Journal articles on the topic 'Organized fan groups'

SummarySince the first sport duels, and with the development of sport through the ages, there were sport fans that cheered either for one or the other opponent and in that way they showed their sympathy. As the time passed, they organized themselves in fan groups, and they became not only an agent of socialization, but also a very important factor in directing social happenings. Hooliganism was created in modern society, and it had devastating effects on both sport and socially-political relations. The functioning of the fan groups that embraces hooliganism, demands high level of organization, so the modern media became a major tool of communication. The aim of this work is to determine in which way, not only the modern media but more importantly the internet sites and the social media of the fan groups, have been used for not only promoting and giving information about their actions, goals and attitude but also promotion of hooliganism.

The paper analyzes causes and mechanisms of victimization by sports violence, as well as the typology of victims and those responsible actors of sports violence. The aim of the paper is to point out, through an analysis of the individual situations of ritualized sports violence, that the suffering of victims of sports violence comes in the system of ritualized forms of relations and behaviors related to sport and organized fan groups, as well as that the victims are the most numerous among fans and the audience. The paper provides an overview of different types of sports violence rituals that result in victimization of individuals or groups.

Crime and hatred have been a permanent part of mass events organized in Poland. The situation is the most difficult in the case of football matches, especially at the national level. Despite legal changes and many measures adopted by sports clubs, the police and other institutions, not only has the situation not changed but there are symptoms of its deterioration. It is extremely worrying that these informal groups form structures that operate following the principles characteristic of organized crime. The subject of study in this article are the phenomena of crime and hatred occurring at mass events organized in Poland; its purpose is to identify the causes and present conclusions regarding necessary actions, based on an analysis of statistics and reports. Methods characteristic of theoretical studies have been employed developing this study, as well as the results of surveys conducted in 2014. The basic research problems involve finding answers to the following questions: – Did the determination of police in ensuring the safety of the EURO 2012 final tournament calm the mood and improve security of mass events? – What is the current scale of crime, hooligan acts and collective violations of security and public order in relation to mass events organized in Poland today? – Are the solutions in this area systemic, durable and consistent?The hypothesis was that, although public security authorities have been implementing a wide range of measures, crime and deep-rooted hatred towards enemy clubs and ideological opponents continue to be a hallmark of football fan circles and thus of some mass events organized in Poland. The inconsistent continuation of good practices adopted in the past, perceiving the problem only in terms of isolated incidents, and the lack of statistics that would help to prepare precise scientific analyses, all require moderation in predicting positive changes in this narrow area of public security.

The first aid is an important tool to save people’s lives after traffic accidents. Drivers are the most-likely bystanders, who might help injured people at the traffic accident site. The current research aims to explore Czech learner drivers‘ knowledge and attitudes towards the first aid and to evaluate whether the first aid education increases the likelihood that a driver will provide the first aid for injuries resulting from traffic accidents. A questionnaire survey was conducted in 2015 among a sample of 370 Czech learner drivers at driving schools. The two groups of student drivers were compared - those who had attended the first aid classes (FAC) and those who had not. The learner drivers who had attended an FAC are more likely to know how to treat burns and serious injuries, contain external bleeding, and unblock the respiratory track. Those who had not attended an FAC would more often hesitate to provide the first aid because they resisted taking a leadership role to organize the scene, or they did not have suitable equipment. This supports the idea that increasing the quality of the first aid training for Czech student drivers would improve the traffic safety in the Czech Republic.

Objectives: Hip arthroscopy for femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) provides reliable pain relief and functional improvement in the majority of patients. Although a small percentage of patients will go on to subsequent revision hip arthroscopy or conversion to arthroplasty, some patients will also have inferior clinical outcome without revision surgery. The purpose of this study is to identify clinical and radiographic characteristics predictive of inferior outcomes 2-years following hip arthroscopy for FAI. Methods: A clinical repository containing patients undergoing primary hip arthroscopy for femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) between 1/1/2012-1/1/2014 with a minimum follow up of two years was queried to include patients in this study. Operative procedures generally included labral debridement and repair, acetabular rim trimming, femoral osteochondroplasty and capsular plication. The primary outcome measure was the Hip Outcome Score Activities of Daily Living (HOS-ADL) questionnaire. Secondary outcome measures included the Hip Outcome Score Sports Subscale (HOS-SS) and modified Harris Hip Score (MHHS). Patients requiring revision hip arthroscopy or hip arthroplasty were excluded from this study. Patients were organized into superior and inferior outcome groups based on the top and bottom quartiles of the postoperative HOS-ADL score. Demographic, preoperative, intraoperative and postoperative variables between these groups were compared to identify predictors for inferior outcomes using bivariate and multivariate analyses. Results: Of 482 patients undergoing hip arthroscopy for FAI there was two year outcome data for 392 patients (81.5%) with an average follow up of 2.3 ± 0.6 years. The superior group contained 98 patients with an HOS-ADL score of 97.06 or higher while the inferior group contained 98 patients with an HOS-ADL score of 80.5 or lower. Patients in the superior outcome group were younger (30.7 ± 12.8 vs 38.0 ± 11.8 p<0.001) with a lower BMI (24.1 ± 4.1 vs. 26.5 ± 5.1 p=0.005) and higher preoperative average joint space width (4.2 ± 0.5 mm vs. 3.7 ± 0.4 mm; p=0.009) and lower Tonnis grade (p<0.001; Table 1 ). Patients in the inferior outcome group also had a higher incidence of smoking (p=0.005), workers compensation claims (p=0.04) and prior psychiatric history (p=0.007). A stepwise multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that older age (p=0.00674), higher BMI (p=0.02629), and smoking (p=0.01863) were independent predictive factors of inferior outcome ( Table 1 ). Both groups demonstrated significant improvements in HOS-ADL, and MHHS scores, however the inferior outcome group did not have significantly improved HOS-SS scores (p=0.06). [Table: see text] Conclusion: Older age, higher BMI, and smoking were independent predictors of inferior clinical outcomes at 2-years following hip arthroscopy for FAI, although both superior and inferior outcome groups experienced significantly improved clinical outcome scores. In addition, lower preoperative joint space, workers compensation status, and psychiatric history were significant factors for inferior outcomes on bivariate analysis. These factors can be considered in preoperative patient counseling about the expected outcome of hip arthroscopy for FAI.

Objective: The purpose of this research was to identify environmental and personal factors that could be related to the variability in the age of onset of familial Alzheimer's disease (FAD) (36–62 years). Methods: A sample was taken of 49 subjects with FAD and with the mutation E280A in the presenilin-1 gene on chromosome 14; the sample was divided into two subgroups: 27 individuals with age of onset of the disease between 36 and 46 years (early onset) and 22 individuals whose disease began between 47 and 62 years (late onset). Information on environmental and personal factors was collected by means of a questionnaire answered by the patients if their clinical condition allowed it, or by their relatives; such information was organized in a categorical way. Comparisons between the two groups for each categorical variable were done by means of the chi-square test. Noncollinear variables that showed statistical significance were included as independent variables in a logistic regression analysis to predict their association with early onset of the disease. Results: Only 5 of the 140 studied variables were different between the two groups in univariate analysis: education, surgical history, type of stressful event, depression, and affective losses. The logistic regression model was constituted by education, depression, and affective losses. High-level education had approximately 15 times more probability of association with an early onset of the disease; both the history of affective losses and depressive symptoms had 4 times more probability of a similar association. Conclusions: The association of high-level education and early onset of the disease could be related to an earlier detection of symptoms, in turn determined by greater intellectual and environmental demands. The occurrence of depression and affective losses has been considered a prodromic manifestation of the disease. Our findings are evidence of high clinical heterogeneity even in a genetically homogeneous group.

158 Background: Terminally ill cancer patients (pts) are often hospitalized in the last 3 months of life, and a large number of them die in hospital. They require specific care provided by a team of health professionals with expertise in palliative (PC) and end-of-life care (EoLC). The aim of this analysis is to investigate the attitudes of nurses (Ns) and health care assistants (HCAs) towards terminally ill patients in a Cancer Center (CC). Methods: From July to November 2017 we applied the Frommelt Attitudes Toward Care of the Dying FORM-B Scale (FATCOD) to Ns and HCAs working in a CC, situated in a metropolitan area in Italy. FATCOD is a validated tool in its Italian version, composed of 30 questions investigating 6 specific areas: Fear (Fe), Communication (Co), Relationship (Rs), Care of the family (CoF), Family as Caring (FaC), Active Care (Ac). Each question has 5 answer options: strongly disagree, disagree, don’t know, agree, strongly agree, with scores from 1, negative, to 5, positive attitude. The total score ranges from 30 to 150. Results: We administered 116 questionnaires, 102 (87.9%) were completed. 81 Ns were involved (79.4%, 31/50 males/females) and 21 HCAs (20.6%, 4/17 males/females). The median age of Ns was 39 years (range 20-50) and 43 for the HCAs (range 30-50). The median duration of employment was 10 years for both groups (range 0-20). The median score achieved by both groups was 110.3 (range 78-140). Ns obtained a score of 112.1 (range 98.7-125.5), HCAs of 103.4 (range 89.4-117.7). Our analysis shows a positive attitude in both groups across 3 areas ( FaC, CoF, AC) and a negative one in others (Fe, Co, Rs), with a statistically significant concordance between the 2 groups (p=0.0037). Conclusions: Data shows NS and HCAs negative attitude in 3 important areas, with scores below the average results reported in literature. Based on our results, we proposed some intervention strategies. We organized periodic meetings with our psychologists. Our Institution introduced the PERCS ( Program to Enhance Relational and Communication Skills) and specific programs in medical and nursing schools of our university, favoring the earliest approach to PC and EoLC. We also provided seminars in PC to Ns and HCAs working in the CC.

The northern area of Cuyo Basin (west‐central Argentina) corresponds to the Rincón Blanco half-graben, whose filling is arranged into the Rincón Blanco and Sorocayense groups. In the present study, we propose a new stratigraphic scheme for the Sorocayense Group in the Barreal depocenter (San Juan Province), revise the palaeoenvironmental interpretations, and organize and analyse the plant assemblages of previous and new fossiliferous levels. We defined three tectosedimentary sequences. The basal sequence represents the initial graben filling with pyroclastic flows, alluvial fan, and ephemeral fluvial systems, and is arranged in a new unit, the Cerro Colorado del Cementerio Formation. The middle sequence, including Barreal and Cortaderita formations, is characterized by sediment gravity flow deposits and different fluvial systems, with development of floodplains with vertisols and calcisols, and temporal ponds/lakes. In turn, the Cortaderita Formation was divided into the following lithostratigraphic members: Don Raúl and La Emilia. The upper sequence, represented by Cepeda Formation, was deposited by distributary fluvial and ephemeral fluvial systems. Twelve fossiliferous strata (EF) were recognized, which were all identified in the middle sequence: EF1 to EF3 in the Barreal Formation, EF4 to EF8 in the Don Raúl Member, and EF9 to EF12 in the La Emilia Member, both of Cortaderita Formation. The taphocoenosis found in the Barreal and Cortaderita formations were dominated by corystosperms, with conifers, cycadales, and peltasperms as subordinate forms. The available evidence from the taphofloras, palaeosols and palaeonvironments indicate the development of seasonal subtropical climates, which vary from arid or semi-arid in the basal sequence, sub-humid to semi-arid in the middle sequence, and arid or semi-arid in the upper sequence. On the basis of the new information, geological correlation and age of the lithostratigraphic units were accurately re-evaluated. Based on the palaeofloristic content and the correlation with the Rincón Blanco Group, it is possible to infer that the basal sequence was accumulated during late Early Triassic-early Middle Triassic, the middle sequence during the Middle Triassic, while the upper sequence was deposited in the early Late Triassic.

Abstract Abstract 1888 Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) comprises a group of heterogeneous hematological disorders with variable risk of leukemic evolution (LE) and short survival (SV). Around 40–50% of patients show abnormal karyotype at diagnosis and cytogenetic findings are an independent prognostic factor in MDS. Although the International Prognostic Scoring System (IPSS) differentiated 3 cytogenetic categories of risk (CCR), the Intermediate one is heterogeneous. The aim of this study was to characterize the cytogenetic profile, to test its prognostic value and to evaluate cytogenetic groups of risk in the Argentinean MDS population. Also, we tried to ascertain whether some abnormalities could be segregated from their respective CCR. This is a multicenter retrospective analysis of 488 primary Argentinean patients with MDS evaluated from 1984 to 2008 (including 183 patients from the Pilot Study for MDS Registry organized by the Argentinean Society of Hematology). Patients' distribution according to French-American-British classification (FAB) was: 235 Refractory Anemia (RA), 50 RA with Ringed Sideroblasts (RARS), 121 RA with excess of Blast (RAEB), 27 RAEB in transformation (RAEBt) and 55 Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia (CMML). The median age was 69 (17-92) years with a gender ratio (M/F) of 1.3. During the follow-up (mean: 25 months (m), range: 1–266 m), 110 (22.5%) underwent LE and 217 (44.5%) patients died. Age, sex, percentage of bone marrow blast, hemoglobin level, platelets count, number of cytopenias, LDH level and red blood cell transfusion requirements were significant predictive variables for prognosis (Kaplan-Meier and Long-Rank test, p<0.05). FAB and World Health Organization (WHO) classifications and scoring systems (Lille, Lausanne-Bournemouth, IPSS, GCECGH and WPSS) allowed us to differentiate groups of risk for SV and LE. Cytogenetic results were available in 421 patients and 176 (42%) showed abnormal karyotype. Cytogenetic profile showed that all chromosomes were involved and different cytogenetic alterations were found (total or partial chromosome losses were predominant). The most common cytogenetic aberrations were: -5/5q- (20% among cases with abnormal karyotype), -7/7q- (16%), +8 (20%), 20q- (9%) and –Y (8%). No particular aberration was associated to any FAB subtype though the frequency of abnormal karyotypes increased from 36% for RA, 39% RARS, 50% RAEB to 74% RAEBt and 39% for LMMC. Karyotypes were further divided according to IPSS CCR into 68% Good, 21% Intermediate and 12% Poor with median SV of 48, 34 and 17m and a LE cumulative risk to 1-year: 13%, 25% and 38%, respectively, p<0.0001. CCR were also predictive in the WHO classified population (p<0.0001 for SV and p=0.0021 for LE). Patients with normal karyotype had better outcome than those with cytogenetic alterations (median SV of 51 vs. 21 m, p=0.0012, and LE cumulative risk to 1-year: 13% vs. 26%, p=0.0047). When we tried to ascertain whether some alterations could be segregated from their respective Good and Poor CCR, no significant differences were observed both for SV and for LE. However, the outcome of the Intermediate CCR was heterogeneous ranging between patients with 12p- (median SV: 65 m and a LE cumulative risk to 1-year: 0%) and those with rearrangements 3q/ del(17p)/ +19/ t(11)(q23) (median SV: 15 m and a LE cumulative risk to 1-year: 48%, p=0.0220). Cytogenetic findings had a clear impact on SV and LE in our population and results in the present series, the largest in Latin America, are coincident with published data. However, the wide spectrum of low frequency aberrations stresses the importance of large study groups where the impact of such aberrations could be statistically evaluated to properly segregate them from their original CCR. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

The way Japanese animation has been spread outside Japan not only by entertainment companies but also by fan groups that have worked to produce fan subs—that is, subtitled translations of films and television shows produced without authorization and shared outside established commercial channels—has been one of the most powerful examples of transformative culture to take place in the last three decades or so. Much has already been written about anime and its global impact, but the process of fan sub creation and distribution, and in particular how these groups have been structured, has not yet been examined in depth. A question that is becoming prominent concerns what happens when the fan subbing culture finally clashes with authorized commercial content distributors. This essay explores the way fan sub distribution has changed over the years and draws on the concept of Net war to illustrate the conflict and the potential tools and methods animation distribution companies have used to engage, subvert, and interdict these groups. This has broad implications for understanding and predicting the flow of other emerging conflicts between networked actors, such as hackers, anarchists, and activists, and hierarchically organized traditional corporate entities.

Abstract: With the rise of the Internet, fans have engaged in a variety of online discussions related to their interests: newsgroups in the “alt.music” and “alt.fan” categories are full of groups devoted to specific music genres and individual Abstract: With the rise of the Internet, fans have engaged in a variety of online discussions related to their interests: newsgroups in the “alt.music” and “alt.fan” categories are full of groups devoted to specific music genres and individual stars. But what is of interest in this context is the transformation of those other, more-or-less organized, “official” fan clubs, where the tensions between fandom and organized consumption are most evident. In this regard, online fan clubs have taken on a new dynamic: marked by the appearance of a more direct form of dialogue between artist and fans and a more regular, even daily, ability to connect both artists with fans and fans with one another, fan clubs are now regarded as a new kind of “community” by some and a new source of revenue by others. This paper discusses how Internet fan clubs have become an important mediating factor in relationships between fans and artists, and between fans themselves. Resumé : Depuis la montée d’Internet, les fans participent à une diversité de discussions en ligne associées à leurs intérêts : à ce titre, des groupes de nouvelles comme « alt.music » ou « alt.fan » rassemblent pleins de groupes consacrés à des vedettes ou genres musicaux particuliers. Ce qui est intéressant dans ce contexte, c’est la transformation de ces autres clubs prétendument officiels d’admirateurs plus ou moins organisés, où les tensions entre fans et la consommation organisée sont les plus en évidence. Ces clubs en ligne ont dû adopter une nouvelle dynamique : ils sont marqués par une forme plus directe de dialogue entre artistes et admirateurs et des échanges plus fréquents — voire quotidiens — entre artistes et admirateurs ainsi que parmi ces derniers. Certains perçoivent ces clubs comme une nouvelle sorte de « communauté » tandis que d’autres les perçoivent comme une nouvelle source de revenus. Cet article explique comment les clubs d’admirateurs en ligne sont devenus un facteur médiateur important dans les rapports entre artistes et fans ainsi que parmi ces derniers.

This paper examines the emergence of organized trolling behaviors on Facebook, specifically in relation to memorial groups and fan pages. In addition to mapping the development of RIP trolling — in which online instigators post abusive comments and images onto pages created for and dedicated to the deceased — the paper also examines the highly contentious and ultimately parasitic relationship(s) between memorial trolls, Facebook’s social networking platform and mainstream media outlets. Recalling Oring’s account of disaster humor, the paper goes on to suggest that, inadvertently or not, Facebook memorial page trolling presents a pointed critique of a tragedy–obsessed global media.

After summarizing initial research into the UK's theater blogging communities, I present some early observations about amateur theater critics writing from within and outside fandom. From my multiple perspectives as Tumblr user, blogger, theater fan, and academic, I consider the way those who respond to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016) on Tumblr display similar behaviors to those who maintain general theater review blogs, with both groups appearing to organize and distinguish themselves according to strict codes of ethics, ways of working, and markers of taste.

Abstract Objectives This study aims to evaluate the ability of tantalum-coated titanium to improve human gingival fibroblasts’ adhesion, viability, proliferation, migration performance, and the potential molecular mechanisms. Materials and methods Titanium plates were divided into two groups: (1) no coating (Ti, control), (2) Tantalum-coated titanium (Ta-coated Ti). All samples were characterized by scanning electronic microscopy, surface roughness, and hydrophilicity. Fibroblasts’ performance were analyzed by attached cell number at 1 h, 4 h, and 24 h, morphology at 1 h and 4 h, viability at 1 day, 3 days, 5 days, and 7 days, recovery after wounding at 6 h, 12 h, and 24 h. RT-PCR, western blot were applied to detect attachment-related genes’ expression and protein synthesis at 4 h and 24 h. Student’s t test was used for statistical analysis. Results Tantalum-coated titanium demonstrates a layer of homogeneously distributed nano-grains with mean diameter of 25.98 (± 14.75) nm. It was found that after tantalum deposition, human gingival fibroblasts (HGFs) adhesion, viability, proliferation, and migration were promoted in comparison to the control group. An upregulated level of Integrin β1 and FAK signaling was also detected, which might be the underlying mechanism. Conclusion In the present study, adhesion, viability, proliferation, migration of human gingival fibroblasts are promoted on tantalum-coated titanium, upregulated integrin β1 and FAK might contribute to its superior performance, indicating tantalum coating can be applied in transmucosal part of dental implant. Clinical significance Tantalum deposition on titanium surfaces can promote human gingival fibroblast adhesion, accordingly forming a well-organized soft tissue sealing and may contribute to a successful osseointegration.

A low-cost charcoal evaporative cooler was designed and tested for the storage of camel milk in an arid pastoral area of northern Kenya. The cooler, 0.75 m3 in capacity, was made of galvanised iron frame reinforced with wire mesh inside and out, leaving a 10 cm-wide cavity which was filled with charcoal. A water reservoir linked to the cooler at the top through a perforated pipe kept the charcoal continuously wet through drip system. A wind driven fan on the roof enhanced air movement through the charcoal walls by sucking out the air in the cooler. The cooler was evaluated for temperature and product response. The inside temperature was 1-11°C lower than outside temperature and inside humidity was 0-49% higher than outside. During the hottest time of the day (14.00 hrs) when cooling was most needed, the cooler consistently maintained an average temperature drop of 10.5±0.4°C below ambient temperature, which varied from 29-32°C. This reduction in temperature was 35.6% and statistically significant (p≤0.05). During this time, cooling efficiency varied between 74.2 to 86.7%. Temperature of camel milk inside the cooler did not significantly increase (p>0.05) between morning time and evening time. However, temperature of control milk at ambient conditions significantly (p≤0.05) changed over the same period, from 22.6±0.08°C to 28.1±0.08°C. Milk inside the cooler was also significantly cooler (p≤0.05) than control milk in the evening, with a net temperature reduction of 27.0%. Total bacterial count changed from 31.4±2.1 x 104 cfu/ml to 43.1±1.9 x 104 and 1638±81 x 104 cfu/ml for test and control milk, respectively, after storage for 10 hours. As an inexpensive alternative to mechanical refrigeration, evaporative cooling technology is promising and suitable for rural application in arid pastoral areas without grid electricity, to minimise risk of milk spoilage at collection points and retail level, and thereby encourage organised women groups to get involved in milk marketing as a source of income.

Introduction: Technology EnthusiasmEnthusiasts are people who have a passion, keenness, dedication or zeal for a particular activity or hobby. Today, there are enthusiasts for almost everything, from genealogy, costume dramas, and country houses, to metal detectors, coin collecting, and archaeology. But to be described as an enthusiast is not necessarily a compliment. Historically, the term “enthusiasm” was first used in England in the early seventeenth century to describe “religious or prophetic frenzy among the ancient Greeks” (Hanks, n.p.). This frenzy was ascribed to being possessed by spirits sent not only by God but also the devil. During this period, those who disobeyed the powers that be or claimed to have a message from God were considered to be enthusiasts (McLoughlin).Enthusiasm retained its religious connotations throughout the eighteenth century and was also used at this time to describe “the tendency within the population to be swept by crazes” (Mee 31). However, as part of the “rehabilitation of enthusiasm,” the emerging middle-classes adopted the word to characterise the intensity of Romantic poetry. The language of enthusiasm was then used to describe the “literary ideas of affect” and “a private feeling of religious warmth” (Mee 2 and 34). While the notion of enthusiasm was embraced here in a more optimistic sense, attempts to disassociate enthusiasm from crowd-inciting fanaticism were largely unsuccessful. As such enthusiasm has never quite managed to shake off its pejorative connotations.The 'enthusiasm' discussed in this paper is essentially a personal passion for technology. It forms part of a longer tradition of historical preservation in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world. From preserved railways to Victorian pumping stations, people have long been fascinated by the history of technology and engineering; manifesting their enthusiasm through their nostalgic longings and emotional attachment to its enduring material culture. Moreover, enthusiasts have been central to the collection, conservation, and preservation of this particular material record. Technology enthusiasm in this instance is about having a passion for the history and material record of technological development, specifically here industrial archaeology. Despite being a pastime much participated in, technology enthusiasm is relatively under-explored within the academic literature. For the most part, scholarship has tended to focus on the intended users, formal spaces, and official narratives of science and technology (Adas, Latour, Mellström, Oldenziel). In recent years attempts have been made to remedy this imbalance, with researchers from across the social sciences examining the position of hobbyists, tinkerers and amateurs in scientific and technical culture (Ellis and Waterton, Haring, Saarikoski, Takahashi). Work from historians of technology has focussed on the computer enthusiast; for example, Saarikoski’s work on the Finnish personal computer hobby:The definition of the computer enthusiast varies historically. Personal interest, pleasure and entertainment are the most significant factors defining computing as a hobby. Despite this, the hobby may also lead to acquiring useful knowledge, skills or experience of information technology. Most often the activity takes place outside working hours but can still have links to the development of professional expertise or the pursuit of studies. In many cases it takes place in the home environment. On the other hand, it is characteristically social, and the importance of friends, clubs and other communities is greatly emphasised.In common with a number of other studies relating to technical hobbies, for example Takahashi who argues tinkerers were behind the advent of the radio and television receiver, Saarikoski’s work focuses on the role these users played in shaping the technology in question. The enthusiasts encountered in this paper are important here not for their role in shaping the technology, but keeping technological heritage alive. As historian of technology Haring reminds us, “there exist alternative ways of using and relating to technology” (18). Furthermore, the sociological literature on audiences (Abercrombie and Longhurst, Ang), fans (Hills, Jenkins, Lewis, Sandvoss) and subcultures (Hall, Hebdige, Schouten and McAlexander) has also been extended in order to account for the enthusiast. In Abercrombie and Longhurst’s Audiences, the authors locate ‘the enthusiast’ and ‘the fan’ at opposing ends of a continuum of consumption defined by questions of specialisation of interest, social organisation of interest and material productivity. Fans are described as:skilled or competent in different modes of production and consumption; active in their interactions with texts and in their production of new texts; and communal in that they construct different communities based on their links to the programmes they like. (127 emphasis in original) Based on this definition, Abercrombie and Longhurst argue that fans and enthusiasts differ in three ways: (1) enthusiasts’ activities are not based around media images and stars in the way that fans’ activities are; (2) enthusiasts can be hypothesized to be relatively light media users, particularly perhaps broadcast media, though they may be heavy users of the specialist publications which are directed towards the enthusiasm itself; (3) the enthusiasm would appear to be rather more organised than the fan activity. (132) What is striking about this attempt to differentiate between the fan and the enthusiast is that it is based on supposition rather than the actual experience and observation of enthusiasm. It is here that the ethnographic account of enthusiasm presented in this paper and elsewhere, for example works by Dannefer on vintage car culture, Moorhouse on American hot-rodding and Fuller on modified-car culture in Australia, can shed light on the subject. My own ethnographic study of groups with a passion for telecommunications heritage, early British computers and industrial archaeology takes the discussion of “technology enthusiasm” further still. Through in-depth interviews, observation and textual analysis, I have examined in detail the formation of enthusiast societies and their membership, the importance of the material record to enthusiasts (particularly at home) and the enthusiastic practices of collecting and hoarding, as well as the figure of the technology enthusiast in the public space of the museum, namely the Science Museum in London (Geoghegan). In this paper, I explore the culture of enthusiasm for the industrial past through the example of the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society (GLIAS). Focusing on industrial sites around London, GLIAS meet five or six times a year for field visits, walks and a treasure hunt. The committee maintain a website and produce a quarterly newsletter. The title of my paper, “If you can walk down the street and recognise the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, the world is altogether a better place,” comes from an interview I conducted with the co-founder and present chairman of GLIAS. He was telling me about his fascination with the materials of industrialisation. In fact, he said even concrete is sexy. Some call it a hobby; others call it a disease. But enthusiasm for industrial archaeology is, as several respondents have themselves identified, “as insidious in its side effects as any debilitating germ. It dictates your lifestyle, organises your activity and decides who your friends are” (Frow and Frow 177, Gillespie et al.). Through the figure of the industrial archaeology enthusiast, I discuss in this paper what it means to be enthusiastic. I begin by reflecting on the development of this specialist subject area. I go on to detail the formation of the Society in the late 1960s, before exploring the Society’s fieldwork methods and some of the other activities they now engage in. I raise questions of enthusiast and professional knowledge and practice, as well as consider the future of this particular enthusiasm.Defining Industrial ArchaeologyThe practice of 'industrial archaeology' is much contested. For a long time, enthusiasts and professional archaeologists have debated the meaning and use of the term (Palmer). On the one hand, there are those interested in the history, preservation, and recording of industrial sites. For example the grandfather figures of the subject, namely Kenneth Hudson and Angus Buchanan, who both published widely in the 1960s and 1970s in order to encourage publics to get involved in recording. Many members of GLIAS refer to the books of Hudson Industrial Archaeology: an Introduction and Buchanan Industrial Archaeology in Britain with their fine descriptions and photographs as integral to their early interest in the subject. On the other hand, there are those within the academic discipline of archaeology who consider the study of remains produced by the Industrial Revolution as too modern. Moreover, they find the activities of those calling themselves industrial archaeologists as lacking sufficient attention to the understanding of past human activity to justify the name. As a result, the definition of 'industrial archaeology' is problematic for both enthusiasts and professionals. Even the early advocates of professional industrial archaeology felt uneasy about the subject’s methods and practices. In 1973, Philip Riden (described by one GLIAS member as the angry young man of industrial archaeology), the then president of the Oxford University Archaeology Society, wrote a damning article in Antiquity, calling for the subject to “shed the amateur train drivers and others who are not part of archaeology” (215-216). He decried the “appallingly low standard of some of the work done under the name of ‘industrial archaeology’” (211). He felt that if enthusiasts did not attempt to maintain high technical standards, publish their work in journals or back up their fieldwork with documentary investigation or join their county archaeological societies then there was no value in the efforts of these amateurs. During this period, enthusiasts, academics, and professionals were divided. What was wrong with doing something for the pleasure it provides the participant?Although relations today between the so-called amateur (enthusiast) and professional archaeologies are less potent, some prejudice remains. Describing them as “barrow boys”, some enthusiasts suggest that what was once their much-loved pastime has been “hijacked” by professional archaeologists who, according to one respondent,are desperate to find subjects to get degrees in. So the whole thing has been hijacked by academia as it were. Traditional professional archaeologists in London at least are running head on into things that we have been doing for decades and they still don’t appreciate that this is what we do. A lot of assessments are handed out to professional archaeology teams who don’t necessarily have any knowledge of industrial archaeology. (James, GLIAS committee member)James went on to reveal that GLIAS receives numerous enquiries from professional archaeologists, developers and town planners asking what they know about particular sites across the city. Although the Society has compiled a detailed database covering some areas of London, it is by no means comprehensive. In addition, many active members often record and monitor sites in London for their own personal enjoyment. This leaves many questioning the need to publish their results for the gain of third parties. Canadian sociologist Stebbins discusses this situation in his research on “serious leisure”. He has worked extensively with amateur archaeologists in order to understand their approach to their leisure activity. He argues that amateurs are “neither dabblers who approach the activity with little commitment or seriousness, nor professionals who make a living from that activity” (55). Rather they pursue their chosen leisure activity to professional standards. A point echoed by Fine in his study of the cultures of mushrooming. But this is to get ahead of myself. How did GLIAS begin?GLIAS: The GroupThe 1960s have been described by respondents as a frantic period of “running around like headless chickens.” Enthusiasts of London’s industrial archaeology were witnessing incredible changes to the city’s industrial landscape. Individuals and groups like the Thames Basin Archaeology Observers Group were recording what they could. Dashing around London taking photos to capture London’s industrial legacy before it was lost forever. However the final straw for many, in London at least, was the proposed and subsequent demolition of the “Euston Arch”. The Doric portico at Euston Station was completed in 1838 and stood as a symbol to the glory of railway travel. Despite strong protests from amenity societies, this Victorian symbol of progress was finally pulled down by British Railways in 1962 in order to make way for what enthusiasts have called a “monstrous concrete box”.In response to these changes, GLIAS was founded in 1968 by two engineers and a locomotive driver over afternoon tea in a suburban living room in Woodford, North-East London. They held their first meeting one Sunday afternoon in December at the Science Museum in London and attracted over 130 people. Firing the imagination of potential members with an exhibition of photographs of the industrial landscape taken by Eric de Maré, GLIAS’s first meeting was a success. Bringing together like-minded people who are motivated and enthusiastic about the subject, GLIAS currently has over 600 members in the London area and beyond. This makes it the largest industrial archaeology society in the UK and perhaps Europe. Drawing some of its membership from a series of evening classes hosted by various members of the Society’s committee, GLIAS initially had a quasi-academic approach. Although some preferred the hands-on practical element and were more, as has been described by one respondent, “your free-range enthusiast”. The society has an active committee, produces a newsletter and journal, as well as runs regular events for members. However the Society is not simply about the study of London’s industrial heritage, over time the interest in industrial archaeology has developed for some members into long-term friendships. Sociability is central to organised leisure activities. It underpins and supports the performance of enthusiasm in groups and societies. For Fine, sociability does not always equal friendship, but it is the state from which people might become friends. Some GLIAS members have taken this one step further: there have even been a couple of marriages. Although not the subject of my paper, technical culture is heavily gendered. Industrial archaeology is a rare exception attracting a mixture of male and female participants, usually retired husband and wife teams.Doing Industrial Archaeology: GLIAS’s Method and PracticeIn what has been described as GLIAS’s heyday, namely the 1970s to early 1980s, fieldwork was fundamental to the Society’s activities. The Society’s approach to fieldwork during this period was much the same as the one described by champion of industrial archaeology Arthur Raistrick in 1973:photographing, measuring, describing, and so far as possible documenting buildings, engines, machinery, lines of communication, still or recently in use, providing a satisfactory record for the future before the object may become obsolete or be demolished. (13)In the early years of GLIAS and thanks to the committed efforts of two active Society members, recording parties were organised for extended lunch hours and weekends. The majority of this early fieldwork took place at the St Katherine Docks. The Docks were constructed in the 1820s by Thomas Telford. They became home to the world’s greatest concentration of portable wealth. Here GLIAS members learnt and employed practical (also professional) skills, such as measuring, triangulations and use of a “dumpy level”. For many members this was an incredibly exciting time. It was a chance to gain hands-on experience of industrial archaeology. Having been left derelict for many years, the Docks have since been redeveloped as part of the Docklands regeneration project.At this time the Society was also compiling data for what has become known to members as “The GLIAS Book”. The book was to have separate chapters on the various industrial histories of London with contributions from Society members about specific sites. Sadly the book’s editor died and the project lost impetus. Several years ago, the committee managed to digitise the data collected for the book and began to compile a database. However, the GLIAS database has been beset by problems. Firstly, there are often questions of consistency and coherence. There is a standard datasheet for recording industrial buildings – the Index Record for Industrial Sites. However, the quality of each record is different because of the experience level of the different authors. Some authors are automatically identified as good or expert record keepers. Secondly, getting access to the database in order to upload the information has proved difficult. As one of the respondents put it: “like all computer babies [the creator of the database], is finding it hard to give birth” (Sally, GLIAS member). As we have learnt enthusiasm is integral to movements such as industrial archaeology – public historian Raphael Samuel described them as the “invisible hands” of historical enquiry. Yet, it is this very enthusiasm that has the potential to jeopardise projects such as the GLIAS book. Although active in their recording practices, the GLIAS book saga reflects one of the challenges encountered by enthusiast groups and societies. In common with other researchers studying amenity societies, such as Ellis and Waterton’s work with amateur naturalists, unlike the world of work where people are paid to complete a task and are therefore meant to have a singular sense of purpose, the activities of an enthusiast group like GLIAS rely on the goodwill of their members to volunteer their time, energy and expertise. When this is lost for whatever reason, there is no requirement for any other member to take up that position. As such, levels of commitment vary between enthusiasts and can lead to the aforementioned difficulties, such as disputes between group members, the occasional miscommunication of ideas and an over-enthusiasm for some parts of the task in hand. On top of this, GLIAS and societies like it are confronted with changing health and safety policies and tightened security surrounding industrial sites. This has made the practical side of industrial archaeology increasingly difficult. As GLIAS member Bob explains:For me to go on site now I have to wear site boots and borrow a hard hat and a high visibility jacket. Now we used to do incredibly dangerous things in the seventies and nobody batted an eyelid. You know we were exploring derelict buildings, which you are virtually not allowed in now because the floor might give way. Again the world has changed a lot there. GLIAS: TodayGLIAS members continue to record sites across London. Some members are currently surveying the site chosen as the location of the Olympic Games in London in 2012 – the Lower Lea Valley. They describe their activities at this site as “rescue archaeology”. GLIAS members are working against the clock and some important structures have already been demolished. They only have time to complete a quick flash survey. Armed with the information they collated in previous years, GLIAS is currently in discussions with the developer to orchestrate a detailed recording of the site. It is important to note here that GLIAS members are less interested in campaigning for the preservation of a site or building, they appreciate that sites must change. Instead they want to ensure that large swathes of industrial London are not lost without a trace. Some members regard this as their public duty.Restricted by health and safety mandates and access disputes, GLIAS has had to adapt. The majority of practical recording sessions have given way to guided walks in the summer and public lectures in the winter. Some respondents have identified a difference between those members who call themselves “industrial archaeologists” and those who are just “ordinary members” of GLIAS. The walks are for those with a general interest, not serious members, and the talks are public lectures. Some audience researchers have used Bourdieu’s metaphor of “capital” to describe the experience, knowledge and skill required to be a fan, clubber or enthusiast. For Hills, fan status is built up through the demonstration of cultural capital: “where fans share a common interest while also competing over fan knowledge, access to the object of fandom, and status” (46). A clear membership hierarchy can be seen within GLIAS based on levels of experience, knowledge and practical skill.With a membership of over 600 and rising annually, the Society’s future is secure at present. However some of the more serious members, although retaining their membership, are pursuing their enthusiasm elsewhere: through break-away recording groups in London; active membership of other groups and societies, for example the national Association for Industrial Archaeology; as well as heading off to North Wales in the summer for practical, hands-on industrial archaeology in Snowdonia’s slate quarries – described in the Ffestiniog Railway Journal as the “annual convention of slate nutters.” ConclusionsGLIAS has changed since its foundation in the late 1960s. Its operation has been complicated by questions of health and safety, site access, an ageing membership, and the constant changes to London’s industrial archaeology. Previously rejected by professional industrial archaeology as “limited in skill and resources” (Riden), enthusiasts are now approached by professional archaeologists, developers, planners and even museums that are interested in engaging in knowledge exchange programmes. As a recent report from the British think-tank Demos has argued, enthusiasts or pro-ams – “amateurs who work to professional standards” (Leadbeater and Miller 12) – are integral to future innovation and creativity; for example computer pro-ams developed an operating system to rival Microsoft Windows. As such the specialist knowledge, skill and practice of these communities is of increasing interest to policymakers, practitioners, and business. So, the subject once described as “the ugly offspring of two parents that shouldn’t have been allowed to breed” (Hudson), the so-called “amateur” industrial archaeology offers enthusiasts and professionals alike alternative ways of knowing, seeing and being in the recent and contemporary past.Through the case study of GLIAS, I have described what it means to be enthusiastic about industrial archaeology. I have introduced a culture of collective and individual participation and friendship based on a mutual interest in and emotional attachment to industrial sites. As we have learnt in this paper, enthusiasm is about fun, pleasure and joy. The enthusiastic culture presented here advances themes such as passion in relation to less obvious communities of knowing, skilled practices, material artefacts and spaces of knowledge. Moreover, this paper has been about the affective narratives that are sometimes missing from academic accounts; overlooked for fear of sniggers at the back of a conference hall. Laughter and humour are a large part of what enthusiasm is. Enthusiastic cultures then are about the pleasure and joy experienced in doing things. Enthusiasm is clearly a potent force for active participation. I will leave the last word to GLIAS member John:One meaning of enthusiasm is as a form of possession, madness. Obsession perhaps rather than possession, which I think is entirely true. It is a pejorative term probably. The railway enthusiast. But an awful lot of energy goes into what they do and achieve. Enthusiasm to my mind is an essential ingredient. If you are not a person who can muster enthusiasm, it is very difficult, I think, to get anything out of it. On the basis of the more you put in the more you get out. 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At last year’s Tour de France—the three-week cycling race—the winner of one stage was disqualified for allegedly obstructing a competitor. In newspapers and on social media, cycling fans immediately started a heated debate about the decision and about the actual course of events. They uploaded photographs and videos, which they had often edited and augmented with graphics to support their interpretation of the situation or to direct attention to some neglected detail (Simpson; "Tour de France").Due to their competitive character and their audience’s partisanship, modern media sports continuously create controversial moments like this, thereby providing ample opportunities for what Jason Mittell—with respect to complex narratives in recent TV drama—called “forensic fandom” ("Forensic;" Complex), in which audience members collectively investigate ambivalent or enigmatic elements of a media product, adding their own interpretations and explanations.Not unlike that of TV drama, sport’s forensic fandom is stimulated through complex forms of seriality—e.g. the successive stages of the Tour de France or the successive games of a tournament or a league, but also the repetition of the same league competition or tournament every (or, in the case of the Olympics, every four) year(s). To articulate their take on the disqualification of the Tour de France rider, fans refer to comparable past events, activate knowledge about rivalries between cyclists, or note character traits that they condensed from the alleged perpetrator’s prior appearances. Sport thus creates a continuously evolving and recursive storyworld that, like all popular seriality, proliferates across different media forms (texts, photos, films, etc.) and different media platforms (television, social media, etc.) (Kelleter).In the following I will use two examples (from 1908 and 1966) to analyse in greater detail why and how sport’s seriality and forensic attitude contribute to the highly dynamic “transmedia intertextuality” (Kinder 35) of media sport. Two arguments are of special importance to me: (1) While social media (as the introductory example has shown) add to forensic fandom’s proliferation, it was sport’s strongly serialized evaluation of performances that actually triggered the “spreadability” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green) of sport-related topics across different media, first doing so at the end of the 19th century. What is more, modern sport owes its very existence to the cross-media circulation of its events. (2) So far, transmedia has mainly been researched with respect to fictional content (Jenkins; Evans), yet existing research on documentary transmedia forms (Kerrigan and Velikovsky) and social media seriality (Page) has shown that the inclusion of non-fiction can broaden our knowledge of how storytelling sprawls across media and takes advantage of their specific affordances. This, I want to argue, ensures that sport is an insightful and important example for the understanding of transmedia world-building.The Origins of Sport, the Olympics 1908, and World-BuildingSome authors claim that it was commercial television that replaced descriptive accounts of sporting events with narratives of heroes and villains in the 1990s (Fabos). Yet even a cursory study of past sport reporting shows that, even back when newspapers had to explain the controversial outcome of the 1908 Olympic Marathon to their readers, they could already rely on a well-established typology of characters and events.In the second half of the 19th century, the rules of many sports became standardized. Individual events were integrated in organized, repetitive competitions—leagues, tournaments, and so on. This development was encouraged by the popular press, which thus enabled the public to compare performances from different places and across time (Werron, "On Public;" Werron, "World"). Rankings and tables condensed contests in easily comparable visual forms, and these were augmented by more narrative accounts that supplemented the numbers with details, context, drama, and the subjective experiences of athletes and spectators. Week by week, newspapers and special-interest magazines alike offered varying explanations for the various wins and losses.When London hosted the Olympics in 1908, the scheduled seriality and pre-determined settings and protagonists allowed for the announcement of upcoming events in advance and for setting up possible storylines. Two days before the marathon race, The Times of London published the rules of the race, the names of the participants, a distance table listing relevant landmarks with the estimated arrival times, and a turn-by-turn description of the route, sketching the actual experience of running the race for the readers (22 July 1908, p. 11). On the day of the race, The Times appealed to sport’s seriality with a comprehensive narrative of prior Olympic Marathon races, a map of the precise course, a discussion of the alleged favourites, and speculation on factors that might impact the performances:Because of their inelasticity, wood blocks are particularly trying to the feet, and the glitter on the polished surface of the road, if the sun happens to be shining, will be apt to make a man who has travelled over 20 miles at top speed turn more than a little dizzy … . It is quite possible that some of the leaders may break down here, when they are almost within sight of home. (The Times 24 July 1908, p. 9)What we see here can be described as a world-building process: The rules of a competition, the participating athletes, their former performances, the weather, and so on, all form “a more or less organized sum of scattered parts” (Boni 13). These parts could easily be taken up by what we now call different media platforms (which in 1908 included magazines, newspapers, and films) that combine them in different ways to already make claims about cause-and-effect chains, intentions, outcomes, and a multitude of subjective experiences, before the competition has even started.The actual course of events, then, like the single instalment in a fictional storyworld, has a dual function: on the one hand, it specifies one particular storyline with a few protagonists, decisive turning points, and a clear determination of winners and losers. On the other hand, it triggers the multiplication of follow-up stories, each suggesting specific explanations for the highly contingent outcome, thereby often extending the storyworld, invoking props, characters, character traits, causalities, and references to earlier instalments in the series, which might or might not have been mentioned in the preliminary reports.In the 1908 Olympic Marathon, the Italian Dorando Pietri, who was not on The Times’ list of favourites, reached the finish first. Since he was stumbling on the last 300 meters of the track inside the stadium and only managed to cross the finish line with the support of race officials, he was disqualified. The jury then declared the American John Hayes, who came in second, the winner of the race.The day after the marathon, newspapers gave different accounts of the race. One, obviously printed too hastily, declared Pietri dead; others unsurprisingly gave the race a national perspective, focusing on the fate of “their” athletes (Davis 161, 166). Most of them evaluated the event with respect to athletic, aesthetic, or ethical terms—e.g. declaring Pietri the moral winner of the race (as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Daily Mail of July 25). This continues today, as praising sport performers often figures as a last resort “to reconstruct unproblematic heroism” (Whannel 44).The general endeavour of modern sport to scrutinize and understand the details of the performance provoked competing explanations for what had happened: was it the food, the heat, or the will power? In a forensic spirit, many publications added drawings or printed one of the famous photographs displaying Pietri being guided across the finish line (these still regularly appear in coffee-table books on sports photography; for a more extensive analysis, see Stauff). Sport—just like other non-fictional transmedia content—enriches its storyworld through “historical accounts of places and past times that already have their own logic, practice and institutions” (Kerrigan and Velikovsky 259).The seriality of sport not only fostered this dynamic by starting the narrative before the event, but also by triggering references to past instalments through the contingencies of the current one. The New York Times took the biggest possible leap, stating that the 1908 marathon must have been the most dramatic competition “since that Marathon race in ancient Greece, where the victor fell at the goal and, with a wave of triumph, died” (The New York Times 25 July 1908, p. 1). Dutch sport magazine De Revue der Sporten (6 August 1908, p. 167) used sport’s seriality more soberly to assess Hayes’ finishing time as not very special (conceding that the hot weather might have had an effect).What, hopefully, has become clear by now, is that—starting in the late 19th century—sporting events are prepared by, and in turn trigger, varying practices of transmedia world-building that make use of the different media’s affordances (drawings, maps, tables, photographs, written narratives, etc.). Already in 1908, most people interested in sport thus quite probably came across multiple accounts of the event—and thereby could feel invited to come up with their own explanation for what had happened. Back then, this forensic attitude was mostly limited to speculation about possible cause-effect chains, but with the more extensive visual coverage of competitions, especially through moving images, storytelling harnessed an increasingly growing set of forensic tools.The World Cup 1966 and Transmedia ForensicsThe serialized TV live transmissions of sport add complexity to storytelling, as they multiply the material available for forensic proliferations of the narratives. Liveness provokes a layered and constantly adapting process transforming the succession of actions into a narrative (the “emplotment”). The commentators find themselves “in the strange situation of a narrator ignorant of the plot” (Ryan 87), constantly balancing between mere reporting of events and more narrative explanation of incidents (Barnfield 8).To create a coherent storyworld under such circumstances, commentators fall back on prefabricated patterns (“overcoming bad luck,” “persistence paying off,” etc.) to frame the events while they unfold (Ryan 87). This includes the already mentioned tropes of heroism or national and racial stereotypes, which are upheld as long as possible, even when the course of events contradicts them (Tudor). Often, the creation of “non-retrospective narratives” (Ryan 79) harnesses seriality, “connecting this season with last and present with past and, indeed, present with past and future” (Barnfield 10).Instant-replay technology, additionally, made it possible (and necessary) for commentators to scrutinize individual actions while competitions are still ongoing, provoking revisions of the emplotment. With video, DVD, and online video, the second-guessing and re-telling of elements—at least in hindsight—became accessible to the general audience as well, thereby dramatically extending the playing field for sport’s forensic attitude.I want to elaborate this development with another example from London, this time the 1966 Men’s Football World Cup, which was the first to systematically use instant replay. In the extra time of the final, the English team scored a goal against the German side: Geoff Hurst’s shot bounced from the crossbar down to the goal line and from there back into the field. After deliberating with the linesman, the referee called it a goal. Until today it remains contested whether the ball actually was behind the goal line or not.By 1966, 1908’s sparsity of visual representation had been replaced by an abundance of moving images. The game was covered by the BBC and by ITV (for TV) and by several film companies (in colour and in black-and-white). Different recordings of the famous goal, taken from different camera angles, still circulate and are re-appropriated in different media even today. The seriality of sport, particularly World Cup Football’s return every four years, triggers the re-telling of this 1966 game just as much as media innovations do.In 1966, the BBC live commentary—after a moment of doubt—pretty soberly stated that “it’s a goal” and observed that “the Germans are mad at the referee;” the ITV reporter, more ambivalently declared: “the linesman says no goal … that’s what we saw … It is a goal!” The contemporary newsreel in German cinemas—the Fox Tönende Wochenschau—announced the scene as “the most controversial goal of the tournament.” It was presented from two different perspectives, the second one in slow motion with the commentary stating: “these images prove that it was not a goal” (my translation).So far, this might sound like mere opposing interpretations of a contested event, yet the option to scrutinize the scene in slow motion and in different versions also spawned an extended forensic narrative. A DVD celebrating 100 years of FIFA (FIFA Fever, 2002) includes the scene twice, the first time in the chapter on famous controversies. Here, the voice-over avoids taking a stand by adopting a meta-perspective: The goal guaranteed that “one of the most entertaining finals ever would be the subject of conversation for generations to come—and therein lies the beauty of controversies.” The scene appears a second time in the special chapter on Germany’s successes. Now the goal itself is presented with music and then commented upon by one of the German players, who claims that it was a bad call by the referee but that the sportsmanlike manner in which his team accepted the decision advanced Germany’s global reputation.This is only included in the German version of the DVD, of course; on the international “special deluxe edition” of FIFA Fever (2002), the 1966 goal has its second appearance in the chapter on England’s World Cup history. Here, the referee’s decision is not questioned—there is not even a slow-motion replay. Instead, the summary of the game is wrapped up with praise for Geoff Hurst’s hat trick in the game and with images of the English players celebrating, the voice-over stating: “Now the nation could rejoice.”In itself, the combination of a nationally organized media landscape with the nationalist approach to sport reporting already provokes competing emplotments of one and the same event (Puijk). The modularity of sport reporting, which allows for easy re-editing, replacing sound and commentary, and retelling events through countless witnesses, triggers a continuing recombination of the elements of the storyworld. In the 50 years since the game, there have been stories about the motivations of the USSR linesman and the Swiss referee who made the decision, and there have been several reconstructions triggered by new digital technology augmenting the existing footage (e.g. King; ‘das Archiv’).The forensic drive behind these transmedia extensions is most explicit in the German Football Museum in Dortmund. For the fiftieth anniversary of the World Cup in 2016, it hosted a special exhibition on the event, which – similarly to the FIFA DVD – embeds it in a story of gaining global recognition for the fairness of the German team ("Deutsches Fußballmuseum").In the permanent exhibition of the German Football Museum, the 1966 game is memorialized with an exhibit titled “Wembley Goal Investigation” (“Ermittlung Wembley-Tor”). It offers three screens, each showing the goal from a different camera angle, a button allowing the visitors to stop the scene at any moment. A huge display cabinet showcases documents, newspaper clippings, quotes from participants, and photographs in the style of a crime-scene investigation—groups of items are called “corpus delicti,” “witnesses,” and “analysis.” Red hand-drawn arrows insinuate relations between different items; yellow “crime scene, do not cross” tape lies next to a ruler and a pair of tweezers.Like the various uses of the slow-motion replays on television, in film, on DVD, and on YouTube, the museum thus offers both hegemonic narratives suggesting a particular emplotment of the event that endow it with broader (nationalist) meaning and a forensic storyworld that offers props, characters, and action building-blocks in a way that invites fans to activate their own storytelling capacities.Conclusion: Sport’s Trans-Seriality Sport’s dependency on a public evaluation of its performances has made it a dynamic transmedia topic from the latter part of the 19th century onwards. Contested moments especially prompt a forensic attitude that harnesses the affordances of different media (and quickly takes advantage of technological innovations) to discuss what “really” happened. The public evaluation of performances also shapes the role of authorship and copyright, which is pivotal to transmedia more generally (Kustritz). Though the circulation of moving images from professional sporting events is highly restricted and intensely monetized, historically this circulation only became a valuable asset because of the sprawling storytelling practices about sport, individual competitions, and famous athletes in press, photography, film, and radio. Even though television dominates the first instance of emplotment during the live transmission, there is no primordial authorship; sport’s intense competition and partisanship (and their national organisation) guarantee that there are contrasting narratives from the start.The forensic storytelling, as we have seen, is structured by sport’s layered seriality, which establishes a rich storyworld and triggers ever new connections between present and past events. Long before the so-called seasons of radio or television series, sport established a seasonal cycle that repeats the same kind of competition with different pre-conditions, personnel, and weather conditions. Likewise, long before the complex storytelling of current television drama (Mittell, Complex TV), sport has mixed episodic with serial storytelling. On the one hand, the 1908 Marathon, for example, is part of the long series of marathon competitions, which can be considered independent events with their own fixed ending. On the other hand, athletes’ histories, continuing rivalries, and (in the case of the World Cup) progress within a tournament all establish narrative connections across individual episodes and even across different seasons (on the similarities between TV sport and soap operas, cf. O’Connor and Boyle).From its start in the 19th century, the serial publication of newspapers supported (and often promoted) sport’s seriality, while sport also shaped the publication schedule of the daily or weekly press (Mason) and today still shapes the seasonal structure of television and sport related computer games (Hutchins and Rowe 164). This seasonal structure also triggers wide-ranging references to the past: With each new World Cup, the famous goal from 1966 gets integrated into new highlight reels telling the German and the English teams’ different stories.Additionally, together with the contingency of sport events, this dual seriality offers ample opportunity for the articulation of “latent seriality” (Kustritz), as a previously neglected recurring trope, situation, or type of event across different instalments can eventually be noted. As already mentioned, the goal of 1966 is part of different sections on the FIFA DVDs: as the climactic final example in a chapter collecting World Cup controversies, as an important—but rather ambivalent—moment of German’s World Cup history, and as the biggest triumph in the re-telling of England’s World Cup appearances. In contrast to most fictional forms of seriality, the emplotment of sport constantly integrates such explicit references to the past, even causally disconnected historical events like the ancient Greek marathon.As a result, each competition activates multiple temporal layers—only some of which are structured as narratives. It is important to note that the public evaluation of performances is not at all restricted to narrative forms; as we have seen, there are quantitative and qualitative comparisons, chronicles, rankings, and athletic spectacle, all of which can create transmedia intertextuality. Sport thus might offer an invitation to more generally analyse how transmedia seriality combines narrative and other forms. Even for fictional transmedia, the immersion in a storyworld and the imagination of extended and alternative storylines might only be two of many dynamics that structure seriality across different media.AcknowledgementsThe two anonymous reviewers and Florian Duijsens offered important feedback to clarify the argument of this text.ReferencesBarnfield, Andrew. "Soccer, Broadcasting, and Narrative: On Televising a Live Soccer Match." Communication & Sport (2013): 326–341.Boni, Marta. "Worlds Today." World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries. Ed. Marta Boni. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017. 9–27."Das Archiv: das Wembley-Tor." Karambolage, 19 June 2016. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://sites.arte.tv/karambolage/de/das-archiv-das-wembley-tor-karambolage>.The Daily Mail, 25 July 1908.Davis, David. Showdown at Shepherd’s Bush: The 1908 Olympic Marathon and the Three Runners Who Launched a Sporting Craze. 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Media of Serial Narrative. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2017. 7–34.Kerrigan, Susan, and J.T. Velikovsky. "Examining Documentary Transmedia Narratives through the Living History of Fort Scratchley Project." Convergence 22.3 (2016): 250–268.Kinder, Marsha. "Playing with Power on Saturday Morning Television and on Home Video Games." Quarterly Review of Film and Television 14 (1992): 29–59.King, Dominic. "Geoff Hurst’s Goal against West Germany DID Cross the Line!" Daily Mail Online. 4 Jan. 2016. 6 Feb. 2018 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3384366/Geoff-Hurst-s-goal-against-West-Germany-DID-cross-line-Sky-Sports-finally-prove-linesman-right-award-controversial-strike-1966-World-Cup-final.html>.Kustritz, Anne. "Seriality and Transmediality in the Fan Multiverse: Flexible and Multiple Narrative Structures in Fan Fiction, Art, and Vids." TV/Series 6 (2014): 225–261.Mason, Tony. "Sporting News, 1860-1914." 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"Peter Sagan’s 2017 Tour de France Disqualification Appeal Rejected by CAS." Bleacher Report. 6 July 2017. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2720166-peter-sagans-2017-tour-de-france-disqualification-appeal-rejected-by-cas>.Stauff, Markus. "The Pregnant-Moment-Photograph: The London 1908 Marathon and the Cross-Media Evaluation of Sport Performances." Historical Social Research (forthcoming). The Times, 22 July 1908.The Times, 24 July 1908."Tour de France: Peter Sagan Disqualified for Elbowing Mark Cavendish." 4 July 2017. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/cycling/2017/07/04/demare-wins-tour-stage-as-cavendish-involved-in-nasty-crash/103410284/>.Tudor, Andrew. "Them and Us: Story and Stereotype in TV World Cup Coverage." European Journal of Communication 7 (1992): 391–413.Werron, Tobias. "On Public Forms of Competition." Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 14.1 (2014): 62–76.———. "World Sport and Its Public. On Historical Relations of Modern Sport and the Media." Observing Sport: System-Theoretical Approaches to Sport as a Social Phenomenon. Eds. Ulrik Wagner and Rasmus Storm. Schorndorf: Hofmann, 2010. 33–59.Whannel, Garry. Media Sport Stars. Masculinities and Moralities. London/New York: Routledge, 2001.

Babies and toddlers are amassing huge followings on social media, achieving microcelebrity status, and raking in five figure sums. In East Asia, many of these lucrative “micro­-microcelebrities” rise to fame by inheriting exposure and proximate microcelebrification from their social media Influencer mothers. Through self-branding techniques, Influencer mothers’ portrayals of their young’ children’s lives “as lived” are the canvas on which (baby) products and services are marketed to readers as “advertorials”. In turning to investigate this budding phenomenon, I draw on ethnographic case studies in Singapore to outline the career trajectory of these young children (under 4yo) including their social media presence, branding strategies, and engagement with their followers. The chapter closes with a brief discussion on some ethical considerations of such young children’s labour in the social media age.Influencer MothersTheresa Senft first coined the term “microcelebrity” in her work Camgirls as a burgeoning online trend, wherein people attempt to gain popularity by employing digital media technologies, such as videos, blogs, and social media. She describes microcelebrities as “non-actors as performers” whose narratives take place “without overt manipulation”, and who are “more ‘real’ than television personalities with ‘perfect hair, perfect friends and perfect lives’” (Senft 16), foregrounding their active response to their communities in the ways that maintain open channels of feedback on social media to engage with their following.Influencers – a vernacular industry term albeit inspired by Katz & Lazarsfeld’s notion of “personal influence” that predates Internet culture – are one type of microcelebrity; they are everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles, engage with their following in “digital” and “physical” spaces, and monetize their following by integrating “advertorials” into their blog or social media posts and making physical appearances at events. A pastiche of “advertisement” and “editorial”, advertorials in the Influencer industry are highly personalized, opinion-laden promotions of products/services that Influencers personally experience and endorse for a fee. Influencers in Singapore often brand themselves as having “relatability”, or the ability to persuade their followers to identify with them (Abidin). They do so by make consciously visible the backstage (Goffman) of the usually “inaccessible”, “personal”, and “private” aspects of mundane, everyday life to curate personae that feel “authentic” to fans (Marwick 114), and more accessible than traditional celebrity (Senft 16).Historically, the Influencer industry in Singapore can be traced back to the early beginnings of the “blogshop” industry from the mid-2000s and the “commercial blogging” industry. Influencers are predominantly young women, and market products and services from diverse industries, although the most popular have been fashion, beauty, F&B, travel, and electronics. Most prominent Influencers are contracted to management agencies who broker deals in exchange for commission and assist in the production of their vlogs. Since then, the industry has grown, matured, and expanded so rapidly that Influencers developed emergent models of advertorials, with the earliest cohorts moving into different life stages and monetizing several other aspects of their personal lives such as the “micro-microcelebrity” of their young children. What this paper provides is an important analysis of the genesis and normative practices of micro-microcelebrity commerce in Singapore from its earliest years, and future research trajectories in this field.Micro-Microcelebrity and Proximate MicrocelebrificationI define micro-microcelebrities as the children of Influencers who have themselves become proximate microcelebrities, having derived exposure and fame from their prominent Influencer mothers, usually through a more prolific, deliberate, and commercial form of what Blum-Ross defines as “sharenting”: the act of parents sharing images and stores about their children in digital spaces such as social networking sites and blogs. Marwick (116-117), drawing from Rojek’s work on types of celebrity – distinguishes between two types of microcelebrity: “ascribed microcelebrity” where the online personality is made recognizable through the “production of celebrity media” such as paparazzi shots and user-produced online memes, or “achieved microcelebrity” where users engage in “self-presentation strateg[ies]”, such as fostering the illusion of intimacy with fans, maintaining a persona, and selective disclosure about oneself.Micro-microcelebrities lie somewhere between the two: In a process I term “proximate microcelebrification”, micro-microcelebrities themselves inherit celebrity through the preemptive and continuous exposure from their Influencer mothers, many beginning even during the pre-birth pregnancy stages in the form of ultrasound scans, as a form of “achieved microcelebrity”. Influencer mothers whose “presentational strategies” (cf. Marshall, “Promotion” 45) are successful enough (as will be addressed later) gain traction among followers, who in turn further popularize the micro-microcelebrity by setting up fan accounts, tribute sites, and gossip forums through which fame is heightened in a feedback loop as a model of “ascribed microcelebrity”.Here, however, I refrain from conceptualizing these young stars as “micro-Influencers” for unlike Influencers, these children do not yet curate their self-presentation to command the attention of followers, but instead are used, framed, and appropriated by their mothers for advertorials. In other words, Influencer mothers “curate [micro-microcelebrities’] identities into being” (Leaver, “Birth”). Following this, many aspects of their micro-microcelebrities become rapidly commodified and commercialized, with advertisers clamoring to endorse anything from maternity hospital stays to nappy cream.Although children of mommybloggers have the prospect to become micro-microcelebrities, both groups are conceptually distinct. Friedman (200-201) argues that among mommybloggers arose a tension between those who adopt “the raw authenticity of nonmonetized blogging”, documenting the “unglamorous minutiae” of their daily lives and a “more authentic view of motherhood” and those who use mommyblogs “primarily as a source of extra income rather than as a site for memoir”, focusing on “parent-centered products” (cf. Mom Bloggers Club).In contrast, micro-microcelebrities and their digital presence are deliberately commercial, framed and staged by Influencer mothers in order to maximize their advertorial potential, and are often postured to market even non-baby/parenting products such as fast food and vehicles (see later). Because of the overt commerce, it is unclear if micro-microcelebrity displays constitute “intimate surveillance”, an “almost always well-intentioned surveillance of young people by parents” (Leaver, “Born” 4). Furthermore, children are generally peripheral to mommybloggers whose own parenting narratives take precedence as a way to connect with fellow mothers, while micro-microcelebrities are the primary feature whose everyday lives and digital presence enrapture followers.MethodologyThe analysis presented is informed by my original fieldwork with 125 Influencers and related actors among whom I conducted a mixture of physical and digital personal interviews, participant observation, web archaeology, and archival research between December 2011 and October 2014. However, the material presented here is based on my digital participant observation of publicly accessible and intentionally-public digital presence of the first four highly successful micro-microcelebrities in Singapore: “Baby Dash” (b.2013) is the son of Influencer xiaxue, “#HeYurou” (b.2011) is the niece of Influencer bongqiuqiu, “#BabyElroyE” (b.2014) is the son of Influencer ohsofickle, and “@MereGoRound” (b.2015) is the daughter of Influencer bongqiuqiu.The microcelebrity/social media handles of these children take different forms, following the platform on which their parent/aunt has exposed them on the most. Baby Dash appears in all of xiaxue’s digital platforms under a variety of over 30 indexical, ironic, or humourous hashtags (Leaver, “Birth”) including “#pointylipped”, #pineappledash”, and “#面包脸” (trans. “bread face”); “#HeYurou” appears on bongqiuqiu’s Instagram and Twitter; “#BabyElroyE” appears on ohsofickle’s Instagram and blog, and is the central figure of his mother’s new YouTube channel; and “@MereGoRound” appears on all of bongqiuqiu’s digital platforms but also has her own Instagram account and dedicated YouTube channel. The images reproduced here are screenshot from Influencer mothers’ highly public social media: xiaxue, bongqiuqiu, and ohsofickle boast 593k, 277k, and 124k followers on Instagram and 263k, 41k, and 17k followers on Twitter respectively at the time of writing.Anticipation and Digital EstatesIn an exclusive front-pager (Figure 1) on the day of his induced birth, it was announced that Baby Dash had already received up to SGD25,000 worth of endorsement deals brokered by his Influencer mother, xiaxue. As the first micro-microcelebrity in his cohort (his mother was among the pioneer Influencers), Baby Dash’s Caesarean section was even filmed and posted on xiaxue’s YouTube channel in three parts (Figure 2). xiaxue had announced her pregnancy on her blog while in her second trimester, following which she consistently posted mirror selfies of her baby bump.Figure 1 & 2, screenshot April 2013 from ‹instagram.com/xiaxue›In her successful attempt at generating anticipation, the “bump” itself seemed to garner its own following on Twitter and Instagram, with many followers discussing how the Influencer dressed “it”, and how “it” was evolving over the weeks. One follower even compiled a collage of xiaxue’s “bump” chronologically and gifted it to the Influencer as an art image via Twitter on the day she delivered Baby Dash (Figure 3 & 4). Followers also frequently speculated and bantered about how her baby would look, and mused about how much they were going to adore him. Figure 3 & 4, screenshot March 2013 from ‹twitter.com/xiaxue› While Lupton (42) has conceptualized the sharing of images that precede birth as a “rite of passage”, Influencer mothers who publish sonograms deliberately do so in order to claim digital estates for their to-be micro-microcelebrities in the form of “reserved” social media handles, blog URLs, and unique hashtags for self-branding. For instance, at the 3-month mark of her pregnancy, Influencer bongqiuqiu debuted her baby’s dedicated hashtag, “#MereGoRound” in a birth announcement on her on Instagram account. Shortly after, she started an Instagram account, “@MereGoRound”, for her baby, who amassed over 5.5k followers prior to her birth. Figure 5 & 6, screenshot March 2015 from instagram.com/meregoround and instagram.com/bongqiuqiuThe debut picture features a heavily pregnant belly shot of bongqiuqiu (Figure 5), creating much anticipation for the arrival of a new micro-microcelebrity: in the six months leading up to her birth, various family, friends, and fans shared Instagram images of their gifts and welcome party for @MereGoRound, and followers shared congratulations and fan art on the dedicated Instagram hashtag. During this time, bongqiuqiu also frequently updated followers on her pregnancy progress, not without advertising her (presumably sponsored) gynecologist and hospital stay in her pregnancy diaries (Figure 6) – like Baby Dash, even as a foetus @MereGoRound was accumulating advertorials. Presently at six months old, @MereGoRound boasts almost 40k followers on Instagram on which embedded in the narrative of her growth are sponsored products and services from various advertisers.Non-Baby-Related AdvertorialsPrior to her pregnancy, Influencer bongqiuqiu hopped onto the micro-microcelebrity bandwagon in the wake of Baby Dash’s birth, by using her niece “#HeYurou” in her advertorials. Many Influencers attempt to naturalize their advertorials by composing their post as if recounting a family event. With reference to a child, parent, or partner, they may muse or quip about a product being used or an experience being shared in a bid to mask the distinction between their personal and commercial material. bongqiuqiu frequently posted personal, non-sponsored images engaging in daily mundane activities under the dedicated hashtag “#HeYurou”.However, this was occasionally interspersed with pictures of her niece holding on to various products including storybooks (Figure 8) and shopping bags (Figure 9). At first glance, this might have seemed like any mundane daily update the Influencer often posts. However, a close inspection reveals the caption bearing sponsor hashtags, tags, and campaign information. For instance, one Instagram post shows #HeYurou casually holding on to and staring at a burger in KFC wrapping (Figure 7), but when read in tandem with bongqiuqiu’s other KFC-related posts published over a span of a few months, it becomes clear that #HeYurou was in fact advertising for KFC. Figure 7, 8, 9, screenshot December 2014 from ‹instagram.com/bongqiuqiu›Elsewhere, Baby Dash was incorporated into xiaxue’s car sponsorship with over 20 large decals of one of his viral photos – dubbed “pineapple Dash” among followers – plastered all over her vehicle (Figure 10). Followers who spot the car in public are encouraged to photograph and upload the image using its dedicated hashtag, “#xiaxuecar” as part of the Influencer’s car sponsorship – an engagement scarcely related to her young child. Since then, xiaxue has speculated producing offshoots of “pineapple Dash” products including smartphone casings. Figure 10, screenshot December 2014 from ‹instagram.com/xiaxue›Follower EngagementSponsors regularly organize fan meet-and-greets headlined by micro-microcelebrities in order to attract potential customers. Photo opportunities and the chance to see Baby Dash “in the flesh” frequently front press and promotional material of marketing campaigns. Elsewhere on social media, several Baby Dash fan and tribute accounts have also emerged on Instagram, reposting images and related media of the micro-microcelebrity with overt adoration, no doubt encouraged by xiaxue, who began crowdsourcing captions for Baby Dash’s photos.Influencer ohsofickle postures #BabyElroyE’s follower engagement in a more subtle way. In her YouTube channel that debut in the month of her baby’s birth, ohsofickle produces video diaries of being a young, single, mother who is raising a child (Figure 11). In each episode, #BabyElroyE is the main feature whose daily activities are documented, and while there is some advertising embedded, ohsofickle’s approach on YouTube is much less overt than others as it features much more non-monetized personal content (Figure 12). Her blog serves as a backchannel to her vlogs, in which she recounts her struggles with motherhood and explicitly solicits the advice of mothers. However, owing to her young age (she became an Influencer at 17 and gave birth at 24), many of her followers are teenagers and young women who respond to her solicitations by gushing over #BabyElroyE’s images on Instagram. Figure 11 & 12, screenshot September 2015 from ‹instagram.com/ohsofickle›PrivacyAs noted by Holloway et al. (23), children like micro-microcelebrities will be among the first cohorts to inherit “digital profiles” of their “whole lifetime” as a “work in progress”, from parents who habitually underestimate or discount the privacy and long term effects of publicizing information about their children at the time of posting. This matters in a climate where social media platforms can amend privacy policies without user consent (23), and is even more pressing for micro-microcelebrities whose followers store, republish, and recirculate information in fan networks, resulting in digital footprints with persistence, replicability, scalability, searchability (boyd), and extended longevity in public circulation which can be attributed back to the children indefinitely (Leaver, “Ends”).Despite minimum age restrictions and recent concerns with “digital kidnapping” where users steal images of other young children to be re-posted as their own (Whigham), some social media platforms rarely police the proliferation of accounts set up by parents on behalf of their underage children prominently displaying their legal names and life histories, citing differing jurisdictions in various countries (Facebook; Instagram), while others claim to disable accounts if users report an “incorrect birth date” (cf. Google for YouTube). In Singapore, the Media Development Authority (MDA) which governs all print and digital media has no firm regulations for this but suggests that the age of consent is 16 judging by their recommendation to parents with children aged below 16 to subscribe to Internet filtering services (Media Development Authority, “Regulatory” 1). Moreover, current initiatives have been focused on how parents can impart digital literacy to their children (Media Development Authority, “Empowered”; Media Literacy Council) as opposed to educating parents about the digital footprints they may be unwittingly leaving about their children.The digital lives of micro-microcelebrities pose new layers of concern given their publicness and deliberate publicity, specifically hinged on making visible the usually inaccessible, private aspects of everyday life (Marshall, “Persona” 5).Scholars note that celebrities are individuals for whom speculation of their private lives takes precedence over their actual public role or career (Geraghty 100-101; Turner 8). However, the personae of Influencers and their young children are shaped by ambiguously blurring the boundaries of privacy and publicness in order to bait followers’ attention, such that privacy and publicness are defined by being broadcast, circulated, and publicized (Warner 414). In other words, the publicness of micro-microcelebrities is premised on the extent of the intentional publicity rather than simply being in the public domain (Marwick 223-231, emphasis mine).Among Influencers privacy concerns have aroused awareness but not action – Baby Dash’s Influencer mother admitted in a national radio interview that he has received a death threat via Instagram but feels that her child is unlikely to be actually attacked (Channel News Asia) – because privacy is a commodity that is manipulated and performed to advance their micro-microcelebrities’ careers. As pioneer micro-microcelebrities are all under 2-years-old at present, future research warrants investigating “child-centred definitions” (Third et al.) of the transition in which they come of age, grow an awareness of their digital presence, respond to their Influencer mothers’ actions, and potentially take over their accounts.Young LabourThe Ministry of Manpower (MOM) in Singapore, which regulates the employment of children and young persons, states that children under the age of 13 may not legally work in non-industrial or industrial settings (Ministry of Manpower). However, the same document later ambiguously states underaged children who do work can only do so under strict work limits (Ministry of Manpower). Elsewhere (Chan), it is noted that national labour statistics have thus far only focused on those above the age of 15, thus neglecting a true reflection of underaged labour in Singapore. This is despite the prominence of micro-microcelebrities who are put in front of (video) cameras to build social media content. Additionally, the work of micro-microcelebrities on digital platforms has not yet been formally recognized as labour, and is not regulated by any authority including Influencer management firms, clients, the MDA, and the MOM. Brief snippets from my ethnographic fieldwork with Influencer management agencies in Singapore similarly reveal that micro-microcelebrities’ labour engagements and control of their earnings are entirely at their parents’ discretion.As models and actors, micro-microcelebrities are one form of entertainment workers who if between the ages of 15 days and 18 years in the state of California are required to obtain an Entertainment Work Permit to be gainfully employed, adhering to strict work, schooling, and rest hour quotas (Department of Industrial Relations). Furthermore, the Californian Coogan Law affirms that earnings by these minors are their own property and not their parents’, although they are not old enough to legally control their finances and rely on the state to govern their earnings with a legal guardian (Screen Actors Guild). However, this similarly excludes underaged children and micro-microcelebrities engaged in creative digital ecologies. Future research should look into safeguards and instruments among young child entertainers, especially for micro-micrcocelebrities’ among whom commercial work and personal documentation is not always distinct, and are in fact deliberately intertwined in order to better engage with followers for relatabilityGrowing Up BrandedIn the wake of moral panics over excessive surveillance technologies, children’s safety on the Internet, and data retention concerns, micro-microcelebrities and their Influencer mothers stand out for their deliberately personal and overtly commercial approach towards self-documenting, self-presenting, and self-publicizing from the moment of conception. 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Over the last decade or so, much has been written about the possibilities offered by the internet for creating sites of community based on exchange, collaboration, and reciprocity. Since Howard Rheingold published his polemic, The Virtual Community, in 1993, much has been written on this subject. The notion of just what constitutes ‘virtual reality’ has been extensively debated; however, ‘community’ is almost universally assumed to be good. There are failed communities and successful communities, but the critique of ‘community’ itself as a concept stops there. How, then, do we account for websites that create a sense of community precisely through the promotion of hatred and violence, and on which hatred of others is what the community ‘has in common’? Community as Good: The Origins of Virtual Community The term ‘community’ suggests communication; indeed, the work derives from the Latin communicare, which, as Peter Gould explains, ‘originally meant to share, to join and to unite” (3), and from which is also derived the verb ‘to communicate.’ Hence, accounts of online culture draw on this definition of community, suggesting that computer technology brings people together by allowing them to communicate. Such proximity is, therefore, privileged over geophysical location. In recent debates about cyber-culture, definitions of online community tend to define community through the concept of ‘shared interests’. What is more, some accounts of cyber-culture share a certain view of online community as inherently liberating. The Bad Community: God Hates Fags God Hates Fags is perhaps one of the best-known far-right sites on the Web. It is a non-interactive website, set up and maintained by Benjamin Phelps, pastor of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, in association with his grandfather Fred Phelps, who originally founded the church in 1964. Phelps first achieved notoriety in 1991 when he organised a picket of the San Francisco Pride Parade, to ‘warn this evil city that they’re going the way of Sodom’. In 1997, the church’s members were ordered by the American Supreme Court to limit their picketing activities after they targeted a local Episcopalian church that they claimed had promoted gay rights. Since the ruling, church members have continued their campaign of homophobic picketing. However, it is as an online promoter of homophobia and other forms of hatred that Phelps has achieved notoriety on an international scale. On paper, Westboro Baptist Church’s Website seems like the perfect example of the Net’s utility as a means of giving voice to small, marginalised community groups, and of bringing together people who share ‘a commonality of interests and goals’. However, this, like other Christian fundamentalist sites, challenges the view of such networks as essentially liberating (though they are certainly utopian in tone), since their shared interests happen to include insisting that creationist dogma be taught in schools, picketing the funerals of those who die of Aids or as a result of homophobic attacks, and promoting violence against lesbians and gay men. God Hates Fags sees itself as both a site of community and as a pressure group fighting a desperately immoral liberal society. It also draws on the idea of a society becoming good through the erasure of certain marginalised subjects, with the erasure to take the form of individuals suppressing their sexual identity in real life, not just online. While God Hates Fags and other sites like it primarily express the fantasy of a post-apocalyptic New Jerusalem. They do so by referring to fantasies of the nation (as a space that must be purified in order for this apocalyptic transformation to take place), of the online community (here imagined as a community of haters), and of the local community producing the site (who, far from being a small, marginal force, are re-presented as a community of ‘knowers’ attempting to promote ‘the truth’ about life in the United States: that is, as a force for good). Fantastic communities are often unaware of their own violence, and the community that hates is no exception, although its claims to peacefulness often stretch credulity to a greater than usual extent. Here is Westboro’s description of its ‘peaceful’ protests: WBC engages in daily peaceful sidewalk demonstrations opposing the homosexual lifestyle of soul-damning, nation-destroying filth. We display large, colourful signs containing Bible words and sentiments, including: GOD HATES FAGS, FAGS HATE GOD, AIDS CURES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR AIDS, FAGS BURN IN HELL, GOD IS NOT MOCKED, FAGS ARE NATURE FREAKS [sic] … FAGS DOOM NATIONS, etc. (God Hates Fags) The site’s authors are able to claim such sentiments as ‘non-violent’ precisely because of the way that violence is imagined purely in terms of the physical act; that is, as embodied. Discursive violence, the violence of the text, is not recognised as such. Reading the passages above, I find it hard to maintain any sense of critical distance at the notion of picketing a funeral, and then going online to publicise the activity and exhort others to do the same. The site is frustrating precisely because it assumes the reader’s sympathy. For Phelps, a community of ‘fag haters’ already exists within the wider, corrupt national community of the United States; the site merely serves to unite this community and to provide it with resources. Nevertheless, the statement is itself part of the process by which the site attempts to construct a community through a process of rehabilitation, which aims to re-position hatred of homosexuals both as a political position and as an identity position. The site assumes that the experience of hatred, like that of other extreme emotions, has been wrongly constructed as essentially private, even impossible to articulate. Phelps assures us that it is not, that our hatred (and the reader is always assumed to be on side; the site is never defensive in tone, and never attempts to address its critics) is shared by others. The community exists in the bodies of individuals; by making hatred public and visible, the community can finally become visible in the public domain. This site, and others like it, provide a chilling new perspective on the notion of ‘shared interests’ as a basis for community, as well as giving an insight into the ways in which inequalities might not only translate from geophysical into online communities but actually be heightened, not least by the liberal rhetoric of free speech in which the intended victims of such assaults are urged simply to ignore them, even as they are imposed an ever-increasing number of victims (Porter 234-5). In order to justify their attacks on outsiders, hate sites reproduce discourses of virtual community alongside fundamentalist dogma. So, for example, Westboro Baptist Church claims that it is necessary to draw together a community based on a shared homophobic response in order to protect the larger community of the nation from destruction. In order to construct the virtual community then, it is necessary to mobilise fantasies of the nation as it might be in an ideal world. The community does not simply represent the wider community of the United States; that is, it is not a ‘virtual America.’ Rather, it draws upon a fantasy of the nation as perfectible, and this fantasy assumes a desire to purify the nation by destroying or expelling strangers. Despite the dystopian violence of Phelps’s vision, however, I do not think it is enough to argue that such manifestations are simply an example of a medium with great potential for spiritual growth falling into the wrong hands. Margaret Wertheim seems to predict the use of the Internet to promote hatred when she writes that ‘[t]here is every potential, if we are not careful, for cyberspace to be less like Heaven, and more like Hell’ (298). This reading of virtual culture tends to normalise the idea of a utopian internet community, from which deviations occur only as the result of insufficient vigilance. What is more, the invocation of a group of right-thinking cyber-citizens—the ‘we’ who must be ‘careful’—reproduces the very liberal rhetoric which, as I have argued, tends to perpetuate, or at least obscure, power structures within online communities. Indeed, the notion of ‘the online community’ invoked here seems, ironically, to reproduce the notion of a single unlimited community which, if it is not conterminous with all mankind exactly, is certainly conterminous with all (responsible) users of the internet. As I have shown, it is by drawing on the notions of universality and redemption that underpin utopian theories of cyber-culture that Phelps is able to present his site as a site of community. I would suggest, then, that the notion of a community that has the potential to be good but is constantly under threat from deviant outsiders, is inadequate. Rather, it is necessary to pay attention to the ways in which utopian rhetoric might in itself play a role in reproducing inequalities that exist in society more generally, both online and off. References Gould, P. “Dynamic Structures of Geographic Space.” Collapsing Space and Time: Geographic Aspects of Communications and Information. Eds. S.D. Brunn and T.R. Leinbach. London: HarperCollins, 1991. 3-30. Porter, J.E. “Liberal Individualism and Internet Policy: A Communitarian Critique.” Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st-Century Technologies. Eds. G.E. Hawisher and C.L. Selfe. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. Rheingold, H. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. HarperPerennial, 1993. 16 Oct. 2002 http://www.well.com/www/hlr/vcbook/index.html>. Wertheim, M. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. London: Virago Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ferreday, Debra. "Bad Communities: Virtual Community and Hate Speech." M/C Journal 8.1 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/07-ferreday.php>. APA Style Ferreday, D. (Feb. 2005) "Bad Communities: Virtual Community and Hate Speech," M/C Journal, 8(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/07-ferreday.php>.

Introduction There are increasing levels of concern around the health of citizens within Western neo-liberal democracies like Britain, the USA, and Australia. These governmental concerns are made manifest by discursive mechanisms that seek to both survey and regulate the lifestyles, eating habits and exercise regimes of citizens. Such governmental imperatives have historically targeted schools with school food ranking high in the priorities of public health policy, particularly in regards to the fears around childhood obesity and related health problems (Gard and Wright, Rich, Vander Schee and Gard). However, more recently such concerns have spilled into the wider public arena in Australia where fears of an “obesity epidemic”, the revision of the “food pyramid” and recent calls that make it mandatory for fast food companies to display calorie/kilojoule content on menu boards illustrate the increasing levels to which governments seek to intervene regarding the health of citizens. Not only does the attempt to produce a healthy citizen take place within policy imperatives but also within popular culture. Here, we see healthy eating and diet shows becoming international brands. For example The Biggest Loser, where obese contestants embark on a televised diet and exercise regime, competing to lose the most weight in the shortest time, and also Jamie Oliver’s attempt to change the eating habits of the British has crossed the Atlantic to the USA. There is a sense of urgency embedded in many such discursive practices and an implication that, as a society, we need a “lifestyle change” to make us healthier. Reflecting this urgency is an increase in cookbooks that not only provide recipe ideas but also seek to intervene into our day-to-day conduct. The content of such books moves beyond ways of putting a meal together and into the territory of self-surveillance and regulation. In this way, then, cookbooks can be read as pedagogical. This particular brand of pedagogy, moreover, feeds into wider socio-political discourses around the governance of the self within our late modern context. This chapter will argue that many contemporary cookbooks attempt to enact governmental imperatives around health and nutrition and that, by doing this, they become pedagogical devices that translate governmental devices into the homes of their readers. By using a post-Foucauldian analytical framework, we will illustrate the ways in which Jane Kennedy’s cookbook, Fabulous Food, Minus the Boombah mobilises discourses of health, gender, risk, and food in a rich (but 99 per cent fat free) mix. Analytical Framework This paper draws upon Foucauldian governmentality studies and the ways in which discursive practices are enacted in order to position and offer an analysis of cookbooks as pedagogical devices that translate the work of government into readers’ homes. Foucault defined government as “the conduct of conduct” arguing that government relates to the “way in which the conduct of individuals or groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick […] to govern in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action” (220–1). Foucault argued that attempts to shape conduct occur within socio-historical moments and contexts (Gordon) and they are, therefore, subject to change. Within this article, we seek to understand the ways in which governmental imperatives around food and lifestyle are taken up by cookbook authors and the implications of this in terms of public pedagogies within our late-modern context. Public health is located within a myriad of governmental sites that attempt to regulate people’s lives. In deciphering how government sites operate as mechanisms of regulation in modern times, Miller and Rose suggest that we require: An investigation not merely of grand political schemata, or economic ambitions, or even of general slogans such as ‘state control’, nationalization, the free market, and the like, but of apparently humble and mundane mechanisms which appear to make it possible to govern […] the list is heterogeneous and is, in principle unlimited (32). Such investigations can be grouped under the umbrella of “governmentality studies”. To grasp “governmentality” is complex and requires an analytics that can span history, and reach across macro and micro contours to trace various linkages and connections forged between governmental rationalities, techniques and practices (Leahy, Assembling). For the purposes of this paper we will be offering an analytic of the humble cookbook and its potential role in the governance of the self, a technique vital to contemporary neo-liberal modes of governance. Neo-liberalism produces particular versions of health, citizenship, and individualism. Within neo-liberal governmental assemblages, public health policy operates as a key site for enacting what Miller and Rose label “government at a distance” (32) by working to facilitate the shifting of responsibility for the health of citizens from the State to the individual. The individual, however, does not instinctively know how to incorporate governmental hopes for a healthy lifestyle into their lives—it is here that the cookbook, as pedagogical device, is vital because it translates macro governmental hopes to the micro level, that is, into the kitchens of citizens. Both risk and expertise also work alongside neo-liberalism in the assemblage to render the problems of government both thinkable and calculable, and in turn, practical. We will see in the next section how Jane Kennedy, the author of Fabulous Food, Minus the Boombah deploys both popular notions of risk alongside her own experience and expertise (her lifelong “battle” with weight) in order to fold the (female) reader in to Kennedy’s particular approach to healthy eating. Pedagogy could be described as part of the “doing” of education, the means through which ideas are transmitted through and between learners and teachers. Like contemporary neo-liberal government, contemporary pedagogies can be understood as assemblages; that is, they are made up of competing, intersecting, contradictory and multiple elements. Pedagogy is a technical device through which these elements are translated and transmitted to its audience, be that school pupils, students, adult learners or citizens. Elizabeth Ellsworth argues that pedagogy is a “social relationship [that] is very close in. It gets right in there in your brain, your body, your heart, your sense of self, of the world, of others, and of possibilities and impossibilities in all those realms” (6). In other words, effective pedagogical devices are necessary contact points between ideas and the self; they inform relationships between the macro and the micro, thus shaping both the individual and the collective. The remainder of this paper will demonstrate how Fabulous Food, Minus the Boombah deploys popular discursive trends regarding food, health, gender, and citizenship as pedagogic tools that aim to cultivate a healthier subject. Food That Makes Your Arse Huge? “Boombah: (adj). Word to describe food that makes your arse huge” (Kennedy 5). Lifestyle, diet, and health books can be seen to have saturated the market over recent years in an almost epidemic-like way. This phenomenon both mirrors and informs governmental imperatives around the health and lifestyle of citizens. A recent visit to our local bookshop revealed that there appears to be a polarisation of texts relating to food, health, and wellbeing. Books that explicitly relate to health and health issues can be found in one section, and cookbooks in another. However, there are an increasing number of texts that blend the two genres and offer diet, health, and lifestyle tips along with recipe ideas and cooking techniques. Within this blend there is also variation; there are texts that offer a scientific exposition of food, nutrition, and diet, such as Ricotti and Connelly’s The Healthy Family Cookbook, a text which offers a twelve-chapter overview of current theories and practices around health and nutrition before offering recipe ideas designed to help the reader achieve and maintain a “healthy weight” (page). In addition there are also texts that fold particular approaches to weight-loss, such as Jenny Craig or The Biggest Loser, together with cooking. The input of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to the mix has been well documented (see Pike; Leahy, Disgusting; Rawlins; Zimmet and James) and the influence of Oliver’s approachable style of writing can be found within many contemporary cookbooks, including Fabulous Food, Minus the Boombah, a text within which Jane Kennedy blends together cooking, health, and lifestyle into a paste that is bound together with a Bridget Jones-style confessional commentary on her own, personal struggles with weight and dieting. For example: “I love food. Always have. Unfortunately I love it about one kilo per month more than I should. Perhaps I should put it another way: the food I love seems to have more calories than I need over a month and a year and a lifetime … it adds up! Yep, I get FAT” (xi). This style can be read as a way of “getting right in” (Ellsworth 6), to enfold the reader into Kennedy’s world. It also may provide readers, particularly, as we will discus below, middle-class Anglo-Australian females, with a sense of solidarity in a struggle against weight gain. Kennedy often deploys the spectre of designer jeans that no longer fit as a way to further entice the reader to embrace the healthy eating regime promoted by the book. Kennedy draws upon notions of horror and disgust at the fat body (her own but, implicitly, also the readers). Horror and disgust are potent pedagogical devices that are often put to work in educational and health promotion settings in an attempt to lure people and their bodies into action (Leahy, Disgusting; Lupton). In many ways Kennedy’s cookbook can be read as public pedagogy—its aim is to teach the reader how to cook food that is “packed full of flavour but minus the boombah” (xxvii), or minus that which causes bodily harm and/or disgusting transformation. In order to achieve this, Kennedy deploys “expert knowledge” as she takes the reader on a journey through her own struggles with weight, fad diets and failure to epiphany—which for Kennedy was a personal trainer and a new approach to cooking, eating and lifestyle and her book is peppered with self help-style narrative devices, for example: The key to successful weight loss with this style of eating is to be organised. Disorganisation is the open door though which every second excuse (and French fry) slips. “Oh no, the stores are closed. Oh well, better order takeaway”. Don’t do it. There. Is. No. Good. Takeaway. Food. (Kennedy xxii, emphasis original). Several mechanisms are being deployed here. Firstly, she is inadvertently constructing the perfect western neo-liberal subject: organised, self-contained, disciplined, and able to make informed rational decisions around food type and purchase. Secondly, by predicting and addressing the reader’s perceived resistance, Kennedy reveals her moralistic overtones. We see the judgment of a rational, ordered subject versus a messy, disorganised, immoral (and fat) subject in a piling up of connotations that lead to the same conclusion: this healthy way is the best healthy way. Kennedy’s personal narrative within the text follows a trajectory of “awareness, struggle and epiphany” (Plummer 131) that often characterise the confessional stories that we tell about ourselves: “I ended up […] back at square one: overweight, staring down a year of chicken consommé dinners […] I finally grew a brain and motivated myself to see a personal trainer” (Kennedy xiv). Kennedy’s narrative is a familiar one and a Foucauldian reading of confession enables us to take the position that confession is imperative to the contemporary construction of self. Modes of confession have become increasingly diverse and reified through the era of reality TV, social networking and the “personal trauma” sub-genre of autobiographical memoir (Brien). Kennedy’s book deploys confession as a narrative device that, like her moralising about the dangers of take away food, attempts to fold the reader into her world and, as a result, reifies her approach to healthy eating and lifestyle. We can do it because she has done it. Through the confessional she is not only able to tell of her love of food but also of her understanding of it as risky. This can be outlined by drawing upon an extract we looked at earlier: “the food I love seems to have more calories than I need and over a month and a year and lifetime it adds up! Yep, I get FAT” (xi). Risk and expertise work alongside neo-liberal individualism in the governmental assemblage to render the problems of government both thinkable and calculable, and in turn, practical. Kennedy deploys both risk and expert knowledge in order to successfully demonstrate her understanding of healthy eating as a battleground that see her appetite and tastes at war with her waistline. She guides us through the various fad diets she has tried, through gaining weight while being pregnant, and the anguish of seeing her image reflected back at her through her career in television, until her epiphany: the realisation that in order to achieve and maintain a healthy weight a balance of healthy eating and exercise is required. These are convincing pedagogical strategies that encourage the reader to apply modes of self-governance that reflect wider, macro hopes for the healthy neo-liberal citizen and Kennedy’s status as TV celebrity within Australia. Her use of the colloquial term “boombah” makes hers a uniquely Australian endeavour. It is worth noting here that Kennedy’s brand of Australian humour and use of colloquialism is deeply entrenched with raced and classed assumptions about desirable body size and the economic and cultural capital of its readers. It is middle class white Anglo-Australian women who are being targeted by this book and, arguably, by this brand of public pedagogy. As with many contemporary cultural texts about cooking, Kennedy’s book promotes an: “upper-middle-class lifestyle enhanced by the appropriation of goods and commodities. All the while, real issues surrounding the life-sustaining reality of food are ignored” (Wright and Sandlin 406). The lifestyle promoted by Kennedy is classed in this way. She writes of Bettina Liano jeans, of working on the popular Australian television show A Current Affair, of drinking wine, and using goats cheese and kaffir lime leaves in her cooking. Her levels of economic and cultural capital are obvious, and this sets the scene well for the type of reader she is attempting to educate. Although she does not explicitly mention gender, her “Bridget Jones”-style confessions of dietary failure (though Kennedy succeeds where Bridget would inevitably continue to fail), the mention of cooking both children’s and adult’s dinners, and the illustrations throughout the book that feature children’s toys implicitly position her as a “typical modern woman” with a career and a family to boot. In terms of pedagogy, Kennedy’s book reflects contemporary governmental discourse around health, food and wellbeing. It is designed “to shape with some degree of deliberation aspects of our behaviour according to particular sets of norms and for a variety of ends” (Dean 18). It reflects government fears around obesity, portion size, calorific content, and body shape. Pike and Leahy argue that food pedagogies provide government, and in this case the individual, with opportunities to shape, sculpt, mobilise, and work through the food choices, desires and aspirations, needs, wants, and lifestyles of parents, families, and children. The explicit intention of food pedagogies is to enlist the public into a process of “governmental self formation”: that is, “the ways in which various authorities and agencies seek to shape the conduct, aspirations, needs, desires and capacities of specified political and social categories, to enlist them in particular strategies and to seek definite goals” (Dean 563). Fabulous Food, Minus the Boombah then uses confession as a springboard to enlisting its readers into a healthier lifestyle and, more importantly, a healthier, risk aversive relationship with food. It individualises this struggle, and, like all good neo-liberal subjects, presents a healthy diet as an individual struggle: This way of cooking and eating works for me […] I feel much healthier and happier and I’ve got a lot more energy […] These recipes have to be better for you than chowing down a creepy bowl of 2 minute noodles and an entire pack of Tim Tams (yes, it’s time to let go). Be disciplined, even if you’ve struggled before. And if you really can’t live without your nightly routine of creamy pasta […] then bung this book back on the shelf. But stop whingeing about your huge arse (xix). This passage illustrates Kennedy’s pedagogy well, particularly the way in which her pedagogy is infused with neo-liberal discursive techniques. She positions herself as expert by stating that her way of cooking “works for me” as well as by deploying phrases like “I feel” and “I’ve got”. She then expertly shifts the reader’s focus from herself to the governance of the self by stating that it is up to the individual to be self-disciplined. Her pedagogy is littered with risk discourse as she informs us that you can continue to eat as you wish, but that there are consequences (a “huge arse”). This particular brand of risk discourse is gendered, as it is arguably mostly women who worry about the size of this part of their anatomy. One of the greatest contradictions of a neo-liberal approach to governance is that at the same time as promoting individual responsibility, there is also a strong emphasis on the collective. Kennedy reflects this throughout the book, as the above passage suggests. Her introductory section acts as a guide for the reader, who—once enfolded into Kennedy’s approach—she lets make their own way with encouragement. This is manifest in her final statements, “So let’s say goodbye to boombah. Go for it! And enjoy!” (xxvii). As pedagogy, then, Fabulous Food, Minus the Boombah attempts to cultivate and shape the reader’s choices around food by providing a practical means for transforming not only the reader’s food practices but also her image and self-esteem. This is achieved by the author’s supplement of supplying expert information, cooking skills, guidance, and incitement. Let’s Say Goodbye to Boombah? This paper has demonstrated how the contemporary cookbook can be read as pedagogy. In some ways the humble cookbook has always been pedagogical; seeking to teach the reader to make something that they previously did not, presumably, know how to, as well as providing cooking techniques and advice on the most suitable produce to use in particular recipes. However, in the contemporary moment, the cookbook arguably increasingly acts as a translation mechanism for governmental imperatives around food, health, and wellbeing. We have taken one cookbook amongst many as an illustration of our thesis. Jane Kennedy’s Fabulous Food Minus the Boombah is an Australian example of the neo-liberal project that lies at the heart of contemporary modes of governance of the population, but also, and more importantly, governance of the self. At the very heart of neo-liberalism is an imagined subject. That is, neo-liberalism needs and wants citizens to be autonomous, health seeking, enterprising, rational, choice-making individuals. The contemporary cookbook, it has been argued, can assist the individual in the production of a healthier-eating self. However, the more complex and intersecting aspects of selfhood—aspects such as socio-economic status, gender, location and ethnicity—are often absent from the construction of the healthy individual promoted by the contemporary cookbook. Above all, this paper has sought to problematise some of the dominant discourse around food, health, and wellbeing that can be found on the pages of the modern-day cookbook. References Brien, Donna Lee. “True Tales that Nurture: Defining Auto/Biographical Storytelling”. Australian Folklore 19 (2004): 84-95. Brien, Donna Lee, and Adele Wessel. “From ‘Training in Citizenship and Home-making’ to ‘Plating Pp’: Writing Australian Cookbooks for Younger Readers”. Ethical Imaginations: Writing Worlds: Refereed Papers of the 16th Annual Australasian Association of Writing Programs Conference. Canberra: AAWP, 2011. Dean, Mitchell. “Governing the Unemployed Self in an Active Society”. Economy and Society 24 (1995): 559–83. Dean, Mitchell. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (2nd ed.). London: Sage, 2010. Ellsworth, Elizabeth. “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Myths of Critical Pedagogy.” Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy. Ed. Luke, Carmen and Gore, Jennifer. New York: Routledge, 1992. 90–119. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject And Power.” Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Ed. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 208–26. Gard, Michael, and Jan Wright. The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology. London: Routledge, 2005. Gordon, Colin. “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction”. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Eds. Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, Foucault, Michel, and Miller, Peter. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. 1–52. Kennedy, Jane. Fabulous Food Minus the Boombah. Melbourne: Hardie Grant, 2009. Leahy, Deana. “Assembling a Health[y] Subject.” Unpublished PhD Thesis. Melbourne: Deakin University, 2012. Leahy, Deana. “Disgusting Pedagogies.” Biopolitics and the Obesity Epidemic. Eds. Wright, Jan, and Harwood, Valerie. Routledge: New York, 2009. 172–83. Lupton, Deborah. Fat. New York: Routledge, 2012. Miller, Peter, and Rose, Nicholas. Governing the Present. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Pike, Jo. “Junk Food Mums: Class, Gender and the Battle of Rawmarsh.” Fat Studies and Health at Every Size. Conference: Durham U, 2010. Pike, Jo, and Leahy, Deana. “School Food and the Pedagogies of Parenting”. Australian Journal of Adult Learning 52.3 (2012): 434–59.Plummer, Ken. Telling Sexual Stories. London: Routledge, 1995. Rawlins, Emma. “Citizenship, Health Education and the Obesity Crisis”. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 7 (2006). 18 Apr. 2013. ‹http://www.acme-journal.org›. Rich, Emma. (2010b). “Obesity Assemblages and Surveillance in Schools” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23 (2010): 803–21. Ricotti, Henry, and Connelly, Vincent. The Healthy Family Cookbook. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Vander Schee, Carol, and Michael Gard. “Editorial: Politics, Pedagogy and Practice in School Health Policy”. Policy Futures in Education 9 (2011): 307–14. Wright, Robin Redman, and Jennifer A. Sandlin. “You Are What You Eat!?: Television Cooking Shows, Consumption, and Lifestyle Practices as Adult Learning”. Honoring Our Past, Embracing Our Future: Proceedings of the 50th Annual Adult Education Research Conference. 2009: 402-407. 18 Apr. 2013. ‹http://digitalcommons.nl.edu/ace_aerc/1›. Zimmet, Paul Z., and James, Phillip W.T. “The Unstoppable Australian Obesity and Diabetes Juggernaut: What Should Politicians Do?”. Medical Journal of Australia 185 (2008): 187–8.

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