’ action: “Since the Civil War and Reconstruction, ‘Dixie’ has always been the bellwether of patriotic fervour in time of war and even as the situation in Vietnam reached its lowest point and support for the war began to fade, the South and its distinctive music remained solidly supportive” (Andresen 105). Historically, country music has a long tradition of attempting to “define who Americans were by defining who they weren’t” (Stuckey). As Bufwack and Oermann note within country music “images of a reactionary South were not hard to find.” They add “Dixie fertilized ‘three r’s’ – the right, racism, and religion” (328). Country musicians supported the United States’ failed intervention in Vietnam with such songs as It’s for God and Country and You Mom (That’s Why I’m Fighting In Vietnam), and even justified the American massacre of noncombatants at My Lai in the Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley (328). Thus, a right-wing response to the current military involvement in Iraq was not unexpected from the industry and the honky-tonk state listeners. During the current election, Republican presidential nominee McCain has also received a boost from the country music genre as John Rich, of Big and Rich, wrote Raising McCain, a musical tribute to McCain’s military service used as his campaign theme song. The song, debuted at a campaign rally on 1 August 2008, in Florida, mentions McCain’s ‘Prisoner of War’ status to keep the focus on the war and challenge those who would question it. Scholars have researched the demographics of the country music listener as they have evaluated the massification theory: the notion that the availability of a widespread media culture would break down social and cultural barriers and result in a “homogenised” society as opposed to the results of government-controlled media in non-democratic countries (Peterson and DiMaggio). They have determined that the massification theory has only been partially demonstrated in that regional and class barriers have eroded to some extent but country music listeners are still predominately white and older (Peterson and DiMaggio 504). These individuals do tend to be more conservative within the United States’ political culture, and militarism has a long history within both country music and conservatism. If the bad news of the massification theory is that a mass media market may not perpetuate a homogenous society, there is good news. The more onerous fears that the government will work in tandem with the media to control the people in a democracy seem not to have been borne out over time. Although President Bush’s fear tactics were met with obsequious silence initially, resistance to the unquestioning support of the war has steadily grown. In 2003, a worldwide rally opposed the invasion of Iraq because it was a sovereign state and because the Bush doctrine lacked United Nations’ support. Further opposition in the United States included rallies and concerts as well as the powerful display in major cities across the nation of pairs of combat boots representing fallen soldiers (Olson). Bush’s popularity has dropped precipitously, with his disapproval ratings higher than any President in history at 71% (Steinhauser). While the current economic woes have certainly been a factor, the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain can also be viewed as a referendum on the Bush war. The American resistance to the Bush rhetoric and the Iraq war is all the more significant in light of research indicating that citizens incorrectly believe that the opposition to the Vietnam War was typified by protests against the troops rather than the war itself (Beamish). This false notion has empowered the Republicans and country musicians to challenge the patriotism of anyone who would subsequently oppose the military involvement of the United States, and it is to this topic of patriotism that we now turn. Patriotism Patriotism can be an effective way for presidential candidates to connect with voters (Sullivan et al). It has been a particularly salient issue since the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ironically, George W. Bush, a man whose limited military service had been the subject of debate in 2000, was able to employ the persistent patriotic themes of country music to his electoral advantage. In fact, Firestein argued that country music radio had a greater effect on the 2004 election than any ads run by issue groups because it “inculcated and reinforced conservative values in the red state electorate, helped frame the issues of the day on terms favourable to the conservative position on those issues, and primed red state voters to respond positively to President Bush’s basic campaign message of family, country, and God” (Firestein 83). Bush even employed Only in America, a patriotic anthem performed by Brooks and Dunn, as a campaign theme song, because the war and patriotism played such a prominent role in the election. That the Bush re-election campaign successfully cast doubt on the patriotism of three-time Purple Heart winner, Democratic Senator John Kerry, during the campaign is evidence of Firestein’s assertion. The criticism was based on a book: Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry (O’Neill and Corsi). The book was followed by advertisements funded by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth which included unsubstantiated claims that Kerry lied or exaggerated his combat role in Vietnam in order to obtain two of his Purple Hearts and his Bronze Star; the testimony of Kerry’s crewmen and Navy records notwithstanding, these ads were effective in smearing Kerry’s service record and providing the President with an electoral advantage. As far as country music was concerned, the 2004 election played out against the backdrop of the battle between the patriotic Toby Keith and the anti-American Dixie Chicks. The Dixie Chicks were berated after lead singer Natalie Maines’s anti-Bush comments during a concert in London. The trio’s song about an American soldier killed in action, Travelin’ Soldier, quickly fell from the top spot of the country music charts. Moreover, while male singers such as Keith, Darryl Worley, and Alan Jackson received accolades for their post 9/11 artistic efforts, the Dixie Chicks endured a vitriolic reaction from country music fans as their CDs were burned, country radio refused to play their music, their names were added to an internet list of traitors, their concerts were protested by Bush supporters, and their lives were even threatened (http://www.poppolitics.com/archives/2003/04/Bandwagon). Speaking from experience at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Kerry addressed the issue of patriotism stating: This election is a chance for America to tell the merchants of fear and division: you don’t decide who loves this country; you don’t decide who is a patriot; you don’t decide whose service counts and whose doesn’t. […] After all, patriotism is not love of power or some cheap trick to win votes; patriotism is love of country. (http://www.clipsandcomment.com/2008/08/27/full-text-john-kerry-speech-democratic-national-convention/) Kerry broached the issue because of the constant attacks on the patriotism of Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama. At the most basic level, many of the attacks questioned whether Obama was even an American. Internet rumours persisted that Obama was a Muslim who was not even an American citizen. The attacks intensified when the Obamas’ pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, came under fire for comments made during a sermon in which he stated “God damn America.” As a result, Obama was forced to distance himself from his pastor and his church. Obama was also criticised for not wearing a United States flag lapel pin. When Michelle Obama stated for the “first time [she was] proud of her country” for its willingness to embrace change in February of 2008, Cindy McCain responded that she “had always been proud of her country” with the implication being, of course, a lack of patriotism on the part of Michelle Obama. Even the 13 July 2008 cover of the liberal New Yorker portrayed the couple as flag-burning Muslim terrorists. During the 2008 election campaign, McCain has attempted to appeal to patriotism in a number of ways. First, McCain’s POW experience in Vietnam has been front and centre as he touts his experience in foreign policy. Second, the slogan of the campaign is “Country First” implying that the Obama campaign does not put the United States first. Third, McCain’s running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, insisted in a speech on 4 October 2008, that Barack Obama has been “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” Her reference was to Obama’s acquaintance, Bill Ayers, who was involved in a series of Vietnam era bombings; the implication, however, was that Obama has terrorist ties and is unpatriotic. Palin stood behind her comments even though several major news organisations had concluded that the relationship was not significant as Ayers’ terrorist activities occurred when Obama was eight-years-old. This recent example is illustrative of Republican attempts to question the patriotism of Democrats for their electoral advantage. Country music has again sided with the Republicans particularly with Raising McCain. However, the Democrats may have realised the potential of the genre as Obama chose Only in America as the song played after his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. He has also attempted to reach rural voters by starting his post-convention campaign in Bristol, Virginia, a small, conservative town. Conclusion Thus, in the wake of 9/11, Republicans seized the opportunity to control the culture through fear and patriotic fervour. They were facilitated in this endeavor by the country music industry with songs that that would questions the motives, defence of “country,” and patriotism, of anyone who would question the Bush administration. This alliance between country music and the right is an historically strong one, and we recommend more research on this vital topic. While this election may indeed be a referendum on the war, it has been influenced by an economic downturn as well. Ultimately, Democrats will have to convince rural voters that they share their values; they don’t have the same edge as Republicans without the reliance of country music. However, the dynamic of country music has changed to somewhat reflect the war fatigue since the 2004 campaign. The Angry American, Toby Keith, has admitted that he is actually a Democrat, and country music listeners have grown tired of the “barrage of pro-troop sentiment,” especially since the summer of 2005 (Willman 115). As Joe Galante, the chief of the RCA family of labels in Nashville, stated, “It’s the relatability. Kerry never really spent time listening to some of those people” (Willman 201). Bill Clinton, a Southern governor, certainly had relatability, carrying the normally red states and overcoming the honky-tonk gap, and Obama has seen the benefit of country music by playing it as the grand finale of the Democratic Convention. Nevertheless, we recommend more research on the “melodrama” theory of the Presidency as the dynamics of the relationship between the Presidency and the country music genre are currently evolving. References Andreson, Lee. Battle Notes: Music of the Vietnam War. 2nd ed. Superior, WI: Savage Press, 2003. Anker, Elisabeth. “Villains, Victims and Heroes: Melodrama, Media and September 11th.” Journal of Communication. 55.1 (2005): 22-37. Baker, Peter and David Brown. “Bush Tries to Tone Down High-Pitched Debate on Iraq.” Monday, 21November 2005, Page A04. washingtonpost.com Beamish, Thomas D., Harvey Molotch, and Richard Flacks. “Who Supports the Troops? Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Making of Collective Memory.” Social Problems. 42.3 (1995): 344-60. Brooks and Dunn. Only in America. Arista Records, 2003. Bufwack, Mary A. and Robert K. Oermann. Finding Her Voice The Saga of Women in Country Music. New York: Crown Publishers, 1993. Dixie Chicks. “Travelin Soldier.” Home. Columbia. 27 August 2002. Firestein, David J. “The Honky-Tonk Gap.” Vital Speeches of the Day. 72.3 (2006): 83-88. Jackson, Alan. Where Were You? (When the World Stopped Turning) Very Best of Alan Jackson. Nashville: Arista, 2004. Keith, Toby. Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American). Nashville: Dreamworks. November 9, 2004. Olson, Scott. “Chicago remembers war dead with 500 pairs of empty boots.” 22 January 2004. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-01-22-chicago-boots_x.htm O’Neill, John E. and Jerome L. Corsi. “Unfit for Command Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.” Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. and Peter Di Maggio. “From Region to Class, the Changing Locus of Country Music. A Test of the Massification Hypothesis.” Social Forces. 53.3 (1975): 497-506. Rich, John. Raising McCain. Production information unavailable. Sampert, Shannon, and Natasja Treiberg. “The Reification of the ?American Soldier?: Popular Culture, American Foreign Policy, and Country Music.” Paper presented at the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Chicago, Illinois, United States, 28 February 2007. Smith, Craig Allen. “President Bush’s Enthymeme of Evil: The Amalgamation of 9/11, Iraq, and Moral Values.” American Behavioral Scientist. 49 (2005): 32-47. Steinhauser, Paul. “Poll: More disapprove of Bush that any other president.” Politics Cnn.politics.com. 1 May 2008. Stuckey, Mary E. Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2004. Sullivan, John L., Amy Fried, Mary G. Dietz. 1992. “Patriotism, Politics, and the Presidential Election of 1988.” American Journal of Political Science. 36.1 (1992): 200-234. Willman, Chris. Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music. New York: The New Press, 2005. Worley, Darryl. Have You Forgotten? Nashville: Dreamworks, 2003.

Poor crop establishment is one of the major constraints to obtain the higher potential of rice, particularly in areas prone to environmental stresses. Therefore, present study was conducted to evaluate the effects of potassium nitrate on germination dynamics, seedling growth and associated physiological and biochemical events of two rice cultivars. For this purpose, various seed priming treatments were tested in lab and greenhouse. The percent concentrations of potassium nitrate were 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, 1.0 and 1.25 in both lab evaluation and greenhouse experiment. Non-primed seeds were maintained as a control for comparison. The results depicted that soaking rice seeds at higher concentrations of KNO3 could delay emergence time and final emergence (%) in both cultivars under lab and greenhouse conditions. Seed priming with 0.75% KNO3 significantly increased the stand establishment and seedling vigor attributes of both cultivars compared with other concentrations and naked rice seeds both in lab evaluation and greenhouse screening. Similarly, highest values for photosynthesis rate, evaporation rate and CO2 index were observed in experimental units receiving primed seeds with 0.75% KNO3 under greenhouse screening. Interestingly, no variance was observed among both rice cultivars. Overall, higher seed emergence, seedling vigor and associated biochemical attributes due to seed priming with 0.75% KNO3 was associated with decrease in alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) and pyruvate decarboxylase (PDH) activities in lab and greenhouse screening. Keywords: Seed priming, potassium nitrate, seed quality, stand establishment, vigor Introduction Rice is an important cereal crop that serve as staple food for almost half of the world population (Chun et al. 2020; Zafar et al. 2020). Its germination is affected under various environmental stresses which causes poor yield (Zafar et al. 2015; Zafar et al. 2018). Poor germination is the problem often faced by different farmers of rice, especially when the seed is broadcasted in dry condition. Under unfavorable and harsh environmental condition, seed priming method is the best technique which help the seed to germinate easily. It enhances the germination chances and boost up the process (Ahmed et al., 2019), and is a cheaper solution to overcome poor stand establishment (Farooq et al., 2009; Harris et al., 1999). It has been reported that the seed priming is very helpful in improving germination rate of many crops i.e., rice, wheat, maize and canola (Basra et al., 2005). The germination percentage and dry weight of seedlings of safflower was increased by seed priming (Razaji et al., 2012). It has been reported that the inferior quality of wheat could also grow well after seed priming (Hussian et al., 2013). Increase in germination rate, uniformity in process, improved plant growth and yield, and better physiological performance are included in the beneficial aspects of seed priming (Farooq et al., 2007; Ruan et al., 2002). The seed priming principle is based on the behavior of seed towards water absorption; water is very important factor for seed germination and growth. The water intake of seed is divided into three phases. First phase includes the intake of water by seed and activation of enzymes. In 2nd phase, after activation of enzymes, several processes such as food deprivation, cell membrane restructuring and biosynthesis of starch occur to support seedling and root growth. In final phase, the growth of root and shoot organs i.e., radicle and plumule takes place (Bewley et al., 2013). There are three categories of seed priming techniques; (1) hydro-priming – priming with simple water, (2) solid-matrix priming – priming with solid organic material and (3) osmopriming – priming with priming solutions e.g., potassium nitrate (KNO3), potassium chloride (KCl) and polyethylene glycol (PEG) (McKersie, 2002; Mohammadi, 2009). PEG and KNO3 are commonly used in priming studies, but PEG is more expensive than KNO3. In a previous study, it was demonstrated that the osmopriming of seed of soybean with KNO3 at the concentration of 6 g/L increased the germination percentage and dry weight of seedling (Ahmadvand et al., 2012). Similarly, seed priming with 1.0% KNO3 for 24 h at 20°C enhance the germination rate and improved the physiological quality of soybean (Mohammadi, 2009). Moreover, it has also been reported that the seed priming could improve the protein synthesis during early growth of embryo (Xu et al., 2009). Here in this study, the aim was to evaluate the effect of seed priming with different concentrations of KNO3 (0.25%, 0.50%, 0.75%, 1.0% and 1.25% (w/v) KNO3 for 1 day at 25°C) on the stand establishment, seedling vigor, physiological and biochemical attributes of two rice cultivars. Materials and Methods Seed Source: Seed of Indica rice (Oryza sativa L.) cultivars viz., Basmati-515 and Basmati-385 were obtained from Rice Research Institute, Kala Shah Kaku, Punjab, Pakistan. The initial germination and seed moisture content prior to seed treatment was ˃80% and 12% respectively on dry weight basis. Seed Priming Treatments: Rice seeds were primed with 0.25%, 0.50%, 0.75%, 1.0% and 1.25% (w/v) KNO3 for 24 h at 25°C. Pre-weighed seeds (5g) were placed on two blotter papers in 9-cm diameter petri dishes saturated with appropriate concentration of osmotic solutions followed by covering of dishes with aluminum foil. Non-primed rice seeds were maintained as control for comparison. Seeds were stored at -4°C in paper bags, prior to experimentation. Experimental Site and Conditions: Lab experiment was conducted in the growth chamber of Seed Preservation Lab, National Agricultural Research Centre, Islamabad, Pakistan during September 2019 to October 2019. While, greenhouse experiment was conducted at the research station of National Agricultural Research Centre, Islamabad, Pakistan during September 2019 to November 2019. Well pulverized soil was collected from the field of research station and each plastic pot 35cm×25cm×15cm in size was filled with 6kg of soil. After leveling the soil surface in each pot, moisture was applied up to field capacity. In each pot, 40 seeds were equally sown on the soil surface in both experiments. Both experiments were laid out in a completely randomized design with four replications. For lab screening, all the trays were placed in the growth chamber with a constant temperature of 25°C and a light period of 12h. The relative humidity during the complete execution of lab experiment was maintained at 65%. For greenhouse experiment, all the trays were placed in greenhouse under natural environmental conditions. Moisture was applied to each try when declined. Stand Establishment: Emergence was recorded on daily basis until a constant was achieved. Final emergence (%) was taken at the end of experiment (AOSA, 1990). Mean emergence time (days) was recorded as per the equation of ISTA (2015). Seedling Vigor: Seedling length of five randomly selected from each treatment was measured with the help of measuring tape and averaged to get mean length. Similarly, fresh and dry weight of these plants was measured on a weighing balance. For dry weight, plants were dried at 70°C till constant weight in an oven (Zafar et al., 2015). Physiological Parameters: Measurements of CO2 index (µmol mol-1), net photosynthetic rate (µmol CO2 m-2 s-1) and evaporation rate (µmol H2O m-2 s-1) were made on a fully expanded leaf from top by using an open system LCA-4 ADC (USA) portable infrared gas analyzer. Biochemical Attributes: To determine the activities of alcohol dehydrogenase and pyruvate decarboxylase, seedling samples were ground and detected by an alcohol dehydrogenase assay kit and a pyruvate decarboxylase test kit. Statistical Analysis: The data from growth chamber and greenhouse experiments are presented as the mean value ± standard error of four replicates. By using Statistix 9.0, analysis of variance for all the treatments was performed. Graphical presentation of data was performed by using SigmaPlot 14.0. Results Lab Screening Stand Establishment: Seed priming treatments maximally improved the final emergence (%) of both rice cultivars under well-controlled conditions. Highest values for final emergence (%) were recorded in experimental units (Cultivar 1 (V1)=96%, Cultivar 2 (V2)=98%) receiving rice seed primed with 0.75% KNO3 as compared to control. Seed priming with 1% KNO3 was also proved to be beneficial in both cultivars (V1=89%, V2=90%) for improving final emergence (%). No variance in final emergence was observed among experimental units receiving rice seed primed 0.50% and 1% KNO3 in V2 cultivar (Fig. 1a). Similarly, minimum mean emergence time (MET) was recorded in rice seeds primed with 0.75% followed by 1% KNO3. Highest values for MET was recorded in control in both cultivars (Fig. 1b). Collectively, statistical analysis of data revealed that seed primed with KNO3 proved better in improving stand establishment of both rice cultivars as compared to control. Seedling Vigor: Seedling length of both rice cultivars is graphically presented in Fig. 2a and data revealed that maximum seedling vigor in both cultivars was achieved in rice seeds primed with 0.75% (V1=8.10cm, V2=8.24cm) followed by 1% (V1=7.88cm, V2=7.91cm) and 0.50% (V1=7.43cm, V2=7.69cm) KNO3 solutions as compared to control (V1=6.83cm, V2=6.71cm) (Fig. 2a). Seed priming with KNO3 also proved effective in improving the seedling fresh and dry weight, nonetheless effect of different cultivars was not pronounced. Plants in both cultivars raised from seeds treated with 0.75% KNO3 depicted highest values for seedling fresh (V1=34.45mg, V2=37.67mg) (Fig. 2b) and dry weight (V1=18.12mg, V2=19.01mg) as compared to other treatments and control (Fig. 2c). No apparent difference in seedling fresh and dry weight was observed among rice seed treated with 0.50% and 1.0% KNO3 in both cultivars. Greenhouse Screening Stand Establishment: A variable trend of primed and non-primed final emergence (%) was observed in both cultivars under greenhouse screening. Rice seed in both cultivars treated with 0.75% KNO3 steadily depicted highest values for final emergence (V1=95%, V2=98%), while an opposite drift was examined in control (V1=77%, V2=80%). Rice seeds treated with 1% KNO3 also proved to be successful in both cultivars (V1=88%, V2=91%) for improving final emergence (%) under greenhouse conditions. No variance in final emergence was observed among experimental units receiving rice seed primed 0.50% and 1% KNO3 in both cultivars (Fig. 3a). However, minimum mean emergence time (MET) was recorded in rice seeds primed with 0.75% followed by 1% KNO3 in both cultivars compared to other treatments and control. In addition, both cultivars showed highest values for MET in experimental units receiving control (Fig. 3b). Seedling Vigor: Statistical analysis of data pertaining to seedling vigor depicted that the effect of seed priming treatments was significant in both cultivars. However, both cultivars did not exhibit pronounced effect on seedling vigor. All priming treatments significantly improved the seedling length in both cultivars, whereas maximum seedling was achieved in rice seed primed with 0.75% (V1=7.90cm, V2=8.09cm) followed by 1% (V1=7.65cm, V2=7.74cm) KNO3 solutions. Furthermore, lowest vales for seedling length in both cultivars was observed in control (V1=6.41cm, V2=6.51cm) (Fig. 3a). Plants in both cultivars raised from seeds treated with 0.75% KNO3 depicted highest values for seedling fresh (V1=33.45mg, V2=36.54mg) (Fig. 3b) and dry weight (V1=16.78mg, V2=19.99mg) as compared to other treatments and control (Fig. 3c). Overall, statistical analysis of data revealed that seed priming with 0.75% KNO3 proved successful in improving seedling vigor of both rice cultivars as compared to other treatments and control. Physiological and Biochemical Attributes: Analysis of variance of data showed that seed priming treatments significantly improved the physiological and biochemical attributes of both cultivars, while effect of cultivars was not significant. Highest photosynthesis rate, evaporation rate and CO2 were observed in rice seeds treated with 0.75% KNO3, whereas lowest values were examined in non-treated control. Statistical analysis of data demonstrated that PDH and ADH activities were significantly influenced by seed priming treatments. Though all the seed priming treatments proved successful for improving the biochemical attributes however lowest values were observed in experimental units receiving rice seed treated with 0.75% KNO3 under greenhouse screening. Highest values for PDH and ADH activities were observed in control (Table 1). Figure 3. Effect of seed priming with KNO3 on stand establishment of two rice cultivars in greenhouse. V1=Basmati-515, V2=Basmati=385: T0=Control, T1=0.25% KNO3, T2=0.50% KNO3, T3=0.75% KNO3, T4=1.0% KNO3, T5=1.25% KNO3. Seedling Vigor: Statistical analysis of data pertaining to seedling vigor depicted that the effect of seed priming treatments was significant in both cultivars. However, both cultivars did not exhibit pronounced effect on seedling vigor. All priming treatments significantly improved the seedling length in both cultivars, whereas maximum seedling was achieved in rice seed primed with 0.75% (V1=7.90cm, V2=8.09cm) followed by 1% (V1=7.65cm, V2=7.74cm) KNO3 solutions. Furthermore, lowest vales for seedling length in both cultivars was observed in control (V1=6.41cm, V2=6.51cm) (Fig. 4a). Plants in both cultivars raised from seeds treated with 0.75% KNO3 depicted highest values for seedling fresh (V1=33.45mg, V2=36.54mg) (Fig. 4b) and dry weight (V1=16.78mg, V2=19.99mg) as compared to other treatments and control (Fig. 4c). Overall, statistical analysis of data revealed that seed priming with 0.75% KNO3 proved successful in improving seedling vigor of both rice cultivars as compared to other treatments and control. Figure 4. Seedling vigor attributes of two cultivars of rice under the influence of seed priming with KNO3 in greenhouse. V1=Basmati-515, V2=Basmati=385: T0=Control, T1=0.25% KNO3, T2=0.50% KNO3, T3=0.75% KNO3, T4=1.0% KNO3, T5=1.25% KNO3. Table 1. Variations in physiological and biochemical attributes of two rice cultivars under the influence of seed priming with KNO3 in lab. Cultivars Treatments Physiological attributes Biochemical attributes Photosynthesis rate (µmol CO2 m-2 s-1) Evaporation rate (µmol H2O m-2 s-1) CO2 index (µmol mol-1) Alcohol dehydrogenase (Ug-1 FW) Pyruvate decarboxylase (U g -1 FW) Basmati-515 T0 10.67±0.05 c 0.91±0.09 c 120.33±5.5 d 1.72±0.09 a 1.62±0.09 a T1 12.67±0.08 bc 1.09±0.09 bc 131.33±6.2 cd 1.44±0.07 ab 1.33±0.05 ab T2 14.83±0.06 abc 1.31±0.08 b 148.33±5.2 bc 1.29±0.06 bc 1.17±0.08 bc T3 17.67±0.04 a 1.72±0.06 a 172.00±5.3 a 1.11±0.08 c 1.02±0.04 c T4 15.83±0.06 ab 1.40±0.06 ab 154.33±4.8 ab 1.33±0.06 bc 1.24±0.07 bc T5 14.00±0.07 abc 1.33±0.08 b 142.67±4.8 bc 1.54±0.09 ab 1.43±0.06 ab LSD at p≤0.05 1.23 0.31 18.71 0.31 0.29 Basmati-385 T0 9.69±0.05 c 1.02±0.08 c 122.33±5.12 c 1.82±0.08 a 1.73±0.08 a T1 11.63±0.08 bc 1.19±0.06 bc 132.67±5.98 bc 1.51±0.09 abc 1.42±0.09 abc T2 13.89±0.06 abc 1.39±0.09 b 152.33±4.82 ab 1.40±0.08 bc 1.29±0.08 bc T3 16.64±0.04 a 1.81±0.05 a 174.00±5.83 a 1.22±0.05 c 1.10±0.05 c T4 14.88±0.06 ab 1.51±0.07 ab 155.33±4.89 ab 1.43±0.06 bc 1.31±0.06 bc T5 13.01±0.07 abc 1.40±0.05 b 144.00±5.01 bc 1.65±0.07 ab 1.56±0.07 ab LSD at p≤0.05 1.03 0.34 28.00 0.32 0.31 Discussion Osmopriming of seed by KNO3 affected the seed emergence and the speed of seed germination. Osmopriming induces the reduction in intake of water in phase-I of germination, causing prolonged duration of phase-2, resulting commencement of major event before the emergence of radicle (Nonogaki and Nonogaki, 2016). This major event includes metabolic changes such as repair of DNA and increase in biosynthesis of RNA (Bray, 2017), and enhancement in the respiration process of seed (Singh et al., 2013). It indicates that the time of seed imbibition is very important for osmopriming. For the study of osmopriming of rice (Oryza sativa L.) seed with different levels of KNO3, therefore it is important to know about the emergence percentage and mean emergence time (MET). The results of present study indicate that the performance of osmopriming of both cultivars of rice with 0.75% KNO3 was appreciable in lab screening as well as greenhouse (Fig. 1 and 3). The pattern of seedling emergence (%) and MET was almost same in both cultivars as well as both sites (lab and greenhouse). The time of water intake by the seed during priming can very within the cultivars which can affect the performance of osmoticum (KNO3) (Kiers et al., 2008), but in our study the difference between the performance of both cultivars was non-significant. Emergence of the seed is the stage where it is determined that either the seedling will further grow or not. The emergence percentage is calculated from the number of emerged seedlings from number of primed seeds sown (International Seed Testing Association, 2015). The data shown in figure 1 and 3 depicts that the osmopriming of rice seed with 0.75% KNO3 is better than all other treatments in term of emergence percentage and MET. Our study is in correspondence with another study who revealed that emergence percentage of wheat seed was decreased with the increase in KNO3 concentration (Shafiei Abnavi and Ghobadi, 2012). This indicates that the KNO3 concentration above than a certain level may not be appropriate for cereals. Osmopriming with 1% KNO3 was found useful in term of emergence percentage in sorghum (Shehzad et al., 2012). Besides, soybean seed priming with 1% KNO3 for 1 day enhanced the emergence percentage as compared to untreated seeds, both in lab and field experiments (Mohammadi, 2009). Seedling vigor is the combine result of the emerged seeds in a wide range of biotic and abiotic factors (International Seed Testing Association, 2015). Seedling vigor is not a single measurable entity, but it is a sum of many growth parameters such as seedling length, seedling fresh weight and seedling dry weight (International Seed Testing Association, 2015). Maximum vigor was observed when seed priming with 0.75% KNO3 was done (Fig. 2 and 4). Our study is in line with another study in which seedling vigor of wheat was improved by the priming with KNO3 (Shafiei Abnavi and Ghobadi, 2012). Similar results were found in corn when the osmopriming of seed was done with 1% KNO3 (Hadinezhad et al., 2013). Our findings are similar with other studies, in which the shoot length of tomato and watermelon was increased by the osmopriming with KNO3 (Demir and Van De Venter, 1999; Mirabi & Hasanabadi, 2012). Seed priming with KNO3 can cause significant increase in seedling vigor of wheat crop as compared to hydro-priming or dry broadcasting (Basra et al., 2003). The growth and development of plant is based upon a process; photosynthesis. While its performance is mostly dependent on the opening/closing of stomata, causing decrease in photosynthetic rate, respiration rate and CO2 index (Shu et al., 2016). The results of present study revealed that the maximum photosynthesis rate, evaporation rate and CO2 index was observed in the rice seeds which were primed with 0.75% KNO3 (Table 1). Whereas the seedlings of control treatments showed inferior results as compared to other osmopriming treatments. Our study is in corroboration with another study in which the increased photosynthetic rate, respiration rate and CO2 index of cucumber seedlings as the result of seed priming with KNO3 was reported (Anwar et al., 2020). Photosynthesis rate of the seedlings has a positive correlation with the growth of seedling (Anwar et al., 2020). A previous study indicated that the leaf nitrogen and chlorophyll contents have a positive correlation, and can derive the photosynthesis rate being a key molecule for photosynthesis (De Castro et al., 2014). The results of present study revealed that the biochemical attributes e.g. alcohol dehydrogenase (Ug-1 FW) and pyruvate decarboxylase (Ug-1 FW) of rice were suppressed by osmopriming of seed with KNO3. Maximum suppression was observed in those seedlings who were treated with 0.75%% KNO3, while minimum suppression was seen in non-primed seedlings. A previous study expressed that seed priming with potassium nitrate (KNO3) improved the biochemical indices of Chicory (Cichorium intybus L.) (Dehkordi et al., 2012). Conclusion Good quality seed is always in demand by the farmers and seed industry. Therefore, present study was conducted to improve the rice seed quality by seed priming with KNO3. The results depicted that seed priming with 0.75% KNO3 proved successful in improving stand establishment, vigor and physiological attributes. The improved performance might by linked with better activities of ADH and PDH. Therefore, present research provides basis for further transcriptomics/metabolomics/proteomics basis of primed seeds with KNO3

Background “The sense of taste,” write Nelson and colleagues in a 2002 issue of Nature, “provides animals with valuable information about the nature and quality of food. Mammals can recognize and respond to a diverse repertoire of chemical entities, including sugars, salts, acids and a wide range of toxic substances” (199). The authors go on to argue that several amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—taste delicious to humans and that “having a taste pathway dedicated to their detection probably had significant evolutionary implications”. They imply, but do not specify, that the evolutionary implications are positive. This may be the case with some amino acids, but contemporary tastes, and changes in them, are far from universally beneficial. Indeed, this article argues that modern food production shapes and distorts human taste with significant implications for health and wellbeing. Take the western taste for fried chipped potatoes, for example. According to Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, “In 1960, the typical American ate eighty-one pounds of fresh potatoes and about four pounds of frozen french fries. Today [2002] the typical American eats about forty-nine pounds of fresh potatoes every year—and more than thirty pounds of frozen french fries” (115). Nine-tenths of these chips are consumed in fast food restaurants which use mass-manufactured potato-based frozen products to provide this major “foodservice item” more quickly and cheaply than the equivalent dish prepared from raw ingredients. These choices, informed by human taste buds, have negative evolutionary implications, as does the apparently long-lasting consumer preference for fried goods cooked in trans-fats. “Numerous foods acquire their elastic properties (i.e., snap, mouth-feel, and hardness) from the colloidal fat crystal network comprised primarily of trans- and saturated fats. These hardstock fats contribute, along with numerous other factors, to the global epidemics related to metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease,” argues Michael A. Rogers (747). Policy makers and public health organisations continue to compare notes internationally about the best ways in which to persuade manufacturers and fast food purveyors to reduce the use of these trans-fats in their products (L’Abbé et al.), however, most manufacturers resist. Hank Cardello, a former fast food executive, argues that “many products are designed for ‘high hedonic value’, with carefully balanced combinations of salt, sugar and fat that, experience has shown, induce people to eat more” (quoted, Trivedi 41). Fortunately for the manufactured food industry, salt and sugar also help to preserve food, effectively prolonging the shelf life of pre-prepared and packaged goods. Physiological Factors As Glanz et al. discovered when surveying 2,967 adult Americans, “taste is the most important influence on their food choices, followed by cost” (1118). A person’s taste is to some extent an individual response to food stimuli, but the tongue’s taste buds respond to five basic categories of food: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. ‘Umami’ is a Japanese word indicating “delicious savoury taste” (Coughlan 11) and it is triggered by the amino acid glutamate. Japanese professor Kikunae Ikeda identified glutamate while investigating the taste of a particular seaweed which he believed was neither sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. When Ikeda combined the glutamate taste essence with sodium he formed the food additive sodium glutamate, which was patented in 1908 and subsequently went into commercial production (Japan Patent Office). Although individual, a person’s taste preferences are by no means fixed. There is ample evidence that people’s tastes are being distorted by modern food marketing practices that process foods to make them increasingly appealing to the average palate. In particular, this industrialisation of food promotes the growth of a snack market driven by salty and sugary foods, popularly constructed as posing a threat to health and wellbeing. “[E]xpanding waistlines [are] fuelled by a boom in fast food and a decline in physical activity” writes Stark, who reports upon the 2008 launch of a study into Australia’s future ‘fat bomb’. As Deborah Lupton notes, such reports were a particular feature of the mid 2000s when: intense concern about the ‘obesity epidemic’ intensified and peaked. Time magazine named 2004 ‘The Year of Obesity’. That year the World Health Organization’s Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health was released and the [US] Centers for Disease Control predicted that a poor diet and lack of exercise would soon claim more lives than tobacco-related disease in the United States. (4) The American Heart Association recommends eating no more than 1500mg of salt per day (Hamzelou 11) but salt consumption in the USA averages more than twice this quantity, at 3500mg per day (Bernstein and Willett 1178). In the UK, a sustained campaign and public health-driven engagement with food manufacturers by CASH—Consensus Action on Salt and Health—resulted in a reduction of between 30 and 40 percent of added salt in processed foods between 2001 and 2011, with a knock-on 15 percent decline in the UK population’s salt intake overall. This is the largest reduction achieved by any developed nation (Brinsden et al.). “According to the [UK’s] National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), this will have reduced [UK] stroke and heart attack deaths by a minimum of 9,000 per year, with a saving in health care costs of at least £1.5bn a year” (MacGregor and Pombo). Whereas there has been some success over the past decade in reducing the amount of salt consumed, in the Western world the consumption of sugar continues to rise, as a graph cited in the New Scientist indicates (O’Callaghan). Regular warnings that sugar is associated with a range of health threats and delivers empty calories devoid of nutrition have failed to halt the increase in sugar consumption. Further, although some sugar is a natural product, processed foods tend to use a form invented in 1957: high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). “HFCS is a gloopy solution of glucose and fructose” writes O’Callaghan, adding that it is “as sweet as table sugar but has typically been about 30% cheaper”. She cites Serge Ahmed, a French neuroscientist, as arguing that in a world of food sufficiency people do not need to consume more, so they need to be enticed to overeat by making food more pleasurable. Ahmed was part of a team that ran an experiment with cocaine-addicted rats, offering them a mutually exclusive choice between highly-sweetened water and cocaine: Our findings clearly indicate that intense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward, even in drug-sensitized and -addicted individuals. We speculate that the addictive potential of intense sweetness results from an inborn hypersensitivity to sweet tastants. In most mammals, including rats and humans, sweet receptors evolved in ancestral environments poor in sugars and are thus not adapted to high concentrations of sweet tastants. The supranormal stimulation of these receptors by sugar-rich diets, such as those now widely available in modern societies, would generate a supranormal reward signal in the brain, with the potential to override self-control mechanisms and thus lead to addiction. (Lenoir et al.) The Tongue and the Brain One of the implications of this research about the mammalian desire for sugar is that our taste for food is about more than how these foods actually taste in the mouth on our tongues. It is also about the neural response to the food we eat. The taste of French fries thus also includes that “snap, mouth-feel, and hardness” and the “colloidal fat crystal network” (Rogers, “Novel Structuring” 747). While there is no taste receptor for fats, these nutrients have important effects upon the brain. Wang et al. offered rats a highly fatty, but palatable, diet and allowed them to eat freely. 33 percent of the calories in the food were delivered via fat, compared with 21 percent in a normal diet. The animals almost doubled their usual calorific intake, both because the food had a 37 percent increased calorific content and also because the rats ate 47 percent more than was standard (2786). The research team discovered that in as little as three days the rats “had already lost almost all of their ability to respond to leptin” (Martindale 27). Leptin is a hormone that acts on the brain to communicate feelings of fullness, and is thus important in assisting animals to maintain a healthy body weight. The rats had also become insulin resistant. “Severe resistance to the metabolic effects of both leptin and insulin ensued after just 3 days of overfeeding” (Wang et al. 2786). Fast food restaurants typically offer highly palatable, high fat, high sugar, high salt, calorific foods which can deliver 130 percent of a day’s recommended fat intake, and almost a day’s worth of an adult man’s calories, in one meal. The impacts of maintaining such a diet over a comparatively short time-frame have been recorded in documentaries such as Super Size Me (Spurlock). The after effects of what we widely call “junk food” are also evident in rat studies. Neuroscientist Paul Kenny, who like Ahmed was investigating possible similarities between food- and cocaine-addicted rats, allowed his animals unlimited access to both rat ‘junk food’ and healthy food for rats. He then changed their diets. “The rats with unlimited access to junk food essentially went on a hunger strike. ‘It was as if they had become averse to healthy food’, says Kenny. It took two weeks before the animals began eating as much [healthy food] as those in the control group” (quoted, Trivedi 40). Developing a taste for certain food is consequently about much more than how they taste in the mouth; it constitutes an individual’s response to a mixture of taste, hormonal reactions and physiological changes. Choosing Health Glanz et al. conclude their study by commenting that “campaigns attempting to change people’s perception of the importance of nutrition will be interpreted in terms of existing values and beliefs. A more promising strategy might be to stress the good taste of healthful foods” (1126). Interestingly, this is the strategy already adopted by some health-focused cookbooks. I have 66 cookery books in my kitchen. None of ten books sampled from the five spaces in which these books are kept had ‘taste’ as an index entry, but three books had ‘taste’ in their titles: The Higher Taste, Taste of Life, and The Taste of Health. All three books seek to promote healthy eating, and they all date from the mid-1980s. It might be that taste is not mentioned in cookbook indexes because it is a sine qua non: a focus upon taste is so necessary and fundamental to a cookbook that it goes without saying. Yet, as the physiological evidence makes clear, what we find palatable is highly mutable, varying between people, and capable of changing significantly in comparatively short periods of time. The good news from the research studies is that the changes wrought by high salt, high sugar, high fat diets need not be permanent. Luciano Rossetti, one of the authors on Wang et al’s paper, told Martindale that the physiological changes are reversible, but added a note of caution: “the fatter a person becomes the more resistant they will be to the effects of leptin and the harder it is to reverse those effects” (27). Morgan Spurlock’s experience also indicates this. In his case it took the actor/director 14 months to lose the 11.1 kg (13 percent of his body mass) that he gained in the 30 days of his fast-food-only experiment. Trivedi was more fortunate, stating that, “After two weeks of going cold turkey, I can report I have successfully kicked my ice cream habit” (41). A reader’s letter in response to Trivedi’s article echoes this observation. She writes that “the best way to stop the craving was to switch to a diet of vegetables, seeds, nuts and fruits with a small amount of fish”, adding that “cravings stopped in just a week or two, and the diet was so effective that I no longer crave junk food even when it is in front of me” (Mackeown). Popular culture indicates a range of alternative ways to resist food manufacturers. In the West, there is a growing emphasis on organic farming methods and produce (Guthman), on sl called Urban Agriculture in the inner cities (Mason and Knowd), on farmers’ markets, where consumers can meet the producers of the food they eat (Guthrie et al.), and on the work of advocates of ‘real’ food, such as Jamie Oliver (Warrin). Food and wine festivals promote gourmet tourism along with an emphasis upon the quality of the food consumed, and consumption as a peak experience (Hall and Sharples), while environmental perspectives prompt awareness of ‘food miles’ (Weber and Matthews), fair trade (Getz and Shreck) and of land degradation, animal suffering, and the inequitable use of resources in the creation of the everyday Western diet (Dare, Costello and Green). The burgeoning of these different approaches has helped to stimulate a commensurate growth in relevant disciplinary fields such as Food Studies (Wessell and Brien). One thing that all these new ways of looking at food and taste have in common is that they are options for people who feel they have the right to choose what and when to eat; and to consume the tastes they prefer. This is not true of all groups of people in all countries. Hiding behind the public health campaigns that encourage people to exercise and eat fresh fruit and vegetables are the hidden “social determinants of health: The conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, including the health system” (WHO 45). As the definitions explain, it is the “social determinants of health [that] are mostly responsible for health iniquities” with evidence from all countries around the world demonstrating that “in general, the lower an individual’s socioeconomic position, the worse his or her health” (WHO 45). For the comparatively disadvantaged, it may not be the taste of fast food that attracts them but the combination of price and convenience. If there is no ready access to cooking facilities, or safe food storage, or if a caregiver is simply too time-poor to plan and prepare meals for a family, junk food becomes a sensible choice and its palatability an added bonus. For those with the education, desire, and opportunity to break free of the taste for salty and sugary fats, however, there are a range of strategies to achieve this. There is a persuasive array of evidence that embracing a plant-based diet confers a multitude of health benefits for the individual, for the planet and for the animals whose lives and welfare would otherwise be sacrificed to feed us (Green, Costello and Dare). Such a choice does involve losing the taste for foods which make up the lion’s share of the Western diet, but any sense of deprivation only lasts for a short time. The fact is that our sense of taste responds to the stimuli offered. It may be that, notwithstanding the desires of Jamie Oliver and the like, a particular child never will never get to like broccoli, but it is also the case that broccoli tastes differently to me, seven years after becoming a vegan, than it ever did in the years in which I was omnivorous. When people tell me that they would love to adopt a plant-based diet but could not possibly give up cheese, it is difficult to reassure them that the pleasure they get now from that specific cocktail of salty fats will be more than compensated for by the sheer exhilaration of eating crisp, fresh fruits and vegetables in the future. Conclusion For decades, the mass market food industry has tweaked their products to make them hyper-palatable and difficult to resist. They do this through marketing experiments and consumer behaviour research, schooling taste buds and brains to anticipate and relish specific cocktails of sweet fats (cakes, biscuits, chocolate, ice cream) and salty fats (chips, hamburgers, cheese, salted nuts). They add ingredients to make these products stimulate taste buds more effectively, while also producing cheaper items with longer life on the shelves, reducing spoilage and the complexity of storage for retailers. Consumers are trained to like the tastes of these foods. Bitter, sour, and umami receptors are comparatively under-stimulated, with sweet, salty, and fat-based tastes favoured in their place. Western societies pay the price for this learned preference in high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and obesity. Public health advocate Bruce Neal and colleagues, working to reduce added salt in processed foods, note that the food and manufacturing industries can now provide most of the calories that the world needs to survive. “The challenge now”, they argue, “is to have these same industries provide foods that support long and healthy adult lives. And in this regard there remains a very considerable way to go”. If the public were to believe that their sense of taste is mutable and has been distorted for corporate and industrial gain, and if they were to demand greater access to natural foods in their unprocessed state, then that journey towards a healthier future might be far less protracted than these and many other researchers seem to believe. References Bernstein, Adam, and Walter Willett. “Trends in 24-Hr Sodium Excretion in the United States, 1957–2003: A Systematic Review.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 92 (2010): 1172–1180. Bhaktivedanta Book Trust. 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Getz, Christy, and Aimee Shreck. “What Organic and Fair Trade Labels Do Not Tell Us: Towards a Place‐Based Understanding of Certification.” International Journal of Consumer Studies 30.5 (2006): 490–501. Glanz, Karen, Michael Basil, Edward Maibach, Jeanne Goldberg, & Dan Snyder. “Why Americans Eat What They Do: Taste, Nutrition, Cost, Convenience, and Weight Control Concerns as Influences on Food Consumption.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 98.10 (1988): 1118–1126. Green, Lelia, Leesa Costello, and Julie Dare. “Veganism, Health Expectancy, and the Communication of Sustainability.” Australian Journal of Communication 37.3 (2010): 87–102 Guthman, Julie. Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: U of California P, 2004 Guthrie, John, Anna Guthrie, Rob Lawson, & Alan Cameron. “Farmers’ Markets: The Small Business Counter-Revolution in Food Production and Retailing.” British Food Journal 108.7 (2006): 560–573. 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MacGregor, Graham, and Sonia Pombo. “The Amount of Hidden Sugar in Your Diet Might Shock You.” The Conversation 9 January (2014). 2 Feb. 2014 ‹http://theconversation.com/the-amount-of-hidden-sugar-in-your-diet-might-shock-you-21867›. Mackeown, Elizabeth. “Cold Turkey?” [Letter]. New Scientist 2787 (2010): 31. Martindale, Diane. “Burgers on the Brain.” New Scientist 2380 (2003): 26–29. Mason, David, and Ian Knowd. “The Emergence of Urban Agriculture: Sydney, Australia.” The International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 8.1–2 (2010): 62–71. Neal, Bruce, Jacqui Webster, and Sebastien Czernichow. “Sanguine About Salt Reduction.” European Journal of Preventative Cardiology 19.6 (2011): 1324–1325. Nelson, Greg, Jayaram Chandrashekar, Mark A. Hoon, Luxin Feng, Grace Zhao, Nicholas J. P. Ryba, & Charles S. Zuker. “An Amino-Acid Taste Receptor.” Nature 416 (2002): 199–202. O’Callaghan, Tiffany. “Sugar on Trial: What You Really Need to Know.” New Scientist 2954 (2011): 34–39. 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Writing in the American Annals of the Deaf in 1931, Emil S. Ladner Jr, a Deaf high school student, predicted the invention of words on screen to facilitate access to “talkies”. He anticipated:Perhaps, in time, an invention will be perfected that will enable the deaf to hear the “talkies”, or an invention which will throw the words spoken directly under the screen as well as being spoken at the same time. (Ladner, cited in Downey Closed Captioning)This invention would eventually come to pass and be known as captions. Captions as we know them today have become widely available because of a complex interaction between technological change, volunteer effort, legislative activism, as well as increasing consumer demand. This began in the late 1950s when the technology to develop captions began to emerge. Almost immediately, volunteers began captioning and distributing both film and television in the US via schools for the deaf (Downey, Constructing Closed-Captioning in the Public Interest). Then, between the 1970s and 1990s Deaf activists and their allies began to campaign aggressively for the mandated provision of captions on television, leading eventually to the passing of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act in the US in 1990 (Ellis). This act decreed that any television with a screen greater than 13 inches must be designed/manufactured to be capable of displaying captions. The Act was replicated internationally, with countries such as Australia adopting the same requirements with their Australian standards regarding television sets imported into the country. As other papers in this issue demonstrate, this market ultimately led to the introduction of broadcasting requirements.Captions are also vital to the accessibility of videos in today’s online and streaming environment—captioning is listed as the highest priority in the definitive World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guideline’s (WCAG) 2.0 standard (W3C, “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0”). This recognition of the requirement for captions online is further reflected in legislation, from both the US 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) (2010) and from the Australian Human Rights Commission (2014).Television today is therefore much more freely available to a range of different groups. In addition to broadcast channels, captions are also increasingly available through streaming platforms such as Netflix and other subscription video on demand providers, as well as through user-generated video sites like YouTube. However, a clear discrepancy exists between guidelines, legislation and the industry’s approach. Guidelines such as the W3C are often resisted by industry until compliance is legislated.Historically, captions have been both unavailable (Ellcessor; Ellis) and inadequate (Ellis and Kent), and in many instances, they still are. For example, while the provision of captions in online video is viewed as a priority across international and domestic policies and frameworks, there is a stark contrast between the policy requirements and the practical implementation of these captions. This has led to the active development of a solution as part of an ongoing tradition of user-led development; user-generated captions. However, within disability studies, research around the agency of this activity—and the media savvy users facilitating it—has gone significantly underexplored.Agency of ActivityInformation sharing has featured heavily throughout visions of the Web—from Vannevar Bush’s 1945 notion of the memex (Bush), to the hacker ethic, to Zuckerberg’s motivations for creating Facebook in his dorm room in 2004 (Vogelstein)—resulting in a wide agency of activity on the Web. Running through this development of first the Internet and then the Web as a place for a variety of agents to share information has been the hackers’ ethic that sharing information is a powerful, positive good (Raymond 234), that information should be free (Levey), and that to achieve these goals will often involve working around intended information access protocols, sometimes illegally and normally anonymously. From the hacker culture comes the digerati, the elite of the digital world, web users who stand out by their contributions, success, or status in the development of digital technology. In the context of access to information for people with disabilities, we describe those who find these workarounds—providing access to information through mainstream online platforms that are not immediately apparent—as the disability digerati.An acknowledged mainstream member of the digerati, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, articulated a vision for the Web and its role in information sharing as inclusive of everyone:Worldwide, there are more than 750 million people with disabilities. As we move towards a highly connected world, it is critical that the Web be useable by anyone, regardless of individual capabilities and disabilities … The W3C [World Wide Web Consortium] is committed to removing accessibility barriers for all people with disabilities—including the deaf, blind, physically challenged, and cognitively or visually impaired. We plan to work aggressively with government, industry, and community leaders to establish and attain Web accessibility goals. (Berners-Lee)Berners-Lee’s utopian vision of a connected world where people freely shared information online has subsequently been embraced by many key individuals and groups. His emphasis on people with disabilities, however, is somewhat unique. While maintaining a focus on accessibility, in 2006 he shifted focus to who could actually contribute to this idea of accessibility when he suggested the idea of “community captioning” to video bloggers struggling with the notion of including captions on their videos:The video blogger posts his blog—and the web community provides the captions that help others. (Berners-Lee, cited in Outlaw)Here, Berners-Lee was addressing community captioning in the context of video blogging and user-generated content. However, the concept is equally significant for professionally created videos, and media savvy users can now also offer instructions to audiences about how to access captions and subtitles. This shift—from user-generated to user access—must be situated historically in the context of an evolving Web 2.0 and changing accessibility legislation and policy.In the initial accessibility requirements of the Web, there was little mention of captioning at all, primarily due to video being difficult to stream over a dial-up connection. This was reflected in the initial WCAG 1.0 standard (W3C, “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0”) in which there was no requirement for videos to be captioned. WCAG 2.0 went some way in addressing this, making captioning online video an essential Level A priority (W3C, “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0”). However, there were few tools that could actually be used to create captions, and little interest from emerging online video providers in making this a priority.As a result, the possibility of user-generated captions for video content began to be explored by both developers and users. One initial captioning tool that gained popularity was MAGpie, produced by the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) (WGBH). While cumbersome by today’s standards, the arrival of MAGpie 2.0 in 2002 provided an affordable and professional captioning tool that allowed people to create captions for their own videos. However, at that point there was little opportunity to caption videos online, so the focus was more on captioning personal video collections offline. This changed with the launch of YouTube in 2005 and its later purchase by Google (CNET), leading to an explosion of user-generated video content online. However, while the introduction of YouTube closed captioned video support in 2006 ensured that captioned video content could be created (YouTube), the ability for users to create captions, save the output into one of the appropriate captioning file formats, upload the captions, and synchronise the captions to the video remained a difficult task.Improvements to the production and availability of user-generated captions arrived firstly through the launch of YouTube’s automated captions feature in 2009 (Google). This service meant that videos could be uploaded to YouTube and, if the user requested it, Google would caption the video within approximately 24 hours using its speech recognition software. While the introduction of this service was highly beneficial in terms of making captioning videos easier and ensuring that the timing of captions was accurate, the quality of captions ranged significantly. In essence, if the captions were not reviewed and errors not addressed, the automated captions were sometimes inaccurate to the point of hilarity (New Media Rock Stars). These inaccurate YouTube captions are colloquially described as craptions. A #nomorecraptions campaign was launched to address inaccurate YouTube captioning and call on YouTube to make improvements.The ability to create professional user-generated captions across a variety of platforms, including YouTube, arrived in 2010 with the launch of Amara Universal Subtitles (Amara). The Amara subtitle portal provides users with the opportunity to caption online videos, even if they are hosted by another service such as YouTube. The captioned file can be saved after its creation and then uploaded to the relevant video source if the user has access to the location of the video content. The arrival of Amara continues to provide ongoing benefits—it contains a professional captioning editing suite specifically catering for online video, the tool is free, and it can caption videos located on other websites. Furthermore, Amara offers the additional benefit of being able to address the issues of YouTube automated captions—users can benefit from the machine-generated captions of YouTube in relation to its timing, then download the captions for editing in Amara to fix the issues, then return the captions to the original video, saving a significant amount of time when captioning large amounts of video content. In recent years Google have also endeavoured to simplify the captioning process for YouTube users by including its own captioning editors, but these tools are generally considered inferior to Amara (Media Access Australia).Similarly, several crowdsourced caption services such as Viki (https://www.viki.com/community) have emerged to facilitate the provision of captions. However, most of these crowdsourcing captioning services can’t tap into commercial products instead offering a service for people that have a video they’ve created, or one that already exists on YouTube. While Viki was highlighted as a useful platform in protests regarding Netflix’s lack of captions in 2009, commercial entertainment providers still have a responsibility to make improvements to their captioning. As we discuss in the next section, people have resorted extreme measures to hack Netflix to access the captions they need. While the ability for people to publish captions on user-generated content has improved significantly, there is still a notable lack of captions for professionally developed videos, movies, and television shows available online.User-Generated Netflix CaptionsIn recent years there has been a worldwide explosion of subscription video on demand service providers. Netflix epitomises the trend. As such, for people with disabilities, there has been significant focus on the availability of captions on these services (see Ellcessor, Ellis and Kent). Netflix, as the current leading provider of subscription video entertainment in both the US and with a large market shares in other countries, has been at the centre of these discussions. While Netflix offers a comprehensive range of captioned video on its service today, there are still videos that do not have captions, particularly in non-English regions. As a result, users have endeavoured to produce user-generated captions for personal use and to find workarounds to access these through the Netflix system. This has been achieved with some success.There are a number of ways in which captions or subtitles can be added to Netflix video content to improve its accessibility for individual users. An early guide in a 2011 blog post (Emil’s Celebrations) identified that when using the Netflix player using the Silverlight plug-in, it is possible to access a hidden menu which allows a subtitle file in the DFXP format to be uploaded to Netflix for playback. However, this does not appear to provide this file to all Netflix users, and is generally referred to as a “soft upload” just for the individual user. Another method to do this, generally credited as the “easiest” way, is to find a SRT file that already exists for the video title, edit the timing to line up with Netflix, use a third-party tool to convert it to the DFXP format, and then upload it using the hidden menu that requires a specific keyboard command to access. While this may be considered uncomplicated for some, there is still a certain amount of technical knowledge required to complete this action, and it is likely to be too complex for many users.However, constant developments in technology are assisting with making access to captions an easier process. Recently, Cosmin Vasile highlighted that the ability to add captions and subtitle tracks can still be uploaded providing that the older Silverlight plug-in is used for playback instead of the new HTML5 player. Others add that it is technically possible to access the hidden feature in an HTML5 player, but an additional Super Netflix browser plug-in is required (Sommergirl). Further, while the procedure for uploading the file remains similar to the approach discussed earlier, there are some additional tools available online such as Subflicks which can provide a simple online conversion of the more common SRT file format to the DFXP format (Subflicks). However, while the ability to use a personal caption or subtitle file remains, the most common way to watch Netflix videos with alternative caption or subtitle files is through the use of the Smartflix service (Smartflix). Unlike other ad-hoc solutions, this service provides a simplified mechanism to bring alternative caption files to Netflix. The Smartflix website states that the service “automatically downloads and displays subtitles in your language for all titles using the largest online subtitles database.”This automatic download and sharing of captions online—known as fansubbing—facilitates easy access for all. For example, blog posts suggest that technology such as this creates important access opportunities for people who are deaf and hard of hearing. Nevertheless, they can be met with suspicion by copyright holders. For example, a recent case in the Netherlands ruled fansubbers were engaging in illegal activities and were encouraging people to download pirated videos. While the fansubbers, like the hackers discussed earlier, argued they were acting in the greater good, the Dutch antipiracy association (BREIN) maintained that subtitles are mainly used by people downloading pirated media and sought to outlaw the manufacture and distribution of third party captions (Anthony). The fansubbers took the issue to court in order to seek clarity about whether copyright holders can reserve exclusive rights to create and distribute subtitles. However, in a ruling against the fansubbers, the court agreed with BREIN that fansubbing violated copyright and incited piracy. What impact this ruling will have on the practice of user-generated captioning online, particularly around popular sites such as Netflix, is hard to predict; however, for people with disabilities who were relying on fansubbing to access content, it is of significant concern that the contention that the main users of user-generated subtitles (or captions) are engaging in illegal activities was so readily accepted.ConclusionThis article has focused on user-generated captions and the types of platforms available to create these. It has shown that this desire to provide access, to set the information free, has resulted in the disability digerati finding workarounds to allow users to upload their own captions and make content accessible. Indeed, the Internet and then the Web as a place for information sharing is evident throughout this history of user-generated captioning online, from Berner-Lee’s conception of community captioning, to Emil and Vasile’s instructions to a Netflix community of captioners, to finally a group of fansubbers who took BRIEN to court and lost. Therefore, while we have conceived of the disability digerati as a conflation of the hacker and the acknowledged digital influencer, these two positions may again part ways, and the disability digerati may—like the hackers before them—be driven underground.Captioned entertainment content offers a powerful, even vital, mode of inclusion for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Yet, despite Berners-Lee’s urging that everything online be made accessible to people with all sorts of disabilities, captions were not addressed in the first iteration of the WCAG, perhaps reflecting the limitations of the speed of the medium itself. This continues to be the case today—although it is no longer difficult to stream video online, and Netflix have reached global dominance, audiences who require captions still find themselves fighting for access. Thus, in this sense, user-generated captions remain an important—yet seemingly technologically and legislatively complicated—avenue for inclusion.ReferencesAnthony, Sebastian. “Fan-Made Subtitles for TV Shows and Movies Are Illegal, Court Rules.” Arstechnica UK (2017). 21 May 2017 <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/fan-made-subtitles-for-tv-shows-and-movies-are-illegal/>.Amara. “Amara Makes Video Globally Accessible.” Amara (2010). 25 Apr. 2017. <https://amara.org/en/ 2010>.Berners-Lee, Tim. “World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Launches International Web Accessibility Initiative.” Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) (1997). 19 June 2010. <http://www.w3.org/Press/WAI-Launch.html>.Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic (1945). 26 June 2010 <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/1969/12/as-we-may-think/3881/>.CNET. “YouTube Turns 10: The Video Site That Went Viral.” CNET (2015). 24 Apr. 2017 <https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-turns-10-the-video-site-that-went-viral/>.Downey, Greg. Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2008.———. “Constructing Closed-Captioning in the Public Interest: From Minority Media Accessibility to Mainstream Educational Technology.” Info: The Journal of Policy, Regulation and Strategy for Telecommunications, Information and Media 9.2/3 (2007): 69–82.Ellcessor, Elizabeth. “Captions On, Off on TV, Online: Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization in Online Closed Captioning.” Television & New Media 13.4 (2012): 329-352. <http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/10/24/1527476411425251.abstract?patientinform-links=yes&legid=sptvns;51v1>.Ellis, Katie. “Television’s Transition to the Internet: Disability Accessibility and Broadband-Based TV in Australia.” Media International Australia 153 (2014): 53–63.Ellis, Katie, and Mike Kent. “Accessible Television: The New Frontier in Disability Media Studies Brings Together Industry Innovation, Government Legislation and Online Activism.” First Monday 20 (2015). <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/6170>.Emil’s Celebrations. “How to Add Subtitles to Movies Streamed in Netflix.” 16 Oct. 2011. 9 Apr. 2017 <https://emladenov.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/how-to-add-subtitles-to-movies-streamed-in-netflix/>.Google. “Automatic Captions in Youtube.” 2009. 24 Apr. 2017 <https://googleblog.blogspot.com.au/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.html>.Jaeger, Paul. “Disability and the Internet: Confronting a Digital Divide.” Disability in Society. Ed. Ronald Berger. Boulder, London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012.Levey, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. North Sebastopol: O’Teilly Media, 1984.Media Access Australia. “How to Caption a Youtube Video.” 2017. 25 Apr. 2017 <https://mediaaccess.org.au/web/how-to-caption-a-youtube-video>.New Media Rock Stars. “Youtube’s 5 Worst Hilariously Catastrophic Auto Caption Fails.” 2013. 25 Apr. 2017 <http://newmediarockstars.com/2013/05/youtubes-5-worst-hilariously-catastrophic-auto-caption-fails/>.Outlaw. “Berners-Lee Applies Web 2.0 to Improve Accessibility.” Outlaw News (2006). 25 June 2010 <http://www.out-law.com/page-6946>.Raymond, Eric S. The New Hacker’s Dictionary. 3rd ed. Cambridge: MIT P, 1996.Smartflix. “Smartflix: Supercharge Your Netflix.” 2017. 9 Apr. 2017 <https://www.smartflix.io/>.Sommergirl. “[All] Adding Subtitles in a Different Language?” 2016. 9 Apr. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/32l8ob/all_adding_subtitles_in_a_different_language/>.Subflicks. “Subflicks V2.0.0.” 2017. 9 Apr. 2017 <http://subflicks.com/>.Vasile, Cosmin. “Netflix Has Just Informed Us That Its Movie Streaming Service Is Now Available in Just About Every Country That Matters Financially, Aside from China, of Course.” 2016. 9 Apr. 2017 <http://news.softpedia.com/news/how-to-add-custom-subtitles-to-netflix-498579.shtml>.Vogelstein, Fred. “The Wired Interview: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.” Wired Magazine (2009). 20 Jun. 2010 <http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/mark-zuckerberg-speaks/>.W3C. “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.” W3C Recommendation (1999). 25 Jun. 2010 <http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/>.———. “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.” 11 Dec. 2008. 21 Aug. 2013 <http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/>.WGBH. “Magpie 2.0—Free, Do-It-Yourself Access Authoring Tool for Digital Multimedia Released by WGBH.” 2002. 25 Apr. 2017 <http://ncam.wgbh.org/about/news/pr_05072002>.YouTube. “Finally, Caption Video Playback.” 2006. 24 Apr. 2017 <http://googlevideo.blogspot.com.au/2006/09/finally-caption-playback.html>.

IntroductionRecut trailers typically mix footage from one or more films to create a preview for a feature that will never exist. Challenging the trailer’s assumed function as existing merely to gain an audience for a main attraction, the recut trailer suggests that the trailer can exist separately from a film. This paper will ask if recut trailers are evidence of fan enthusiasm and question precisely where this enthusiasm is directed. Do recut trailers demonstrate there are fans for the feature film that is recut, or does this enthusiasm extend beyond an appreciation and anticipation for a feature film? It will be ascertained if the recut trailer – as a site for homage, parody and fandom – transcends the advertising imperatives of box office success. This paper will demonstrate how fan-made trailers are symptomatic of the need for a new critical approach to trailers, one that does not situate the trailer as the low advertisement to the high cultural text of the film. It will be proposed that trailers form a network, of which the feature films and other trailers that are invoked form only a part.Recut trailers, while challenging the norms of what is considered an advertisement, function within a strict frame of reference: in their length, use of credits, text, voiceover in direct address to the audience, and editing techniques. Consequently, the recut trailer parodies and challenges the tools of promotion by utilising the very methods that sell to a prospective audience, to create an advertisement that is stripped of its traditional function by promoting a film that cannot exist and cannot be consumed. The promotion seems to end at the site of the advertisement, while still calling upon a complex series of interconnected references and collective knowledge in order for the parody to be effective. This paper will examine the network of Brokeback Mountain parodies, which were created before, during and after the feature film’s release, suggesting that the temporal imperative usually present in trailers is irrelevant for their appreciation. A playlist of the trailers discussed is available here.The Shift from Public to PrivateThe limited scholarship available situates the trailer as a promotional tool and a “brief film text” (Kernan 1), which is a “limited sample of the product” of the feature film (Kerr and Flynn 103), one that directly markets to demographics in order to draw an audience to see the feature. The traditional distribution methods for the trailer – as pre-packaged coming attractions in a cinema, and as television advertisements – work by building a desire to see a film in the future. For the trailer to be commercially successful within this framework, there is an imperative to differentiate itself from other trailers through creating an appeal to stars, genre or narrative (Kernan 14), or to be recognised as a trailer in amongst the stream of other advertisements on television. As new media forms have emerged, the trailer’s spatial and temporal bounds have shifted: the trailer is now included as a special feature on DVD packages, is sent to mobile devices on demand, and is viewed on video-sharing websites such as YouTube. In this move from the communal, collective and directed consumption of the trailer in the public sphere to the individualised, domesticated and on-demand consumption in the private sphere – the trailer has shown itself to be a successful “cross-media text” (Johnston 145). While choosing to watch a trailer – potentially long after the theatrical release of the film it promotes – suggests a growing “interactive relationship between film studio and audience” (Johnston 145), it also marks the beginning of increasing interactivity between the trailer and the audience, a relationship that has altered the function and purpose of the trailer beyond the studio’s control. Yet, the form of the trailer as it was traditionally distributed has been retained for recut trailers in order to parody and strip the trailer of its original meaning and purpose, and removes any commercial capital attached to it. Rather than simply being released at the control of a studio, the trailer is now actively shared, appropriated and altered. Demand for the trailer has not diminished since the introduction of new media, suggesting that there is an enthusiasm not only for coming feature films, but also for the act of watching, producing and altering trailers that may not translate into box office takings. This calls into question the role of the trailer in new media sites, in which the recut trailers form a significant part by embodying the larger changes to the consumption and distribution of trailers.TrailerTubeThis study analyses recut trailers released on YouTube only. This is, arguably, the most common way that these trailers are watched and newly created trailers are shared and interacted with, with some clips reaching several million views. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the network that is created surrounding the recut trailer through addressing its specific qualities. YouTube is the only site consulted in this study for the release for fan-made trailers as YouTube forms a formidable part of the network of recut trailers and studio released trailers, and currently, serves as a common way for Internet users to search for videos.YouTube was launched in December 2005, and in the following 1-2 years, the majority of popular recut trailers emerged. The correlation between these two dates is not arbitrary; the technology and culture promoted and fostered by the unique specificities of YouTube has in turn developed the recut trailer as “one of the most popular forms of fan subversion in the age of digital video” (Hilderband 52). It is also the role of audiences and producers that has ensured that the trailer has moved beyond its original spatial and temporal bounds – to be consumed in the home or on mobile devices, and at any stage past any promotional urgency. The Brokeback Mountain parodies, to be later discussed, surfaced mainly in 2006, demonstrative of an early acceptance of the possibilities that YouTube and mass broadcasting presented, and the possibilities that the trailer could offer to YouTube’s “clip” culture (Hilderbrand 49).The specificities of YouTube as a channel for dissemination have allowed for fan-made trailers to exist alongside trailers released by studios. Rather than the trailer being consumed and then becoming irretrievable, perpetually tied to the feature film it promotes, the online distribution and storing of trailers allows a constant revisiting of the advertisement – this act alone demonstrating an enthusiasm for the form of the trailer. Hilderbrand argues that YouTube “offers[s] new and remediating relationships to texts that indicate changes and acceleration of spectatorial consumption” (49). Specifically, Hilderbrand proposes that YouTube functions as a collection of memories, which in turn present a “portal of cultural memory” (54) – amplified by the ability to create playlists and channels. The tagging of trailers to the films from which they drive, the official trailers released for a film referenced, or other recut trailers ensures that there is a physical trace of the network the trailer creates. Recut trailers demand for knowledge and capital to be shared amongst viewers, the technical attributes of YouTube allow for much of this knowledge to be available on demand, and to be hyperlinked or suggested to the viewer. In order for the parody present in recut trailers to function at the level intended, the films that are drawn upon would presumably need to be identified and some basic elements of the plot understood in order for the capital imbued in the trailer to be completely realised. If the user is unaware of the film, however, clips of the film or the original trailer can be reached either through the “related videos” menu which populates according to the didactic information for the clip watched, or by searching. As the majority of recut trailers seek to displace the original genre of the film parodied – such as, for example, Ten Things I Hate about Commandments which presents the story of The Ten Commandments as a teen film in which Moses will both part the sea and get the girl – the original genre of the film must be known by the viewer in order to acknowledge the site for parody in the fan-made trailer. Further to this, the network deployed suggests that there must be some knowledge of the conventions of the genre that is being applied to the original film’s promotional qualities. The parody functions by effectively sharing the knowledge between two genres, in conjunction with an awareness of the role and capital of the trailer. Tagging, playlists and channels facilitate the sharing of knowledge and dispersing of capital. As the recut trailer tends to derive from more than one source, the network alters the viewer’s relationship to the original feature film and cultivates a series of clips and knowledge. However, this also indicates that intimate fan knowledge can be bypassed – which places this particular relationship to the trailer and the invoked films as existing outside the realms of the archetypal cult fan. This challenges prior conceptions of fan culture by resisting a prolonged engagement normally attributed to cultivating fan status (Hills), as typically only one trailer will be made, rather than exhibiting a concentrated adulation of one text. The recut trailer is placed as the nexus in a series of links, in which the studio system is subverted while also being directly engaged with and utilised. The tools that have traditionally been used to sell to an audience through pre-packaged coming attractions are now used to promote a film that cannot be consumed that holds no commercial significance for film studios. These tools also work to reinforce the aesthetic and cinematic norms in the trailer, which provide a contract of audience expectations – such as the use of the approval by the American Motion Picture Association screen and classification at the beginning of the majority of recut trailers. The recut trailer assimilates to the nature of video sharing on YouTube in which the trailer is part of a network of narratives all of which are accessible on demand, can be fast-forwarded, replayed, and embedded on numerous social networking sites for further dissemination and accompanying editorial comment. The trailer thus becomes a social text that involves a community and is wide-reaching in its aims and consumption, despite being physically consumed in the private sphere. The feature which enables the user to “favourite” a video, add it to their playlist and embed it in another site, demonstrates that the trailer is considered as its own cohesive form, subject to scrutiny and favoured or dismissed. Constant statistics reflecting its popularity reinforce the success of a recut trailer, and popularity will generally lead to the trailer becoming more accessible. Hilderbrand argues that YouTube has nutured a “new temporality of immediate gratification for audiences” which has in turn contributed to the “culture of the clip” (49), which the trailer seems to exemplify – and in the absence of feature films being legally readily accessible on sites such as YouTube, the trailer seeks to fill the void for immediate gratification.Brokeback MountainsWhile fan-made trailers can generate enthusiasm about the release of an upcoming film they may be linked to – as was recently the case with fan-made trailers for teen vampire film, Twilight – there is also a general enthusiasm to play with the form of the trailer and all that it signifies, while in the process, stripping the trailer of its traditional function. Following the release of the trailer for feature film Brokeback Mountain, numerous recut trailers emerged on YouTube which took the romantic and sexual relationship of the two male leads in the film, and applied this narrative to films depicting two male leads in a non-romantic friendship. In effect, new films were created that used the basis of Brokeback Mountain to shift plots in existing films, creating a new narrative in the process. The many Brokeback… parodies vary in popularity, and have been uploaded to YouTube continuously since 2006. The titles include Brokeback to the Future, Saved by the Bell: Brokeback Style, Brokeback of the Ring, The Brokeback Redemption, Broke Trek, Harry Potter and Brokeback Goblet and Star Wars: The Emperor Brokeback. The trailers use footage from a variety of film and television sources that show a friendship between two men and introduce it to the “style” of Brokeback Mountain. There are several techniques which are used uniformly across all of the trailers in order to convey this new plot: the original score used in the Brokeback Mountain trailer begins each recut trailer; the use of typically white text on a black screen based on the original trailer’s text, or a slight variant of it which is specific to the film which is being recut; and the pace of shots altered to focus on lingering looks, or to splice scenes together in order to imply sexual contact. Consequently, there is a consciousness of the effects used in the original trailer to sell a particular narrative to the audience as something that an audience would want to view. The narrative is constructed as being universal, as any story with two men as the leads and their friendship can be altered to show an underlying homoerotic story, and the form of the trailer allows these storylines to be promoted and shared. The insider knowledge of the fan that has noticed these interactions is able to make their knowledge communal. Hills argues that “fans participate in communal activities” (ix), which here takes the form of creating a network of collective stories which form Brokeback – it is a story extended to several sites, and a story which is promoted and sold. Through the use of tagging, playlists and suggested videos, once one recut trailer is viewed, several others are made instantly available. The availability of the original Brokeback Mountain trailer then serves to reinforce the authenticity and professionalism of the clips, by providing a template in which existing footage from other films is moulded to fit within.The instant identifier of a Brokeback… trailer is the music that was used in the original trailer. This signals that the trailer for Brokeback Mountain was itself so iconic that the use of its soundtrack would be instantly recognisable, and the re-use of music and text suggests that the recut trailers reinforce this iconography and its capital by visually reinforcing what signifies Brokeback Mountain. The network these trailers create includes the film Brokeback Mountain itself, but the recut trailer begins to open a new trajectory for the narrative to mould and shift, identifiable by techniques present in the trailer but not the feature film itself. The fan appreciation is evident in several ways: namely, there is an enthusiasm to conflate a feature film into Brokeback Mountain’s general narrative; that there has been enough of an engagement with a feature in order to retrieve clips to be edited into a new montage, and consequently, a condensed narrative with a direct mode of address; and also the eagerness to see a feature film in trailer form, employing trailer-specific cinematic techniques to enhance parody and displacement. Recut trailers are also subject to commenting, which generally reflect on either the insider fan knowledge of the text that is being initiated to the world of Brokeback Mountain, or take the place of comments that reflect on the success of the editing. In this respect, critique is a part of the communal fan interaction with the creator and uploader in the recut trailer’s network. As such, there is a focus on quality for the creator of the fan video, and rating occurs in order to rank the recut trailers. This focus on quality and professionalism elevates the creator of the recut trailer to the status of a director, despite not having filmed the scenes themselves. Demonstrating the enthusiasm for the role of the trailer, the internal promotion on YouTube of the most successful trailers – designated as such by the YouTube community – signals an active engagement with the role of the trailer, and its social properties, even though it is consumed individually.ConclusionWhile the recut trailer extends the fan gaze toward one object or more, it is typically presented as a parody, and consequently, could also be seen as rejecting elements of a genre or feature film. However, the parody typically occurs at the site of displacement: such as the relationship between the two male leads in Brokeback to the Future having a romantic relationship whilst coming to terms with time-travel; the burning bush in Ten Things I Hate about Commandments being played by Samuel L. Jackson as “Principal Firebush”, complete with audio from Pulp Fiction; or recutting romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle to become a horror film. The parody relies on knowledge that can be found easily, aided by YouTube’s features, while requiring the creator to intimately engage with a feature film. The role of the trailer in this network is to provide the tools and the boundaries for the new narrative to exist within, and create a system of referents for the fan to identify, through parodies of star appeal, genre, or narrative, as Kernan proposes are the three ways in which a trailer often relies upon to sell itself to an audience (14).As this paper has argued toward, the recut trailer can also be released from the feature films it invokes by being considered as its own coherent form, which draws upon numerous sites of knowledge and capital in order to form a network. While traditionally trailers have worked to gain an audience for an impending feature release, the recut trailer only seeks to create an audience for itself. Through the use of cult texts or a particularly successful form of parody, as demonstrated in Scary Mary Poppins, the recut trailer is widely consumed and shared across multiple avenues. The recut trailer then seeks to promote only itself through providing a condensed narrative, speaking directly to audiences, and cleverly engaging with the use of editing to leave traces of authorship. Fan culture may be seen as the adoration of one creator to the film they recut, but the network that the recut trailer creates demonstrates that there is an enthusiasm in both creators and viewers for the form of the trailer itself, to exist beyond the feature film and advertising imperatives.ReferencesBrokeback of the Ring. 27 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgt-BiFiBek›.Brokeback to the Future. 1 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwuLxrv8jY›.Brokeback Mountain. Dir. Ang Lee. Film. Paramount Pictures, 2005. The Brokeback Redemption Trailer. 28 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtRi42DEdTE›.Broke Trek – A Star Trek Brokeback Mountain Parody. 27 May 2007. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xSOuLky3n0›.Harry Potter and the Brokeback Goblet. 8 March 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9D0veHTxh0›. Hilderbrand, Lucas. "Youtube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge." Film Quarterly 61 (2007): 48-57. Hills, Matthew. Fan Cultures. New York: Routledge, 2002. Johnston, Keith M. "'The Coolest Way to Watch Movie Trailers in the World': Trailers in the Digital Age." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14 (2008): 145-60. Kernan, Lisa. Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin: U of Texas P, 2004. Kerr, Aphra, and Roddy Flynn. "Rethinking Globalisation through the Movie and Games Industries." Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 9 (2003): 91-113. The Original Scary ‘Mary Poppins’ Recut Trailer. 8 Oct. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic›.Saved by the Bell: Brokeback Style. 4 April 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHLr5AYl5f4›.Sleepless in Seattle. Dir. Nora Ephron. Film. Tristar Pictures, 1993. Sleepless in Seattle: Recut as a Horror Movie. 30 Jan. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUPnZMxr08›.Star Wars: The Emperor Brokeback. 14 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omB18oRsBYg›.The Ten Commandments. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille. Film. Paramount Pictures, 1956. Ten Things I Hate about Commandments. 14 May 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1kqqMXWEFs›.

Conurbation [f. CON- + L. urb- and urbs city + -ation] An aggregation of urban areas. (OED) Beyond the urban, further and lower even than the suburban, lies the con-urban. The conurban: with the urban, partaking of the urbane, lying against but also perhaps pushing against or being contra the urban. Conurbations stretch littorally from Australian cities, along coastlines to other cities, joining cities through the passage of previously outlying rural areas. Joining the dots between cities, towns, and villages. Providing corridors between the city and what lies outside. The conurban is an accretion, an aggregation, a piling up, or superfluity of the city: Greater London, for instance. It is the urban plus, filling the gaps between cities, as Los Angeles oozing urbanity does for the dry, desert areas abutting it (Davis 1990; Soja 1996). I wish to propose that the conurban imaginary is a different space from its suburban counterpart. The suburban has provided a binary opposition to what is not the city, what lies beneath its feet, outside its ken. Yet it is also what is greater than the urban, what exceeds it. In modernism, the city and its denizens define themselves outside what is arrayed around the centre, ringing it in concentric circles. In stark relief to the modernist lines of the skyscraper, contrasting with the central business district, central art galleries and museums, is to be found the masses in the suburbs. The suburban as a maligned yet enabling trope of modernism has been long revalued, in the art of Howard Arkeley, and in photography of suburban Gothic. It comes as no surprise to read a favourable newspaper article on the Liverpool Regional Art Gallery, in Sydney's Western Suburbs, with its exhibition on local chicken empires, Liverpool sheds, or gay and lesbians living on the city fringe. Nor to hear in the third way posturing of Australian Labor Party parliamentarian Mark Latham, the suburbs rhetorically wielded, like a Victa lawn mover, to cut down to size his chardonnay-set inner-city policy adversaries. The politics of suburbia subtends urban revisionism, reformism, revanchism, and recidivism. Yet there is another less exhausted, and perhaps exhaustible, way of playing the urban, of studying the metropolis, of punning on the city's proper name: the con-urban. World cities, as Saskia Sassen has taught us, have peculiar features: the juxtaposition of high finance and high technology alongside subaltern, feminized, informal economy (Sassen 1998). The Australian city proudly declared to be a world city is, of course, Sydney while a long way from the world's largest city by population, it is believed to be the largest in area. A recent newspaper article on Brisbane's real estate boom, drew comparisons with Sydney only to dismiss them, according to one quoted commentator, because as a world city, Sydney was sui generis in Australia, fairly requiring comparison with other world cities. One form of conurbanity, I would suggest, is the desire of other settled areas to be with the world city. Consider in this regard, the fate of Byron Bay a fate which lies very much in the balance. Byron Bay is sign that circulates in the field of the conurban. Craig MacGregor has claimed Byron as the first real urban culture outside an Australian city (MacGregor 1995). Local residents hope to keep the alternative cultural feel of Byron, but to provide it with a more buoyant economic outlook. The traditional pastoral, fishing, and whaling industries are well displaced by niche handicrafts, niche arts and craft, niche food and vegetables, a flourishing mind, body and spirit industry, and a booming film industry. Creative arts and cultural industries are blurring into creative industries. The Byron Bay area at the opening of the twenty-first century is attracting many people fugitive from the city who wish not to drop out exactly; rather to be contra wishes rather to be gently contrary marked as distinct from the city, enjoying a wonderful lifestyle, but able to persist with the civilizing values of an urban culture. The contemporary figure of Byron Bay, if such a hybrid chimera may be represented, wishes for a conurbanity. Citizens relocate from Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney, seeking an alternative country and coastal lifestyle and, if at all possible, a city job (though without stress) (on internal migration in Australia see Kijas 2002): Hippies and hip rub shoulders as a sleepy town awakes (Still Wild About Byron, (Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 2002). Forerunners of Byron's conurbanity leave, while others take their place: A sprawling $6.5 million Byron Bay mansion could be the ultimate piece of memorabilia for a wealthy fan of larrikin Australian actor Paul Hogan (Hoges to sell up at Byron Bay, Illawarra Mercury, 14 February 2002). The ABC series Seachange is one key text of conurbanity: Laura Gibson has something of a city job she can ply the tools of her trade as a magistrate while living in an idyllic rural location, a nice spot for a theme park of contemporary Australian manners and nostalgia for community (on Sea Change see Murphy 2002). Conurban designates a desire to have it both ways: cityscape and pastoral mode. Worth noting is that the Byron Shire has its own independent, vibrant media public sphere, as symbolized by the Byron Shire Echo founded in 1986, one of the great newspapers outside a capital city (Martin & Ellis 2002): <http://www.echo.net.au>. Yet the textual repository in city-based media of such exilic narratives is the supplement to the Saturday broadsheet papers. A case in point is journalist Ruth Ostrow, who lives in hills in the Byron Shire, and provides a weekly column in the Saturday Australian newspaper, its style gently evocative of just one degree of separation from a self-parody of New Age mores: Having permanently relocated to the hills behind Byron Bay from Sydney, it's interesting for me to watch friends who come up here on holiday over Christmas… (Ostrow 2002). The Sydney Morning Herald regards Byron Bay as another one of its Northern beaches, conceptually somewhere between Palm Beach and Pearl Beach, or should one say Pearl Bay. The Herald's fascination for Byron Bay real estate is coeval with its obsession with Sydney's rising prices: Byron Bay's hefty price tags haven't deterred beach-lovin' boomers (East Enders, Sydney Morning Herald 17 January 2002). The Australian is not immune from this either, evidence 'Boom Times in Byron', special advertising report, Weekend Australia, Saturday 2 March 2002. And plaudits from The Financial Review confirm it: Prices for seafront spots in the enclave on the NSW north coast are red hot (Smart Property, The Financial Review, 19 January 2002). Wacky North Coast customs are regularly covered by capital city press, the region functioning as a metonym for drugs. This is so with Nimbin especially, with regular coverage of the Nimbin Mardi Grass: Mardi Grass 2001, Nimbin's famous cannabis festival, began, as they say, in high spirits in perfect autumn weather on Saturday (Oh, how they danced a high old time was had by all at the Dope Pickers' Ball, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 May 2001). See too coverage of protests over sniffer dogs in Byron Bay in Easter 2001 showed (Peatling 2001). Byron's agony over its identity attracts wider audiences, as with its quest to differentiate itself from the ordinariness of Ballina as a typical Aussie seaside town (Buttrose 2000). There are national metropolitan audiences for Byron stories, readers who are familiar with the Shire's places and habits: Lismore-reared Emma Tom's 2002 piece on the politics of perving at King's beach north of Byron occasioned quite some debate from readers arguing the toss over whether wanking on the beach was perverse or par for the course: Public masturbation is a funny old thing. On one hand, it's ace that some blokes feel sexually liberated enough to slap the salami any old time… (Tom 2002). Brisbane, of course, has its own designs upon Byron, from across the state border. Brisbane has perhaps the best-known conurbation: its northern reaches bleed into the Sunshine Coast, while its southern ones salute the skyscrapers of Australia's fourth largest city, the Gold Coast (on Gold Coast and hinterland see Griffin 2002). And then the conburbating continues unabated, as settlement stretches across the state divide to the Tweed Coast, with its mimicking of Sanctuary Cove, down to the coastal towns of Ocean Shores, Brunswick Heads, Byron, and through to Ballina. Here another type of infrastructure is key: the road. Once the road has massively overcome the topography of rainforest and mountain, there will be freeway conditions from Byron to Brisbane, accelerating conurbanity. The caf is often the short-hand signifier of the urban, but in Byron Bay, it is film that gives the urban flavour. Byron Bay has its own International Film Festival (held in the near-by boutique town of Bangalow, itself conurban with Byron.), and a new triple screen complex in Byron: Up north, film buffs Geraldine Hilton and Pete Castaldi have been busy. Last month, the pair announced a joint venture with Dendy to build a three-screen cinema in the heart of Byron Bay, scheduled to open mid-2002. Meanwhile, Hilton and Castaldi have been busy organising the second Byron All Screen Celebration Film Festival (BASC), after last year's inaugural event drew 4000 visitors to more than 50 sessions, seminars and workshops. Set in Bangalow (10 minutes from Byron by car, less if you astral travel)… (Cape Crusaders, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 February 2002). The film industry is growing steadily, and claims to be the largest concentration of film-makers outside of an Australian capital city (Henkel 2000 & 2002). With its intimate relationship with the modern city, film in its Byron incarnation from high art to short video, from IMAX to multimedia may be seen as the harbinger of the conurban. If the case of Byron has something further to tell us about the transformation of the urban, we might consider the twenty-first century links between digital communications networks and conurbanity. It might be proposed that telecommunications networks make it very difficult to tell where the city starts and ends; as they interactively disperse information and entertainment formerly associated with the cultural institutions of the metropolis (though this digitization of urbanity is more complex than hyping the virtual suggest; see Graham & Marvin 1996). The bureau comes not just to the 'burbs, but to the backblocks as government offices are closed in country towns, to be replaced by online access. The cinema is distributed across computer networks, with video-on-demand soon to become a reality. Film as a cultural form in the process of being reconceived with broadband culture (Jacka 2001). Global movements of music flow as media through the North Coast, with dance music culture and the doof (Gibson 2002). Culture and identity becomes content for the information age (Castells 1996-1998; Cunningham & Hartley 2001; OECD 1998; Trotter 2001). On e-mail, no-one knows, as the conceit of internet theory goes, where you work or live; the proverbial refashioning of subjectivity by the internet affords a conurbanity all of its own, a city of bits wherever one resides (Mitchell 1995). To render the digital conurban possible, Byron dreams of broadband. In one of those bizarre yet recurring twists of Australian media policy, large Australian cities are replete with broadband infrastructure, even if by 2002 city-dwellers are not rushing to take up the services. Telstra's Foxtel and Optus's Optus Vision raced each other down streets of large Australian cities in the mid-1990s to lay fibre-coaxial cable to provide fast data (broadband) capacity. Cable modems and quick downloading of video, graphics, and large files have been a reality for some years. Now the Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) technology is allowing people in densely populated areas close to their telephone exchanges to also avail themselves of broadband Australia. In rural Australia, broadband has not been delivered to most areas, much to the frustration of the conurbanites. Byron Bay holds an important place in the history of the internet in Australia, because it was there that one of Australia's earliest and most important internet service providers, Pegasus Network, was established in the late 1980s. Yet Pegasus relocated to Brisbane in 1993, because of poor quality telecommunications networks (Peters 1998). As we rethink the urban in the shadow of modernity, we can no longer ignore or recuse ourselves from reflecting upon its para-urban modes. As we deconstruct the urban, showing how the formerly pejorative margins actually define the centre the suburban for instance being more citified than the grand arcades, plazas, piazzas, or malls; we may find that it is the conurban that provides the cultural imaginary for the urban of the present century. Work remains to be done on the specific modalities of the conurban. The conurban has distinct temporal and spatial coordinates: citizens of Sydney fled to Manly earlier in the twentieth century, as they do to Byron at the beginning of the twenty-first. With its resistance to the transnational commercialization and mass culture that Club Med, McDonalds, and tall buildings represent, and with its strict environment planning regulation which produce a litigious reaction (and an editorial rebuke from the Sydney Morning Herald [SMH 2002]), Byron recuperates the counter-cultural as counterpoint to the Gold Coast. Subtle differences may be discerned too between Byron and, say, Nimbin and Maleny (in Queensland), with the two latter communities promoting self-sufficient hippy community infused by new agricultural classes still connected to the city, but pushing the boundaries of conurbanity by more forceful rejection of the urban. Through such mapping we may discover the endless attenuation of the urban in front and beyond our very eyes; the virtual replication and invocation of the urban around the circuits of contemporary communications networks; the refiguring of the urban in popular and elite culture, along littoral lines of flight, further domesticating the country; the road movies of twenty-first century freeways; the perpetuation and worsening of inequality and democracy (Stilwell 1992) through the action of the conurban. Cities without bounds: is the conurban one of the faces of the postmetropolis (Soja 2000), the urban without end, with no possibility for or need of closure? My thinking on Byron Bay, and the Rainbow Region in which it is situated, has been shaped by a number of people with whom I had many conversations during my four years living there in 1998-2001. My friends in the School of Humanities, Media, and Cultural Studies, Southern Cross University, Lismore, provided focus for theorizing our ex-centric place, of whom I owe particular debts of gratitude to Baden Offord (Offord 2002), who commented upon this piece, and Helen Wilson (Wilson 2002). Thanks also to an anonymous referee for helpful comments. References Buttrose, L. (2000). Betray Byron at Your Peril. Sydney Morning Herald 7 September 2000. Castells, M. (1996-98). The Information Age. 3 vols. Blackwell, Oxford. Cunningham, S., & Hartley, J. (2001). Creative Industries from Blue Poles to Fat Pipes. Address to the National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit, National Museum of Canberra. July 2001. Davis, M. (1990). City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Verso, London. Gibson, C. (2002). Migration, Music and Social Relations on the NSW Far North Coast. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Graham, S., and Marvin, S. (1996). Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. Routledge, London & New York. Griffin, Graham. (2002). Where Green Turns to Gold: Strip Cultivation and the Gold Coast Hinterland. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...> Henkel, C. (2002). Development of Audiovisual Industries in the Northern Rivers Region of NSW. Master thesis. Queensland University of Technology. . (2000). Imagining the Future: Strategies for the Development of 'Creative Industries' in the Northern Rivers Region of NSW. Northern Rivers Regional Development Board in association with the Northern Rivers Area Consultative Committee, Lismore, NSW. Jacka, M. (2001). Broadband Media in Australia Tales from the Frontier, Australian Film Commission, Sydney. Kijas, J. (2002). A place at the coast: Internal migration and the shift to the coastal-countryside. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. MacGregor, Craig. (1995). The Feral Signifier and the North Coast. In The Abundant Culture: Meaning And Significance in Everyday Australia, ed. Donald Horne & Jill Hooten. Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Martin, F., & Ellis, R. (2002). Dropping in, not out: the evolution of the alternative press in Byron Shire 1970-2001. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Mitchell, W.J. (1995). City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Molnar, Helen. (1998). 'National Convergence or Localism?: Rural and Remote Communications.' Media International Australia 88: 5-9. Moyal, A. (1984). Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Thomas Nelson, Melbourne. Murphy, P. (2002). Sea Change: Re-Inventing Rural and Regional Australia. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Offord, B. (2002). Mapping the Rainbow Region: Fields of belonging and sites of confluence. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (1998). Content as a New Growth Industry: Working Party for the Information Economy. OECD, Paris. Ostrow, R. (2002). Joyous Days, Childish Ways. The Australian, 9 February. Peatling, S. (2001). Keep Off Our Grass: Byron stirs the pot over sniffer dogs. Sydney Morning Herald. 16 April. <http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/14/natio...> Peters, I. (1998). Ian Peter's History of the Internet. Lecture at Southern Cross University, Lismore. CD-ROM. Produced by Christina Spurgeon. Faculty of Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. Productivity Commission. (2000). Broadcasting Inquiry: Final Report, Melbourne, Productivity Commission. Sassen, S. (1998). Globalisation and its Contents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New Press, New York. Soja, E. (2000). Postmetropolis: critical studies of cities and regions. Blackwell, Oxford. . (1996). Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass. Stilwell, F. (1992). Understanding Cities and Regions: Spatial Political Economy. Pluto Press, Sydney. Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). (2002). Byron Should Fix its own Money Mess. Editorial. 5 April. Tom, E. (2002). Flashing a Problem at Hand. The Weekend Australian, Saturday 12 January. Trotter, R. (2001). Regions, Regionalism and Cultural Development. Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs. Ed. Tony Bennett and David Carter. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 334-355. Wilson, H., ed. (2002). Fleeing the City. Special Issue of Transformations journal, no. 2. < http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Links http://www.echo.net.au http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/14/national/national3.html http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformations/journal/issue2/issue.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php>. Chicago Style Goggin, Gerard, "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Goggin, Gerard. (2002) Conurban. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]).

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. Crucially, if we reduce identity performances such as unboxing, toy review videos, and other forms of children’s fan marketing to pure advertisement, we cannot afford Jacob and other child influencers the agency that their self representation is legally and artistically their own.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor.” Social Media + Society 3.2 (2017): 1-15.Andrejevic, Mark. “Privacy, Exploitation, and the Digital Enclosure.” Amsterdam Law Forum 1.4 (2009). <http://amsterdamlawforum.org/article/view/94/168>.Atkins, Bridgette, Isabel Pedersen, Shirley Van Nuland, and Samantha Reid. “A Glimpse into the Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables Project: A Work-in-Progress.” ICET 60th World Assembly: Teachers for a Better World: Creating Conditions for Quality Education – Pedagogy, Policy and Professionalism. 2017. 49-60.Beer, David, and Roger Burrows. “Popular Culture, Digital Archives and the New Social Life of Data.” Theory, Culture & Society 30.4 (2013): 47–71.Brophy, Sarah, and Janice Hladki. 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M/C Journal 19.4 (2016). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1127>.———. “The Vulnerability of Contemporary Digital Autobiography” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.2 (2017): 409-411.Kinder Playtime. “VTech Kidizoom Smart Watch DX Review by Kinder Playtime.” YouTube, 4 Nov. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaxCSjwZjcA&t=28s>.Magid, Larry. “Protecting Children Online Needs to Allow for Their Right to Free Speech.” ConnectSafely 29 Aug. 2014. <http://www.connectsafely.org/protecting-children-online-needs-to-allow-for-their-right-to-free-speech/>.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>.Marsh, Jackie. “‘Unboxing’ Videos: Co-construction of the Child as Cyberflâneur.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 37.3 (2016): 369-380.Nansen, Bjorn. “Accidental, Assisted, Automated: An Emerging Repertoire of Infant Mobile Media Techniques.” M/C Journal 18.5 (2015). <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1026>.———, and Benjamin Nicoll. “Toy Unboxing Videos and the Mimetic Production of Play.” Paper presented at the 18th Annual Conference of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Tartu, Estonia. 2017.Palfrey, John, and Urs Gasser. Born Digital: How Children Grow Up in a Digital Age. New York: Basic Books, 2016.Pedersen, Isabel, and Kristen Aspevig. “‘My Eyes Ended Up at My Fingertips, My Ears, My Nose, My Mouth’: Antoine, Autobiographical Documentary, and the Cinematic Depiction of a Blind Child Subject.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 34.4 (2011).Pedersen, Isabel, and Kristen Aspevig. “‘Swept to the Sidelines and Forgotten’: Cultural Exclusion, Blind Persons’ Participation, and International Film Festivals.” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 3.3 (2014): 29-52.Rak, Julie. “First Person? Life Writing versus Automedia.” International Association for Biography and Autobiography Europe (IABA Europe). Vienna, Austria. 30 Oct. – 3 Nov. 2013.Smith, Sidonie. “The Autobiographical Manifesto.” Ed. Shirely Neuman. Autobiography and Questions of Gender. London: Frank Cass, 1991.———, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.———. “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.Sweeney, Meghan. “‘Where Happily Ever After Happens Every Day’: Disney's Official Princess Website and the Commodification of Play.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 3.2 (2011): 66-87.Uhls, Yalda, and Particia Greenfield. “The Value of Fame: Preadolescent Perceptions of Popular Media and Their Relationship to Future Aspirations.” Developmental Psychology 48.2 (2012): 315-326.YouTube. “YouTube for Press.” 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/press/>.

The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) Family Network show Switched at Birth tells two stories—one which follows the unique plot of the show, and one about the new openness of television executives toward integrating more people with a variety of visible and invisible physical embodiments, such as hearing loss, into television content. It first aired in 2011 and in 2017 aired its fifth and final season.The show focuses on two teen girls in Kansas City who find out they were switched due to a hospital error on the day of their birth and who grew up with parents who were not biologically related to them. One, Bay Kennish (Vanessa Marano), lives with her wealthy parents—a stay-at-home mom Kathryn (Lea Thompson) and a former professional baseball player, now businessman, father John (D.W. Moffett). She has an older brother Toby (Lucas Grabeel) who is into music. In her high school science class, Bay learns about blood types and discovers her parents’ blood types could not have produced her. The family has professional genetic tests done and discovers the switch (ABC Family, “This Is Not a Pipe”).In the pilot episode, Bay’s parents find out that deaf teen, Daphne Vasquez (Katie Leclerc), is actually their daughter. She lives in a working class Hispanic neighbourhood with her hairdresser single mother Regina (Constance Marie) and grandmother Adrianna (Ivonne Coll), both of whom are of Puerto Rican ancestry. Daphne is deaf due to a case of meningitis when she was three, which the rich Kennishes feel happened because of inadequate healthcare provided by working class Regina. Daphne attends an all-deaf school, Carlton.The man who was thought to be her biological father, Angelo Sorrento (Gilles Marini), doesn’t appear in the show until episode 10 but becomes a series regular in season 2. It becomes apparent that Daphne believes her father left because of her deafness; however, as the first season progresses, the real reasons begin to emerge. From the pilot onwards, the show dives into clashes of language, culture, ethnicity, class, and even physical appearance—in one scene in the pilot, the waspy Kennishes ask Regina if she is “Mexican.” As later episodes reveal, many of these physical appearance issues are revealed to have fractured the Vasquez family early on—Daphne is a freckled, strawberry blonde, and her father (who is French and Italian) suspected infidelity.The two families merge when the Kennishes ask Daphne and her mother to move into their guest house in order get to know their daughter better. That forces the Kennishes into the world of deafness, and throughout the show this hearing family therefore becomes a surrogate for a hearing audience’s immersion into Deaf culture.Cultural Inclusivity: The Way ForwardShow creator Lizzy Weiss explained that it was actually the ABC Family network that “suggested making one of the kids disabled” (Academy of Television Arts & Sciences). Weiss was familiar with American Sign Language (ASL) because she had a “classical theatre of the Deaf” course in college. She said, “I had in the back of my head a little bit of background at least about how beautiful the language was. So I said, ‘What if one of the girls is deaf?’” The network thought it was wonderful idea, so she began researching the Deaf community, including spending time at a deaf high school in Los Angeles called Marlton, on which she modelled the Switched at Birth school, Carlton. Weiss (Academy of Television Arts & Sciences) says of the school visit experience:I learned so much that day and spoke to dozens of deaf teenagers about their lives and their experiences. And so, this is, of course, in the middle of writing the pilot, and I said to the network, you know, deaf kids wouldn’t voice orally. We would have to have those scenes only in ASL, and no sound and they said, ‘Great. Let’s do it.’ And frankly, we just kind of grew and grew from there.To accommodate the narrative structure of a television drama, Weiss said it became clear from the beginning that the show would need to use SimCom (simultaneous communication or sign supported speech) for the hearing or deaf characters who were signing so they could speak and sign at the same time. She knew this wasn’t the norm for two actual people communicating in ASL, but the production team worried about having a show that was heavily captioned as this might distance its key—overwhelmingly hearing—teen audience who would have to pay attention to the screen during captioned scenes. However, this did not appear to be the case—instead, viewers were drawn to the show because of its unique sign language-influenced television narrative structure. The show became popular very quickly and, with 3.3 million viewers, became the highest-rated premiere ever on the ABC Family network (Barney).Switched at Birth also received much praise from the media for allowing its deaf actors to communicate using sign language. The Huffington Post television critic Maureen Ryan said, “Allowing deaf characters to talk to each other directly—without a hearing person or a translator present—is a savvy strategy that allows the show to dig deeper into deaf culture and also to treat deaf characters as it would anyone else”. Importantly, it allowed the show to be unique in a way that was found nowhere else on television. “It’s practically avant-garde for television, despite the conventional teen-soap look of the show,” said Ryan.Usually a show’s success is garnered by audience numbers and media critique—by this measure Switched at Birth was a hit. However, programs that portray a disability—in any form—are often the target of criticism, particularly from the communities they attempting to represent. It should be noted that, while actress Katie Leclerc, who plays Daphne, has a condition, Meniere’s disease, which causes hearing loss and vertigo on an intermittent basis, she does not identify as a deaf actress and must use a deaf accent to portray Daphne. However, she is ASL fluent, learning it in high school (Orangejack). This meant her qualifications met the original casting call which said “actress must be deaf or hard of hearing and must speak English well, American Sign Language preferred” (Paz, 2010) Leclerc likens her role to that of any actor to who has to affect body and vocal changes for a role—she gives the example of Hugh Laurie in House, who is British with no limp, but was an American who uses a cane in that show (Bibel).As such, initially, some in the Deaf community complained about her casting though an online petition with 140 signatures (Nielson). Yet many in the Deaf community softened any criticism of the show when they saw the production’s ongoing attention to Deaf cultural details (Grushkin). Finally, any lingering criticisms from the Deaf community were quieted by the many deaf actors hired for the show who perform using ASL. This includes Sean Berdy, who plays Daphne’s best friend Emmett, his onscreen mother, played by actress Marlee Matlin, and Anthony Natale who plays his father; their characters both sign and vocalize in the show. The Emmett character only communicates in ASL and does not vocalise until he falls in love with the hearing character Bay—even then he rarely uses his voice.This seemingly all-round “acceptance” of the show gave the production team more freedom to be innovative—by season 3 the audience was deemed to be so comfortable with captions that the shows began to feature less SimCom and more all-captioned scenes. This lead to the full episode in ASL, a first on American mainstream television.For an Hour, Welcome to Our WorldSwitched at Birth writer Chad Fiveash explained that when the production team came up with the idea for a captioned all-ASL episode, they “didn’t want to do the ASL episode as a gimmick. It needed to be thematically resonant”. As a result, they decided to link the episode to the most significant event in American Deaf history, an event that solidified its status as a cultural community—the 1988 Deaf President Now (DPN) protest at Gallaudet University in Washington. This protest inspired the March 2013 episode for Switched at Birth and aired 25 years to the week that the actual DPN protest happened. This episode makes it clear the show is trying to completely embrace Deaf culture and wants its audience to better understand Deaf identity.DPN was a pivotal moment for Deaf people—it truly solidified members of a global Deaf community who felt more empowered to fight for their rights. Students demanded that Gallaudet—as the premier university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students—no longer have a hearing person as its president. The Gallaudet board of trustees, the majority of whom were hearing, tried to force students and faculty to accept a hearing president; their attitude was that they knew what was best for the deaf persons there. For eight days, deaf people across America and the world rallied around the student protestors, refusing to give in until a deaf president was appointed. Their success came in the form of I. King Jordan, a deaf man who had served as dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the time of the protest.The event was covered by media around the world, giving the American Deaf community international attention. Indeed, Gallaudet University says the DPN protest symbolized more than just the hiring of a Deaf president; it brought Deaf issues before the public and “raised the nation’s consciousness of the rights and abilities of deaf and hard of hearing people” (Gallaudet University).The activities of the students and their supporters showed dramatically that in the 1980s deaf people could be galvanized to unite around a common issue, particularly one of great symbolic meaning, such as the Gallaudet presidency. Gallaudet University represents the pinnacle of education for deaf people, not only in the United States but throughout the world. The assumption of its presidency by a person himself deaf announced to the world that deaf Americans were now a mature minority (Van Cleve and Crouch, 172).Deaf people were throwing off the oppression of the hearing world by demanding that their university have someone from their community at its helm. Jankowski (Deaf Empowerment; A Metaphorical Analysis of Conflict) studied the Gallaudet protest within the framework of a metaphor. She found a recurring theme during the DPN protest to be Gallaudet as “plantation”—which metaphorically refers to deaf persons as slaves trying to break free from the grip of the dominant mastery of the hearing world—and she parallels the civil rights movement of African Americans in the 1960s. As an example, Gallaudet was referred to as the “Selma of the Deaf” during the protest, and protest signs used the language of Martin Luther King such as “we still have a dream.” For deaf Americans, the presidency of Gallaudet became a symbol of hope for the future. As Jankowski attests:deaf people perceived themselves as possessing the ability to manage their own kind, pointing to black-managed organization, women-managed organizations, etc., struggling for that same right. They argued that it was a fight for their basic human rights, a struggle to free themselves, to release the hold their ‘masters’ held on them. (“A Metaphorical Analysis”)The creators of the Switched at Birth episode wanted to ensure of these emotions, as well as historical and cultural references, were prevalent in the modern-day, all-ASL episode, titled Uprising. That show therefore wanted to represent both the 1988 DPN protest as well as a current issue in the US—the closing of deaf schools (Anderson). The storyline focuses on the deaf students at the fictitious Carlton School for the Deaf seizing one of the school buildings to stage a protest because the school board has decided to shut down the school and mainstream the deaf students into hearing schools. When the deaf students try to come up with a list of demands, conflicts arise about what the demands should be and whether a pilot program—allowing hearing kids who sign to attend the deaf school—should remain.This show accomplished multiple things with its reach into Deaf history and identity, but it also did something technologically unique for the modern world—it made people pay attention. Because captioning translated the sign language for viewers, Lizzy Weiss, the creator of the series, said, “Every single viewer—deaf or hearing—was forced to put away their phones and iPads and anything else distracting … and focus … you had to read … you couldn’t do anything else. And that made you get into it more. It drew you in” (Stelter). The point, Weiss said, “was about revealing something new to the viewer—what does it feel like to be an outsider? What does it feel like to have to read and focus for an entire episode, like deaf viewers do all the time?” (Stelter). As one deaf reviewer of the Uprising episode said, “For an hour, welcome to our world! A world that’s inconvenient, but one most of us wouldn’t leave if offered a magic pill” (DR_Staff).This episode, more than any other, afforded hearing television viewers an experience perhaps similar to deaf viewers. The New York Times reported that “Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers commented by the thousands after the show, with many saying in effect, “Yes! That’s what it feels like” (Stelter).Continued ResonancesWhat is also unique about the episode is that in teaching the hearing viewers more about the Deaf community, it also reinforced Deaf community pride and even taught young deaf people a bit of their own history. The Deaf community and Gallaudet were very pleased with their history showing up on a television show—the university produced a 30-second commercial which aired within the episode, and held viewing parties. Gallaudet also forwarded the 35 pages of Facebook comments they’d received about the episode to ABC Family and Gallaudet President T. Alan Hurwitz said of the episode (Yahr), “Over the past 25 years, [DPN] has symbolised self-determination and empowerment for deaf and hard of hearing people around the world”. The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) also lauded the episode, describing it as “phenomenal and groundbreaking, saying the situation is very real to us” (Stelter)—NAD had been vocally against budget cuts and closings of US deaf schools.Deaf individuals all over the Internet and social media also spoke out about the episode, with overwhelmingly favourable opinions. Deaf blogger Amy Cohen Efron, who participated in 1988′s DPN movement, said that DPN was “a turning point of my life, forcing me to re-examine my own personal identity, and develop self-determinism as a Deaf person” and led to her becoming an activist.When she watched the Uprising episode, she said the symbolic and historical representations in the show resonated with her. In the episode, a huge sign is unfurled on the side of the Carlton School for the Deaf with a girl with a fist in the air under the slogan “Take Back Carlton.” During the DPN protest, the deaf student protesters unfurled a sign that said “Deaf President Now” with the US Capitol in the background; this image has become an iconic symbol of modern Deaf culture. Efron says the image in the television episode was much more militant than the actual DPN sign. However, it could be argued that society now sees the Deaf community as much more militant because of the DPN protest, and that the imagery in the Uprising episode played into that connection. Efron also acknowledged the episode’s strong nod to the Gallaudet student protestors who defied the hearing community’s expectations by practising civil disobedience. As Efron explained, “Society expected that the Deaf people are submissive and accept to whatever decision done by the majority without any of our input and/or participation in the process.”She also argues that the episode educated more than just the hearing community. In addition to DPN, Uprising was filled with other references to Deaf history. For example a glass door to the room at Carlton was covered with posters about people like Helen Keller and Jean-Ferdinand Berthier, a deaf educator in 19th century France who promoted the concept of deaf identity and culture—Efron says most people in the Deaf community have never heard of him. She also claims that the younger Deaf community may also not be aware of the 1988 DPN protest—“It was not in high school textbooks available for students. Many deaf and hard of hearing students are mainstreamed and they have not the slightest idea about the DPN movement, even about the Deaf Community’s ongoing fight against discrimination, prejudice and oppression, along with our victories”.Long before the Uprising episode aired, the Deaf community had been watching Switched at Birth carefully to make sure Deaf culture was accurately represented. Throughout season 3 David Martin created weekly videos in sign language that were an ASL/Deaf cultural analysis of Switched at Birth. He highlighted content he liked and signs that were incorrect, a kind of a Deaf culture/ASL fact checker. From the Uprising episode, he said he thought this quote from Marlee Matlin’s character said it all, “Until hearing people walk a day in our shoes they will never understand” (Martin). That succinctly states what the all-ASL episode was trying to capture—creating an awareness of Deaf people’s cultural experience and their oppression in hearing society.Even a deaf person who was an early critic of Switched at Birth because of the hiring of Katie Leclerc and the use of SimCom admitted he was impressed with the all-ASL episode (Grushkin):all too often, we see media accounts of Deaf people which play into our society’s perceptions of Deaf people: as helpless, handicapped individuals who are in need of fixes such as cochlear implants in order to “restore” us to society. Almost never do we see accounts of Deaf people as healthy, capable individuals who live ordinary, successful lives without necessarily conforming to the Hearing ‘script’ for how we should be. And important issues such as language rights or school closings are too often virtually ignored by the general media.In addition to the episode being widely discussed within the Deaf community, the mainstream news media also covered Uprising intensely, seeing it as a meaningful cultural moment, not just for the Deaf community but for popular culture in general. Lacob wrote that he realises that hearing viewers probably won’t understand what it means to be a deaf person in modern America, but he believes that the episodeposits that there are moments of understanding, commonalities, and potential bridge-building between these two communities. And the desire for understanding is the first step toward a more inclusive and broad-minded future.He continues:the significance of this moment can’t be undervalued, nor can the show’s rich embrace of deaf history, manifested here in the form of Gallaudet and the historical figures whose photographs and stories are papered on the windows of Carlton during the student protest. What we’re seeing on screen—within the confines of a teen drama, no less—is an engaged exploration of a culture and a civil rights movement brought to life with all of the color and passion it deserves. It may be 25 years since Gallaudet, but the dreams of those protesters haven’t faded. And they—and the ideals of identity and equality that they express—are most definitely being heard.Lacob’s analysis was praised by several Deaf people—by a Deaf graduate student who teaches a Disability in Popular Culture course and by a Gallaudet student who said, “From someone who is deaf, and not ashamed of it either, let me say right here and now: that was the most eloquent piece of writing by someone hearing I have ever seen” (Emma72). The power of the Uprising episode illustrated a political space where “groups actively fuse and blend their culture with the mainstream culture” (Foley 119, as cited in Chang 3). Switched at Birth—specifically the Uprising episode—has indeed fused Deaf culture and ASL into a place in mainstream television culture.ReferencesABC Family. “Switched at Birth Deaf Actor Search.” Facebook (2010). <https://www.facebook.com/SwitchedSearch>.———. “This Is Not a Pipe.” Switched at Birth. Pilot episode. 6 June 2011. <http://freeform.go.com/shows/switched-at-birth>.———. “Not Hearing Loss, Deaf Gain.” Switched at Birth. YouTube video, 11 Feb. 2013. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5W604uSkrk>.Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. “Talking Diversity: ABC Family’s Switched at Birth.” Emmys.com (Feb. 2012). <http://www.emmys.com/content/webcast-talking-diversity-abc-familys-switched-birth>.Anderson, G. “‘Switched at Birth’ Celebrates 25th Anniversary of ‘Deaf President Now’.” Pop-topia (5 Mar. 2013). <http://www.pop-topia.com/switched-at-birth-celebrates-25th-anniversary-of-deaf-president-now/>.Barney, C. “’Switched at Birth’ Another Winner for ABC Family.” Contra Costa News (29 June 2011). <http://www.mercurynews.com/tv/ci_18369762>.Bibel, S. “‘Switched at Birth’s Katie LeClerc Is Proud to Represent the Deaf Community.” Xfinity TV blog (20 June 2011). <http://xfinity.comcast.net/blogs/tv/2011/06/20/switched-at-births-katie-leclerc-is-proud-to-represent-the-deaf-community/>.Chang, H. “Re-Examining the Rhetoric of the ‘Cultural Border’.” Essay presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, Dec. 1988.DR_Staff. “Switched at Birth: How #TakeBackCarlton Made History.” deafReview (6 Mar. 2013). <http://deafreview.com/deafreview-news/switched-at-birth-how-takebackcarlton-made-history/>.Efron, Amy Cohen. “Switched At Birth: Uprising – Deaf Adult’s Commentary.” Deaf World as I See It (Mar. 2013). <http://www.deafeyeseeit.com/2013/03/05/sabcommentary/>.Emma72. “ABC Family’s ‘Switched at Birth’ ASL Episode Recalls Gallaudet Protest.” Comment. The Daily Beast (28 Feb. 2013). <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/28/abc-family-s-switched-at-birth-asl-episode-recalls-gallaudet-protest.html>.Fiveash, Chad. Personal interview. 17 Jan. 2014.Gallaudet University. “The Issues.” Deaf President Now (2013). <http://www.gallaudet.edu/dpn_home/issues.html>.Grushkin, D. “A Cultural Review. ASL Challenged.” Switched at Birth Facebook page. Facebook (2013). <https://www.facebook.com/SwitchedatBirth/posts/508748905835658>.Jankowski, K.A. Deaf Empowerment: Emergence, Struggle, and Rhetoric. Washington: Gallaudet UP, 1997.———. “A Metaphorical Analysis of Conflict at the Gallaudet Protest.” Unpublished seminar paper presented at the University of Maryland, 1990.Lacob, J. “ABC Family’s ‘Switched at Birth’ ASL Episode Recalls Gallaudet Protest.” The Daily Beast 28 Feb. 2013. <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/28/abc-family-s-switched-at-birth-asl-episode-recalls-gallaudet-protest.html>.Martin, D. “Switched at Birth Season 2 Episode 9 ‘Uprising’ ASL/Deaf Cultural Analysis.” David Martin YouTube channel (6 Mar. 2013). <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA0vqCysoVU>.Nielson, R. “Petitioned ABC Family and the ‘Switched at Birth’ Series, Create Responsible, Accurate, and Family-Oriented TV Programming.” Change.org (2011). <http://www.change.org/p/abc-family-and-the-switched-at-birth-series-create-responsible-accurate-and-family-oriented-tv-programming>.Orangejack. “Details about Katie Leclerc’s Hearing Loss.” My ASL Journey Blog (29 June 2011). <http://asl.orangejack.com/details-about-katie-leclercs-hearing-loss>.Paz, G. “Casting Call: Open Auditions for Switched at Birth by ABC Family.” Series & TV (3 Oct. 2010). <http://seriesandtv.com/casting-call-open-auditions-for-switched-at-birth-by-abc-family/4034>.Ryan, Maureen. “‘Switched at Birth’ Season 1.5 Has More Drama and Subversive Soapiness.” The Huffington Post (31 Aug. 2012). <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-ryan/switched-at-birth-season-1_b_1844957.html>.Stelter, B. “Teaching Viewers to Hear with Their Eyes Only.” The New York Times 8 Mar. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/arts/television/teaching-viewers-to-hear-the-tv-with-eyes-only.html>.Van Cleve, J.V., and B.A. Crouch. A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America. DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1989.Yahr, E. “Gallaudet University Uses All-Sign Language Episode of ‘Switched at Birth’ to Air New Commercial.” The Washington Post 3 Mar. 2013 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tv-column/post/gallaudet-university-uses-all-sign-language-episode-of-switched-at-birth-to-air-new-commercial/2013/03/04/0017a45a-8508-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394_blog.html>.

IntroductionThe walking tour is an enduring feature of cities. Fuelled by a desire to learn more about the hidden and unknown spaces of the city, the walking tour has moved beyond its historical role as tourist attraction to play a key role in the transformation of urban space through gentrification. Conversely, the walking tour has a counter-history as part of a critical urban praxis. This article reflects on historical examples, as well as our own experience of conducting Field Trip, a critical geographical walking tour through an industrial precinct in Marrickville, a suburb of Sydney that is set to undergo rapid change as a result of high-rise residential apartment construction (Gibson et al.). This precinct, known as Carrington Road, is located on the unceded land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation who call the area Bulanaming.Drawing on a long history of philosophical walking, many contemporary writers (Solnit; Gros; Bendiner-Viani) have described walking as a practice that can open different ways of thinking, observing and being in the world. Some have focused on the value of walking to the study of place (Hall; Philips; Heddon), and have underscored its relationship to established research methods, such as sensory ethnography (Springgay and Truman). The work of Michel de Certeau pays particular attention to the relationship between walking and the city. In particular, the concepts of tactics and strategy have been applied in a variety of ways across cultural studies, cultural geography, and urban studies (Morris). In line with de Certeau’s thinking, we view walking as an example of a tactic – a routine and often unconscious practice that can become a form of creative resistance.In this sense, walking can be a way to engage in and design the city by opposing its structures, or strategies. For example, walking in a city such as Sydney that is designed for cars requires choosing alternative paths, redirecting flows of people and traffic, and creating custom shortcuts. Choosing pedestrianism in Sydney can certainly feel like a form of resistance, and we make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a way of doing this collectively, firstly by moving in opposite directions, and secondly, at incongruent speeds to those for whom the scale and style of strategic urban development is inevitable. How such tactical walking relates to the design of cities, however, is less clear. Walking is a generally described in the literature as an individual act, while the design of cities is, at its best participatory, and always involving multiple stakeholders. This reveals a tension between the practice of walking as a détournement or appropriation of urban space, and its relationship to existing built form. Field Trip, as an example of collective walking, is one such appropriation of urban space – one designed to lead to more democratic decision making around the planning and design of cities. Given the anti-democratic, “post-political” nature of contemporary “consultation” processes, this is a seemingly huge task (Legacy et al.; Ruming). We make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a form of collective resistance to top-down urban planning.By using an open-source wiki in combination with the Internet Archive, Field Trip also seeks to collectively document and make public the local knowledge generated by walking at the frontier of gentrification. We discuss these digital choices as oppositional practice, and consider the idea of tactical media (Lovink and Garcia; Raley) in order to connect knowledge sharing with the practice of walking.This article is structured in four parts. Firstly, we provide a historical introduction to the relationship between walking tours and gentrification of global cities. Secondly, we examine the significance of walking tours in Sydney and then specifically within Marrickville. Thirdly, we discuss the Field Trip project as a citizen-led walking tour and, finally, elaborate on its role as tactical media project and offer some conclusions.The Walking Tour and Gentrification From the outset, people have been walking the city in their own ways and creating their own systems of navigation, often in spite of the plans of officialdom. The rapid expansion of cities following the Industrial Revolution led to the emergence of “imaginative geographies”, where mediated representations of different urban conditions became a stand-in for lived experience (Steinbrink 219). The urban walking tour as mediated political tactic was utilised as far back as Victorian England, for reasons including the celebration of public works like the sewer system (Garrett), and the “othering” of the working class through upper- and middle-class “slum tourism” in London’s East End (Steinbrink 220). The influence of the Situationist theory of dérive has been immense upon those interested in walking the city, and we borrow from the dérive a desire to report on the under-reported spaces of the city, and to articulate alternative voices within the city in this project. It should be noted, however, that as Field Trip was developed for general public participation, and was organised with institutional support, some aspects of the dérive – particularly its disregard for formal structure – were unable to be incorporated into the project. Our responsibility to the participants of Field Trip, moreover, required the imposition of structure and timetable upon the walk. However, our individual and collective preparation for Field Trip, as well as our collective understanding of the area to be examined, has been heavily informed by psychogeographic methods that focus on quotidian and informal urban practices (Crosby and Searle; Iveson et al).In post-war American cities, walking tours were utilised in the service of gentrification. Many tours were organised by real estate agents with the express purpose of selling devalorised inner-city real estate to urban “pioneers” for renovation, including in Boston’s South End (Tissot) and Brooklyn’s Park Slope, among others (Lees et al 25). These tours focused on a symbolic revalorisation of “slum neighbourhoods” through a focus on “high culture”, with architectural and design heritage featuring prominently. At the same time, urban socio-economic and cultural issues – poverty, homelessness, income disparity, displacement – were downplayed or overlooked. These tours contributed to a climate in which property speculation and displacement through gentrification practices were normalised. To this day, “ghetto tours” operate in minority neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, serving as a beachhead for gentrification.Elsewhere in the world, walking tours are often voyeuristic, featuring “locals” guiding well-meaning tourists through the neighbourhoods of some of the world’s most impoverished communities. Examples include the long runningKlong Toei Private Tour, through “Bangkok’s oldest and largest slum”, or the now-ceased Jakarta Hidden Tours, which took tourists to the riverbanks of Jakarta to see the city’s poorest before they were displaced by gentrification.More recently, all over the world activists have engaged in walking tours to provide their own perspective on urban change, attempting to direct the gentrifier’s gaze inward. Whilst the most confrontational of these might be the Yuppie Gazing Tour of Vancouver’s historically marginalised Downtown Eastside, other tours have highlighted the deleterious effects of gentrification in Williamsburg, San Francisco, Oakland, and Surabaya, among others. In smaller towns, walking tours have been utilised to highlight the erasure of marginalised scenes and subcultures, including underground creative spaces, migrant enclaves, alternative and queer spaces. Walking Sydney, Walking Marrickville In many cities, there are now both walking tours that intend to scaffold urban renewal, and those that resist gentrification with alternative narratives. There are also some that unwittingly do both simultaneously. Marrickville is a historically working-class and migrant suburb with sizeable populations of Greek and Vietnamese migrants (Graham and Connell), as well as a strong history of manufacturing (Castles et al.), which has been undergoing gentrification for some time, with the arts playing an often contradictory role in its transformation (Gibson and Homan). More recently, as the suburb experiences rampant, financialised property development driven by global flows of capital, property developers have organised their own self-guided walking tours, deployed to facilitate the familiarisation of potential purchasers of dwellings with local amenities and ‘character’ in precincts where redevelopment is set to occur. Mirvac, Marrickville’s most active developer, has designed its own self-guided walking tour Hit the Marrickville Pavement to “explore what’s on offer” and “chat to locals”: just 7km from the CBD, Marrickville is fast becoming one of Sydney’s most iconic suburbs – a melting pot of cuisines, creative arts and characters founded on a rich multicultural heritage.The perfect introduction, this self-guided walking tour explores Marrickville’s historical architecture at a leisurely pace, finishing up at the pub.So, strap on your walking shoes; you're in for a treat.Other walking tours in the area seek to highlight political, ecological, and architectural dimension of Marrickville. For example, Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance provides a series of plant-led walks in the suburb; The Warren Walk is a tour organised by local Australian Labor Party MP Anthony Albanese highlighting “the influence of early settlers such as the Schwebel family on the area’s history” whilst presenting a “political snapshot” of ALP history in the area. The Australian Ugliness, in contrast, was a walking tour organised by Thomas Lee in 2016 that offered an insight into the relationships between the visual amenity of the streetscape, aesthetic judgments of an ambiguous nature, and the discursive and archival potentialities afforded by camera-equipped smartphones and photo-sharing services like Instagram. Figure 1: Thomas Lee points out canals under the street of Marrickville during The Australian Ugliness, 2016.Sydney is a city adept at erasing its past through poorly designed mega-projects like freeways and office towers, and memorialisation of lost landscapes has tended towards the literary (Berry; Mudie). Resistance to redevelopment, however, has often taken the form of spectacular public intervention, in which public knowledge sharing was a key goal. The Green Bans of the 1970s were partially spurred by redevelopment plans for places like the Rocks and Woolloomooloo (Cook; Iveson), while the remaking of Sydney around the 2000 Olympics led to anti-gentrification actions such as SquatSpace and the Tour of Beauty, an “aesthetic activist” tour of sites in the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo threatened with “revitalisation.” Figure 2: "Tour of Beauty", Redfern-Waterloo 2016. What marks the Tour of Beauty as significant in this context is the participatory nature of knowledge production: participants in the tours were addressed by representatives of the local community – the Aboriginal Housing Company, the local Indigenous Women’s Centre, REDWatch activist group, architects, designers and more. Each speaker presented their perspective on the rapidly gentrifying suburb, demonstrating how urban space is made an remade through processes of contestation. This differentiation is particularly relevant when considering the basis for Sydney-centric walking tours. Mirvac’s self-guided tour focuses on the easy-to-see historical “high culture” of Marrickville, and encourages participants to “chat to locals” at the pub. It is a highly filtered approach that does not consider broader relations of class, race and gender that constitute Marrickville. A more intense exploration of the social fabric of the city – providing a glimpse of the hidden or unknown spaces – uncovers the layers of social, cultural, and economic history that produce urban space, and fosters a deeper engagement with questions of urban socio-spatial justice.Solnit argues that walking can allow us to encounter “new thoughts and possibilities.” To walk, she writes, is to take a “subversive detour… the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences” (13). In this way, tactical activist walking tours aim to make visible what cannot be seen, in a way that considers the polysemic nature of place, and in doing so, they make visible the hidden relations of power that produce the contemporary city. In contrast, developer-led walking tours are singularly focussed, seeking to attract inflows of capital to neighbourhoods undergoing “renewal.” These tours encourage participants to adopt the position of urban voyeur, whilst activist-led walking tours encourage collaboration and participation in urban struggles to protect and preserve the contested spaces of the city. It is in this context that we sought to devise our own walking tour – Field Trip – to encourage active participation in issues of urban renewal.In organising this walking tour, however, we acknowledge our own entanglements within processes of gentrification. As designers, musicians, writers, academics, researchers, venue managers, artists, and activists, in organising Field Trip, we could easily be identified as “creatives”, implicated in Marrickville’s ongoing transformation. All of us have ongoing and deep-rooted connections to various Sydney subcultures – the same subcultures so routinely splashed across developer advertising material. This project was borne out of Frontyard – a community not-just-art space, and has been supported by the local Inner West Council. As such, Field Trip cannot be divorced from the highly contentious processes of redevelopment and gentrification that are always simmering in the background of discussions about Marrickville. We hope, however, that in this project we have started to highlight alternative voices in those redevelopment processes – and that this may contribute towards a “method of equality” for an ongoing democratisation of those processes (Davidson and Iveson).Field Trip: Urban Geographical Enquiry as Activism Given this context, Field Trip was designed as a public knowledge project that would connect local residents, workers, researchers, and decision-makers to share their experiences living and working in various parts of Sydney that are undergoing rapid change. The site of our project – Carrington Road, Marrickville in Sydney’s inner-west – has been earmarked for major redevelopment in coming years and is quickly becoming a flashpoint for the debates that permeate throughout the whole of Sydney: housing affordability, employment accessibility, gentrification and displacement. To date, public engagement and consultation regarding proposed development at Carrington Road has been limited. A major landholder in the area has engaged a consultancy firm to establish a community reference group (CRG) the help guide the project. The CRG arose after public outcry at an original $1.3 billion proposal to build 2,616 units in twenty towers of up to 105m in height (up to thirty-five storeys) in a predominantly low-rise residential suburb. Save Marrickville, a community group created in response to the proposal, has representatives on this reference group, and has endeavoured to make this process public. Ruming (181) has described these forms of consultation as “post-political,” stating thatin a universe of consensual decision-making among diverse interests, spaces for democratic contest and antagonistic politics are downplayed and technocratic policy development is deployed to support market and development outcomes.Given the notable deficit of spaces for democratic contest, Field Trip was devised as a way to reframe the debate outside of State- and developer-led consultation regimes that guide participants towards accepting the supposed inevitability of redevelopment. We invited a number of people affected by the proposed plans to speak during the walking tour at a location of their choosing, to discuss the work they do, the effect that redevelopment would have on their work, and their hopes and plans for the future. The walking tour was advertised publicly and the talks were recorded, edited and released as freely available podcasts. The proposed redevelopment of Carrington Road provided us with a unique opportunity to develop and operate our own walking tour. The linear street created an obvious “circuit” to the tour – up one side of the road, and down the other. We selected speakers based on pre-existing relationships, some formed during prior rounds of research (Gibson et al.). Speakers included a local Aboriginal elder, a representative from the Marrickville Historical Society, two workers (who also gave tours of their workplaces), the Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, who gave us a tour of the Carrington Road pumping station, and a representative from the Save Marrickville residents’ group. Whilst this provided a number of perspectives on the day, regrettably some groups were unrepresented, most notably the perspective of migrant groups who have a long-standing association with industrial precincts in Marrickville. It is hoped that further community input and collaboration in future iterations of Field Trip will address these issues of representation in community-led walking tours.A number of new understandings became apparent during the walking tour. For instance, the heritage-listed Carrington Road sewage pumping station, which is of “historic and aesthetic significance”, is unable to cope with the proposed level of residential development. According to Philip Bennett, Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, the best way to maintain this piece of heritage infrastructure is to keep it running. While this issue had been discussed in private meetings between Sydney Water and the developer, there is no formal mechanism to make this expert knowledge public or accessible. Similarly, through the Acknowledgement of Country for Field Trip, undertaken by Donna Ingram, Cultural Representative and a member of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, it became clear that the local Indigenous community had not been consulted in the development proposals for Carrington Road. This information, while not necessary secret, had also not been made public. Finally, the inclusion of knowledgeable local workers whose businesses are located on Carrington Road provided an insight into the “everyday.” They talked of community and collaboration, of site-specificity, the importance of clustering within their niche industries, and their fears for of displacement should redevelopment proceed.Via a community-led, participatory walking tour like Field Trip, threads of knowledge and new information are uncovered. These help create new spatial stories and readings of the landscape, broadening the scope of possibility for democratic participation in cities. Figure 3: Donna Ingram at Field Trip 2018.Tactical Walking, Tactical Media Stories connected to walking provide an opportunity for people to read the landscape differently (Mitchell). One of the goals of Field Trip was to begin a public knowledge exchange about Carrington Road so that spatial stories could be shared, and new readings of urban development could spread beyond the confines of the self-contained tour. Once shared, this knowledge becomes a story, and once remixed into existing stories and integrated into the way we understand the neighbourhood, a collective spatial practice is generated. “Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice”, says de Certeau in “Spatial Stories”. “In reality, they organise walks” (72). As well as taking a tactical approach to walking, we took a tactical approach to the mediation of the knowledge, by recording and broadcasting the voices on the walk and feeding information to a publicly accessible wiki. The term “tactical media” is an extension of de Certeau’s concept of tactics. David Garcia and Geert Lovink applied de Certeau’s concept of tactics to the field of media activism in their manifesto of tactical media, identifying a class of producers who amplify temporary reversals in the flow of power by exploiting the spaces, channels and platforms necessary for their practices. Tactical media has been used since the late nineties to help explain a range of open-source practices that appropriate technological tools for political purposes. While pointing out the many material distinctions between different types of tactical media projects within the arts, Rita Raley describes them as “forms of critical intervention, dissent and resistance” (6). The term has also been adopted by media activists engaged in a range of practices all over the world, including the Tactical Technology Collective. For Field Trip, tactical media is a way of creating representations that help navigate neighbourhoods as well as alternative political processes that shape them. In this sense, tactical representations do not “offer the omniscient point of view we associate with Cartesian cartographic practice” (Raley 2). Rather these representations are politically subjective systems of navigation that make visible hidden information and connect people to the decisions affecting their lives. Conclusion We have shown that the walking tour can be a tourist attraction, a catalyst to the transformation of urban space through gentrification, and an activist intervention into processes of urban renewal that exclude people and alternative ways of being in the city. This article presents practice-led research through the design of Field Trip. By walking collectively, we have focused on tactical ways of opening up participation in the future of neighbourhoods, and more broadly in designing the city. 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Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. 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Dempsey, John “Biography Rewrite: A&E’s Signature Series Heads to Sib Net.” Variety 4 Jun. 2006. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117944601.html?categoryid=1238&cs=1>. Donaldson, Ian. “Matters of Life and Death: The Return of Biography.” Australian Book Review 286 (Nov. 2006): 23–29. Douglas, Kate. “‘Blurbing’ Biographical: Authorship and Autobiography.” Biography 24.4 (2001): 806–26. Eliot, Simon. “Very Necessary but not Sufficient: A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book History.” Book History 5 (2002): 283–93. Feather, John, and Hazel Woodbridge. “Bestsellers in the British Book Industry.” Publishing Research Quarterly 23.3 (Sept. 2007): 210–23. Feather, JP, and M Reid. “Bestsellers and the British Book Industry.” Publishing Research Quarterly 11.1 (1995): 57–72. Galligan, Anne. “Living in the Marketplace: Publishing in the 1990s.” Publishing Studies 7 (1999): 36–44. Grossman, Lev. “Time’s Person of the Year: You.” Time 13 Dec. 2006. Online edition. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C1569514%2C00.html>. Gutjahr, Paul C. “No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America.” Book History 5 (2002): 209–36. Hamilton, Nigel. Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Kaplan, Justin. “A Culture of Biography.” The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions. Ed. Dale Salwak. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. 1–11. Korda, Michael. Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900–1999. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001. Miller, Laura J. “The Bestseller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction.” Book History 3 (2000): 286–304. Morreale, Joanne. “Revisiting The Osbournes: The Hybrid Reality-Sitcom.” Journal of Film and Video 55.1 (Spring 2003): 3–15. Rak, Julie. “Bio-Power: CBC Television’s Life & Times and A&E Network’s Biography on A&E.” LifeWriting 1.2 (2005): 1–18. Starck, Nigel. “Capturing Life—Not Death: A Case For Burying The Posthumous Parallax.” Text: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 5.2 (2001). 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct01/starck.htm>.

Introduction The decline of marriage in the West has been extensively researched over the last three decades (Carmichael and Whittaker; de Vaus; Coontz; Beck-Gernshein). Indeed, it was fears that the institution would be further eroded by the legalisation of same sex unions internationally that provided the impetus for the Australian government to amend the Marriage Act (1961). These amendments in 2004 sought to strengthen marriage by explicitly defining, for the first time, marriage as a legal partnership between one man and one woman. The subsequent heated debates over the discriminatory nature of this definition have been illuminating, particularly in the way they have highlighted the ongoing social significance of marriage, even at a time it is seen to be in decline. Demographic research about partnering practices (Carmichael and Whittaker; Simons; Parker; Penman) indicates that contemporary marriages are more temporary, fragile and uncertain than in previous generations. Modern marriages are now less about a permanent and “inescapable” union between a dominant man and a submissive female for the purposes of authorised sex, legal progeny and financial security, and more about a commitment between two social equals for the mutual exchange of affection and companionship (Croome). Less research is available, however, about how couples themselves reconcile the inherited constructions of romantic love as selfless and unending, with trends that clearly indicate that romantic love is not forever, ideal or exclusive. Civil marriage ceremonies provide one source of data about representations of love. Civil unions constituted almost 70 per cent of all marriages in Australia in 2010, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The civil marriage ceremony has both a legal and symbolic role. It is a legal contract insofar as it prescribes a legal arrangement with certain rights and responsibilities between two consenting adults and outlines an expectation that marriage is voluntarily entered into for life. The ceremony is also a public ritual that requires couples to take what are usually private feelings for each other and turn them into a public performance as a way of legitimating their relationship. Consistent with the conventions of performance, couples generally customise the rest of the ceremony by telling the story of their courtship, and in so doing they often draw upon the language and imagery of the Western Romantic tradition to convey the personal meaning and social significance of their decision. This paper explores how couples construct the idea of love in their relationship, first by examining the western history of romantic love and then by looking at how this discourse is invoked by Australians in the course of developing civil marriage ceremonies in collaboration with the author. A History of Romantic Love There are many definitions of romantic love, but all share similar elements including an intense emotional and physical attraction, an idealisation of each other, and a desire for an enduring and unending commitment that can overcome all obstacles (Gottschall and Nordlund; Janowiak and Fischer). Romantic love has historically been associated with heightened passions and intense almost irrational or adolescent feelings. Charles Lindholm’s list of clichés that accompany the idea of romantic love include: “love is blind, love overwhelms, a life without love is not worth living, marriage should be for love alone and anything less is worthless and a sham” (5). These elements, which invoke love as sacred, unending and unique, perpetuate past cultural associations of the term. Romantic love was first documented in Ancient Rome where intense feelings were seen as highly suspect and a threat to the stability of the family, which was the primary economic, social and political unit. Roman historian Plutarch viewed romantic love based upon strong personal attraction as disruptive to the family, and he expressed a fear that romantic love would become the norm for Romans (Lantz 352). During the Middle Ages romantic love emerged as courtly love and, once again, the conventions that shaped its expression grew out of an effort to control excessive emotions and sublimate sexual desire, which were seen as threats to social stability. Courtly love, according to Marilyn Yalom, was seen as an “irresistible and inexhaustible passion; a fatal love that overcomes suffering and even death” (66). Feudal social structures had grounded marriage in property, while the Catholic Church had declared marriage a sacrament and a ceremony through which God’s grace could be obtained. In this context courtly love emerged as a way of dealing with the conflict between the individual and family choices over the martial partner. Courtly love is about a pure ideal of love in which the knight serves his unattainable lady, and, by carrying out feats in her honour, reaches spiritual perfection. The focus on the aesthetic ideal was a way to fulfil male and female emotional needs outside of marriage, while avoiding adultery. Romantic love re-appeared again in the mid-eighteenth century, but this time it was associated with marriage. Intellectuals and writers led the trend normalising romantic love in marriage as a reaction to the Enlightenment’s valorisation of reason, science and materialism over emotion. Romantics objected to the pragmatism and functionality induced by industrialisation, which they felt destroyed the idea of the mysterious and transcendental nature of love, which could operate as a form of secular salvation. Love could not be bought or sold, argued the Romantics, “it is mysterious, true and deep, spontaneous and compelling” (Lindholm 5). Romantic love also emerged as an expression of the personal autonomy and individualisation that accompanied the rise of industrial society. As Lanz suggests, romantic love was part of the critical reflexivity of the Enlightenment and a growing belief that individuals could find self actualisation through the expression and expansion of their “emotional and intellectual capacities in union with another” (354). Thus it was romantic love, which privileges the feelings and wishes of an individual in mate selection, that came to be seen as a bid for freedom by the offspring of the growing middle classes coerced into marriage for financial or property reasons. Throughout the 19th century romantic love was seen as a solution to the dehumanising forces of industrialisation and urbanisation. The growth of the competitive workplace—which required men to operate in a restrained and rational manner—saw an increase in the search for emotional support and intimacy within the domestic domain. It has been argued that “love was the central preoccupation of middle class men from the 1830s until the end of the 19th century” (Stearns and Knapp 771). However, the idealisation of the aesthetic and purity of love impacted marriage relations by casting the wife as pure and marital sex as a duty. As a result, husbands pursued sexual and romantic relationships outside marriage. It should be noted that even though love became cemented as the basis for marriage in the 19th century, romantic love was still viewed suspiciously by religious groups who saw strong affection between couples as an erosion of the fundamental role of the husband in disciplining his wife. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries romantic love was further impacted by urbanisation and migration, which undermined the emotional support provided by extended families. According to Stephanie Coontz, it was the growing independence and mobility of couples that saw romantic love in marriage consolidated as the place in which an individual’s emotional and social needs could be fully satisfied. Coontz says that the idea that women could only be fulfilled through marriage, and that men needed women to organise their social life, reached its heights in the 1950s (25-30). Changes occurred to the structure of marriage in the 1960s when control over fertility meant that sex was available outside of marriage. Education, equality and feminism also saw women reject marriage as their only option for fulfilment. Changes to Family Law Acts in western jurisdictions in the 1970s provided for no-fault divorce, and as divorce lost its stigma it became acceptable for women to leave failing marriages. These social shifts removed institutional controls on marriage and uncoupled the original sexual, emotional and financial benefits packaged into marriage. The resulting individualisation of personal lifestyle choices for men and women disrupted romantic conventions, and according to James Dowd romantic love came to be seen as an “investment” in the “future” that must be “approached carefully and rationally” (552). It therefore became increasingly difficult to sustain the idea of love as a powerful, mysterious and divine force beyond reason. Methodology In seeking to understand how contemporary partnering practices are reconstituting romantic love, I draw upon anecdotal data gathered over a nine-year period from my experiences as a marriage celebrant. In the course of personalising marriage ceremonies, I pose a series of questions designed to assist couples to explain the significance of their relationship. I generally ask brides and grooms why they love their fiancé, why they want to legalise their relationship, what they most treasure about their partner, and how their lives have been changed by their relationship. These questions help couples to reflexively interrogate their own relationship, and by talking about their commitment in concrete terms, they produce the images and descriptions that can be used to describe for guests the internal motivations and sentiments that have led to their decision to marry. I have had couples, when prompted to explain how they know the other person loves them say, in effect: “I know that he loves me because he brings me a cup of coffee every morning” or “I know that she loves me because she takes care of me so well.” These responses are grounded in a realism that helps to convey a sense of sincerity and authenticity about the relationship to the couple’s guests. This realism also helps to address the cynicism about the plausibility of enduring love. The brides and grooms in this sample of 300 couples were a socially, culturally and economically diverse group, and they provided a wide variety of responses ranging from deeply nuanced insights into the nature of their relationship, to admissions that their feelings were so private and deeply felt that words were insufficient to convey their significance. Reoccurring themes, however, emerged across the cases, and it is evident that even as marriage partnerships may be entered into for a variety of reasons, romantic love remains the mechanism by which couples talk of their feelings for each other. Australian Love and Marriage Australians' attitudes to romantic love and marriage have, understandably, been shaped by western understandings of romantic love. It is evident, however, that the demands of late modern capitalist society, with its increased literacy, economic independence and sexual equality between men and women, have produced marriage as a negotiable contract between social equals. For some, like Carol Pateman, this sense of equality within marriage may be illusory. Nonetheless, the drive for individual self-fulfilment by both the bride and groom produces a raft of challenges to traditional ideas of marriage as couples struggle to find a balance between independence and intimacy; between family and career; and between pursuing personal goals and the goals of their partners. This shift in the nature of marriage has implications for the “quest for undying romantic love,” which according to Anthony Giddens has been replaced by other forms of relationship, "each entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only in so far as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to stay within it” (qtd. in Lindholm 6). The impact of these social changes on the nature of romantic love in marriage is evident in how couples talk about their relationship in the course of preparing a ceremony. Many couples describe the person they are marrying as their best friend, and friendship is central to their commitment. This description supports research by V.K. Oppenheimer which indicates that many contemporary couples have a more “egalitarian collaborative approach to marriage” (qtd. in Carmichael and Whittaker 25). It is also standard for couples to note in ceremonies that they make each other happy and contented, with many commenting upon how their partners have helped to bring focus and perspective to their work-oriented lives. These comments tend to invoke marriage as a refuge from the isolation, competition, and dehumanising elements of workplaces. Since emotional support is central to the marriage contract, it is not surprising that care for each other is another reoccurring theme in ceremonies. Many brides and grooms not only explicitly say they are well taken care of by their partner, but also express admiration for their partner’s treatment of their families and friends. This behaviour appears to be seen as an indicator of the individual’s capacity for support and commitment to family values. Many couples admire partner’s kindness, generosity and level of personal self-sacrifice in maintaining the relationship. It is also not uncommon for brides and grooms to say they have been changed by their love: become kinder, more considerate and more tolerant. Honesty, communication skills and persistence are also attributes that are valued. Brides and grooms who have strong communication skills are also praised. This may refer to interpersonal competency and the willingness to acquire the skills necessary to negotiate the endless compromises in contemporary marriage now that individualisation has undermined established rules, rituals and roles. Persistence and the ability not to be discouraged by setbacks is also a reoccurring theme, and this connects with the idea that marriage is work. Many couples promise to grow together in their marriage and to both take responsibility for the health of their relationship. This promise implies awareness that marriage is not the fantasy of happily ever after produced in romantic popular culture, but rather an arrangement that requires hard work and conscious commitment, particularly in building a union amidst many competing options and distractions. Many couples talk about their relationship in terms of companionship and shared interests, values and goals. It is also not uncommon for couples to say that they admire their partner for supporting them to achieve their life goals or for exposing them to a wider array of lifestyle choices and options like travel or study. These examples of interdependence appear to make explicit that couples still see marriage as a vehicle for personal freedom and self-realisation. The death of love is also alluded to in marriage ceremonies. Couples talk of failed past relationships, but these are produced positively as a mechanism that enables the couple to know that they have now found an enduring relationship. It is also evident that for many couples the decision to marry is seen as the formalisation of a preexisting commitment rather than the gateway to a new life. This is consistent with figures that show that 72 per cent of Australian couples chose to cohabit before marriage (Simons 48), and that cohabitation has become the “normative pathway to marriage” (Penman 26). References to children also feature in marriage ceremonies, and for the couples I have worked with marriage is generally seen as the pre-requisite for children. Couples also often talk about “being ready” for marriage. This seems to refer to being financially prepared. Robyn Parker citing the research of K. Edin concludes that for many modern couples “rushing into marriage before being ‘set’ is irresponsible—marrying well (in the sense of being well prepared) is the way to avoid divorce” (qtd. in Parker 81). From this overview of reoccurring themes in the production of Australian ceremonies it is clear that romantic love continues to be associated with marriage. However, couples describe a more grounded and companionable attachment. These more practical and personalised sentiments serve to meet both the public expectation that romantic love is a precondition for marriage, while also avoiding the production of romantic love in the ceremony as an empty cliché. Grounded descriptions of love reveal that attraction does not have to be overwhelming and unconquerable. Indeed, couples who have lived together and are intimately acquainted with each other’s habits and disposition, appear to be most comfortable expressing their commitment to each other in more temperate, but no less deeply felt, terms. Conclusion This paper has considered how brides and grooms constitute romantic love within the shifting partnering practices of contemporary Australia. It is evident “in the midst of significant social and economic change and at a time when individual rights and freedom of choice are important cultural values” marriage remains socially significant (Simons 50). This significance is partially conveyed through the language of romantic love, which, while freighted with an array of cultural and historical associations, remains the lingua franca of marriage, perhaps because as Roberto Unger observes, romantic love is “the most influential mode of moral vision in our culture” (qtd. in Lindholm 5). It is thus possible to conclude, that while marriage may be declining and becoming more fragile and impermanent, the institution remains important to couples in contemporary Australia. Moreover, the language and imagery of romantic love, which publicly conveys this importance, remains the primary mode of expressing care, affection and hope for a partnership, even though the changed partnering practices of late modern capitalist society have exposed the utopian quality of romantic love and produced a cynicism about the viability of its longevity. It is evident in the marriage ceremonies prepared by the author that while the language of romantic love has come to signify a broader range of more practical associations consistent with the individualised nature of modern marriage and demystification of romantic love, it also remains the best way to express what Dowd and Pallotta describe as a fundamental human “yearning for communion with and acceptance by another human being” (571). References Beck, U., and E. Beck-Gernsheim, Individualisation: Institutionalised Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences. London: Sage, 2002. Beigel, Hugo G. “Romantic Love.” American Sociological Review 16.3 (1951): 326–34. Carmichael, Gordon A, and Andrea Whittaker. “Forming Relationships in Australia: Qualitative Insights into a Process Important to Human Well Being.” Journal of Population Research 24.1 (2007): 23–49. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005. Croome, Rodney. “Love and Commitment, To Equality.” The Drum Opinion, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News. 8 June 2011. 14 Aug. 2012 < http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2749898.html >. de Vaus, D.L. Qu, and R. Weston. “Family Trends: Changing Patterns of Partnering.” Family Matters 64 (2003): 10–15. Dowd, James T, and Nicole R. Pallotta. “The End of Romance: The Demystification of Love in the Postmodern Age.” Sociological Perspectives 43.4 (2000): 549–80. Gottschall, Jonathan, and Marcus Nordlund. “Romantic Love: A Literary Universal?” Philosophy and Literature 30 (2006): 450–70. Jankowiak, William, and Ted Fischer, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love,” Ethnology 31 (1992): 149–55. Lantz, Herman R. “Romantic Love in the Pre-Modern Period: A Sociological Commentary.” Journal of Social History 15.3 (1982): 349–70. Lindholm, Charles. “Romantic Love and Anthropology.” Etnofoor 19:1 Romantic Love (2006): 5–21. Parker, Robyn. “Perspectives on the Future of Marriage.” Australian Institute of Family Studies 72 Summer (2005): 78–82.Pateman, Carole. “Women and Consent.” Political Theory (1980): 149–68. Penman, Robyn. “Current Approaches to Marriage and Relationship Research in the United States and Australia.” Family Matters 70 Autumn (2005): 26–35. Simons, Michelle. “(Re)-forming Marriage in Australia?” Australian Institute of Family Matters 73 (2006): 46–51.Stearns, Peter N, and Mark Knapp. “Men and Romantic Love: Pinpointing a 20th-Century Change.” Journal of Social History 26.4 (1993): 769–95. Yalom, Marilyn. A History of the Wife. New York: Harper Collins, 2001.

Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. 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Introduction The aim of this paper is to examine whether recent catastrophic tsunamis have driven a cultural shift in the awareness of Australians to the danger associated with this natural hazard and whether the media have contributed to the emergence of “tsunami” as a new Australian catastrophe. Prior to the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami disaster (2004 IOT), tsunamis as a type of hazard capable of generating widespread catastrophe were not well known by the general public and had barely registered within the wider scientific community. As a university based lecturer who specialises in natural disasters, I always started my public talks or student lectures with an attempt at a detailed description of what a tsunami is. With little high quality visual and media imagery to use, this was not easy. The Australian geologist Ted Bryant was right when he named his 2001 book Tsunami: The Underrated Hazard. That changed on 26 December 2004 when the third largest earthquake ever recorded occurred northwest of Sumatra, Indonesia, triggering the most catastrophic tsunami ever experienced. The 2004 IOT claimed at least 220,000 lives—probably more—injured tens of thousands, destroyed widespread coastal infrastructure and left millions homeless. Beyond the catastrophic impacts, this tsunami was conspicuous because, for the first time, such a devastating tsunami was widely captured on video and other forms of moving and still imagery. This occurred for two reasons. Firstly, the tsunami took place during daylight hours in good weather conditions—factors conducive to capturing high quality visual images. Secondly, many people—both local residents and westerners who were on beachside holidays and at the coast at multiple locations impacted by the tsunami—were able to capture images of the tsunami on their cameras, videos, and smart phones. The extensive media coverage—including horrifying television, video, and still imagery that raced around the globe in the hours and days after the tsunami, filling our television screens, homes, and lives regardless of where we lived—had a dramatic effect. This single event drove a quantum shift in the wider cultural awareness of this type of catastrophe and acted as a catalyst for improved individual and societal understanding of the nature and effects of disaster landscapes. Since this event, there have been several notable tsunamis, including the March 2011 Japan catastrophe. Once again, this event occurred during daylight hours and was widely captured by multiple forms of media. These events have resulted in a cascade of media coverage across television, radio, movie, and documentary channels, in the print media, online, and in the popular press and on social media—very little of which was available prior to 2004. Much of this has been documentary and informative in style, but there have also been numerous television dramas and movies. For example, an episode of the popular American television series CSI Miami entitled Crime Wave (Season 3, Episode 7) featured a tsunami, triggered by a volcanic eruption in the Atlantic and impacting Miami, as the backdrop to a standard crime-filled episode ("CSI," IMDb; Wikipedia). In 2010, Warner Bros Studios released the supernatural drama fantasy film Hereafter directed by Clint Eastwood. In the movie, a television journalist survives a near-death experience during the 2004 IOT in what might be the most dramatic, and probably accurate, cinematic portrayal of a tsunami ("Hereafter," IMDb; Wikipedia). Thus, these creative and entertaining forms of media, influenced by the catastrophic nature of tsunamis, are impetuses for creativity that also contribute to a transformation of cultural knowledge of catastrophe. The transformative potential of creative media, together with national and intergovernmental disaster risk reduction activity such as community education, awareness campaigns, community evacuation planning and drills, may be indirectly inferred from rapid and positive community behavioural responses. By this I mean many people in coastal communities who experience strong earthquakes are starting a process of self-evacuation, even if regional tsunami warning centres have not issued an alert or warning. For example, when people in coastal locations in Samoa felt a large earthquake on 29 September 2009, many self-evacuated to higher ground or sought information and instruction from relevant authorities because they expected a tsunami to occur. When interviewed, survivors stated that the memory of television and media coverage of the 2004 IOT acted as a catalyst for their affirmative behavioural response (Dominey-Howes and Thaman 1). Thus, individual and community cultural understandings of the nature and effects of tsunami catastrophes are incredibly important for shaping resilience and reducing vulnerability. However, this cultural shift is not playing out evenly.Are Australia and Its People at Risk from Tsunamis?Prior to the 2004 IOT, there was little discussion about, research in to, or awareness about tsunamis and Australia. Ted Bryant from the University of Wollongong had controversially proposed that Australia had been affected by tsunamis much bigger than the 2004 IOT six to eight times during the last 10,000 years and that it was only a matter of when, not if, such an event repeated itself (Bryant, "Second Edition"). Whilst his claims had received some media attention, his ideas did not achieve widespread scientific, cultural, or community acceptance. Not-with-standing this, Australia has been affected by more than 60 small tsunamis since European colonisation (Dominey-Howes 239). Indeed, the 2004 IOT and 2006 Java tsunami caused significant flooding of parts of the Northern Territory and Western Australia (Prendergast and Brown 69). However, the affected areas were sparsely populated and experienced very little in the way of damage or loss. Thus they did not cross any sort of critical threshold of “catastrophe” and failed to achieve meaningful community consciousness—they were not agents of cultural transformation.Regardless of the risk faced by Australia’s coastline, Australians travel to, and holiday in, places that experience tsunamis. In fact, 26 Australians were killed during the 2004 IOT (DFAT) and five were killed by the September 2009 South Pacific tsunami (Caldwell et al. 26). What Role Do the Media Play in Preparing for and Responding to Catastrophe?Regardless of the type of hazard/disaster/catastrophe, the key functions the media play include (but are not limited to): pre-event community education, awareness raising, and planning and preparations; during-event preparation and action, including status updates, evacuation warnings and notices, and recommendations for affirmative behaviours; and post-event responses and recovery actions to follow, including where to gain aid and support. Further, the media also play a role in providing a forum for debate and post-event analysis and reflection, as a mechanism to hold decision makers to account. From time to time, the media also provide a platform for examining who, if anyone, might be to blame for losses sustained during catastrophes and can act as a powerful conduit for driving socio-cultural, behavioural, and policy change. Many of these functions are elegantly described and a series of best practices outlined by The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency in a tsunami specific publication freely available online (CDEMA 1). What Has Been the Media Coverage in Australia about Tsunamis and Their Effects on Australians?A manifest contents analysis of media material covering tsunamis over the last decade using the framework of Cox et al. reveals that coverage falls into distinctive and repetitive forms or themes. After tsunamis, I have collected articles (more than 130 to date) published in key Australian national broadsheets (e.g., The Australian and Sydney Morning Herald) and tabloid (e.g., The Telegraph) newspapers and have watched on television and monitored on social media, such as YouTube and Facebook, the types of coverage given to tsunamis either affecting Australia, or Australians domestically and overseas. In all cases, I continued to monitor and collect these stories and accounts for a fixed period of four weeks after each event, commencing on the day of the tsunami. The themes raised in the coverage include: the nature of the event. For example, where, when, why did it occur, how big was it, and what were the effects; what emergency response and recovery actions are being undertaken by the emergency services and how these are being provided; exploration of how the event was made worse or better by poor/good planning and prior knowledge, action or inaction, confusion and misunderstanding; the attribution of blame and responsibility; the good news story—often the discovery and rescue of an “iconic victim/survivor”—usually a child days to weeks later; and follow-up reporting weeks to months later and on anniversaries. This coverage generally focuses on how things are improving and is often juxtaposed with the ongoing suffering of victims. I select the word “victims” purposefully for the media frequently prefer this over the more affirmative “survivor.”The media seldom carry reports of “behind the scenes” disaster preparatory work such as community education programs, the development and installation of warning and monitoring systems, and ongoing training and policy work by response agencies and governments since such stories tend to be less glamorous in terms of the disaster gore factor and less newsworthy (Cox et al. 469; Miles and Morse 365; Ploughman 308).With regard to Australians specifically, the manifest contents analysis reveals that coverage can be described as follows. First, it focuses on those Australians killed and injured. Such coverage provides elements of a biography of the victims, telling their stories, personalising these individuals so we build empathy for their suffering and the suffering of their families. The Australian victims are not unknown strangers—they are named and pictures of their smiling faces are printed or broadcast. Second, the media describe and catalogue the loss and ongoing suffering of the victims (survivors). Third, the media use phrases to describe Australians such as “innocent victims in the wrong place at the wrong time.” This narrative establishes the sense that these “innocents” have been somehow wronged and transgressed and that suffering should not be experienced by them. The fourth theme addresses the difficulties Australians have in accessing Consular support and in acquiring replacement passports in order to return home. It usually goes on to describe how they have difficulty in gaining access to accommodation, clothing, food, and water and any necessary medicines and the challenges associated with booking travel home and the complexities of communicating with family and friends. The last theme focuses on how Australians were often (usually?) not given relevant safety information by “responsible people” or “those in the know” in the place where they were at the time of the tsunami. This establishes a sense that Australians were left out and not considered by the relevant authorities. This narrative pays little attention to the wide scale impact upon and suffering of resident local populations who lack the capacity to escape the landscape of catastrophe.How Does Australian Media Coverage of (Tsunami) Catastrophe Compare with Elsewhere?A review of the available literature suggests media coverage of catastrophes involving domestic citizens is similar globally. For example, Olofsson (557) in an analysis of newspaper articles in Sweden about the 2004 IOT showed that the tsunami was framed as a Swedish disaster heavily focused on Sweden, Swedish victims, and Thailand, and that there was a division between “us” (Swedes) and “them” (others or non-Swedes). Olofsson (557) described two types of “us” and “them.” At the international level Sweden, i.e. “us,” was glorified and contrasted with “inferior” countries such as Thailand, “them.” Olofsson (557) concluded that mediated frames of catastrophe are influenced by stereotypes and nationalistic values.Such nationalistic approaches preface one type of suffering in catastrophe over others and delegitimises the experiences of some survivors. Thus, catastrophes are not evenly experienced. Importantly, Olofsson although not explicitly using the term, explains that the underlying reason for this construction of “them” and “us” is a form of imperialism and colonialism. Sharp refers to “historically rooted power hierarchies between countries and regions of the world” (304)—this is especially so of western news media reporting on catastrophes within and affecting “other” (non-western) countries. Sharp goes much further in relation to western representations and imaginations of the “war on terror” (arguably a global catastrophe) by explicitly noting the near universal western-centric dominance of this representation and the construction of the “west” as good and all “non-west” as not (299). Like it or not, the western media, including elements of the mainstream Australian media, adhere to this imperialistic representation. Studies of tsunami and other catastrophes drawing upon different types of media (still images, video, film, camera, and social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and the like) and from different national settings have explored the multiple functions of media. These functions include: providing information, questioning the authorities, and offering a chance for transformative learning. Further, they alleviate pain and suffering, providing new virtual communities of shared experience and hearing that facilitate resilience and recovery from catastrophe. Lastly, they contribute to a cultural transformation of catastrophe—both positive and negative (Hjorth and Kyoung-hwa "The Mourning"; "Good Grief"; McCargo and Hyon-Suk 236; Brown and Minty 9; Lau et al. 675; Morgan and de Goyet 33; Piotrowski and Armstrong 341; Sood et al. 27).Has Extensive Media Coverage Resulted in an Improved Awareness of the Catastrophic Potential of Tsunami for Australians?In playing devil’s advocate, my simple response is NO! This because I have been interviewing Australians about their perceptions and knowledge of tsunamis as a catastrophe, after events have occurred. These events have triggered alerts and warnings by the Australian Tsunami Warning System (ATWS) for selected coastal regions of Australia. Consequently, I have visited coastal suburbs and interviewed people about tsunamis generally and those events specifically. Formal interviews (surveys) and informal conversations have revolved around what people perceived about the hazard, the likely consequences, what they knew about the warning, where they got their information from, how they behaved and why, and so forth. I have undertaken this work after the 2007 Solomon Islands, 2009 New Zealand, 2009 South Pacific, the February 2010 Chile, and March 2011 Japan tsunamis. I have now spoken to more than 800 people. Detailed research results will be presented elsewhere, but of relevance here, I have discovered that, to begin with, Australians have a reasonable and shared cultural knowledge of the potential catastrophic effects that tsunamis can have. They use terms such as “devastating; death; damage; loss; frightening; economic impact; societal loss; horrific; overwhelming and catastrophic.” Secondly, when I ask Australians about their sources of information about tsunamis, they describe the television (80%); Internet (85%); radio (25%); newspaper (35%); and social media including YouTube (65%). This tells me that the media are critical to underpinning knowledge of catastrophe and are a powerful transformative medium for the acquisition of knowledge. Thirdly, when asked about where people get information about live warning messages and alerts, Australians stated the “television (95%); Internet (70%); family and friends (65%).” Fourthly and significantly, when individuals were asked what they thought being caught in a tsunami would be like, responses included “fun (50%); awesome (75%); like in a movie (40%).” Fifthly, when people were asked about what they would do (i.e., their “stated behaviour”) during a real tsunami arriving at the coast, responses included “go down to the beach to swim/surf the tsunami (40%); go to the sea to watch (85%); video the tsunami and sell to the news media people (40%).”An independent and powerful representation of the disjunct between Australians’ knowledge of the catastrophic potential of tsunamis and their “negative” behavioral response can be found in viewing live television news coverage broadcast from Sydney beaches on the morning of Sunday 28 February 2010. The Chilean tsunami had taken more than 14 hours to travel from Chile to the eastern seaboard of Australia and the ATWS had issued an accurate warning and had correctly forecast the arrival time of the tsunami (approximately 08.30 am). The television and radio media had dutifully broadcast the warning issued by the State Emergency Services. The message was simple: “Stay out of the water, evacuate the beaches and move to higher ground.” As the tsunami arrived, those news broadcasts showed volunteer State Emergency Service personnel and Surf Life Saving Australia lifeguards “begging” with literally hundreds (probably thousands up and down the eastern seaboard of Australia) of members of the public to stop swimming in the incoming tsunami and to evacuate the beaches. On that occasion, Australians were lucky and the tsunami was inconsequential. What do these responses mean? Clearly Australians recognise and can describe the consequences of a tsunami. However, they are not associating the catastrophic nature of tsunami with their own lives or experience. They 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 but are the subject of ongoing study.The Emergence of Tsunami as a “New Australian Catastrophe”?As a natural disaster expert with nearly two decades experience, in my mind tsunami has emerged as a “new Australian catastrophe.” I believe this has occurred for a number of reasons. Firstly, the 2004 IOT was devastating and did impact northwestern Australia, raising the flag on this hitherto, unknown threat. Australia is now known to be vulnerable to the tsunami catastrophe. The media have played a critical role here. Secondly, in the 2004 IOT and other tsunamis since, Australians have died and their deaths have been widely reported in the Australian media. Thirdly, the emergence of various forms of social media has facilitated an explosion in information and material that can be consumed, digested, reimagined, and normalised by Australians hungry for the gore of catastrophe—it feeds our desire for catastrophic death and destruction. Fourthly, catastrophe has been creatively imagined and retold for a story-hungry viewing public. Whether through regular television shows easily consumed from a comfy chair at home, or whilst eating popcorn at a cinema, tsunami catastrophe is being fed to us in a way that reaffirms its naturalness. Juxtaposed against this idea though is that, despite all the graphic imagery of tsunami catastrophe, especially images of dead children in other countries, Australian media do not and culturally cannot, display images of dead Australian children. Such images are widely considered too gruesome but are well known to drive changes in cultural behaviour because of the iconic significance of the child within our society. As such, a cultural shift has not yet occurred and so the potential of catastrophe remains waiting to strike. Fifthly and significantly, given the fact that large numbers of Australians have not died during recent tsunamis means that again, the catastrophic potential of tsunamis is not yet realised and has not resulted in cultural changes to more affirmative behaviour. Lastly, Australians are probably more aware of “regular or common” catastrophes such as floods and bush fires that are normal to the Australian climate system and which are endlessly experienced individually and culturally and covered by the media in all forms. The Australian summer of 2012–13 has again been dominated by floods and fires. If this idea is accepted, the media construct a uniquely Australian imaginary of catastrophe and cultural discourse of disaster. The familiarity with these common climate catastrophes makes us “culturally blind” to the catastrophe that is tsunami.The consequences of a major tsunami affecting Australia some point in the future are likely to be of a scale not yet comprehensible. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). "ABC Net Splash." 20 Mar. 2013 ‹http://splash.abc.net.au/media?id=31077›. Brown, Philip, and Jessica Minty. “Media Coverage and Charitable Giving after the 2004 Tsunami.” Southern Economic Journal 75 (2008): 9–25. Bryant, Edward. Tsunami: The Underrated Hazard. First Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. ———. Tsunami: The Underrated Hazard. Second Edition, Sydney: Springer-Praxis, 2008. 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A politician’s political and personal selves have been in the spotlight of academic scholarship for hundreds of years, but only in recent years has a political ‘persona’ obtained new modes of mediation via networked media. New advancements in politics, technology, and media brought challenges to the traditional politics and personal self-representation of major leaders. Vladimir Putin’s divorce announcement in June 2013, posed a new challenge for his political self-mediation. A rather reserved leader (Loshak), he nonetheless broadcast his personal news to the large audience and made it in a very peculiar way, causing the media professionals and public to draw parallels with Soviet-era mediated politics and thereby evoke collective memories. This paper studies how Vladimir Putin’s divorce announcement was constructed and presented and also what response and opinion threads—satirical and humorous, ignorant and informed feedback—it achieved via media professionals and the general Twitter audience. Finally, this study aims to evaluate how Vladimir Putin’s political ‘persona’ was represented and perceived via these mixed channels of communication.According to classic studies of mediated political persona (Braudy; Meyrowitz; Corner), any public activity of a political persona is considered a part of their political performance. The history of political marketing can be traced back to ancient times, but it developed through the works of Renaissance and Medieval thinkers. Of particular prominence is Machiavelli’s The Prince with its famous “It is unnecessary for the prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them” (cited in Corner 68). All those centuries-built developments and patterns of political self-representation have now taken on new forms as a result of the development of media industry and technology. Russian mediated politics has seen various examples of new ways of self-representation exercised by major politicians in the 2010s. For instance, former president Dmitry Medvedev was known as the “president with an iPad” (Pronina), as he was advocating technology and using social networks in order to seem more approachable and appear to be responsive to collecting feedback from the nation. Traditional media constantly highlighted Medvedev’s keen interest in Facebook and Twitter, which resulted in a growing public assumption that this new modern approach to self-representation may signify a new approach to governance (see Asmolov).Goffman’s classic study of the distinction between public and private life helps in linking political persona to celebrity persona. In his view the political presentation of self differs from the one in popular culture because politicians as opposed to entertainers have to conform to a set of ideals, projections, social stereotypes and cultural/national archetypes for their audience of voters (Goffman; Corner). A politician’s public persona has to be constantly reaffirming and proving the values he or she is promoting through their campaigns. Mediations of a political personhood can be projected in three main modes: visual, vocal, and kinetic (Ong; Mayhew; Corner). Visual representation follows the iconic paintings and photography in displaying the position, attitude, and associative contexts related to that. Vocal representation covers both content and format of a political speech, it is not only the articulated message, but also more important the persona speaking. Ong describes this close relation of the political and personal along with the interrelation of the message and the medium as “secondary orality”—voice, tone and volume make the difference. The third mode is kinetic representation and means the political persona in action and interaction. Overlapping of different strategies and structures of political self-representation fortifies the notion of performativity (Corner and Pels) in politics that becomes a core feature of the multidimensional representation of a mediated political self.The advancement of electronic media and interactive platforms has influenced political communication and set the new standard for the convergence of the political and personal life of a politician. On its own, the President Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair raised the level of public awareness of the politician’s private life. It also allowed for widely distributed, contested, and mediated judgments of a politician’s personal actions. Lawrence and Bennett in their study of Lewinsky case’s academic and public response state that although the majority of American citizens did not expect the president to be the moral leader, they expressed ambivalence in their rendition of the importance of “moral leadership” by big politicians (438). The President Clinton/Lewinsky case adds a new dimension to Goffman and Corner’s respective discussions on the significance of values in the political persona self-representation. This case proves that values can not only be reinforced by one’s public persona, but those values can be (re)constructed by the press or public opinion. Values are becoming a contested trait in the contemporary mediated political persona. This view can be supported by Dmitry Medvedev’s case: although modern technology was known as his personal passion, it was publicised only with reference to his role as a public politician and specifically when Medvedev appeared with an iPad talking about modernisation at major meetings (Pronina). However, one can argue that one’s charisma can affect the impact of values in public self-representation of the politician. In addition, social networks add a new dimension to personified publicity. From Barack Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’ networked campaign in 2008 and through many more recent examples, we are witnessing the continuing process of the personalisation of politics (Corner and Pels). From one point of view, audiences tend to have more interest and sympathy in political individuals and their lifestyles rather than political parties and their programmes (Lawrence and Bennett; Corner and Pels). It should be noted that the interest towards political individuals does not fall apart from the historical logics of politics; it is only mediated in a new way. Max Weber’s notion of “leadership democracy” proves that political strategy is best distributed through the charismatic leadership imposing his will on the audience. This view can be strengthened by Le Bon’s concept of emotive connection of the leader and his crowd, and Adorno’s writings on the authoritarian personality also highlight the significance of the leader’s own natural and mediated persona in politics. What is new is the channels of mediation—modern audiences’ access to a politician’s private life is facilitated by new forms of media interactivity (Corner and Pels). This recent development calls for the new understanding of “persona” in politics. On one hand, the borderline between private and public becomes blurred and we are more exposed to the private self of a leader, but on the other hand, those politicians aware of new media literacy can create new structures of proximity and distance and construct a separate “persona” online, using digital media for their benefit (Corner and Pels). Russian official politics has developed a cautious attitude towards social networks in the post-Medvedev era - currently, President Vladimir Putin is not known for using social networks personally and transmits his views via his spokesperson. However, his personal charisma makes him overly present in digital media - through the images and texts shared both by his supporters and rivals. As opposed to Medvedev’s widely publicised “modernisation president” representation, Putin’s persona breaks the boundaries of limited traditional publicity and makes him recognised not only for his political activity, but looks, controversial expression, attitude to employees, and even personal life. That brings us back to Goffman, Corner and Lawrence and Bennett’s discussions on the interrelation of political values and personal traits in one’s political self-representation, making it evident that one’s strong personality can dominate over his political image and programme. Moreover, an assumption can be made that a politician’s persona may be more powerful than the narrative suggested by the constructed self-representation and new connotations may arise on the crossroads of this interaction.Russian President Divorce Announcement and Collective MemoryVladimir Putin’s divorce announcement was broadcast via traditional media on 6 June 2013 as a simple news story. The state broadcasting company Vesti-24 sent a journalist Polina Yermolayeva from their news bulletin to cover Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putin’s visit to a ballet production, Esmeralda, at the state Kremlin theatre. The news anchor’s introduction to the interview was ordinarily written and had no hints of the upcoming sensation. After the first couple and the journalist had discussed their opinion of the ballet (“beautiful music,” “flawless and light moves”), the reporter Yermolayeva suddenly asked: “You and Lyudmila are rarely seen together in public. Rumour has it that you do not live together. It is true?” Vladimir Putin and his wife exchanged a number of rather pre-scripted speeches stating that the first couple was getting a divorce as the children had grown old enough, and they would still stay friends and wished each other the best of luck. The whole interview lasted 3:25 minutes and became a big surprise for the country (Loshak; Sobchak).When applying the classification of three modes of political personhood (Corner; Ong) to Vladimir Putin’s divorce announcement, it becomes evident that all three modes—visual, vocal, and kinetic—were used. Television audiences watched their president speak freely to the unknown reporter, explain details of his life in his own words so that body language also was visible and conveyed additional information. The visual self-representation harkens back to classic, Soviet-style announcements: Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putina are dressed in classic monochrome suit and costume with a skirt respectively. They pose in front of the rather dull yet somewhat golden decorations of the Kremlin Theatre Hall, the walls themselves reflecting the glory and fanfare of the Soviet leadership and architecture. Vladimir Putin and his wife both talk calmly while Lyudmila appears even more relaxed than her husband (Sobchak). Although the speech looks prepared in advance (Loshak), it uses colloquial expressions and is delivered with emotional pauses and voice changes.However, close examination of not only the message but the medium of the divorce announcement reveals a vast number of intriguing symbols and parallels. First, although living in the era of digital media, Vladimir Putin chose to broadcast his personal news through a traditional television channel. Second, it was broadcast in a news programme making the breaking news of the president’s divorce, paradoxically, quite a mundane news event. Third, the semiotic construction of the divorce announcement bore a lot of connotations and synergies to the conservative, Soviet-style information distribution patterns. There are a few key symbols here that evoke collective memories: ballet, conservative political report on the government, and the stereotype of a patriarchal couple with a submissive wife (see Loshak; Rostovskiy). For example, since the perestroika of the 1990s, ballet has been widely perceived as a symbol of big political change and cause of public anxiety (Kachkaeva): this connotation was born in the 1990s when all channels were broadcasting Swan Lake round the clock while the White House was under attack. Holden reminds us that this practice was applied many times during major crises in Soviet history, thus creating a short link in the public subconscious of a ballet broadcast being symbolic of a political crisis or turmoil.Vladimir Putin Divorce: Traditional and Social Media ReceptionIn the first day after the divorce announcement Russian Twitter generated 180,000 tweets about Vladimir Putin’s divorce, and the hashtag #развод (“divorce”) became very popular. For the analysis that follows, Putin divorce tweets were collected by two methods: retrieved from traditional media coverage of Twitter talk on Putin’s divorce and from Twitter directly, using Topsy engine. Tweets were collected for one week, from the divorce announcement on 6 June to 13 June when the discussion declined and became repetitive. Data was collected using Snob.ru, Kommersant.ru, Forbes.ru, other media outlets and Topsy. The results were then combined and evaluated.Some of those tweets provided a satirical commentary to the divorce news and can be classified as “memes.” An “Internet meme” is a contagious message, a symbolic pattern of information spread online (Lankshear and Knobel; Shifman). Memes are viral texts that are shared online after being adjusted/altered or developed on the way. Starting from 1976 when Richard Dawkins coined the term, memes have been under media scholarship scrutiny and the term has been widely contested in various sciences. In Internet research studies, memes are defined as “condensed images that stimulate visual, verbal, musical, or behavioral associations that people can easily imitate and transmit to others” (Pickerel, Jorgensen, and Bennett). The open character of memes makes them valuable tools for political discourse in a modern highly mediated environment.Qualitative analysis of the most popular and widely shared tweets reveals several strong threads and themes round Putin’s divorce discussion. According to Burzhskaya, many users created memes with jokes about the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. For instance, “He should have tied up his relationship with Dmitry Anatolyevich long ago” or “So actually Medvedev is the case?” were among popular memes generated. Another collection of memework contained a comment that, according to the Russian legislation, Putin’s ex-wife should get half of their wealth, in this case—half of the country. This thread was followed by the discussion whether the separation/border of her share of Russia should use the Ural Mountains as the borderline. Another group of Twitter users applied the Russian president’s divorce announcement to other countries’ politics. Thus one user wrote “Take Yanukovich to the ballet” implying that Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich (who was still a legitimate president in June 2013) should also be taken to the ballet to trigger changes in the political life in Ukraine. Twitter celebrity and well-known Russian actress and comedian Tatiana Lazareva wrote “In my opinion, it is a scam”, punning on the slang meaning of the word “razvod” (“divorce”) in Russian that can also mean “fraud” or “con”. Famous Russian journalist Dmitry Olshansky used his Twitter account to draw a historical parallel between Putin and other Russian and Soviet political leaders’ marital life. He noted that such Russian leaders as Tsar Nikolay the Second and Mikhail Gorbachev who loved their wives and were known to be good husbands were not successful managers of the state. In contrast, lone rulers of Russia such as Joseph Stalin proved to be leaders who loved their country first and gained a lot of support from their electorate because of that lonely love. Popular print and online journalist Oleg Kashin picked up on that specific idea: he quoted Vladimir Putin’s press secretary who explained that the president had declared that he would now spend more time working for the prosperity of the country.Twitter users were exchanging not only 140 symbol texts but also satirical images and other visual memes based on the divorce announcement. Those who suggested that Vladimir Putin should have divorced the country instead portrayed Lyudmila Putina and Vladimir holding candles and wearing funereal black with various taglines discussing how the country would now be split. Other users contributed visual memes jamming the television show Bachelor imagery and font with Vladimir Putin’s face and an announcement that the most desirable bachelor in the country is now its president. A similar idea was put into jammed images of the Let’s Get Married television show using Vladimir Putin’s face or name linked with a humorous comment that he could try those shows to find a new wife. One more thread of Twitter memes on Putin’s divorce used the name of Alina Kabaeva, Olympic gymnast who is rumoured by the press to be in relationship with the leader (Daily Mail Reporter). She was mentioned in plenty of visual and textual memes. Probably, the most popular visual meme (Burzhskaya; Topsy) used the one-liner from a famous Soviet comedy Ivan Vasylievich Menyaet Professiyu: it uses a joyful exclamation of an actress who learns that her love interest, a movie director, is leaving his wife so that the lovers can now fly to a resort together. Alina Kabaeva, the purported love interest of Putin, was jammed to be that actress as she announced the “triumphal” resort vacation plan to a girlfriend over the phone.Vladimir Putin’s 2013 divorce announcement presented new challenges for his personal and political self-representation and revealed new traits of the Russian president’s interaction with the nation. As the news of Vladimir and Lyudmila Putin’s divorce was broadcast via traditional media in a non-interactive television format, commentary on the event advanced only through the following week’s media coverage and the massive activity on social networks. It has still to be examined whether Vladimir Putin’s political advisors intentionally included many symbols of collective memory in the original and staid broadcast announcement. However, the response from traditional and social media shows that both Russian journalists and regular Twitter users were inclined to use humour and satire when discussing the personal life of a major political leader. Despite this appearance of an active counter-political sphere via social networks, the majority of tweets retrieved also revealed a certain level of respect towards Vladimir Putin’s privacy as few popular jokes or memes were aggressive, offensive or humiliating. Most popular memes on Vladimir Putin’s divorce linked this announcement to the political life of Russia, the political situation in other countries, and television shows and popular culture. Some of the memes, though, advanced the idea that Vladimir Putin should have divorced the country instead. The analysis also shows how a charismatic leader can affect or reconstruct the “values” he represents. In Vladimir Putin’s divorce event, his personality is the main focus of discussion both by traditional and new media. However, he is not judged for his personal choices as the online social media users provide rather mild commentary and jokes about them. The event and the subsequent online discourse, images and texts not only identify how Putin’s politics have become personified, the research also uncovers how the audience/citizenry online often see the country as a “persona” as well. Some Internet users suggested Putin’s marriage to the country; this mystified, if not mythologised view reinforces Vladimir Putin’s personal and political charisma.Conclusively, Vladimir Putin’s divorce case study shows how political and private persona are being mediated and merged via mixed channels of communication. 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Introduction Negative stereotyping of alternative diets such as veganism and other plant-based diets has been common in Australia, conventionally a meat-eating culture (OECD qtd. in Ting). Indeed, meat consumption in Australia is sanctioned by the ubiquity of advertising linking meat-eating to health, vitality and nation-building, and public challenges to such plant-based diets as veganism. In addition, state, commercial enterprises, and various community groups overtly resist challenges to Australian meat-eating norms and to the intensive animal husbandry practices that underpin it. Hence activists, who may contest not simply this norm but many of the customary industry practices that comprise Australia’s meat production, have been accused of promoting a vegan agenda and even of undermining the “Australian way of life”.If veganism meansa philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals. (Vegan Society)then our interest in this article lies in how a stereotyped label of veganism (and other associated attributes) is being used across Australian public spheres to challenge the work of animal activists as they call out factory farming for entrenched animal cruelty. This is carried out in three main parts. First, following an outline of our research approach, we examine the processes of stereotyping and the key dimensions of vegan stereotyping. Second, in the main part of the article, we reveal how opponents to such animal activist organisations as Animals Australia attempt to undermine activist calls for change by framing them as promoting an un-Australian vegan agenda. Finally, we consider how, despite such framing, that organisation is generating productive public debate around animal welfare, and, further, facilitating the creation of new activist identifications and identities.Research ApproachData collection involved searching for articles where Animals Australia and animal activism were yoked with veg*n (vegan and vegetarian), across the period May 2011 to 2016 (discussion peaked between May and June 2013). This period was of interest because it exposed a flare point with public discord being expressed between communities—namely between rural and urban consumers, farmers and animal activists, Coles Supermarkets (identified by The Australian Government the Treasury as one of two major supermarkets holding over 65% share of Australian food retail market) and their producers—and a consequent voicing of disquiet around Australian identity. We used purposive sampling (Waller, Farquharson, and Dempsey 67) to identify relevant materials as we knew in advance the case was “information-rich” (Patton 181) and would provide insightful information about a “troublesome” phenomenon (Emmel 6). Materials were collected from online news articles (30) and readers’ comments (167), online magazines (2) and websites (2) and readers’ comments (3), news items (Factiva 13), Australian Broadcasting Commission television (1) and radio (1), public blogs (2), and Facebook pages from involved organisations, specifically Australia’s National Farmers’ Federation (NFF, 155 posts) and Coles Supermarkets (29 posts). Many of these materials were explicitly responsive to a) Animals Australia’s Make It Possible campaign against Australian factory farming (launched and highly debated during this period), and b) Coles Supermarket’s short-lived partnership with Animals Australia in 2013. We utilised content analysis so as to make visible the most prominent and consistent stereotypes utilised in these various materials during the identified period. The approach allowed us to code and categorise materials so as to determine trends and patterns of words used, their relationships, and key structures and ways of speaking (Weerakkody). In addition, discourse analysis (Gee) was used in order to identify and track “language-in-use” so as to make visible the stereotyping deployed during the public reception of both the campaign and Animals Australia’s associated partnership with Coles. These methods enabled a “nuanced approach” (Coleman and Moss 12) with which to spot putdowns, innuendos, and stereotypical attitudes.Vegan StereotypingStereotypes creep into everyday language and are circulated and amplified through mainstream media, speeches by public figures, and social media. Stereotypes maintain their force through being reused and repurposed, making them difficult to eradicate due to their “cumulative effects” and influence (Harris and Sanborn 38; Inzlicht, Tullett, Legault, and Kang; Pickering). Over time stereotypes can become the lens through which we view “the world and social reality” (Harris and Sanborn 38; Inzlicht et al.). In summation, stereotyping:reduces identity categories to particular sets of deeds, attributes and attitudes (Whitley and Kite);informs individuals’ “cognitive investments” (Blum 267) by associating certain characteristics with particular groups;comprises symbolic and connotative codes that carry sets of traits, deeds, or beliefs (Cover; Rosello), and;becomes increasingly persuasive through regulating language and image use as well as identity categories (Cover; Pickering; Rosello).Not only is the “iterative force” (Rosello 35) of such associative stereotyping compounded due to its dissemination across digital media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, websites, and online news, but attempts to denounce it tend to increase its “persuasive power” (29). Indeed, stereotypes seem to refuse “to die” (23), remaining rooted in social and cultural memory (Whitley and Kite 10).As such, despite the fact that there is increasing interest in Australia and elsewhere in new food norms and plant-based diets (see, e.g., KPMG), as well as in vegan lifestyle options (Wright), studies still show that vegans remain a negatively stereotyped group. Previous studies have suggested that vegans mark a “symbolic threat” to Western, conventionally meat-eating cultures (MacInnis and Hodson 722; Stephens Griffin; Cole and Morgan). One key UK study of national newspapers, for instance, showed vegans continuing to be discredited in multiple ways as: 1) “self-evidently ridiculous”; 2) “ascetics”; 3) having a lifestyle difficult and impossible to maintain; 4) “faddist”; 5) “oversensitive”; and 6) “hostile extremists” (Cole and Morgan 140–47).For many Australians, veganism also appears anathema to their preferred culture and lifestyle of meat-eating. For instance, the NFF, Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), and other farming bodies continue to frame veganism as marking an extreme form of lifestyle, as anti-farming and un-Australian. Such perspectives are also circulated through online rural news and readers’ comments, as will be discussed later in the article. Such representations are further exemplified by the MLA’s (Lamb, Australia Day, Celebrate Australia) Australia Day lamb advertising campaigns (Bembridge; Canning). For multiple consecutive years, the campaign presented vegans (and vegetarians) as being self-evidently ridiculous and faddish, representing them as mentally unhinged and fringe dwellers. Such stereotyping not only invokes “affective reactions” (Whitley and Kite 8)—including feelings of disgust towards individuals living such lifestyles or holding such values—but operates as “political baits” (Rosello 18) to shore-up or challenge certain social or political positions.Although such advertisements are arguably satirical, their repeated screening towards and on Australia Day highlights deeply held views about the normalcy of animal agriculture and meat-eating, “homogenizing” (Blum 276; Pickering) both meat-eaters and non-meat-eaters alike. Cultural stereotyping of this kind amplifies “social” as well as political schisms (Blum 276), and arguably discourages consumers—whether meat-eaters or non-meat-eaters—from advocating together around shared goals such as animal welfare and food safety. Additionally, given the rise of new food practices in Australia—including flexitarian, reducetarian, pescatarian, kangatarian (a niche form of ethical eating), vegivores, semi-vegetarian, vegetarian, veganism—alongside broader commitments to ethical consumption, such stereotyping suggests that consumers’ actual values and preferences are being disregarded in order to shore-up the normalcy of meat-eating.Animals Australia and the (So-Called) Vegan Agenda of Animal ActivismGiven these points, it is no surprise that there is a tacit belief in Australia that anyone labelled an animal activist must also be vegan. Within this context, we have chosen to primarily focus on the attitudes towards the campaigning work of Animals Australia—a not-for-profit organisation representing some 30 member groups and over 2 million individual supporters (Animals Australia, “Who Is”)—as this organisation has been charged as promoting a vegan agenda. Along with the RSPCA and Voiceless, Animals Australia represents one of the largest animal protection organisations within Australia (Chen). Its mission is to:Investigate, expose and raise community awareness of animal cruelty;Provide animals with the strongest representation possible to Government and other decision-makers;Educate, inspire, empower and enlist the support of the community to prevent and prohibit animal cruelty;Strengthen the animal protection movement. (Animals Australia, “Who Is”)In delivery of this mission, the organisation curates public rallies and protests, makes government and industry submissions, and utilises corporate outreach. Campaigning engages the Web, multiple forms of print and broadcast media, and social media.With regards to Animals Australia’s campaigns regarding factory farming—including the Make It Possible campaign (see fig. 1), launched in 2013 and key to the period we are investigating—the main message is that: the animals kept in these barren and constrictive conditions are “no different to our pets at home”; they are “highly intelligent creatures who feel pain, and who will respond to kindness and affection – if given the chance”; they are “someone, not something” (see the Make It Possible transcript). Campaigns deliberately strive to engender feelings of empathy and produce affect in viewers (see, e.g., van Gurp). Specifically they strive to produce mainstream recognition of the cruelties entrenched in factory farming practices and build community outrage against these practices so as to initiate industry change. Campaigns thus expressly challenge Australians to no longer support factory farmed animal products, and to identify with what we have elsewhere called everyday activist positions (Rodan and Mummery, “Animal Welfare”; “Make It Possible”). They do not, however, explicitly endorse a vegan position. Figure 1: Make It Possible (Animals Australia, campaign poster)Nonetheless, as has been noted, a common counter-tactic used within Australia by the industries targeted by such campaigns, has been to use well-known negative stereotypes to discredit not only the charges of systemic animal cruelty but the associated organisations. In our analysis, we found four prominent interconnected stereotypes utilised in both digital and print media to discredit the animal welfare objectives of Animals Australia. Together these cast the organisation as: 1) anti-meat-eating; 2) anti-farming; 3) promoting a vegan agenda; and 4) hostile extremists. These stereotypes are examined below.Anti-Meat-EatingThe most common stereotype attributed to Animals Australia from its campaigning is of being anti-meat-eating. This charge, with its associations with veganism, is clearly problematic for industries that facilitate meat-eating and within a culture that normalises meat-eating, as the following example expresses:They’re [Animals Australia] all about stopping things. They want to stop factory farming – whatever factory farming is – or they want to stop live exports. And in fact they’re not necessarily about: how do I improve animal welfare in the pig industry? Or how do I improve animal welfare in the live export industry? Because ultimately they are about a meat-free future world and we’re about a meat producing industry, so there’s not a lot of overlap, really between what we’re doing. (Andrew Spencer, Australian Pork Ltd., qtd. in Clark)Respondents engaging this stereotype also express their “outrage at Coles” (McCarthy) and Animals Australia for “pedalling [sic]” a pro-vegan agenda (Nash), their sense that Animals Australia is operating with ulterior motives (Flint) and criminal intent (Brown). They see cultural refocus as unnecessary and “an exercise in futility” (Harris).Anti-FarmingTo be anti-farming in Australia is generally considered to be un-Australian, with Glasgow suggesting that any criticism of “farming practices” in Australian society can be “interpreted as an attack on the moral integrity of farmers, amounting to cultural blasphemy” (200). Given its objectives, it is unsurprising that Animals Australia has been stereotyped as being “anti-farming”, a phrase additionally often used in conjunction with the charge of veganism. Although this comprises a misreading of veganism—given its focus on challenging animal exploitation in farming rather than entailing opposition to all farming—the NFF accused Animals Australia of being “blatantly anti-farming and proveganism” (Linegar qtd. in Nason) and as wanting “to see animal agriculture phased out” (National Farmers’ Federation). As expressed in more detail:One of the main factors for VFF and other farmers being offended is because of AA’s opinion and stand on ALL farming. AA wants all farming banned and us all become vegans. Is it any wonder a lot of people were upset? Add to that the proceeds going to AA which may have been used for their next criminal activity washed against the grain. If people want to stand against factory farming they have the opportunity not to purchase them. Surely not buying a product will have a far greater impact on factory farmed produce. Maybe the money could have been given to farmers? (Hunter)Such stereotyping reveals how strongly normalised animal agriculture is in Australia, as well as a tendency on the part of respondents to reframe the challenge of animal cruelty in some farming practices into a position supposedly challenging all farming practices.Promoting a Vegan AgendaAs is already clear, Animals Australia is often reproached for promoting a vegan agenda, which, it is further suggested, it keeps hidden from the Australian public. This viewpoint was evident in two key examples: a) the Australian public and organisations such as the NFF are presented as being “defenceless” against the “myopic vitriol of the vegan abolitionists” (Jonas); and b) Animals Australia is accused of accepting “loans from liberation groups” and being “supported by an army of animal rights lawyers” to promote a “hard core” veganism message (Bourke).Nobody likes to see any animals hurt, but pushing a vegan agenda and pushing bad attitudes by group members is not helping any animals and just serves to slow any progress both sides are trying to resolve. (V.c. Deb Ford)Along with undermining farmers’ “legitimate business” (Jooste), veganism was also considered to undermine Australia’s rural communities (Park qtd. in Malone).Hostile ExtremistsThe final stereotype linking veganism with Animals Australia was of hostile extremism (cf. Cole and Morgan). This means, for users, being inimical to Australian national values but, also, being akin to terrorists who engage in criminal activities antagonistic to Australia’s democratic society and economic livelihood (see, e.g., Greer; ABC News). It is the broad symbolic threat that “extremism” invokes that makes this stereotype particularly “infectious” (Rosello 19).The latest tag team attacks on our pork industry saw AL giving crash courses in how to become a career criminal for the severely impressionable, after attacks on the RSPCA against the teachings of Peter Singer and trying to bully the RSPCA into vegan functions menu. (Cattle Advocate)The “extremists” want that extended to dairy products, as well. The fact that this will cause the total annihilation of practically all animals, wild and domestic, doesn’t bother them in the least. (Brown)What is interesting about these last two dimensions of stereotyping is their displacement of violence. That is, rather than responding to the charge of animal cruelty, violence and extremism is attributed to those making the charge.Stereotypes and Symbolic Boundary ShiftingWhat is evident throughout these instances is how stereotyping as a “cognitive mechanism” is being used to build boundaries (Cherry 460): in the first instance, between “us” (the meat-eating majority) and “them” (the vegan minority aka animal activists); and secondly between human interest and livestock. This point is that animals may hold instrumental value and receive some protection through such, but any more stringent arguments for their protection at the expense of perceived human interests tend to be seen as wrong-headed (Sorenson; Munro).These boundaries are deeply entrenched in Western culture (Wimmer). They are also deeply problematic in the context of animal activism because they fragment publics, promote restrictive identities, and close down public debate (Lamont and Molnár). Boundary entrenching is clearly evident in the stereotyping work carried out by industry stakeholders where meat-eating and practices of industrialised animal agriculture are valorised and normalised. Challenging Australia’s meat production practices—irrespective of the reason given—is framed and belittled as entailing a vegan agenda, and further as contributing to the demise of farming and rural communities in Australia.More broadly, industry stakeholders are explicitly targeting the activist work by such organisations as Animals Australia as undermining the ‘Australian way of life’. In their reading, there is an irreconcilable boundary between human and animal interests and between an activist minority which is vegan, unreasonable, extremist and hostile to farming and the meat-eating majority which is representative of the Australian community and sustains the Australian economy. As discussed so far, such stereotyping and boundary making—even in their inaccuracies—can be pernicious in the way they entrench identities and divisions, and close the possibility for public debate.Rather than directly contesting the presuppositions and inaccuracies of such stereotyping, however, Animals Australia can be read as cultivating a process of symbolic boundary shifting. That is, rather than responding by simply underlining its own moderate position of challenging only intensive animal agriculture for systemic animal cruelty, Animals Australia uses its campaigns to develop “boundary blurring and crossing” tactics (Cherry 451, 459), specifically to dismantle and shift the symbolic boundaries conventionally in place between humans and non-human animals in the first instance, and between those non-human animals used for companionship and those used for food in the second (see fig. 2). Figure 2: That Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady (Animals Australia, campaign image on back of taxi)Indeed, the symbolic boundaries between humans and animals left unquestioned in the preceding stereotyping are being profoundly shaken by Animals Australia with campaigns such as Make It Possible making morally relevant likenesses between humans and animals highly visible to mainstream Australians. Namely, the organisation works to interpellate viewers to exercise their own capacities for emotional identification and moral imagination, to identify with animals’ experiences and lives, and to act upon that identification to demand change.So, rather than reactively striving to refute the aforementioned stereotypes, organisations such as Animals Australia are modelling and facilitating symbolic boundary shifting by building broad, emotionally motivated, pathways through which Australians are being encouraged to refocus their own assumptions, practices and identities regarding animal experience, welfare and animal-human relations. Indeed the organisation has explicitly framed itself as speaking on behalf of not only animals but all caring Australians, suggesting thereby the possibility of a reframing of Australian national identity. Although such a tactic does not directly contest this negative stereotyping—direct contestation being, as noted, ineffective given the perniciousness of stereotyping—such work nonetheless dismantles the oppositional charge of such stereotyping in calling for all Australians to proudly be a little bit anti-meat-eating (when that meat is from factory farmed animals), a little bit anti-factory farming, a little bit pro-veg*n, and a little bit proud to consider themselves as caring about animal welfare.For Animals Australia, in other words, appealing to Australians to care about animal welfare and to act in support of that care, not only defuses the stereotypes targeting them but encourages the work of symbolic boundary shifting that is really at the heart of this dispute. 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