Journal articles on the topic 'Ludlow Industries UK Limited'

Abstract Objectives The processing of seafood (fish and shellfish) for human consumption can lead to health consequences, including occupational asthma (OA). Several non-UK studies have reported both respiratory outcomes and airborne levels of major allergens in seafood processing. However, there is a paucity of such evidence in the UK land-based seafood processing sector, which employs some 20 000 workers. Methods University of Manchester’s Surveillance of Work-related and Occupational Respiratory Disease (SWORD) reporting system has been interrogated over the period 1992–2017 to define the incidence rate of OA cases that can be ascribed to the UK land-based processing sector, and the seafood species implicated. Airborne allergen monitoring data undertaken at Health and Safety Executive’s laboratory from 2003 to 2019 have also been collated. Results The estimated annual OA incidence rate in seafood processors was 70 [95% confidence intervals (CIs) 48.9, 91.1] per 100 000 workers compared with 2.9 (95% CIs 2.8, 3.1) in ‘all other industries’. The annual calculated percentage trend in OA (1992–2017) was −8.1% (95% CIs −15.9, 0.4) in seafood processing showing a similar trend to ‘all other industries’ (mean −7.0%; 95% CIs −7.8, −6.1). Prawns and salmon/trout were notably implicated by SWORD as causative species related to OA. There is a general paucity of available UK airborne allergen monitoring data, particularly concerning processing salmon or trout. Available airborne monitoring for salmon parvalbumin in seven processors ranged between the limit of detection and 816 ng m−3 (n = 64). Available air monitoring levels of the major shellfish allergen (tropomyosin) during processing of crabs and prawns ranged between 1 and 101 600 ng m−3 (n = 280), highlighting that high levels of exposure can occur. Conclusions These data show an excess incidence of OA in the UK seafood processing industry during 1992–2017, with limited airborne monitoring data for the processing of prawn, crab, and salmon suggesting that significant exposure to major seafood allergens can occur in this industry. Further investigation of current levels of respiratory ill-health and the sources of allergen exposure are warranted.

The ongoing Covid-19 crisis and recession represent one of the biggest shocks to the UK manufacturing ecosystem yet, and comes at a time when the ecosystem was already in a worrying situation after decades of deindustrialisation, a decade of austerity and an impending ‘Brexit’. The effects of this shock will also be unevenly felt due to the geography of the UK manufacturing ecosystem, amplifying the need for a successful response to ensure that places are not left (further) behind. This paper assesses the pre-Covid-19 ecosystem to ascertain the areas and industries likely to be particularly impacted by the crisis, and to understand existing issues. These issues are important to consider due to the implications for choosing strategies moving forward, for which two are appraised here. First, the reshoring of supply chains is considered in light of recent government comments, but difficulties in implementation may arise due to the highly fragmented nature of UK policy frameworks. Second, an acceleration of the ‘grand challenges’ approach is likely but limited by issues of connectivity in the ecosystem and small and medium-sized firm disengagement. We suggest that any strategy moving forward must strike a balance between such strategies

Industrial processes are associated with high amounts of energy consumed and greenhouse gases emitted, stressing the urgent need for low-carbon sectoral transitions. This research reviews the energy-intensive iron and steel, cement and chemicals industries of Germany and the United Kingdom, two major emitting countries with significant activity, yet with different recent orientation. Our socio-technical analysis, based on the Sectoral Innovation Systems and the Systems Failure framework, aims to capture existing and potential drivers of or barriers to diffusion of sustainable industrial technologies and extract implications for policy. Results indicate that actor structures and inconsistent policies have limited low-carbon innovation. A critical factor for the successful decarbonisation of German industry lies in overcoming lobbying and resistance to technological innovation caused by strong networks. By contrast, a key to UK industrial decarbonisation is to drive innovation and investment in the context of an industry in decline and in light of Brexit-related uncertainty.

Purpose In recent years, circular economy (CE) has come to prominence as an alternative to the classic approach of “make-use-dispose”. How companies can exploit the opportunities of CE to position themselves better are not well articulated in the literature. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to identify the barriers and opportunities of CE in the manufacturing sector through a socio-political, economic, legal and environmental perspective. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a positivist approach, which is deductive in nature. A survey questionnaire was designed and distributed to manufacturing companies operating in the UK and EU. The study used FAME database and social networking platform LinkedIn to identify manufacturing companies. More than 200+ companies were approached for this study and data collection lasted over two months. Findings The study provides a comprehensive review of the CE literature and identifies a number of barriers and opportunities to CE implementation from a socio-political, economic, legal and environmental perspective. The findings highlight key barriers, opportunities and benefits of CE for the manufacturing industries operating in the UK and EU. Research limitations/implications The findings are limited to 63 responses from the survey questionnaire distributed to manufacturing companies in the UK and EU. The present study aims to equip manufacturers with necessary understanding of the key opportunities and barriers to address the challenges encountered during the implementation of CE. Originality/value This study adds to the limited empirical literature on CE barriers and opportunities to manufacturing organisations operating in the UK and EU. The paper also identifies barriers and opportunities of CE from a socio-political, economic, legal and environmental lens.

PurposeThis paper contributes to risk management research with reference to disclosure of risk specific information within the oil and gas industry. This paper provides empirical evidence regarding voluntary and mandatory disclosure behaviour from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective.Design/methodology/approachA longitudinal empirical study examines probabilistic reserve quantum reporting of UK companies, over a time-period spanning voluntary and mandatory disclosure. The researchers analyse disclosure behaviour under voluntary and mandatory time spans using a logistical regression approach to measure determinants of risk reporting. Form of regulation is considered as the fundamental driver for disclosure whilst controlling for other relevant variables. Implications for developing international regulation are presented with suggestions for further research.FindingsMandatory reporting is not seen as a significant influence to disclosure. Degree of risk, quality of audit firms, level of stock exchange and organisational visibility each impact on disclosure. The findings indicate that a mandatory disclosure approach is ineffective, partially explained by mimetic and normative forces and a balancing of agency-related costs and benefits. There is an inverse relationship between level of risk and risk reporting.Research limitations/implicationsGeneralisation of the findings is limited due to the specific context of the extractive industry.Practical implicationsThe paper seeks to inform the International Accounting Standards Board's (IASB) on-going consideration of risk reporting and also its extractive industries deliberations.Originality/valueThe paper provides original insight into the area of risk management with particular focus on risk specificity and quantitative metrics for risk profiling not previously tested. The paper introduces risk profiling as a variable in risk disclosure.

Abstract. A new three-phase (oil/water/gas) flow metering system has been developed for use in the oil and gas industries, based on Coriolis mass flow metering. To obtain certification for use in the Russian oil and gas industries, trials have taken place at the UK and Russian national flow laboratories, NEL in Glasgow and VNIIR in Kazan, respectively. The metrology of three-phase flow is complex, and the uncertainty of each measurement varies dynamically with the operating point, as well as the metering technology, and other aspects. To a limited extent this is reflected in the error limits allowed in national standards, which may vary with operating point. For example, the GOST standard allows errors in the oil flow rate of ±6% for water cuts of less than 70%, which is increased to ±15% for water cuts between 70 and 95%. The provision of online uncertainty for each measurement, for example in accordance with the British Standard BS-7986, would be highly desirable, allowing the user to observe in real time variations in measurement quality. This paper will discuss how an online uncertainty assessment could be implemented in the Coriolis meter-based system.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review current continuous improvement implementation models and frameworks, and present a new conceptual framework tailored specifically to the needs of UK manufacturing companies. Design/methodology/approach The paper details the in-depth review of 20 existing models or frameworks for continuous improvement implementation, demonstrating the need for a new industry and region specific solution. Through the incorporation of previous findings from literature, coupled with the positive aspects of the current offerings, a new conceptual framework for continuous improvement implementation in UK manufacturing companies is presented. Findings The paper demonstrates the need for industry and region specific frameworks and demonstrates that current models and frameworks do not completely fulfil the objective of the research. A new continuous improvement implementation framework is therefore presented in a user friendly format, comprising positive aspects of previous models and frameworks where applicable. Research limitations/implications The focus of the research is limited to the UK and the manufacturing industry. It is therefore not clear the applicability of the framework presented to other regions and industries. The framework presented is also conceptual at this stage and requires validation through interview and application. Practical implications The framework presented will provide senior managers wishing to implement continuous improvement an understanding of the high level process, as well as awareness of their role within the roll out. Overall, the framework provides a clear guide whilst also allowing for individual tailoring of the elements contained to the needs of the company. Originality/value The paper presents a new conceptual framework; the first to be tailored to the needs of UK manufacturing companies. The framework has also been demonstrated to be a more robust solution than those currently in existence.

In this paper we focus on the ‘Christmas’ flood in York (UK), 2015. The case is special in the sense that little infrastructure was lost or damaged, while a single industry (IT services) was completely knocked out for a limited time. Due to these characteristics, the standard modelling techniques are no longer appropriate. An alternative option is provided by the Hypothetical Extraction Method, or HEM. However, there are restrictions in using the HEM, one being that no realistic substitutes exist for inputs from industries that were affected. In this paper we discuss these restrictions and show that the HEM performs well in the York flood case. In the empirical part of this paper we show that a three-day shutdown of the IT services caused a £3.24 m to £4.23 m loss in York, which is equivalent to 10% of the three days' average GVA (Gross Value Added) of York city. The services sector (excluding IT services) sustained the greatest loss at £0.80 m, where the business support industry which was predominantly hit. This study is the first to apply a HEM in this type of flood on a daily basis.

This article examines the early evolution of British policy, prior to the Second World War. The British government adopted an ‘open’ policy towards foreign direct investment (FDI), despite periodic fears that some foreign acquisitions of UK firms in key sectors might be detrimental to the national interest, and a few ad hoc attempts to deal with particular instances of this kind. During the 1930s, when the inflow of foreign firms accelerated following Britain's adoption of general tariff protection, the government developed a sophisticated admissions policy, based on an assessment of the likely net benefit of each applicant to the British economy. Its limited regulatory powers were used to maximize the potential of immigrant firms for technology transfer, enhanced competition, industrial diversification, and employment creation (particularly in the depressed regions), while protecting British industries suffering from excess capacity.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate if CSR is balanced between firm and wider society interests. Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative interpretive hermeneutic approach is used to analyse a variety of publically published secondary sources on the CSR of Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons and Co-operative in the UK grocery multiple sector (2005-2010). Findings – CSR strategic outcomes currently favour the firm more than society interests. A multilayered framework in the form of Social Responsibility of the Corporation (SRC) is designed and offered in support of balancing the business-society relationship more evenly. Research limitations/implications – This study is limited to firms originating from within the UK grocery multiple sector. Asda could not be included in the study as it does not publish CSR reports annually in the UK after becoming part of Walmart group. Practical implications – A framework for multi-level standardised definition of CSR in the form of SRC is offered. The inclusion of employees and members of the public on CSR/SRC boards is recommended to foster wider collaboration. The SRC framework promotes standardisation at global level while respecting diversity and firm heterogeneity at firm level. The findings may further contribute to GRI; UN Global Compact; WEF dialogues. Social implications – Recommendations are made to extend CSR board diversity for improved dialogue with communities. The SRC framework may be applied at global; national; industry and firm level. The framework can be applied internationally or locally. Future studies may offer quantitative attributes for balancing CSR/SRC. Originality/value – A globally unique and universally applicable framework for evaluating CSR activities is proposed. Future studies may extend the authors' framework to other industries, national environments or globally in the pursuit of balance between firm and society. Furthermore, firms may also adopt the framework to support CSR activities.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine what the term sustainable fashion means from the perspective of micro-organisations, experts, and consumers. Design/methodology/approach This research is qualitative in nature, utilising a multi-methods case study approach (semi-structured interviews, semiotics, questionnaires). Grounded analysis was applied to analyse the data. Findings Findings indicate that interpretation of sustainable fashion is context and person dependent. A matrix of key criteria provides the opportunity to find common elements. Research limitations/implications Due to the nature of this research the sample size is limited and may not be generalised. Data were collected in the UK and are limited to a geographical region. Practical implications An important implication is that defining sustainable fashion is vital in order to avoid challenges, such as greenwashing, which were faced in other industries that have a longer history in sustainable practices. Micro-organisations should take advantage of identifying key sustainable fashion criteria, which will enable them to promote their fashion collections more effectively. Social implications The criteria identified provide assurance for consumers that sustainable fashion is produced with social aspects in mind (fair wages, good working conditions). Originality/value The paper proposes a matrix that allows micro-organisations to clearly identify their collections as sustainable.

This article examines the alcohol industry's legal challenges to minimum unit pricing (MUP) in Scotland through the stages heuristic of the policy process. It builds on previous studies of alcohol pricing policy in Scotland and across the UK, and of the use of legal challenges by health harming industries to oppose health policy globally. Having failed to prevent MUP passing into law, industry actors sought to frustrate the implementation of the legislation via challenges in the Scottish, European and UK courts. However, the relevance of legal challenges is not limited to the post-legislative stage of the policy process but was foreshadowed in all earlier stages of the policy process. The potential for a legal challenge to MUP, and the alcohol industry's clearly articulated intention to pursue such action, was used by industry actors to seek to prevent the adoption of MUP in the agenda setting, policy formulation and legislative stages and created significant ‘regulatory chill’ in other areas of Scottish and UK alcohol policy. Litigation, and the prospect of it, was thus part of a coherent and integrated long-term strategy which adapted to changes in the political climate and to different stages in the policy process. While both the rhetoric and reality of litigation failed to prevent policy implementation, it succeeded in causing a delay of six years, imposing significant costs on the Scottish government and creating policy inertia in Scottish alcohol policy subsequently. Moreover, the inclusion of a ‘sunset clause’ in the legislation, requiring ongoing evaluation of the policy's effects, presents additional opportunities for the industry to reverse MUP. Thus, industry strategies to undermine MUP and delay further alcohol policy developments require ongoing attention by policy actors and scholars.

BackgroundEquine piroplasmosis (EP) is a notifiable disease in Ireland and a significant concern to domestic and international equine industries. Information regarding EP presence in Ireland is currently limited. This retrospective surveillance study describes a serological and molecular analysis of blood samples submitted to the Irish Equine Centre for EP testing between January 2013 and April 2016.MethodsFollowing serological testing, seropositive samples were screened using a PCR targeting the 18S ribosomal RNA gene. Amplicon sequences were bioinformatically analysed to identify the parasite species and to assess genetic diversity.ResultsFrom 2099 screened equine blood samples, 2.5 per cent and 1 per cent were seropositive for Theileria equi and Babesia caballi, respectively. T equi DNA was detected in 9 per cent of the seropositive samples while B caballi DNA was not detected in any sample. The T equi DNA sequences displayed no genetic diversity at this locus, in contrast to samples from the UK and from endemic areas.ConclusionDetection of EP-seropositive and parasitaemic horses in Ireland indicates a clear and present health risk to the equine population. It is recommended that owners adopt appropriate biosecurity measures and that clinicians are mindful of this disease as a differential diagnosis.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how a supervisor’s virtuous leadership as perceived by subordinates influences subordinates’ work-related well-being and to examine the mediating role of trust in the leader and the moderating roles of individual leader virtues and various characteristics of subordinates and organizations. Design/methodology/approach An online survey was conducted through Prolific among a self-selected sample of 1,237 employees who worked with an immediate supervisor across various industries in primarily the UK and the USA. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses. Findings The empirical results indicate that an immediate supervisor’s virtuous leadership as evaluated by the subordinate positively influences all three considered dimensions of work-related well-being – job satisfaction, work-related affect and work engagement – for a wide variety of employees in different industries and countries. A subordinate’s greater trust in the supervisor fully mediates this positive influence for job satisfaction and work engagement and partially for work-related affect. All five individual core leader virtues – prudence, temperance, justice, courage and humanity – positively influence work-related well-being. Practical implications The findings underscore that promoting virtuous leadership is a promising pathway for improved employee well-being, which may ultimately benefit individual and organizational performance. Originality/value Despite an age-old interest in leader virtues, the lack of consensus on the defining elements of virtuous leadership has limited the understanding of its consequences. Building on recent advances in the conceptualization and measurement of virtuous leadership and leader character, this paper addresses this void by exploring how virtuous leadership relates to employees’ well-being and trust.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine how organisations report on the detection and remediation of modern slavery in their operations and supply chains and to understand their approaches to disclosing information in response to modern slavery legislation. Design/methodology/approach An analysis of secondary data based on the statements is released in response to the 2015 UK Modern Slavery Act by 101 firms in the clothing and textiles sector. Findings Many firms use the same practices to detect and remediate modern slavery as for other social issues. But the hidden, criminal nature of modern slavery and the involvement of third party labour agencies mean practices need to either be tailored or other more innovative approaches developed, including in collaboration with traditional and non-traditional actors. Although five broad types of disclosure are identified, there is substantial heterogeneity in the statements. It is posited however that firms will converge on a more homogenous set of responses over time. Research limitations/implications The study is limited to one industry, responses to UK legislation and the information disclosed by focal firms only. Future research could expand the focus to include other industries, country contexts and stakeholders. Practical implications Managers must consider how their own firm’s behaviour contributes to the modern slavery threat, regulates both their stock and non-stock supply chains and ensures modern slavery is elevated from the procurement function to the boardroom. In making disclosures, managers may trade-off the potential competitive gains of transparency against the threat of information leakage and reputational risk should their statements be falsified. The managers should also consider what signals their statements send back up the chain to (sub-)suppliers. Findings also have potential policy implications. Originality/value The study expands the authors’ understanding of: modern slavery from a supply chain perspective, e.g. identifying the importance of standard setting and risk avoidance; and, supply chain information disclosure in response to legislative demands. This is the first academic paper to examine the statements produced by organisations in response to the UK Modern Slavery Act.

Purpose Supply chain risk (SCR) has increasingly attracted academic and corporate interest; however, the SCR debate in academic literature is rather limited to case- and location-specific studies. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to utilize a systematic literature review (SLR) to explore the SCR research trends and gaps within the management literature. Design/methodology/approach To achieve the research objective an SLR, looking into 25 years since 1990, into supply chain risk management (SCRM) was conducted, which resulted in 114 papers. Findings While the SCRM literature is growing, results from the SLR identified limited organized understanding of what constitutes a holistic SCR process, and high reliance of particular categories for SCR, such as the high reliance on specific country settings (the USA and the UK); limited presence of cross competitive SCR process analysis and challenges in developing conceptual SCR frameworks. Research limitations/implications The SCR embeds categories of location, scope of supply chain, risk management tools, and the industry sectors involved. The search for related publications was mainly used from a wide range of coverage from accountancy to design in SCR; hence, although there is indication to specific industries, and foci of risk, this could be explored further. Practical implications This review of SCRM identifies various research gaps and directions for future research to develop theory and a practical understanding of SCR. Originality/value The current literature on SCR has been assessed based on its definition and utilization. The current paper bridges this gap by synthesizing the diverse academic journal papers into the categories based on the design continuum, relationship continuum, process continuum and economic continuum. In addition, it highlights the gaps in industry context, theoretical contribution, geographic location, and research methods applied and addresses the scope for further research.

AbstractBarley ‘Scald’ is an economically damaging fungal disease that is a global problem, causing significant yield and economical losses in the UK barley feed and malting industries. Presently, a limited number of Rhynchosporium resistance genes exist, but selective pressures on the fungi cause the demand for new sources of resistance. Landraces, such as the Scottish Bere barley, hold potential sources of resistance that can be utilised, with farmers providing anecdotal evidence of resistance in field populations of Bere. This study analysed 131 heritage cultivars and landrace lines, including 37 Bere lines, to screen for resistance using both detached leaf assays (DLAs) and field experiments. Results showed that Bere lines produced smaller, but more necrotic, lesions for the majority of isolates in the DLAs, as well as smaller scores when visually assessed in field conditions. Whilst the infection patterns of the lines differed between isolates and experimental conditions, three Bere lines were identified as consistently showing reduced levels of infection (45 A 23, 58 A 36 Eday, and 8-125). Using genome-wide association analysis, we were able to identify a number of genomic regions associated with reduced infection symptoms, four in regions associated with known resistance genes, but another four associated with new regions that contain promising candidate genes. Further analysis of these new regions and candidate genes should be undertaken to identify targets for future disease-resistance breeding.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe a qualitative observational study of how middle managers in healthcare in the UK on a work-based masters programme in leadership were introduced to foundational aspects of creativity and delivering innovation through an assignment on contemporary architectural design.Design/methodology/approachThe assignment involved individual research of a recent architectural design followed by group poster presentations of findings and structured analysis. No prior knowledge of design was required. An activity theory approach was used to explore common principles of creativity and leading innovation, key features of design processes and tools for facilitating implementation.FindingsA total of 89 managers in seven cohorts completed the assignment. Data from process records and group work, artefacts and follow-up evaluation questionnaires were analysed within an interpretive approach. Analysis of data lent support for the view that exploring architectural design as an activity system helped participants to develop conceptual and applied links between management performance, creative collaboration and delivering innovation in their own, different field of practice. Where participants expressed limited self-efficacy regarding the capacity for fostering creativity, this was usually ascribed to systemic inhibitors.Practical implicationsExploring architectural design could provide a relatively low-cost, highly stimulating component of management development programmes seeking to harness the contribution of creative industries to foster work-based creativity and innovation.Originality/valueThis study explores a novel use of architectural design within the context of work-applied development programmes for healthcare managers.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate rationales for integrated reporting (<IR>) adoption and factors that impact on the extent of adoption in the UK early adopter organisations. Diffusion of innovation theory was used as a guiding theoretical lens Design/methodology/approach The study was based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 36 senior executives actively involved in IR in finance, sustainability, communications and legal functions within seventeen organisations. A content analysis of the interviews was undertaken using qualitative coding techniques within Nvivo 11 software. Findings Organisations drew on a wide range of rationales for adoption, with a predominance of sociological over economic rationales, both of which offered organisations a relative advantage over existing practices. Economically, <IR> emerged as an incremental process, which filled a performance gap is predominantly manufacturing and utility industries with significant impacts on the environment/society. Predominant sociological rationales were: external pressures, primarily due to perceptions of shifts in societal expectations; and internal aspirations relating to enhancing reputation. Findings also revealed that the <IR> framework was not fully adopted by the majority of organisations, primarily due to incompatibility with organisational requirements and/or perceived complexity of the framework. Research limitations/implications This research study was limited by the small sample of organisations that participated, although significant efforts were made to ensure that the sample incorporated the majority of early adopter UK organisations who demonstrated best practice in <IR>. Practical implications Recommendations on how the adoption of <IR> may be further enhanced in the future are outlined. Social implications Research that provides recommendations to inform policy and practice regarding how <IR> could be more widely adopted, and its practices further diffused, within organisations is important given <IR> has the potential to contribute to societal and environmental well-being. Originality/value This study is significant as research into <IR> adoption decision motivations and subsequent extent of adoption is scant, particularly in the UK. It responds to the call by Dumay et al. (2016) for <IR> researchers to engage more with practice. It further enriches prior research on the adoption of management innovations where an extensive body of innovation literature has focussed on the rationale for organisational adoption of management innovations but has neglected the subsequent extent of adoption.

AbstractThe major ruminant species, dairy and beef cattle and sheep, represent a rather heterogeneous group as regards genetic improvement, which to a large extent reflects their respective breeding structures. In the UK, the beef cattle and sheep industries still span many different breeds, have small herds/flocks, and have been relatively unaffected by agribusiness investment, and are assumed to have a traditional pyramid breeding structure, in which progress is determined by a small number of breeders. Recording of production information, which to date has focussed on terminal sire characteristics, is relatively recent, and until the use of across herd evaluations, genetic progress was probably limited. However in recent years there have been gains in both growth and muscling. There is little evidence or concern for undesired consequences in commercial flocks, partly because of the extensive use of crossbreeding in these industries, which exploits both breed complementarity and heterosis.By contrast, the dairy industry is now dominated by purebred Holsteins. Increasingly breeding activities are both global in scope and dominated by a small number of large breeding companies. Because most traits of interest are only expressed in the female, improvement programmes have continued to focus on progeny testing, with test daughters in many herds. Most recording schemes and promotional activities emphasise production and type traits. The dairy industry is also notable for the publication of bull progeny test results, so that top bulls can then be used as sires of the next generation of by all companies. These bull evaluations now extend to international rankings.Data from the US indicates continuing genetic progress for production traits in the Holstein, particularly since the 1960s, by when progeny testing had been established, frozen semen widely used, and adequate statistical procedures in place for evaluating bulls. Genetic progress is also evident for type traits. There is now growing concern and evidence of undesirable genetic changes in fertility, disease incidence and overall stress, despite improved nutrition and general management. Altering this situation will require both the recording of such traits and the use of that information by breeding companies, especially in sire selection.

Purpose – Despite the surge of interest in construction sustainability and the many Government initiatives encouraging reform in the UK construction industry (CI), the prevalence of sustainable development (SD) in the industry is still largely lagging behind that of other industries. Given the amount of focus and activity identified nationally in this area, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the reasons why this is not being translated into action and to seek counsel from industry professionals as to how they believe change can be achieved with a particular focus on how they believe higher education institutions (HEIs) can contribute. Design/methodology/approach – An explorative, qualitative study using three focus groups was of construction professionals. Findings – Despite a lack of action, many in industry support sustainability and actively attempt to engage in sustainable practices but a number of barriers preclude successful implementation. Government initiatives are having a positive impact, with participants believing that both Government and HEIs are imperative in driving the sustainability agenda forward. Research limitations/implications – Whilst limited in scale, this paper highlights the current state of the CI in relation to SD and evidences that progress is being made albeit slowly. The findings may help both Government and HEIs alongside industry in achieving how this can be overcome. Originality/value – Previous research in this area has generally adopted a quantitative approach. Adopting a qualitative approach provides a more in depth view as to why the status quo remains with regards to SD in the CI.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to conceive the concept of inter-industry creative collaboration; a unique kind of cooperation between business partners from diverse industries. It investigates the motivations that encourage their creation and identifies a method to evaluate consumers’ attitudes towards this kind of partnership. The study analyses consumer-based brand equity and links them to inter-industry creative collaborations within the luxury fashion industry. Design/methodology/approach – Research was conducted using a comparative case design, which was qualitative in nature. Four cases were selected purposively. The data were obtained using semi-structured interviews with industry informants and consumer focus groups. Transcripts were thematically analysed according to common categories identified in the literature to enable cross-case conclusions to be drawn. Findings – The research proposes the existence of a direct relationship between the consumer-based brand equity effects and consumers’ attitudes towards inter-industry creative collaborations. This research not only proves the existence of the stated relationship but also generates a theoretical framework that specifically analyses inter-industry creative collaboration involving luxury fashion brands. Research limitations/implications – The usage of convenience sampling limited consumer participants to individuals who considered themselves luxury fashion consumers. In addition, the findings are limited to London, UK and cannot be generalised outside the examined cases. That said, the research provides a useful starting point for further empirical research to test the validity and reliability of the model outside of the stated cases. Practical implications – The proposed theoretical framework serves as a practical guide for luxury managers to assess the planning and execution of inter-industry creative collaborations conducted by their brands. Originality/value – The research makes a contribution to brand management literature by creating a connection between four topics of academic research: motivations of inter-industry creative collaborations; consumer-based brand equity; consumers’ attitudes towards inter-industry creative collaborations; and the creative and emotional elements of luxury fashion.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to investigate the contextual factors that influence the impact of account manager turnover on the client–agency relationship, an under-researched area of relationship management literature. Design/methodology/approach – A case study approach and one-to-one interviews are used to conduct the exploratory study, analysing client–agency relationships within the UK design industry. A conceptual framework covering individual and organisational characteristics is used to examine the contextual factors impacting account manager turnover. Findings – The findings identify both organisational and individual contextual factors that influence the outcome of turnover. Categorized into three core contexts (client-specific knowledge, multiple relationship ties and turnover process management), factors such as agency structure and culture, agency knowledge management policies and client experience were all found to impact on account manager turnover. Research limitations/implications – This small, qualitative, exploratory study suggests the need for further research to investigate the transferability of the findings to a broader range of organisational types and industries and to highlight additional contextual factors that influence the impact of turnover. Practical implications – Account manager turnover does not necessarily mean the end of the client–service firm relationship. Agencies can create contexts that mitigate the potential negative effects. Small firms appear to have advantages inherent in their size, but larger firms can take steps to emulate some of the conditions found in micro firms. Originality/value – This paper adds to the limited number of studies into account manager turnover, making a theoretical and practical contribution, enabling marketing managers to take steps to ensure staff turnover does not result in client switching.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present the key findings of a systematic literature review (SLR) on Lean for services and, in particular, airport services. Design/methodology/approach The authors have utilised an SLR methodology proposed by Denyer and Tranfield (2009). A total of 23 papers published in 18 scientific journals have been systematically reviewed for evaluating and establishing the current status of Lean for airport services. Findings It was observed that there are no journal publications on the use of Lean in UK airport services. Although value stream mapping has been widely accepted as a powerful Lean tool across many service organisations, its applications in airport services is in its early stages. One of the biggest challenges in the implementation of Lean for airport services is about maintaining the level of service standards. The most common barriers in the implementation of Lean for airport services may include: resistance to change, varied definitions of the term Lean for different people across the business and understanding the need for Lean in airport services as there is a misconception that Lean is confined to manufacturing. Research limitations/implications This paper seeks to contribute to and broaden the limited body of evidence of the applicability of Lean to airport services and identify areas for further research and review. Originality/value This paper makes an attempt to demonstrate the use of Lean thinking for service industries and, in particular, airport services. The authors have identified less than five papers on the use of Lean thinking in airport services and this paper sets the foundation for future research on the use of process excellence methodologies such as Lean. Moreover, the authors firmly believe that the results of this SLR can be extremely beneficial to many managers working in Airport Service contexts, irrespective of the country and culture of the organisation.

Purpose Previous studies generally focused on the definition of cybercrime and its effect on the market. Following Kesan’s study, this paper aims to analyse the relationship between cyber insurance and social welfare and compare it among three countries, namely, USA, UK and Turkey. The paper also discusses the main obstacles that the cyber insurer has to deal with and its effect on social welfare. This paper answers two questions related to cyber insurance at an aggregate level. First, “what kind of contribution does cyber insurance make to social welfare?” Second,“What kind of problems do insurers and insured have to face?” Although the findings are similar to Kesan’s study, this study gives an opportunity to make a country-based study and interpret the results with a different perspective. Design/methodology/approach The calculation of utility is also important for interpreting social welfare in the market. Consumer behaviour under uncertainty constructs the background for this paper because the risks of malicious attacks are contingent and independent, which means that consumers have to make their decisions under uncertainty. Von-Neumann-Morgenstern utility function is used for interpreting consumer’s behaviour. Findings Basically, there are two important conclusions that can derive for cyber insurance. First, cyber insurance can be defined as a higher security investment when coupled with increased levels of safety and a robust IT infrastructure. Second, cyber insurance, as a high-security investment, would have a positive impact on social welfare by making the internet safer for all users. The results show that the problems that lead to market failure can be virtually eliminated with an accurate risk assessment that leads to appropriate premium levels for insured. These results are consistent with those of study by Kesan et al. (2006). Research limitations/implications Data availability for different industries have limited the ability to compare the impact of cyber-crime to different sectors. Originality/value Technological devices have become part of our daily life. Although they have brought us increasing access to all types of information, including opportunities for business, they have also increased the risk of malicious attacks and the risk of e-crime. By replicating the economic model used by Kesan et al. (2006), social welfare losses and insurance premiums are calculated for three countries: USA, UK and Turkey. Questions pertaining to contribution of cyber insurance to social welfare and problems faced by insurers and insured are addressed.

Purpose – Despite the ongoing research into visitor motivation in the live events and tourism industries, only a limited amount of research has examined the motivational factors exhibited in individual segments of society. The purpose of this paper was to identify a relationship between visitor demographics and visitor motivation, for the purpose of enhanced market research at folk festivals in the UK. Design/methodology/approach – In this research, a qualitative study of visitor demographics and their accompanying motivation to attend Purbeck Folk Festival is reported. The study was conducted in the form of interviews, which investigated the underlying motivation behind visitor attendance to Purbeck Folk Festival in 2014. The research process, guided by the literature of Robson (2011) and Bryman (2012), aimed to establish the extent to which visitor demographics did or did not impact visitor motivation to attend the event. Findings – The study revealed five motivational dimensions, and from this devised five core audience segments including: the escapists, the socialites, the family type, the experience seekers and the folkniks. This study highlights the correlation between visitor demographics and visitor motivation and suggests further applications of this research and similar research in the field of live events. The study contributes an insight into the audience of Purbeck Folk Festival and may be used to provide an understanding of audience profile and behaviour at folk festivals within the UK. Research limitations/implications – Due to the nature of the research, participants will be secured through non-probability quota sampling, which is a method of convenience. This approach may place limitations on the validity of the findings, as researcher bias may occur when selecting participants, for example, avoiding visitors who look intimidating or abnormal (Robson, 2011). The use of open-ended questions in the capacity of a greenfield event was identified as a potential difficulty, as participants are required to think about their answers and provide opinions, unlike a closed question method, which although quicker and easier, may not be as effective (Kumar, 2014). Therefore, to keep participants engaged and willing to provide further information, the interview design was kept short and questions are easily comprehendible. Originality/value – The research study reflects early the work of Mayo (Dickson, 1973), Maslow (1954) and Herzberg (1966), and builds on more recent literature by Kruger and Saayman (2012), which analysed the relationship between audience profile and motivation to attend.

Purpose – Due to the complexities involved in disasters and due to the peculiar nature of post-disaster reconstruction, built environment professionals require continuous updating of their skills and knowledge to contribute effectively to disaster resilience. The purpose of this paper is to identify the ways in which higher education institutions (HEIs) can address this need through the provision of lifelong learning. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on both a literature review and on empirical evidence obtained through interviews, a workshop and group validation. Findings – The challenges faced by HEIs in accommodating lifelong learning are presented. Furthermore, good practice guidelines are provided to enable HEIs to respond effectively to industry requirements; to provide lifelong learning via through-life studentship; to promote collaboration amongst HEIs, industries, professional bodies and communities, and to promote the adoption, diffusion and exploitation of the latest learning and teaching technologies. Research limitations/implications – The empirical focus of the research is limited to three EU countries, namely UK, Lithuania and Estonia. This paper focuses on role of HEIs in enhancing the disaster risk reduction (DRR) capacity in the built environment, especially at the stage of post-disaster reconstruction. Practical implications – The recommendations provided on good practice suggest how HEIs can integrate disaster related knowledge into their curriculum faster than previously and how they are able to assist their educators and learners in building up their knowledge base on a continuous basis. Social implications – Capacity building in enhancing DRR during the post-disaster reconstruction stage through the provision of lifelong learning will create social implications within the responsiveness of built environment professionals to cater for disaster resilience. Originality/value – The appropriateness of lifelong learning as an approach to disaster management education is justified. The challenges HEIs face in accommodating lifelong learning and the recommendations on good practice guidelines in order to make the HEIs more responsive to educational needs are discussed.

When the Fun Stops, Stop, is a prominent ‘responsible gambling’ campaign in the UK, originally funded and delivered by the industry-initiated and funded Senet Group. Since the Senet Group’s dissolution in 2020, the campaign has been overseen by the Betting and Gambling Council (BGC), the main gambling industry trade body. There has been no prior analysis of the activities, ideas and framing adopted by the Senet Group, who claimed to be acting as an industry ‘watchdog’ and oversaw what they characterised as a major public education campaign. We collated written and image-based material related to the Senet Group and its When the Fun Stops, Stop campaign from multiple sources. Guided by Entman’s four functions of framing, we analysed the Senet Group’s framing of the issues it sought to address, particularly harmful gambling, as well as its causes, and the solutions, focusing on the group’s main activity: the delivery of the When the Fun Stops, Stop campaign. We also critically appraised an evaluation of the campaign funded by the Senet Group, using the findings to interrogate the stated claims about the campaign’s effectiveness. The analysis showed that the Senet Group’s framing of the problem, its causes, and proposed responses resemble those adopted by other industries and industry-funded groups. This involves portraying any harms caused by their products as limited to an atypical minority, rejecting upstream determinants of harm, and promoting individually-targeted voluntary measures, all contrary to the evidence of what works in health promotion, and what would characterise a public health approach. Neither the existing evidence base nor the evidence presented by the Senet Group support their claims about the campaign’s effectiveness. These findings add to concerns about industry-funded campaigns in other areas. To minimise conflicts of interest, interventions intended to address gambling-related harms, such as public education campaigns, should be evidence-based and developed, implemented and evaluated completely independent of the industry and industry-funded organisations.

Background Online customer feedback has become routine in many industries, but it has yet to be harnessed for service improvement in health care. Objectives To identify the current evidence on online patient feedback; to identify public and health professional attitudes and behaviour in relation to online patient feedback; to explore the experiences of patients in providing online feedback to the NHS; and to examine the practices and processes of online patient feedback within NHS trusts. Design A multimethod programme of five studies: (1) evidence synthesis and stakeholder consultation; (2) questionnaire survey of the public; (3) qualitative study of patients’ and carers’ experiences of creating and using online comment; (4) questionnaire surveys and a focus group of health-care professionals; and (5) ethnographic organisational case studies with four NHS secondary care provider organisations. Setting The UK. Methods We searched bibliographic databases and conducted hand-searches to January 2018. Synthesis was guided by themes arising from consultation with 15 stakeholders. We conducted a face-to-face survey of a representative sample of the UK population (n = 2036) and 37 purposively sampled qualitative semistructured interviews with people with experience of online feedback. We conducted online surveys of 1001 quota-sampled doctors and 749 nurses or midwives, and a focus group with five allied health professionals. We conducted ethnographic case studies at four NHS trusts, with a researcher spending 6–10 weeks at each site. Results Many people (42% of internet users in the general population) read online feedback from other patients. Fewer people (8%) write online feedback, but when they do one of their main reasons is to give praise. Most online feedback is positive in its tone and people describe caring about the NHS and wanting to help it (‘caring for care’). They also want their feedback to elicit a response as part of a conversation. Many professionals, especially doctors, are cautious about online feedback, believing it to be mainly critical and unrepresentative, and rarely encourage it. From a NHS trust perspective, online patient feedback is creating new forms of response-ability (organisations needing the infrastructure to address multiple channels and increasing amounts of online feedback) and responsivity (ensuring responses are swift and publicly visible). Limitations This work provides only a cross-sectional snapshot of a fast-emerging phenomenon. Questionnaire surveys can be limited by response bias. The quota sample of doctors and volunteer sample of nurses may not be representative. The ethnographic work was limited in its interrogation of differences between sites. Conclusions Providing and using online feedback are becoming more common for patients who are often motivated to give praise and to help the NHS improve, but health organisations and professionals are cautious and not fully prepared to use online feedback for service improvement. We identified several disconnections between patient motivations and staff and organisational perspectives, which will need to be resolved if NHS services are to engage with this source of constructive criticism and commentary from patients. Future work Intervention studies could measure online feedback as an intervention for service improvement and longitudinal studies could examine use over time, including unanticipated consequences. Content analyses could look for new knowledge on specific tests or treatments. Methodological work is needed to identify the best approaches to analysing feedback. Study registration The ethnographic case study work was registered as Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN33095169. Funding This project was funded by the National institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Services and Delivery Research programme and will be published in full in Health Services and Delivery Research; Vol. 7, No. 38. See the NIHR Journals Library website for further project information.

The POLYCHAR 16: World Forum on Advanced Materials, organized by the University of Lucknow, was held from 17 to 21 February 2008 in the capital of the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. The annual POLYCHAR conferences have been sponsored by IUPAC for several years and are known for combining the broad field of materials sciences with a clear focus on polymeric materials (the name "POLYCHAR" is derived from the term "polymer characterization"). POLYCHAR 16 was supported by many scientific associations and industries such as IUPAC, Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) (Trieste, Italy), Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Department of Biotechnology (DBT) (India), Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) (India), Reliance Industries Ltd. (India), Department of Science and Technology (India), Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), Indian National Science Academy (INSA), Uttar Pradesh Council of Science and Technology (UPCST) (India), Lucknow Chapter, Materials Research Society of India (MRSI), and University of Lucknow.As in past years, POLYCHAR puts emphasis on the quality of research presented - in contrast to maximizing the number of participants. The areas covered include nanomaterials and smart materials; natural and biodegradable materials and recycling; materials synthesis; polymers for energy; rheology, solutions, and processing; mechanical properties and performance; characterization and structure-property relationships; biomaterials and tissue engineering; dielectric and electrical properties; surfaces, interfaces, and tribology; and predictive methods. Symptomatically, the number of papers on "green" science was higher than at POLYCHAR 15 last year in Búzios, Rio de Janeiro.There were a total of 292 registered participants from 35 countries (Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, China, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Fiji, UK, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Korea, Kuwait, Mauritius, Malaysia, Mexico, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Sri Lanka, Slovakia, South Africa, Ukraine, USA, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela). This reflects the philosophy of POLYCHAR to provide an international forum to encourage young scientists and advanced students to present their scientific work and give them the opportunity to meet with colleagues and well-known scientists to discuss their results, exchange experiences, and make new contacts, in particular, international ones. Many industrial contacts and much international cooperation with exchange of students and scientists have resulted from this and earlier POLYCHAR meetings.This conference volume represents only a small fraction of the multitude of contributions from different parts of materials science - 48 oral contributions and 170 posters. Many of the contributions have review character, some represent excellent original contributions. Only a small number could be selected for this volume because of the limited space that is available. All this was possible with the sponsorship of IUPAC. Highlights of the conference were the Paul J. Flory Research Award (ex aequo) to Prof. Jiasong He, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; the International Materials Research Award to Dr. Rameshvar Adhikari, Tribhuvan University, Katmandu, Nepal; and numerous awards for young scientists and students, including the IUPAC Poster Award. Special Prof. Brar's 60th Birthday Celebration Awards were given to IUPAC poster prize winners.The next POLYCHAR will be hosted by Jean-Marc Saiter, University of Rouen, Rouen, France in April 2009.Poonam TandonConference Executive Secretary and Co-editor

Background Public health policies and recommendations aim to be informed by the best available evidence. Evidence underpinning e-cigarettes policy recommendations has been necessarily limited due to the novelty of the technology and the lack of long-term epidemiological studies and trials. Some public health bodies have actively encouraged e-cigarette use whilst others have raised concerns over introducing new health risks and renormalising tobacco smoking. Using citation network analysis we investigated the author conflicts of interest and study funding statements within sources of evidence used by public health bodies when making recommendations about e-cigarette policy. Methods We conducted citation network analysis of public health recommendation documents across four purposively selected diverse jurisdictions: WHO, UK, Australia, and USA. We extracted all citations from 15 public health recommendation documents, with more detailed data collected for influential citations (used in 3+ recommendation documents). We analysed the relationships between the sources of evidence used across jurisdictions using block modelling to determine if similar groups of documents were used across different jurisdictions. We assessed the frequency and nature of conflicts of interest. Results 1700 unique citations were included across the 15 public health recommendation documents, with zero to 923 citations per document (median = 63, IQR = 7.5–132). The evidence base underpinning public health recommendations did not systematically differ across jurisdictions. Of the 1700 citations included, the majority were journal articles (n = 1179). Across 1081 journal articles published between 1998–2018, 200 declared a conflict of interest, 288 contained no mention of conflicts of interest, and 593 declared none. Conflicts of interest were reported with tobacco (3%; n = 37 journal articles of 1081), e-cigarette (7%; n = 72), and pharmaceutical companies (12%; n = 127), with such conflicts present even in the most recent years. There were 53 influential citations, the most common study type was basic science research without human subjects (e.g. examination of aerosols and e-liquids) (n = 18) followed by systematic review (n = 10); with randomised control trial being least common (n = 4). Network analysis identified clusters of highly-cited articles with a higher prevalence of conflicts of interest. Conclusion Public health bodies across different jurisdictions drew upon similar sources of evidence, despite articulating different policy approaches to e-cigarettes. The evidence drawn upon, including the most influential evidence, contained substantial conflicts of interest (including relationships with e-cigarette and tobacco industries). Processes to explicitly manage conflicts of interest arising from the underlying evidence base may be required when developing public health recommendations.

This reflective commentary summarizes the key learnings that arose from the 2019/20 Knowledge Exchange and the Creative Industries seminar series. These seminars at the University of Bristol, UK, looked at engagement with research within the creative industries. Each seminar showcased an academic and artistic partnership from across South West England and Wales which resulted in an artistic output that could be classified as ‘immersive’, including, but not limited to, audio storytelling applications, augmented reality games, virtual reality projects, films and theatre productions. Each seminar involved collaborators sharing their experiences and thoughts on best practice, possible styles and potential pitfalls in knowledge exchange projects. My commentary provides an overview of the partnerships, which represent a snapshot of current knowledge exchange practices in the region. I summarize the common trends that emerged throughout the seminars, including methods of initiating a collaboration, the scalability of partnerships between industry and academia, the challenges surrounding process when working on multi-partner collaborations, and questions of ethics and intellectual property. I also reflect upon the processes and learnings that arose from hosting the series, to guide others who are thinking about strategies to encourage collaboration. Overall, the commentary offers a blueprint of considerations for those in both academia and the creative industries who are considering embarking upon knowledge exchange projects. By drawing attention to the lessons learned from a series of successful partnerships, the discussion paves the way for future projects of engaged research within the creative industries.

In order to evaluate the performance of mutual fund industry in various financial markets a wide variety of researches have been conducted, which lead to different results. As Pakistani mutual fund industry is much younger as compared to the US and UK fund industries and thus limited work has been done to evaluate Pakistani mutual fund industry. Over the past few years the industry had showed a phenomenal growth and it makes it worthwhile to study the performance of mutual funds. The aim of this research study is to validate the Fama French 3-Factor Model and Carhart 4-Factor Model. Also this research attempts to test that which one of the included model performs better than the other so as to check there preferred suitability in measuring and evaluating the mutual fund performance in Pakistan. The monthly data of 323 open ended mutual funds for the period of 2008 to 2018 is analyzed. The GRS model validation test was applied, the results of the test found that the Carhart 4-Factor Model performed much better than the Fama French 3-Factor Model and from the CAPM as well. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by providing academicians and practitioners more knowledge regarding multifactor asset pricing model so as to make better investment decisions. Keywords: Mutual funds, performance evaluation, CAPM, Fama-French 3- factor model, Carhart 4-factor model

In order to evaluate the performance of mutual fund industry in various financial markets a wide variety of researches have been conducted, which lead to different results. As Pakistani mutual fund industry is much younger as compared to the US and UK fund industries and thus limited work has been done to evaluate Pakistani mutual fund industry. Over the past few years the industry had showed a phenomenal growth and it makes it worthwhile to study the performance of mutual funds. The aim of this research study is to validate the Fama French 3-Factor Model and Carhart 4-Factor Model. Also this research attempts to test that which one of the included model performs better than the other so as to check there preferred suitability in measuring and evaluating the mutual fund performance in Pakistan. The monthly data of 323 open ended mutual funds for the period of 2008 to 2018 is analyzed. The GRS model validation test was applied, the results of the test found that the Carhart 4-Factor Model performed much better than the Fama French 3-Factor Model and from the CAPM as well. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by providing academicians and practitioners more knowledge regarding multifactor asset pricing model so as to make better investment decisions. Keywords: Mutual funds, performance evaluation, CAPM, Fama-French 3- factor model, Carhart 4-factor model

PurposeThis study aims to explore how horizontal collaboration can help small and micro enterprises within the drink sector through the relational theory lens.Design/methodology/approachThe use of qualitative research methods, including focus groups and interviews, facilitated understanding the horizontal collaboration in micro and small companies within the Welsh brewery industry. Data collection involved conducting three focus groups and 13 interviews within the Welsh brewery sector in the UK. The collaboration phenomena were explained using the three elements of relational theory: relational rents, relational capitals and relational governance.FindingsMicro and small enterprises in the drink sector use collaborative initiatives in building new capabilities to generate relational rents. In addition, relational capitals and relational governance mechanisms were identified to support the horizontal collaboration among these enterprises.Research limitations/implicationsThe focus is on only one part of the drinks industry, i.e. the brewery industry; therefore, this study could be extended to other industries within the drink sector or across manufacturing industries.Practical implicationsThe micro and small enterprises can collaborate to achieve relational rent, but this collaboration requires strong relational capitals, such as trust. These partners need to change informal governance mechanisms that already exist towards more contractual formal mechanisms.Originality/valuePrior research has largely focused on vertical collaboration, with limited studies using the relational theory lens to explicate horizontal collaboration phenomena and no previous research in the context of micro and small companies. Relational rents, relational capitals and relational governance mechanisms are studied to provide insights into an effective collaboration in this context.

A rhetoric of freedom characterises much of the literature dealing with online communities: freedom from fixed identity and appearance, from the confines of geographic space, and from control. The prevailing view, a combination of futurism and utopianism, is that the lack of order in cyberspace enables the creation of social spaces that will enhance personal freedom and advance the common good. Sherry Turkle argues that computer-mediated communication allows us to create a new form of community, in which identity is multiple and fluid (15-17). Marcos Novak celebrates the possibilities of a dematerialized, ethereal virtual architecture in which the relationships between abstract elements are in a constant state of flux (250). John Perry Barlow employs the frontier metaphor to frame cyberspace as an unmapped, ungoverned territory in which a romantic and a peculiarly American form of individualism can be enjoyed by rough and ready pioneers (“Crime” 460). In his 1993 account as an active participant in The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), one of the earliest efforts to construct a social space online, Howard Rheingold celebrates the freedom to create a “new kind of culture” and an “authentic community” in the “electronic frontier.” He worries, however, that the freedom enjoyed by early homesteaders may be short lived, because “big power and big money” might soon find ways to control the Internet, just as they have come to dominate and direct other communications media. “The Net,” he states, “is still out of control in fundamental ways, but it might not stay that way for long” (Virtual Community 2-5). The uses of order and disorder Some theorists have identified disorder as a necessary condition for the development of healthy communities. In The Uses of Disorder (1970), Richard Sennett argues that “the freedom to accept and to live with disorder” is integral to our search for community (xviii). In his 1989 study of social space, Ray Oldenburg maintains that public hangouts, which constitute the heart of vibrant communities, support sociability best when activities are unplanned, unorganized, and unrestricted (33). He claims that without the constraints of preplanned control we will be more in control of ourselves and more aware of one another (198). More recently, Charles Landry suggests that “structured instability” and “controlled disruption,” resulting from competition, conflict, crisis, and debate, make cities less comfortable but more exciting. Further, he argues that “endemic structural disorder” requiring ongoing adjustments can generate healthy creative activity and stimulate continual innovation (156-58). Kevin Robins, too, believes that any viable social system must be prepared to accept a level of uncertainty, disorder, and fear. He observes, however, that techno-communities are “driven by the compulsion to neutralize,” and they therefore exclude these possibilities in favour of order and security (90-91). Indeed, order and security are the dominant characteristics that less idealistic observers have identified with cyberspace. Alexander Galloway explains how, despite its potential as a liberating development, the Internet is based on technologies of control. This control is exercised at the code level through technical protocols, such as TCP/IP, DNS, and HTM, that determine disconnections as well as connections (Galloway). Lawrence Lessig suggests that in our examination of the ownership, regulation, and governance of the virtual commons, we must take into account three distinct layers. As well as the “logical” or “code” layer that Galloway foregrounds, we should also consider the “physical” layer, consisting of the computers and wires that carry Internet communications, and the “content” layer, which includes everything that we see and hear over the network. In principle, each of these layers could be free and unorganized, or privately owned and controlled (Lessig 23). Dan Schiller documents the increasing privatization of the Net and argues that corporate cyberspace extends the reach of the market, enabling it to penetrate into areas that have previously been considered to be part of the public domain. For Schiller, the Internet now serves as the main production and control mechanism of a global market system (xiv). Checking into Habbo Hotel Habbo Hotel is an example of a highly ordered and controlled online social space that uses community and game metaphors to suggest something much more open and playful. Designed to attract the teenage market, this graphically intensive cartoon-like hotel is like an interactive Legoland, in which participants assemble a toy-like “Habbo” character and chat, play games, and construct personal environments. The first Habbo Hotel opened its doors in the United Kingdom in 2000, and, by September 2004, localized sites were based in a dozen countries, including Canada, the Unites States, Finland, Japan, Switzerland and Spain, with further expansion planned. At that time, there were more than seventeen million registered Habbo characters worldwide with 2.3 million unique visitors each month (“Strong Growth”). The hotel contains thousands of private rooms and twenty-two public spaces, including a welcome lounge, three lobbies, cinema, game hall, café, pub, and an extensive hallway. Anyone can go to the Room-O-Matic and instantly create a free guest room. However, there are a limited number of layouts to choose from and the furnishings, which must be purchased, have be chosen from a catalog of fixed offerings. All rooms are located on one of five floors, which categorize them according to use (parties, games, models, mazes, and trading). Paradoxically, the so-called public spaces are more restricted and less public than the private guest quarters. The limited capacity of the rooms means that all of the public spaces are full most of the time. Priority is given to paying Habbo Club members and others are denied entry or are unceremoniously ejected from a room when it becomes full. Most visitors never make it into the front lobby. This rigid and restricted construction is far from Novak’s vision of a “liquid architecture” without barriers, that morphs in response to the constantly changing desires of individual inhabitants (Novak 250). Before entering the virtual hotel, individuals must first create a Lego-like avatar. Users choose a unique name for their Habbo (no foul language is allowed) and construct their online persona from a limited selection and colour of body parts. One of two different wardrobes is available, depending on whether “Boy” or “Girl” is chosen. The gender of every Habbo is easily recognizable and the restricted wardrobe results in remarkably similar looking young characters. The lack of differentiation encourages participants to treat other Habbos as generic “Boys” or “Girls” and it encourages limited and predictable conversations that fit the stereotype of male-female interactions in most chat sites. Contrary to Turkle’s contention that computer mediated communication technologies expose the fallacy of a single, fixed, identity, and free participants to experiment with alternative selves (15-17), Habbo characters are permitted just one unchangeable name, and are capable of only limited visual transformations. A fixed link between each Habbo character and its registered user (information that is not available to other participants) allows the hotel management to track members through the site and monitor their behavior. Habbo movements are limited to walking, waving, dancing and drinking virtual alcohol-free beverages. Movement between spaces is accomplished by entering a teleport booth, or by selecting a location by name from the hotel Navigator. Habbos cannot jump, fly or walk through objects or other Habbos. They have no special powers and only a limited ability to interact with objects in their environment. They cannot be hurt or otherwise affected by anything in their surroundings, including other Habbos. The emphasis is on safety and avoidance of conflict. Text chat in Habbo Hotel is limited to one sixty-one-character line, which appears above the Habbo, floats upward, and quickly disappears off the top of the screen. Text must be typed in real time while reading on-going conversations and it is not possible to archive a chat sessions or view past exchanges. There is no way of posting a message on a public board. Using the Habbo Console, shorter messages can also be exchanged between Habbos who may be occupying different rooms. The only other narratives available on the site are in the form of official news and promotions. Before checking into the hotel, Habbos can stop to read Habbo Today, which promotes current offers and activities, and HabboHood Happenings, which offers safety tips, information about membership benefits, jobs (paid in furniture), contest winners, and polls. According to Rheingold, a virtual community can form online when enough people participate in meaningful public discussions over an extended period of time and develop “webs of personal relationships” (Virtual Community 5). By restricting communication to short, fleeting messages between individual Habbos, the hotel frustrates efforts by members to engage in significant dialogue and create a viable social group. Although “community” is an important part of the Habbo Hotel brand, it is unlikely to be a substantial part of the actual experience. The virtual hotel is promoted as a safe, non-threatening environment suitable for the teenagers is designed to attract. Parents’ concerns about the dangers of an unregulated chat space provide the hotel management with a justification for creating a highly controlled social space. The hotel is patrolled twenty-four hours a day by professional moderators backed-up by a team of 180 volunteer “Hobbas,” or guides, who can issue warnings to misbehaving Habbos, or temporarily ban them from the site. All text keyed in by Habbos passes through an automated “Bobba Filter” that removes swearing, racist words, explicit sexual comments and “anything that goes against the “Habbo Way” (“Bad Language”). Stick to the rules and you’ll have fun, Habbos are told, “break them and you’ll get yourself banned” (“Habbo Way”). In Big Brother fashion, messages are displayed throughought the hotel advising members to “Stay safe, read the Habbohood Watch,” “Never give out your details!” and “Obey the Habbo way and you’ll be OK.” This miniature surveillance society contradicts Barlow’s observation that cyberspace serves as “a perfect breeding ground for both outlaws and new ideas about liberty” (“Crime” 460). In his manifesto declaring the independence of cyberspace from government control, he maintains that the state has no authority in the electronic “global social space,” where, he asserts, “[w]e are forming our own Social Contract” based on the Golden Rule (“Declaration”). However, Habbo Hotel shows how the rule of the marketplace, which values profits more than social practices, can limit the freedoms of online civil society just as effectively as the most draconian government regulation. Place your order Far from permitting the “controlled disruption” advocated by Landry, the hotel management ensures that nothing is allowed to disrupt their control over the participants. Without conflict and debate, there are few triggers for creative activity in the site, which is designed to encourage consumption, not community. Timo Soininen, the managing director of the company that designed the hotel, states that, because teenagers like to showcase their own personal style, “self-expression is the key to our whole concept.” However, since it isn’t possible to create a Habbo from scratch, or to import clothing or other objects from outside the site, the only way for members to effectively express themselves is by decorating and furnishing their room with items purchased from the Habbo Catalogue. “You see, this,” admits Soininen, “is where our revenue model kicks in” (Shalit). Real-world products and services are also marketed through ads and promotions that are integrated into chat, news, and games. The result, according to Habbo Ltd, is “the ideal vehicle for third party brands to reach this highly desired 12-18 year-old market in a cost-effective and creative manner” (“Habbo Company Profile”). Habbo Hotel is a good example of what Herbert Schiller describes as the corporate capture of sites of public expression. He notes that, when put at the service of growing corporate power, new technologies “provide the instrumentation for organizing and channeling expression” (5-6). In an afterword to a revised edition of The Virtual Community, published in 2000, Rheingold reports on the sale of the WELL to a privately owned corporation, and its decline as a lively social space when order was imposed from the top down. Although he believes that there is a place for commercial virtual communities on the Net, he acknowledges that as economic forces become more entrenched, “more controls will be instituted because there is more at stake.” While remaining hopeful that activists can leverage the power of many-to-many communications for the public good, he wonders what will happen when “the decentralized network infrastructure and freewheeling network economy collides with the continuing growth of mammoth, global, communication empires” (Virtual Community Rev. 375-7). Although the company that built Habbo Hotel is far from achieving global empire status, their project illustrates how the dominant ethos of privatization and the increasing emphasis on consumption results in gated virtual communities that are highly ordered, restricted, and controlled. The popularity of the hotel reflects the desire of millions of Habbos to express their identities and ideas in a playful environment that they are free to create and manipulate. However, they soon find that the rules are stacked against them. Restricted design options, severe communication limitations, and fixed architectural constraints mean that the only freedom left is the freedom to choose from a narrow range of provided options. In private cyberspaces like Habbo Hotel, the logic of the market rules out unrestrained many-to-many communications in favour of controlled commercial relationships. The liberating potential of the Internet that was recognized by Rheingold and others has been diminished as the forces of globalized commerce impose their order on the electronic frontier. References “Bad Language.” Habbo Hotel. 2004. Sulake UK Ltd. 15 Apr. 2004 http://www.habbohotel.co.uk/habbo/en/help/safety/badlanguage/>. Barlow, John Perry. “Crime and Puzzlement.” High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace. Ed. Peter Ludlow. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1996. 459-86. ———. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 8 Feb. 1996. 3 July 2004 http://www.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html>. Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2004. “Habbo Company Profile.” Habbo Hotel. 2002. Habbo Ltd. 20 Jan. 2003 http://www.habbogroup.com>. “The Habbo Way.” Habbo Hotel. 2004. Sulake UK Ltd. 15 Apr. 2004 http://www.habbohotel.co.uk/habbo/en/help/safety/habboway/>. Landry, Charles. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan, 2000. Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random, 2001. Novak, Marcos. “Liquid Architecture in Cyberspace.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991. 225-54. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You through the Day. New York: Paragon, 1989. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper, 1993. ———. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2000. Robins, Kevin. “Cyberspace and the World We Live In.” The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000. 77-95. Schiller, Dan. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1999. Schiller, Herbert I. Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Sennett, Richard. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life. New York: Vintage, 1970. Shalit, Ruth. “Welcome to the Habbo Hotel.” mpulse Magazine. Mar. 2002. Hewlett-Packard. 1 Apr. 2004 http://www.cooltown.com/cooltown/mpulse/0302-habbo.asp>. “Strong Growth in Sulake’s Revenues and Profit – Habbo Hotel Online Game Will Launch in the US in September.” 3 Sept. 2004. Sulake. Sulake Corp. 9 Jan. 2005 http://www.sulake.com/>. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McGuire, Mark. "Ordered Communities." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/06-mcguire.php>. APA Style McGuire, M. (Jan. 2005) "Ordered Communities," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/06-mcguire.php>.

Introduction: Artist Villages in Beijing Many of the most renowned sites of Beijing are found in the inner-city districts of Dongcheng and Xicheng: for instance, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Lama Temple, the National Theatre, the Central Opera Academy, the Bell Tower, the Drum Tower, the Imperial College, and the Confucius Temple. However, in the past decade a new attraction has been added to the visitor “must-see” list in Beijing. The 798 Art District originated as an artist village within abandoned factory buildings at Dashanzi, right between the city’s Central Business District and the open outer rural space on Beijing’s north-east. It is arguably the most striking symbol of China’s contemporary art scene. The history of the 798 Art District is by now well known (Keane), so this paper will provide a short summary of its evolution. Of more concern is the relationship between the urban fringe and what Howard Becker has called “art worlds.” By art worlds, Becker refers to the multitude of agents that contribute to a final work of art: for instance, people who provide canvasses, frames, and art supplies; critics and intermediaries; and the people who run exhibition services. To the art-world list in Beijing we need to add government officials and developers. To date there are more than 100 artist communities or villages in Beijing; almost all are located in the city’s outskirts. In particular, a high-powered art centre outside the city of Beijing has recently established a global reputation. Songzhuang is situated in outer Tongzhou District, some 30 kilometres east of Tiananmen Square. The Beijing Municipal Government officially classifies Songzhuang as the Capital Art District (CAD) or “the Songzhuang Original Art Cluster.” The important difference between 798 and Songzhuang is that, whereas the former has become a centre for retail and art galleries, Songzhuang operates as an arts production centre for experimental art, with less focus on commercial art. The destiny of the artistic communities is closely related to urban planning policies that either try to shut them down or protect them. In this paper I will take a close look at three artist villages: Yuanmingyuan, 798, and Songzhuang. In tracing the evolution of the three artist villages, I will shed some light on artists’ lives in city fringes. I argue that these outer districts provide creative industries with a new opportunity for development. This is counter to the conventional wisdom that central urban areas are the ideal locality for creative industries. Accordingly, this argument needs to be qualified: some types of creative work are more suitable to rural and undeveloped areas. The visual art “industry” is one of these. Inner and Outer Worlds Urban historians contend that innovation is more likely to happen in inner urban areas because of intensive interactions between people (Jacobs). City life has been associated with the development of creative industries and economic benefits brought about by the interaction of creative classes. In short, the argument is that cities, or, more specifically, urban areas are primary economic entities (Montgomery) whereas outer suburbs are uncreative and dull (Florida, "Cities"). The conventional wisdom is that talented creative people are attracted to the creative milieu in cities: universities, book shops, cafes, museums, theatres etc. These are both the hard and the soft infrastructure of modern cities. They illustrate diversified built forms, lifestyles and experiences (Lorenzen and Frederiksen; Florida, Rise; Landry; Montgomery; Leadbeater and Oakley). The assumption that inner-city density is the cradle of creative industries has encountered critique. Empirical studies in Australia have shown that creative occupations are found in relatively high densities in urban fringes. The point made in several studies is that suburbia has been neglected by scholars and policy makers and may have potential for future development (Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Commission; Collis, Felton, and Graham). Moreover, some have argued that the practice of constructing inner city enclaves may be leading to homogenized and prescriptive geographies (Collis, Felton, and Graham; Kotkin). As Jane Jacobs has indicated, it is not only density of interactions but diversity that attracts and accommodates economic growth in cities. However, the spatiality of creative industries varies across different sectors. For example, media companies and advertising agencies are more likely to be found in the inner city, whereas most visual artists prefer working in the comparatively quiet and loosely-structured outskirts. Nevertheless, the logic embodied in thinking around the distinctions between “urbanism” and “suburbanism” pays little attention to this issue, although both schools acknowledge the causal relationship between locality and creativity. According to Drake, empirical evidence shows that the function of locality is not only about encouraging interactions between SMEs (small to medium enterprises) within clusters which can generate creativity, but also a catalyst for individual creativity (Drake). Therefore for policy makers in China, the question here is how to plan or prepare a better space to accommodate creative professionals’ needs in different sectors while making the master plan. This question is particularly urgent to the Chinese government, which is undertaking a massive urbanization transition throughout the country. In placing a lens on Beijing, it is important to note the distinctive features of its politics, forms of social structure, and climate. As Zhu has described it, Beijing has spread in a symmetrical structure. The reasons have much to do with ancient history. According to Zhu, the city which was planned in the era of Genghis Khan was constituted by four layers or enclosures, with the emperor at the centre, surrounded by the gentry and other populations distributed outwards according to wealth, status, and occupation. The outer layer accommodated many lower social classes, including itinerant artists, musicians, and merchants. This ”outer city” combined with open rural space. The system of enclosures is carried on in today’s city planning of Beijing. Nowadays Beijing is most commonly described by its ring roads (Mars and Hornsby). However, despite the existing structure, new approaches to urban policy have resulted in a great deal of flux. The emergence of new landscapes such as semi-urbanized villages, rural urban syndicates (chengxiang jiehebu), and villages-within-cities (Mars and Hornsby 290) illustrate this flux. These new types of landscapes, which don’t correspond to the suburban concept that we find in the US or Australia, serve to represent and mediate the urban-rural relationship in China. The outer villages also reflect an old tradition of “recluse” (yin shi), which since the Wei and Jin Dynasties allowed intellectuals to withdraw themselves from the temporal world of the city and live freely in the mountains. The Lost Artistic Utopia: Yuanmingyuan Artist Village Yuanmingyuan, also known as the Ming Dynasty summer palace, is located in Haidian District in the north-west of Beijing. Haidian has transformed from an outer district of Beijing into one of its flourishing urban districts since the mid-1980s. Haidian’s success is largely due to the electronics industry which developed from spin-offs from Peking University, Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the 1980s. This led to the rapid emergence of Zhongguancun, sometimes referred to as China’s Silicon Valley. However there is another side of Haidian’s transformation. As the first graduates came out of Chinese Academies of the Arts following the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), creative lifestyles became available. Some people quit jobs at state-owned institutions and chose to go freelance, which was unimaginable in China under the former regime of Mao Zedong. By 1990, the earliest “artist village” emerged around the Yuanmingyuan accommodating artists from around China. The first site was Fuyuanmen village. Artists living and working there proudly called their village “West Village” in China, comparing it to the Greenwich Village in New York. At that time they were labelled as “vagabonds” (mangliu) since they had no family in Beijing, and no stable job or income. Despite financial difficulties, the Yuanmingyuan artist village was a haven for artists. They were able to enjoy a liberating and vigorous environment by being close to the top universities in Beijing[1]. Access to ideas was limited in China at that time so this proximity was a key ingredient. According to an interview by He Lu, the Yuanmingyuan artist village gave artists a sense of belonging which went far beyond geographic identification as a marginal group unwelcomed by conservative urban society. Many issues arose along with the growth of the artist village. The non-traditional lifestyle and look of these artists were deemed abnormal by many of the general public; the way of their expression and behaviour was too extreme to be accepted by the mainstream in what was ultimately a political district; they were a headache for local police who saw them as troublemakers; moreover, their contact with the western world was a sensitive issue for the government at that time. Suddenly, the village was closed by the government in 1993. Although the Yuanmingyuan artist village existed for only a few years, it is of significance in China’s contemporary art history. It is the birth place of the cynical realism movement as well as the genesis of Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Mingjun, now among the most successful Chinese contemporary artists in global art market. The Starting Point of Art Industry: 798 and Songzhuang After the Yuanmingyuan artist village was shut down in 1993, artists moved to two locations in the east of Beijing to escape from the government and embrace the free space they longed for. One was 798, an abandoned electronic switching factory in Beijing’s north-east urban fringe area; the other was Songzhuang in Tongzhou District, a further twenty kilometres east. Both of these sites would be included in the first ten official creative clusters by Beijing municipal government in 2006. But instead of simply being substitutes for the Yuanmingyuan artist village, both have developed their own cultures, functioning and influencing artists’ lives in different ways. Songzhuang is located in Tongzhou which is an outer district in Beijing’s east. Songzhuang was initially a rural location; its livelihood was agriculture and industry. Just before the closing down of the Yuanmingyuan village, several artists including Fang Lijun moved to this remote quiet village. Through word of mouth, more artists followed their steps. There are about four thousand registered artists currently living in Songzhuang now; it is already the biggest visual art community in Beijing. An artistic milieu and a local sense of place have grown with the increasing number of artists. The local district government invests in building impressive exhibition spaces and promoting art in order to bring in more tourists, investors and artists. Compared with Songzhuang, 798 enjoys a favourable location along the airport expressway, between the capital airport and the CBD of Beijing. The unused electronics plant was initially rented as classrooms by the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s. Then several artists moved their studios and workshops to the area upon eviction from the Yuanmingyuan village. Until 2002 the site was just a space to rent cheap work space, a factor that has stimulated many art districts globally (Zukin). From that time the resident artists began to plan how to establish a contemporary art district in China. Led by Huang Rui, a leading visual artist, the “798 collective” launched arts events and festivals, notably a “rebuilding 798” project of 2003. More galleries, cafés, bars, and restaurants began to set up, culminating in a management takeover by the Chaoyang District government with the Seven Stars Group[2] prior to the Beijing Olympics. The area now provides massive tax revenue to the local and national government. Nonetheless, both 798 and Songzhuang face problems which reflect the conflict between artists’ attachment to fringe areas and the government’s urbanization approach. 798 can hardly be called an artist production village now due to the local government’s determination to exploit cultural tourism. Over 50 percent of enterprises and people working in 798 now identify 798 as a tourism area rather than an art or “creative” cluster (Liu). Heavy commercialization has greatly disappointed many leading artists. The price for renting space has gone beyond the affordability of artists, and many have chosen to leave. In Songzhuang, the story is similar. In addition to rising prices, a legal dispute between artists and local residents regarding land property rights in 2008 drove some artists out of Songzhuang because they didn’t feel it was stable anymore (Smith). The district’s future as a centre of original art runs up against the aspirations of local officials for more tax revenue and tourist dollars. In the Songzhuang Cultural Creative Industries Cluster Design Plan (cited in Yang), which was developed by J.A.O Design International Architects and Planners Limited and sponsored by the Songzhuang local government in 2007, Songzhuang is designed as an “arts capital incorporated with culture, commerce and tourism.” The down side of this aspiration is that more museums, galleries, shopping centres, hotels, and recreation infrastructure will inevitably be developed in order to capitalise on Songzhuang’s global reputation. Concluding Reflections In reflecting on the recent history of artist villages in Beijing, we might conclude that rural locations are not only a cheap place for artists to live but also a space to showcase their works. More importantly, the relation of artists and outlying district has evolved into a symbiotic relationship. They interact and grow together. The existence of artists transforms the locale and the locale in turn reinforces the identity of artists. In Yuanmingyuan the artists appreciated the old “recluse” tradition and therefore sought spiritual liberation after decades of suppression. The outlying location symbolized freedom to them and provided distance from the world of noisy interaction. But isolation of artists from the local community and the associated constant conflict with local villagers deepened estrangement; these events brought about the end of the dream. In contrast, at 798 and Songzhuang, artists not only regarded the place as their worksite but also engaged with the local community. They communicated with local people and co-developed projects to transform the local landscape. Local communities changed; they started to learn about the artistic world while gaining economic benefits in many ways, such as house renting, running small grocery stores, providing art supplies and even modelling. Their participation into the “art worlds” (Becker) contributed to a changing cultural environment, in turn strengthening the brand of these artist villages. In many regards there were positive externalities for both artists and the district, although as I mentioned in relation to Songzhuang, tensions about land use have never completely been resolved. Today, the fine arts in China have gone far beyond the traditional modes of classics, aesthetics, liberation or rebellion. Art is also a business which requires the access to the material world in order to produce incomes and make profits. It appears that many contemporary artists are not part of a movement of rebellion (except several artists, such as Ai Weiwei), adopting the pure spirit of art as their life-time mission, as in the Yuanmingyuan artist village. They still long for recognition, but they are also concerned with success and producing a livelihood. The boundary between inner urban and outer urban areas is not as significant to them as it once was for artists from a former period. While many artists enjoy the quiet and space of the fringe and rural areas to work; they also require urban space to exhibit their works and earn money. This factor explains the recent emergence of Caochangdi and other artist villages in the neighbouring area around the 798. These latest artist villages in the urban fringe still have open and peaceful spaces and can be accessed easily due to convenient transportation. Unfortunately, the coalition of business and government leads to rapid commercialization of place which is not aligned with the basic need of artists, which is not only a free or affordable place but also a space for creativity. As mentioned above, 798 is now so commercialized that it is too crowded and expensive for artists due to the government’s overdevelopment; whereas the government’s original intention was to facilitate the development of 798. Furthermore, although artists are a key stakeholder in the government’s agenda for visual art industry, it is always the government’s call when artists’ attachment to rural space comes into conflict with Beijing government’s urbanization plan. Hence the government decides which artist villages should be sacrificed to give way to urban development and which direction the reserved artist villages or art clusters should be developed. The logic of government policy causes an absolute distinction between cities and outlying districts. And the government’s enthusiasm for “urbanization” leads to urbanized artist villages, such as the 798. A vicious circle is formed: the government continuously attempts to have selected artist villages commercialized and transformed into urbanized or quasi-urbanized area and closes other artist villages. One of the outcomes of this policy is that in the government created creative clusters, many artists do not stay, and move away into rural and outlying areas because they prefer to work in non-urban spaces. To resolve this dilemma, greater attention is required to understand artists needs and ways to combine urban convenience and rural tranquillity into their development plans. This may be a bridge too far, however. Reference Becker, Howard Saul. Art Worlds. 25th anniversary, updated and expanded ed. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2008. Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. "Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice." The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12. Commission, Outer London. The Mayor's Outer London Commission: Report. London: Great London Authority, 2010. Drake, Graham. "'This Place Gives Me Space': Place and Creativity in the Creative Industries." Geoforum 34.4 (2003): 511–24. Florida, Richard. "Cities and the Creative Class." The Urban Sociology Reader. Eds. Jan Lin and Christopher Mele. London: Routledge, 2005. 290–301. ———. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. "Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research." Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Jacobs, Jane. The Economy of Cities. New York: Random House, 1969. Keane, Michael. "The Capital Complex: Beijing's New Creative Clusters." Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives. Ed. Lily Kong and Justin O'Connor. London: Springer, 2009. 77–95. Kotkin, Joel. "The Protean Future of American Cities." New Geographer 7 Mar. 2011. 27 Mar. 2011 ‹http://blogs.forbes.com/joelkotkin/2011/03/07/the-protean-future-of-american-cities/›. Landry, Charles. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan Publications, 2000. Leadbeater, Charles, and Kate Oakley. The Independents: Britain's New Cultural Entrepreneurs. London: Demos, 1999. Liu, Mingliang. "Beijing 798 Art Zone: Field Study and Follow-Up Study in the Context of Market." Chinese National Academy of Arts, 2010. Lorenzen, Mark, and Lars Frederiksen. "Why Do Cultural Industries Cluster? Localization, Urbanization, Products and Projects." Creative Cities, Cultural Clusters and Local Economic Development. Ed. Philip Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2008. 155-79. Mars, Neville, and Adrian Hornsby. The Chinese Dream: A Society under Construction. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2008. Montgomery, John. The New Wealth of Cities: City Dynamics and the Fifth Wave. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Smith, Karen. "Heart of the Art." Beijing: Portrait of a City. Ed. Alexandra Pearson and Lucy Cavender. Hong Kong: The Middle Kingdom Bookworm, 2008. 106–19. Yang, Wei, ed. Songzhuang Arts 2006. Beijing: Hunan Fine Arts Press, 2007. Zhu, Jianfei. Chinese Spatial Strategies Imperial Beijing, 1420-1911. Routledge Curzon, 2004. Zukin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995. [1] Most prestigious Chinese universities are located in the Haidian District of Beijing, such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, etc. [2] Seven Star Group is the landholder of the area where 798 is based.

The academic journal is obsolete. In a world where there are more titles than ever, this is a comment on their form – especially the print journal – rather than their quantity. Now that you can get everything online, it doesn’t really matter what journal a paper appears in; certainly it doesn’t matter what’s in the same issue. The experience of a journal is rapidly obsolescing, for both editors and readers. I’m obviously not the first person to notice this (see, for instance, "Scholarly Communication"; "Transforming Scholarly Communication"; Houghton; Policy Perspectives; Teute), but I do have a personal stake in the process. For if the journal is obsolete then it follows that the editor is obsolete, and I am the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. I founded the IJCS and have been sole editor ever since. Next year will see the fiftieth issue. So far, I have been responsible for over 280 published articles – over 2.25 million words of other people’s scholarship … and counting. We won’t say anything about the words that did not get published, except that the IJCS rejection rate is currently 87 per cent. Perhaps the first point that needs to be made, then, is that obsolescence does not imply lack of success. By any standard the IJCS is a successful journal, and getting more so. It has recently been assessed as a top-rating A* journal in the Australian Research Council’s journal rankings for ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), the newly activated research assessment exercise. (In case you’re wondering, M/C Journal is rated B.) The ARC says of the ranking exercise: ‘The lists are a result of consultations with the sector and rigorous review by leading researchers and the ARC.’ The ARC definition of an A* journal is given as: Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/ subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted.Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions. (Appendix I, p. 21; and see p. 4.)Talking of boasting, I love to prate about the excellent people we’ve published in the IJCS. We have introduced new talent to the field, and we have published new work by some of its pioneers – including Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. We’ve also published – among many others – Sara Ahmed, Mohammad Amouzadeh, Tony Bennett, Goran Bolin, Charlotte Brunsdon, William Boddy, Nico Carpentier, Stephen Coleman, Nick Couldry, Sean Cubitt, Michael Curtin, Daniel Dayan, Ben Dibley, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, John Frow, Elfriede Fursich, Christine Geraghty, Mark Gibson, Paul Gilroy, Faye Ginsberg, Jonathan Gray, Lawrence Grossberg, Judith Halberstam, Hanno Hardt, Gay Hawkins, Joke Hermes, Su Holmes, Desmond Hui, Fred Inglis, Henry Jenkins, Deborah Jermyn, Ariel Heryanto, Elihu Katz, Senator Rod Kemp (Australian government minister), Youna Kim, Agnes Ku, Richard E. Lee, Jeff Lewis, David Lodge (the novelist), Knut Lundby, Eric Ma, Anna McCarthy, Divya McMillin, Antonio Menendez-Alarcon, Toby Miller, Joe Moran, Chris Norris, John Quiggin, Chris Rojek, Jane Roscoe, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, John Storey, Su Tong, the late Sako Takeshi, Sue Turnbull, Graeme Turner, William Uricchio, José van Dijck, Georgette Wang, Jing Wang, Elizabeth Wilson, Janice Winship, Handel Wright, Wu Jing, Wu Qidi (Chinese Vice-Minister of Education), Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, Robert Young and Zhao Bin. As this partial list makes clear, as well as publishing the top ‘hegemons’ we also publish work pointing in new directions, including papers from neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, area studies, economics, education, feminism, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. We have sought to represent neglected regions, especially Chinese cultural studies, which has grown strongly during the past decade. And for quite a few up-and-coming scholars we’ve been the proud host of their first international publication. The IJCS was first published in 1998, already well into the internet era, but it was print-only at that time. Since then, all content, from volume 1:1 onwards, has been digitised and is available online (although vol 1:2 is unaccountably missing). The publishers, Sage Publications Ltd, London, have steadily added online functionality, so that now libraries can get the journal in various packages, including offering this title among many others in online-only bundles, and individuals can purchase single articles online. Thus, in addition to institutional and individual subscriptions, which remain the core business of the journal, income is derived by the publisher from multi-site licensing, incremental consortial sales income, single- and back-issue sales (print), pay-per-view, and deep back file sales (electronic). So what’s obsolete about it? In that boasting paragraph of mine (above), about what wonderful authors we’ve published, lies one of the seeds of obsolescence. For now that it is available online, ‘users’ (no longer ‘readers’!) can search for what they want and ignore the journal as such altogether. This is presumably how most active researchers experience any journal – they are looking for articles (or less: quotations; data; references) relevant to a given topic, literature review, thesis etc. They encounter a journal online through its ‘content’ rather than its ‘form.’ The latter is irrelevant to them, and may as well not exist. The Cover Some losses are associated with this change. First is the loss of the front cover. Now you, dear reader, scrolling through this article online, might well complain, why all the fuss about covers? Internet-generation journals don’t have covers, so all of the work that goes into them to establish the brand, the identity and even the ‘affect’ of a journal is now, well, obsolete. So let me just remind you of what’s at stake. Editors, designers and publishers all take a good deal of trouble over covers, since they are the point of intersection of editorial, design and marketing priorities. Thus, the IJCS cover contains the only ‘content’ of the journal for which we pay a fee to designers and photographers (usually the publisher pays, but in one case I did). Like any other cover, ours has three main elements: title, colour and image. Thought goes into every detail. Title I won’t say anything about the journal’s title as such, except that it was the result of protracted discussions (I suggested Terra Nullius at one point, but Sage weren’t having any of that). The present concern is with how a title looks on a cover. Our title-typeface is Frutiger. Originally designed by Adrian Frutiger for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, it is suitably international, being used for the corporate identity of the UK National Health Service, Telefónica O2, the Royal Navy, the London School of Economics , the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Conservative Party of Canada, Banco Bradesco of Brazil, the Finnish Defence Forces and on road signs in Switzerland (Wikipedia, "Frutiger"). Frutiger is legible, informal, and reads well in small copy. Sage’s designer and I corresponded on which of the words in our cumbersome name were most important, agreeing that ‘international’ combined with ‘cultural’ is the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the journal, so they should be picked out (in bold small-caps) from the rest of the title, which the designer presented in a variety of Frutiger fonts (regular, italic, and reversed – white on black), presumably to signify the dynamism and diversity of our content. The word ‘studies’ appears on a lozenge-shaped cartouche that is also used as a design element throughout the journal, for bullet points, titles and keywords. Colour We used to change this every two years, but since volume 7 it has stabilised with the distinctive Pantone 247, ‘new fuchsia.’ This colour arose from my own environment at QUT, where it was chosen (by me) for the new Creative Industries Faculty’s academic gowns and hoods, and thence as a detailing colour for the otherwise monochrome Creative Industries Precinct buildings. There’s a lot of it around my office, including on the wall and the furniture. New Fuchsia is – we are frequently told – a somewhat ‘girly’ colour, especially when contrasted with the Business Faculty’s blue or Law’s silver; its similarity to the Girlfriend/Dolly palette does introduce a mild ‘politics of prestige’ element, since it is determinedly pop culture, feminised, and non-canonical. Image Right at the start, the IJCS set out to signal its difference from other journals. At that time, all Sage journals had calligraphic colours – but I was insistent that we needed a photograph (I have ‘form’ in this respect: in 1985 I changed the cover of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies from a line drawing (albeit by Sydney Nolan) to a photograph; and I co-designed the photo-cover of Cultural Studies in 1987). For IJCS I knew which photo I wanted, and Sage went along with the choice. I explained it in the launch issue’s editorial (Hartley, "Editorial"). That original picture, a goanna on a cattle grid in the outback, by Australian photographer Grant Hobson, lasted ten years. Since volume 11 – in time for our second decade – the goanna has been replaced with a picture by Italian-based photographer Patrick Nicholas, called ‘Reality’ (Hartley, "Cover Narrative"). We have also used two other photos as cover images, once each. They are: Daniel Meadows’s 1974 ‘Karen & Barbara’ (Hartley, "Who"); and a 1962 portrait of Richard Hoggart from the National Portrait Gallery in London (Owen & Hartley 2007). The choice of picture has involved intense – sometimes very tense – negotiations with Sage. Most recently, they were adamant the Daniel Meadows picture, which I wanted to use as the long-term replacement of the goanna, was too ‘English’ and they would not accept it. We exchanged rather sharp words before compromising. There’s no need to rehearse the dispute here; the point is that both sides, publisher and editor, felt that vital interests were at stake in the choice of a cover-image. Was it too obscure; too Australian; too English; too provocative (the current cover features, albeit in the deep background, a TV screen-shot of a topless Italian game-show contestant)? Running Order Beyond the cover, the next obsolete feature of a journal is the running order of articles. Obviously what goes in the journal is contingent upon what has been submitted and what is ready at a given time, so this is a creative role within a very limited context, which is what makes it pleasurable. Out of a limited number of available papers, a choice must be made about which one goes first, what order the other papers should follow, and which ones must be held over to the next issue. The first priority is to choose the lead article: like the ‘first face’ in a fashion show (if you don’t know what I mean by that, see FTV.com. It sets the look, the tone, and the standard for the issue. I always choose articles I like for this slot. It sends a message to the field – look at this! Next comes the running order. We have about six articles per issue. It is important to maintain the IJCS’s international mix, so I check for the country of origin, or failing that (since so many articles come from Anglosphere countries like the USA, UK and Australia), the location of the analysis. Attention also has to be paid to the gender balance among authors, and to the mix of senior and emergent scholars. Sometimes a weak article needs to be ‘hammocked’ between two good ones (these are relative terms – everything published in the IJCS is of a high scholarly standard). And we need to think about disciplinary mix, so as not to let the journal stray too far towards one particular methodological domain. Running order is thus a statement about the field – the disciplinary domain – rather than about an individual paper. It is a proposition about how different voices connect together in some sort of disciplinary syntax. One might even claim that the combination of cover and running order is a last vestige of collegiate collectivism in an era of competitive academic individualism. Now all that matters is the individual paper and author; the ‘currency’ is tenure, promotion and research metrics, not relations among peers. The running order is obsolete. Special Issues An extreme version of running order is the special issue. The IJCS has regularly published these; they are devoted to field-shaping initiatives, as follows: Title Editor(s) Issue Date Radiocracy: Radio, Development and Democracy Amanda Hopkinson, Jo Tacchi 3.2 2000 Television and Cultural Studies Graeme Turner 4.4 2001 Cultural Studies and Education Karl Maton, Handel Wright 5.4 2002 Re-Imagining Communities Sara Ahmed, Anne-Marie Fortier 6.3 2003 The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption John Hartley 7.1 2004 Creative Industries and Innovation in China Michael Keane, John Hartley 9.3 2006 The Uses of Richard Hoggart Sue Owen, John Hartley 10.1 2007 A Cultural History of Celebrity Liz Barry 11.3 2008 Caribbean Media Worlds Anna Pertierra, Heather Horst 12.2 2009 Co-Creative Labour Mark Deuze, John Banks 12.5 2009 It’s obvious that special issues have a place in disciplinary innovation – they can draw attention in a timely manner to new problems, neglected regions, or innovative approaches, and thus they advance the field. They are indispensible. But because of online publication, readers are not held to the ‘project’ of a special issue and can pick and choose whatever they want. And because of the peculiarities of research assessment exercises, editing special issues doesn’t count as research output. The incentive to do them is to that extent reduced, and some universities are quite heavy-handed about letting academics ‘waste’ time on activities that don’t produce ‘metrics.’ The special issue is therefore threatened with obsolescence too. Refereeing In many top-rating journals, the human side of refereeing is becoming obsolete. Increasingly this labour-intensive chore is automated and the labour is technologically outsourced from editors and publishers to authors and referees. You have to log on to some website and follow prompts in order to contribute both papers and the assessment of papers; interactions with editors are minimal. At the IJCS the process is still handled by humans – namely, journal administrator Tina Horton and me. We spend a lot of time checking how papers are faring, from trying to find the right referees through to getting the comments and then the author’s revisions completed in time for a paper to be scheduled into an issue. The volume of email correspondence is considerable. We get to know authors and referees. So we maintain a sense of an interactive and conversational community, albeit by correspondence rather than face to face. Doubtless, sooner or later, there will be a depersonalised Text Management System. But in the meantime we cling to the romantic notion that we are involved in refereeing for the sake of the field, for raising the standard of scholarship, for building a globally dispersed virtual college of cultural studies, and for giving everyone – from unfavoured countries and neglected regions to famous professors in old-money universities – the same chance to get their research published. In fact, these are largely delusional ideals, for as everyone knows, refereeing is part of the political economy of publicly-funded research. It’s about academic credentials, tenure and promotion for the individual, and about measurable research metrics for the academic organisation or funding agency (Hartley, "Death"). The IJCS has no choice but to participate: we do what is required to qualify as a ‘double-blind refereed journal’ because that is the only way to maintain repute, and thence the flow of submissions, not to mention subscriptions, without which there would be no journal. As with journals themselves, which proliferate even as the print form becomes obsolete, so refereeing is burgeoning as a practice. It’s almost an industry, even though the currency is not money but time: part gift-economy; part attention-economy; partly the payment of dues to the suzerain funding agencies. But refereeing is becoming obsolete in the sense of gathering an ‘imagined community’ of people one might expect to know personally around a particular enterprise. The process of dispersal and anonymisation of the field is exacerbated by blind refereeing, which we do because we must. This is suited to a scientific domain of objective knowledge, but everyone knows it’s not quite like that in the ‘new humanities’. The agency and identity of the researcher is often a salient fact in the research. The embedded positionality of the author, their reflexiveness about their own context and room-for-manoeuvre, and the radical contextuality of knowledge itself – these are all more or less axiomatic in cultural studies, but they’re not easily served by ‘double-blind’ refereeing. When refereeing is depersonalised to the extent that is now rife (especially in journals owned by international commercial publishers), it is hard to maintain a sense of contextualised productivity in the knowledge domain, much less a ‘common cause’ to which both author and referee wish to contribute. Even though refereeing can still be seen as altruistic, it is in the service of something much more general (‘scholarship’) and much more particular (‘my career’) than the kind of reviewing that wants to share and improve a particular intellectual enterprise. It is this mid-range altruism – something that might once have been identified as a politics of knowledge – that’s becoming obsolete, along with the printed journals that were the banner and rallying point for the cause. If I were to start a new journal (such as cultural-science.org), I would prefer ‘open refereeing’: uploading papers on an open site, subjecting them to peer-review and criticism, and archiving revised versions once they have received enough votes and comments. In other words I’d like to see refereeing shifted from the ‘supply’ or production side of a journal to the ‘demand’ or readership side. But of course, ‘demand’ for ‘blind’ refereeing doesn’t come from readers; it comes from the funding agencies. The Reading Experience Finally, the experience of reading a journal is obsolete. Two aspects of this seem worthy of note. First, reading is ‘out of time’ – it no longer needs to conform to the rhythms of scholarly publication, which are in any case speeding up. Scholarship is no longer seasonal, as it has been since the Middle Ages (with university terms organised around agricultural and ecclesiastical rhythms). Once you have a paper’s DOI number, you can read it any time, 24/7. It is no longer necessary even to wait for publication. With some journals in our field (e.g. Journalism Studies), assuming your Library subscribes, you can access papers as soon as they’re uploaded on the journal’s website, before the published edition is printed. Soon this will be the norm, just as it is for the top science journals, where timely publication, and thereby the ability to claim first discovery, is the basis of intellectual property rights. The IJCS doesn’t (yet) offer this service, but its frequency is speeding up. It was launched in 1998 with three issues a year. It went quarterly in 2001 and remained a quarterly for eight years. It has recently increased to six issues a year. That too causes changes in the reading experience. The excited ripping open of the package is less of a thrill the more often it arrives. Indeed, how many subscribers will admit that sometimes they don’t even open the envelope? Second, reading is ‘out of place’ – you never have to see the journal in which a paper appears, so you can avoid contact with anything that you haven’t already decided to read. This is more significant than might first appear, because it is affecting journalism in general, not just academic journals. As we move from the broadcast to the broadband era, communicative usage is shifting too, from ‘mass’ communication to customisation. This is a mixed blessing. One of the pleasures of old-style newspapers and the TV news was that you’d come across stories you did not expect to find. Indeed, an important attribute of the industrial form of journalism is its success in getting whole populations to read or watch stories about things they aren’t interested in, or things like wars and crises that they’d rather not know about at all. That historic textual achievement is in jeopardy in the broadband era, because ‘the public’ no longer needs to gather around any particular masthead or bulletin to get their news. With Web 2.0 affordances, you can exercise much more choice over what you attend to. This is great from the point of view of maximising individual choice, but sub-optimal in relation to what I’ve called ‘population-gathering’, especially the gathering of communities of interest around ‘tales of the unexpected’ – novelty or anomalies. Obsolete: Collegiality, Trust and Innovation? The individuation of reading choices may stimulate prejudice, because prejudice (literally, ‘pre-judging’) is built in when you decide only to access news feeds about familiar topics, stories or people in which you’re already interested. That sort of thing may encourage narrow-mindedness. It is certainly an impediment to chance discovery, unplanned juxtaposition, unstructured curiosity and thence, perhaps, to innovation itself. This is a worry for citizenship in general, but it is also an issue for academic ‘knowledge professionals,’ in our ever-narrower disciplinary silos. An in-close specialist focus on one’s own area of expertise need no longer be troubled by the concerns of the person in the next office, never mind the next department. Now, we don’t even have to meet on the page. One of the advantages of whole journals, then, is that each issue encourages ‘macro’ as well as ‘micro’ perspectives, and opens reading up to surprises. This willingness to ‘take things on trust’ describes a ‘we’ community – a community of trust. Trust too is obsolete in these days of performance evaluation. We’re assessed by an anonymous system that’s managed by people we’ll never meet. If the ‘population-gathering’ aspects of print journals are indeed obsolete, this may reduce collegiate trust and fellow-feeling, increase individualist competitiveness, and inhibit innovation. In the face of that prospect, I’m going to keep on thinking about covers, running orders, referees and reading until the role of editor is obsolete too. ReferencesHartley, John. "'Cover Narrative': From Nightmare to Reality." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.2 (2005): 131-137. ———. "Death of the Book?" Symposium of the National Scholarly Communication Forum & Australian Academy of the Humanities, Sydney Maritime Museum, 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.humanities.org.au/Resources/Downloads/NSCF/RoundTables1-17/PDF/Hartley.pdf›. ———. "Editorial: With Goanna." International Journal of Cultural Studies 1.1 (1998): 5-10. ———. "'Who Are You Going to Believe – Me or Your Own Eyes?' New Decade; New Directions." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 5-14. Houghton, John. "Economics of Scholarly Communication: A Discussion Paper." Center for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, 2000. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.caul.edu.au/cisc/EconomicsScholarlyCommunication.pdf›. Owen, Sue, and John Hartley, eds. The Uses of Richard Hoggart. International Journal of Cultural Studies (special issue), 10.1 (2007). Policy Perspectives: To Publish and Perish. (Special issue cosponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Association of American Universities and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable) 7.4 (1998). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.arl.org/scomm/pew/pewrept.html›. "Scholarly Communication: Crisis and Revolution." University of California Berkeley Library. N.d. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Collections/crisis.html›. Teute, F. J. "To Publish or Perish: Who Are the Dinosaurs in Scholarly Publishing?" Journal of Scholarly Publishing 32.2 (2001). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/322/perish5.html›."Transforming Scholarly Communication." University of Houston Library. 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://info.lib.uh.edu/scomm/transforming.htm›.

Critique of Ability In July 2008, we could be on the eve of an enormously important shift in disability in Australia. One sign of change is the entry into force on 3 May 2008 of the United Nations convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which will now be adopted by the Rudd Labor government. Through this, and other proposed measures, the Rudd government has indicated its desire for a seachange in the area of disability. Bill Shorten MP, the new Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services has been at pains to underline his commitment to a rights-based approach to disability. In this inaugural speech to Parliament, Senator Shorten declared: I believe the challenge for government is not to fit people with disabilities around programs but for programs to fit the lives, needs and ambitions of people with disabilities. The challenge for all of us is to abolish once and for all the second-class status that too often accompanies Australians living with disabilities. (Shorten, “Address in reply”; see also Shorten, ”Speaking up”) Yet if we listen to the voices of people with disability, we face fundamental issues of justice, democracy, equality and how we understand the deepest aspects of ourselves and our community. This is a situation that remains dire and palpably unjust, as many people with disabilities have attested. Elsewhere I have argued (Goggin and Newell) that disability constitutes a systemic form of exclusion and othering tantamount to a “social apartheid” . While there have been improvements and small gains since then, the system that reigns in Australia is still fundamentally oppressive. Nonetheless, I would suggest that through the rise of the many stranded movements of disability, the demographic, economic and social changes concerning impairment, we are seeing significant changes in how we understand impairment and ability (Barnes, Oliver and Barton; Goggin and Newell, Disability in Australia; Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson; Shakespeare; Stiker). There is now considerable, if still incomplete, recognition of disability as a category that is constituted through social, cultural, and political logics, as well as through complex facets of impairment, bodies (Corker and Shakespeare), experiences, discourses (Fulcher), and modes of materiality and subjectivity (Butler), identity and government (Tremain). Also there is growing awareness of the imbrication of disability and other categories such as sex and gender (Fine and Asch; Thomas), race, age, culture, class and distribution of wealth (Carrier; Cole; Davis, Bending over Backwards, and Enforcing Normalcy; Oliver; Rosenblum and Travis), ecology and war (Bourke; Gerber; Muir). There are rich and wide-ranging debates that offer fundamental challenges to the suffocating grip of the dominant biomedical model of disability (that conceives disability as individual deficit — for early critiques see: Borsay; Walker), as well as the still influential and important (if at times limiting) social model of disability (Oliver; Barnes and Mercer; Shakespeare). All in all,there have been many efforts to transform the social and political relations of disability. If disability has been subject to considerable examination, there has not yet been an extended, concomitant critique of ability. Nor have we witnessed a thoroughgoing recognition of unmarked, yet powerful operations of ability in our lives and thought, and the potential implications of challenging these. Certainly there have been important attempts to reframe the relationship between “ability” and “disability” (for example, see Jones and Mark). And we are all familiar with the mocking response to some neologisms that seek to capture this, such as the awkward yet pointed “differently-abled.” Despite such efforts we lack still a profound critique of ability, an exploration of “able”, the topic that this special issue invites us to consider. If we think of the impact and significance of “whiteness”, as a way to open up space for how to critically think about and change concepts of race; or of “masculinity” as a project for thinking about gender and sexuality — we can see that this interrogation of the unmarked category of “able” and “ability” is much needed (for one such attempt, see White). In this paper I would like to make a small contribution to such a critique of ability, by considering what the concept of innovation and its contemporary rhetorics have to offer for reframing disability. Innovation is an important discourse in contemporary life. It offers interesting possibilities for rethinking ability — and indeed disability. And it is this relatively unexplored prospect that this paper seeks to explore. Beyond Access, Equity & Diversity In this scene of disability, there is attention being given to making long over-due reforms. Yet the framing of many of these reforms, such as the strengthening of national and international legal frameworks, for instance, also carry with them considerable problems. Disability is too often still seen as something in need of remediation, or special treatment. Access, equity, and anti-discrimination frameworks offer important resources for challenging this “special” treatment, so too do the diversity approaches which have supplemented or supplanted them (Goggin and Newell, “Diversity as if Disability Mattered”). In what new ways can we approach disability and policies relevant to it? In a surprisingly wide range of areas, innovation has featured as a new, cross-sectoral approach. Innovation has been a long-standing topic in science, technology and economics. However, its emergence as master-theme comes from its ability to straddle and yoke together previously diverse fields. Current discussions of innovation bring together and extend work on the information society, the knowledge economy, and the relationships between science and technology. We are now familiar for instance with arguments about how digital networked information and communications technologies and their consumption are creating new forms of innovation (Benkler; McPherson; Passiante, Elia, and Massari). Innovation discourse has extended to many other unfamiliar realms too, notably the area of social and community development, where a new concept of social innovation is now proposed (Mulgan), often aligned with new ideas of social entrepreneurship that go beyond earlier accounts of corporate social responsibility. We can see the importance of innovation in the ‘creative industries’ discourses and initiatives which have emerged since the 1990s. Here previously distinct endeavours of arts and culture have become reframed in a way that puts their central achievement of creativity to the fore, and recognises its importance across all sorts of service and manufacturing industries, in particular. More recently, theorists of creative industries, such as Cunningham, have begun to talk about “social network markets,” as a way to understand the new hybrid of creativity, innovation, digital technology, and new economic logics now being constituted (Cunningham and Potts). Innovation is being regarded as a cardinal priority for societies and their governments. Accordingly, the Australian government has commissioned a Review of The National Innovation System, led by Dr Terry Cutler, due to report in the second half of 2008. The Cutler review is especially focussed upon gaps and weaknesses in the Australian innovation system. Disability has the potential to figure very strongly in this innovation talk, however there has been little discussion of disability in the innovation discourse to date. The significance of disability in relation to innovation was touched upon some years ago, in a report on Disablism from the UK Demos Foundation (Miller, Parker and Gillinson). In a chapter entitled “The engine of difference: disability, innovation and creativity,” the authors discuss the area of inclusive design, and make the argument for the “involvement of disabled people to create a stronger model of user design”:Disabled people represented a market of 8.6 million customers at the last count and their experiences aren’t yet feeding through into processes of innovation. But the role of disabled people as innovators can and should be more active; we should include disabled people in the design process because they are good at it. (57) There are two reasons given for this expertise of disabled people in design. Firstly, “disabled people are often outstanding problem solvers because they have to be … life for disabled people at the moment is a series of challenges to be overcome” (57). Secondly, “innovative ideas are more likely to come from those who have a new or different angle on old problems” (57). The paradox in this argument is that as life becomes more equitable for people with disabilities, then these ‘advantages’ should disappear” (58). Accordingly, Miller et al. make a qualified argument, namely that “greater participation of disabled people in innovation in the short term may just be the necessary trigger for creating an altogether different, and better, system of innovation for everyone in the future” (58). The Demos Disablism report was written at a time when rhetorics of innovation were just beginning to become more generalized and mainstream. This was also at a time in the UK, when there was hope that new critical approaches to disability would see it become embraced as a part of the diverse society that Blair’s New Labor Britain had been indicating. The argument Disablism offers about disability and innovation is in some ways a more formalized version of vernacular theory (McLaughlin, 1996). In the disability movement we often hear, with good reason, that people with disability, by dint of their experience and knowledge are well positioned to develop and offer particular kinds of expertise. However, Miller et al. also gesture towards a more generalized account of disability and innovation, one that would intersect with the emerging frameworks around innovation. It is this possibility that I wish to take up and briefly explore here. I want to consider the prospects for a fully-fledged encounter between disability and innovation. I would like to have a better sense of whether this is worth pursuing, and what it would add to our understanding of both disability and innovation? Would the disability perspective be integrated as a long-term part of our systems of innovation rather than, as Miller et al. imply, deployed temporarily to develop better innovation systems? What pitfalls might be bound up with, or indeed be the conditions of, such a union between disability and innovation? The All-Too-Able User A leading area where disability figures profoundly in innovation is in the field of technology — especially digital technology. There is now a considerable literature and body of practice on disability and digital technology (Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra; Goggin and Newell, Digital Disability; National Council on Disability), however for my purposes here I would like to focus upon the user, the abilities ascribed to various kinds of users, and the user with disability in particular. Digital technologies are replete with challenges and opportunities; they are multi-layered, multi-media, and global in their manifestation and function. In Australia, Britain, Canada, the US, and Europe, there have been some significant digital technology initiatives which have resulted in improved accessibility for many users and populations (Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra; National Council on Disability) . There are a range of examples of ways in which users with disability are intervening and making a difference in design. There is also a substantial body of literature that clarifies why we need to include the perspective of the disabled if we are to be truly innovative in our design practices (Annable, Goggin and Stienstra; Goggin and Newell, “Disability, Identity and Interdependence”). I want to propose, however, that there is merit in going beyond recognition of the role of people with disability in technology design (vital and overlooked as it remains), to consider how disability can enrich contemporary discourses on innovation. There is a very desirable cross-over to be promoted between the emphasis on the user-as-expert in the sphere of disability and technology, and on the integral role of disability groups in the design process, on the one hand, and the rise of the user in digital culture generally, on the other. Surprisingly, such connections are nowhere near as widespread and systematic as they should be. It may be that contemporary debates about the user, and about the user as co-creator, or producer, of technology (Haddon et al.; von Hippel) actually reinstate particular notions of ability, and the able user, understood with reference to notions of disability. The current emphasis on the productive user, based as it is on changing understandings of ability and disability, provides rich material for critical revision of the field and those assumptions surrounding ability. It opens up possibilities for engaging more fully with disability and incorporating disability into the new forms and relations of digital technology that celebrate the user (Goggin and Newell, Digital Disability). While a more detailed consideration of these possibilities require more time than this essay allows, let us consider for a moment the idea of a genuine encounter between the activated user springing from the disability movement, and the much feted user in contemporary digital culture and theories of innovation. People with disability are using these technologies in innovative ways, so have much to contribute to wider discussions of digital technology (Annable, Goggin and Stienstra). The Innovation Turn Innovation policy, the argument goes, is important because it stands to increase productivity, which in turn leads to greater international competitiveness and economic benefit. Especially with the emergence of capitalism (Gleeson), productivity has strong links to particular notions of which types of production and produce are valued. Productivity is also strongly conditioned by how we understand ability and, last in a long chain of strong associations, how we as a society understand and value those kinds of people and bodies believed to contain and exercise the ordained and rewarded types of ability, produce, and productivity. Disability is often seen as antithetical to productivity (a revealing text on the contradictions of disability and productivity is the 2004 Productivity Commission Review of the Disability Discrimination Act). When we think about the history of disability, we quickly realize that productivity, and by extension, innovation, are strongly ideological. Ideological, that is, in the sense that these fields of human endeavour and our understanding of them are shaped by power relations, and are built upon implicit ‘ableist’ assumptions about productivity. In this case, the power relations of disability go right to the heart of the matter, highlighting who and what are perceived to be of value, contributing economically and in other ways to society, and who and what are considered as liabilities, as less valued and uneconomical. A stark recent example of this is the Howard government workplace and welfare reforms, which further disenfranchised, controlled, and impoverished people with disability. If we need to rethink our ideas of productivity and ability in the light of new notions of disability, then so too do we need to rethink our ideas about innovation and disability. Here the new discourses of innovation may actually be useful, but also contain limited formulations and assumptions about ability and disability that need to be challenged. The existing problems of a fresh approach to disability and innovation can be clearly observed in the touchstones of national science and technology “success.” Beyond One-Sided Innovation Disability does actually feature quite prominently in the annals of innovation. Take, for instance, the celebrated case of the so-called “bionic ear” (or cochlear implant) hailed as one of Australia’s great scientific inventions of the past few decades. This is something we can find on display in the Powerhouse Museum of Technology and Design, in Sydney. Yet the politics of the cochlear implant are highly controversial, not least as it is seen by many (for instance, large parts of the Deaf community) as not involving people with disabilities, nor being informed by their desires (Campbell, also see “Social and Ethical Aspects of Cochlear Implants”). A key problem with the cochlear implant and many other technologies is that they are premised on the abolition or overcoming of disability — rather than being shaped as technology that acknowledges and is informed by disabled users in their diverse guises. The failure to learn the lessons of the cochlear implant for disability and innovation can be seen in the fact that we are being urged now to band together to support the design of a “bionic eye” by the year 2020, as a mark of distinction of achieving a great nation (2020 Summit Initial Report). Again, there is no doubting the innovation and achievement in these artefacts and their technological systems. But their development has been marked by a distinct lack of consultation and engagement with people with disabilities; or rather the involvement has been limited to a framework that positions them as passive users of technology, rather than as “producer/users”. Further, what notions of disability and ability are inscribed in these technological systems, and what do they represent and symbolize in the wider political and social field? Unfortunately, such technologies have the effect of reproducing an ableist framework, “enforcing normalcy” (Davis), rather than building in, creating and contributing to new modes of living, which embrace difference and diversity. I would argue that this represents a one-sided logic of innovation. A two-sided logic of innovation, indeed what we might call a double helix (at least) of innovation would be the sustained, genuine interaction between different users, different notions of ability, disability and impairment, and the processes of design. If such a two-sided (or indeed many-sided logic) is to emerge there is good reason to think it could more easily do so in the field of digital cultures and technologies, than say, biotechnology. The reason for this is the emphasis in digital communication technologies on decentralized, participatory, user-determined governance and design, coming from many sources. Certainly this productive, democratic, participatory conception of the user is prevalent in Internet cultures. Innovation here is being reshaped to harness the contribution and knowledge of users, and could easily be extended to embrace pioneering efforts in disability. Innovating with Disability In this paper I have tried to indicate why it is productive for discourses of innovation to consider disability; the relationship between disability and innovation is rich and complex, deserving careful elaboration and interrogation. In suggesting this, I am aware that there are also fundamental problems that innovation raises in its new policy forms. There are the issues of what is at stake when the state is redefining its traditional obligations towards citizens through innovation frameworks and discourses. And there is the troubling question of whether particular forms of activity are normatively judged to be innovative — whereas other less valued forms are not seen as innovative. By way of conclusion, however, I would note that there are now quite basic, and increasingly accepted ways, to embed innovation in design frameworks, and while they certainly have been adopted in the disability and technology area, there is much greater scope for this. However, a few things do need to change before this potential for disability to enrich innovation is adequately realized. Firstly, we need further research and theorization to clarify the contribution of disability to innovation, work that should be undertaken and directed by people with disability themselves. Secondly, there is a lack of resources for supporting disability and technology organisations, and the development of training and expertise in this area (especially to provide viable career paths for experts with disability to enter the field and sustain their work). If this is addressed, the economic benefits stand to be considerable, not to mention the implications for innovation and productivity. Thirdly, we need to think about how we can intensify existing systems of participatory design, or, better still, introduce new user-driven approaches into strategically important places in the design processes of ICTs (and indeed in the national innovation system). Finally, there is an opportunity for new approaches to governance in ICTs at a general level, informed by disability. New modes of organising, networking, and governance associated with digital technology have attracted much attention, also featuring recently in the Australia 2020 Summit. Less well recognised are new ideas about governance that come from the disability community, such as the work of Queensland Advocacy Incorporated, Rhonda Galbally’s Our Community, disability theorists such as Christopher Newell (Newell), or the Canadian DIS-IT alliance (see, for instance, Stienstra). The combination of new ideas in governance from digital culture, new ideas from the disability movement and disability studies, and new approaches to innovation could be a very powerful cocktail indeed.Dedication This paper is dedicated to my beloved friend and collaborator, Professor Christopher Newell AM (1964-2008), whose extraordinary legacy will inspire us all to continue exploring and questioning the idea of able. 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IntroductionWe are increasingly being told to make ethical food choices, often by high-profile chefs advocating what they view as ethical consumption habits. Some actively promote vegetarian or vegan diets, with a growing number of high-profile restaurants featuring only or mainly plant-based meals. However, what makes food or restaurant menus ethical is not assessed by most of us using one standardised definition. Our food values differ based on our outlooks, past experiences, and perhaps most importantly, how we balance various trade-offs inherent in making food choices under different circumstances and in diverse contexts.Restaurants can face difficulties when trying to balance ethical considerations. For instance, is it inconsistent to promote foraging, seasonality, local products, and plant-based eating, yet also serve meat and other animal-derived protein products on the same menu? For example, Danish chef Rene Redzepi, co-owner of the Michelin-starred restaurant Noma in Copenhagen who recently had an extended stay in Australia (Redzepi), recently offered a purely vegetarian menu featuring foraged native ingredients. However, Redzepi followed this with a meat-based menu including teal, moose leg, reindeer tongue, and wild duck brain. These changes make clear that although Redzepi was still conflicted about serving animal products (Ankeny and Bray), he thinks that options for ethical eating are not limited to plants and that it is important to utilise available, and especially neglected, resources in novel ways.In this article, we argue that celebrity and other high-profile chefs have roles to play in conversations about the emerging range of new meat consumption norms, which might include humanely produced meat, wild meat, or other considerations. However, we contend that restaurants and popular media may be limited spaces in which to engage consumers in these conversations. Ultimately, celebrity and high-profile chefs can help us not only to reflect on our eating habits, but also to engage us in ways that help us to ask the right questions rather than encouraging reliance on set answers from them or other supposed experts.Chefs and New Meat NormsChefs are now key voices in the politics of lifestyle, shaping both the grammars and the practices of ethical consumption, which is further reinforced by the increasing mediatisation of food and food politics (Phillipov, Media). Contemporary trends toward ethical consumption have been much critiqued; nevertheless, ethical consumption has become a dominant means through which individuals within contemporary marketised, neoliberal economies are able to invest lifestyle choices with ethical, social, and civic meanings (Barnett et al.; Lewis and Potter). While vegetarianism was once considered a central pillar of ethical diets, the rise of individualized and diverse approaches to food and food politics has seen meat (at least in its “ethical” form) not only remain firmly on the menu, but also become a powerful symbol of “good” politics, taste, and desirable lifestyles (Pilgrim 112).Chefs’ involvement in promoting ethical meat initially began within restaurants catering for an elite foodie clientele. The details provided about meat producers and production methods on the menu of Alice Waters’ Californian restaurant Chez Panisse and her cookbooks (Waters), or the focus by Fergus Henderson on “nose to tail” eating at his London restaurant St. John (Henderson) has led many to cite them as among the originators of the ethical meat movement. But the increasing mediatisation of food and the emergence of chefs as celebrity brands with their own TV shows, cookbooks, YouTube channels, websites, sponsorship deals, and myriad other media appearances has allowed ethical meat to move out of elite restaurants and into more quotidian domestic spaces. High profile UK and US exposés including “campaigning culinary documentaries” fronted by celebrity chefs (Bell, Hollows, and Jones 179), along with the work of popular food writers such as Michael Pollan, have been instrumental in the mainstreaming of diverse new meat norms.The horrifying depictions of intensive chicken, beef, and pork farming in these exposés have contributed to greater public awareness of, and concern about, industrialised meat production. However, the poor welfare conditions of animals raised in battery cages and concentrated animal feeding operations often are presented not as motivations to eschew meat entirely, but instead as reasons to opt for more ethical alternatives. For instance, Hugh’s Chicken Run, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s 2008 television campaign for chicken welfare, resulted in making more free-range products available in British supermarkets (Johnston). More recently, there have been significant expansions in markets for variously defined categories such as grass-fed, free-range, organic, welfare-certified, humane, and/or environmentally friendly meat products in Australia and elsewhere, thanks in part to increased media attention to animal welfare issues (Arcari 169).As media has emerged as a “fundamental component of contemporary foodscapes, how they ‘perform’ and function, and the socio-material means by which they are produced” (Johnston and Goodman 205), ethical meat has increasingly been employed as a strategic resource in mainstream media and marketing. Ethical meat, for example, has been a key pillar in the contemporary rebranding of both of Australia’s major supermarkets (Lewis and Huber 289). Through partnerships that draw upon the “ethical capital” (290) of celebrity chefs including Jamie Oliver and Curtis Stone, and collaborations with animal welfare organisations such as the RSPCA, ethical meat has become central to supermarket advertising campaigns in recent years. Such campaigns have been especially successful for Coles supermarkets, which controls almost 30% of Australia’s highly concentrated grocery market (Roy Morgan). The retailer’s long-term sponsorship of MasterChef Australia (Network 10, 2009–)—a show that presents meat (or, as they term it, “protein”) as an essential component of most dishes and which regularly rates in the top 10 of Australian television programs (OzTAM)—further helps to emphasise that the solution to ethical problems is not to avoid meat, but to choose (Coles’) “better” meat (see fig. 1). This is promoted on the basis of a combination of ethics, price, and taste, and, remarkably, is able to deliver “better welfare at no extra cost to you” (Parker, Carey, and Scrinis 209). In short, chefs are making major contributions to awareness of ethical norms relating to meat consumption in a variety of settings. Figure 1: An example of a current meat product on the shelf at a major Australian retailer with packaging that makes a range of claims relating to production practices and quality, among other attributes. (Emily Buddle)“The Good Life”Lifestyle media has been a key site through which meat eating is normalised and recuperated into “ethical” frameworks (Arcari 169). Utopian visions of small-scale animal agriculture are a key feature of popular texts from the River Cottage Australia (Foxtel Networks, 2013–) series to Gourmet Farmer (SBS, 2010–) and Paddock to Plate (Foxtel Networks, 2013–). These programs are typically set in bucolic rural surrounds and centre on the host’s “escape” from the city to a more fulfilling, happier existence in the country (Phillipov, “Escaping”). Rural self-sufficiency is frequently framed as the solution to urban consumers’ alienation from the sources of their food, and a means of taking responsibility for the food they eat. The opening credits of Gourmet Farmer, for instance, outline host Matthew Evans’s quest to “know and trust what [he] eat[s]”, either by growing the food himself or being “no more than one degree of separation from the person who does”.This sense of connection to one’s food is central to how these programs make meat consumption ethical. Indeed, the production of animals for food reinforces particular notions of “the good life” in which the happiness of the animal is closely aligned with the happiness of its human producer. While texts sometimes show food animals’ full lifecycle from birth to slaughter, lifestyle media focuses mainly on their happy existence while still alive. Evans gives his pigs names that foreground their destiny as food (e.g., Prosciutto and Cassoulet), but he also pampers them as though they are pets, feeding them cherries and apples, and scratching them behind the ears much like he would his dog. These bucolic televisual images serve to anchor the programs’ many “spin-off” media texts, including blog posts, cookbooks (e.g. Evans), and endorsements, that instruct urban audiences who do not have the luxury of raising their own meat on how to source ethical alternatives. They also emphasise the deliciousness of meat raised and killed in humane, “natural” conditions, as opposed to those subjected to more intensive, industrialised production systems.Some argue that the notion of “ethical meat” merely masks the realities of humans’ domination over animals (Arcari). However the transition from “happy animals” to “happy meat” (Pilgrim 123) has been key to lifestyle media’s recuperation of (certain kinds of) meat production as a “humane, benevolent and wholly ‘natural’ process” (Parry 381), which helps to morally absolve the chefs who promote it, and by extension, their audiences.The Good DeathMeat consumption has been theorised to be based on the invisibility of the lives and deaths of animals—what has been termed the “absent referent” by feminist philosopher Carol J. Adams (14; see also Fiddes). This line of argument holds that slaughter and other practices that may raise moral concerns are actively hidden from view, and that animals are “made absent” within food consumption practices (Evans and Miele 298). Few meat consumers, at least those in Western countries, have seen animal slaughter first hand, and a disconnect between meat and animal is actively maintained through current retail practices (such as pre-packaged meat with few identifying cues), as well as in our language use, at least in English where most of the names of the meat are different to those of the animal (Plous; Croney) and where euphemisms such as “harvesting” abound (Abrams, Zimbres, and Carr). In many locales, including Australia, there is squeamishness about talking about slaughter and the processes by which “animal” becomes “meat” which in turn prevents open discussion about the origins of meat (Bray et al., “Conversation”).Campaigning culinary documentaries by chefs, including Matthew Evans’s recent For the Love of Meat (SBS, 2016), aim to reconnect animal and meat in order to critique modern meat production methods. In addition, Gourmet Farmer and River Cottage Australia both feature depictions of hunting (skinning and butchering of the animals is shown but viewers are rarely exposed to the kill itself) and emphasise the use of highly skilled hunters in order to bring about a quick death. By highlighting not only a good life but also what constitutes a “good death”, celebrity chefs and others are arguably generating discussion about what makes meat ethical by emphasizing that the quality of death is as important as the quality of life. In many of these programs, the emphasis is on more boutique or small-scale production systems which typically produce meat products that are higher priced and more difficult to source.Given that such products are likely out of reach for many potential consumers because of price point, convenience, or both, perhaps unsurprisingly the emphasis in many of these programs is on the consumer rather than the consumed. Hence these programs tend to be more about constructing an “ethical meat consumer”, defined implicitly as someone who acknowledges the meat/animal connection through conscious exposure to the realities of animal slaughter (for example, by watching a documentary), by “meeting your meat” such as in the BBC series Kill It, Cook It, Eat It (BBC, 2007; Evans and Miele), or by actively participating in the slaughter process as Evans did with his own chickens on Gourmet Farmer. As anthropologist Catie Gressier notes in her study of wild meat consumers in Australia, “hunting meat is seen as more noble than purchasing it, while wild meat is seen as preferable to farmed” (Gressier 58). Gressier also describes how one of her participants viewed hunting (and eating locally) as preferable to veganism because of the “animal violence that is the inevitable outcome of mass-crop agriculture” (58). However some scholars have argued that highly graphic depictions of slaughter in the popular media are becoming more commonplace as a masculinised type of “gastro-snuff” (a term referring to food-related visual depictions of brutal killings) (Parry 382). These types of efforts thus may fail to create dialogue about what constitutes ethical meat or even an ethical meat consumer, and may well reinforce more traditional ideas about human/non-human hierarchies.In contrast to coverage in popular media, detailed descriptions of commercial slaughter, in particular pre-slaughter (lairage) conditions, are yet to make it on to restaurant menus, despite the connections between meat quality and pre-slaughter conditions being well recognised even by consumers (Evans and Miele). Commercial slaughter conditions are one of the reasons that hunting is framed as more ethical than “ethically farmed” animals. As an Internet post, quoted in Adams (“Redneck” 50), puts it: “Hunting? A creature is peacefully in its own domain, it is shot. How is that worse than being carried for hours in a truck, being forced into a crush, hearing the bellows of other creatures, being physically restrained at the peak of terror, then culled?” Although determining precise rates of consumption of wild meat is methodologically difficult (Conservation Visions 28), available rates of hunting together with limited consumption data indicate that Australians currently eat less game or wild-caught meat per capita than those in Europe or North America. However, there is a sector of the community in Australia who pursue hunting as part of their ethical food habits (Bray et al., “Ferals”) with the largest proportion of wild-meat consumers being those who hunted it themselves (Gressier).In many cases, descriptions of animal lives (using descriptors such as “free range” or “grass fed”) serve implicitly as proxies for assurances that the animals’ deaths also have been good. One exception is the increasing awareness of the use of halal slaughter methods in part due to more transparent labelling, despite limited public awareness about the nature of these methods, particularly in the Australian context where they in fact comply with standard animal welfare requirements such as pre-slaughter stunning (Bergeauld-Blackler). Detailed descriptions of post-mortem conditions (e.g., aging conditions and time) are more common on restaurant menus, although arguably these no longer draw attention to the connections between the animal and the meat, and instead focus on the meat itself, its flavour and other physical qualities, rather than on ethical attributes.Thus, although it would seem obvious that ethical meat consumption should involve considerations about slaughter conditions or what makes a “good death”, most efforts have focused on encouraging people to make better and more reflexive consumer choices, rather than promoting deeper engagement with slaughter processes, perhaps underscoring that this domain may still represent one of the final food taboos. Although it might seem to be counterintuitive that wild or hunted meat could be viewed as an ethical food choice, particularly if vegetarianism or veganism is taken as the main point of comparison, these trends point toward the complexities inherent in food choice and the inevitable trade-offs in values that occur in these processes.Problems with Promoting Ethical Meat Norms: Ways ForwardIt is undeniable that many people are reflecting on their consumption habits in order to pursue decisions that better reflect their values. Attempting to be an “ethical meat consumer” clearly fits within these broader trends. However there are a number of problems associated with current approaches to ethical meat consumption, and these raise questions as to whether such efforts are likely to result in broader changes. First, it is not clear that restaurants are the most appropriate spaces for people to engage with ethical considerations, including those relating to meat consumption. Many people seek to try something new, or to treat themselves when dining out, but these behaviours do not necessarily translate into changes in everyday eating habits. Reasons are varied but include that people cannot reproduce the same types of dishes or concepts at home as what they get at restaurants (or see on TV shows for that matter), and that many products may be out of an acceptable price range or inconvenient for daily consumption. Others want to escape from ethical decisions when dining out by relying on those preparing the food to do the work for them, and thus sometimes simply consume without necessarily investigating every detail relating to its production, preparation, and so on.Perhaps more importantly, many are sceptical about the promotion of various meat-related values by high-profile or celebrity chefs, raising questions about whether ethical categories are merely packaging or window dressing designed to sell products, or if they are truly tied to deeper values and better products. Such concerns are reinforced by tendencies to emphasize one type of meat product—say free-range, grass-fed, or humanely-raised—as better than all others, or even as the only right choice, and thus can at times seem to be elitist in their approaches, since they emphasize that only certain (often extremely expensive boutique products) count as ethical. As scholars have noted about the classed nature of many of these consumption practices (see, for example, Bell and Hollows; Naccarato and LeBesco), these types of value judgments are likely to be alienating to many people, and most importantly will not foster deeper reflections on our consumption habits.However it is clear that celebrity and other high-profile chefs do get the public’s attention, and thus can play important roles in shaping conversations about fostering more ethical ways of eating, including meat consumption. We contend that it is important not to emphasize only one right way of eating, but to actively consider the various trade-offs that we make when choosing what to buy, prepare, and consume. Promoting answers by nominating certain meat products or production methods as always better in all circumstances, no matter how these might be in conflict with other values, such as preferences for local, organic, alignment with cultural or religious values, sustainable, fair trade, and so on, is not likely to result in meaningful public engagement. Critiques of Pollan and other food activists make similar points about the potential elitism and hence limited value of promoting narrow forms of ethical eating (e.g., Guthman et al.; Zimmerman).In addition, such food categories often serve as proxies for deeper values, but not necessarily for the same values for all of us. Simply relying on categories or types of products thus fails to allow engagement with the underlying rationale for various choices. More generally, promoting individual consumer decision-making and market demand as the keys to ethical consumption overlooks the broader systemic issues that limit our choices, and in turn limits attention to changes that might be made in that system (e.g., Lavin; Guthman et al.; DeLind; Ankeny).Thus instead of promoting one right way of eating meat, or a narrow number of acceptable choices, celebrities, chefs, and restauranteurs should consider how they can help to promote dialogue and the posing of the right types of questions to consumers and diners, including about trade-offs inherent in meat consumption and choices of other products, ethical and otherwise. They also should use their roles as change-makers to consider how they might influence the broader food system, but without promoting a single right way of eating. 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I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. Richard Stallman (GNU Manifesto) There is much more to Stallman’s Manifesto […] Suffice it to say that on the surface, it read like a socialist polemic, but I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise. Michael Tiemann (72) The current discourse surrounding the rapid development and deployment of “free” and “open source” software and operating systems is framed by an undeniably utopian impulse. The “openness” of open source software is informed by concerns both practical (freedom from oppressive software production and licensing/copyright schemes) and ideological (the valorisation of anarchic organizational forms, communal production, and public property rights). The utopian impulse that underwrites this discourse is important for many reasons, but what I want to trace here is the trajectory from ideological position to practical action as it relates to differing forms of utopianism. The initial anarcho-socialist utopian move initiated by Richard Stallman’s GNU (GNU’s Not UNIX) Project and Free Software Foundation (FSF) is currently being transformed into an organizational utopia in the form of the Open Source Movement (OSM). The purpose here is not to take sides in the philological/philosophical debate over the definitions and relative merits of “free” versus “open source” software or to lament the passing of a missed opportunity, but to address the intimations of hope and deprival (with apologies to Grant) that can be gleaned from the relationship between utopianism and socio-technological practices. The popularity of open source development ideals and practices indicates a certain dissatisfaction with corporate technoculture on the part of some (many?) of those who work in these institutions. This dissatisfaction is clearly evident in Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto wherein he critiques the shift from public domain to copyrighted software development that has occurred in the last three decades. Recalling Brian Winston’s theorization of technological development, the move toward copyrighted software appears to have come as a result of the increasing diffusion of computing hardware in the 1980’s and the practical realization of software development as an economically rationalized for-profit enterprise. Prior to the broad commodification of software, programmers shared knowledge and code without worrying about software licenses and copyrights, institutionally commodified intellectual property, and non-disclosure agreements (at least according to Stallman’s experience). Stallman’s heroic effort to create the GNU system is thus not only a direct attack on commodified software production, but a consciously utopian attempt to recapture the “open” communal programming practices that existed during the 1960’s and 70’s. The utopian impulse found in this open form of software development is significant precisely because it underwrites recent efforts to reject current copyright regimes and, by extension, techno-industrial oligarchies. This potential is enabled by newly available forms of grassroots software development (code sharing and development via the Internet being the most obvious example). Stallman introduced and encouraged a licensing system that expressly prohibited the copyrighting of software developed using GNU software protocols and standards (termed “copyleft”). The lag between the initial deployment of Stallman’s early software efforts and their uptake by the wider computing community came as increases in computer literacy, technology markets, affordable personal computing power, and broadband CMC networks came along in the 1990’s. The OSM’s recent mobilization around Linux continues and parallels Stallman’s efforts via the adoption of the GNU license and copyleft. While the hallmarks of Stallman’s communal software production system remain, the overall nature of Open Source software is framed by a rather different notion of utopian openness than is evident in Stallman’s manifesto. This brings me to the broader notion of an anarcho-utopianism framed by what Bookchin has identified as the twin goals of individual liberty and social democracy. Claims are already being made that practices related to open source software development and its emergent virtually interconnected organizational form may provide the basis for (re)imagining systems of social governance while simultaneously providing the practical infrastructure by which these new forms may be manifested: The experience of open source development, or even just the acceptance of its value as a model for others, provides a real-life practice for the deeper change in perspective required if we are to move into a more networked and emergent understanding of our world. The local community must be experienced as a place to implement policies, incrementally, that will eventually have an effect on the whole. (Rushkoff 61) Suggestions that the FSF’s and OSM’s methods of software development may serve as a model for more open and democratic policy making resonates with political theory in general, and social democracy and anarchism in particular. But neither the OSM nor the FSF is a political platform. They are simply modalities of software production which find their foundations in communal forms of decision making, intellectual labour, and dissemination. A utopian impulse is nonetheless revealed in the typically vague invocations of political anarchism and social democratic ideals that accompany the discursive promotion and legitimization of these modalities. The FSF advocates a broadly social anarchistic approach allied with a desire to overturn entirely commodified software production. The OSM, on the other hand, is more concerned with a kind of lifestyle anarchism that focuses on increasing programmer and user freedom within existing frameworks of software production and use. For Bookchin, the latter form of anarchism is positive insofar it advocates individual liberty, but it ultimately undermines the broader goals of anarchism by focusing on transient notions of individualism. The result is a situation wherein “the word anarchy will become part of the chic bourgeois vocabulary of the coming century — naughty, rebellious, insouciant, but deliciously safe” (3). It is interesting to note in passim the various discursive entanglements of anarchism and the Internet that have occurred since 1995, the time of Bookchin’s statement. The utopian discourse that weaves its way through the non-technical discussions surrounding GNU, Linux, and other Open Source projects is certainly strong, but it begs the question of exactly what kinds of utopias are being offered ? Henri Lefebvre was rather suspicious of utopian thought because it is so frequently allied with efforts to legitimize nationalistic and totalitarian organizational practices. While suggesting that utopian thought was useful, he would only go so far as to warn that any such thought must avoid notions of a revolution that would simply substitute one state-sanctioned form of organized production with another, arguing instead for a “transformation of society [that] presupposes a collective ownership and management of space [we could say “society’ or even “software” here in place of “space] founded on the permanent participation of the ‘interested parties’, with their multiple, varied and even contradictory interests” (422). For Lefebvre, any useful form of utopianism is not a matter of coming up with alternative state apparatuses, but of somehow creating the conditions through which an open orientation to future possibilities might allow for the foundation of a more socially democratic society. The FSF comes closest to fulfilling this ideal—at least within the realm of computing—insofar its attendant communities are involved less in the creation of a new institutional form than in the propagation of practices and desires for more open forms of software development. As such, the FSF seems to deploy the kind of utopian thinking and practice that Lefebvre finds useful. There is hope (social and computational) in this kind of utopian orientation because its socio-institutional functioning is left forever open-ended by way of its locating productive practices in communal formations. The FSF offers an idealized mode of communally open software development while refusing to provide an overarching and institutionalized organizational form by which it is to be utilized. Borrowing heavily from the FSF’s ideals and practices, the OSM’s efforts to integrate practices of communal software development into contemporary techno-capitalism is not simply an intimation of deprival — a moment to lament the passing of the FSF’s utopian ideals — rather, the OSM constitutes what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a moment of actualization whereby the virtual (and utopian) potential future(s) of communal software development cross the practico-material threshold to become manifest practices. Stallman’s GNU existed in the rather rarefied realm of hardcore coders for years before Torvald’s Linux took open/free software principles into the mainstream. The moment of actualization was not simply technical (available hardware, software, programmers, networks, etc.): it was the recognition that communal “copylefted” programming could “find a place” in the everyday structures of IT industries, services, and markets. It is the moment when Tiemann sees a business plan in Stallman’s “socialist polemic”. At this point that the utopian orientation and ideals promoted by the FSF transforms into an organizational utopia spearheaded by the OSM. The debate over this transformation shows few signs of abating any time soon. Stallman feels that Eric Raymond’s (the spiritual “leader” of the OSM) promotion of a potentially massive, and certainly for-profit, industry founded on the implementation and support of open source software defeats the basic (utopian) principles of free software. Echoing Bookchin’s concerns about lifestyle anarchism, Stallman worries that the OSM will simply result in the re-introduction of all of those things that drove him out of institutional software development in the first place: “the rhetoric of ‘open source’ focuses on the potential to make high quality, powerful software, but shuns the ideas of freedom, community and principle” (1999:70) . The FSF’s social utopianism thus appears to provide the productive content, but not the political form, for the more practically minded utopianism of the OSM, which offers an organizational utopia more akin to the “substitutive” utopias disavowed by Lefebvre. As Martin Parker argues, utopian thought and practice tends to be organizational in nature: “most, if not all, fictional and actual utopias rely on a re-formulation of principles of social order. They are in that sense organized, though often on different principles to the market managerial hegemony” (217-218). Stallman’s open anarcho-utopianism commits to an avoidance of market managerial hegemony. The OSM, however, not only cooperates with market hegemony, it seeks to find a place within it. This is a crucial difference. The openness introduced by the FSF is incorporated by the OSM only at the level of software production itself, thus containing and integrating its communal practices in the service of existing market needs and structures. The OSM is thus likely only a threat to Microsoft, and this only because it proffers a new business model. Indeed, the popular appeal of the OSM’s version of open source as a metaphor and model for businesses suggests that it may be an easily, and safely, appropriated set of practices. On the other hand, the FSF’s promotion of a more “socialist” approach to software production and use is based on the same basic programming practices and it will therefore be rather difficult to exact some sort of industrial control of copyright and/or intellectual property where open source software is concerned. Whether or not these two approaches are compatible, or if users will push their development into as yet unseen directions, is by no means clear at this point. With open source development poised on the verge of being the “next big thing”, the manifest expression of its anarchic utopian impulse in the form of treatises and essays is somewhat limited insofar as the community is primarily composed of programmers rather than social theorists. Nevertheless, the utopian impulse is becoming more clearly expressed where it perhaps matters most: as an emergent set of practices in the domain of software production and use. The “kernel” of openness introduced by both the FSF and the OSM thus needs to be addressed in detail, and sooner rather than later, because it is in the struggle between these two forms of anarchic utopianism that the broader sociopolitical implications of a radically different form of software production will be played out. About the Author Dale Bradley is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Communications, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University, Canada. His research interests include the discursive analysis of contemporary technoculture and the historical emergence of cybersociety. Email: dbradley@brocku.ca Works Cited Bookchin, Murray. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism. San Francisco: AK Press, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1987. Grant, George. Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford UK: Blackwell, 1991. Parker, Martin. ‘Utopia and the Organizational Imagination: Eutopia’. Utopia and Organization. Ed. Martin Parker. Oxford UK: Blackwell, 2002. Rushkoff, Douglas. Open Source Democracy. London: Demos, 2003. Full text available under open source licensing at: http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/opensourcedemocracy_page292.aspx http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html Stallman, Richard. ‘The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement’. Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Eds. Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman & Mark Stone. Sebastopol CA: O’Reilly & Associates,1999. Tiemann, Michael. ‘Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur’s Account’. Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Eds. Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman & Mark Stone. O’Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol CA: 1999 Winston, Brian. Misunderstanding Media. Harvard U Press, Cambridge MA: 1986 For a brief overview of the debate between Stallman and Raymond, see ‘Whence the Source: Untangling the Open Source/Free Software Debate’ at: http://opensource.oreilly.com/news/scoville_0399.html) Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bradley, Dale. "Open Source, Anarchy, and the Utopian Impulse" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/03_Bradley.php>. APA Style Bradley, D. (2004, Jul1). Open Source, Anarchy, and the Utopian Impulse. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/03_Bradley.php>

This paper provides embedded, reflective practice-based insight arising from my experience collaborating to produce online and print-on-demand editions of a magazine showcasing the photography of members of haphazart! Contemporary Abstracts group (hereafter referred to as haphazart!). The group’s online visual, textual and activity-based practices via the photo sharing social networking site Flickr are portrayed as achieving cohesive visual identity. Stylistic analysis of pictures in support of this claim is not attempted. Rather negotiation, that Elliot has previously described in M/C Journal as innate in collaboration, is identified as the unifying factor. However, the collaborators’ adherence to Flickr’s communication platform proves problematic in the editorial context. Some technical incoherence with possible broader cultural implications is encountered during the process of repurposing images from screen to print. A Scan of Relevant Literature The photographic gaze perceives and captures objects which seem to ‘carry within them ready-made’ a work of art. But the reminiscences of the gaze are only made possible by knowing and associating with groups that define a tradition. The list of valorised subjects is not actually defined with reference to a culture, but rather by familiarity with a limited group. (Chamboredon 144) As part of the array of socio-cultural practices afforded by Web 2.0 interoperability, sites of produsage (Bruns) are foci for studies originating in many disciplines. Flickr provides a rich source of data that researchers interested in the interface between the technological and the social find useful to analyse. Access to the Flickr application programming interface enables quantitative researchers to observe a variety of means by which information is propagated, disseminated and shared. Some findings from this kind of research confirm the intuitive. For example, Negoecsu et al. find that “a large percentage of users engage in sharing with groups and that they do so significantly” ("Analyzing Flickr Groups" 425). They suggest that Flickr’s Groups feature appears to “naturally bring together two key aspects of social media: content and relations.” They also find evidence for what they call hyper-groups, which are “communities consisting of groups of Flickr groups” ("Flickr Hypergroups" 813). Two separate findings from another research team appear to contradict each other. On one hand, describing what they call “social cascades,” Cha et al. claim that “content in the form of ideas, products, and messages spreads across social networks like a virus” ("Characterising Social Cascades"). Yet in 2009 they claim that homocity and reciprocity ensure that “popularity of pictures is localised” ("Measurement-Driven Analysis"). Mislove et al. reflect that the affordances of Flickr influence the growth patterns they observe. There is optimism shared by some empiricists that through collation and analysis of Flickr tag data, the matching of perceptual structures of images and image annotation techniques will yield ontology-based taxonomy useful in automatic image annotation and ultimately, the Semantic Web endeavour (Kennedy et al.; Su et al.; Xu et al.). Qualitative researchers using ethnographic interview techniques also find Flickr a valuable resource. In concluding that the photo sharing hobby is for many a “serious leisure” activity, Cox et al. propose that “Flickr is not just a neutral information system but also value laden and has a role within a wider cultural order.” They also suggest that “there is genuinely greater scope for individual creativity, releasing the individual to explore their own identity in a way not possible with a camera club.” Davies claims that “online spaces provide an arena where collaboration over meanings can be transformative, impacting on how individuals locate themselves within local and global contexts” (550). She says that through shared ways of describing and commenting on images, Flickrites develop a common criticality in their endeavour to understand images, each other and their world (554).From a psychologist’s perspective, Suler observes that “interpersonal relationships rarely form and develop by images alone” ("Image, Word, Action" 559). He says that Flickr participants communicate in three dimensions: textual (which he calls “verbal”), visual, and via the interpersonal actions that the site affords, such as Favourites. This latter observation can surely be supplemented by including the various games that groups configure within the constraints of the discussion forums. These often include submissions to a theme and voting to select a winning image. Suler describes the place in Flickr where one finds identity as one’s “cyberpsychological niche” (556). However, many participants subscribe to multiple groups—45.6% of Flickrites who share images share them with more than 20 groups (Negoescu et al., "Analyzing Flickr Groups" 420). Is this a reflection of the existence of the hyper-groups they describe (2009) or, of the ranging that people do in search of a niche? It is also probable that some people explore more than a singular identity or visual style. Harrison and Bartell suggest that there are more interesting questions than why users create media products or what motivates them to do so: the more interesting questions center on understanding what users will choose to do ultimately with [Web2.0] capabilities [...] in what terms to define the success of their efforts, and what impact the opportunity for individual and collaborative expression will have on the evolution of communicative forms and character. (167) This paper addresseses such questions. It arises from a participatory observational context which differs from that of the research described above. It is intended that a different perspective about online group-based participation within the Flickr social networking matrix will avail. However, it will be seen that the themes cited in this introductory review prove pertinent. Context As a university teacher of a range of subjects in the digital media field, from contemporary photomedia to social media to collaborative multimedia practice, it is entirely appropriate that I embed myself in projects that engage, challenge and provide me with relevant first-hand experience. As an academic I also undertake and publish research. As a practicing new media artist I exhibit publically on a regular basis and consider myself semi-professional with respect to this activity. While there are common elements to both approaches to research, this paper is written more from the point of view of ‘reflective practice’ (Holmes, "Reconciling Experimentum") rather than ‘embedded ethnography’ (Pink). It is necessarily and unapologetically reflexive. Abstract Photography Hyper-Group A search of all Flickr groups using the query “abstract” is currently likely to return around 14,700 results. However, only in around thirty of them does the group name, its stated rules and, the stream of images that flow through the pool arguably reflect a sense of collective concept and aesthetic that is coherently abstract. This loose complex of groups comprises a hyper-group. Members of these groups often have co-memberships, reciprocal contacts, and regularly post images to a range of groups and comment on others’ posts to be found throughout. Given that one of Flickr’s largest groups, Black and White, currently has around 131,150 members and hosts 2,093,241 items in its pool, these abstract special interest groups are relatively small. The largest, Abstract Photos, has 11,338 members and hosts 89,306 items in its pool. The group that is the focus of this paper, haphazart!, currently has 2,536 members who have submitted 53,309 items. The group pool is more like a constantly flowing river because the most recently added images are foremost. Older images become buried in an archive of pages which cannot be reverse accessed at a rate greater than the seven pages linked from a current view. A member’s presence is most immediate through images posted to a pool. This structural feature of Flickr promotes a desire for currency; a need to post regularly to maintain presence. Negotiating Coherence to the Abstract The self-managing social dynamics in groups has, as Suler proposes to be the case for individuals, three dimensions: visual, textual and action. A group integrates the diverse elements, relationships and values which cumulatively constitute its identity with contributions from members in these dimensions. First impressions of that identity are usually derived from the group home page which consists of principal features: the group name, a selection of twelve most recent posts to the pool, some kind of description, a selection of six of the most recent discussion topics, and a list of rules (if any). In some of these groups, what is considered to constitute an abstract photographic image is described on the group home page. In some it is left to be contested and becomes the topic of ongoing forum debates. In others the specific issue is not discussed—the images are left to speak for themselves. Administrators of some groups require that images are vetted for acceptance. In haphazart! particular administrators dutifully delete from the pool on a regular basis any images that they deem not to comply with the group ethic. Whether reasons are given or not is left to the individual prosecutor. Mostly offending images just disappear from the group pool without trace. These are some of the ways that the coherence of a group’s visual identity is established and maintained. Two groups out of the abstract photography hyper-group are noteworthy in that their discussion forums are particularly active. A discussion is just the start of a new thread and may have any number of posts under it. At time of writing Abstract Photos has 195 discussions and haphazart! — the most talkative by this measure—has 333. Haphazart! invites submissions of images to regularly changing themes. There is always lively and idiosyncratic banter in the forum over the selection of a theme. To be submitted an image needs to be identified by a specific theme tag as announced on the group home page. The tag can be added by the photographer themselves or by anyone else who deems the image appropriate to the theme. An exhibition process ensues. Participant curators search all Flickr items according to the theme tag and select from the outcome images they deem to most appropriately and abstractly address the theme. Copies of the images together with comments by the curators are posted to a dedicated discussion board. Other members may also provide responses. This activity forms an ongoing record that may serve as a public indicator of the aesthetic that underlies the group’s identity. In Abstract Photos there is an ongoing discussion forum where one can submit an image and request that the moderators rule as to whether or not the image is ‘abstract’. The same group has ongoing discussions labelled “Hall of Appropriate” where worthy images are reposted and celebrated and, “Hall of Inappropriate” where images posted to the group pool have been removed and relegated because abstraction has been “so far stretched from its definition that it now resides in a parallel universe” (Askin). Reasons are mostly courteously provided. In haphazart! a relatively small core of around twelve group members regularly contribute to the group discussion board. A curious aspect of this communication is that even though participants present visually with a ‘buddy icon’ and most with a screen name not their real name, it is usual practice to address each other in discussions by their real Christian names, even when this is not evident in a member’s profile. This seems to indicate a common desire for authenticity. The makeup of the core varies from time to time depending on other activities in a member’s life. Although one or two may be professionally or semi-professionally engaged as photographers or artists or academics, most of these people would likely consider themselves to be “serious amateurs” (Cox). They are internationally dispersed with bias to the US, UK, Europe and Australia. English is the common language though not the natural tongue of some. The age range is approximately 35 to 65 and the gender mix 50/50. The group is three years old. Where Do We Go to from Here? In early January 2009 the haphazart! core was sparked into a frenzy of discussion by a post from a member headed “Where do we go to from here?” A proposal was mooted to produce a ‘book’ featuring images and texts representative of the group. Within three days a new public group with invited membership dedicated to the idea had been established. A smaller working party then retreated to a private Flickr group. Four months later Issue One of haphazart! magazine was available in print-on-demand and online formats. Following however is a brief critically reflective review of some of the collaborative curatorial, editorial and production processes for Issue Two which commenced in early June 2009. Most of the team had also been involved with Issue One. I was the only newcomer and replaced the person who had undertaken the design for Issue One. I was not provided access to the prior private editorial ruminations but apparently the collaborative curatorial and editorial decision-making practices the group had previously established persisted, and these took place entirely within the discussion forums of a new dedicated private Flickr group. Over a five-month period there were 1066 posts in 54 discussions concerning matters such as: change of format from the previous; selection of themes, artists and images; conduct of and editing of interviews; authoring of texts; copyright and reproduction. The idiom of those communications can be described as: discursive, sporadic, idiosyncratic, resourceful, collegial, cooperative, emphatic, earnest and purposeful. The selection process could not be said to follow anything close to a shared manifesto, or articulation of style. It was established that there would be two primary themes: the square format and contributors’ use of colour. Selection progressed by way of visual presentation and counter presentation until some kind of consensus was reached often involving informal votes of preference. Stretching the Limits of the Flickr Social Tools The magazine editorial collaborators continue to use the facilities with which they are familiar from regular Flickr group participation. However, the strict vertically linear format of the Flickr discussion format is particularly unsuited to lengthy, complex, asynchronous, multithreaded discussion. For this purpose it causes unnecessary strain, fatigue and confusion. Where images are included, the forums have set and maximum display sizes and are not flexibly configured into matrixes. Images cannot readily be communally changed or moved about like texts in a wiki. Likewise, the Flickrmail facility is of limited use for specialist editorial processes. Attachments cannot be added. This opinion expressed by a collaborator in the initial, open discussion for Issue One prevailed among Issue Two participants: do we want the members to go to another site to observe what is going on with the magazine? if that’s ok, then using google groups or something like that might make sense; if we want others to observe (and learn from) the process - we may want to do it here [in Flickr]. (Valentine) The opinion appears socially constructive; but because the final editorial process and production processes took place in a separate private forum, ultimately the suggested learning between one issue and the next did not take place. During Issue Two development the reluctance to try other online collaboration tools for the selection processes requiring visual comparative evaluation of images and trials of sequencing adhered. A number of ingenious methods of working within Flickr were devised and deployed and, in my opinion, proved frustratingly impractical and inefficient. The digital layout, design, collation and formatting of images and texts, all took place on my personal computer using professional software tools. Difficulties arose in progressively sharing this work for the purposes of review, appraisal and proofing. Eventually I ignored protests and insisted the team review demonstrations I had converted for sharing in Google Documents. But, with only one exception, I could not tempt collaborators to try commenting or editing in that environment. For example, instead of moving the sequence of images dynamically themselves, or even typing suggestions directly into Google Documents, they would post responses in Flickr. To Share and to Hold From the first imaginings of Issue One the need to have as an outcome something in one’s hands was expressed and this objective is apparently shared by all in the haphazart! core as an ongoing imperative. Various printing options have been nominated, discussed and evaluated. In the end one print-on-demand provider was selected on the basis of recommendation. The ethos of haphazart! is clearly not profit-making and conflicts with that of the printing organisation. Presumably to maintain an incentive to purchase the print copy online preview is restricted to the first 15 pages. To satisfy the co-requisite to make available the full 120 pages for free online viewing a second host that specialises in online presentation of publications is also utilised. In this way haphazart! members satisfy their common desires for sharing selected visual content and ideas with an online special interest audience and, for a physical object of art to relish—with all the connotations of preciousness, fetish, talisman, trophy, and bookish notions of haptic pleasure and visual treasure. The irony of publishing a frozen chunk of the ever-flowing Flickriver, whose temporally changing nature is arguably one of its most interesting qualities, is not a consideration. Most of them profess to be simply satisfying their own desire for self expression and would eschew any critical judgement as to whether this anarchic and discursive mode of operation results in a coherent statement about contemporary photographic abstraction. However there remains a distinct possibility that a number of core haphazart!ists aspire to transcend: popular taste; the discernment encouraged in camera clubs; and, the rhetoric of those involved professionally (Bourdieu et al.); and seek to engage with the “awareness of illegitimacy and the difficulties implied by the constitution of photography as an artistic medium” (Chamboredon 130). Incoherence: A Technical Note My personal experience of photography ranges from the filmic to the digital (Holmes, "Bridging Adelaide"). For a number of years I specialised in facsimile graphic reproduction of artwork. In those days I became aware that films were ‘blind’ to the psychophysical affect of some few particular paint pigments. They just could not be reproduced. Even so, as I handled the dozens of images contributed to haphazart!2, converting them from the pixellated place where Flickr exists to the resolution and gamut of the ink based colour space of books, I was surprised at the number of hue values that exist in the former that do not translate into the latter. In some cases the affect is subtle so that judicious tweaking of colour levels or local colour adjustment will satisfy discerning comparison between the screenic original and the ‘soft proof’ that simulates the printed outcome. In other cases a conversion simply does not compute. I am moved to contemplate, along with Harrison and Bartell (op. cit.) just how much of the experience of media in the shared digital space is incomparably new? Acknowledgement Acting on the advice of researchers experienced in cyberethnography (Bruckman; Suler, "Ethics") I have obtained the consent of co-collaborators to comment freely on proceedings that took place in a private forum. They have been given the opportunity to review and suggest changes to the account. References Askin, Dean (aka: dnskct). “Hall of Inappropriate.” Abstract Photos/Discuss/Hall of Inappropriate, 2010. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.flickr.com/groups/abstractphotos/discuss/72157623148695254/>. Bourdieu, Pierre, Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredeon, and Dominique Schnapper. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. 1965. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Bruckman, Amy. Studying the Amateur Artist: A Perspective on Disguising Data Collected in Human Subjects Research on the Internet. 2002. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bru_full.html>. Bruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Proceedings: Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology 2006. Perth: Murdoch U, 2006. 275–84. ———, and Mark Bahnisch. Social Media: Tools for User-Generated Content. Vol. 1 – “State of the Art.” Sydney: Smart Services CRC, 2009. Cha, Meeyoung, Alan Mislove, Ben Adams, and Krishna P. Gummadi. “Characterizing Social Cascades in Flickr.” Proceedings of the First Workshop on Online Social Networks. ACM, 2008. 13–18. ———, Alan Mislove, and Krishna P. Gummadi. “A Measurement-Driven Analysis of Information Propagation in the Flickr Social Network." WWW '09: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web. ACM, 2009. 721–730. Cox, A.M., P.D. Clough, and J. Marlow. “Flickr: A First Look at User Behaviour in the Context of Photography as Serious Leisure.” Information Research 13.1 (March 2008). 12 Dec. 2009 ‹http://informationr.net/ir/13-1/paper336.html>. Chamboredon, Jean-Claude. “Mechanical Art, Natural Art: Photographic Artists.” Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Pierre Bourdieu. et al. 1965. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. 129–149. Davies, Julia. “Display, Identity and the Everyday: Self-Presentation through Online Image Sharing.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 28.4 (Dec. 2007): 549–564. Elliott, Mark. “Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work.” M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php>. Harrison, Teresa, M., and Brea Barthel. “Wielding New Media in Web 2.0: Exploring the History of Engagement with the Collaborative Construction of Media Products.” New Media & Society 11.1-2 (2009): 155–178. Holmes, Ashley. “‘Bridging Adelaide 2001’: Photography and Hyperimage, Spanning Paradigms.” VSMM 2000 Conference Proceedings. International Society for Virtual Systems and Multimedia, 2000. 79–88. ———. “Reconciling Experimentum and Experientia: Reflective Practice Research Methodology for the Creative Industries”. Speculation & Innovation: Applying Practice-Led Research in the Creative Industries. Brisbane: QUT, 2006. Kennedy, Lyndon, Mor Naaman, Shane Ahern, Rahul Nair, and Tye Rattenbury. “How Flickr Helps Us Make Sense of the World: Context and Content in Community-Contributed Media Collections.” MM’07. ACM, 2007. Miller, Andrew D., and W. Keith Edwards. “Give and Take: A Study of Consumer Photo-Sharing Culture and Practice.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2007. 347–356. Mislove, Alan, Hema Swetha Koppula, Krishna P. Gummadi, Peter Druschel and Bobby Bhattacharjee. “Growth of the Flickr Social Network.” Proceedings of the First Workshop on Online Social Networks. ACM, 2008. 25–30. Negoescu, Radu-Andrei, and Daniel Gatica-Perez. “Analyzing Flickr Groups.” CIVR '08: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval. ACM, 2008. 417–426. ———, Brett Adams, Dinh Phung, Svetha Venkatesh, and Daniel Gatica-Perez. “Flickr Hypergroups.” MM '09: Proceedings of the Seventeenth ACM International Conference on Multimedia. ACM, 2009. 813–816. Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2007. Su, Ja-Hwung, Bo-Wen Wang, Hsin-Ho Yeh, and Vincent S. Tseng. “Ontology–Based Semantic Web Image Retrieval by Utilizing Textual and Visual Annotations.” 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology – Workshops. 2009. Suler, John. “Ethics in Cyberspace Research: Consent, Privacy and Contribution.” The Psychology of Cyberspace. 1996. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html>. ———. “Image, Word, Action: Interpersonal Dynamics in a Photo-Sharing Community.” Cyberpsychology & Behavior 11.5 (2008): 555–560. Valentine, Mark. “HAPHAZART! Magazine/Discuss/image selections…” [discussion post]. 2009. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.flickr.com/groups/haphazartmagazin/discuss/72157613147017532/>. Xu, Hongtao, Xiangdong Zhou, Mei Wang, Yu Xiang, and Baile Shi. “Exploring Flickr’s Related Tags for Semantic Annotation of Web Images.” CIVR ’09. ACM, 2009.

Introduction Sharing food is central to culture. Indeed, according to Montanari, “food is culture” (xii). Ways of sharing knowledge about food, such as the exchange of recipes, give longevity to food sharing. Recipes, an important cultural technology, expand the practice of sharing food beyond specific times and places. The means through which recipes, and information about food, is shared has historically been communicated through whatever medium is available at the time. Cookbooks were among the first printed books, with the first known cookbook published in 1485 at Nuremberg, which set a trend in which cookbooks were published in most of the languages across Western Europe by the mid 16th century (Mennell). Since then, recipe collections have found a comfortable home in new and emerging media, from radio, to television, and now, online. The proliferation of cookbooks and other forms of food-related media “can be interpreted as a reflection of culinary inexperience, if not also incompetence—otherwise why so much reliance on outside advice?” (Belasco 46). Food-related media has also been argued to reflect both what people eat and what they might wish they could eat (Neuhaus, in Belasco). As such, cookbooks, television cooking shows, and food websites help shape our identity and, as Gallegos notes, play “a role in inscribing the self with a sense of place, belonging and achievement” (99). Food writing has expanded beyond the instructional form common to cookbooks and television cooking shows and, according to Hughes, “has insinuated itself into every aspect of the literary imagination” (online) from academic writing through to memoir, fiction, and travel writing. Hughes argues that concerns that people are actually now cooking less that ever, despite this influx of food-related media, miss the point that “food writing is a literary activity […] the best of it does what good writing always does, which is to create an alternative world to the one you currently inhabit” (online). While pragmatic, this argument also reinforces the common perception that food writing is a professional pursuit. It is important to note that while cookbooks and other forms of food-related media are well established as a means for recipes to be communicated, recipes have a longer history of being shared between individuals, that is, within families and communities. In helping to expand recipe-sharing practices, food-related media has also both professionalised and depersonalised this activity. As perhaps a reaction to this, or through a desire to re-establish communal recipe-sharing traditions, blogging, and specifically food blogging, has emerged as a new and viable way for people to share information about food in a non-professional capacity. Blogging has long been celebrated for its capacity to give “ordinary” people a voice (Nilsson). Due to their social nature (Walker Rettberg) and the ability for bloggers to create “networks for sharing ideas, trends and information” (Walker Rettberg 60), blogs are a natural fit for sharing recipes and information about food. Additionally, blogs, like food-related media forms such as cookbooks, are also used as tools for identity building. Blogger’s identities may be closely tied to their offline identity (Baumer, Sueyoshi and Tomlinson), forged through discussions about their everyday lives (Lövheim) or used in a professional capacity (Kedrowicz and Sullivan). Food blogs, broadly defined as blogs primarily focused on food, are one of the most prominent means through which so-called “ordinary” people can share recipes online, and can be seen to challenge perceptions that food writing is a professional activity. They may focus specifically on recipes, restaurant reviews, travel, food ethics, or aesthetic concerns such as food styling and photography. Since food blogs began to appear in the early 2000s, their number has steadily increased, and the community has become more established and structured. In my interview with the writer of the popular blog Chocolate & Zucchini, she noted that when she started blogging about food in 2003 there were perhaps a dozen other food bloggers. Since then, this blogger has become a professional food writer, published author, and recipe developer, while the number of food bloggers has grown dramatically. It is difficult to know the precise number of food blogs—as at July 2012, Technorati ranked more than 16,000 food blogs, including both recipe and restaurant review blogs (online)—but it is clear that they are both increasing in number and have become a common and popular blog genre. For the purposes of this article, food blogs are understood as those blogs that mostly feature recipes. The term “recipe blog” could be used, but food bloggers make little distinction between different topic categories—whether someone writes recipes or reviews, they are referred to as a food blogger. As such, I have used the term “food blog” in keeping with the community’s own terminology and practices. Recipes published on blogs reach a wider audience than those shared between individuals within a family or in a community, but are not as exclusive or professional, in most instances, as traditional food-related media. Blogging allows for the compression of time and space, as people can connect with others from around the world, and respond and reinvigorate posts sometimes several years after they have been written. In this sense, food blogs are more dynamic than cookbooks, with multiple entry points and means for people to discover them—through search engines as well as through traditional word of mouth referrals. This dynamism allows food bloggers to form an active community through which “ordinary” people can share their passion for food and the pleasures of cooking, seek advice, give feedback, and discuss such issues as seasonality, locality, and diet. This article is based on research I conducted on food blogs between 2010 and 2012, which used an ethnographic, cultural studies approach to online community studies to provide a rich description of the food blogging community. It examines how food blogging provides insight into the eating habits of “ordinary” people in a more broad-based manner than traditional food-related media such as cookbooks. It looks at how food blogging has evolved from a subcultural activity to an established and recognised element of the wider food-related media ecology, and in this way has been transformed from a hobbyist activity to a cottage industry. It discusses how food blogs have influenced food-related media and the potential they have to drive food trends. In doing so, this research does not consider the Internet, or online communities, as separate or distinct from offline culture. Instead, it follows Richard Rogers’s argument for a new approach to Internet studies, in which “one is not so much researching the Internet, and its users, as studying culture and society with the Internet” (29). A cultural studies approach is useful for understanding food blogs in a broader historical and cultural context, since it considers the Internet as “a rich arena for thinking about how contemporary culture is constituted” (Hine et al. 2). Food Blogging: From Hobbyist Activity to Cottage Industry Benkler argues that “people have always created their own culture” (296); however, as folk culture has gradually been replaced by mass-produced popular culture, we have come to expect certain production values in culture, and lost confidence in creating or sharing it ourselves, for fear of it not meeting these high standards. Such mass-produced popular culture includes food-related media and recipes, as developing and sharing recipes has become the domain of celebrity chefs. Food blogs are created by “ordinary” people, and in this way continue the tradition of community cookbooks and reflect an increased interest in both the do-it-yourself phenomena, and a resurgence of a desire to share and contribute to folk culture. Jenkins argues that “a thriving culture needs spaces where people can do bad art, get feedback, and get better” (140-1). He notes that the Internet has drastically expanded the availability of these spaces, and argues that: "some of what amateurs create will be surprisingly good, and some artists will be recruited into commercial entertainment or the art world. Much of it will be good enough to engage the interest of some modest public, to inspire someone else to create, to provide new content which, when polished through many hands, may turn into something more valuable down the line" (140-1). Food blogs provide such a space for amateurs to share their creations and get feedback. Additionally, some food bloggers, like the artists to whom Jenkins refers, do create recipes, writing, and images that are “surprisingly good”, and are recruited, not into commercial entertainment or the art world, but into food-related media. Some food bloggers publish cookbooks (for example, Clotilde Dusoulier of Chocolate & Zucchini), or food-related memoirs (for example, Molly Wizenberg of Orangette), and some become food celebrities in their own right, as guests on high profile television shows such as Martha Stewart (Matt Armendariz of mattbites) or with their own cooking shows (Ree Drummond of The Pioneer Woman Cooks). Others, while not reaching these levels of success, do manage to inspire others to create, or recreate their, recipes. Mainstream media has a tendency to suggest that all food bloggers have professional aspirations (see, for example, Phipps). Yet, it is important to note that, many food bloggers are content to remain hobbyists. These food bloggers form the majority of the community, and blog about food because they are interested in food, and enjoy sharing recipes and discussing their interest with like-minded people. In this way, they are contributing to, and engaging with, folk culture within the blogging community. However, this does not mean that they do not have a broader impact on mainstream food-related media. Food-Related Media Response As the food blogging community has grown, food-related media and other industries have responded with attempts to understand, engage with, and manage food bloggers. Food blogs are increasingly recognised as an aspect of the broader food-related media and, as such, provide both competition and opportunities for media and other industries. Just as food blogs offer individuals opportunities for entry into food-related media professions, they also offer media and other industries opportunities to promote products, reach broader audiences, and source new talent. While food bloggers do not necessarily challenge existing food-related media, they increasingly see themselves as a part of it, and expect to be viewed as a legitimate part of the media landscape and as an alternative source of food-related information. As such, they respond positively to the inclusion of bloggers in food-related media and in other food-related environments. Engaging with the food blogging community allows the wider food-related media to subtly regulate blogger behaviour. It can also provide opportunities for some bloggers to be recruited in a professional capacity into food-related media. In a sense, food-related media attempt to “tame” food bloggers by suggesting that if bloggers behave in a way that they deem is acceptable, they may be able to transition into the professional world of food writing. The most notable example of this response to food blogs by food-related media is the decision to publish blogger’s work. While not all food bloggers have professional aspirations, being published is generally viewed within the community as a positive outcome. Food bloggers are sometimes profiled in food-related media, such as in the Good Weekend magazine in The Sydney Morning Herald (Karnikowski), and in MasterChef Magazine, which profiles a different food blogger each month (T. Jenkins). Food bloggers are also occasionally commissioned to write features for food-related media, as Katie Quinn Davies, of the blog What Katie Ate, who is a regular contributor to delicious magazine. Other food bloggers have been published in their own right. These food bloggers have transitioned from hobbyists to professionals, moving beyond blogging spaces into professional food-related media, and they could be, in Abercrombie and Longhurst’s terms, described as “petty producers” (140). As professionals, they have become a sort of “brand”, which their blog supports and promotes. This is not to say they are no longer interested in food or blogging on a personal level, but their relationship to these activities has shifted. For example, Dusoulier has published numerous books, and was one of the first food bloggers to transition into professional food-related media. However, her career in food-related media—as a food writer, recipe developer and author—goes beyond the work of a petty producer. Dusoulier edited the first English-language edition of I Know How To Cook (Mathiot), which, first published in 1932 (in French), has been described as the “bible” of traditional French cookery. Her work revising this classic book reveals that, beyond being a high-profile member of the food blogging community, she is a key figure in wider food culture. Such professional food bloggers achieve a certain level of celebrity both within the food blogging community and in food-related media. This is reflective of broader media trends in which “ordinary” people are “plucked from obscurity to enjoy a highly circumscribed celebrity” (Turner 12), and, in this way, food bloggers challenge the idea that you need to be an “expert” to talk publicly about food. Food Blogging as an Established Genre Food blogs are often included alongside traditional food-related media as another source of food-related information. For example, the site Eat your books, which indexes cookbooks, providing users with an online tool for searching the recipes in the books they own, has begun to index food blogs as well. Likewise, in 2010, the James Beard Foundation announced that their prestigious journalism awards had “mostly abolished separate categories based on publishing platforms”, although they still have an award for best food blog (Fox online). This inclusion reflects how established food blogging has become. Over time, food blogs have co-evolved and converged with food-related media, offering greater diversity of opinion. Ganda Suthivarakom, a food blogger and now director of the SAVEUR website, says that “in 2004, to be a food blogger was to be an outsider in the world of food media. Today, it couldn’t be more different” (online). She argues that “food blogs leveled the playing field […] Instead of a rarefied and inaccessible group of print reviewers having a say, suddenly thousands of voices of varying skill levels and interests chimed in, and the conversation became livelier” (Suthivarakom online). It is worthwhile noting that while there are more voices and more diversity in traditional food-related media, food blogging has also become somewhat of a cliché: it has even been satirised in an episode of The Simpsons (Bailey and Anderson). As food blogging has evolved it has developed into an established and recognised genre, which may be nuanced to the bloggers themselves, but often appears generic to outsiders. Food blogging has, as it were, gone mainstream. As such, the thousands of voices are also somewhat of an echo chamber. In becoming established as a genre, food blogs reflect the gradual convergence of different types of food-related media. Food blogs are part of a wider trend towards user-generated, food-related online content. It could also be argued that reality shows take cues from food blogs in terms of their active audiences and use of social media. MasterChef in particular is supported by a website, a magazine, and active social media channels, reflecting an increasing expectation of audience participation and interactivity in the delivery of food-related information. Food bloggers have also arguably contributed to the increasingly image-driven nature of food-related media. They have also played a key role in the popularity of sharing photos of food through platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. Food Blogs and Food Trends Food blogs, like cookbooks, can be seen to both reflect and shape culture (Gallegos). In addition to providing an archive of what “ordinary” people are cooking on a scale not previously available, they have potential to influence food trends. Food bloggers are essentially food enthusiasts or “foodies”. According to De Solier, “most foodies see themselves as culturalists rather than materialists, people whose self-making is bound up in the acquisition of cultural experiences and knowledge, rather than the accumulation of material things” (16). As foodies, food bloggers are deeply engaged with food, keen to share their knowledge and, due to the essential and convivial nature of food, are afforded many opportunities to do so. As such, food blogs have influence beyond the food blogging community. For example, food bloggers could be seen to be responsible, in part at least, for the current popularity of macarons. These sweet, meringue-based biscuits were featured on the blog A la cuisine! in 2004—one of the earliest examples of the recipe in the food blogging community. Its popularity then steadily grew throughout the community, and has since been featured on high-profile and popular blogs such as David Lebovitz (2005), The Traveller’s Lunchbox (2005), and La Tartine Gourmand (2006). Creating and posting a recipe for macarons became almost a rite of passage for food bloggers. At a food blogging conference I attended in 2011, one blogger confided to me that she did not feel like a proper blogger because she had not yet made macarons. The popularity of macarons then extended beyond the food blogging community. They were the subject of a book, I Love Macarons (Ogita), first published in Japanese in 2006 and then in English in 2009, and featured in a cooking challenge on MasterChef (Byrnes), which propelled their popularity into mainstream food culture. Macarons, which could have once been seen as exclusive, delicate, and expensive (Jargon and Passariello) are now readily available, and can even be purchased at MacDonalds. Beyond the popularity of specific foods, the influence of food bloggers can be seen in the growing interest in where, and how, food is produced, coupled with concerns around food wastage (see, for example, Tristram). Concerns about food production are sometimes countered by the trend of making foods “from scratch,” a popular topic on food blogs, and such trends can also be seen in wider food culture, such as with classes on topics ranging from cheese making to butchering (Severson). These concerns are also evident in the growing interest in organic and ethical produce (Paish). Conclusion Food blogs have demonstrably revitalised an interest in recipe sharing among “ordinary” people. The evolution of food blogs, however, is just one part of the ongoing evolution of food-related media and recipe sharing technologies. Food blogs are also an important part of food culture, and indeed, culture more broadly. They reflect a renewed interest in folk culture and the trend towards “do-it-yourself”, seen in online and offline communities. Beyond this, food blogs provide a useful case study for understanding how our online and offline lives have become intertwined, and showcase the Internet as a part of everyday life. 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Introduction -- Making Sense of the (Virtual) World Computer games are never "just games". Computer games are models of reality and if they were not, we would never be able to understand them. Models serve three functions; they capture important, critical features of that which is to be represented while ignoring the irrelevant, they are appropriate for the person and they are appropriate for the task -- thereby enhancing the ability to make judgements and discover relevant regularities and structures (Norman 1993). Despite the inherently unvisualisable nature of computer code -- the flexible material of which all software constructs are built -- computer code is still the most "salient" ingredient in computer games. Less salient are those assumptions that are "built into" the software. By filtering out those parts of reality that are deemed irrelevant or unnecessary, different sorts of assumptions, different sorts of bias are automatically built into the software, reified in the very computer code (Friedman 1995, Friedman and Nissenbaum 1997). Here I will analyse some of the built-in structures that constitute the fabric of a special sort of game, a MUD. A MUD is an Internet-accessible "multi-participant, user-extensible virtual reality whose user interface is entirely textual" (Curtis, 1992). The specific MUD in question is a nine-year old Swedish-language adventure MUD called SvenskMUD ("SwedishMUD") that is run by Lysator, the academic computer club at Linköping University, Sweden. I have done field studies of SvenskMUD over a period of three and a half years (Pargman, forthcoming 2000). How is the SvenskMUD adventure world structured and what are the rules that are built into the fabric of this computer game? I will describe some of the ways in which danger and death, good and evil, courage, rewards and wealth are handled in the game. I will conclude the paper with a short analysis of the purpose of configuring the player according to those structures. Revocable Deaths Characters (personae/avatars) in SvenskMUD can be divided into two categories, players and magicians. Making a career as a player to a large part involves solving quests and killing "monsters" in the game. The magicians are all ex-players who have "graduated" and gone beyond playing the game of SvenskMUD. They have become the administrators, managers and programmers of SvenskMUD. A watchful eye is kept on the magicians by "God", the creator, owner and ultimate custodian of SvenskMUD. My own first battle in the game, in a sunlit graveyard with a small mouse, is an example of a bit-sized danger suitable for newcomers, or "newbies". I correctly guessed that the mouse was a suitably weak opponent for my newborn character, but still had to "tickle" the mouse on its belly (a euphemism for hitting it without much force) 50 times before I managed to kill it. Other parts of this epic battle included 45 failed attempts of mine to "tickle" the mouse, 39 successful "tickles" of the mouse and finally a wild chase around the graveyard before I caught up with the mouse, cornered it and managed to kill it and end the fight. Although I was successful in my endeavour, I was also more than half dead after my run-in with the mouse and had to spend quite some time engaged in more peaceful occupations before I was completely healed. It was only later that I learned that you can improve your odds considerably by using weapons and armour when you fight... Should a SvenskMUD player fail in his (or less often, her) risky and adventurous career and die, that does not constitute an insurmountable problem. Should such a thing pass, the player's ghost only has to find the way back to a church in one of the villages. In the church, the player is reincarnated, albeit with some loss of game-related abilities and experience. The way the unfortunate event of an occasional death is handled is part of the meta-rules of SvenskMUD. The meta-rules are the implicit, underlying rules that represent the values, practices and concerns that shape the frame from which the "ordinary" specific rules operate. Meta-rules are part of the "world view that directs the game action and represents the implicit philosophy or ideals by which the world operates" (Fine 1983, 76). Despite the adventure setting with all its hints of medieval lawlessness and unknown dangers lurking, SvenskMUD is in fact a very caring and forgiving environment. The ultimate proof of SvenskMUD's forgiveness is the revocable character of death itself. Fair Dangers Another SvenskMUD meta-rule is that dangers (and death) should be "fair". This fairness is extended so as to warn players explicitly of dangers. Before a dangerous monster is encountered, the player receives plenty of warnings: You are standing in the dark woods. You feel a little afraid. East of you is a small dark lake in the woods. There are three visible ways from here: east, north and south. It would be foolish to direct my character to go east in this situation without being adequately prepared for encountering and taking on something dangerous in battle. Those preparations should include a readiness to flee if the expected danger proves to be superior. If, in the example above, a player willingly and knowingly directs a character to walk east, that player has to face the consequences of this action. But if another player is very cautious and has no reason to suspect a deadly danger lurking behind the corner, it is not considered "fair" if that player's character dies or is hurt in such a way that it results in damage that has far-reaching consequences within the game. The dangerous monsters that roam the SvenskMUD world are restricted to roam only "dangerous" areas and it is considered good manners to warn players in some way when they enter such an area. Part of learning how to play SvenskMUD successfully becomes a matter of understanding different cues, such as the transition from a safe area to a dangerous one, or the different levels of danger signalled by different situations. Should they not know it in advance, players quickly learn that it is not advisable to enter the "Valley of Ultimate Evil" unless they have reached a very high level in the game and are prepared to take on any dangers that come their way. As with all other meta-rules, both players and magicians internalise this rule to such an extent that it becomes unquestionable and any transgression (such as a dangerous monster roaming around in a village, killing newbie characters who happen to stray its way) would immediately render complaints from players and corresponding actions on behalf of the magicians to rectify the situation. Meta-Rules as "Folk Ideas" Fine (1983, 76-8) enumerates four meta-rules that Dundes (1971) has described and applies them to the fantasy role-playing games he has studied. Dundes's term for these meta-rules is "folk ideas" and they reflect existing North American (and Western European) cultural beliefs. Fine shows that these folk ideas capture core beliefs or central values of the fantasy role-playing games he studied. Three of Dundes's four folk ideas are also directly applicable to SvenskMUD. Unlimited Wealth The first folk idea is the principle of unlimited good. There is no end to growth or wealth. For that reason, treasure found in a dungeon doesn't need a rationale for being there. This folk idea is related to the modernist concept of constant, unlimited progress. "Some referees even 'restock' their dungeons when players have found a particular treasure so that the next time someone enters that room (and kills the dragon or other beasties guarding it) they, too, will be rewarded" (Fine 1983, 76). To restock all treasures and reawaken all killed monsters at regular intervals is standard procedure in SvenskMUD and all other adventure MUDs. The technical term is that the game "resets". The reason why a MUD resets at regular intervals is that, while the MUD itself is finite, there is no end to the number of players who want their share of treasures and other goodies. The handbook for SvenskMUD magicians contains "design guidelines" for creating quests: You have to invent a small story about your quest. The typical scenario is that someone needs help with something. It is good if you can get the story together in such a way that it is possible to explain why it can be solved several times, since the quest will be solved, once for each prospective magician. Perhaps a small spectacle a short while after (while the player is pondering the reward) that in some way restore things in such a way that it can be solved again. (Tolke 1993, my translation) Good and Evil The second folk idea is that the world is a battleground between good and evil. In fantasy literature or a role-playing game there is often no in-between and very seldom any doubt whether someone encountered is good or evil, as "referees often express the alignment [moral character] of nonplayer characters through stereotyped facial features or symbolic colours" (Fine 1983, 77). "Good and evil" certainly exists as a structuring resource for the SvenskMUD world, but interestingly the players are not able to be described discretely in these terms. As distinct from role-playing games, a SvenskMUD player is not created with different alignments (good, evil or neutral). All players are instead neutral and they acquire an alignment as they go along, playing SvenskMUD -- the game. If a player kills a lot of mice and cute rabbits, that player will turn first wicked and then evil. If a player instead kills trolls and orcs, that player first turns good and then saint-like. Despite the potential fluidity of alignment in SvenskMUD, some players cultivate an aura of being good or evil and position themselves in opposition to each other. This is most apparent with two of the guilds (associations) in SvenskMUD, the Necromancer's guild and the Light order's guild. Courage Begets Rewards The third folk idea is the importance of courage. Dangers and death operate in a "fair" way, as should treasures and rewards. The SvenskMUD world is structured both so as not to harm or kill players "needlessly", and in such a way that it conveys the message "no guts, no glory" to the players. In different places in the MUD (usually close to a church, where new players start), there are "easy" areas with bit-sized dangers and rewards for beginners. My battle with the mouse was an example of such a danger/reward. A small coin or an empty bottle that can be returned for a small finder's fee are examples of other bit-sized rewards: The third folk idea is the importance of courage. Dangers and death operate in a "fair" way, as should treasures and rewards. The SvenskMUD world is structured both so as not to harm or kill players "needlessly", and in such a way that it conveys the message "no guts, no glory" to the players. In different places in the MUD (usually close to a church, where new players start), there are "easy" areas with bit-sized dangers and rewards for beginners. My battle with the mouse was an example of such a danger/reward. A small coin or an empty bottle that can be returned for a small finder's fee are examples of other bit-sized rewards: More experienced characters gain experience points (xps) and rise in levels only by seeking out and overcoming danger and "there is a positive correlation between the danger in a setting and its payoff in treasure" (Fine 1983, 78). Just as it would be "unfair" to die without adequate warning, so would it be (perceived to be) grossly unfair to seek out and overcome dangerous monsters or situations without being adequately rewarded. And conversely, it would be perceived to be unfair if someone "stumbled over the treasure" without having deserved it, i.e. if someone was rewarded without having performed an appropriately difficult task. Taken from the information on etiquette in an adventure MUD, Reid's quote is a good example of this: It's really bad form to steal someone else's kill. Someone has been working on the Cosmicly Invulnerable Utterly Unstoppable Massively Powerful Space Demon for ages, leaves to get healed, and in the interim, some dweeb comes along and whacks the Demon and gets all it's [sic] stuff and tons of xps [experience points]. This really sucks as the other person has spent lots of time and money in expectation of the benefits from killing the monster. The graceful thing to do is to give em [sic] all the stuff from the corpse and compensation for the money spent on healing. This is still a profit to you as you got all the xps and spent practically no time killing it. (Reid 1999, 122, my emphasis) The User Illusion An important objective of the magicians in SvenskMUD is to describe everything that a player experiences in the SvenskMUD world in game-related terms. The game is regarded as a stage where the players are supposed to see only what is in front of, but not behind the scenes. A consistent use of game-related terms and game-related explanations support the suspension of disbelief and engrossment in the SvenskMUD fantasy world. The main activity of the MUD users should be to enter into the game and guide their characters through a fascinating (and, as much as possible and on its own terms, believable) fantasy world. The guiding principle is therefore that the player should never be reminded of the fact that the SvenskMUD world is not for real, that SvenskMUD is only a game or a computer program. From this perspective, the worst thing players can encounter in SvenskMUD is a breakdown of the user illusion, a situation that instantly transports a person from the SvenskMUD world and leaves that person sitting in front of a computer screen. Error messages, e.g. the feared "you have encountered a bug [in the program]", are an example of this. If a magician decides to change the SvenskMUD world, that magician is supposed to do the very best to explain the change by using game-related jargon. This is reminiscent of the advice to "work within the system": "wherever possible, things that can be done within the framework of the experiential level should be. The result will be smoother operation and greater harmony among the user community" (Morningstar and Farmer 1991, 294). If for some reason a shop has to be moved from one village to another, a satisfactory explanation must be given, e.g. a fire occurring in the old shop or the old shop being closed due to competition (perhaps from the "new", relocated shop). Explanations that involve supernatural forces or magic are also fine in a fantasy world. Explanations that remind the player of the fact that the SvenskMUD world is not for real ("I moved the shop to Eriksros, because all magicians decided that it would be so much better to have it there"), or even worse, that SvenskMUD is a computer program ("I moved the program shop.c to another catalogue in the file structure") are to be avoided at all costs. Part of socialising magicians becomes teaching them to express themselves in this way even when they know better about the machinations of SvenskMud. There are several examples of ingenious and imaginative ways to render difficult-to-explain phenomena understandable in game-related terms: There was a simple problem that appeared at times that made the computer [that SvenskMUD runs on] run a little slower, and as time went by the problem got worse. I could fix the problem easily when I saw it and I did that at times. After I had fixed the problem the game went noticeably faster for the players that were logged in. For those occasions, I made up a message and displayed it to everyone who was in the system: "Linus reaches into the nether regions and cranks a little faster". (Interview with Linus Tolke, "God" in SvenskMUD) When a monster is killed in the game, it rots away (disappears) after a while. However, originally, weapons and armour that the monster wielded did not disappear; a lucky player could find valuable objects and take them without having "deserved" them. This specific characteristic of the game was deemed to be a problem, not least because it furthered a virtual inflation in the game that tended to decrease the value of "honestly" collected weapons and loot. The problem was discussed at a meeting of the SvenskMUD magicians that I attended. It was decided that when a monster is killed and the character that killed it does not take the loot, the loot should disappear ("rot") together with the monster. But how should this be explained to the players in a suitable way if they approach a magician to complain about the change, a change that in their opinion was for the worse? At the meeting it was suggested that from now on, all weapons and shields were forged with a cheaper, weaker metal. Not only would objects of this metal "rot" away together with the monster that wielded them, but it was also suggested that all weapons in the whole game should in fact be worn down as time goes by. (Not to worry, new ones appear in all the pre-designated places every time the game resets.) Conclusion -- Configuring the Player SvenskMUD can easily be perceived as a "blooming buzzing confusion" for a new player and my own first explorations in SvenskMUD often left me confused even as I was led from one enlightenment to the next. Not everyone feels inclined to take up the challenge to make sense of a world where you have to learn everything anew, including how to walk and how to talk. On the other hand, in the game world, much is settled for the best, and a crack in a subterranean cave is always exactly big enough to squeeze through... The process of becoming part of the community of SvenskMUD players is inexorably connected to learning to become an expert in the activities of that community, i.e. of playing SvenskMUD (Wenger 1998). A player who wants to program in SvenskMUD (thereby altering the fabric of the virtual world) will acquire many of the relevant concepts before actually becoming a magician, just by playing and exploring the game of SvenskMUD. Even if the user illusion succeeds in always hiding the computer code from the player, the whole SvenskMUD world constitutes a reflection of that underlying computer code. An implicit understanding of the computer code is developed through extended use of SvenskMUD. The relationship between the SvenskMUD world and the underlying computer code is in this sense analogous to the relationship between the lived-in world and the rules of physics that govern the world. All around us children "prepare themselves" to learn the subject of physics in school by throwing balls up in the air (gravity) and by pulling carts or sledges (friction). By playing SvenskMUD, a player will become accustomed to many of the concepts that govern the SvenskMUD world and will come to understand the goals, symbols, procedures and values of SvenskMUD. This process bears many similarities to the "primary socialisation" of a child into a member of society, a socialisation that serves "to make appear as necessity what is in fact a bundle of contingencies" (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 155). This is the purpose of configuring the player and it is intimately connected to the re-growth of SvenskMUD magicians and the survival of SvenskMUD itself over time. However, it is not the only possible outcome of the SvenskMUD socialisation process. The traditional function of trials and quests in fantasy literature is to teach the hero, usually through a number of external or internal encounters with evil or doubt, to make the right, moral choices. By excelling at these tests, the protagonist shows his or her worthiness and by extension also stresses and perhaps imputes these values in the reader (Dalquist et al. 1991). Adventure MUDs could thus socialise adolescents and reinforce common moral values in society; "the fantasy hero is the perfectly socialised and exemplary subject of a society" (53, my translation). My point here is not that SvenskMUD differs from other adventure MUDs. I would imagine that most of my observations are general to adventure MUDs and that many are applicable also to other computer games. My purpose here has rather been to present a perspective on how an adventure MUD is structured, to trace the meaning of that structure beyond the game itself and to suggest a purpose behind that organisation. I encourage others to question built-in bias and underlying assumptions of computer games (and other systems) in future studies. References Berger, P., and T. Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin, 1966. Curtis, P. "MUDding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities." High Noon on the Electronic Frontier. Ed. P. Ludlow. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1996. 13 Oct. 2000 <http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/virtual-reality/communications/papers/muds/muds/Mudding-Social-Phenomena.txt>. Dalquist, U., T. Lööv, and F. Miegel. "Trollkarlens lärlingar: Fantasykulturen och manlig identitetsutveckling [The Wizard's Apprentices: Fantasy Culture and Male Identity Development]." Att förstå ungdom [Understanding Youth]. Ed. A. Löfgren and M. Norell. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 1991. Dundes, A. "Folk Ideas as Units of World View." Toward New Perspectives in Folklore. Ed. A. Paredes and R. Bauman. Austin: U of Texas P, 1971. Fine, G.A. Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. Friedman, B. and H. Nissenbaum. "Bias in Computer Systems." Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology. Ed. B. Friedman. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997. Friedman, T. "Making Sense of Software: Computer Games and Interactive Textuality." Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed. S. Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. Morningstar, C. and F. R. Farmer. "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat." Cyberspace: The First Steps. Ed. M. Benedikt. Cambridge: MA, MIT P, 1991. 13 Oct. 2000 <http://www.communities.com/company/papers/lessons.php>. Norman, D. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993. Pargman, D. "Code Begets Community: On Social and Technical Aspects of Managing a Virtual Community." Ph.D. dissertation. Dept. of Communication Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, forthcoming, December 2000. Reid, E. "Hierarchy and Power: Social Control in Cyberspace." Communities in Cyberspace. Ed. M. Smith and P. Kollock. London, England: Routledge, 1999. Tolke, L. Handbok för SvenskMudmagiker: ett hjälpmedel för byggarna i SvenskMUD [Handbook for SvenskMudmagicians: An Aid for the Builders in SvenskMUD]. Printed and distributed by the author in a limited edition, 1993. Wenger, E. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Daniel Pargman. "The Fabric of Virtual Reality -- Courage, Rewards and Death in an Adventure MUD." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/mud.php>. Chicago style: Daniel Pargman, "The Fabric of Virtual Reality -- Courage, Rewards and Death in an Adventure MUD," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/mud.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Daniel Pargman. (2000) The Fabric of Virtual Reality -- Courage, Rewards and Death in an Adventure MUD. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/mud.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction The social roles of alcohol consumption are rich and varied, with different types of alcoholic beverages reflecting important symbolic and cultural meanings. Sparkling wine is especially notable for its association with secular and sacred celebrations. Indeed, sparkling wine is rarely drunk as a matter of routine; bottles of such wine signal special occasions, heightened by the formality and excitement associated with opening the bottle and controlling (or not!) the resultant fizz (Faith). Originating in England and France in the late 1600s, sparkling wine marked a dramatic shift in winemaking techniques, with winemakers deliberately adding “fizz” or bubbles to their product (Faith). The resulting effervescent wines were first enjoyed by the social elite of European society, signifying privilege, wealth, luxury and nobility; however, new techniques for producing, selling and distributing the wines created a mass consumer culture (Guy). Production of Australian sparkling wines began in the late nineteenth century and consumption remains popular. As a “new world” country – that is, one not located in the wine producing areas of Europe – Australian sparkling wines cannot directly draw on the same marketing traditions as those of the “old world”. One enterprising company, Treasury Wine Estates, markets a range of wines, including a sparkling variety, called 19 Crimes, that draws, not on European traditions tied to luxury, wealth and prestige, but Australia’s colonial history. Using Augmented Reality and interactive story-telling, 19 Crimes wine labels feature convicts who had committed one or more of 19 crimes punishable by transportation to Australia from Britain. The marketing of sparkling wine using convict images and convict stories of transportation have not diminished the celebratory role of consuming “bubbly”. Rather, in exploring the marketing techniques employed by the company, particularly when linked to the traditional drink of celebration, we argue that 19 Crimes, while fun and informative, nevertheless romanticises convict experiences and Australia’s convict past. Convict Heritage and Re-Appropriating the Convict Image Australia’s cultural heritage is undeniably linked to its convict past. Convicts were transported to Australia from England and Ireland over an 80-year period between 1788-1868. While the convict system in Australia was not predominantly characterised by incarceration and institutionalisation (Jones 18) the work they performed was often forced and physically taxing, and food and clothing shortages were common. Transportation meant exile, and “it was a fierce punishment that ejected men, women and children from their homelands into distant and unknown territories” (Bogle 23). Convict experiences of transportation often varied and were dependent not just on the offender themselves (for example their original crime, how willing they were to work and their behaviour), but also upon the location they were sent to. “Normal” punishment could include solitary confinement, physical reprimands (flogging) or hard labour in chain gangs. From the time that transportation ceased in the mid 1800s, efforts were made to distance Australia’s future from the “convict stain” of its past (Jones). Many convict establishments were dismantled or repurposed with the intent of forgetting the past, although some became sites of tourist visitation from the time of closure. Importantly, however, the wider political and social reluctance to engage in discourse regarding Australia’s “unsavoury historical incident” of its convict past continued up until the 1970s (Jones 26). During the 1970s Australia’s convict heritage began to be discussed more openly, and indeed, more favourably (Welch 597). Many today now view Australia’s convicts as “reluctant pioneers” (Barnard 7), and as such they are celebrated within our history. In short, the convict heritage is now something to be celebrated rather than shunned. This celebration has been capitalised upon by tourist industries and more recently by wine label 19 Crimes. “19 Crimes: Cheers to the Infamous” The Treasury Wine Estates brand launched 19 Crimes in 2011 to a target population of young men aged between 18 and 34 (Lyons). Two limited edition vintages sold out in 2011 with “virtually no promotion” (19 Crimes, “Canadians”). In 2017, 19 Crimes became the first wine to use an Augmented Reality (AR) app (the app was later renamed Living Wines Labels in 2018) that allowed customers to hover their [smart] phone in front of a bottle of the wine and [watch] mugshots of infamous 18th century British criminals come to life as 3D characters who recount their side of the story. Having committed at least one of the 19 crimes punishable by exile to Australia, these convicts now humor and delight wine drinkers across the globe. (Lirie) Given the target audience of the 19 Crimes wine was already 18-34 year old males, AR made sense as a marketing technique. Advertisers are well aware the millennial generation is “digitally empowered” and the AR experience was created to not only allow “consumers to engage with 19 Crimes wines but also explore some of the stories of Australia’s convict past … [as] told by the convicts-turned-colonists themselves!” (Lilley cited in Szentpeteri 1-2). The strategy encourages people to collect convicts by purchasing other 19 Crimes alcohol to experience a wider range of stories. The AR has been highly praised: they [the labels] animate, explaining just what went down and giving a richer experience to your beverage; engaging both the mind and the taste buds simultaneously … . ‘A fantastic app that brings a little piece of history to life’, writes one user on the Apple app store. ‘I jumped out of my skin when the mugshot spoke to me’. (Stone) From here, the success of 19 Crimes has been widespread. For example, in November 2020, media reports indicated that 19 Crimes red wine was the most popular supermarket wine in the UK (Lyons; Pearson-Jones). During the UK COVID lockdown in 2020, 19 Crimes sales increased by 148 per cent in volume (Pearson-Jones). This success is in no small part to its innovative marketing techniques, which of course includes the AR technology heralded as a way to enhance the customer experience (Lirie). The 19 Crimes wine label explicitly celebrates infamous convicts turned settlers. The website “19 Crimes: Cheers to the Infamous” incorporates ideas of celebration, champagne and bubbles by encouraging people to toast their mates: the convicts on our wines are not fiction. They were of flesh and blood, criminals and scholars. Their punishment of transportation should have shattered their spirits. Instead, it forged a bond stronger than steel. Raise a glass to our convict past and the principles these brave men and women lived by. (19 Crimes, “Cheers”) While using alcohol, and in particular sparkling wine, to participate in a toasting ritual is the “norm” for many social situations, what is distinctive about the 19 Crimes label is that they have chosen to merchandise and market known offenders for individuals to encounter and collect as part of their drinking entertainment. This is an innovative and highly popular concept. According to one marketing company: “19 Crimes Wines celebrate the rebellious spirit of the more than 160,000 exiled men and women, the rule breakers and law defying citizens that forged a new culture and national spirit in Australia” (Social Playground). The implication is that by drinking this brand of [sparkling] wine, consumers are also partaking in celebrating those convicts who “forged” Australian culture and national spirit. In many ways, this is not a “bad thing”. 19 Crimes are promoting Australian cultural history in unique ways and on a very public and international scale. The wine also recognises the hard work and success stories of the many convicts that did indeed build Australia. Further, 19 Crimes are not intentionally minimising the experiences of convicts. They implicitly acknowledge the distress felt by convicts noting that it “should have shattered their spirits”. However, at times, the narratives and marketing tools romanticise the convict experience and culturally reinterpret a difficult experience into one of novelty. They also tap into Australia’s embracement of larrikinism. In many ways, 19 Crimes are encouraging consumers to participate in larrikin behaviour, which Bellanta identifies as being irreverent, mocking authority, showing a disrespect for social subtleties and engaging in boisterous drunkenness with mates. Celebrating convict history with a glass of bubbly certainly mocks authority, as does participating in cultural practices that subvert original intentions. Several companies in the US and Europe are now reportedly offering the service of selling wine bottle labels with customisable mugshots. Journalist Legaspi suggests that the perfect gift for anyone who wants a sparkling wine or cider to toast with during the Yuletide season would be having a customisable mugshot as a wine bottle label. The label comes with the person’s mugshot along with a “goofy ‘crime’ that fits the person-appealing” (Sotelo cited in Legaspi). In 2019, Social Playground partnered with MAAKE and Dan Murphy's stores around Australia to offer customers their own personalised sticker mugshots that could be added to the wine bottles. The campaign was intended to drive awareness of 19 Crimes, and mugshot photo areas were set up in each store. Customers could then pose for a photo against the “mug shot style backdrop. Each photo was treated with custom filters to match the wine labels actual packaging” and then printed on a sticker (Social Playground). The result was a fun photo moment, delivered as a personalised experience. Shoppers were encouraged to purchase the product to personalise their bottle, with hundreds of consumers taking up the offer. With instant SMS delivery, consumers also received a branded print that could be shared so [sic] social media, driving increased brand awareness for 19 Crimes. (Social Playground) While these customised labels were not interactive, they lent a unique and memorable spin to the wine. In many circumstances, adding personalised photographs to wine bottles provides a perfect and unique gift; yet, could be interpreted as making light of the conditions experienced by convicts. However, within our current culture, which celebrates our convict heritage and embraces crime consumerism, the reframing of a mugshot from a tool used by the State to control into a novelty gift or memento becomes culturally acceptable and desirable. Indeed, taking a larrikin stance, the reframing of the mugshot is to be encouraged. It should be noted that while some prisons were photographing criminals as early as the 1840s, it was not common practice before the 1870s in England. The Habitual Criminals Act of 1869 has been attributed with accelerating the use of criminal photographs, and in 1871 the Crimes Prevention Act mandated the photographing of criminals (Clark). Further, in Australia, convicts only began to be photographed in the early 1870s (Barnard) and only in Western Australia and Port Arthur (Convict Records, “Resources”), restricting the availability of images which 19 Crimes can utilise. The marketing techniques behind 19 Crimes and the Augmented app offered by Living Wines Labels ensure that a very particular picture of the convicts is conveyed to its customers. As seen above, convicts are labelled in jovial terms such as “rule breakers”, having a “rebellious spirit” or “law defying citizens”, again linking to notions of larrikinism and its celebration. 19 Crimes have been careful to select convicts that have a story linked to “rule breaking, culture creating and overcoming adversity” (19 Crimes, “Snoop”) as well as convicts who have become settlers, or in other words, the “success stories”. This is an ingenious marketing strategy. Through selecting success stories, 19 Crimes are able to create an environment where consumers can enjoy their bubbly while learning about a dark period of Australia’s heritage. Yet, there is a distancing within the narratives that these convicts are actually “criminals”, or where their criminal behaviour is acknowledged, it is presented in a way that celebrates it. Words such as criminals, thieves, assault, manslaughter and repeat offenders are foregone to ensure that consumers are never really reminded that they may be celebrating “bad” people. The crimes that make up 19 Crimes include: Grand Larceny, theft above the value of one shilling. Petty Larceny, theft under one shilling. Buying or receiving stolen goods, jewels, and plate... Stealing lead, iron, or copper, or buying or receiving. Impersonating an Egyptian. Stealing from furnished lodgings. Setting fire to underwood. Stealing letters, advancing the postage, and secreting the money. Assault with an intent to rob. Stealing fish from a pond or river. Stealing roots, trees, or plants, or destroying them. Bigamy. Assaulting, cutting, or burning clothes. Counterfeiting the copper coin... Clandestine marriage. Stealing a shroud out of a grave. Watermen carrying too many passengers on the Thames, if any drowned. Incorrigible rogues who broke out of Prison and persons reprieved from capital punishment. Embeuling Naval Stores, in certain cases. (19 Crimes, “Crimes”) This list has been carefully chosen to fit the narrative that convicts were transported in the main for what now appear to be minimal offences, rather than for serious crimes which would otherwise have been punished by death, allowing the consumer to enjoy their bubbly without engaging too closely with the convict story they are experiencing. The AR experience offered by these labels provides consumers with a glimpse of the convicts’ stories. Generally, viewers are told what crime the convict committed, a little of the hardships they encountered and the success of their outcome. Take for example the transcript of the Blanc de Blancs label: as a soldier I fought for country. As a rebel I fought for cause. As a man I fought for freedom. My name is James Wilson and I fight to the end. I am not ashamed to speak the truth. I was tried for treason. Banished to Australia. Yet I challenged my fate and brought six of my brothers to freedom. Think that we have been nearly nine years in this living tomb since our first arrest and that it is impossible for mind or body to withstand the continual strain that is upon them. One or the other must give way. While the contrived voice of James Wilson speaks about continual strain on the body and mind, and having to live in a “living tomb” [Australia] the actual difficulties experienced by convicts is not really engaged with. Upon further investigation, it is also evident that James Wilson was not an ordinary convict, nor was he strictly tried for treason. Information on Wilson is limited, however from what is known it is clear that he enlisted in the British Army at age 17 to avoid arrest when he assaulted a policeman (Snoots). In 1864 he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and became a Fenian; which led him to desert the British Army in 1865. The following year he was arrested for desertion and was convicted by the Dublin General Court Martial for the crime of being an “Irish rebel” (Convict Records, “Wilson”), desertion and mutinous conduct (photo from the Wild Geese Memorial cited in The Silver Voice). Prior to transportation, Wilson was photographed at Dublin Mountjoy Prison in 1866 (Manuscripts and Archives Division), and this is the photo that appears on the Blanc de Blancs label. He arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia on 9 January 1868. On 3 June 1869 Wilson “was sentenced to fourteen days solitary, confinement including ten days on bread and water” (photo from the Wild Geese Memorial cited in The Silver Voice) for an unknown offence or breach of conduct. A few years into his sentence he sent a letter to a fellow Fenian New York journalist John Devoy. Wilson wrote that his was a voice from the tomb. For is not this a living tomb? In the tomb it is only a man’s body is good for the worms but in this living tomb the canker worm of care enters the very soul. Think that we have been nearly nine years in this living tomb since our first arrest and that it is impossible for mind or body to withstand the continual strain that is upon them. One or the other must give way. (Wilson, 1874, cited in FitzSimons; emphasis added) Note the last two lines of the extract of the letter have been used verbatim by 19 Crimes to create their interactive label. This letter sparked a rescue mission which saw James Wilson and five of his fellow prisoners being rescued and taken to America where Wilson lived out his life (Reid). This escape has been nicknamed “The Great Escape” and a memorial was been built in 2005 in Rockingham where the escape took place. While 19 Crimes have re-created many elements of Wilson’s story in the interactive label, they have romanticised some aspects while generalising the conditions endured by convicts. For example, citing treason as Wilson’s crime rather than desertion is perhaps meant to elicit more sympathy for his situation. Further, the selection of a Fenian convict (who were often viewed as political prisoners that were distinct from the “criminal convicts”; Amos) allows 19 Crimes to build upon narratives of rule breaking by focussing on a convict who was sent to Australia for fighting for what he believed in. In this way, Wilson may not be seen as a “real” criminal, but rather someone to be celebrated and admired. Conclusion As a “new world” producer of sparkling wine, it was important for 19 Crimes to differentiate itself from the traditionally more sophisticated market of sparkling-wine consumers. At a lower price range, 19 Crimes caters to a different, predominantly younger, less wealthy clientele, who nevertheless consume alcoholic drinks symbolic to the occasion. The introduction of an effervescent wine to their already extensive collection encourages consumers to buy their product to use in celebratory contexts where the consumption of bubbly defines the occasion. The marketing of Blanc de Blancs directly draws upon ideas of celebration whilst promoting an image and story of a convict whose situation is admired – not the usual narrative that one associates with celebration and bubbly. Blanc de Blancs, and other 19 Crimes wines, celebrate “the rules they [convicts] broke and the culture they built” (19 Crimes, “Crimes”). This is something that the company actively promotes through its website and elsewhere. Using AR, 19 Crimes are providing drinkers with selective vantage points that often sensationalise the reality of transportation and disengage the consumer from that reality (Wise and McLean 569). Yet, 19 Crimes are at least engaging with the convict narrative and stimulating interest in the convict past. Consumers are being informed, convicts are being named and their stories celebrated instead of shunned. Consumers are comfortable drinking bubbly from a bottle that features a convict because the crimes committed by the convict (and/or to the convict by the criminal justice system) occurred so long ago that they have now been romanticised as part of Australia’s colourful history. The mugshot has been re-appropriated within our culture to become a novelty or fun interactive experience in many social settings. For example, many dark tourist sites allow visitors to take home souvenir mugshots from decommissioned police and prison sites to act as a memento of their visit. The promotional campaign for people to have their own mugshot taken and added to a wine bottle, while now a cultural norm, may diminish the real intent behind a mugshot for some people. For example, while drinking your bubbly or posing for a fake mugshot, it may be hard to remember that at the time their photographs were taken, convicts and transportees were “ordered to sit for the camera” (Barnard 7), so as to facilitate State survelliance and control over these individuals (Wise and McLean 562). Sparkling wine, and the bubbles that it contains, are intended to increase fun and enjoyment. Yet, in the case of 19 Crimes, the application of a real-life convict to a sparkling wine label adds an element of levity, but so too novelty and romanticism to what are ultimately narratives of crime and criminal activity; thus potentially “making light” of the convict experience. 19 Crimes offers consumers a remarkable way to interact with our convict heritage. The labels and AR experience promote an excitement and interest in convict heritage with potential to spark discussion around transportation. The careful selection of convicts and recognition of the hardships surrounding transportation have enabled 19 Crimes to successfully re-appropriate the convict image for celebratory occasions. References 19 Crimes. “Cheers to the Infamous.” 19 Crimes, 2020. 14 Dec. 2020 <https://www.19crimes.com>. ———. “The 19 Crimes.” 19 Crimes, 2020. 14 Dec. 2020 <https://www.19crimes.com/en-au/the-19-crimes>. ———. “19 Crimes Announces Multi-Year Partnership with Entertainment Icon Snoop Dogg.” PR Newswire 16 Apr. 2020. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/19-crimes-announces-multi-year-partnership-with-entertainment-icon-snoop-dogg-301041585.html>. ———. “19 Crimes Canadians Not Likely to Commit, But Clamouring For.” PR Newswire 10 Oct. 2013. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/19-crimes-canadians-not-likely-to-commit-but-clamouring-for-513086721.html>. Amos, Keith William. The Fenians and Australia c 1865-1880. Doctoral thesis, UNE, 1987. <https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/12781>. Barnard, Edwin. Exiled: The Port Arthur Convict Photographs. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2010. Bellanta, Melissa. Larrikins: A History. University of Queensland Press. Bogle, Michael. Convicts: Transportation and Australia. Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 2008. Clark, Julia. ‘Through a Glass, Darkly’: The Camera, the Convict and the Criminal Life. PhD Dissertation, University of Tasmania, 2015. Convict Records. “James Wilson.” Convict Records 2020. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://convictrecords.com.au/convicts/wilson/james/72523>. ———. “Convict Resources.” Convict Records 2021. 23 Feb. 2021 <https://convictrecords.com.au/resources>. Faith, Nicholas. The Story of Champagne. Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2016. FitzSimons, Peter. “The Catalpa: How the Plan to Break Free Irish Prisoners in Fremantle Was Hatched, and Funded.” Sydney Morning Herald 21 Apr. 2019. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-catalpa-how-the-plan-to-break-free-irish-prisoners-in-fremantle-was-hatched-and-funded-20190416-p51eq2.html>. Guy, Kolleen. When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National identity. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. Jones, Jennifer Kathleen. Historical Archaeology of Tourism at Port Arthur, Tasmania, 1885-1960. PhD Dissertation, Simon Fraser University, 2016. Legaspi, John. “Need a Wicked Gift Idea? Try This Wine Brand’s Customizable Bottle Label with Your Own Mugshot.” Manila Bulletin 18 Nov. 2020. 14 Dec. 2020 <https://mb.com.ph/2020/11/18/need-a-wicked-gift-idea-try-this-wine-brands-customizable-bottle-label-with-your-own-mugshot/>. Lirie. “Augmented Reality Example: Marketing Wine with 19 Crimes.” Boot Camp Digital 13 Mar. 2018. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://bootcampdigital.com/blog/augmented-reality-example-marketing-wine-19-crimes/>. Lyons, Matthew. “19 Crimes Named UK’s Favourite Supermarket Wine.” Harpers 23 Nov. 2020. 14 Dec. 2020 <https://harpers.co.uk/news/fullstory.php/aid/28104/19_Crimes_named_UK_s_favourite_supermarket_wine.html>. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "John O'Reilly, 10th Hussars; Thomas Delany; James Wilson, See James Thomas, Page 16; Martin Hogan, See O'Brien, Same Page (16)." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1866. <https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dc-9768-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99>. Pearson-Jones, Bridie. “Cheers to That! £9 Bottle of Australian Red Inspired by 19 Crimes That Deported Convicts in 18th Century Tops List as UK’s Favourite Supermarket Wine.” Daily Mail 22 Nov. 2020. 14 Dec. 2020 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-8933567/19-Crimes-Red-UKs-favourite-supermarket-wine.html>. Reid, Richard. “Object Biography: ‘A Noble Whale Ship and Commander’ – The Catalpa Rescue, April 1876.” National Museum of Australia n.d. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/2553/NMA_Catalpa.pdf>. Snoots, Jen. “James Wilson.” Find A Grave 2007. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/19912884/james-wilson>. Social Playground. “Printing Wine Labels with 19 Crimes.” Social Playground 2019. 14 Dec. 2020 <https://www.socialplayground.com.au/case-studies/maake-19-crimes>. Stone, Zara. “19 Crimes Wine Is an Amazing Example of Adult Targeted Augmented Reality.” Forbes 12 Dec. 2017. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/zarastone/2017/12/12/19-crimes-wine-is-an-amazing-example-of-adult-targeted-augmented-reality/?sh=492a551d47de>. Szentpeteri, Chloe. “Sales and Marketing: Label Design and Printing: Augmented Reality Bringing Bottles to Life: How Treasury Wine Estates Forged a New Era of Wine Label Design.” Australian and New Zealand Grapegrower and Winemaker 654 (2018): 84-85. The Silver Voice. “The Greatest Propaganda Coup in Fenian History.” A Silver Voice From Ireland 2017. 15 Dec. 2020 <https://thesilvervoice.wordpress.com/tag/james-wilson/>. Welch, Michael. “Penal Tourism and the ‘Dream of Order’: Exhibiting Early Penology in Argentina and Australia.” Punishment & Society 14.5 (2012): 584-615. Wise, Jenny, and Lesley McLean. “Pack of Thieves: The Visual Representation of Prisoners and Convicts in Dark Tourist Sites.” The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture. Eds. Marcus K. Harmes, Meredith A. Harmes, and Barbara Harmes. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 555-73.

Connecting I’ve moved house on the weekend, closer to the centre of an Australian capital city. I had recently signed up for broadband, with a major Australian Internet company (my first contact, cf. Turner). Now I am the proud owner of a larger modem than I have ever owned: a white cable modem. I gaze out into our new street: two thick black cables cosseted in silver wire. I am relieved. My new home is located in one of those streets, double-cabled by Telstra and Optus in the data-rush of the mid-1990s. Otherwise, I’d be moth-balling the cable modem, and the thrill of my data percolating down coaxial cable. And it would be off to the computer supermarket to buy an ASDL modem, then to pick a provider, to squeeze some twenty-first century connectivity out of old copper (the phone network our grandparents and great-grandparents built). If I still lived in the country, or the outskirts of the city, or anywhere else more than four kilometres from the phone exchange, and somewhere that cable pay TV will never reach, it would be a dish for me — satellite. Our digital lives are premised upon infrastructure, the networks through which we shape what we do, fashion the meanings of our customs and practices, and exchange signs with others. Infrastructure is not simply the material or the technical (Lamberton), but it is the dense, fibrous knotting together of social visions, cultural resources, individual desires, and connections. No more can one easily discern between ‘society’ and ‘technology’, ‘carriage’ and ‘content’, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, or ‘infrastructure’ and ‘applications’ (or ‘services’ or ‘content’). To understand telecommunications in action, or the vectors of fibre, we need to consider the long and heterogeneous list of links among different human and non-human actors — the long networks, to take Bruno Latour’s evocative concept, that confect our broadband networks (Latour). The co-ordinates of our infrastructure still build on a century-long history of telecommunications networks, on the nineteenth-century centrality of telegraphy preceding this, and on the histories of the public and private so inscribed. Yet we are in the midst of a long, slow dismantling of the posts-telegraph-telephone (PTT) model of the monopoly carrier for each nation that dominated the twentieth century, with its deep colonial foundations. Instead our New World Information and Communication Order is not the decolonising UNESCO vision of the late 1970s and early 1980s (MacBride, Maitland). Rather it is the neoliberal, free trade, market access model, its symbol the 1984 US judicial decision to require the break-up of AT&T and the UK legislation in the same year that underpinned the Thatcherite twin move to privatize British Telecom and introduce telecommunications competition. Between 1984 and 1999, 110 telecommunications companies were privatized, and the ‘acquisition of privatized PTOs [public telecommunications operators] by European and American operators does follow colonial lines’ (Winseck 396; see also Mody, Bauer & Straubhaar). The competitive market has now been uneasily installed as the paradigm for convergent communications networks, not least with the World Trade Organisation’s 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services and Annex on Telecommunications. As the citizen is recast as consumer and customer (Goggin, ‘Citizens and Beyond’), we rethink our cultural and political axioms as well as the axes that orient our understandings in this area. Information might travel close to the speed of light, and we might fantasise about optical fibre to the home (or pillow), but our terrain, our band where the struggle lies today, is narrower than we wish. Begging for broadband, it seems, is a long way from warchalking for WiFi. Policy Circuits The dreary everyday business of getting connected plugs the individual netizen into a tangled mess of policy circuits, as much as tricky network negotiations. Broadband in mid-2003 in Australia is a curious chimera, welded together from a patchwork of technologies, old and newer communications industries, emerging economies and patterns of use. Broadband conjures up grander visions, however, of communication and cultural cornucopia. Broadband is high-speed, high-bandwidth, ‘always-on’, networked communications. People can send and receive video, engage in multimedia exchanges of all sorts, make the most of online education, realise the vision of home-based work and trading, have access to telemedicine, and entertainment. Broadband really entered the lexicon with the mass takeup of the Internet in the early to mid-1990s, and with the debates about something called the ‘information superhighway’. The rise of the Internet, the deregulation of telecommunications, and the involuted convergence of communications and media technologies saw broadband positioned at the centre of policy debates nearly a decade ago. In 1993-1994, Australia had its Broadband Services Expert Group (BSEG), established by the then Labor government. The BSEG was charged with inquiring into ‘issues relating to the delivery of broadband services to homes, schools and businesses’. Stung by criticisms of elite composition (a narrow membership, with only one woman among its twelve members, and no consumer or citizen group representation), the BSEG was prompted into wider public discussion and consultation (Goggin & Newell). The then Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE), since transmogrified into the Communications Research Unit of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), conducted its large-scale Communications Futures Project (BTCE and Luck). The BSEG Final report posed the question starkly: As a society we have choices to make. If we ignore the opportunities we run the risk of being left behind as other countries introduce new services and make themselves more competitive: we will become consumers of other countries’ content, culture and technologies rather than our own. Or we could adopt new technologies at any cost…This report puts forward a different approach, one based on developing a new, user-oriented strategy for communications. The emphasis will be on communication among people... (BSEG v) The BSEG proposed a ‘National Strategy for New Communications Networks’ based on three aspects: education and community access, industry development, and the role of government (BSEG x). Ironically, while the nation, or at least its policy elites, pondered the weighty question of broadband, Australia’s two largest telcos were doing it. The commercial decision of Telstra/Foxtel and Optus Vision, and their various television partners, was to nail their colours (black) to the mast, or rather telegraph pole, and to lay cable in the major capital cities. In fact, they duplicated the infrastructure in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne, then deciding it would not be profitable to cable up even regional centres, let alone small country towns or settlements. As Terry Flew and Christina Spurgeon observe: This wasteful duplication contrasted with many other parts of the country that would never have access to this infrastructure, or to the social and economic benefits that it was perceived to deliver. (Flew & Spurgeon 72) The implications of this decision for Australia’s telecommunications and television were profound, but there was little, if any, public input into this. Then Minister Michael Lee was very proud of his anti-siphoning list of programs, such as national sporting events, that would remain on free-to-air television rather than screen on pay, but was unwilling, or unable, to develop policy on broadband and pay TV cable infrastructure (on the ironies of Australia’s television history, see Given’s masterly account). During this period also, it may be remembered, Australia’s Internet was being passed into private hands, with the tendering out of AARNET (see Spurgeon for discussion). No such national strategy on broadband really emerged in the intervening years, nor has the market provided integrated, accessible broadband services. In 1997, landmark telecommunications legislation was enacted that provided a comprehensive framework for competition in telecommunications, as well as consolidating and extending consumer protection, universal service, customer service standards, and other reforms (CLC). Carrier and reseller competition had commenced in 1991, and the 1997 legislation gave it further impetus. Effective competition is now well established in long distance telephone markets, and in mobiles. Rivalrous competition exists in the market for local-call services, though viable alternatives to Telstra’s dominance are still few (Fels). Broadband too is an area where there is symbolic rivalry rather than effective competition. This is most visible in advertised ADSL offerings in large cities, yet most of the infrastructure for these services is comprised by Telstra’s copper, fixed-line network. Facilities-based duopoly competition exists principally where Telstra/Foxtel and Optus cable networks have been laid, though there are quite a number of ventures underway by regional telcos, power companies, and, most substantial perhaps, the ACT government’s TransACT broadband network. Policymakers and industry have been greatly concerned about what they see as slow takeup of broadband, compared to other countries, and by barriers to broadband competition and access to ‘bottleneck’ facilities (such as Telstra or Optus’s networks) by potential competitors. The government has alternated between trying to talk up broadband benefits and rates of take up and recognising the real difficulties Australia faces as a large country with a relative small and dispersed population. In March 2003, Minister Alston directed the ACCC to implement new monitoring and reporting arrangements on competition in the broadband industry. A key site for discussion of these matters has been the competition policy institution, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and its various inquiries, reports, and considerations (consult ACCC’s telecommunications homepage at http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm). Another key site has been the Productivity Commission (http://www.pc.gov.au), while a third is the National Office on the Information Economy (NOIE - http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/access/access/broadband1.htm). Others have questioned whether even the most perfectly competitive market in broadband will actually provide access to citizens and consumers. A great deal of work on this issue has been undertaken by DCITA, NOIE, the regulators, and industry bodies, not to mention consumer and public interest groups. Since 1997, there have been a number of governmental inquiries undertaken or in progress concerning the takeup of broadband and networked new media (for example, a House of Representatives Wireless Broadband Inquiry), as well as important inquiries into the still most strategically important of Australia’s companies in this area, Telstra. Much of this effort on an ersatz broadband policy has been piecemeal and fragmented. There are fundamental difficulties with the large size of the Australian continent and its harsh terrain, the small size of the Australian market, the number of providers, and the dominant position effectively still held by Telstra, as well as Singtel Optus (Optus’s previous overseas investors included Cable & Wireless and Bell South), and the larger telecommunications and Internet companies (such as Ozemail). Many consumers living in metropolitan Australia still face real difficulties in realising the slogan ‘bandwidth for all’, but the situation in parts of rural Australia is far worse. Satellite ‘broadband’ solutions are available, through Telstra Countrywide or other providers, but these offer limited two-way interactivity. Data can be received at reasonable speeds (though at far lower data rates than how ‘broadband’ used to be defined), but can only be sent at far slower rates (Goggin, Rural Communities Online). The cultural implications of these digital constraints may well be considerable. Computer gamers, for instance, are frustrated by slow return paths. In this light, the final report of the January 2003 Broadband Advisory Group (BAG) is very timely. The BAG report opens with a broadband rhapsody: Broadband communications technologies can deliver substantial economic and social benefits to Australia…As well as producing productivity gains in traditional and new industries, advanced connectivity can enrich community life, particularly in rural and regional areas. It provides the basis for integration of remote communities into national economic, cultural and social life. (BAG 1, 7) Its prescriptions include: Australia will be a world leader in the availability and effective use of broadband...and to capture the economic and social benefits of broadband connectivity...Broadband should be available to all Australians at fair and reasonable prices…Market arrangements should be pro-competitive and encourage investment...The Government should adopt a National Broadband Strategy (BAG 1) And, like its predecessor nine years earlier, the BAG report does make reference to a national broadband strategy aiming to maximise “choice in work and recreation activities available to all Australians independent of location, background, age or interests” (17). However, the idea of a national broadband strategy is not something the BAG really comes to grips with. The final report is keen on encouraging broadband adoption, but not explicit on how barriers to broadband can be addressed. Perhaps this is not surprising given that the membership of the BAG, dominated by representatives of large corporations and senior bureaucrats was even less representative than its BSEG predecessor. Some months after the BAG report, the Federal government did declare a broadband strategy. It did so, intriguingly enough, under the rubric of its response to the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry report (Estens), the second inquiry responsible for reassuring citizens nervous about the full-privatisation of Telstra (the first inquiry being Besley). The government’s grand $142.8 million National Broadband Strategy focusses on the ‘broadband needs of regional Australians, in partnership with all levels of government’ (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’). Among other things, the government claims that the Strategy will result in “improved outcomes in terms of services and prices for regional broadband access; [and] the development of national broadband infrastructure assets.” (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’) At the same time, the government announced an overall response to the Estens Inquiry, with specific safeguards for Telstra’s role in regional communications — a preliminary to the full Telstra sale (Alston, ‘Future Proofing’). Less publicised was the government’s further initiative in indigenous telecommunications, complementing its Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities (DCITA). Indigenous people, it can be argued, were never really contemplated as citizens with the ken of the universal service policy taken to underpin the twentieth-century government monopoly PTT project. In Australia during the deregulatory and re-regulatory 1990s, there was a great reluctance on the part of Labor and Coalition Federal governments, Telstra and other industry participants, even to research issues of access to and use of telecommunications by indigenous communicators. Telstra, and to a lesser extent Optus (who had purchased AUSSAT as part of their licence arrangements), shrouded the issue of indigenous communications in mystery that policymakers were very reluctant to uncover, let alone systematically address. Then regulator, the Australian Telecommunications Authority (AUSTEL), had raised grave concerns about indigenous telecommunications access in its 1991 Rural Communications inquiry. However, there was no government consideration of, nor research upon, these issues until Alston commissioned a study in 2001 — the basis for the TAPRIC strategy (DCITA). The elision of indigenous telecommunications from mainstream industry and government policy is all the more puzzling, if one considers the extraordinarily varied and significant experiments by indigenous Australians in telecommunications and Internet (not least in the early work of the Tanami community, made famous in media and cultural studies by the writings of anthropologist Eric Michaels). While the government’s mid-2003 moves on a ‘National Broadband Strategy’ attend to some details of the broadband predicament, they fall well short of an integrated framework that grasps the shortcomings of the neoliberal communications model. The funding offered is a token amount. The view from the seat of government is a glance from the rear-view mirror: taking a snapshot of rural communications in the years 2000-2002 and projecting this tableau into a safety-net ‘future proofing’ for the inevitable turning away of a fully-privately-owned Telstra from its previously universal, ‘carrier of last resort’ responsibilities. In this aetiolated, residualist policy gaze, citizens remain constructed as consumers in a very narrow sense in this incremental, quietist version of state securing of market arrangements. What is missing is any more expansive notion of citizens, their varied needs, expectations, uses, and cultural imaginings of ‘always on’ broadband networks. Hybrid Networks “Most people on earth will eventually have access to networks that are all switched, interactive, and broadband”, wrote Frances Cairncross in 1998. ‘Eventually’ is a very appropriate word to describe the parlous state of broadband technology implementation. Broadband is in a slow state of evolution and invention. The story of broadband so far underscores the predicament for Australian access to bandwidth, when we lack any comprehensive, integrated, effective, and fair policy in communications and information technology. We have only begun to experiment with broadband technologies and understand their evolving uses, cultural forms, and the sense in which they rework us as subjects. Our communications networks are not superhighways, to invoke an enduring artefact from an older technology. Nor any longer are they a single ‘public’ switched telecommunications network, like those presided over by the post-telegraph-telephone monopolies of old. Like roads themselves, or the nascent postal system of the sixteenth century, broadband is a patchwork quilt. The ‘fibre’ of our communications networks is hybrid. To be sure, powerful corporations dominate, like the Tassis or Taxis who served as postmasters to the Habsburg emperors (Briggs & Burke 25). Activating broadband today provides a perspective on the path dependency of technology history, and how we can open up new threads of a communications fabric. Our options for transforming our multitudinous networked lives emerge as much from everyday tactics and strategies as they do from grander schemes and unifying policies. We may care to reflect on the waning potential for nation-building technology, in the wake of globalisation. We no longer gather our imagined community around a Community Telephone Plan as it was called in 1960 (Barr, Moyal, and PMG). Yet we do require national and international strategies to get and stay connected (Barr), ideas and funding that concretely address the wider dimensions of access and use. We do need to debate the respective roles of Telstra, the state, community initiatives, and industry competition in fair telecommunications futures. Networks have global reach and require global and national integration. Here vision, co-ordination, and resources are urgently required for our commonweal and moral fibre. To feel the width of the band we desire, we need to plug into and activate the policy circuits. Thanks to Grayson Cooke, Patrick Lichty, Ned Rossiter, John Pace, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. Works Cited Alston, Richard. ‘ “Future Proofing” Regional Communications.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115485,00.php> —. ‘A National Broadband Strategy.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115486,00.php>. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Broadband Services Report March 2003. Canberra: ACCC, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm>. —. Emerging Market Structures in the Communications Sector. Canberra: ACCC, 2003. 15 July 2003 <http://www.accc.gov.au/pubs/publications/utilities/telecommu... ...nications/Emerg_mar_struc.doc>. Barr, Trevor. new media.com: The Changing Face of Australia’s Media and Telecommunications. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Besley, Tim (Telecommunications Service Inquiry). Connecting Australia: Telecommunications Service Inquiry. Canberra: Department of Information, Communications and the Arts, 2000. 17 July 2003 <http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/final_report.php>. Briggs, Asa, and Burke, Peter. A Social History of the Internet: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Broadband Advisory Group. Australia’s Broadband Connectivity: The Broadband Advisory Group’s Report to Government. Melbourne: National Office on the Information Economy, 2003. 15 July 2003 <http://www.noie.gov.au/publications/NOIE/BAG/report/index.htm>. Broadband Services Expert Group. Networking Australia’s Future: Final Report. 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Melbourne: Productivity Commission, 2001. <http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/telecommunications/finalreport/>, accessed 17 July 2003. Spurgeon, Christina. ‘National Culture, Communications and the Information Economy.’ Media International Australia 87 (1998): 23-34. Turner, Graeme. ‘First Contact: coming to terms with the cable guy.’ UTS Review 3 (1997): 109-21. Winseck, Dwayne. ‘Wired Cities and Transnational Communications: New Forms of Governance for Telecommunications and the New Media’. In The Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, ed. Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone. London: Sage, 2002. 393-409. World Trade Organisation. General Agreement on Trade in Services: Annex on Telecommunications. Geneva: World Trade Organisation, 1994. 17 July 2003 <http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/12-tel_e.htm>. —. Fourth protocol to the General Agreement on Trade in Services. 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MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "Broadband" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/02-featurebroadband.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. (2003, Aug 26). Broadband. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/02-featurebroadband.php>

“I realised some time ago that I am a showgirl. When I perform it is to show the girl, whereas some performers take the approach of caricaturing or ‘burlesquing’ the girl.” (Lola the Vamp) “Perhaps the most surprising idea of contemporary feminism is that women are female impersonators” (Tyler, 1) In recent years, femininity has been the subject of much debate in mainstream culture, as well as in feminist theory. The recent moral panic over “size zero” bodies is only the latest example of the anxieties and tensions generated by a culture in which every part of the female body is subject to endless surveillance and control. The backlash against the women’s movement of the late 20th century has seen the mainstreaming of high femininity on an unprecedented scale. The range of practices now expected of middle-class women, including cosmetic surgery, dieting, fake tanning, manicures, pedicures, and waxing (including pubic waxing) is staggering. Little wonder, then, that femininity has often been imagined as oppressive labour, as work. If women were to attempt to produce the ideal femininities promoted by women’s magazines in the UK, USA and Australia, there would be little time in the day—let alone money—for anything else. The work of femininity hence becomes the work of adapting oneself to a current set of social norms, a work of adaptation and adjustment that must remain invisible. The goal is to look natural while constantly labouring away in private to maintain the façade. Alongside this feminine ideal, a subculture has grown up that also promotes the production of an elaborately feminine identity, but in very different ways. The new burlesque is a subculture that began in club nights in London and New York, has since extended to a network of performers and fans, and has become a highly active community on the Internet as well as in offline cultural spaces. In these spaces, performers and audiences alike reproduce striptease performances, as well as vintage dress and styles. Performers draw on their own knowledge of the history of burlesque to create acts that may invoke late 19th-century vaudeville, the supper clubs of pre-war Germany, or 1950s pinups. However the audience for these performances is as likely to consist of women and gay men as the heterosexual men who comprise the traditional audience for such shows. The striptease star Dita von Teese, with her trademark jet-black hair, pale skin, red lips and tiny 16-inch corseted waist, has become the most visible symbol of the new burlesque community. However, the new burlesque “look” can be seen across a web of media sites: in film, beginning with Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), and more recently in The Notorious Bettie Paige (Mary Harron, 2005), as well as in mainstream movies like Mrs Henderson Presents (Stephen Frears, 2005); in novels (such as Louise Welsh’s The Bullet Trick); in popular music, such as the iconography of Kylie Minogue’s Showgirl tour and the stage persona of Alison Goldfrapp; and in high fashion through the work of Vivienne Westwood and Roland Mouret. Since the debut in the late 1990’s of von Teese’s most famous act, in which she dances in a giant martini glass, the new burlesque has arisen in popular culture as a counterpoint to the thin, bronzed, blonde ideal of femininity that has otherwise dominated popular culture in the West. The OED defines burlesque as “a comically exaggerated imitation, especially in a literary or dramatic work; a parody.” In this article, I want to think about the new burlesque in precisely this way: as a parody of feminine identity that, by making visible the work involved in producing feminine identity, precisely resists mainstream notions of feminine beauty. As Lola the Vamp points out in the quotation that opens this article, new burlesque is about “caricaturing or burlesquing the girl”, but also about “showing the girl”, not only in the literal sense of revealing the body at the end of the striptease performance, but in dramatising and making visible an attachment to feminine identity. For members of the new burlesque community, I want to suggest, femininity is experienced as an identity position that is lived as authentic. This makes new burlesque a potentially fruitful site in which to think through the questions of whether femininity can be adapted, and what challenges such adaptations might pose, not only for mainstream culture, but for feminist theory. As I have stated, feminist responses to mainstream femininity have emphasised that femininity is work; that is, that feminine identities do not emerge naturally from certain bodies, but rather have to be made. This is necessary in order to resist the powerful cultural discourses through which gender identities are normalised. This model sees femininity as additive, as something that is superimposed on some mystical “authentic” self which cries out to be liberated from the artificially imposed constraints of high heels, makeup and restrictive clothing. This model of femininity is summed up by Naomi Wolf’s famous statement, in The Beauty Myth, that “femininity is code for femaleness plus whatever society happens to be selling” (Wolf, 177; emphasis added). However, a potential problem with such a view of gender identity is that it tends to reproduce essentialist notions of identity. The focus on femininity as a process through which bodies are adapted to social norms suggests that there is an unmarked self that precedes adaptation. Sabina Sawhney provides a summary and critique of this position: Feminism seems to be relying on the notion that the authentic identity of woman would be revealed once the drag is removed. That is to say, when her various “clothes”—racial, ethnic, hetero/homosexual, class textured—are removed, the real, genuine woman would appear whose identity would pose no puzzles. But surely that is a dangerous assumption, for it not only prioritises certain forms of identity formation over others, but also essentialises a sexual or gendered identity as already known in advance. (5) As Sawhney suggests here, to see femininity only in terms of oppressive labour is implicitly essentialist, since it suggests the existence of a primary, authentic “femaleness”. Femininity consists of consumer “stuff” which is superimposed onto unproblematically female bodies. Sawhney is right, here, to compare femininity to drag: however, female and male femininities are read very differently in this account. Drag and cross-dressing are decried as deliberate (male) parodies of “women” (and it is interesting to note that parodies of femininity are inevitably misread as parodies of women, as though the two were the same). However, those women who engage in feminine identity practices are to be pitied, not blamed, or at least not explicitly. Femininity, the compulsion to adapt oneself to incorporate “whatever society is selling”, is articulated in terms of “social pressure”, as a miserable duty over which women have no control. As Samantha Holland argues, the danger is that women become positioned as “mindless consumers, in thrall to the power of media images” (10). Resisting the adaptations demanded by femininity thus becomes a way of resisting mindlessness, particularly through resisting excessive consumption. This anxiety about female excess is echoed in some of the press coverage of the burlesque scene. For example, an article in the British Sunday paper The Observer takes a sceptical position on some performers’ claims that their work is feminist, wondering whether the “fairy dust of irony really strips burlesque of any political dubiousness” (O’Connell, 4), while an article on a feminist Website argues that the movement “can still be interpreted as a form of exploitation of women’s bodies,” (DiNardo, 1), which rather suggests that it is the purpose of feminism to try and interpret all manifestations of femininity in this way: as if the writer is suggesting that feminism itself were a system for curbing feminine excess. This is not to deny that the new burlesque, like more mainstream forms of femininity, involves work. Indeed, a reading of online burlesque communities suggests that it is precisely the labour of femininity that is a source of pleasure. Many books and Websites associated with this movement offer lessons in stage performance; however, these real and virtual classes are not limited to those who wish to perform. In this subculture, much of the pleasure derives from a sense of community between performer and audience, a sense which derives mainly from the adaptation of a specific retro or vintage feminine identity. Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy offers courses in the more theatrical aspects of burlesque, such as stripping techniques, but also in subjects such as “makeup and wig tricks” and “walking in heels” (Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque). Burlesque, like cross-dressing suggests that femininity needs to be learnt: and learning femininity, in this sense, also involves unlearning whatever “one [usually restrictive] size fits all” forms of femininity are currently being sold by the fashion and beauty industries. In contrast to this normative model, the online accounts of burlesque fans and performers reveal an intense pleasure in creating and adapting new feminine identities within a subculture, through a “DIY” approach to femininity. This insistence on doing it yourself is important, since it is through the process of reclaiming vintage styles of clothing, hair and makeup that real adaptation takes place. Whereas mainstream femininity is positioned as empty consumption, and as a source of anxiety, burlesque is aligned with recycling, thrift shopping and the revival of traditional crafts such as knitting and weaving. This is most visible in magazines and Websites such as Bust magazine. This magazine, which launched in the early 1990s, was an early forerunner of the burlesque revival with its use of visual imagery taken from 1950s women’s magazines alongside pinups of the same era. The Website has been selling Bettie Page merchandise for some time alongside its popular Stitch n’ Bitch knitting books, and also hosts discussions on feminism, craft and “kitsch and make-up” (Bust). In the accounts cited above, femininity is clearly not imagined through an imperative to conform to social norms: instead, the practice of recovering and re-creating vintage looks is constructed as a pleasurable leisure activity that brings with it a sense of achievement and of engagement with a wider community. The appeal of burlesque, therefore, is not limited to a fetishistic preference for the trappings of burlesque or retro femininity: it is also defined by what it is not. Online discussions reveal a sense of dissatisfaction with more culturally visible forms of femininity promoted by celebrity culture and women’s magazines. Particular irritants include the low-maintenance look, skinniness, lip gloss, highlighted and layered hair, fake tan and, perhaps unexpectedly, jeans. These are seen as emblematic of precisely stereotypical and homogenising notions of feminine identity, as one post points out: “Dita VT particularly stands out in this day and age where it seems that the mysterious Blondifier and her evil twin, the Creosoter, get to every female celeb at some point.” (Bust Lounge, posted on Oct 17 2006, 3.32 am) Another reason for the appeal of New Burlesque is that it does not privilege slenderness: as another post says “i think i like that the women have natural bodies in some way” (Bust Lounge, posted on Oct 8 2006, 7:34 pm), and it is clear that the labour associated with this form of femininity consists of adorning the body for display in a way that opposes the dominant model of constructing “natural” beauty through invisible forms of labour. Burlesque performers might therefore be seen as feminist theorists, whose construction of a feminine image against normative forms of femininity dramatises precisely those issues of embodiment and identity that concern feminist theory. This open display and celebration of feminine identity practices, for example, makes visible Elizabeth Grosz’s argument, in Volatile Bodies, that all bodies are inscribed with culture, even when they are naked. A good example of this is the British performer Immodesty Blaize, who has been celebrated in the British press for presenting an ideal of beauty that challenges the cultural predominance of size zero bodies: a press cutting on her Website shows her appearance on the cover of the Sunday Times Style magazine for 23 April 2006, under the heading “More Is More: One Girl’s Sexy Journey as a Size 18” (Immodesty Blaize). However, this is not to suggest that her version of femininity is simply concerned with rejecting practices such as diet and exercise: alongside the press images of Immodesty in ornate stage costumes, there is also an account of the rigorous training her act involves. In other words, the practices involved in constructing this version of femininity entail bringing together accounts of multiple identity practices, often in surprising ways that resist conforming to any single ideal of femininity: while both the athletic body and the sexualised size 18 body may both be seen as sites of resistance to the culturally dominant slender body, it is unusual for one performer’s image to draw on both simultaneously as Blaize does. This dramatisation of the work involved in shaping the body can also be seen in the use of corsets by performers like von Teese, whose extremely tiny waist is a key aspect of her image. Although this may be read on one hand as a performance of conformity to feminine ideals of slimness, the public flaunting of the corset (which is after all a garment originally designed to be concealed beneath clothing) again makes visible the practices and technologies through which femininity is constructed. The DIY approach to femininity is central to the imperative to resist incorporation by mainstream culture. Dita von Teese makes this point in a press interview, in which she stresses the impossibility of working with stylists: “the one time I hired a stylist, they picked up a pair of my 1940’s shoes and said, these would look really cute with jeans. I immediately said, you’re out of here” (West, 10). With its constant dramatisation and adaptation of femininity, then, I would argue that burlesque precisely carries out the work which Grosz says is imperative for feminist theory, of problematising the notion of the body as a “blank, passive page” (156). If some feminist readings of femininity have failed to account for the multiplicity and diversity of feminine identity performances, it is perhaps surprising that this is also true of feminist research that has engaged with queer theory, especially theories of drag. As Carol-Ann Tyler notes, feminist critiques of drag performances have tended to read drag performances as a hostile parody of women themselves (60). I would argue that this view of drag as a parody of women is problematic, in that it reproduces an essentialist model in which women and femininity are one and the same. What I want to suggest is that it is possible to read drag in continuum with other performances, such as burlesque, as an often affectionate parody of femininity; one which allows female as well as male performers to think through the complex and often contradictory pleasures and anxieties that are at stake in performing feminine identities. In practice, some accounts of burlesque do see burlesque as a kind of drag performance, but they reveal that anxiety is not alleviated but heightened when the drag performer is biologically female. While drag is performed by male bodies, and hence potentially from a position of power, a female performer is held to be both complicit with patriarchal power, and herself powerless: the performance thus emanates from a doubly powerless position. Because femininity is imagined as a property of “women”, to parody femininity is to parody oneself and is hence open to being read as a performance of self-hatred. At best, the performer is herself held to occupy a position of middle class privilege, and hence to have access to what O’Connell, in the Observer article, calls “the fairy dust of irony” (4). For O’Connell however the performer uses this privilege to celebrate a normative, “politically dubious” form of femininity. In this reading, which positions itself as feminist, any potential for irony is lost, and burlesque is seen as unproblematically reproducing an oppressive model of feminine identities and roles. The Websites I have cited are aware of the potential power of burlesque as parody, but as a parody of femininity which attempts to work with the tensions inherent in feminine identity: its pleasures as well as its constraints and absurdities. Such a thinking-through of femininity is not the sole preserve of the male drag performer. Indeed, my current research on drag is engaged with the work of self-proclaimed female drag queens, also known as “bio queens” or “faux queens”: recently, Ana Matronic of the Scissor Sisters has spoken of her early experiences as a performer in a San Francisco drag show, where there is an annual faux-queen beauty pageant (Barber, 1). I would argue that there is a continuity between these performers and participants in the burlesque scene who may be conflicted about their relationship to “feminism” but are highly aware of the possibilities offered by this sense of parody, which is often articulated through an invocation of queer politics. Queer politics is often explicitly on the agenda in burlesque performance spaces; however the term “queer” is used not only to refer to performances that take place in queer spaces or for a lesbian audience, but to the more general way in which the very idea of women parodying femininity works to queer both feminist and popular notions of femininity that equate it with passivity, with false consciousness. While burlesque does celebrate extreme femininities, it does so in a highly self-aware and parodic manner which works to critique and denaturalise more normalised forms of femininity. It does so partly by engaging with a queer agenda (for example Miss Indigo’s Academy of Burlesque hosts lectures on queer politics and feminism alongside makeup classes and stripping lessons). New Burlesque stage performers use 19th- and 20th-century ideals of femininity to parody contemporary feminine ideals, and this satirical element is carried through in the audience and in the wider community. In burlesque, femininity is reclaimed as an identity precisely through aligning an excessive form of femininity with feminism and queer theory. This model of burlesque as queer parody of femininity draws out the connections as well as the discontinuities between male and female “alternative” femininities, a potentially powerful connectivity that is suggested by Judith Butler’s work and that disrupts the notion that femininity is always imposed on women through consumer culture. It is possible, then, to open up Butler’s writing on drag in order to make explicit this continuity between male and female parodies of femininity. Writing of the need to distinguish between truly subversive parody, and that which is likely to be incorporated, Butler explains: Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony (Gender Trouble, 177). The problem with this is that femininity, as performed by biologically female subjects, is still positioned as other, as that which presents itself as natural, but is destabilised by more subversive gender performances, such as male drag, that reveal it as performative. The moment of judgment, when we as queer theorists decide which performances are truly subversive and which are not, is divisive: having drawn out the continuity between male and female performances of femininity, it reinstates the dualistic order in which women are positioned as lacking agency. If a practice is ultimately incorporated by consumer culture, this does not necessarily mean that it is not troubling or politically interesting. Such a reductive and pessimistic reading produces “the popular” as a bad object in a way that reproduces precisely the hegemonic discourse it is trying to disrupt. In this model, very few practices, including drag, could be held to be subversive at all. What is missing from Butler’s account is an awareness of the complex and multiple forms of pleasure and desire that characterise women’s attachment to feminine identities. I would argue that she opens up a potentially exhilarating possibility that has significant implications for feminist understandings of feminine identity in that it allows for an understanding of the ways in which female performers actively construct, rework and critique feminine identity, but that this possibility is closed down through the implication that only male drag performances are “truly troubling” (Gender Trouble, 177). By allowing female performers to ”parody the girl”, I am suggesting that burlesque potentially allows for an understanding in which female performances of femininity may, like drag, also be “truly troubling” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 177). Like drag, they require the audience both to reflect on the ways in which femininity is performatively constructed within the constraints of a normative, gendered culture, but also do justice to the extent to which feminine identity may be experienced as a source of pleasure. Striptease, in which feminine identity is constructed precisely through painstakingly creating a look whose layers are then stripped away in a stylised performance of feminine gesture, powerfully dramatises the historic tension between feminism and femininity. Indeed, the labour involved in burlesque performances can be adapted and adopted as feminist theoretical performances that speak back to hegemonic ideals of beauty, to feminism, and to queer theory. References Barber, Lynn. “Life’s a Drag”. The Guardian 26 Nov. 2006, 10. Bust Lounge. 8 Mar. 2007 http://www.bust.com/>. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. ———. Undoing Gender. London and New York: Routledge, 2004 DiNardo, Kelly. “Burlesque Comeback Tries to Dance with Feminism.” Women’s E-News 2004. 1 Mar. 2007 http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2099>. Dita von Teese. 8 Mar. 2007 http://www.dita.net>. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a New Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Holland, Samantha. Alternative Femininities. London: Berg, 2004. Immodesty Blaize. 10 Apr. 2007 http://www.immodestyblaize.com/collage2.html>. Lola the Vamp. 8 Mar. 2006 http://www.lolathevamp.net>. Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque. 8 Mar. 2007 http://www.academyofburlesque.com>. O’Connell, Dee. “Tassels Will Be Worn.” The Observer 28 Sep. 2003, 4. Sawhney, Sabina. “Feminism and Hybridity Round Table.” Surfaces 7 (2006): 113. Tyler, Carol Ann. Female Impersonation. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. West, Naomi. “Art of the Teese.” Daily Telegraph online edition 6 Mar. 2006: 10. 1 Mar. 2007 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/main.jhtml?xml=/fashion/2006/03/06/efdita04.xml>. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. London: Chatto and Windus, 1990. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ferreday, Debra. "Adapting Femininities: The New Burlesque." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/12-ferreday.php>. APA Style Ferreday, D. (May 2007) "Adapting Femininities: The New Burlesque," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/12-ferreday.php>.

This article investigates the possibilities for understanding waste as a resource, with a particular focus on understanding food waste as a food resource. It considers the popular yeast spread Vegemite within this frame. The spread’s origins in waste product, and how it has achieved and sustained its status as a popular symbol of Australia despite half a century of Australian gastro-multiculturalism and a marked public resistance to other recycling and reuse of food products, have not yet been a focus of study. The process of producing Vegemite from waste would seem to align with contemporary moves towards recycling food waste, and ensuring environmental sustainability and food security, yet even during times of austerity and environmental concern this has not provided the company with a viable marketing strategy. Instead, advertising copywriting and a recurrent cycle of product memorialisation have created a superbrand through focusing on Vegemite’s nutrient and nostalgic value.John Scanlan notes that producing waste is a core feature of modern life, and what we dispose of as surplus to our requirements—whether this comprises material objects or more abstract products such as knowledge—reveals much about our society. In observing this, Scanlan asks us to consider the quite radical idea that waste is central to everything of significance to us: the “possibility that the surprising core of all we value results from (and creates even more) garbage (both the material and the metaphorical)” (9). Others have noted the ambivalent relationship we have with the waste we produce. C. T. Anderson notes that we are both creator and agent of its disposal. It is our ambivalence towards waste, coupled with its ubiquity, that allows waste materials to be described so variously: negatively as garbage, trash and rubbish, or more positively as by-products, leftovers, offcuts, trimmings, and recycled.This ambivalence is also crucial to understanding the affectionate relationship the Australian public have with Vegemite, a relationship that appears to exist in spite of the product’s unpalatable origins in waste. A study of Vegemite reveals that consumers can be comfortable with waste, even to the point of eating recycled waste, as long as that fact remains hidden and unmentioned. In Vegemite’s case not only has the product’s connection to waste been rendered invisible, it has been largely kept out of sight despite considerable media and other attention focusing on the product. Recycling Food Waste into Food ProductRecent work such as Elizabeth Royte’s Garbage Land and Tristram Stuart’s Waste make waste uncomfortably visible, outlining how much waste, and food waste in particular, the Western world generates and how profligately this is disposed of. Their aim is clear: a call to less extravagant and more sustainable practices. The relatively recent interest in reducing our food waste has, of course, introduced more complexity into a simple linear movement from the creation of a food product, to its acquisition or purchase, and then to its consumption and/or its disposal. Moreover, the recycling, reuse and repurposing of what has previously been discarded as waste is reconfiguring the whole idea of what waste is, as well as what value it has. The initiatives that seem to offer the most promise are those that reconfigure the way waste is understood. However, it is not only the process of transforming waste from an abject nuisance into a valued product that is central here. It is also necessary to reconfigure people’s acculturated perceptions of, and reactions to waste. Food waste is generated during all stages of the food cycle: while the raw materials are being grown; while these are being processed; when the resulting food products are being sold; when they are prepared in the home or other kitchen; and when they are only partly consumed. Until recently, the food industry in the West almost universally produced large volumes of solid and liquid waste that not only posed problems of disposal and pollution for the companies involved, but also represented a reckless squandering of total food resources in terms of both nutrient content and valuable biomass for society at large. While this is currently changing, albeit slowly, the by-products of food processing were, and often are, dumped (Stuart). In best-case scenarios, various gardening, farming and industrial processes gather household and commercial food waste for use as animal feed or as components in fertilisers (Delgado et al; Wang et al). This might, on the surface, appear a responsible application of waste, yet the reality is that such food waste often includes perfectly good fruit and vegetables that are not quite the required size, shape or colour, meat trimmings and products (such as offal) that are completely edible but extraneous to processing need, and other high grade product that does not meet certain specifications—such as the mountains of bread crusts sandwich producers discard (Hickman), or food that is still edible but past its ‘sell by date.’ In the last few years, however, mounting public awareness over the issues of world hunger, resource conservation, and the environmental and economic costs associated with food waste has accelerated efforts to make sustainable use of available food supplies and to more efficiently recycle, recover and utilise such needlessly wasted food product. This has fed into and led to multiple new policies, instances of research into, and resultant methods for waste handling and treatment (Laufenberg et al). Most straightforwardly, this involves the use or sale of offcuts, trimmings and unwanted ingredients that are “often of prime quality and are only rejected from the production line as a result of standardisation requirements or retailer specification” from one process for use in another, in such processed foods as soups, baby food or fast food products (Henningsson et al. 505). At a higher level, such recycling seeks to reclaim any reusable substances of significant food value from what could otherwise be thought of as a non-usable waste product. Enacting this is largely dependent on two elements: an available technology and being able to obtain a price or other value for the resultant product that makes the process worthwhile for the recycler to engage in it (Laufenberg et al). An example of the latter is the use of dehydrated restaurant food waste as a feedstuff for finishing pigs, a reuse process with added value for all involved as this process produces both a nutritious food substance as well as a viable way of disposing of restaurant waste (Myer et al). In Japan, laws regarding food waste recycling, which are separate from those governing other organic waste, are ensuring that at least some of food waste is being converted into animal feed, especially for the pigs who are destined for human tables (Stuart). Other recycling/reuse is more complex and involves more lateral thinking, with the by-products from some food processing able to be utilised, for instance, in the production of dyes, toiletries and cosmetics (Henningsson et al), although many argue for the privileging of food production in the recycling of foodstuffs.Brewing is one such process that has been in the reuse spotlight recently as large companies seek to minimise their waste product so as to be able to market their processes as sustainable. In 2009, for example, the giant Foster’s Group (with over 150 brands of beer, wine, spirits and ciders) proudly claimed that it recycled or reused some 91.23% of 171,000 tonnes of operational waste, with only 8.77% of this going to landfill (Foster’s Group). The treatment and recycling of the massive amounts of water used for brewing, rinsing and cooling purposes (Braeken et al.; Fillaudeaua et al.) is of significant interest, and is leading to research into areas as diverse as the development microbial fuel cells—where added bacteria consume the water-soluble brewing wastes, thereby cleaning the water as well as releasing chemical energy that is then converted into electricity (Lagan)—to using nutrient-rich wastewater as the carbon source for creating bioplastics (Yu et al.).In order for the waste-recycling-reuse loop to be closed in the best way for securing food supplies, any new product salvaged and created from food waste has to be both usable, and used, as food (Stuart)—and preferably as a food source for people to consume. There is, however, considerable consumer resistance to such reuse. Resistance to reusing recycled water in Australia has been documented by the CSIRO, which identified negative consumer perception as one of the two primary impediments to water reuse, the other being the fundamental economics of the process (MacDonald & Dyack). This consumer aversion operates even in times of severe water shortages, and despite proof of the cleanliness and safety of the resulting treated water. There was higher consumer acceptance levels for using stormwater rather than recycled water, despite the treated stormwater being shown to have higher concentrations of contaminants (MacDonald & Dyack). This reveals the extent of public resistance to the potential consumption of recycled waste product when it is labelled as such, even when this consumption appears to benefit that public. Vegemite: From Waste Product to Australian IconIn this context, the savoury yeast spread Vegemite provides an example of how food processing waste can be repurposed into a new food product that can gain a high level of consumer acceptability. It has been able to retain this status despite half a century of Australian gastronomic multiculturalism and the wide embrace of a much broader range of foodstuffs. Indeed, Vegemite is so ubiquitous in Australian foodways that it is recognised as an international superbrand, a standing it has been able to maintain despite most consumers from outside Australasia finding it unpalatable (Rozin & Siegal). However, Vegemite’s long product history is one in which its origin as recycled waste has been omitted, or at the very least, consistently marginalised.Vegemite’s history as a consumer product is narrated in a number of accounts, including one on the Kraft website, where the apocryphal and actual blend. What all these narratives agree on is that in the early 1920s Fred Walker—of Fred Walker and Company, Melbourne, canners of meat for export and Australian manufacturers of Bonox branded beef stock beverage—asked his company chemist to emulate Marmite yeast extract (Farrer). The imitation product was based, as was Marmite, on the residue from spent brewer’s yeast. This waste was initially sourced from Melbourne-based Carlton & United Breweries, and flavoured with vegetables, spices and salt (Creswell & Trenoweth). Today, the yeast left after Foster Group’s Australian commercial beer making processes is collected, put through a sieve to remove hop resins, washed to remove any bitterness, then mixed with warm water. The yeast dies from the lack of nutrients in this environment, and enzymes then break down the yeast proteins with the effect that vitamins and minerals are released into the resulting solution. Using centrifugal force, the yeast cell walls are removed, leaving behind a nutrient-rich brown liquid, which is then concentrated into a dark, thick paste using a vacuum process. This is seasoned with significant amounts of salt—although less today than before—and flavoured with vegetable extracts (Richardson).Given its popularity—Vegemite was found in 2009 to be the third most popular brand in Australia (Brand Asset Consulting)—it is unsurprising to find that the product has a significant history as an object of study in popular culture (Fiske et al; White), as a marker of national identity (Ivory; Renne; Rozin & Siegal; Richardson; Harper & White) and as an iconic Australian food, brand and product (Cozzolino; Luck; Khamis; Symons). Jars, packaging and product advertising are collected by Australian institutions such as Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, and are regularly included in permanent and travelling exhibitions profiling Australian brands and investigating how a sense of national identity is expressed through identification with these brands. All of this significant study largely focuses on how, when and by whom the product has been taken up, and how it has been consumed, rather than its links to waste, and what this circumstance could add to current thinking about recycling of food waste into other food products.It is worth noting that Vegemite was not an initial success in the Australian marketplace, but this does not seem due to an adverse public perception to waste. Indeed, when it was first produced it was in imitation of an already popular product well-known to be made from brewery by-products, hence this origin was not an issue. It was also introduced during a time when consumer relationships to waste were quite unlike today, and thrifty re-use of was a common feature of household behaviour. Despite a national competition mounted to name the product (Richardson), Marmite continued to attract more purchasers after Vegemite’s launch in 1923, so much so that in 1928, in an attempt to differentiate itself from Marmite, Vegemite was renamed “Parwill—the all Australian product” (punning on the idea that “Ma-might” but “Pa-will”) (White 16). When this campaign was unsuccessful, the original, consumer-suggested name was reinstated, but sales still lagged behind its UK-owned prototype. It was only after remaining in production for more than a decade, and after two successful marketing campaigns in the second half of the 1930s that the Vegemite brand gained some market traction. The first of these was in 1935 and 1936, when a free jar of Vegemite was offered with every sale of an item from the relatively extensive Kraft-Walker product list (after Walker’s company merged with Kraft) (White). The second was an attention-grabbing contest held in 1937, which invited consumers to compose Vegemite-inspired limericks. However, it was not the nature of the product itself or even the task set by the competition which captured mass attention, but the prize of a desirable, exotic and valuable imported Pontiac car (Richardson 61; Superbrands).Since that time, multinational media company, J Walter Thompson (now rebranded as JWT) has continued to manage Vegemite’s marketing. JWT’s marketing has never looked to Vegemite’s status as a thrifty recycler of waste as a viable marketing strategy, even in periods of austerity (such as the Depression years and the Second World War) or in more recent times of environmental concern. Instead, advertising copywriting and a recurrent cycle of cultural/media memorialisation have created a superbrand by focusing on two factors: its nutrient value and, as the brand became more established, its status as national icon. Throughout the regular noting and celebration of anniversaries of its initial invention and launch, with various commemorative events and products marking each of these product ‘birthdays,’ Vegemite’s status as recycled waste product has never been more than mentioned. Even when its 60th anniversary was marked in 1983 with the laying of a permanent plaque in Kerferd Road, South Melbourne, opposite Walker’s original factory, there was only the most passing reference to how, and from what, the product manufactured at the site was made. This remained the case when the site itself was prioritised for heritage listing almost twenty years later in 2001 (City of Port Phillip).Shying away from the reality of this successful example of recycling food waste into food was still the case in 1990, when Kraft Foods held a nationwide public campaign to recover past styles of Vegemite containers and packaging, and then donated their collection to Powerhouse Museum. The Powerhouse then held an exhibition of the receptacles and the historical promotional material in 1991, tracing the development of the product’s presentation (Powerhouse Museum), an occasion that dovetailed with other nostalgic commemorative activities around the product’s 70th birthday. Although the production process was noted in the exhibition, it is noteworthy that the possibilities for recycling a number of the styles of jars, as either containers with reusable lids or as drinking glasses, were given considerably more notice than the product’s origins as a recycled product. By this time, it seems, Vegemite had become so incorporated into Australian popular memory as a product in its own right, and with such a rich nostalgic history, that its origins were no longer of any significant interest or relevance.This disregard continued in the commemorative volume, The Vegemite Cookbook. With some ninety recipes and recipe ideas, the collection contains an almost unimaginably wide range of ways to use Vegemite as an ingredient. There are recipes on how to make the definitive Vegemite toast soldiers and Vegemite crumpets, as well as adaptations of foreign cuisines including pastas and risottos, stroganoffs, tacos, chilli con carne, frijole dip, marinated beef “souvlaki style,” “Indian-style” chicken wings, curries, Asian stir-fries, Indonesian gado-gado and a number of Chinese inspired dishes. Although the cookbook includes a timeline of product history illustrated with images from the major advertising campaigns that runs across 30 pages of the book, this timeline history emphasises the technological achievement of Vegemite’s creation, as opposed to the matter from which it orginated: “In a Spartan room in Albert Park Melbourne, 20 year-old food technologist Cyril P. Callister employed by Fred Walker, conducted initial experiments with yeast. His workplace was neither kitchen nor laboratory. … It was not long before this rather ordinary room yielded an extra-ordinary substance” (2). The Big Vegemite Party Book, described on its cover as “a great book for the Vegemite fan … with lots of old advertisements from magazines and newspapers,” is even more openly nostalgic, but similarly includes very little regarding Vegemite’s obviously potentially unpalatable genesis in waste.Such commemorations have continued into the new century, each one becoming more self-referential and more obviously a marketing strategy. In 2003, Vegemite celebrated its 80th birthday with the launch of the “Spread the Smile” campaign, seeking to record the childhood reminisces of adults who loved Vegemite. After this, the commemorative anniversaries broke free from even the date of its original invention and launch, and began to celebrate other major dates in the product’s life. In this way, Kraft made major news headlines when it announced that it was trying to locate the children who featured in the 1954 “Happy little Vegemites” campaign as part of the company’s celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the television advertisement. In October 2006, these once child actors joined a number of past and current Kraft employees to celebrate the supposed production of the one-billionth jar of Vegemite (Rood, "Vegemite Spreads" & "Vegemite Toasts") but, once again, little about the actual production process was discussed. In 2007, the then iconic marching band image was resituated into a contemporary setting—presumably to mobilise both the original messages (nutritious wholesomeness in an Australian domestic context) as well as its heritage appeal. Despite the real interest at this time in recycling and waste reduction, the silence over Vegemite’s status as recycled, repurposed food waste product continued.Concluding Remarks: Towards Considering Waste as a ResourceIn most parts of the Western world, including Australia, food waste is formally (in policy) and informally (by consumers) classified, disposed of, or otherwise treated alongside garden waste and other organic materials. Disposal by individuals, industry or local governments includes a range of options, from dumping to composting or breaking down in anaerobic digestion systems into materials for fertiliser, with food waste given no special status or priority. Despite current concerns regarding the security of food supplies in the West and decades of recognising that there are sections of all societies where people do not have enough to eat, it seems that recycling food waste into food that people can consume remains one of the last and least palatable solutions to these problems. This brief study of Vegemite has attempted to show how, despite the growing interest in recycling and sustainability, the focus in both the marketing of, and public interest in, this iconic and popular product appears to remain rooted in Vegemite’s nutrient and nostalgic value and its status as a brand, and firmly away from any suggestion of innovative and prudent reuse of waste product. That this is so for an already popular product suggests that any initiatives that wish to move in this direction must first reconfigure not only the way waste itself is seen—as a valuable product to be used, rather than as a troublesome nuisance to be disposed of—but also our own understandings of, and reactions to, waste itself.Acknowledgements Many thanks to the reviewers for their perceptive, useful, and generous comments on this article. All errors are, of course, my own. The research for this work was carried out with funding from the Faculty of Arts, Business, Informatics and Education, CQUniversity, Australia.ReferencesAnderson, C. T. “Sacred Waste: Ecology, Spirit, and the American Garbage Poem.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17 (2010): 35-60.Blake, J. The Vegemite Cookbook: Delicious Recipe Ideas. Melbourne: Ark Publishing, 1992.Braeken, L., B. Van der Bruggen and C. 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IntroductionEmpathy: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another, either in the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also: the capacity for this. (Merriam-Webster, “Empathy”)Compassion: sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it. (Merriam-Webster, “Compassion”)After thirty years of being a vegetarian, my eyes were opened to the inherent cruelty in animal-use industries. I became vegan and spoke out on these issues at animal rights events, rallies and ethical leadership forums. My private psychology practice attracted a significant number of vegans who presented with symptoms of anxiety and depression. However, unlike many of my non-vegan clients who were unclear as to what caused their symptoms, vegans reported it as being directly related to their discovery of systematised animal misuse in society. It was as if they had extended their compassion beyond their own species.Despite these issues being increasingly discussed in open circles, this extension of compassion seems to be limited to veganism. Why is veganism increasing as a compassionate centre, with animal social justice being at its core? Drawing on key emotional experiences of vegans, based on a survey conducted in 2018 and observational data from a private psychology practice, this article explores the experiences of compassion and empathy of vegans, and the impact such experiences can have on social change.The Increase in VeganismVeganism has noticeably increased over the past decade, with greater public debate in the media. A 2016 Roy Morgan poll indicated that the number of strict vegetarian adults in Australia was 2.1 million; an increase of nearly half a million people over four years, and likely to grow (Roy Morgan). Internationally, veganism was the biggest trend of 2018, with over three times the level of interest online as “vegetarian” or “gluten-free” (The Vegan Society).I believe there are a number of reasons for this, including greater awareness through social media, increased social mobility, and people becoming aware of international practices (Oberst). Photos and videos of animal suffering are more easily accessible via mobile devices, and can be shared at a faster rate than mainstream media could traditionally share news (Forgrieve). Small budget Indie films have also shared unknown information with the public, such as Earthlings, Dominion, Cowspiracy, and Kangaroo. In addition to this, I believe there is a greater propensity for people to challenge authority and previous direction from doctors or politicians in what is known as “the era of respect” (Mowat, Corrigan, and Long).These circumstances and more have led to an increase in people making more informed, kinder choices with regard to veganism; suggesting the opening of a new era of compassion beyond one’s own species. However, living in a world where the majority of people’s consumer choices facilitates animal abuse behind closed doors, the vegan is left struggling with “the burden of knowing”; knowledge of the facts of animal mistreatment and the inability to change it or successfully induce others to acknowledge it (Mann, Vystopia).Case Study ResearchBetween 2013 and 2018 I held individual psychological counselling sessions with over 100 self-selected vegans. For these case studies, the definition of “vegan” means someone who has chosen to live their life underpinned by the philosophy of the non-use and non-exploitation of animals and informs what they eat, wear, use and are involved in. These individuals reached out to me because of the trauma they reported experiencing since learning of the ubiquitous nature of animal cruelty in society. They claimed to feel more comfortable with a vegan professional who they felt understood their anguish.From these sessions, using the qualitative research methodology of hermeneutics (Rennie), I began to notice a pattern relating to the nature and enormity of the typical vegan’s distress. Almost every vegan who came to see me presented with symptoms related to their awareness of the systemised cruelty towards animals. Their distress was compounded when they shared this information with their friends and family, whom they were sure would be equally upset by it. Instead, many people responded with indifference, criticism, and anger, saying that everyone has a right to choose what to eat. These feelings of frustration and powerlessness left them unable to reconcile competing beliefs; that the people they loved were capable of turning their eyes away from the suffering their consumer choices were financing. The typical symptoms they reported included (fig. 1):Complicated griefMental anguishDepressionAnxietySelf-medicationAnger and despairSelf-harmSuicidal thoughtsHopelessnessLonelinessPost-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)Fig. 1: Typical symptoms reported by vegans in individual counselling sessions, 2013–2018.After over 1,300 hours of one-to-one sessions with vegans around the world, plus anecdotal stories from vegans I met at numerous events, I came to believe that the vegan’s pain is unique to being vegan and warrants a specific definition.It is imperative to me that vegans do not become labelled as mentally ill or chronically dysfunctional, for which the only solution is medication. As a fellow sufferer of the “burden of knowing”, I wanted to create a term to validate our experience and avoid medicalising our plight. Only then can the vegan’s experience be examined from a humane perspective and solutions be found to help us. Then, we can become part of the rising tide of social action that says human superiority and animal abuse is unacceptable. Because I believe that this experience and associated symptoms are existential in nature, I called this “Vystopia” (Mann, Vystopia).VystopiaThe Existential crisis experienced by vegans, arising out of an awareness of the trance-like collusion with a dystopian world and the awareness of the greed, ubiquitous animal exploitation, and speciesism in a modern dystopia. (Mann, “Suffer”)Vystopia is the anguish a vegan feels, knowing about the systematised cruelty towards animals in society, and the further distress they experience with the unconscious collusion of non-vegans, and their resistance or criticism of this information. Many of my clients experienced a range of symptoms of vystopia (fig. 2): Feelings of alienation from non-vegansMisanthropyGuilt over past consumption of animalsGuilt that they are not doing enough to save animalsInability to enjoy normal aspects of lifeFrustration with non-vegans who don’t ask more questionsAnger with the “burden of knowing”Powerlessness when health professionals tell them “it’s normal”Fig. 2: Symptoms of VystopiaMisdiagnosis of the Vegan’s ConditionMany doctors have referred patients to me for mental health symptoms of eating disorders, social adjustment disorder, and self-harm. It is my opinion that vegans referred to me with these symptoms do not suffer from traditional eating or self-harm disorders.As I learned from working in a psychiatric teaching hospital in the UK, clients with these conditions are often deeply unaware of the reasons influencing their symptoms. Their symptoms become an outward sign of hidden or unconscious distress which is too painful to confront directly. The vegans sent to me are deeply distressed due to the horror they’ve witnessed or now know about in the animal industries.I discovered that regularly viewing graphic videos of animal abuse was linked with vegan clients diagnosed as having self-harm tendencies (Klonsky). They view these as they feel guilty if they don’t know about all aspects of the animal’s suffering. It’s only by knowing all the details that they can be informed and act to change it. Vegan clients who have told their doctors they “can’t eat around people who are consuming animals” are often diagnosed as having eating disorders, although they lack the typical medical symptoms of eating disorders. While it is possible for vegans, like anyone else, to suffer from these conditions, I believe that many clients have been misdiagnosed. For many, their symptoms are indicative of a normal, feeling human’s way of dealing with vystopia: The truth is that it is not a pathology, but the distress a vegan feels when they look at the state of the world and the cruelty and suffering and it’s an absolutely rational response any feeling human being should feel; a dystopian reaction to what they are seeing. (Klaper)Survey ResearchBetween February and July 2018, I conducted an anonymous online survey of 820 vegans. The survey comprised 26 multiple-choice questions covering 7 main areas:How long someone has been veganLength they have experienced vystopiaWhen vystopia was most experiencedWhere people seek help for vystopiaWhat they do to reduce symptomsFamily and relationships where significant others are not veganWhat support is most needed to help vystopiansResultsWhilst an in-depth analysis of the results is outside the scope of this article, some of the key responses are as follows (figs. 3–6):How long have you been vegan?1–5 years48%Less than 6 months16%6–12 months14%5–10 years12%10 years plus10%Fig. 3: Length of time as vegan.How long have you suffered from vystopia?1–5 years39%5–10 years21%6–12 months15%Less than 6 months13%10 years plus12%Fig. 4: Length of time suffering from vystopia.When do you most experience vystopia?Others around you eat animals79%Seeing images of animal cruelty78%Other people refuse to hear about animal cruelty78%Grocery shopping69%People laugh at you for being vegan56%Family celebrations55%Holidays40%At work events39%All the time37%When away from vegan friends30%Other8%NB: Participants invited to tick all that apply Fig. 5: When vystopia is experienced.What do you do to reduce your vystopia?Remove yourself from the world58%Increase animal advocacy55%Talk to friends34%Self-medicate (e.g. alcohol, drugs, food)24%Other16%See a doctor2%Fig. 6: Actions taken to reduce vystopia.Explaining the Differences in Adoption of VeganismWhy do some people extend their compassion towards animals whilst others are unaware of the need to do so, or believe it is anthropomorphic or sentimental? Research is needed to examine this more, but my own research and anecdotal experience suggests some factors:Social ConformityMany people are strongly influenced by what they perceive as socially normal (Mallinson and Hatemi). Cultural and family traditions, media, and community behaviour all influence the food and lifestyle choices of society. Most people are unaware that their consumer choices play a role in the mistreatment and abuse of animals.Social conditioning influences whether people choose to investigate new information further or continue with the status quo for the sake of fitting in. The need to fit in creates a social trance whereby people continue to collude with animal cruelty through their inaction, and in fact their willful ignorance means they are not likely to change their actions, as they don’t know any differently.The vegan is one who has chosen to find out the truth about animal exploitation and extend their compassion towards other species by abstaining from anything related to animal abuse.Personal and Social Defense MechanismsSimilar to social conformity, the concept of being “different” from the perceived norm is enough for many people to continue with their actions, regardless of the consequence for animals. Similarly, those who are suddenly privy to new information may feel judged by the messenger, and resistance is easier than change. The vegan is one who chooses to adjust their actions, despite the judgement or ridicule which may accompany it.Personality VariablesOn the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers and Myers), my anecdotal experience suggests that individuals with preferences for “feeling” over “thinking” are more likely to become vegan. The vegan community consists of many different personality types, with those who are strong “feeling” types more inclined to display empathy and empathetic action.Avoidance of Existential Anxiety When a person’s understanding of the world is challenged, this can create anxiety, where one is compelled to ask, “What else don’t I know?” If animal cruelty can occur at such a widespread rate—with most of society oblivious to it—what else is going on behind closed doors? For some, the reality of facing the truth can create enough angst that they will resist knowing and changing. The vegan may still experience such angst, but is compelled to change for the sake of the animals. Differing Capacity to Encompass Novel IdeasIdeas which vary from a widely believed ideology are often rejected, simply because the new idea is too radical to believe or comprehend. Consider the Law of Gravity or the concept of germs, both initially shunned by experts. Some people are more willing to delve into a new concept and explore the possibilities which come with it. Others are firmly tied to conformist ideology and will only jump on the bandwagon once others are driving it.Differing Levels of ConsciousnessIn the original book on Spiral Dynamics, Beck and Cowan talk about the magnetic forces that attract and repel individuals, the webs that connect people within organisations, and influence the rise and fall of nations and cultures. The book tracks our historic emergence from clans and tribes to networks and inter-connected networks. It identifies seven variations on how change occurs in individuals, society and leadership.Its relevance for veganism is in appreciating that there are different levels of consciousness in society. For example, a vegan passionate about the ethical treatment of animals would be faced with resistance from a hunter with a more tribal level of consciousness, according to the Spiral Dynamics model. It would be like two people from different planets communicating. Another example would be a community outraged by the influence of veganism on local employment, as demand for dairy reduces. By understanding where other people or groups are coming from, we can adapt the way in which we communicate. If vegans talk ethics and non-speciesism to people focused primarily on job security, they will face resistance.Tipping PointsIn marketing, the uptake of products and services follows a certain pattern. For example, in the 1990s, few people believed that the mobile phone market would explode to such a point. The same goes for changes in collective beliefs and ideas in society, such as the early protagonists for the Abolition of Slavery. These early innovators and adopters faced enormous resistance by those who benefited from the trade. As the movement gathered momentum, it reached what Gladwell has called the “Tipping Point”, “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point” (12). As Gladwell stresses here, “ideas, products, messages and behaviours spread like viruses do” (7).In The Empathetic Civilization, Rifkin discusses society being wired for empathy. This occurs when the neurons in the brain mirror those of people around them, and can be likened to the psychological concept of “entrainment”. This phenomenon suggests that vegans have the ability to influence others through showing empathy and compassion.Increasingly, teenage vegans are referred to me who say, “I just had this awareness and know it is wrong to eat animals”. Many of them hadn’t seen anything on veganism or spoken to anyone about animal exploitation. I believe that this is an example of what Jung has called the “Collective Unconscious”; the structures of the unconscious mind which are shared among beings of the same species. This is encouraging for vegans who often feel helpless and cannot see how a vegan world will happen in their lifetime.ConclusionThose who are vegan for ethical reasons appear to feel compelled to take action to end animals’ plight. This may be because of the ubiquitous nature of the problem, but also because other people’s non-veganism is contributing to their vystopia.The extended compassion of vegans leaves them feeling depressed, wondering how enough people are going to change in order for veganism to become the new norm. The concept of entrainment is an encouraging one for vegans, reminding us of the importance of playing our part in being the example we want others to “entrain” to.It is my experience that empathy alone will not alleviate vystopia for these ethically-driven vegans. Vystopia can only be alleviated through action. A person may feel compelled to take action to end the suffering of refugees, children, the homeless and when they tell people, their efforts are applauded. The vegan who changes their everyday consumer choices to end animal suffering is often met with resistance, derision or criticism, as the non-vegan insists they have choice or that animals are inferior to humans. Another person may disagree with animal cruelty and yet refuse to change their consumer habits which finance the cruelty. One’s food choices are powerful political actions, and disagreeing with animal cruelty yet eating animals fuels the vegan’s vystopia. By shifting our focus from how awful the world is to taking action every day to mirror the vegan world we seek, we are creating a new norm to which others will entrain.With the increase in veganism trending upwards, the changes we are seeing across the world might mirror our compulsion to act. While the depth of animal empathy and vystopia is full of real anguish, I believe it also provides what we need to propel the world towards a vegan norm.ReferencesBeck, Don Edward, and Christopher Cowan. Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret. Dirs. Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn. Appian Way, A.U.M. Films, First Spark Media, 2014.Dominion. Dir. Chris Delforce. Aussie Farms, 2018.Earthlings. Dir. Shaun Monson. Libra Max and Maggie Q, 2005.Forgrieve, Janet. “The Growing Acceptance of Veganism.” Forbes 2 Nov. 2018. 29 Mar. 2018 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetforgrieve/2018/11/02/picturing-a-kindler-gentler-world-vegan-month/#331421342f2b>.Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. London: Abacus, 2000.Jung, Carl G. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. 1969.Kangaroo: A Love-Hate Story. Dirs. Michael McIntyre and Kate Clere-McIntyre. Hopping Pictures, 2017.Klaper, Michael. “Interview with Dr. Michael Klaper.” YouTube 17 Aug. 2018. 29 Mar. 2019 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=87&v=8EQOUODlq2c>.Klonsky, E. David. “The Functions of Deliberate Self-Injury: A Review of the Evidence.” Clinical Psychology Review 27.2 (2007): 226–39. Mallinson, Daniel J., and Peter K. Hatemi. “The Effects of Information and Social Conformity on Opinion Change.” Plos One 13.5 (2018). 29 Mar. 2019 <https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0196600>.Mann, Clare. “Do You Suffer from Vystopia? The Discovery of Systemised Cruelty.” Blog post. No date. 5 Apr. 2019 <https://www.veganpsychologist.com/do-you-suffer-from-vystopia/?platform=hootsuite>.———. Vystopia: The Anguish of Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World. Sydney: Communicate31, 2018.Mowat, Andrew, John Corrigan, and Douglas Long. The Success Zone: 5 Powerful Steps to Growing Yourself and Leading Others. Mt. Evelyn: Global Publishing Group, 2009.Myers, Isabel Briggs, and Peter B. Myers. Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type. 2nd ed. Mountain View: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1995.Oberst, Lindsay. “Why the Global Rise in Vegan and Plant-Based Eating Isn’t a Fad (600% Increase in U.S. Vegans + Other Astounding Stats).” Food Revolution Network 18 Jan. 2018. 20 Mar. 2019 <https://foodrevolution.org/blog/vegan-statistics-global/>. Rennie, David L. “Methodical Hermeneutics and Humanistic Psychology.” The Humanistic Psychologist 35.1 (2007): 1-14.Rifkin, Jeremy. The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Cambridge: Polity, 2010.Roy Morgan. “The Slow But Steady Rise of Vegetarianism in Australia.” Roy Morgan 15 Aug. 2016. 29 Mar. 2019 <http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/vegetarianisms-slow-but-steady-rise-in-australia-201608151105>.The Vegan Society. “Statistics.” The Vegan Society, 2019. 20 Mar. 2019 <https://www.vegansociety.com/news/media/statistics>.

The move from analog distribution to online digital delivery is common in the contemporary mediascape. Music is in the midst of an ipod driven paradigm shift (Levy), television and movie delivery is being reconfigured (Johnson), and newspaper and magazines are confronting the reality of the world wide web and what it means for business models and ideas of journalism (Beecher). In the midst of this change, the book publishing industry remains defiant. While embracing digital production technologies, the vast majority of book content is still delivered in material form, printed and shipped the old-fashioned way—despite the efforts of many technology companies over the last decade. Even the latest efforts from corporate giants such as Sony and Amazon (who appear to have solved many of the technical hurdles of electronic reading devices) have had little visible impact. The idea of electronic books, or e-books, remains the domain of geeky early adopters (“Have”). The reasons for this are manifold, but, arguably, a broader uptake of e-books has not occurred because cultural change is much more difficult than technological change and book readers have yet to be persuaded to change their cultural habits. Electronic reading devices have been around for as long as there have been computers with screens, but serious attempts to replicate the portability, readability, and convenience of a printed book have only been with us for a decade or so. The late 1990s saw the release of a number of e-book devices. In quick succession, the likes of the Rocket e-Book, the SoftBook and the Franklin eBookman all failed to catch on. Despite this lack of market penetration, software companies began to explore the possibilities—Microsoft’s Reader software competed with a similar product from Adobe, some publishers became content providers, and a niche market of consumers began reading e-books on personal digital assistants (PDAs). That niche was sufficient for e-reading communities and shopfronts to appear, with a reasonable range of titles becoming available for purchase to feed demand that was very much driven by early adopters. But the e-book market was and remains small. For most people, books are still regarded as printed paper objects, purchased from a bookstore, borrowed from a library, or bought online from companies like Amazon.com. More recently, the introduction of e-ink technologies (EPDs) (DeJean), which allow for screens with far more book-like resolution and contrast, has provided the impetus for a new generation of e-book devices. In combination with an expanded range of titles (and deals with major publishing houses to include current best-sellers), there has been renewed interest in the idea of e-books. Those who have used the current generation of e-ink devices are generally positive about the experience. Except for some sluggishness in “turning” pages, the screens appear crisp, clear and are not as tiring to read as older displays. There are a number of devices that have embraced the new screen technologies (mobileread) but most attention has been paid to three devices in particular—mainly because their manufacturers have tried to create an ecosystem that provides content for their reading devices in much the same way that Apple’s itunes store provides content for ipods. The Sony Portable Reader (Sonystyle) was the first electronic ink device to be produced by a mainstream consumers electronics company. Sony ties the Reader to its Connect store, which allows the purchase of book titles via a computer; titles are then downloaded to the Reader in the same way that an mp3 player is loaded with music. Sony’s most prominent competition in the marketplace is Amazon’s Kindle, which does not require users to have a computer. Instead, its key feature is a constant wireless connection to Amazon’s growing library of Kindle titles. This works in conjunction with US cellphone provider Sprint to allow the purchase of books via wireless downloads wherever the Sprint network exists. The system, which Amazon calls “whispernet,” is invisible to readers and the cost is incorporated into the price of books, so Kindle users never see a bill from Sprint (“Frequently”). Both the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle are available only in limited markets; Kindle’s reliance on a cellphone network means that its adoption internationally is dependent on Amazon establishing a relationship with a cellphone provider in each country of release. And because both devices are linked to e-bookstores, territorial rights issues with book publishers (who trade publishing rights for particular global territories in a colonial-era mode of operation that seems to ignore the reality of global information mobility (Thompson 74–77)) contribute to the restricted availability of both the Sony and Amazon products. The other mainstream device is the iRex Iliad, which is not constrained to a particular online bookstore and thus is available internationally. Its bookstore ecosystems are local relationships—with Dymocks in Australia, Borders in the UK, and other booksellers across Europe (iRex). All three devices use EPDs and share similar specifications for the actual reading of e-books. Some might argue that the lack of a search function in the Sony and the ability to write on pages in the Iliad are quite substantive differences, but overall the devices are distinguished by their availability and the accessibility of book titles. Those who have used the devices extensively are generally positive about the experience. Amazon’s Customer Reviews are full of positive comments, and the sense from many commentators is that the systems are a viable replacement for old-fashioned printed books (Marr). Despite the good reviews—which suggest that the technology is actually now good enough to compete with printed books—the e-book devices have failed to catch on. Amazon has been hesitant to state actual sales figures, leaving it to so-called analysts to guess with the most optimistic suggesting that only 30 to 50,000 have sold since launch in late 2007 (Sridharan). By comparison, a mid-list book title (in the US) would expect to sell a similar number of copies. The sales data for the Sony Portable Reader (which has been on the market for nearly two years) and the iRex iliad are also elusive (Slocum), suggesting that they have not meaningfully changed the landscape. Tellingly, despite the new devices, the e-book industry is still tiny. Although it is growing, the latest American data show that the e-book market has wholesale revenues of around $10 million per quarter (or around $40 million per year), which is dwarfed by the $35 billion in revenues regularly earned annually in the US printed book industry ("Book"). It’s clear that despite the technological advances, e-books have yet to cross the chasm from early adopter to mainstream usage (see IPDF). The reason for this is complex; there are issues of marketing and distribution that need to be considered, as well as continuing arguments about screen technologies, appropriate publishing models, and digital rights management. It is beyond the scope of this article to do justice to those issues. Suffice to say, the book industry is affected by the same debates over content that plague other media industries (Vershbow). But, arguably, the key reason for the minimal market impact is straightforward—technological change is relatively easy, but cultural change is much more difficult. The current generation of e-book devices might be technically very close to being a viable replacement for print on paper (and the next generation of devices will no doubt be even better), but there are bigger cultural hurdles to be overcome. For most people, the social practice of reading books (du Gay et al 10) is inextricably tied with printed objects and a print culture that is not yet commonly associated with “technology” (perhaps because books, as machines for reading (Young 160), have become an invisible technology (Norman 246)). E. Annie Proulx’s dismissive suggestion that “nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever” (1994) is commonly echoed when book buyers consider the digital alternative. Those thoughts only scratch the surface of a deeply embedded cultural practice. The centuries since Gutenberg’s printing press and the vast social and cultural changes that followed positioned print culture as the dominant cultural mode until relatively recently (Eisenstein; Ong). The emerging electronic media forms of the twentieth century displaced that dominance with many arguing that the print age was moved aside by first radio and television and now computers and the Internet (McLuhan; Postman). Indeed, there is a subtext in that line of thought, one that situates electronic media forms (particularly screen-based ones) as the antithesis of print and book culture. Current e-book reading devices attempt to minimise the need for cultural change by trying to replicate a print culture within an e-print culture. For the most part, they are designed to appeal to book readers as a replacement for printed books. But it will take more than a perfect electronic facsimile of print on paper to persuade readers to disengage with a print culture that incorporates bookshops, bookclubs, writing in the margins, touching and smelling the pages and covers, admiring the typesetting, showing off their bookshelves, and visibly identifying with their collections. The frequently made technical arguments (about flashing screens and reading in the bath (Randolph)) do not address the broader apprehension about a cultural experience that many readers do not wish to leave behind. It is in that context that booklovers appear particularly resistant to any shift from print to a screen-based format. One only has to engage in a discussion about e-books (or lurk on an online forum where one is happening) to appreciate how deeply embedded print culture is (Hepworth)—book readers have a historical attachment to the printed object and it is this embedded cultural resistance that is the biggest barrier for e-books to overcome. Although e-book devices in no way resemble television, print culture is still deeply suspicious of any screen-based media and arguments are often made that the book as a physical object is critical because “different types of media function differently, and even if the content is similar the form matters quite a lot” (Weber). Of course, many in the newspaper industry would argue that long-standing cultural habits can change very rapidly and the migration of eyeballs from newsprint to the Internet is a cautionary tale (see Auckland). That specific format shift saw cultural change driven by increased convenience and a perception of decreased cost. For those already connected to the Internet, reading newspapers online represented zero marginal cost, and the range of online offerings dwarfed that of the local newsagency. The advantage of immediacy and multimedia elements, and the possibility of immediate feedback, appeared sufficient to drive many away from print towards online newspapers.For a similar shift in the e-book realm, there must be similar incentives for readers. At the moment, the only advantages on offer are weightlessness (which only appeals to frequent travellers) and convenience via constant access to a heavenly library of titles (Young 150). Amazon’s Kindle bookshop can be accessed 24/7 from anywhere there is a Sprint network coverage (Nelson). However, even this advantage is not so clear-cut—there is a meagre range of available electronic titles compared to printed offerings. For example, Amazon claims 130,000 titles are currently available for Kindle and Sony has 50,000 for its Reader, figures that are dwarfed by Amazon’s own printed book range. Importantly, there is little apparent cost advantage to e-books. The price of electronic reading devices is significant, amounting to a few hundred dollars to which must be added the cost of e-books. The actual cost of those titles is also not as attractive as it might be. In an age where much digital content often appears to be free, consumers demand a significant price advantage for purchasing online. Although some e-book titles are priced more affordably than their printed counterparts, the cost of many seems strangely high given the lack of a physical object to print and ship. For example, Amazon Kindle titles might be cheaper than the print version, but the actual difference (after discounting) is not an order of magnitude, but of degree. For example, Randy Pausch’s bestselling The Last Lecture is available for $12.07 as a paperback or $9.99 as a Kindle edition (“Last”). For casual readers, the numbers make no sense—when the price of the reading device is included, the actual cost is prohibitive for those who only buy a few titles a year. At the moment, e-books only make sense for heavy readers for whom the additional cost of the reading device will be amortised over a large number of books in a reasonably short time. (A recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggested that the break-even point for the Kindle was the purchase of 61 books (Arends).) Unfortunately for the e-book industry, not is only is that particular market relatively small, it is the one least likely to shift from the embedded habits of print culture. Arguably, should e-books eventually offer a significant cost benefit for consumers, uptake would be more dramatic. However, in his study of cellphone cultures, Gerard Goggin argues against purely fiscal motivations, suggesting that cultural change is driven by other factors—in his example, new ways of communicating, connecting, and engaging (205–211). The few market segments where electronic books have succeeded are informative. For example, the market for printed encyclopedias has essentially disappeared. Most have reinvented themselves as CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs and are sold for a fraction of the price. Although cost is undoubtedly a factor in their market success, added features such as multimedia, searchability, and immediacy via associated websites are compelling reasons driving the purchase of electronic encyclopedias over the printed versions. The contrast with the aforementioned e-book devices is apparent with encyclopedias moving away from their historical role in print culture. Electronic encyclopedias don’t try to replicate the older print forms. Rather they represent a dramatic shift of book content into an interactive audio-visual domain. They have experimented with new formats and reconfigured content for the new media forms—the publishers in question simply left print culture behind and embraced a newly emerging computer or multimedia culture. This step into another realm of social practices also happened in the academic realm, which is now deeply embedded in computer-based delivery of research and pedagogy. Not only are scholarly journals moving online (Thompson 320–325), but so too are scholarly books. For example, at the Macquarie University Library, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of electronic books in the collection. The library purchased 895 e-books in 2005 and 68,000 in 2007. During the same period, the number of printed books purchased remained relatively stable with about 16,000 bought annually (Macquarie University Library). The reasons for the dramatic increase in e-book purchases are manifold and not primarily driven by cost considerations. Not only does the library have limited space for physical storage, but Macquarie (like most other Universities) emphasises its e-learning environment. In that context, a single e-book allows multiple, geographically dispersed, simultaneous access, which better suits the flexibility demanded of the current generation of students. Significantly, these e-books require no electronic reading device beyond a standard computer with an internet connection. Users simply search for their required reading online and read it via their web browser—the library is operating in a pedagogical culture that assumes that staff and students have ready access to the necessary resources and are happy to read large amounts of text on a screen. Again, gestures towards print culture are minimal, and the e-books in question exist in a completely different distributed electronic environment. Another interesting example is that of mobile phone novels, or “keitai” fiction, popular in Japan. These novels typically consist of a few hundred pages, each of which contains about 500 Japanese characters. They are downloaded to (and read on) cellphones for about ten dollars apiece and can sell in the millions of copies (Katayama). There are many reasons why the keitai novel has achieved such popularity compared to the e-book approaches pursued in the West. The relatively low cost of wireless data in Japan, and the ubiquity of the cellphone are probably factors. But the presence of keitai culture—a set of cultural practices surrounding the mobile phone—suggests that the mobile novel springs not from a print culture, but from somewhere else. Indeed, keitai novels are written (often on the phones themselves) in a manner that lends itself to the constraints of highly portable devices with small screens, and provides new modes of engagement and communication. Their editors attribute the success of keitai novels to how well they fit into the lifestyle of their target demographic, and how they act as community nodes around which readers and writers interact (Hani). Although some will instinctively suggest that long-form narratives are doomed with such an approach, it is worthwhile remembering that, a decade ago, few considered reading long articles using a web browser and the appropriate response to computer-based media was to rewrite material to suit the screen (Nielsen). However, without really noticing the change, the Web became mainstream and users began reading everything on their computers, including much longer pieces of text. Apart from the examples cited, the wider book trade has largely approached e-books by trying to replicate print culture, albeit with an electronic reading device. Until there is a significant cost and convenience benefit for readers, this approach is unlikely to be widely successful. As indicated above, those segments of the market where e-books have succeeded are those whose social practices are driven by different cultural motivations. It may well be that the full-frontal approach attempted to date is doomed to failure, and e-books would achieve more widespread adoption if the book trade took a different approach. The Amazon Kindle has not yet persuaded bookloving readers to abandon print for screen in sufficient numbers to mark a seachange. Indeed, it is unlikely that any device positioned specifically as a book replacement will succeed. Instead of seeking to make an e-book culture a replacement for print culture, effectively placing the reading of books in a silo separated from other day-to-day activities, it might be better to situate e-books within a mobility culture, as part of the burgeoning range of social activities revolving around a connected, convergent mobile device. Reading should be understood as an activity that doesn’t begin with a particular device, but is done with whatever device is at hand. In much the same way that other media producers make content available for a number of platforms, book publishers should explore the potential of the new mobile devices. Over 45 million smartphones were sold globally in the first three months of 2008 (“Gartner”)—somewhat more than the estimated shipments of e-book reading devices. As well as allowing a range of communications possibilities, these convergent devices are emerging as key elements in the new digital mediascape—one that allows users access to a broad range of media products via a single pocket-sized device. Each of those smartphones makes a perfectly adequate e-book reading device, and it might be useful to pursue a strategy that embeds book reading as one of the key possibilities of this growing mobility culture. The casual gaming market serves as an interesting example. While hardcore gamers cling to their games PCs and consoles, a burgeoning alternative games market has emerged, with a different demographic purchasing less technically challenging games for more informal gaming encounters. This market has slowly shifted to convergent mobile devices, exemplified by Sega’s success in selling 300,000 copies of Super Monkey Ball within 20 days of its release for Apple’s iphone (“Super”). Casual gamers do not necessarily go on to become hardcore games, but they are gamers nonetheless—and today’s casual games (like the aforementioned Super Monkey Ball) are yesterday’s hardcore games of choice. It might be the same for reading. The availability of e-books on mobile platforms may not result in more people embracing longer-form literature. But it will increase the number of people actually reading, and, just as casual gaming has attracted a female demographic (Wallace 8), the instant availability of appropriate reading material might sway some of those men who appear to be reluctant readers (McEwan). Rather than focus on printed books, and book-like reading devices, the industry should re-position e-books as an easily accessible content choice in a digitally converged media environment. This is more a cultural shift than a technological one—for publishers and readers alike. Situating e-books in such a way may alienate a segment of the bookloving community, but such readers are unlikely to respond to anything other than print on paper. 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