Journal articles on the topic 'Lawrence Buell'

Given the environmental crisis plaguing the world, this paper investigates the manner in which Linus Asong represents man’s link with nature in the novel No Way to Die. It attempts to provide an answer to the following question: how does Linus Asong portray the contact between man and nature? The work is based on the premise that the Cameroonian author depicts the relationship between human beings and other elements of the ecosystem with perspectives for improvement for the benefit of both man and nature. Second Wave Ecocriticism, as outlined by Lawrence Buell, is used to bring out novelist’s ecological vision which posits that human beings need to improve their relationship with, or treatment of, other elements of nature so that the rapidly degrading ecosystem is saved. Keywords: Environment, Fiction, Ecocriticism, Degradation, Protection, Vision

Abstract Cloud Atlas takes the form of what Lawrence Buell calls an observer-hero narrative, in which an observer has difficulty representing and interpreting a hero’s actions. While Cloud Atlas structurally magnifies this problem over its multiple stories, its subversion of genre and convention suggests a reading strategy through which one might believe in another’s effective action, despite the accepted knowledge and limiting rules of the systems in which action might occur. The novel’s principle of symmetry, that an observer’s belief in a hero’s action bolsters the action’s effects, suggests the significance of what I call proximate observation – observation founded in an appropriate degree of connection. Proximate observation allows for the belief in another’s story, belief that is necessary for change. The implications for a text, the world, or world literature are the same: proximate reading strategies foreground the need for belief in possibilities one does not already know.

In his 2012 documentary film Müll im Garten Eden Fatih Akin tells the story of the residents of the small village of Çamburnu and their decade-long struggle with the authorities that have turned a former copper mine into a gigantic landfill. In his documentary he engages the parameters of toxic discourse as discussed by Lawrence Buell in response to Rachel Carson’s claims about the toxic nature of chemical pollutants in her seminal book Silent Spring.2 Toxic discourse emerges in response to the destruction of the pastoral. At the same time, it speaks the language of the pastoral. Fatih Akin displaces the toxic scene into a different cultural context, thereby emphasizing the cultural dimension of toxicity and waste. Resorting to the narrative paradigm of toxic discourse allows Akin to engage the tradition of the pastoral, probing the conventions of the genre, and, at the same time, addressing a sensational and emotionally charged subject in a way that is aesthetically challenging. Müll im Garten Eden finds a cinematic language to configure the conflicted nature of toxic discourse and deal with the complexities of waste, society, and culture in a parable of modernity and the systemic patterns of environmental degradation. As Frederick Buell has argued in his essay on oil cultures, energy history and cultural history are intricately intertwined and the material features of oil have significantly shaped cultural production through the recurring motifs of exuberance and catastrophe.3 In my essay on Fatih Akin’s documentary, I discuss the societal and cultural circumstances of this film and tie its poetic practice of exuberance to the principles of production and consumption that create waste in the first place. Sublime still lifes of waste and long takes of protesting shrill voices encourage the viewer to engage critically with the issue of waste through the performance of excess as poetic practice.

For nearly two decades since Lawrence Buell defined and anatomized “toxic discourse” in Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (2001), the storying of toxic experience has received fruitful theoretical and literary attention. Throughout the world, citizens have come to terms with the reality that we live on a poisoned planet and the poisons in our environment are also in ourselves—the poisons our industrial activities spew into the air, water, soil, and food are almost imperceptibly (“slowly,” as Rob Nixon would put it) absorbed into all of our bodies (through the process Stacy Alaimo described as “transcorporeality”). Biologist and literary activist Sandra Steingraber stated in Living Downstream: A Scientist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (1997) that we must “cultivat[e] an ability to imagine” in order to appreciate the meaning of our post-industrial lives. In this essay, I focus on Ryan Walsh’s new collection of poetry, Reckonings (2019), and on Pramod K. Nayar’s recent ecocritical study, Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity, and the Biopolitical Uncanny (2017), in order to propose and define an evolving “poetics of toxicity.”

This paper attempts to analyze anthropocentric hubris and ecological reversal in J.G. Ballard’s The Drought by applying ecocritical perspective. In the context of growing environmental concern in literary studies, this paper aims to investigate how the human-nature relationship is presented in J.G. Ballard’s The Drought. The book depicts a hypothetical world turning into a global desert due to human- induced climate change. The industrial waste released into the rivers and seas has interrupted the evaporation cycle. As a consequence, all lives including humans and non-humans are threatened. To analyze this novel, the ecocritical insights developed by Lawrence Buell, Lynn White, Val Plumwood and Vandana Shiva have been used as theoretical parameters. Unquestionably, this novel strives to cultivate environmental consciousness among readers and greater urges to save the planet by projecting the futuristic apocalyptic scenarios and situating all biotic and abiotic components on the verge of extinction. However, this narrative eventually creates a bit of illusion among readers by restoring the hydrological cycle without making characters ecologically aware and morally obliged towards nature. Hence, the researcher believes that until and unless human beings develop ecological self, the avoidance of ecological reversal is unachievable.

As most readers of this journal will already know, 2003 marked the bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson's birth in Boston on May 25, 1803. The occasion did not generate quite the hoopla that characterized the celebration of the centennial of his birth; then, as Lawrence Buell notes in his own generous tribute to Emerson, children in Concord were let out of school for the day, and there were major celebrations both there and in Boston. To the chagrin of some of Emerson's admirers, the bicentennial passed without official recognition: as one complained on a website, “It's Emerson's 200th Birthday—and there's no postage stamp,” an important indicator of cultural currency in the United States. In 1967, for example, the Post Office issued a stamp to commemorate the mere 150th anniversary of the other most famous Transcendentalist, Henry Thoreau. Nonetheless, like Thoreau, Emerson retains a tenacious foothold in American popular culture, though he is probably known there primarily for the inspirational aphorisms—usually collected under headings such as “action,” “confidence,” and “conformity”—on websites with names like Brainy Quote and Wisdom Quotes. Despite challenges from both the left and the right, Emerson also remains a central figure in American literary and cultural history; and he has been the focus of sustained scholarly attention, especially since the so-called “Emerson Renaissance,” the resurgence of interest in his life and writings beginning around 1980.

This paper considers the interrelation and coexistence between human and nonhuman in nature in William Blake’s (1757-1827) Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (1789-1794). The paper looks at his poems in the light of ecocentrism, especially the theories of Lawrence Buell (1939- ) and Ashton Nichols (1953- ), who articulate ecocentrism as a word which expresses the interconnection between human and nonhuman in nature and environment. The word, ecocentrism, denotes nature and environment as the central and essential parts of the world to represent them as a web or system wherein all members and parts, including human and nonhuman, are related and connected to each other so closely that they cannot exist and live separately and lonely. By human, it refers to who is a creature in the web, who links to other creatures and entities so closely that he cannot be isolated from them. The linkage and coexistence are the matter which can be viewed in some of the poems of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Blake watches environment and nature carefully, and in some of the poems of two mentioned collections such as “The Echoing Green,” “Nurse’s Song,” “Holy Thursday,” “The School Boy,” to name just a few, he illustrates a situation of life in which human has close relation and connection to other creatures. According to Blake, human and nonhuman have such a vital relationship so that no one can live without the others. All creatures and beings in an organism have an effect on each other, and they are interrelated. The paper shows interconnection and coexistence between human and nonhuman in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience due to portrayal and representation of nonhuman creatures in the world. It defines some nonhuman terms such as nature and environment and then focuses on the interrelation and coexistence between human and nonhuman in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in accordance with ecocentrism.

Environmental degradation has become a pivotal issue in Hawai’i nowadays. The policies of United States’government and military has shaped the Hawai’ian ecology. Through the process of ecological imperialism,started from the beginning of American colonialism, both the Hawai’ian’s landscape and their connection withthe environment is disrupted. Modern Hawai’ian ecology nowadays is a postcolonial ecology, which was, andstill is molded by the American imperial power. As a product of colonialism, Hawai’ians’ have becomealienated with their ancestral traditions, especially regarding interrelation between human and non-human.Taking cues from Lawrence Buell’s assertion that environmental crisis is a crisis of the imagination, modernHawai’ian literature tries to reorient human–non human relationship from indigenous Hawai’ianepistemology. As seen in Kiana Davenport’s the House of Many Gods, traditional Hawai’ian perspective isreimagined to reterritorialize Hawai’ians in their previous environmental outlook, before the arrival of theAmericans. This study argues that by several bioregional concepts such as dwelling, and reinhabit, KianaDavenport’s the House of Many Gods can be stated as a bioregional literature.

Multiple Walkley Award winners Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker from Fairfax’s Melbourne newspaper, The Age, have rocked venerable Australian institutions to their foundations with their investigative reporting. Previous investigations have exposed drug smuggling within Australian Customs, bribery on behalf of the Reserve Bank and organised criminals’ manipulation of horse racing. The duo started this year with an investigation deemed worthy of a Royal Commission. Their reports across the Fairfax network and on the ABC’s 7.30 programme featured interviews with whistleblowers risking their lives to go on the record to publicise the relationship between Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and organised crime. The stories also exposed registered businesses owned by major organised crime figures winning lucrative construction contracts from the Victorian state government, and dealings within the New South Wales government’s Barangaroo development. Freelance reporter and University of Technology, Sydney, Journalism Masters student Lawrence Bull spoke with Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker about their latest project in two careers full of influential investigations, ‘Inside the Building Racket’.Frontline editor: Professor Wendy Bacon

In 1943, Mark Oliphant arrived on the Manhattan Project as a leading member of the British mission. Inside the laboratory he was a measured and skilful physicist, but outside he was a bull that charged headlong into the gates of secrecy and the unholy communion of science, politics and military. General Leslie Groves was the abrasive and practical military man in charge of the Manhattan Project and he rarely let his guard down. But in 1944, Oliphant and Ernest Lawrence challenged him on secrecy, and the usually circumspect Groves became agitated at the naivety of the self-absorbed scientists and provided an insight on America's secret post-war intentions of an atomic monopoly. Oliphant, not a man to let explosive knowledge pass him by, headed to the British Embassy inWashington to send a secure report to London that escalated all the way to the top of Britain's war time leadership. In this moment, Oliphant was sounding a horn to warn that Britain's own atomic ambitions and scientific freedoms were under imminent threat.

This case report documents the diagnosis, treatment, and outcome of a nonresectable oral squamous cell carcinoma in a dog with initial poor prognosis. An approximately 4-year-old female Staffordshire Bull Terrier presented with a large mass on the front of lower jaw which was diagnosed as oral papillary squamous cell carcinoma by histopathology. CT scans revealed invasion of the cancer to the frenulum of the tongue. The mass was inoperable due to location, expansiveness, and metastatic lymph nodes. The dog received 4 treatments of intralesional hyaluronan-platinum conjugates (HylaPlat™, HylaPharm LLC, Lawrence, Kansas) at 3-week intervals. Clinical chemistry and complete blood count were performed one week after each treatment and results were within normal limits. Complications included bleeding due to tumor tissue sloughing, as well as a single seizure due to unknown causes. Upon completion of chemotherapy, CT showed that the mass had regressed and was no longer invading the lingual frenulum, and multiple lymph nodes were free of metastasis. The mass thus became resectable and the dog successfully underwent rostral bilateral mandibulectomy. Over one year after chemotherapy and surgery, the cancer remains in complete remission.

New methods are presented for determining the role of coupled ocean-atmosphere model climate bias on the strength and variability of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and on the seasonal ensemble prediction of El Nino and La Nina events. An intermediate complexity model with a global atmosphere coupled to a Pacific basin ocean is executed with parallelised algorithms to produce computationally efficient year-long forecasts of large ensembles of coupled flow fields, beginning every month between 1980 and 1999. Firstly, the model is provided with forcing functions that reproduce the average annual cycle of climatology of the atmosphere and ocean based on reanalysed observations. We also configure the model to generate realistic ENSO fluctuations. Next, an ensemble prediction scheme is employed which produces perturbations that amplify rapidly over a month. These perturbations are added to the analyses and give the initial conditions for the ensemble forecasts. The skill of the forecasts is presented and the dependency on the annual and ENSO cycles determined. Secondly, we replace the forcing functions in our model with functions that reproduce the averaged annual cycles of climatology of two state of the art, comprehensive Coupled General Circulation Models. The changes in skill of subsequent ensemble forecasts elucidate the roles of model bias in error growth and potential predictability. References C. S. Frederiksen, J. S. Frederiksen, and R. C. Balgovind. ENSO variability and prediction in a coupled ocean-atmosphere model. Aust. Met. Ocean. J., 59:35–52, 2010a. URL http://www.bom.gov.au/jshess/papers.php?year=2010. C. S. Frederiksen, J. S. Frederiksen, and R. C. Balgovind. Dynamic variability and seasonal predictability in an intermediate complexity coupled ocean-atmosphere model. In Proceedings of the 16th Biennial Computational Techniques and Applications Conference, CTAC-2012, volume 54 of ANZIAM J., pages C34–C55, 2013a. doi:10.21914/anziamj.v54i0.6296. C. S. Frederiksen, J. S. Frederiksen, J. M. Sisson, and S. L. Osbrough. Trends and projections of Southern Hemisphere baroclinicity: the role of external forcing and impact on Australian rainfall. Clim. Dyn., 48:3261–3282, 2017. doi:10.1007/s00382-016-3263-8. J. S. Frederiksen, C. S. Frederiksen, and S. L. Osbrough. Seasonal ensemble prediction with a coupled ocean-atmosphere model. Aust. Met. Ocean. J., 59:53–66, 2010b. URL http://www.bom.gov.au/jshess/papers.php?year=2010. J. S. Frederiksen, C. S. Frederiksen, and S. L. Osbrough. Methods of ensemble prediction for seasonal forecasts with a coupled ocean-atmosphere model. In Proceedings of the 16th Biennial Computational Techniques and Applications Conference, CTAC-2012, volume 54 of ANZIAM J., pages C361–C376, 2013b. doi:10.21914/anziamj.v54i0.6509. P. R. Gent, G. Danabasoglu, L. J. Donner, M. M. Holland, E. C. Hunke, S. R. Jayne, D. M. Lawrence, R. B. Neale, P. J. Rasch, M. Vertenstein, P. H. Worley, Z.-L. Yang, and M. Zhang. The community Climate System Model version 4. J. Clim., 24:4973–4991, 2011. doi:10.1175/2011JCLI4083.1. S. Grainger, C. S. Frederiksen, and X. Zheng. Assessment of modes of interannual variability of Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation in CMIP5 models. J. Clim., 27:8107–8125, 2014. doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00251.1. E. Kalnay, M. Kanamitsu, R. Kistler, W. Collins, D. Deaven, L. Gandin, M. Iredell, S. Saha, G. White, J. Woollen, Y. Zhu, M. Chelliah, W. Ebisuzaki, W. Higgins, J. Janowiak, K. C. Mo, C. Ropelewski, J. Wang, A. Leetmaa, R. Reynolds, R. Jenne, and D. Joseph. The NCEP/NCAR 40-year reanalysis project. B. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 77:437–472, 1996. doi:10.1175/1520-0477(1996)077<0437:TNYRP>2.0.CO;2. H. A. Rashid, A. Sullivan, A. C. Hirst, D. Bi, X. Zhou, and S. J. Marsland. Evaluation of El Nino-Southern Oscillation in the ACCESS coupled model simulations for CMIP5. Aust. Met. Ocean. J., 63:161–180, 2013. doi:10.22499/2.6301.010. K. E. Taylor, R. J. Stouffer, and G. A. Meehl. An overview of CMIP5 and the experiment design. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 93:485–498, 2012. doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00094.1.

The concept of the “writer flâneur”, as developed by Walter Benjamin, sought to make sense of the seemingly chaotic nineteenth century city. While the flâneur provided a way for new urban structures to be ordered, it was also a transgressive act that involved engaging with urban spaces in new ways. In the contemporary city, where spaces are now heavily controlled and ordered, some members of the city’s socio-ecological community suffer as a result of idealistic notions of who and what belongs in the city, and how we must behave as urban citizens. Many of these ideals emerge from nineteenth century conceptions of the city in contrast to the country (Williams). However, a reimagining of the flâneur can allow for new transgressions of urban space and result in new literary imaginaries that capture the complexity of urban environments, question some of the more damaging processes and systems, offer new ways of connecting with the city, and propose alternative ways of living with the non-human in such places. With reference to the work of Debra Benita Shaw, Rob Shields and Donna Haraway, I will examine how the urban walking figure might be reimagined as cyborg, complicating boundaries between the real and imagined, the organic and inorganic, and between the human and non-human (Haraway Cyborgs). I will argue that the cyborg flâneur allows for new ways of writing and reading the urban and can work to reimagine the city as posthuman multispecies community. As one example of cyborg flânerie, I look to the app Story City to show how a writer can develop new environmental imaginaries in situ as an act of resistance against the anthropocentric ordering of the city. This article intends to begin a conversation about the ethical, political and epistemological potential of cyborg flânerie and leads to several questions which will require further research.Shaping the City: Environmental ImaginariesIn a sense, the flâneur is the product of a utopian imaginary of the city. According to Shields, Walter Benjamin used the flâneur as a literary device to make sense of the changing modern city of Paris: The flâneur is a hero who excels under the stress of coming to terms with a changing ‘social spatialisation’ of everyday social and economic relations which in the nineteenth century increasingly extended the world of the average person further and further to include rival mass tourism destinations linked by railroad, news of other European powers and distant colonies. This expanding spatialization took the form of economic realities such as changing labour markets and commodity prices and social encounters with strangers and foreigners which impinged on the life world of Europeans. (Fancy Footwork 67)Through his writing, these new spaces and inhabitants were made familiar again to those that lived there. In consequence, the flâneur was seen as a heroic figure who approached the city like a wilderness to be studied and tamed:Even to early 20th-century sociologists the flâneur was a heroic everyman—masculine, controlled and as in tune with his environment as James Fenimore Cooper’s Mohican braves were in their native forests. Anticipating the hardboiled hero of the detective novel, the flâneur pursued clues to the truth of the metropolis, attempting to think through its historical specificity, to inhabit it, even as the truth of empire and commodity capitalism was hidden from him. (Shields Flanerie 210)In this way, the flâneur was a stabilising force, categorising and therefore ordering the city. However, flânerie was also a transgressive act as the walker engaged in eccentric and idle wandering against the usual purposeful walking practices of the time (Coates). Drawing on this aspect, flânerie has increasingly been employed in the humanities and social sciences as a practice of resistance as Jamie Coates has shown. This makes the flâneur, albeit in a refigured form, a useful tool for transgressing strict socio-ecological conventions that affect the contemporary city.Marginalised groups are usually the most impacted by the strict control and ordering of contemporary urban spaces in response to utopian imaginaries of who and what belong. Marginalised people are discouraged and excluded from living in particular areas of the city through urban policy and commercial practices (Shaw 7). Likewise, certain non-human others, like birds, are allowed to inhabit our cities while those that don’t fit ideal urban imaginaries, like bats or snakes, are controlled, excluded or killed (Low). Defensive architecture, CCTV, and audio deterrents are often employed in cities to control public spaces. In London, the spiked corridor of a shop entrance designed to keep homeless people from sleeping there (Andreou; Borromeo) mirrors the spiked ledges that keep pigeons from resting on buildings (observed 2012/2014). On the Gold Coast youths are deterred from loitering in public spaces with classical music (observed 2013–17), while in Brisbane predatory bird calls are played near outdoor restaurants to discourage ibis from pestering customers (Hinchliffe and Begley). In contrast, bright lights, calming music and inviting scents are used to welcome orderly consumers into shopping centres while certain kinds of plants are cultivated in urban parks and gardens to attract acceptable wildlife like butterflies and lorikeets (Wilson; Low). These ways of managing public spaces are built on utopian conceptions of the city as a “civilising” force—a place of order, consumption and safety.As environmental concerns become more urgent, it is important to re-examine these conceptions of urban environments and the assemblage of environmental imaginaries that interact and continue to shape understandings of and attitudes towards human and non-human nature. The network of goods, people and natural entities that feed into and support the city mean that imaginaries shaped in urban areas influence both urban and surrounding peoples and ecologies (Braun). Local ecologies also become threatened as urban structures and processes continue to encompass more of the world’s populations and locales, often displacing and damaging entangled natural/cultural entities in the process. Furthermore, conceptions and attitudes shaped in the city often feed into global systems and as such can have far reaching implications for the way local ecologies are governed, built, and managed. There has already been much research, including work by Lawrence Buell and Ursula Heise, on the contribution that art and literature can make to the development of environmental imaginaries, whether intentional or unintentional, and resulting in both positive and negative associations with urban inhabitants (Yusoff and Gabrys; Buell; Heise). Imaginaries might be understood as social constructs through which we make sense of the world and through which we determine cultural and personal values, attitudes and beliefs. According to Neimanis et al., environmental imaginaries help us to make sense of the way physical environments shape “one’s sense of social belonging” as well as how we “formulate—and enact—our values and attitudes towards ‘nature’” (5). These environmental imaginaries underlie urban structures and work to determine which aspects of the city are valued, who is welcomed into the city, and who is excluded from participation in urban systems and processes. The development of new narrative imaginaries can question some of the underlying assumptions about who or what belongs in the city and how we might settle conflicts in ecologically diverse communities. The reimagined flâneur then might be employed to transgress traditional notions of belonging in the city and replace this with a sense of “becoming” in relation with the myriad of others inhabiting the city (Haraway The Trouble). Like the Benjaminian flâneur, the postmodern version enacts a similar transgressive walking practice. However, the postmodern flâneur serves to resist dominant narratives, with a “greater focus on the tactile and grounded qualities of walking” than the traditional flâneur—and, as opposed to the lone detached wanderer, postmodern flâneur engage in a network of social relationships and may even wander in groups (Coates 32). By employing the notion of the postmodern flâneur, writers might find ways to address problematic urban imaginaries and question dominant narratives about who should and should not inhabit the city. Building on this and in reference to Haraway (Cyborgs), the notion of a cyborg flâneur might take this resistance one step further, not only seeking to counter the dominant social narratives that control urban spaces but also resisting anthropocentric notions of the city. Where the traditional flâneur walked a pet tortoise on a leash, the cyborg flâneur walks with a companion species (Shields Fancy Footwork; Haraway Companion Species). The distinction is subtle. The traditional flâneur walks a pet, an object of display that showcases the eccentric status of the owner. The cyborg flâneur walks in mutual enjoyment with a companion (perhaps a domestic companion, perhaps not); their path negotiated together, tracked, and mapped via GPS. The two acts may at first appear the same, but the difference is in the relationship between the human, non-human, and the multi-modal spaces they occupy. As Coates argues, not everyone who walks is a flâneur and similarly, not everyone who engages in relational walking is a cyborg flâneur. Rather a cyborg flâneur enacts a deliberate practice of walking in relation with naturecultures to transgress boundaries between human and non-human, cultural and natural, and the virtual, material and imagined spaces that make up a place.The Posthuman City: Cyborgs, Hybrids, and EntanglementsIn developing new environmental imaginaries, posthuman conceptions of the city can be drawn upon to readdress urban space as complex, questioning utopian notions of the city particularly as they relate to the exclusion of certain others, and allowing for diverse socio-ecological communities. The posthuman city might be understood in opposition to anthropocentric notions where the non-human is seen as something separate to culture and in need of management and control within the human sphere of the city. Instead, the posthuman city is a complex entanglement of hybrid non-human, cultural and technological entities (Braun; Haraway Companion Species). The flâneur who experiences the city through a posthuman lens acknowledges the human as already embodied and embedded in the non-human world. Key to re-imagining the city is recognising the myriad ways in which non-human nature also acts upon us and influences decisions on how we live in cities (Schliephake 140). This constitutes a “becoming-with each other”, in Haraway’s terms, which recognises the interdependency of urban inhabitants (The Trouble 3). In re-considering the city as a negotiated process between nature and culture rather than a colonisation of nature by culture, the agency of non-humans to contribute to the construction of cities and indeed environmental imaginaries must be acknowledged. Living in the posthuman city requires us humans to engage with the city on multiple levels as we navigate the virtual, corporeal, and imagined spaces that make up the contemporary urban experience. The virtual city is made up of narratives projected through media productions such as tourism campaigns, informational plaques, site markers, and images on Google map locations, all of which privilege certain understandings of the city. Virtual narratives serve to define the city through a network of historical and spatially determined locales. Closely bound up with the virtual is the imagined city that draws on urban ideals, potential developments, mythical or alternative versions of particular cities as well as literary interpretations of cities. These narratives are overlaid on the places that we engage with in our everyday lived experiences. Embodied encounters with the city serve to reinforce or counteract certain virtual and imagined versions while imagined and virtual narratives enhance locales by placing current experience within a temporal narrative that extends into the past as well as the future. Walking the City: The Cyber/Cyborg FlâneurThe notion of the cyber flâneur emerged in the twenty-first century from the practices of idly surfing the Internet, which in many ways has become an extension of the cityscape. In the contemporary world where we exist in both physical and digital spaces, the cyber flâneur (and indeed its cousin the virtual flâneur) have been employed to make sense of new digital sites of connection, voyeurism, and consumption. Metaphors that evoke the city have often been used to describe the experience of the digital including “chat rooms”, “cyber space”, and “home pages” while new notions of digital tourism, the rise of online shopping, and meeting apps have become substitutes for engaging with the physical sites of cities such as shopping malls, pubs, and attractions. The flâneur and cyberflâneur have helped to make sense of the complexities and chaos of urban life so that it might become more palatable to the inhabitants, reducing anxieties about safety and disorder. However, as with the concept of the flâneur, implicit in the cyberflâneur is a reinforcement of traditional urban hierarchies and social structures. This categorising has also worked to solidify notions of who belongs and who does not. Therefore, as Debra Benita Shaw argues, the cyberflâneur is not able to represent the complexities of “how we inhabit and experience the hybrid spaces of contemporary cities” (3). Here, Shaw suggests that Haraway’s cyborg might be used to interrupt settled boundaries and to reimagine the urban walking figure. In both Shaw and Shields (Flanerie), the cyborg is invoked as a solution to the problematic figure of the flâneur. While Shaw presents these figures in opposition and proposes that the flâneur be laid to rest as the cyborg takes its place, I argue that the idea of the flâneur may still have some use, particularly when applied to new multi-modal narratives. As Shields demonstrates, the cyborg operates in the virtual space of simulation rather than at the material level (217). Instead of setting up an opposition between the cyborg and flâneur, these figures might be merged to bring the cyborg into being through the material practice of flânerie, while refiguring the flâneur as posthuman. The traditional flâneur sought to define space, but the cyborg flâneur might be seen to perform space in relation to an entangled natural/cultural community. By drawing on this notion of the cyborg, it becomes possible to circumvent some of the traditional associations with the urban walking figure and imagine a new kind of flâneur, one that walks the streets as an act to complicate rather than compartmentalise urban space. As we emerge into a post-truth world where facts and fictions blur, creative practitioners can find opportunities to forge new ways of knowing, and new ways of connecting with the city through the cyborg flâneur. The development of new literary imaginaries can reconstruct natural/cultural relationships and propose alternative ways of living in a posthuman and multispecies community. The rise of smart-phone apps like Story City provides cyborg flâneurs with the ability to create digital narratives overlaid on real places and has the potential to encourage real connections with urban environments. While these apps are by no means the only activity that a cyborg flâneur might participate in, they offer the writer a platform to engage audiences in a purposeful and transgressive practice of cyborg flânerie. Such narratives produced through cyborg flânerie would conflate virtual, corporeal, and imagined experiences of the city and allow for new environmental imaginaries to be created in situ. The “readers” of these narratives can also become cyborg flâneurs as the traditional urban wanderer is combined with the virtual and imagined space of the contemporary city. As opposed to wandering the virtual city online, readers are encouraged to physically walk the city and engage with the narrative in situ. For example, in one narrative, readers are directed to walk a trail along the Brisbane river or through the CBD to chase a sea monster (Wilkins and Diskett). The reader can choose different pre-set paths which influence the outcome of each story and embed the story in a physical location. In this way, the narrative is layered onto the real streets and spaces of the cityscape. As the reader is directed to walk particular routes through the city, the narratives which unfold are also partly constructed by the natural/cultural entities which make up those locales establishing a narrative practice which engages with the urban on a posthuman level. The murky water of the Brisbane River could easily conceal monsters. Occasional sightings of crocodiles (Hall), fish that leap from the water, and shadows cast by rippling waves as the City Cat moves across the surface impact the experience of the story (observed 2016–2017). Potential exists to capitalise on this narrative form and develop new environmental imaginaries that pay attention to the city as a posthuman place. For example, a narrative might direct the reader’s attention to the networks of water that hydrate people and animals, allow transportation, and remove wastes from the city. People may also be directed to explore their senses within place, be encouraged to participate in sensory gardens, or respond to features of the city in new ways. The cyborg flâneur might be employed in much the same way as the flâneur, to help the “reader” make sense of the posthuman city, where boundaries are shifted, and increasing rates of social and ecological change are transforming contemporary urban sites and structures. Shields asks whether the cyborg might also act as “a stabilising figure amidst the collapse of dualisms, polluted categories, transgressive hybrids, and unstable fluidity” (Flanerie 211). As opposed to the traditional flâneur however, this “stabilising” figure doesn’t sort urban inhabitants into discrete categories but maps the many relations between organisms and technologies, fictions and realities, and the human and non-human. The cyborg flâneur allows for other kinds of “reading” of the city to take place—including those by women, families, and non-Western inhabitants. As opposed to the nineteenth century reader-flâneur, those who read the city through the Story City app are also participants in the making of the story, co-constructing the narrative along with the author and locale. I would argue this participation is a key feature of the cyborg flâneur narrative along with the transience of the narratives which may alter and eventually expire as urban structures and environments change. Not all those who engage with these narratives will necessarily enact a posthuman understanding and not all writers of these narratives will do so as cyborg flâneurs. Nevertheless, platforms such as Story City provide writers with an opportunity to engage participants to question dominant narratives of the city and to reimagine themselves within a multispecies community. In addition, by bringing readers into contact with the human and non-human entities that make up the city, there is potential for real relationships to be established. Through new digital platforms such as apps, writers can develop new environmental imaginaries that question urban ideals including conceptions about who belongs in the city and who does not. The notion of the cyborg is a useful concept through which to reimagine the city as a negotiated process between nature and culture, and to reimagine the flâneur as performer who becomes part of the posthuman city as they walk the streets. This article provides one example of cyborg flânerie in smart-phone apps like Story City that allow writers to construct new urban imaginaries, bring the virtual and imagined city into the physical spaces of the urban environment, and can act to re-place the reader in diverse socio-ecological communities. The reader then becomes both product and constructer of urban space, a cyborg flâneur in the cyborg city. This conversation raises further questions about the cyborg flâneur, including: how might cyborg flânerie be enacted in other spaces (rural, virtual, more-than-human)? What other platforms and narrative forms might cyborg flâneurs use to share their posthuman narratives? How might cyborg flânerie operate in other cities, other cultures and when adopted by marginalised groups? In answering these questions, the potential and limitations of the cyborg flâneur might be refined. The hope is that one day the notion of a cyborg flâneur will no longer necessary as the posthuman city becomes a space of negotiation rather than exclusion. ReferencesAndreou, Alex. “Anti-Homeless Spikes: ‘Sleeping Rough Opened My Eyes to the City’s Barbed Cruelty.’” The Guardian 19 Feb. 2015. 25 Aug. 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/18/defensive-architecture-keeps-poverty-undeen-and-makes-us-more-hostile>.Borromeo, Leah. “These Anti-Homeless Spikes Are Brutal. We Need to Get Rid of Them.” The Guardian 23 Jul. 2015. 25 Aug. 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/23/anti-homeless-spikes-inhumane-defensive-architecture>.Braun, Bruce. “Environmental Issues: Writing a More-than-Human Urban Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 29.5 (2005): 635–50. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell, 2005.Coates, Jamie. “Key Figure of Mobility: The Flâneur.” Social Anthropology 25.1 (2017): 28–41.Hall, Peter. “Crocodiles Spotted in Queensland: A Brief History of Sightings and Captures in the Southeast.” The Courier Mail 4 Jan. 2017. 20 Aug. 2017 <http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/crocodiles-spotted-in-queensland-a-brief-history-of-sightings-and-captures-in-the-southeast/news-story/5fbb2d44bf3537b8a6d1f6c8613e2789>.Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke UP, 2016.———. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.———. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Oxon: Routledge, 1991.Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Hinchliffe, Jessica, and Terri Begley. “Brisbane’s Angry Birds: Recordings No Deterrent for Nosey Ibis at South Bank.” ABC News 2 Jun. 2015. 25 Aug. 2017 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-06/recorded-bird-noise-not-detering-south-banks-angry-birds/6065610>.Low, Tim. The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia. London: Penguin, 2002.Neimanis, Astrid, Cecilia Asberg, and Suzi Hayes. “Posthumanist Imaginaries.” Research Handbook on Climate Governance. Eds. K. Bäckstrand and E. Lövbrand. Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015. 480–90.Schliephake, Christopher. Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014.Shaw, Debra Benita. “Streets for Cyborgs: The Electronic Flâneur and the Posthuman City.” Space and Culture 18.3 (2015): 230–42.Shields, Rob. “Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on Flânerie.” The Flâneur. Ed. Keith Tester. London: Routledge, 2014. 61–80.———. “Flânerie for Cyborgs.” Theory, Culture & Society 23.7-8 (2006): 209–20.Yusoff, Kathryn, and Jennifer Gabrys. “Climate Change and the Imagination.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2.4 (2011): 516–34.Wilkins, Kim, and Joseph Diskett. 9 Fathom Deep. Brisbane: Story City, 2014. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.Wilson, Alexander. The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991.

One of the most crucial decisions political candidates make ahead of an election is whether they want to focus on their image or that of their their political opponents in their advertisement (Lau and Rovner , 2009). During electoral campaigns, candidates need to decide whether they use political advertisement to display a positive image of themselves or whether they try to make the opponent look bad. The first strategy is referred to as Acclaim or Positive Ads. The second approach, according to Surlin and Gordon is called Negative Campaigning and is applied by a political candidate when (s)he “attacks the other candidate personally, the issues for which the other candidate stands, or the party of the other candidate” (1977, p. 93). However, measuring negative campaigning poses a challenge to academic research since content analyses often fail to address the grey areas of this concept. To begin with, many political ads compare positive characteristics of a candidate against opponents’ more negative ones. (Lau & Rovner, 2009). Ads that contain both strategies, shedding positive light on the candidate while also highlighting negative aspects about the opponent’s character or policies are called Comparison or Comparative Ads. These comparisons are difficult to code with straightforward approaches. For example, analyzing campaigns along a positive/negative dichotomy by discounting attacks to the opponent from positive self-presentations may equate strongly positively and negatively charged political advertising to neutral campaigns. Also, negativity in political campaigning is studied in different contexts and has been extended as a number of studies on negative campaigning look in particular at Attacks and Rebuttals/Defense from opponents after an attack (Benoit, 2000; Benoit & Airne, 2009; Erigha & Charles, 2012; Lee & Benoit, 2004; Torres, Hyman, & Hamilton, 2012). This distinction raises other important methodological and theoretical implications. Sweeping measures of negativity based on common scholarly definitions do not consider voters’ tolerance towards the use of certain forms of negativity by candidates (for example, rebutting an attack from an opponent) that may be perceived as legitimate. Not accounting for such nuances is what makes many negativity measures unable to accurately gauge the effects of negative campaigning among the electorate (Sigelman & Kugler, 2003). Field of application/theoretical foundation: Negative campaigning and its related constructs (such as attacks or rebuttals) have been often associated with current trends in political communication of modernization and professionalization of election campaigns (Voltmer, 2004). Negative campaigning is indeed a development that can be observed across many different political contexts (Kaid & Holtz-Bacha, 2006). Campaign strategies using negative messages about a political opponent have been studied relying on theories from social and cognitive psychology (Kahn & Kenney, 1999; Lau, 1985) and mostly in regard to their potential consequences for a healthy democracy (Lau & Rovner, 2009). Their operationalization follows a simple schema by coding whether a certain construct is present in a given advertising piece or not. Alternatively, it is coded which kind of category best reflects on the content of a given political advertisement. References/combination with other methods of data collection: Negative campaigning and related constructs have been studied through content analysis both of paid advertisement (Benoit, 2000) and news coverage by the mass media (Lau & Pomper, 2004); The features and effects of negative campaigning have also been analyzed through voter surveys (Brader, 2005, 2006) and interviews with campaign managers (Kahn & Kenney, 1999). Its effects were furthermore more precisely measured through numerous experimental studies (Ansolabehere, Iyengar, Simon, & Valentino, 1994; overview see: Lau et al., 2007). Example studies: Table 1: Overview exemplary studies measuring of negative campaigning and related constructs Authors Sample Unit of analysis Constructs Values Reliability Benoit (2000), Benoit & Airne (2009), Lee & Benoit (2004) Television ads, direct mail, newspaper ads, and candidate web pages Acclaim Acclaims portray the sponsored candidate in a favorable light, both his/her character and/or policy (Benoit, 2000, 281, 295) 0 = not present 1 = present Cohen’s kappa average = .96 Erigha & Charles (2012) Television and web advertisements Non-negative/ advocacy A non-negative/advocacy ad favors a party’s candidate, focusing solely on that individual. 1 = non-negative / advocacy 2 = comparison 3= attack ads (exclusive options) Cohen’s kappa average = .96 Torres et al. (2012) Presidential candidate–sponsored TV ads Non-comparative ad If the ad simply mentions positive attributes of a particular candidate without mentioning an opponent, the ad is coded as a non-comparison (positive) ad (p. 196) 1 = comparative ad 2 = negative ad 3= non-comparative ad (exclusive options) Cohen’s kappa average = .98 Steffan & Venema (2019) Campaign posters Textual negative campaigning Visual negative campaigning Based on Lau and Pomper’s (2002), textual/visual negative campaiging indicates whether the image / text on the campaign posters referred to other political parties or candidates. (p. 273) 0 = not present 1 = present Visual negative campaigning: Krippendorff’s α = .82 Textual negative campaigning: Krippendorff’s α = .84 Torres et al. (2012) Presidential candidate–sponsored TV ads Negative ad If the ad criticizes the opposing party and/or candidate but offers no alternative (in essence, the ad presents negative information about an opponent but no information about the candidate on whose behalf it is run), then the ad is coded as a negative ad. 1 = comparative ad 2 = negative ad 3= non-comparative ad (exclusive options) Cohen’s kappa average = .98 Ceccobelli (2018) Facebook posts Negative rhetorical strategy The posts taken into consideration are those in which leaders employ a purely negative campaigning strategy. Cases in which a hypothetic leader A attacks one or more political opponents by comparing his/her own figure or policy proposal with the one(s) of her/his competitor(s) are not coded, since they denote a comparative rhetorical strategy (p. 129) 0 = not present 1 = present Krippendorff’s α average = .85 Benoit (2000), Benoit & Airne (2009), Lee & Benoit (2004) Television spots, direct mail pieces, newspaper ads, and candidate web pages Attack Portrays the opposing candidate in an unfavorable light, both his/her character and/or policy (Benoit, 2000, 281, 295) 0 = not present 1 = present Cohen’s kappa average = .96 Erigha & Charles (2012) Television and web advertisements Attack ads Attack ads criticize the opposing candidate without referencing the sponsoring party’s candidate (p. 443) 1 = non-negative / advocacy 2 = comparison 3= attack ads (exclusive options) Cohen's kappa average = .96 Benoit (2000), Benoit & Airne (2009), Lee & Benoit (2004) Television spots, direct mail pieces, newspaper ads, and candidate web pages Defense Defense responds to (refutes) an attack on the candidate, both on his/her character and/or policy (Benoit, 2000, 281, 295) 0 = not present 1 = present Cohen’s kappa average = .96 Erigha & Charles (2012) Television and web advertisements Comparison A comparison ad weighs two credentials, characteristics, or policystances (p. 443) 1 = non-negative / advocacy 2 = comparison 3= attack ads (exclusive options) Cohen's kappa average = .956 Torres et al. (2012) Presidential candidate–sponsored TV ads Comparative ad If the ad criticizes the opposing party and/or candidate and recommends alternative courses of action by comparing two candidates on specific points so as to present one in a more positive and the other in a more negative light, then the ad is coded as a comparative ad (p. 195) 1 = comparative ad 2 = negative ad 3= non-comparative ad (exclusive options) Cohen’s kappa average = .98 References Ansolabehere, S., Iyengar, S., Simon, A., & Valentino, N. (1994). Does Attack Advertising Demobilize the Electorate? American Political Science Review, 88(4), 829–838. https://doi.org/10.2307/2082710 Benoit, W. L. (2000). A Functional Analysis of Political Advertising across Media, 1998. Communication Studies, 51(3), 274–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970009388524 Benoit, W. L., & Airne, D. (2009). Non-Presidential Political Advertising in Campaign 2004. Human Communication, 12(1), 91–117. Brader, T. (2005). Striking a Responsive Chord: How Political Ads Motivate and Persuade Voters by Appealing to Emotions. American Journal of Political Science, 49(2), 388. https://doi.org/10.2307/3647684 Brader, T. (2006). Campaigning for hearts and minds: How emotional appeals in political ads work. Studies in communication, media, and public opinion. Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press. Retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0622/2005009159-b.html Buell, E. H., & Sigelman, L. (2008). Attack politics: Negativity in presidential campaigns since 1960. Studies in government and public policy. Lawrence, Kan.: Univ. Press of Kansas. Ceccobelli, D. (2018). Not Every Day is Election Day: a Comparative Analysis of Eighteen Election Campaigns on Facebook. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 15(2), 122–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2018.1449701 Erigha, M., & Charles, C. Z. (2012). Other, Uppity Obama: A Content Analysis of Race Appeals in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 9(2), 439–456. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X12000264 Geer, J. G. (2010). In defense of negativity: Attack ads in presidential campaigns. Studies in communication, media, and public opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=319130 Kahn, K. F., & Kenney, P. J. (1999). Do Negative Campaigns Mobilize or Suppress Turnout? Clarifying the Relationship between Negativity and Participation. American Political Science Review, 93(4), 877–889. https://doi.org/10.2307/2586118 Kaid, L. L., & Holtz-Bacha, C. (Eds.) (2006). The SAGE handbook of political advertising. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications. Kanouse, D. E., & Hansen, L. R. (1987). Negativity in evaluations. In E. E. Jones, D. E. Kanouse, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett, S. Valins, & B. Weiner (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Lau, R. R. (1985). Two explanations for negativity effects in political behavior. American Journal of Political Science. (29), 119–138. Lau, R. R., & Pomper, G. M. (2004). Negative campaigning: An analysis of U.S. Senate elections. Campaigning American style. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Lau, R. R., & Rovner, I. B. (2009). Negative Campaigning. Annual Review of Political Science, 12(1), 285–306. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.10.071905.101448 Lau, R. R., Sigelman, L., & Rovner, I. B. (2007). The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: A Meta-Analytic Reassessment. The Journal of Politics, 69(4), 1176–1209. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00618.x Lee, C., & Benoit, W. L. (2004). A Functional Analysis of Presidential Television Spots: A Comparison of Korean and American Ads. Communication Quarterly, 52(1), 68–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/01463370409370179 Sigelman, L., & Kugler, M. (2003). Why Is Research on the Effects of Negative Campaigning So Inconclusive? Understanding Citizens’ Perceptions of Negativity. The Journal of Politics, 65(1), 142–160. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2508.t01-1-00007 Steffan, D., & Venema, N. (2019). Personalised, De-Ideologised and Negative? A Longitudinal Analysis of Campaign Posters for German Bundestag Elections, 1949–2017. European Journal of Communication, 34(3), 267–285. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323119830052 Surlin, S. H., & Gordon, T. F. (1977). How Values Affect Attitudes Toward Direct Reference Political Advertising. Journalism Quarterly, 54(1), 89–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769907705400113 Torres, I. M., Hyman, M. R., & Hamilton, J. (2012). Candidate-Sponsored TV Ads for the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election: A Content Analysis. Journal of Political Marketing, 11(3), 189–207. https://doi.org/10.1080/15377857.2012.703907 Voltmer, K. (2004). Mass media and political communication in new democracies: Routledge.

Political activity is expected to be of interest to a knowledgeable electorate, citizenry or ‘public’. Performance and entertainment have, on the other hand, been considered the domain of the ‘audience’. The line between active electorate and passive audience has been continually blurred, and as more political communication is designed along the lines of entertainment, the less likely it seems that the distinction will become clearer any time soon. The following article will attempt to thoroughly evaluate the contemporary implications of terms related to ‘public’ and ‘audience’, and to suggest a path forward in understanding the now intertwined roles of these two entities. In political commentary of all kinds, the term ‘audience’ has come to be regularly used in place of the more traditionally political terms ‘public’, ‘electorate’, ‘constituency’ or even ‘mass’, ‘mob’ and ‘multitude’. (Bratich 249) This slight alteration of language would seem to suggest an ongoing, and occasionally unintentional debate as to whether or not our increasingly mediated society has become incapable of true political discourse – an audience to be courted and won solely on the basis of visual and aural stimulation. In some instances, the debate goes unacknowledged, with authors using the term interchangeably with that of voter or public. Others seem to be making a more definite statement, as do the authors of Campaign Craft, wherein the term ‘audience’ is often used to refer to the voting population. (Shea and Burton) In either case, it is clear that the ‘public’ and the ‘audience’ are no longer to be considered two entirely separate entities. To understand the significance of this shift, it is necessary to identify the traditional distinctions of these sometimes problematic terms. To do so we must look briefly at how the original and contemporary meanings have developed. Herbert Blau writes that “audiences, such as they are, are nothing like a public, certainly nothing like the capitalised Public of another time” (Blau 22). That “capitalised Public” he refers to is perhaps the ideal state envisioned by Greek and Roman philosophers in which the community, as a whole, is maintained by and for its own members, and each individual plays a significant and specific role in its maintenance. The “audiences”, however, can be popularly defined as “the assembled spectators or listeners at a public event such as a play, film, concert, or meeting” or “the people giving attention to something”. (Soanes & Stevenson) The difference is subtle but significant. The public is expected to take some active interest in its own maintenance and growth, while the audience is not expected to offer action, just attention. The authors of Soundbite Culture, who would seem to see the blurring between audience and public as a negative side effect of mass media, offer this description of the differences between these two entities: Audiences are talked to; publics are talked with. Audiences are entertained; publics are engaged. Audiences live in the moment; publics have both memory and dreams. Audiences have opinions, publics have thoughts. (Slayden & Whillock 7) A ‘public’ is joined by more than their attendance at or attention to a single performance and responsible for more than just the experience of that performance. While an audience is expected to do little more than consume the performance before them, a public must respond to an experience with appropriate action. A public is a community, bound together by activity and mutual concerns. An audience is joined together only by their mutual interest in, or presence at, a performance. Carpini and Williams note that the term ‘public’ is no longer an adequate way to describe the complex levels of interaction that form contemporary political discourse: “people, politics, and the media are far more complex than this. Individuals are simultaneously citizens, consumers, audiences…and so forth” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 161). Marshall sees the audience as both a derivative of and a factor in the larger, more political popular body called the “masses”. These masses define the population largely as an unorganised political power, while audiences emerge in relation to consumer products, as rationalised and therefore somewhat subdued categories within that scope. He notes that although the audience, in the twentieth century, has emerged as a “social category” of its own, it has developed as such in relation to both the unharnessed political power of the masses and the active political power of the public (Marshall 61-70). The audience, then, can be said to be a separate but overlapping state that rationalises and segments the potential of the masses, but also informs the subsequent actions of the public. An audience without some degree of action or involvement is not a public. Such a definition provides important insights into the debate from the perspective of political communication. The cohesiveness of the group that is to define the public can be undermined by mass media. It has been argued that mass media, in particular the internet, have removed all sense of local community and instead provided an information outlet that denies individual response. (Franklin 23; Postman 67-69) It can certainly be argued that with media available on such an instant and individual basis, the necessity of group gathering for information and action has been greatly reduced. Thus, one of the primary functions of the public is eliminated, that of joining together for information. This lack of communal information gathering can eliminate the most important functions of the public: debate and personal action. Those who tune-in to national broadcasts or even read national newspapers to receive political information are generally not invited to debate and pose solutions to the problems that are introduced to them, or to take immediate steps to resolve the conflicts addressed. Instead, they are asked only to fulfill that traditional function of the audience, to receive the information and either absorb or dismiss it. Media also blur the audience/public divide by making it necessary to change the means of political communication. Previous to the advent of mass media, political communication was separated from entertainment by its emphasis on debate and information. Television has led a turn toward more ‘emotion’ and image-based campaigning both for election and for support of a particular political agenda. This subsequently implies that this public has increasingly become primarily an audience. Although this attitude is one that has been adopted by many critics and observers, it is not entirely correct to say that there are no longer any opportunities for the audience to regain their function as a public. On a local level, town hall meetings, public consultations and rallies still exist and provide an opportunity for concerned citizens to voice their opinions and assist in forming local policy. Media, often accused of orchestrating the elimination of the active public, occasionally provide opportunities for more traditional public debate. In both Canada and the US, leaders are invited to participate in ‘town hall’ style television debates in which audience members are invited to ask questions. In the UK, both print media and television tend to offer opportunities for leaders to respond to the questions and concerns of individuals. Many newspapers publish responses and letters from many different readers, allowing for public debate and interaction. (McNair 13) In addition, newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail operate Websites that allow the public to comment on articles published in the paper text. In Canada, radio is often used as a forum for public debate and comment. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s Cross Country Check Up and Cross Talk allows mediated debate between citizens across the country. Regional stations offer similar programming. Local television news programmes often include ‘person on the street’ interviews on current issues and opportunities for the audience to voice their arguments on-air. Of course, in most of these instances, the information received from the audience is moderated, and shared selectively. This does not, however, negate the fact that there is interaction between that audience and the media. Perhaps the greatest challenge to traditional interpretations of media-audience response is the proliferation of the internet. As McNair observes, “the emergence of the internet has provided new opportunities for public participation in political debate, such as blogging and ‘citizen journalism’. Websites such as YouTube permit marginal political groups to make statements with global reach” (McNair 13). These ‘inter-networks’ not only provide alternative information for audiences to seek out, but also give audience members the ability to respond to any communication in an immediate and public way. Therefore, the audience member can exert potentially wide reaching influence on the public agenda and dialogue, clearly altering the accept-or-refuse model often applied to mediated communication. Opinion polls provide us with an opportunity to verify this shift away from the ‘hypodermic needle’ approach to communication theory (Sanderson King 61). Just as an audience can be responsible for the success of a theatre or television show based on attendance or viewing numbers, so too have public opinion polls been designed to measure, without nuance, only whether the audience accepts or dismisses what is presented to them through the media. There is little place for any measure of actual thought or opinion. The first indications of an upset in this balance resulted in tremendous surprise, as was the case during the US Clinton/Lewinsky scandal (Lawrence & Bennett 425). Stephanopoulos writes that after a full year of coverage of the Monica Lewinsky ‘scandal’, Clinton’s public approval poll numbers were “higher than ever” while the Republican leaders who had initiated the inquiry were suffering from a serious lack of public support (Stephanopoulos 442). Carpini and Williams also observed that public opinion polls taken during the media frenzy showed very little change of any kind, although the movement that did occur was in the direction of increased support for Clinton. This was in direct contrast to what “…traditional agenda-setting, framing, and priming theory would predict” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 177). Zaller confirms that the expectation among news organisations, journalists, and political scientists was never realised; despite being cast by the media in a negative role, and despite the consumption of that negative media, the audience refused to judge the President solely on his framed persona (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 255). It was clear that the majority of the population in the US, and in other countries, were exposed to the information regarding the Clinton scandal. At the height of the scandal, it was almost unavoidable (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 254). Therefore it cannot be said that the information the media provided was not being consumed. Rather, the audience did not agree with the media’s attempts to persuade them, and communicated this through opinion polls, creating something resembling a mass political dialogue. As Lawrence and Bennett discuss in their article regarding the Lewinsky/Clinton public opinion “phenomenon”, it should not be assumed by polling institutions or public opinion watchers that the projected angle of the media will be immediately adopted by the public (Lawerence & Bennett 425). Although the media presented a preferred reading of the text, it could not ensure that the audience would interpret that meaning (Hall in Curran, Gurevitch & Harris 343). The audience’s decoding of the media’s message would have to depend on each audience member’s personal experiences and their impression of the media that was presenting the communication. This kind of response is, in fact, encouraging. If the audience relies on mainstream media to provide a frame and context to all political communication, then they are giving up their civic responsibility and placing complete authority in the hands of those actively involved in the process of communicating events. It could be suggested that the reported increase in the perceived reliabilty of internet news sources (Kinsella 251) can be at least partially attributed to the audience’s increasing awareness of these frames and limitations on mainstream media presentation. With the increase in ‘backstage’ reporting, the audience has become hyper-aware of the use of these strategies in communications. The audience is now using its knowledge and media access to decipher information, as it is presented to them, for authenticity and context. While there are those who would lament the fact that the community driven public is largely in the past and focus their attention on finding ways to see the old methods of communication revived, others argue that the way to move forward is not to regret the existence of an audience, but to alter our ideas about how to understand it. It has been suggested that in order to become a more democratic society we must now “re-conceive audiences as citizens” (Golding in Ferguson 98). And despite Blau’s pronouncement that audiences are “nothing like a public”, he later points out that there is still the possibility of unity even in the most diverse of audiences. “The presence of an audience is in itself a sign of coherence”(Blau 23). As Rothenbuhler writes: There is too much casualness in the use of the word spectator…A spectator is almost never simply looking at something. On the contrary, most forms of spectatorship are socially prescribed and performed roles and forms of communication…the spectator, then, is not simply a viewer but a participant in a larger system. (Rothenbuhler 65) We cannot regress to a time when audiences are reserved for the theatre and publics for civic matters. In a highly networked world that relies on communicating via the methods and media of entertainment, it is impossible to remove the role of the audience member from the role of citizen. This does not necessarily need to be a negative aspect of democracy, but instead a step in its constant evolution. There are positive aspects to the audience/public as well as potential negatives. McNair equates the increase in mediated communication with an increase in political knowledge and involvement, particularly for those on the margins of society who are unlikely to be exposed to national political activity in person. He notes that the advent of television may have limited political discourse to a media-friendly sound bite, but that it still increases the information dispensed to the majority of the population. Despite the ideals of democracy, the majority of the voting population is not extremely well informed as to political issues, and prior to the advent of mass media, were very unlikely to have an opportunity to become immersed in the details of policy. Media have increased the amount of political information the average citizen will be exposed to in their lifetime (McNair 41). With this in mind, it is possible to equate the faults of mass media not with their continued growth, but with society’s inability to recognise the effects of the media as technologies and to adjust education accordingly. While the quality of information and understanding regarding the actions and ideals of national political leaders may be disputed, the fact that they are more widely distributed than ever before is not. They have an audience at all times, and though that audience may receive information via a filtered medium, they are still present and active. As McNair notes, if the purpose of democracy is to increase the number of people participating in the political process, then mass media have clearly served to promote the democratic ideal (McNair 204). However, these positives are qualified by the fact that audiences must also possess the skills, the interests and the knowledge of a public, or else risk isolation that limits their power to contribute to public discourse in a meaningful way. The need for an accountable, educated audience has not gone unnoticed throughout the history of mass media. Cultural observers such as Postman, McLuhan, John Kennedy, and even Pope Pius XII have cited the need for education in media. As McLuhan aptly noted, “to the student of media, it is difficult to explain the human indifference to the social effect of these radical forces”(McLuhan 304). In 1964, McLuhan wrote that, “education will become recognised as civil defence against media fallout. The only medium for which our education now offers some civil defence is the print medium”(McLuhan 305). Unfortunately, it is only gradually and usually at an advanced level of higher education that the study and analysis of media has developed to any degree. The mass audiences, those who control the powers of the public, often remain formally uneducated as to the influence that the mediating factors of television have on the distribution of information. Although the audience may have developed a level of sophistication in their awareness of media frames, the public has not been taught how to translate this awareness into any real political or social understanding. The result is a community susceptible to being overtaken by manipulations of any medium. Those who attempt to convey political messages have only added to that confusion by being unclear as to whether or not they are attempting to address an audience or engage a public. In some instances, politicians and their teams focus their sole attention on the public, not taking into consideration the necessities of communicating with an audience, often to the detriment of political success. On the other hand, some focus their attentions on attracting and maintaining an audience, often to the detriment of the political process. This confusion may be a symptom of the mixed messages regarding the appropriate attitude toward performance that is generated by western culture. In an environment where open attention to performance is both demanded and distained, communication choices can be difficult. Instead we are likely to blindly observe the steady increase in the entertainment style packaging of our national politics. Until the audience fully incorporates itself with the public, we will see an absence of action, and excess of confused consumption (Kraus 18). Contemporary society has moved far beyond the traditional concepts of exclusive audience or public domains, and yet we have not fully articulated or defined what this change in structure really means. Although this review does suggest that contemporary citizens are both audience and public simultaneously, it is also clear that further discussion needs to occur before either of those roles can be fully understood in a contemporary communications context. References Bennett, Lance C., and Robert M. Entman. Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Bratich, Jack Z. “Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies”. Communication Theory 15 (2005): 242-65. Curran, J., M. Gurevitch, and D. Janet Harris, eds. Mass Communication and Society. Beverley Hills: Sage, 1977. DeLuca, T., and J. Buell. Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics. New York: New York UP, 2005. Ferguson, Marjorie, ed. Public Communication: The New Imperatives. London: Sage, 1990. Franklin, Bob. Packaging Politics. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Keown, Leslie-Anne. “Keeping Up with the Times: Canadians and Their News Media Diets.” Canadian Social Trends June 2007. Government of Canada. Kinsella, Warren. The War Room. Toronto: Dunduran Group, 2007. Kraus, Sidney. Televised Presidential Debates and Public Policy. New Jersey: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. Lawrence, Regina, and Lance Bennett. “Rethinking Media Politics and Public Opinion: Reactions to the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal”. Political Science Quarterly 116 (Fall 2001): 425-46. Marland, Alex. Political Marketing in Modern Canadian Federal Elections. Dalhousie University: Canadian Political Science Association Conference, 2003. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New ed. London: ARK Paperbacks, 1987 [1964]. McNair, Brian. An Introduction to Political Communication. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2007. The Oxford Dictionary of English. Eds. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Rev. ed. Oxford UP, 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford UP. 1 Mar. 2008. < http://www.oxfordreference.com.qe2aproxy.mun.ca/views/ ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t140.e4525 >. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin, 1985. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. Ritual Communication. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1998. Sanderson King, Sarah. Human Communication as a Field of Study. New York: State U of New York P, 1990. Schultz, David A., ed. It’s Show Time! Media, Politics and Popular Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Shea, Daniel, and Michael John Burton. Campaign Craft. 3rd ed. Westport: Praeger, 2006. Slayden, D., and R.K. Whillock. Soundbite Culture: The Death of Discourse in a Wired World. London: Sage, 1999. Stephanopoulos, George. All Too Human. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1999. Webster, James C. “Beneath the Veneer of Fragmentation: Television Audience Polarization in a Multichannel World.” Journal of Communication 55 (June 2005): 366-82. Woodward, Gary C. Center Stage: Media and the Performance of American Politics. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Xenos, Michael, and Kirsten Foot. “Not Your Father’s Internet: The Generation Gap in Online Politics.” Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth. Cambridge: MIT P, 2008.

Political activity is expected to be of interest to a knowledgeable electorate, citizenry or ‘public’. Performance and entertainment have, on the other hand, been considered the domain of the ‘audience’. The line between active electorate and passive audience has been continually blurred, and as more political communication is designed along the lines of entertainment, the less likely it seems that the distinction will become clearer any time soon. The following article will attempt to thoroughly evaluate the contemporary implications of terms related to ‘public’ and ‘audience’, and to suggest a path forward in understanding the now intertwined roles of these two entities. In political commentary of all kinds, the term ‘audience’ has come to be regularly used in place of the more traditionally political terms ‘public’, ‘electorate’, ‘constituency’ or even ‘mass’, ‘mob’ and ‘multitude’. (Bratich 249) This slight alteration of language would seem to suggest an ongoing, and occasionally unintentional debate as to whether or not our increasingly mediated society has become incapable of true political discourse – an audience to be courted and won solely on the basis of visual and aural stimulation. In some instances, the debate goes unacknowledged, with authors using the term interchangeably with that of voter or public. Others seem to be making a more definite statement, as do the authors of Campaign Craft, wherein the term ‘audience’ is often used to refer to the voting population. (Shea and Burton) In either case, it is clear that the ‘public’ and the ‘audience’ are no longer to be considered two entirely separate entities. To understand the significance of this shift, it is necessary to identify the traditional distinctions of these sometimes problematic terms. To do so we must look briefly at how the original and contemporary meanings have developed. Herbert Blau writes that “audiences, such as they are, are nothing like a public, certainly nothing like the capitalised Public of another time” (Blau 22). That “capitalised Public” he refers to is perhaps the ideal state envisioned by Greek and Roman philosophers in which the community, as a whole, is maintained by and for its own members, and each individual plays a significant and specific role in its maintenance. The “audiences”, however, can be popularly defined as “the assembled spectators or listeners at a public event such as a play, film, concert, or meeting” or “the people giving attention to something”. (Soanes & Stevenson) The difference is subtle but significant. The public is expected to take some active interest in its own maintenance and growth, while the audience is not expected to offer action, just attention. The authors of Soundbite Culture, who would seem to see the blurring between audience and public as a negative side effect of mass media, offer this description of the differences between these two entities: Audiences are talked to; publics are talked with. Audiences are entertained; publics are engaged. Audiences live in the moment; publics have both memory and dreams. Audiences have opinions, publics have thoughts. (Slayden & Whillock 7) A ‘public’ is joined by more than their attendance at or attention to a single performance and responsible for more than just the experience of that performance. While an audience is expected to do little more than consume the performance before them, a public must respond to an experience with appropriate action. A public is a community, bound together by activity and mutual concerns. An audience is joined together only by their mutual interest in, or presence at, a performance. Carpini and Williams note that the term ‘public’ is no longer an adequate way to describe the complex levels of interaction that form contemporary political discourse: “people, politics, and the media are far more complex than this. Individuals are simultaneously citizens, consumers, audiences…and so forth” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 161). Marshall sees the audience as both a derivative of and a factor in the larger, more political popular body called the “masses”. These masses define the population largely as an unorganised political power, while audiences emerge in relation to consumer products, as rationalised and therefore somewhat subdued categories within that scope. He notes that although the audience, in the twentieth century, has emerged as a “social category” of its own, it has developed as such in relation to both the unharnessed political power of the masses and the active political power of the public (Marshall 61-70). The audience, then, can be said to be a separate but overlapping state that rationalises and segments the potential of the masses, but also informs the subsequent actions of the public. An audience without some degree of action or involvement is not a public. Such a definition provides important insights into the debate from the perspective of political communication. The cohesiveness of the group that is to define the public can be undermined by mass media. It has been argued that mass media, in particular the internet, have removed all sense of local community and instead provided an information outlet that denies individual response. (Franklin 23; Postman 67-69) It can certainly be argued that with media available on such an instant and individual basis, the necessity of group gathering for information and action has been greatly reduced. Thus, one of the primary functions of the public is eliminated, that of joining together for information. This lack of communal information gathering can eliminate the most important functions of the public: debate and personal action. Those who tune-in to national broadcasts or even read national newspapers to receive political information are generally not invited to debate and pose solutions to the problems that are introduced to them, or to take immediate steps to resolve the conflicts addressed. Instead, they are asked only to fulfill that traditional function of the audience, to receive the information and either absorb or dismiss it. Media also blur the audience/public divide by making it necessary to change the means of political communication. Previous to the advent of mass media, political communication was separated from entertainment by its emphasis on debate and information. Television has led a turn toward more ‘emotion’ and image-based campaigning both for election and for support of a particular political agenda. This subsequently implies that this public has increasingly become primarily an audience. Although this attitude is one that has been adopted by many critics and observers, it is not entirely correct to say that there are no longer any opportunities for the audience to regain their function as a public. On a local level, town hall meetings, public consultations and rallies still exist and provide an opportunity for concerned citizens to voice their opinions and assist in forming local policy. Media, often accused of orchestrating the elimination of the active public, occasionally provide opportunities for more traditional public debate. In both Canada and the US, leaders are invited to participate in ‘town hall’ style television debates in which audience members are invited to ask questions. In the UK, both print media and television tend to offer opportunities for leaders to respond to the questions and concerns of individuals. Many newspapers publish responses and letters from many different readers, allowing for public debate and interaction. (McNair 13) In addition, newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail operate Websites that allow the public to comment on articles published in the paper text. In Canada, radio is often used as a forum for public debate and comment. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s Cross Country Check Up and Cross Talk allows mediated debate between citizens across the country. Regional stations offer similar programming. Local television news programmes often include ‘person on the street’ interviews on current issues and opportunities for the audience to voice their arguments on-air. Of course, in most of these instances, the information received from the audience is moderated, and shared selectively. This does not, however, negate the fact that there is interaction between that audience and the media. Perhaps the greatest challenge to traditional interpretations of media-audience response is the proliferation of the internet. As McNair observes, “the emergence of the internet has provided new opportunities for public participation in political debate, such as blogging and ‘citizen journalism’. Websites such as YouTube permit marginal political groups to make statements with global reach” (McNair 13). These ‘inter-networks’ not only provide alternative information for audiences to seek out, but also give audience members the ability to respond to any communication in an immediate and public way. Therefore, the audience member can exert potentially wide reaching influence on the public agenda and dialogue, clearly altering the accept-or-refuse model often applied to mediated communication. Opinion polls provide us with an opportunity to verify this shift away from the ‘hypodermic needle’ approach to communication theory (Sanderson King 61). Just as an audience can be responsible for the success of a theatre or television show based on attendance or viewing numbers, so too have public opinion polls been designed to measure, without nuance, only whether the audience accepts or dismisses what is presented to them through the media. There is little place for any measure of actual thought or opinion. The first indications of an upset in this balance resulted in tremendous surprise, as was the case during the US Clinton/Lewinsky scandal (Lawrence & Bennett 425). Stephanopoulos writes that after a full year of coverage of the Monica Lewinsky ‘scandal’, Clinton’s public approval poll numbers were “higher than ever” while the Republican leaders who had initiated the inquiry were suffering from a serious lack of public support (Stephanopoulos 442). Carpini and Williams also observed that public opinion polls taken during the media frenzy showed very little change of any kind, although the movement that did occur was in the direction of increased support for Clinton. This was in direct contrast to what “…traditional agenda-setting, framing, and priming theory would predict” (Carpini & Williams in Bennett & Entman 177). Zaller confirms that the expectation among news organisations, journalists, and political scientists was never realised; despite being cast by the media in a negative role, and despite the consumption of that negative media, the audience refused to judge the President solely on his framed persona (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 255). It was clear that the majority of the population in the US, and in other countries, were exposed to the information regarding the Clinton scandal. At the height of the scandal, it was almost unavoidable (Zaller in Bennett & Entman 254). Therefore it cannot be said that the information the media provided was not being consumed. Rather, the audience did not agree with the media’s attempts to persuade them, and communicated this through opinion polls, creating something resembling a mass political dialogue. As Lawrence and Bennett discuss in their article regarding the Lewinsky/Clinton public opinion “phenomenon”, it should not be assumed by polling institutions or public opinion watchers that the projected angle of the media will be immediately adopted by the public (Lawerence & Bennett 425). Although the media presented a preferred reading of the text, it could not ensure that the audience would interpret that meaning (Hall in Curran, Gurevitch & Harris 343). The audience’s decoding of the media’s message would have to depend on each audience member’s personal experiences and their impression of the media that was presenting the communication. This kind of response is, in fact, encouraging. If the audience relies on mainstream media to provide a frame and context to all political communication, then they are giving up their civic responsibility and placing complete authority in the hands of those actively involved in the process of communicating events. It could be suggested that the reported increase in the perceived reliabilty of internet news sources (Kinsella 251) can be at least partially attributed to the audience’s increasing awareness of these frames and limitations on mainstream media presentation. With the increase in ‘backstage’ reporting, the audience has become hyper-aware of the use of these strategies in communications. The audience is now using its knowledge and media access to decipher information, as it is presented to them, for authenticity and context. While there are those who would lament the fact that the community driven public is largely in the past and focus their attention on finding ways to see the old methods of communication revived, others argue that the way to move forward is not to regret the existence of an audience, but to alter our ideas about how to understand it. It has been suggested that in order to become a more democratic society we must now “re-conceive audiences as citizens” (Golding in Ferguson 98). And despite Blau’s pronouncement that audiences are “nothing like a public”, he later points out that there is still the possibility of unity even in the most diverse of audiences. “The presence of an audience is in itself a sign of coherence”(Blau 23). As Rothenbuhler writes: There is too much casualness in the use of the word spectator…A spectator is almost never simply looking at something. On the contrary, most forms of spectatorship are socially prescribed and performed roles and forms of communication…the spectator, then, is not simply a viewer but a participant in a larger system. (Rothenbuhler 65) We cannot regress to a time when audiences are reserved for the theatre and publics for civic matters. In a highly networked world that relies on communicating via the methods and media of entertainment, it is impossible to remove the role of the audience member from the role of citizen. This does not necessarily need to be a negative aspect of democracy, but instead a step in its constant evolution. There are positive aspects to the audience/public as well as potential negatives. McNair equates the increase in mediated communication with an increase in political knowledge and involvement, particularly for those on the margins of society who are unlikely to be exposed to national political activity in person. He notes that the advent of television may have limited political discourse to a media-friendly sound bite, but that it still increases the information dispensed to the majority of the population. Despite the ideals of democracy, the majority of the voting population is not extremely well informed as to political issues, and prior to the advent of mass media, were very unlikely to have an opportunity to become immersed in the details of policy. Media have increased the amount of political information the average citizen will be exposed to in their lifetime (McNair 41). With this in mind, it is possible to equate the faults of mass media not with their continued growth, but with society’s inability to recognise the effects of the media as technologies and to adjust education accordingly. While the quality of information and understanding regarding the actions and ideals of national political leaders may be disputed, the fact that they are more widely distributed than ever before is not. They have an audience at all times, and though that audience may receive information via a filtered medium, they are still present and active. As McNair notes, if the purpose of democracy is to increase the number of people participating in the political process, then mass media have clearly served to promote the democratic ideal (McNair 204). However, these positives are qualified by the fact that audiences must also possess the skills, the interests and the knowledge of a public, or else risk isolation that limits their power to contribute to public discourse in a meaningful way. The need for an accountable, educated audience has not gone unnoticed throughout the history of mass media. Cultural observers such as Postman, McLuhan, John Kennedy, and even Pope Pius XII have cited the need for education in media. As McLuhan aptly noted, “to the student of media, it is difficult to explain the human indifference to the social effect of these radical forces”(McLuhan 304). In 1964, McLuhan wrote that, “education will become recognised as civil defence against media fallout. The only medium for which our education now offers some civil defence is the print medium”(McLuhan 305). Unfortunately, it is only gradually and usually at an advanced level of higher education that the study and analysis of media has developed to any degree. The mass audiences, those who control the powers of the public, often remain formally uneducated as to the influence that the mediating factors of television have on the distribution of information. Although the audience may have developed a level of sophistication in their awareness of media frames, the public has not been taught how to translate this awareness into any real political or social understanding. The result is a community susceptible to being overtaken by manipulations of any medium. Those who attempt to convey political messages have only added to that confusion by being unclear as to whether or not they are attempting to address an audience or engage a public. In some instances, politicians and their teams focus their sole attention on the public, not taking into consideration the necessities of communicating with an audience, often to the detriment of political success. On the other hand, some focus their attentions on attracting and maintaining an audience, often to the detriment of the political process. This confusion may be a symptom of the mixed messages regarding the appropriate attitude toward performance that is generated by western culture. In an environment where open attention to performance is both demanded and distained, communication choices can be difficult. Instead we are likely to blindly observe the steady increase in the entertainment style packaging of our national politics. Until the audience fully incorporates itself with the public, we will see an absence of action, and excess of confused consumption (Kraus 18). Contemporary society has moved far beyond the traditional concepts of exclusive audience or public domains, and yet we have not fully articulated or defined what this change in structure really means. Although this review does suggest that contemporary citizens are both audience and public simultaneously, it is also clear that further discussion needs to occur before either of those roles can be fully understood in a contemporary communications context. References Bennett, Lance C., and Robert M. Entman. Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Bratich, Jack Z. “Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies”. Communication Theory 15 (2005): 242-65. Curran, J., M. Gurevitch, and D. Janet Harris, eds. Mass Communication and Society. Beverley Hills: Sage, 1977. DeLuca, T., and J. Buell. Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics. New York: New York UP, 2005. Ferguson, Marjorie, ed. Public Communication: The New Imperatives. London: Sage, 1990. Franklin, Bob. Packaging Politics. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Keown, Leslie-Anne. “Keeping Up with the Times: Canadians and Their News Media Diets.” Canadian Social Trends June 2007. Government of Canada. Kinsella, Warren. The War Room. Toronto: Dunduran Group, 2007. Kraus, Sidney. Televised Presidential Debates and Public Policy. New Jersey: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. Lawrence, Regina, and Lance Bennett. “Rethinking Media Politics and Public Opinion: Reactions to the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal”. Political Science Quarterly 116 (Fall 2001): 425-46. Marland, Alex. Political Marketing in Modern Canadian Federal Elections. Dalhousie University: Canadian Political Science Association Conference, 2003. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New ed. London: ARK Paperbacks, 1987 [1964]. McNair, Brian. An Introduction to Political Communication. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2007. The Oxford Dictionary of English. Eds. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Rev. ed. Oxford UP, 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford UP. 1 Mar. 2008. http://www.oxfordreference.com.qe2aproxy.mun.ca/views/ ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t140.e4525>. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin, 1985. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. Ritual Communication. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1998. Sanderson King, Sarah. Human Communication as a Field of Study. New York: State U of New York P, 1990. Schultz, David A., ed. It’s Show Time! Media, Politics and Popular Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Shea, Daniel, and Michael John Burton. Campaign Craft. 3rd ed. Westport: Praeger, 2006. Slayden, D., and R.K. Whillock. Soundbite Culture: The Death of Discourse in a Wired World. London: Sage, 1999. Stephanopoulos, George. All Too Human. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1999. Webster, James C. “Beneath the Veneer of Fragmentation: Television Audience Polarization in a Multichannel World.” Journal of Communication 55 (June 2005): 366-82. Woodward, Gary C. Center Stage: Media and the Performance of American Politics. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Xenos, Michael, and Kirsten Foot. “Not Your Father’s Internet: The Generation Gap in Online Politics.” Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth. Cambridge: MIT P, 2008. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mullins, Kimberley. "The Voting Audience." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/03-mullins.php>. APA Style Mullins, K. (Apr. 2008) "The Voting Audience," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/03-mullins.php>.

Congress passed both the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA” or “the Act”) and Sarbanes-Oxley Act (“SOX”) in reaction to national corruption and bribery scandals.[1] The reputation and integrity of American companies were under attack as these scandals unraveled and made international news. Allegations of fraud, bribery and illegal practices plagued corporate America. Congress needed legislation to address these problems to ensure its own country, as well as the international community, that the legislature would not tolerate corrupt business practices. The FCPA was enacted to decrease corruption and bribery and to improve the accuracy of accounting and record-keeping of companies, and the SOX was enacted for very similar purposes, yet twenty five years later. The FCPA requires companies to report their financial information in accordance with its provisions, while the SOX requires the Chief Executive Officers and Chief Financial Officers of public companies to guarantee that their financial reports are accurate.[2] During the first twenty five years after the FCPA was enacted, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) did not conduct many investigations into companies that had potentially violated the Act’s provisions. However, in the aftermath of the Enron[3] and WorldCom[4] scandals, which lead to the enactment of the SOX in 2002 and subsequent increased international awareness of the problems of bribery and financial fraud, there has been a significant increase in FCPA enforcement.[5] [1] The FCPA was enacted in 1977 in response to the Watergate scandal, and the SOX was enacted in 2002 in response to the Enron and WorldCom scandals. Lawrence A. Cunningham, Sharing Accounting’s Burden: Business Lawyers in Enron’s Dark Shadows, 57 Bus. Law. 1421, 1427 (2002) (commenting that the Enron scandal that led to the enactment of the SOX is “akin to the straw that broke the camel’s back, not a bull in a china shop. The accounting camel’s back has been broken before in a similar way. The early 1970s were riddled with accounting horror stories . . . that led to the enactment of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”).[2] See Robert Prentice, Sarbanes-Oxley: The Evidence Regarding the Impact of SOX 404, 29 Cardozo L. Rev. 703, 706 (2007) (The SOX places more responsibility on CEOs and CFOs, as Congress felt that “executive certification would be more meaningful and persuasive to investors if those executives had reasonable grounds to believe that the internal financial controls on the process producing those numbers were solid.”).[3] The Texas-based energy company used complex partnerships to mask over $500 million of debt from its books and records. By disguising its financial statements, the company continued to obtain cash and credit payments to run its business operation, despite operating with such a large amount of debt. Enron filed for protection from creditors on December 2, 2002, which became the biggest corporate bankruptcy in American history. Its stock plummeted to merely pennies in 2002, although it previously was worth over $80. See Bethany McLean and Peter Elkin, The Smartest Guys in The Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (2003); Press Release, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Federal Jury Convicts Former Enron Chief Executives Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling on Fraud, Conspiracy And Related Charges (May 26, 2006), available at http://usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2006/May/06_crm_328.html (commenting that the Enron “scheme” was designed “to make it appear that Enron was growing at a healthy and predictable rate, consistent with analysts’ published expectations, that Enron did not have significant write-offs or debt and was worthy of investment-grade credit rating, that Enron was compromised of a number of successful business units, and that the company had an appropriate cash flow.”).[4] The Mississippi-based telecommunications company owned MCI, the second largest U.S. long distance carrier. From 1999 to 2002, the company improperly recorded their operating expenses as capital expenses, which falsely and drastically increased its profit margins. See Kyle Vasatka, WorldCom Scandal: A Look Back at One of the Biggest Corporate Scandals in U.S. History, Associated Content, March 8, 2007, http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/162656/worldcom_scandal_a_look_back_at_one.html?cat=3. [5] See David Hess & Cristie L. Ford, Corporate Corruption and Reform Undertakings: A New Approach to an Old Problem, 41 Cornell Int’l L.J. 307, 307-08 (2008) (commenting “[a]lthough [the FCPA’s] first twenty-five years were relatively quiet, the same cannot be said for its last five years.”); Justin F. Marceau, A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action: Evaluating and Forecasting the Trend of More Frequent and Severe Prosecutions Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, 12 Fordham J. Corp. & Fin. L. 285, 285 (2007) (stating that “the Department of Justice has initiated four times more prosecutions over the last five years over the previous five years.”); Erin M. Pedersen, , The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Its Application to U.S. Business Operations in China, 7 J. Int’l Bus. & L. 13, 14 (2008) (noting that the SEC and DOJ “have recently begun an aggressive enforcement approach to the FCPA. . . . .”).

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

Introduction Darkness is often characterised as something that warrants heightened caution and scrutiny – signifying increased danger and risk. Within settler-colonial settings such as Australia, cautionary and negative connotations of darkness are projected upon Black people and their bodies, forming part of continuing colonial regimes of power (Moreton-Robinson). Negative stereotypes of “dark” continues to racialise all Indigenous peoples. In Australia, Indigenous peoples are both Indigenous and Black regardless of skin colour, and this plays out in a range of ways, some of which will be highlighted within this article. This article demonstrates that for Indigenous peoples, associations of fear and danger are built into the structural mechanisms that shape and maintain colonial understandings of Indigenous peoples and their bodies. It is this embodied form of darkness, and its negative connotations, and responses that we explore further. Figure 1: Megan Cope’s ‘I’m not afraid of the Dark’ t-shirt (Fredericks and Heemsbergen 2021) Responding to the anxieties and fears of settlers that often surround Indigenous peoples, Quandamooka artist and member of the art collective ProppaNow, Megan Cope, has produced a range of t-shirts, one of which declares “I’m not afraid of the Dark” (fig. 1). The wording ‘reflects White Australia’s fear of blackness’ (Dark + Dangerous). Exploring race relations through the theme of “darkness”, we begin by discussing how negative connotations of darkness are represented through everyday lexicons and how efforts to shift prejudicial and racist language are often met with defensiveness and resistance. We then consider how fears towards the dark translate into everyday practices, reinforced by media representations. The article considers how stereotype, conjecture, and prejudice is inflicted upon Indigenous people and reflects white settler fears and anxieties, rooting colonialism in everyday language, action, and norms. The Language of Fear Indigenous people and others with dark skin tones are often presented as having a proclivity towards threatening, aggressive, deceitful, and negative behaviours. This works to inform how Indigenous peoples are “known” and responded to by hegemonic (predominantly white) populations. Negative connotations of Indigenous people are a means of reinforcing and legitimising the falsity that European knowledge systems, norms, and social structures are superior whilst denying the contextual colonial circumstances that have led to white dominance. In Australia, such denial corresponds to the refusal to engage with the unceded sovereignty of Aboriginal peoples or acknowledge Indigenous resistance. Language is integral to the ways in which dominant populations come to “know” and present the so-called “Other”. Such language is reflected in digital media, which both produce and maintain white anxieties towards race and ethnicity. When part of mainstream vernacular, racialised language – and the value judgments associated with it – often remains in what Moreton-Robinson describes as “invisible regimes of power” (75). Everyday social structures, actions, and habits of thought veil oppressive and discriminatory attitudes that exist under the guise of “normality”. Colonisation and the dominance of Eurocentric ways of knowing, being, and doing has fixated itself on creating a normality that associates Indigeneity and darkness with negative and threatening connotations. In doing so, it reinforces power balances that presents an image of white superiority built on the invalidation of Indigeneity and Blackness. White fears and anxieties towards race made explicit through social and digital media are also manifest via subtle but equally pervasive everyday action (Carlson and Frazer; Matamoros-Fernández). Confronting and negotiating such fears becomes a daily reality for many Indigenous people. During the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, which extended to Australia and were linked to deaths in custody and police violence, African American poet Saul Williams reminded his followers of the power of language in constructing racialised fears (saulwilliams). In an Instagram post, Williams draws back the veil of an uncontested normality to ask that we take personal responsibility over the words we use. He writes: here’s a tip: Take the words DARK or BLACK in connection to bad, evil, ominous or scary events out of your vocabulary. We learn the stock market crashed on Black Monday, we read headlines that purport “Dark Days Ahead”. There’s “dark” or “black” humour which implies an undertone of evil, and then there are people like me who grow up with dark skin having to make sense of the English/American lexicon and its history of “fair complexions” – where “fair” can mean “light; blond.” OR “in accordance with rules or standards; legitimate.” We may not be fully responsible for the duplicitous evolution of language and subtle morphing of inherited beliefs into description yet we are in full command of the words we choose even as they reveal the questions we’ve left unasked. Like the work of Moreton-Robinson and other scholars, Williams implores his followers to take a reflexive position to consider the questions often left unasked. In doing so, he calls for the transcendence of anonymity and engagement with the realities of colonisation – no matter how ugly, confronting, and complicit one may be in its continuation. In the Australian context this means confronting how terms such as “dark”, “darkie”, or “darky” were historically used as derogatory and offensive slurs for Aboriginal peoples. Such language continues to be used today and can be found in the comment sections of social media, online news platforms, and other online forums (Carlson “Love and Hate”). Taking the move to execute personal accountability can be difficult. It can destabilise and reframe the ways in which we understand and interact with the world (Rose 22). For some, however, exposing racism and seemingly mundane aspects of society is taken as a personal attack which is often met with reactionary responses where one remains closed to new insights (Whittaker). This feeds into fears and anxieties pertaining to the perceived loss of power. These fears and anxieties continue to surface through conversations and calls for action on issues such as changing the date of Australia Day, the racialised reporting of news (McQuire), removing of plaques and statues known to be racist, and requests to change placenames and the names of products. For example, in 2020, Australian cheese producer Saputo Dairy Australia changed the name of it is popular brand “Coon” to “Cheer Tasty”. The decision followed a lengthy campaign led by Dr Stephen Hagan who called for the rebranding based on the Coon brand having racist connotations (ABC). The term has its racist origins in the United States and has long been used as a slur against people with dark skin, liking them to racoons and their tendency to steal and deceive. The term “Coon” is used in Australia by settlers as a racist term for referring to Aboriginal peoples. Claims that the name change is example of political correctness gone astray fail to acknowledge and empathise with the lived experience of being treated as if one is dirty, lazy, deceitful, or untrustworthy. Other brand names have also historically utilised racist wording along with imagery in their advertising (Conor). Pear’s soap for example is well-known for its historical use of racist words and imagery to legitimise white rule over Indigenous colonies, including in Australia (Jackson). Like most racial epithets, the power of language lies in how the words reflect and translate into actions that dehumanise others. The words we use matter. The everyday “ordinary” world, including online, is deeply politicised (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”) and comes to reflect attitudes and power imbalances that encourage white people to internalise the falsity that they are superior and should have control over Black people (Conor). Decisions to make social change, such as that made by Saputo Dairy Australia, can manifest into further white anxieties via their ability to force the confrontation of the circumstances that continue to contribute to one’s own prosperity. In other words, to unveil the realities of colonialism and ask the questions that are too often left in the dark. Lived Experiences of Darkness Colonial anxieties and fears are driven by the fact that Black populations in many areas of the world are often characterised as criminals, perpetrators, threats, or nuisances, but are rarely seen as victims. In Australia, the repeated lack of police response and receptivity to concerns of Indigenous peoples expressed during the Black Lives Matter campaign saw tens of thousands of people take to the streets to protest. Protestors at the same time called for the end of police brutality towards Indigenous peoples and for an end to Indigenous deaths in custody. The protests were backed by a heavy online presence that sought to mobilise people in hope of lifting the veil that shrouds issues relating to systemic racism. There have been over 450 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to die in custody since the end of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991 (The Guardian). The tragedy of the Indigenous experience gains little attention internationally. The negative implications of being the object of white fear and anxiety are felt by Indigenous and other Black communities daily. The “safety signals” (Daniella Emanuel) adopted by white peoples in response to often irrational perceptions of threat signify how Indigenous and other Black peoples and communities are seen and valued by the hegemony. Memes played out in social media depicting “Karens” – a term that corresponds to caricaturised white women (but equally applicable to men) who exhibit behaviours of entitlement – have increasing been used in media to expose the prevalence of irrational racial fears (also see Wong). Police are commonly called on Indigenous people and other Black people for simply being within spaces such as shopping malls, street corners, parks, or other spaces in which they are considered not to belong (Mohdin). Digital media are also commonly envisioned as a space that is not natural or normal for Indigenous peoples, a notion that maintains narratives of so-called Indigenous primitivity (Carlson and Frazer). Media connotations of darkness as threatening are associated with, and strategically manipulated by, the images that accompany stories about Indigenous peoples and other Black peoples. Digital technologies play significant roles in producing and disseminating the images shown in the media. Moreover, they have a “role in mediating and amplifying old and new forms of abuse, hate, and discrimination” (Matamoros-Fernández and Farkas). Daniels demonstrates how social media sites can be spaces “where race and racism play out in interesting, sometimes disturbing, ways” (702), shaping ongoing colonial fears and anxieties over Black peoples. Prominent footballer Adam Goodes, for example, faced a string of attacks after he publicly condemned racism when he was called an “Ape” by a spectator during a game celebrating Indigenous contributions to the sport (Coram and Hallinan). This was followed by a barrage of personal attacks, criticisms, and booing that spread over the remaining years of his football career. When Goodes performed a traditional war dance as a form of celebration during a game in 2015, many turned to social media to express their outrage over his “confrontational” and “aggressive” behaviour (Robinson). Goodes’s affirmation of his Indigeneity was seen by many as a threat to their own positionality and white sensibility. Social media were therefore used as a mechanism to control settler narratives and maintain colonial power structures by framing the conversation through a white lens (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”). Indigenous peoples in other highly visible fields have faced similar backlash. In 1993, Elaine George was the first Aboriginal person to feature on the cover of Vogue magazine, a decision considered “risky” at the time (Singer). The editor of Vogue later revealed that the cover was criticised by some who believed George’s skin tone was made to appear lighter than it actually was and that it had been digitally altered. The failure to accept a lighter skin colour as “Aboriginal” exposes a neglect to accept ethnicity and Blackness in all its diversity (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”; Carlson “Love and Hate”). Where Adam Goodes was criticised for his overt expression of Blackness, George was critisised for not being “black enough”. It was not until seventeen years later that another Aboriginal model, Samantha Harris, was featured on the cover of Vogue (Marks). While George inspired and pathed the way for those to come, Harris experienced similar discrimination within the industry and amongst the public (Carson and Ky). Singer Jessica Mauboy (in Hornery) also explains how her identity was managed by others. She recalls, I was pretty young when I first received recognition, and for years I felt as though I couldn't show my true identity. What I was saying in public was very dictated by other people who could not handle my sense of culture and identity. They felt they had to take it off my hands. Mauboy’s experience not only demonstrates how Blackness continues to be seen as something to “handle”, but also how power imbalances play out. Scholar Chelsea Watego offers numerous examples of how this occurs in different ways and arenas, for example through relationships between people and within workplaces. Bargallie’s scholarly work also provides an understanding of how Indigenous people experience racism within the Australian public service, and how it is maintained through the structures and systems of power. The media often represents communities with large Indigenous populations as being separatist and not contributing to wider society and problematic (McQuire). Violence, and the threat of violence, is often presented in media as being normalised. Recently there have been calls for an increased police presence in Alice Springs, NT, and other remotes communities due to ongoing threats of “tribal payback” and acts of “lawlessness” (Sky News Australia; Hildebrand). Goldberg uses the phrase “Super/Vision” to describe the ways that Black men and women in Black neighbourhoods are continuously and erroneously supervised and surveilled by police using apparatus such as helicopters and floodlights. Simone Browne demonstrates how contemporary surveillance practices are rooted in anti-black domination and are operationalised through a white gaze. Browne uses the term “racializing surveillance” to describe a ”technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a ‘power to define what is in or out of place’” (16). The outcome is often discriminatory treatment to those negatively racialised by such surveillance. Narratives that associate Indigenous peoples with darkness and danger fuel colonial fears and uphold the invisible regimes of power by instilling the perception that acts of surveillance and the restrictions imposed on Indigenous peoples’ autonomy are not only necessary but justified. Such myths fail to contextualise the historic colonial factors that drive segregation and enable a forgetting that negates personal accountability and complicity in maintaining colonial power imbalances (Riggs and Augoustinos). Inayatullah and Blaney (165) write that the “myth we construct calls attention to a darker, tragic side of our ethical engagement: the role of colonialism in constituting us as modern actors.” They call for personal accountability whereby one confronts the notion that we are both products and producers of a modernity rooted in a colonialism that maintains the misguided notion of white supremacy (Wolfe; Mignolo; Moreton-Robinson). When Indigenous and other Black peoples enter spaces that white populations don’t traditionally associate as being “natural” or “fitting” for them (whether residential, social, educational, a workplace, online, or otherwise), alienation, discrimination, and criminalisation often occurs (Bargallie; Mohdin; Linhares). Structural barriers are erected, prohibiting career or social advancement while making the space feel unwelcoming (Fredericks; Bargallie). In workplaces, Indigenous employees become the subject of hyper-surveillance through the supervision process (Bargallie), continuing to make them difficult work environments. This is despite businesses and organisations seeking to increase their Indigenous staff numbers, expressing their need to change, and implementing cultural competency training (Fredericks and Bargallie). As Barnwell correctly highlights, confronting white fears and anxieties must be the responsibility of white peoples. When feelings of shock or discomfort arise when in the company of Indigenous peoples, one must reflexively engage with the reasons behind this “fear of the dark” and consider that perhaps it is they who are self-segregating. Mohdin suggests that spaces highly populated by Black peoples are best thought of not as “black spaces” or “black communities”, but rather spaces where white peoples do not want to be. They stand as reminders of a failed colonial regime that sought to deny and dehumanise Indigenous peoples and cultures, as well as the continuation of Black resistance and sovereignty. Conclusion In working towards improving relationships between Black and white populations, the truths of colonisation, and its continuing pervasiveness in local and global settings must first be confronted. In this article we have discussed the association of darkness with instinctual fears and negative responses to the unknown. White populations need to reflexively engage and critique how they think, act, present, address racism, and respond to Indigenous peoples (Bargallie; Moreton-Robinson; Whittaker), cultivating a “decolonising consciousness” (Bradfield) to develop new habits of thinking and relating. To overcome fears of the dark, we must confront that which remains unknown, and the questions left unasked. This means exposing racism and power imbalances, developing meaningful relationships with Indigenous peoples, addressing structural change, and implementing alternative ways of knowing and doing. Only then may we begin to embody Megan Cope’s message, “I’m not afraid of the Dark”. Acknowledgements We thank Dr Debbie Bargallie for her feedback on our article, which strengthened the work. References ABC News. 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