Journal articles on the topic 'Podcast industry'

Podcasts as a new media have grew rapidly in the last five years. Podcast growth also occurs in Indonesia supported by technology, industry, creators and society. Podcasts have become a popular culture among Indonesia's young generation, especially in urban areas. In the future, podcast is expected to continue to grow both globally and in Indonesia. Advances in internet and smartphone technology will be the key aspect in the future progress of podcasts.

Purpose. The article presents the results of the analysis of the podcasting market in Russia. It highlights the main problems of the industry, the types of podcast producers, and their monetization models developed in the Russian market. The revenues and expenses of podcast studios are also in focus of study.Results. The research is based on the study of the platforms themselves, scientific papers in the field of podcasting, Internet resources, company reporting, and expert interviews conducted by the authors. The authors have carried out the study in the autumn-winter of 2020.Conclusion. The authors identify five main industry monetization models (which can be combined): advertising, podcasts for companies, podcasts for streaming platforms, donations, and subscriptions. The authors come to the conclusion that despite the main modern problems of Russian podcasting – the absence of regular audience measurements, a single platform, and, as a result, difficulties with monetization – the conditions for launching a podcast studio in the Russian market are favorable.

Podcasts are increasingly being recognized as an effective platform to facilitate the continuous professional development (CPD) of health care professionals (HCPs). Compared with face-to-face meetings and other more traditional forms of CPD, podcasts allow for flexible learning and are less expensive to develop. Podcasts are at the cutting edge of digital education and can be an important element of a pharmaceutical company’s multichannel communications plan to improve HCP engagement and CPD in specific therapy areas. However, developing a successful podcast can have significant challenges. In this viewpoint paper, we provide our perspectives on medical podcasts as a medium for educating HCPs in the digital age. We describe our experience in developing an HIV-focused podcast for Australian HCPs, creating a series that has now expanded to other therapy areas in several countries. Practical considerations and unique challenges associated with industry-sponsored podcasts are outlined. Overall, we believe that the process of developing a podcast can be a challenging but rewarding experience, and CPD delivered via podcasting should be more routinely considered by pharmaceutical companies.

Abstract: In the digital age which allows anyone by their smartphone to record videos and upload them online, it is surprising that audio not only survives, but also develops. Podcasts — audio file that can be downloaded to digital devices to be played later—starts being familiar. Podcasts are growing, unfortunately they are still not widely used both academically dan practically in Indonesia as they should in America and Europe. Since the lack of conceptual papers about podcast, this article aims to develop an understanding of podcasts. The research method applied is library research based on various references relating to keywords and research areas. The results show that podcasts in Indonesia are starting to grow and attract the attention of people in Indonesia, especially on Java. Podcasts as audio media have the potential to be used in the fields of education, tourism industry, and opportunities for growth in Indonesia.

SEG President-elect Anna Shaughnessy joins the podcast to highlight her 2020 Honorary Lecture tour, “Developing a successful career in geophysics today.” In this timely discussion, Anna shares her insights on choosing a career field, preparing for a successful career, navigating a career in a transitional industry, and staying relevant no matter the discipline. Hear the full episode at https://seg.org/podcast/post/10202 .

The following is an excerpt from SEG's podcast, Seismic Soundoff. In episode 75, host Andrew Geary highlights David Lumley's President's Page column from the March 2020 issue of The Leading Edge titled “Geophysics and sustainability.” In this timely conversation, they discuss the future of geophysics education, areas SEG could develop to continue to support the science, how climate change could impact the industry, and the proposal for a new name for SEG. Listen to the full episode at https://seg.org/podcast/post/8963 .

“Powerset Hype to Boiling Point”, said a February headline on TechCrunch. In the last installment of this column, I asked whether 2007 would be the year of question-answering. My query was occasioned by a number of new attempts at natural language question-answering that were being promoted in the marketplace as the next advance upon search, and particularly by the buzz around the stealth-mode natural language search company Powerset. That buzz continued with a major news item in the first quarter of this year: in February, Xerox PARC and PowerSet struck a much-anticipated deal whereby PowerSet won exclusive rights to use PARC's natural language technology, as announced in a VentureBeat posting. Following the scoop, other news sources drew the battle lines with titles like “Can natural language search bring down Google?”, “Xerox vs. Google?”, and “Powerset and Xerox PARC team up to beat Google”. An April posting on Barron's Online noted that an analyst at Global Equities Research had cited Powerset in his downgrading of Google from Buy to Neutral. And, all this on the basis of a product which, at the time of writing, very few people have actually seen. Indications are that the search engine is expected to go live by the end of the year, so we have a few more months to wait to see whether this really is a Google-killer. Meanwhile, another question remaining unanswered is what happened to the Powerset engineer who seemed less sure about the technology's capabilities: see the segment at the end of D7TV's PartyCrasher video from the Powerset launch party. For a more confident appraisal of natural language search, check out the podcast of Barney Pell, CEO of Powerset, giving a lecture at the University of California–Berkeley.

In this episode, Andrew Geary speaks with Ali Tura about his upcoming Distinguished Lecture, “Recent advances in seismic reservoir characterization and monitoring.” Tura provides an overview of the three advances he highlights in his lecture and shares a few that didn't make the list. In addition, he explains why carbon sequestration is the most important issue facing the industry and why geophysics is well positioned to support sequestration for enhanced oil recovery. Hear the full episode at https://seg.org/podcast/post/12481 .

This article identifies the peculiarities of audio consumption (radio, music and podcast) by Colombian adolescents and youth on their screen devices, especially the smartphone. The irruption in the digital ecosystem of radio and sound platforms redefines the industry’s relationship with new audiences. The body of research, classified into three age groups (puberty –10 to 14 years–, middle –15 to 19 years–, and full –20 to 24 years–), is made up of students in basic secondary education and university students who were consulted through a quantitative methodology (700 surveys) and a qualitative one (8 focus groups with 48 participants), which made it possible to recognize the routines and the sound agenda of the subjects of study. The results of the research outline the profile of the Colombian audio consumer, whose habits of listening to the radio alternate times of attention to the broadcast on air with the consumption of apps, websites and music distribution platforms, which evidences their digital skills and the creation of a menu that combines music, sports and entertainment content. It is a media diet built on the mediation of technological devices and the influence of family and virtual communities. The sound component is the backbone of the relationship between industry and listener, but visual and iconographic elements are added to reinforce the bonds with brand, media and producer, regardless of where audio meets audience.

This article explores the role of digital platforms in podcasting (both past and present) and their impacts on the emergent podcast industry structure, content, and governance. Nieborg and Poell’s theoretical framework for understanding the impacts of platformization on culture is leveraged here to better understand the changes underway in podcasting. Like other forms of media, podcasting is being profoundly reshaped by platformization, though these transformations are distinct from other media in several key ways. Because podcasting emerged as a technology at the beginning of the 21st century before the advent of social media and the cloud, its decentralized architecture is structured around RSS, also known as “Really Simple Syndication.” When Apple added RSS aggregation into their iTunes Music Store in 2005, their market dominance in digital audio sales shaped early popular conceptions for the medium. I then outline how platformization is reshaping podcasting today by exploring how the three primary functions of media-related platform services—storage, discovery, and consumption—are shaping producers’ and audience experiences. Market imperatives for audience consumption data, as well as the structural features of platforms, are currently fueling industry consolidation. Even though podcasting is built upon the open architecture of RSS, commercial pressures and the desire of market players to capitalize on the “winner-take-all” features of platforms are shaping the trajectory of the medium’s current development.

Abstract Field days and workshops are fundamental to fostering communication and demonstrating management techniques. However, when faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, Extension agents turned to alternative platforms for providing educational opportunities. In April 2020, Louisiana State University Agricultural Center (LSU AgCenter) agents hosted a live webinar entitled “Sustainability during Turbulent Markets” to bring beef cattle producers information on management strategies during a time of instability. This initial webinar included 41 live participants and an additional 40 views within one week of posting the recording. Event responses prompted creation of the Beef Brunch Educational Series, an online series designed to maintain engagement and allow agents to present timely management recommendations and industry news to producers. Live webinars occur at 10:30 a.m. on the second Tuesday of each month. Webinars are also recorded for online distribution through the LSU AgCenter website, LSU AgCenter-Livestock YouTube channel, and podcast platforms. Bi-weekly news updates are released on the same platforms. News updates feature weather and pasture conditions, market outlooks, management tips, events, and current industry topics. Webinar engagement on all platforms averages 233 viewers with a growth range of 81 to 859 since April. News updates average 87 views with a growth range of 29 to 270 participants. When asked, 85% of viewers strongly agreed or agreed that information learned in webinars would be applied to their operations. Extension agents utilize this program for professional development, with 75% strongly agreeing or agreeing that webinars increased confidence to apply presented knowledge and 70% stating they have or plan to incorporate news update content in their programming. Thus, increased views, positive feedback, and requests for more information illustrate relevance in continuing the Beef Brunch Educational Series beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and optimistically developing it into a leading informational source for beef cattle producers in Louisiana.

Abstract In the digital game industry, micro-transactions (MTXs) have been introduced as a new vehicle for profit generation. MTXs are small sum payments for additional virtual content beyond the content players obtain through game-play and progression, which impose new structural limitations and opportunities for game participation on the players. This article explores the perspectives of players on corporate commodification strategies of gameplay. The empirical work consists of semi-structured focus group interviews of players and interviews of podcast hosts. All informants are players of various online games. By adopting Sayer’s (2004, 2007, 2017) concept of moral economy and de Certeau’s (2011) concept of tactics in everyday life, this study draws two conclusions. First, virtual items and goods obtained through in-game activities or MTXs are a means to communicate skill level, taste, and experience between players as a fundamental part of the moral economy of establishing fair ground for competition. With regard to MTXs, players distinguish among three levels in which agency is maintained or limited. Second, players negotiate these models of commodification and agency limitation in ambivalent ways, both resisting and embracing economic values in the moral economy of play. Furthermore, because of this negotiation, players are generally concerned about the invasive nature of economic values taking priority over the values that guide the practices of play. In other words, there is a moral concern regarding how norms and values in play are compromised or overridden by outside economic pressures.

In 2018, the BBC announced plans to replace their long-established ‘iPlayer Radio’ service with a new platform called BBC Sounds. The new service was promoted as a single space where listeners can consume BBC radio, music and podcasts, creating a single point of interaction between audiences and content. This is, however, far more than an exercise in reframing public service radio content in a new app; it is also a practical application of these policies through the commissioning of content made for online, specifically, younger, audiences. This shift happens not only at a time where traditional broadcasters are exploring ways to re-engage younger listeners but as commentators search for the ‘Netflix of Podcasts’ This article explores the manner in which the BBC Sounds project is a response to current trends in the radio industry and to which it recognizes podcasting as an audio medium that is distinct from but institutionally connected to radio.

In a recent SPE Podcast, Shauna Noonan asked me why I chose a career in artificial lift. My answer was twofold. First, I explained that I love instant gratification and that there is probably no other discipline within petroleum engineering that allows you to see immediate results from your work the way artificial lift does. Second, I explained that, when I was an incoming freshman at Texas Tech University, I learned that past department chair Herald Winkler was revered throughout the industry as one of the pioneers of gas lift technology. I figured that, if artificial lift was a good enough career path for “Wink,” it was good enough for me. It did not take long, however, for me to learn that not everyone felt the same way. When I was given the opportunity to select a senior petroleum engineering elective, I chose Artificial Lift. On the first day of the semester, I was one of only two students to show up for that class. We were disappointed when, at 8 a.m., a department staff member informed us that the class did not make and that we had been enrolled in Thermal Recovery Methods instead. This would not be the last time I learned that artificial lift did not always receive the love that it should. Years later, I was visiting with a seasoned artificial lift professional at a meeting and mentioned the need to better leverage the resources SPE has to offer. He immediately retorted, “Oh, Greg, SPE is for reservoir engineers. Why waste your time?” I am pleased to report that, in the decade since that meeting, artificial lift has experienced something of a renaissance within SPE. Past President Shauna Noonan is a career artificial lift professional, and, during her administration, the SPE Board of Directors greatly expanded the role of artificial lift technology within our professional society. Since 2014, SPE International has presented a dedicated series of artificial lift conferences, the most recent of which was the virtual 2020 SPE Artificial Lift Conference and Exhibition—Americas. This biennial event has greatly enhanced the breadth, depth, and quality of artificial lift papers available to our members through the OnePetro online library. For the 2020–21 season, two artificial lift experts, Anthony Allison and Ken Decker, were selected as SPE Distinguished Lecturers. In 2020, SPE established a new technical section dedicated to artificial lift technology. Beginning in 2021, JPT is expanding its coverage of artificial lift to two features per year. Finally, since 2014, SPE has recognized 16 eminent artificial lift professionals for their outstanding contributions by presenting them with the Legends of Artificial Lift award. As it happens, the very first class of Artificial Lift Legends included both Herald Winkler and Joe Clegg—the very individual who told me that SPE was for reservoir engineers. One common theme shared by each of the Artificial Lift Legends in their talks is that artificial lift really shines during a downturn. This is because, when capital spending is constrained, artificial lift is one of the few levers an operator has available to increase production while reducing operating expenses. As my colleagues and I can attest, this was certainly the case in 2020. While many groups within my company and others like it struggled to stay busy, artificial lift professionals found that they had never been busier. I am proud of the work that my colleagues in the industry have done to help operators achieve positive free cash flow during one of the most challenging periods of our industry’s history. The results of your dedication, ingenuity, and hard work demonstrate the important role artificial lift technology plays in our industry today.

Perante a normalização da internet e os novos hábitos de recepção e consumo, a rádio assumiu a necessidade de ganhar presença no cenário digital mediante estratégias que a tornem atraente na tela de smartphones e tablets, que são dispositivos dominantes no acesso ao lazer e entretenimento contemporâneo. Este artigo identifica e descreve as iniciativas crossmídia e transmídia estimuladas pela indústria radiofônica espanhola para adaptar-se ao novo cenário, desde a multiplicação e segmentação de emissões on-line e sob demanda (podcast) até a criação de conteúdos audiovisuais que ampliam a natureza essencialmente sonora da linguagem radiofônica até o momento.

Celem artykułu jest scharakteryzowanie pojęcia Smart Industry, przedstawienie aktywności polskich przedsiębiorstw innowacyjnych oraz określenie szans i barier wynikających z wdrożenia nowoczesnych rozwiązań technologicznych. Podczas przygotowania artykułu korzystano z literatury przedmiotu oraz publikacji branżowych, w tym także obcojęzycznych. Wykorzystano pozycje książkowe, artykuły, wyniki badań firm konsultingowych, dane statystyczne, czasopisma i informacje ze źródeł internetowych. Świat nowoczesnych rozwiązań technologicznych nie jest jeszcze w pełni zbadany i zdefiniowany, jednak charakteryzuje się ogromnymi możliwościami, które powinny zostać wykorzystane przez przedsiębiorstwa do osiągania ich celów strategicznych. Publikacja ta uzasadnia sens wdrażania nowoczesnych rozwiązań technologicznych, ukazuje pozycję Polski oraz polskich przedsiębiorstw na tle krajów europejskich, przedstawia termin przedsiębiorstwa Smart oraz wskazuje możliwe szanse i bariery rozwoju innowacyjności.

Radio broadcasting institutions continue to develop with the process of developing transmission technology and audio applications. Any situation in changes in radio technology always adapts in an effort to maximise performance in management. This study uses a qualitative approach that is still not widely done to review the websites of private radio broadcasters with the technique of collecting data through field observations, interviews, and documentation studies. The process is carried out with data analysis techniques by performing 3 (three) aspects of the analysis systematically, namely data reduction, data display, and drawing conclusions. This study found that radio broadcasting in addition to air or broadcast transmission in the form of sound or sound also distributes broadcasts through live streaming or streaming podcasts on the internet (network) in the form of sound, text, images and videos.

The global market’s economic growth has been boosted by the size of the sports industry, which now has a budget in the billions of dollars. Sports marketing has emerged as a result of this growth in the sports industry. Sports marketing has emerged as the most important feature of sports companies, having grown in importance as a scientific discipline. Inside the industry, sports clubs have started to search for ways to increase their market share in both national, and foreign markets.The industry’s ongoing growth has resulted in an increase in the number of goods, and services available, as well as a competitive climate. The purpose of this study is to identify innovations in web-based technology used by sports clubs to market their goods, and services to target audiences.The research was carried out in accordance with the standards of qualitative research. Search engines, blogs, forums, podcasts, press bulletins, e-mail, and content sharing sites are the most commonly used web-based technologies by sports clubs, according to the results of the study.

Mikroskopia w podczerwieni z transformacją fourierowską (FT-IR) wykorzystuje dwie techniki badawcze: mikroskopię i spektrometrię FT-IR. Pozwala to na analizę materiału pod kątem występowania charakterystycznych grup funkcyjnych oraz na przedstawienie jego topograficznego rozkładu. Daje to możliwość analizy związków chemicznych w mikroobszarach badanego materiału. Przegląd literatury wskazuje na szerokie zastosowanie tych połączonych technik, m.in. w diagnostyce medycznej, kryminalistyce czy w badaniu jednorodności analitów. Analizie poddawane są tkanki, a także pojedyncze komórki. Wśród zalet połączonych technik jako narzędzia diagnostycznego należy wymienić możliwość rejestracji anomalii składu chemicznego z mikrometrową rozdzielczością przy minimalnej preparatyce, próbki nie wymagają dodatkowego utrwalania materiału do badań ani stosowania żadnych markerów. Niniejszy artykuł ma na celu przedstawienie przykładowych możliwości zastosowania mikroskopii IR w pracy laboratorium naftowego, podczas badania próbek ciekłych oraz stałych w postaci zawiesin czy osadów wytrąconych na elementach zbiorników, silników i różnych urządzeń. Wskazano na konieczność właściwego przygotowania próbek w zależności od ich charakteru oraz rodzaju zastosowanej techniki. Pokazano też możliwości związane z posiadanymi bibliotekami widm oraz mapowania po wybranym obszarze widm. Należy jeszcze raz wskazać na istotną rolę, jaką pełni mikroskopia FT-IR w badaniu próbek niejednorodnych, głównie ze względu na możliwość wytypowania konkretnych punktów pomiarowych o większej koncentracji substancji organicznych w stosunku do obszarów z dużą koncentracją, np. wody. Dzięki temu można w prostszy sposób określać, czy dana substancja lub produkt występujący w miejscu poboru wpływa na powstawanie osadów lub emulsji. Mikroskopia IR umożliwia przede wszystkim prowadzenie analizy niewielkiej ilości próbki, co jest szczególnie ważne w badaniu pobranych substancji w śladowych ilościach.

The article attempts to present a number of key technologies that determine the new quality of life of people. The following content is specified and disclosed: autonomous artificial intelligence in a smartphone, professional robot assistants, available satellite intelligence, podcasts, digital urban planning tools. In the article, the authors hypothesize that Industry X.0 is by far the highest stage of digitalization and represents a concept of innovative and digital production, the components of which are «smart assets», «smart services», «smart business», and «smart government». Structural elements of the authors’ concept of X.0 Industry are indicated, its visual cut in virtual reality conditions is provided and the functioning of this Industry exclusively within the framework of the 7th technological mode is characterized. The authors have developed and presented the protocol of formation of the X.0 Industry through the prism of innovations, technologies in both the industry sector and business management. 4 stages of implementation of this protocol are defined, namely: determination of the innovative landscape of «technological breakthrough» in a particular industry within the formation of industry X.0; assessment of threats; determining the course of further development and the action plan (four main approaches to which organizations can apply: protection, adoption of innovations, initiation of subversive innovations, retreat); implementation of structural changes at the DNA level of the organization. The authors on the basis of a number of factors bring forward the argument that today’s realities of the digital space require the development of a new logic of running a platform business in terms of its digitization. It is concluded that in practice it is necessary to form a broad coalition of educators, government officials, analysts, high-tech specialists, economists, industrialists, scientists who will join the formation of the X.0 Industry on the basis of digitalization and innovatizing. The authors concluded that Industry X.0 is a new approach to the organization of production in the context of virtual reality, which is based on highly intelligent integrated new products and digital ecosystems that form an innovative digital value chain, add new competencies and implement deep cultural changes in the direction of the formation of a new virtual reality.

This paper is devoted to the author’s experience of applying the most popular Web 2.0 technologies to mining ingeneers’ educational process. The paper deals with incorporating such services as RSS, weblogs, microblogs, podcasts, mashups, wikis into the process of teaching English to future mining specialists. With the development of globalization processes, higher education in mineral resource universities has new objectives, i.e. training professionals capable of working effectively in the changed conditions of the global mining industry. Modern higher educational system has a number of specific features and requires certain changes in the content and organizing the teaching process. Web 2.0 opens up great opportunities for educational practice: the use of free electronic resources used for training purposes; creation of network content; interpersonal interaction of all the members of the educational process, etc. The paper notes the effectiveness of implementing some Web 2.0 technologies to make education of mining engineers more realistic, increase their motivation to become ready for professional communications with foreign colleagues, which will help to raise mining safety and productivity.

W świecie szybko postępującej digitalizacji oraz cyfryzacji i związanych z tym udogodnień, organizacje rozpoczęły przenoszenie swojej działalności do sfery cyfrowej. Pozwoliło to na utworzenie nowej koncepcji – Przemysłu 4.0, której głównym założeniem jest usieciowienie wszystkich czynności zachodzących w przedsiębiorstwach. Główną rolę w tym procesie odgrywać będzie możliwość wirtualizacji (np. sprzętu komputerowego) i dostęp do niego z dowolnego miejsca o dowolnym czasie przez interesariuszy (klientów, pracowników oraz inne podmioty zewnętrzne) za pomocą zintegrowanego środowiska zapewniającego odpowiednią moc obliczeniową (chmura obliczeniowa). Zjawisko to będzie generować nowe rozwiązania techniczno-technologiczne na polu szeroko pojętej automatyzacji procesów zarządzania. Poruszana problematyka znajduje szczególne zastosowanie podczas występowania różnego rodzaju zagrożeń (zewnętrznych oraz wewnętrznych), których powstawanie prowadzi do niemożności fizycznego (osobistego) prowadzenia działalności gospodarczej. Jest to szczególnie widoczne na kanwie ostatnich wydarzeń związanych z wystąpieniem pandemii koronawirusa (SARS-CoV-2), która wymusiła na wielu podmiotach (prywatnych oraz publicznych) przejście na model pracy zdalnej. By spełnił on swój podstawowy cel – zapewnienie ciągłości działania podmiotu – zostały utworzone nowe oraz rozbudowane już istniejące narzędzia wspomagające pracę zdalną, które oparte są również na wirtualizacji zasobów sprzętowych oraz chmurze obliczeniowej. By obniżyć poziom ryzyka, który wzrósł z względu na konieczność szybkiego dostosowania procesów zachodzących w organizacjach do formuły pracy zdalnej (zwiększone występowanie cyberzagrożeń), koniecznym staje się wykonanie analizy dostępnych rozwiązań narzędziowych w celu przygotowania odpowiednich rekomendacji (dobrych praktyk) możliwych do wdrożenia w każdym podmiocie (organizacji) publicznym lub prywatnym. W tym celu należy dokonać analizy danych zastanych (desk research) oraz przeglądu dostępnej literatury przedmiotu (w tym również dostępnej dokumentacji technicznej) by uzyskać katalog efektywnych rozwiązań techniczno-organizacyjnych.

The dynamic development of the friction stir welding (FSW) technology is the basis for the design of durabe joints inter alia in the aviation industry. This technology has a prospective application, especially for the aluminum alloys. It is suitable for a broad spectrum of permanent joints. The joints obtained by FSW technology are characterized by good mechanical properties. In this paper, the friction stir spot welding joints were analysed. The example of a structure made using this technology were presented. The lap joints made of 2mm Al 6061-T6 sheets were the investigation subject. The different spot welds arrangements were analysed. The tensile test were performed with optical deformation measurement system, which allow to obtain the plastic deformation field on the sample surface. The plastic strain graphs for the characteristic line passing through the maximum deformation were registered and presented. The experimental results were compared to the FEM numerical analysis. The numerical models were built with 3D-solid elements. The boundary conditions, material properties and geometry of the joints were identical as during experimental investigation. The mechanism of deformation of welded joints during tensile test was described and explained. It has been found that the arrangement of the spot welds with respect to the tensile direction has an important influence on the behaviour and deformation of lap joint.

The interactive communication in the artificial environment has widened its limits with the usage of the social media tools and has become an inevitable element of the digital era. The usage of the tools such as social network sharing sites, blogs, e-mail usage, intranet, video conferencing, forums, video sharing sites such as Youtube, music sharing sites, business network sites, cooperative web sites, instant message, vikis, podcasts, training materials sharing, social bookmarking, bookmarking sites ensuring its users to make online news, stories, music, personal publication which take place in the social media tools by the public relations practitioners gradually gains importance in terms of the public relations practitioners.In this study, the place and importance of social media tools with regards to public relations and their role in creating a new public relations process are discussed. Accordingly, an online questionnaire form was prepared and sent via e-mail to the public relations practitioners. These public relations practitioners were determined through the survey results of Turkeys Top 500 Industrial Enterprises 2011 which was conducted regularly by Istanbul Chamber of Industry ISO . An assessment intended to identify the trends and reasons of use of social media tools by the public relations practitioners who work in the biggest companies of Turkey and their perceptions of social media and traditional media was made.

Abstract Since the beginnings of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, pedagogy has been a crucial survival strategy, especially when government agencies failed to prevent mass deaths. However, contemporary sex education on HIV/AIDS—if taught to undergraduates before they arrive on campus—often does not account for the disproportionate effects of the pandemic on racial minorities and global South countries. In this teaching essay, the author describes how his course on the history of HIV/AIDS takes a global approach to highlight that the AIDS crisis is not over. Starting with histories of HIV/AIDS in the United States, Haiti, China, and elsewhere that sought to find a scapegoat for the pandemic, the course then turns to the global power of the pharmaceutical industry. It examines the marketing and lobbying strategies of companies such as Gilead, which use the stigma of HIV/AIDS to transform impoverished global South countries into new markets for research and capital extraction. Finally, it also highlights how the AIDS crisis remains an ongoing struggle against racial disparities in health care that prevent access to life-saving treatments and preventative drugs such as Truvada and Descovy for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Using a range of materials from podcasts to pills, the author introduces students to the globalizing forces that take the bodies of the poor, women, and Black, Latinx, trans, and global South citizens as expendable in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the possible gaps in use of Web 2.0 tools and human resource (HR) functional performance, and to identify the potential areas of future research for the upcoming researcher and industry practitioners. Design/methodology/approach By having a thorough literature review on the said Web 2.0 and HR functions’ concepts, the study develops a conceptual model with seven propositions that assist in answering two major research questions, i.e., whether Web 2.0 tools can benefit the four major functions of human resource management (HRM), and to what extent Web 2.0 tools help HR Managers to reap maximum (efficiently and effectively) out of four major functions of HRM. By identifying the possible gaps in use of Web 2.0 tools and HR functional performance, the study identifies potential areas of future research for the upcoming researcher and industry practitioners. Findings HR 2.0 regime (right alignment of Web 2.0 tools and HR functions) will allow both the ends (employee and employer) to drive the organization toward sustainable, long-term business success. Excellence in HR functions following the HR 2.0 concept, can lead the organizations get best desired HR and business outcomes across sectors and industries. Though using Web 2.0 tools in HR functions can encounter various challenges as management of bulky information, time wastage, personal conflicts, threats of losing information confidentiality, etc., but these potential threats can be made less risky by transforming organization culture. Research limitations/implications As the scope of the study was limited to the use of Web 2.0 tools in HR practices, the study provided a generic view of the use of Web 2.0 tools in HR domain. Thus the findings should be used only in HR domain in a variety of contexts. Practical implications The current study adds value to in the exploration of the link between Web 2.0 and HRM in a systematic way because of the fact that Web 2.0 tools as drivers or facilitating tools can play a vital role in execution of HR practices and processes in a secure, effective and efficient manner. The current study also paves the way for the HR practitioners and researcher to extract manifold benefits from the use of Web 2.0 tools in all of its functions with the right understanding. Critical role of HR can be favorably facilitated by Web 2.0 in favor of both, i.e., employees and the employers which could ultimately enable them to create a competitive edge in the market place. The organizations in general (whether private or public, manufacturing or public, small and medium enterprises or MNEs) can extract the real benefits from the right use of Web 2.0 while performing any of their HR function. Enhanced decision making may also be gained using the right mix of Web 2.0 tools and HR practices in any organization. The study also provides a track to the researchers to excavate more associations among the said constructs and to test these relationships in different industries so that maximum HR challenges may be addressed related to the employee and the HR process. Social implications Social implications of the current study can be derived as the main focus is HR practices which are executed by the employees, who if are positively addressed, may gain economic and social up gradations. As for the employers use of Web 2.0 tools in their HR functions not only will bring economic prosperity for themselves but for the employees and the society. Originality/value Conceptual analysis of links between the use of Web 2.0 tools and HR functions to draw the attention of HR practitioners to benefit both employers and employees. Though the use of Web 2.0 is being popular in various other business areas but not for internal employees regarding HR functions. Paper provides the conceptual link of Web 2.0 applications, i.e., blogs, wikis, folksonomies, RSS, podcasts and online social networks with human resource functions.

The co-creation process within the New Zealand luxury accommodation sector has, until recently, been under researched. However, in 2016, a doctoral thesis was completed [1] with the key question, ‘how is the luxury accommodation experience created?’ Following an interpretivist paradigm, data were collected that included 81 interviews (of 27 guests, 27 employees and 27 managers) within six luxury properties (three luxury hotels and three luxury lodges) which were selected via purposive sampling. Drawing from the findings of the thesis, this article aims to show that co-creation is a valuable tool for hoteliers. Co-creation is about customers creating value for themselves through an interactive relationship with a company. The hospitality industry is a complete veteran at this; for example, the use of à-la-carte menus, whereby a customer has the ability to compose a meal that has value specifically for them. The possible scope of the co-creation process, beyond à-la-carte menus, is now being recognised by the luxury accommodation sector. Co-creation can be described as a joint process that involves a customer and an organisation resulting in an output of value [2]. Co-creation permits and indeed encourages a more active involvement from the customer [1], and is important to organisations as it can ensure that any personal interaction that their customers have adds value to their experience [3]. If co-creation is used to its full potential, it can give an organisation a competitive advantage due to increased customer satisfaction resulting in a positive impact on customer loyalty [4]. Co-creation can also provide continual feedback for improving existing services, presenting a business with constant opportunities to increase their revenue and success [5]. In summary, the main finding of the doctoral research was the consensus among guests, employees and managers that the luxury accommodation experience is materialised through a process of co-creation, involving the many different forms of interaction happening between guests, employees and managers, as well as with external contributors outside of the properties [1]. The practical implications of co-creation cannot be determined without luxury properties first identifying what makes their accommodation a luxury experience. When this has been defined, more interaction between guests, employees and managers should be encouraged to ensure that this particular brand of luxury accommodation experience is created. This could include having staff members dedicated to interacting with guests, and having certain ‘touch points’ throughout the guests’ stay that ensure the type and the amount of engagement that is required happens. External co-creation should also be encouraged; for example, staff visiting the local producers of food and wine, which in turn would enable them to talk more informatively to guests about these products when they are interacting with them during their stay. Another example would be to build relationships with external agents who offer activities to the guests, to enable the continuation of the experience when guests are away from the property. Luxury properties also need to apply co-creation strategies that would enable guests to innovate new products and services. One such strategy is in the form of a digital customer relationship management tool; an example of this being HGRM – Happy Guest Relationship Management, although this technology is still quite innovative. Hotels and lodges need to make sure that they are using Web 2.0 applications such as videos, blogs, fora, wiki, podcasts, chat rooms, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to encourage communication and social interaction, which is the customer engagement that enables co-creation. For any business that is involved in customer experience, especially hospitality, there is every good reason to go down the route of co-creation, especially when it can give that business a competitive advantage. If you would like to read the PhD thesis this research is based on you can access it here: http://aut.researchgateway.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10292/9925/HarkisonT.pdf?sequence=3 Corresponding author Tracy is a Senior Lecturer in Hospitality at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Her research passions are hospitality education and the co-creation of luxury accommodation experiences. This has resulted in the completion of her PhD thesis on how the luxury accommodation experience is created. Tracy Harkison can be contacted at: tracy.harkison@aut.ac.nz References (1) Harkison, T. How is the Luxury Accommodation Experience Created? Case Studies from New Zealand; Ph.D. Thesis, Auckland University of Technology, 2016. (2) Prahalad, C. K.; Ramaswamy, V. Co-creation Experiences: The Next Practice in Value Creation. Journal of Interactive Marketing 2004, 18(3), 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1002/dir.20015 (3) Chathoth, P. K.; Ungson, G. R.; Harrington, R. J.; Chan, E. S. Co-creation and Higher Order Customer Engagement in Hospitality and Tourism Services: A Critical Review. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 2016, 28(2), 222–245. (4) Oyner, O.; Korelina, A. The Influence of Customer Engagement in Value Co-creation on Customer Satisfaction: Searching for New Forms of Co-creation in the Russian Hotel Industry. Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes 2016, 8(3), 327–345. (5) Thomas, A. K.; James, P. S.; Vivek, N. Co-creating Luxury Hotel Services: A Framework Development. Life Sciences Journal 2013, 10(7s), 1005–1012. http://www.lifesciencesite.com 162

Podcasting has thrived since its popularization in 2004 as a bastion for amateur media production. Over the past ten years, however, entrepreneurs and legacy media companies have rapidly expanded their interests in podcasting, bringing with them professional standards and the logics of capital. Breakout hits such as 2014’s Serial (with nearly 40 million downloads) and This American Life have demonstrated to both programmers and advertisers the potential for podcasting to emerge as a commercially viable media industry (O’Connell, 2015). According to a recent nationwide survey by Edison Research (2019), an estimated 90 million listeners reported having listened to a podcast in the previous month. Despite the medium’s homespun, DIY roots, this dramatic expansion of the podcast audience and interest from legacy media has begun to transform it “from a do-it-yourself, amateur niche medium into a commercial mass medium” (Bonini, 2015, p. 27). This proposed panel aims to explore the transitions currently underway in podcasting. Specifically, each of the papers on this panel address in some way the process of formalization, or the process by which “media systems become progressively more rationalized, consolidated and financially transparent” (Lobato &Thomas, 2015, p. 27). Formalization is not a monolithic process, but rather one that is responsive to existing institutional, regulatory, and cultural structures. It is also historically contingent. The first paper, entitled “Podcasting as a cultural form between old and new media” utilizes a historical lens to link the current trajectory of the medium’s development to the development and domestication of radio in the 1920s as well as the rise of online streaming services in the 21st Century. In particular, this paper situates podcasting in the context of these earlier technologies, arguing that the medium is best understood as a complex interplay between networks of market actors. This complex interplay of actors is explored in more detail by papers 2 and 3. In the second paper, entitled “Formalising the informal: BBC commissions and the shape of podcasts,” the author explores the powerful role of the BBC in providing an institutional and creative framework for podcasting production via its BBC Sounds online radio platform. Through the efforts of this venerable public service broadcaster to reach new audiences by developing podcast content specific to this platform, this paper argues that the medium’s amateur and informal ethos stands to be re-shaped. The third paper, entitled “Protecting public podcasting: Are U.S. news, public affairs, and learning podcasts at risk?”, takes a macro-level view of the formalization process, focusing on podcasts within the U.S. context. Nothing that the most popular podcasts in the U.S. are either learning or information-oriented, this paper argues that the podcast ecosystem fulfills an important public service function. The introduction of platform services like Spotify as power players in podcast distribution, coupled with the rise of advertising as a means of monetization, presents new risks for perpetuation of the medium as an aural public service resource. The fourth paper expands the arguments surrounding podcast formalization by exploring the introduction of market information regimes within the medium. Specifically, this paper explores the development of audience metrics for podcasting, beginning in the mid-2000’s. This paper makes clear that powerful industry players such as Apple and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) are quickly standardizing the measurement of podcast audiences. These standards create a more transparent market for advertisers, but in so doing they also shift the focus away from the unique nature of podcast content and move it toward notions of audience size. This has the potential to move the medium further away from its amateur roots. Finally, the fifth paper on the panel attempts to reframe the formalization debate by pulling the discussion away from the confining binaries of utopian or dystopian narratives. Instead, this paper situates podcasting within a much broader context by leveraging Don Idhe’s phenomenological philosophy of technology to “speculate on a potential future of reified oral/aural meditation.” This paper considers the nature of the medium itself as a unique “techno-sonic experience”. Here, podcasting is not considered as a medium being shaped by the formalization efforts of institutions or legacy forms of media. Instead, podcasting emerges as a transformational technology that promises a new era of sound integration.

No abstract available. Editor’s note: The Pharmacy Podcast Show serves pharmacy businesses, including independent retail, long-term care, specialty, and small chains. During this interview, Dr. Jeff Kosowsky, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development of American Well, a telehealth company, discusses telehealth-like technologies in the pharmacy industry and health system pharmacies, including consultations and medication therapy management. The entire interview is presented here. Below, Telehealth and Medicine Today has summarized the key points by Dr. Kosowsky during an interview with Todd Eury, Founder & Publisher of Pharmacy Podcast.

This article examines the role of mediators in the production of commodity value, arguing that there is a rise in a kind of immaterial labor, shaped by contemporary conditions of late capitalism, that functions explicitly as a mediating force. In this example, video game journalists are understood as actively engaged in producing and negotiating the value and meaning of video games for both producers and consumers. By specifically examining a moment of value contestation, a podcast debate between a journalist and a game developer, this article traces the mediating practices of the enthusiast gaming press and examines the way their history with and relationship to the video game industry continue to structure their ability to filter knowledge and shape desires.

ABSTRACT The rapidly growing supplement industry operates without a formal premarket approval process. Consumers rely on product labels to be accurate and true. Those products containing live microbials report both identity and viability on most product labels. This study used next-generation sequencing technology as an analytical tool in conjunction with classic culture methods to examine the validity of the labels on supplement products containing live microbials found in the United States marketplace. Our results show the importance of testing these products for identity, viability, and potential contaminants, as well as introduce a new culture-independent diagnostic approach for testing these products. Millions of people consume dietary supplements either following a doctor’s recommendation or at their own discretion to improve their overall health and well-being. This is a rapidly growing trend, with an associated and expanding manufacturing industry to meet the demand for new health-related products. In this study, we examined the contents and microbial viability of several popular probiotic products on the United States market. Culture-independent methods are proving ideal for fast and efficient analysis of foodborne pathogens and their associated microbial communities but may also be relevant for analyzing probiotics containing mixed microbial constituents. These products were subjected to next-generation whole-genome sequencing and analyzed by a custom in-house-developed k-mer counting method to validate manufacturer label information. In addition, the batch variability of respective products was examined to determine if any changes in their formulations and/or the manufacturing process occurred. Overall, the products we tested adhered to the ingredient claims and lot-to-lot differences were minimal. However, there were a few discrepancies in the naming of closely related Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species, whereas one product contained an apparent Enterococcus contaminant in two of its three lots. With the microbial contents of the products identified, we used traditional PCR and colony counting methods to comparatively assess our results and verify the viability of the microbes in these products with regard to the labeling claims. Of all the supplements examined, only one was found to be inaccurate in viability. Our use of next-generation sequencing as an analytical tool clearly demonstrated its utility for quickly analyzing commercially available products containing multiple microbes to ensure consumer safety. IMPORTANCE The rapidly growing supplement industry operates without a formal premarket approval process. Consumers rely on product labels to be accurate and true. Those products containing live microbials report both identity and viability on most product labels. This study used next-generation sequencing technology as an analytical tool in conjunction with classic culture methods to examine the validity of the labels on supplement products containing live microbials found in the United States marketplace. Our results show the importance of testing these products for identity, viability, and potential contaminants, as well as introduce a new culture-independent diagnostic approach for testing these products. Podcast: A podcast concerning this article is available.

This podcast is a recording of a roundtable discussion on Co-operatives in the Cultural Industries, that took place at City University London on April 1, 2015, organised by Marisol Sandoval and Jo Littler. Speakers were Robin Murray, Rhiannon Colvin, Sion Whellens and Tara Mulqueen. The lives of cultural workers are complex and contradictory; often combining work satisfaction, pleasure and autonomy with job insecurity, low pay, long hours, anxiety and inequality.The roundtable discussed the potentials and limits of worker co-operatives as an alternative way of organizing cultural work. It explored how worker co-operation might contribute to new collaborative forms of cultural production; how they do, or might, strengthen a 'cultural commons'; and the role cultural co-ops play in the wider context of movements for workers' rights. Questions that were discussed include: To what extent can worker co-operatives be a means to confront precariousness and individualisation in work in the cultural sector? Do worker co-ops open up new possibilities for the collaborative production of cultural commons? What role can worker co-operatives play within a broader movement for creating more just, equal and humane cultural work and an alternative to capitalist economies? Where lies the boundary between neoliberal calls for self-help and individual responsibility and a radical co-op movement? What is the relation between worker co-ops and other forms of progressive politics such as the union movements, social protests and civil society activism? Can cultural co-ops contribute to reinventing the meaning and practice of work in the 21st century? About the speakers:Marisol Sandoval is a Lecturer at the Department of Culture and Creative Industries at City University London. Her research critically deals with questions of power, responsibility, commodification, exploitation, ideology and resistance in the global culture industry. Jo Littler is Senior Lecturer at City University London's Department of Culture and Creative Industries. Her work explores questions of culture and power from an interdisciplinary, cultural studies-informed perspective. Rhiannon Colvin after graduating in 2010 to find the world of work competitive and brutal, Rhiannon founded AltGen to empower young graduates to get together and create their own work. http://www.altgen.org.uk/ Tara Mulqueen is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck College School of Law. Her thesis concerns the development of legislation for co-operatives in the 19th century. Robin Murray is an industrial economist. He was Director of Industry at the Greater London Council (GLC) in the 1980s, and has been a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, the Director of Development for the Government of Ontario and co-founder of Twin and Twin Trading. He is an associate of Co-operatives UK and author of Co-operation in the age of Google. http://www.uk.coop/ageofgoogle Sion Whellens is a member of the graphic design and print co-operative Calverts. As part of the Principle Six partnership, he also advises and supports co-ops in creative industries. http://www.calverts.coop

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting stay-at-home directives, adopted out of necessity to protect human health, introduced significant challenges for horse owners and small equine businesses. Restricted access, and in many cases closure of barns, resulted in a multitude of questions and concerns within the equine community which needed to be addressed rapidly. Extension Horses, Inc. (EH) coordinated the development and delivery of a variety of educational resources utilizing a combination of online formats and dissemination through social media and EH member contact lists. A series of infographics, webinars, and podcasts (three in each category) were created to provide guidance on essential care of horses, emergency preparedness, financial assistance, legal concerns, and biosecurity during the crucial, initial weeks of the pandemic (March to April 2020). Web conferencing technology (Zoom) was used to facilitate discussion and task delegation among EH members and to conduct and record webinars and podcasts. Podcasts were hosted on Buzzsprout and infographics were created using Adobe InDesign. Live webinar participants were invited to participate in several polls during the webinar and were sent a brief survey to complete at the end of the webinar series. Analytics for all educational resources combined demonstrated a 32-d total direct reach of 135,563. Most live webinar participants identified themselves as horse owners and small equine business owners (55%). The majority of live webinar participants indicated the information was useful (99%), and they would utilize the resources they had learned about (80%). Survey respondents reported that Facebook, email, and word of mouth were key ways in which they learned about the webinars. The same survey found that the web-platform was an effective method to receive information (85% high satisfaction) and respondents were highly likely to recommend future EH webinars to others (88%). The three infographics had a total Facebook reach of 131,765, the webinars had 3,522 total views, and the three podcasts had 276 total downloads. The rapid response of EH and quick turnaround of products allowed a large online audience to receive vital information for coping with COVID-19. Having the established EH network, already familiar with virtual education, was a big asset in this effort. This can serve as a model for cooperative extension to utilize in future collaborative responses to industry issues.

IntroductionOver three days in November 2017, 400 people gathered for a conference at the Sam’s Town Hotel and Gambling Hall in Las Vegas, Nevada. The majority of attendees were fiction authors but the conference program looked like no ordinary writer’s festival; there were no in-conversation interviews with celebrity authors, no panels on the politics of the book industry and no books launched or promoted. Instead, this was a gathering called 20Books2017, a self-publishing conference about the business of fiction ebooks and there was expertise in the room.Among those attending, 50 reportedly earned over $100,000 US per annum, with four said to be earning in excess of $1,000,000 US year. Yet none of these authors are household names. Their work is not adapted to film or television. Their books cannot be found on the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores. For the most part, these authors go unrepresented by the publishing industry and literary agencies, and further to which, only a fraction have ever actively pursued traditional publishing. Instead, they write for and sell into a commercial fiction market dominated by a single retailer and publisher: online retailer Amazon.While the online ebook market can be dynamic and lucrative, it can also be chaotic. Unlike the traditional publishing industry—an industry almost stoically adherent to various gatekeeping processes: an influential agent-class, formalized education pathways, geographic demarcations of curatorial power (see Thompson)—the nascent ebook market is unmapped and still somewhat ungoverned. As will be discussed below, even the markets directly engineered by Amazon are subject to rapid change and upheaval. It can be a space with shifting boundaries and thus, for many in the traditional industry both Amazon and self-publishing come to represent a type of encroaching northern dread.In the eyes of the traditional industry, digital self-publishing certainly conforms to the barbarous north of European literary metaphor: Orwell’s ‘real ugliness of industrialism’ (94) governed by the abject lawlessness of David Peace’s Yorkshire noir (Fowler). But for adherents within the day-to-day of self-publishing, this unruly space also provides the frontiers and gold-rushes of American West mythology.What remains uncertain is the future of both the traditional and the self-publishing sectors and the degree to which they will eventually merge, overlap and/or co-exist. So-called ‘hybrid-authors’ (those self-publishing and involved in traditional publication) are becoming increasingly common—especially in genre fiction—but the disruption brought about by self-publishing and ebooks appears far from complete.To the contrary, the Amazon-led ebook iteration of this market is relatively new. While self-publishing and independent publishing have long histories as modes of production, Amazon launched both its Kindle e-reader device and its marketplace Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) a little over a decade ago. In the years subsequent, the integration of KDP within the Amazon retail environment dramatically altered the digital self-publishing landscape, effectively paving the way for competing platforms (Kobo, Nook, iBooks, GooglePlay) and today’s vibrant—and, at times, crassly commercial—self-published fiction communities.As a result, the self-publishing market has experienced rapid growth: self-publishers now collectively hold the largest share of fiction sales within Amazon’s ebook categories, as much as 35% of the total market (Howey). Contrary to popular belief they do not reside entirely at the bottom of Amazon’s expansive catalogue either: at the time of writing, 11 of Amazon’s Top 50 Bestsellers were self-published and the median estimated monthly revenue generated by these ‘indie’ books was $43,000 USD / month (per author) on the American site alone (KindleSpy).This international publishing market now proffers authors running the gamut of commercial uptake, from millionaire successes like romance writer H.M. Ward and thriller author Mark Dawson, through to the 19% of self-published authors who listed their annual royalty income as $0 per annum (Weinberg). Their overall market share remains small—as little as 1.8% of trade publishing in the US as a whole (McIlroy 4)—but the high end of this lucrative slice is particularly dynamic: science fiction author Michael Anderle (and 20Books2017 keynote) is on-track to become a seven-figure author in his second year of publishing (based on Amazon sales ranking data), thriller author Mark Dawson has sold over 300,000 copies of his self-published Milton series in 3 years (McGregor), and a slew of similar authors have recently attained New York Times and US Today bestseller status.To date, there is not a broad range of scholarship investigating the operational logics of self-published fiction. Timothy Laquintano’s recent Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing (2016) is a notable exception, drawing self-publishing into historical debates surrounding intellectual property, the future of the book and digital abundance. The more empirical portions of Mass Authorship—taken from activity between 2011 to 2015—directly informs this research and his chapter on Amazon (Chapter 4) could be read as a more macro companion to my findings below; taken together and compared they illustrate just how fast-moving the market is. Nick Levey’s work on ‘post-press’ literature and its inherent risks (and discourses of cultural capitol) also informs my thesis here.In addition to which, there is scholarship centred on publishing more generally that also touches on self-published writers as a category of practitioner (see Baverstock and Steinitz, Haughland, Thomlinson and Bélanger). Most of this later work focuses almost entirely on the finished product, usually situating self-publishing as directly oppositional to traditional publishing, and thus subordinating it.In this paper, I hope to outline how the self-publishers I’ve observed have enacted various tactical approaches that specifically strive to tame their chaotic marketplace, and to indicate—through one case study (Amazon exclusivity)—a site of production and resistance where they have occasionally succeeded. Their approach is one that values information sharing and an open-source approach to book-selling and writing craft, ideologies drawn more from the tech / start-up world than commercial book industry described by Thompson (10). It is a space deeply informed by the virtual nature of its major platforms and as such, I argue its relation to the world of traditional publishing—and its representation within the traditional book industry—are tenuous, despite the central role of authorship and books.Making the Virtual Self-Publishing SceneWithin the study of popular music, the use of Barry Shank and Will Straw’s ‘scene’ concept has been an essential tool for uncovering and mapping independent/DIY creative practice. The term scene, defined by Straw as cultural space, is primarily interested in how cultural phenomena articulates or announces itself. A step beyond community, scene theorists are less concerned with examining an evolving history of practice (deemed essentialist) than they are concerned with focusing on the “making and remaking of alliances” as the crucial process whereby communal culture is formed, expressed and distributed (370).A scene’s spatial dimension—often categorized as local, translocal or virtual (see Bennett and Peterson)—demands attention be paid to hybridization, as a diversity of actors approach the same terrain from differing vantage points, with distinct motivations. As a research tool, scene can map action as the material existence of ideology. Thus, its particular usefulness is its ability to draw findings from diverse communities of practice.Drawing methodologies and approaches from Bourdieu’s field theory—a particularly resonant lens for examining cultural work—and de Certeau’s philosophies of space and circumstantial moves (“failed and successful attempts at redirection within a given terrain,” 375), scene focuses on articulation, the process whereby individual and communal activity becomes an observable or relatable or recordable phenomena.Within my previous work (see Bennett and Rogers, Rogers), I’ve used scene to map a variety of independent music-making practices and can see clear resemblances between independent music-making and the growing assemblage of writers within ebook self-publishing. The democratizing impulses espoused by self-publishers (the removal of gatekeepers as married to visions of a fiction/labour meritocracy) marry up quite neatly with the heady mix of separatism and entrepreneurialism inherent in Australian underground music.Self-publishers are typically older and typically more upfront about profit, but the communal interaction—the trade and gifting of support, resources and information—looks decidedly similar. Instead, the self-publishers appear different in one key regard: their scene-making is virtual in ways that far outstrip empirical examples drawn from popular music. 20Books2017 is only one of two conferences for this community thus far and represents one of the few occasions in which the community has met in any sort of organized way offline. For the most part, and in the day-to-day, self-publishing is a virtual scene.At present, the virtual space of self-published fiction is centralized around two digital platforms. Firstly, there is the online message board, of which two specific online destinations are key: the first is Kboards, a PHP-coded forum “devoted to all things Kindle” (Kboards) but including a huge author sub-board of self-published writers. The archive of this board amounts to almost two million posts spanning back to 2009. The second message board site is a collection of Facebook groups, of which the 10,000-strong membership of 20BooksTo50K is the most dominant; it is the originating home of 20Books2017.The other platform constituting the virtual scene of self-publishing is that of podcasting. While there are a number of high-profile static websites and blogs related to self-publishing (and an emerging community of vloggers), these pale in breadth and interaction when compared to podcasts such as The Creative Penn, The Self-Publishing Podcast, The Sell More Books Show, Rocking Self-Publishing (now defunct but archived) and The Self-Publishing Formula podcast. Statistical information on the distribution of these podcasts is unavailable but the circulation and online discussion of their content and the interrelation between the different shows and their hosts and guests all point to their currency within the scene.In short, if one is to learn about the business and craft production modes of self-publishing, one tends to discover and interact with one of these two platforms. The consensus best practice espoused on these boards and podcasts is the data set in which the remainder of this paper draws findings. I have spent the last two years embedded in these communities but for the purposes of this paper I will be drawing data exclusively from the public-facing Kboards, namely because it is the oldest, most established site, but also because all of the issues and discussion presented within this data have been cross-referenced across the different podcasts and boards. In fact, for a long period Kboards was so central to the scene that itself was often the topic of conversation elsewhere.Sticking in the Algorithm: The Best Practice of Fiction Self-PublishingSelf-publishing is a virtual scene because its “constellation of divergent interests and forces” (Shank, Preface, x) occur almost entirely online. This is not just a case of discussion, collaboration and discovery occurring online—as with the virtual layer of local and translocal music scenes—rather, the self-publishing community produces into the online space, almost exclusively. Its venues and distribution pathways are online and while its production mechanisms (writing) are still physical, there is an almost instantaneous and continuous interface with the online. These writers type and, increasingly dictate, their work into the virtual cloud, have it edited there (via in-text annotation) and from there the work is often designed, formatted, published, sold, marketed, reviewed and discussed online.In addition to which, a significant portion of these writers produce collaborative works, co-writing novels and co-editing them via cooperative apps. Teams of beta-readers (often fans) work on manuscripts pre-launch. Covers, blurbs, log lines, ad copy and novel openings are tested and reconfigured via crowd-sourced opinion. Seen here, the writing of the self-publishing scene is often explicitly commercial. But more to the fact, it never denies its direct co-relation with the mandates of online publishing. It is not traditional writing (it moves beyond authorship) and viewing these writers as emerging or unpublished or indeed, using the existing vernacular of literary writing practices, often fails to capture what it is they do.As the self-publishers write for the online space, Amazon forms a huge part of their thinking and working. The site sits at the heart of the practices under consideration here. Many of the authors drawn into this research are ‘wide’ in their online retail distribution, meaning they have books placed with Amazon’s online retail competitors. Yet the decision to go ‘wide’ or stay exclusive to Amazon — and the volume of discussion around this choice — is illustrative of how dominant the company remains in the scene. In fact, the example of Amazon exclusivity provides a valuable case-study.For self-publishers, Amazon exclusivity brings two stated and tangible benefits. The first relates to revenue diversification within Amazon, with exclusivity delivering an additional revenue stream in the form of Kindle Unlimited royalties. Kindle Unlimited (KU) is a subscription service for ebooks. Consumers pay a flat monthly fee ($13.99 AUD) for unlimited access to over a million Kindle titles. For a 300-page book, a full read-through of a novel under KU pays roughly the same royalty to authors as the sale of a $2.99 ebook, but only to Amazon-exclusive authors. If an exclusive book is particularly well suited to the KU audience, this can present authors with a very serious return.The second benefit of Amazon exclusivity is access to internal site merchandising; namely ‘Free Days’ where the book is given away (and can chart on the various ‘Top 100 Free’ leaderboards) and ‘Countdown Deals’ where a decreasing discount is staggered across a period (thus creating a type of scarcity).These two perks can prove particularly lucrative to individual authors. On Kboards, user Annie Jocoby (also writing as Rachel Sinclair) details her experiences with exclusivity:I have a legal thriller series that is all-in with KU [Kindle Unlimited], and I can honestly say that KU has been fantastic for visibility for that particular series. I put the books into KU in the first part of August, and I watched my rankings rise like crazy after I did that. They've stuck, too. If I weren't in KU, I doubt that they would still be sticking as well as they have. (anniejocoby)This is fairly typical of the positive responses to exclusivity, yet it incorporates a number of the more opaque benefits entangled with going exclusive to Amazon.First, there is ‘visibility.’ In self-publishing terms, ‘visibility’ refers almost exclusively to chart positions within Amazon. The myriad of charts — and how they function — is beyond the scope of this paper but they absolutely indicate — often dictate — the discoverability of a book online. These charts are the ‘front windows’ of Amazon, to use an analogy to brick-and-mortar bookstores. Books that chart well are actively being bought by customers and they are very often those benefiting from Amazon’s powerful recommendation algorithm, something that expands beyond the site into the company’s expansive customer email list. This brings us to the second point Jocoby mentions, the ‘sticking’ within the charts.There is a widely held belief that once a good book (read: free of errors, broadly entertaining, on genre) finds its way into the Amazon recommendation algorithm, it can remain there for long periods of time leading to a building success as sales beget sales, further boosting the book’s chart performance and reviews. There is also the belief among some authors that Kindle Unlimited books are actively favoured by this algorithm. The high-selling Amanda M. Lee noted a direct correlation:Rank is affected when people borrow your book [under KU]. Page reads don't play into it all. (Amanda M. Lee)Within the same thread, USA Today bestseller Annie Bellet elaborated:We tested this a bunch when KU 2.0 hit. A page read does zip for rank. A borrow, even with no pages read, is what prompts the rank change. Borrows are weighted exactly like sales from what we could tell, it doesn't matter if nobody opens the book ever. All borrows now are ghost borrows, of course, since we can't see them anymore, so it might look like pages are coming in and your rank is changing, but what is probably happening is someone borrowed your book around the same time, causing the rank jump. (Annie B)Whether this advantage is built into the algorithm in a (likely) attempt to favour exclusive authors, or by nature of KU books presenting at a lower price point, is unknown but there is anecdotal evidence that once a KU book gains traction, it can ‘stick’ within the charts for longer periods of time compared to non-exclusive titles.At the entrepreneurial end of the fiction self-publishing scene, Amazon is positioned at the very centre. To go wide—to follow vectors through the scene adjacent to Amazon — is to go around the commercial centre and its profits. Yet no one in this community remains unaffected by the strategic position of this site and the market it has either created or captured. Amazon’s institutional practices can be adopted by competitors (Kobo Plus is a version of KU) and the multitude of tactics authors use to promote their work all, in one shape or another, lead back to ‘circumstantial moves’ learned from Amazon or services that are aimed at promoting work sold there. Further to which, the sense of instability and risk engendered by such a dominant market player is felt everywhere.Some Closing Ideas on the Ideology of Self-PublishingSelf-publishing fiction remains tactical in the de Certeau sense of the term. It is responsive and ever-shifting, with a touch of communal complicity and what he calls la perruque (‘the wig’), a shorthand for resistance that presents itself as submission (25). The entrepreneurialism of self-published fiction trades off this sense of the tactical.Within the scene, Amazon bestseller charts aren’t as much markers of prestige as systems to be hacked. The choice between ‘wide’ and exclusive is only ever short-term; it is carefully scrutinised and the trade-offs and opportunities are monitored week-to-week and debated constantly online. Over time, the self-publishing scene has become expert at decoding Amazon’s monolithic Terms of Service, ever eager to find both advantage and risk as they attempt to lever the affordances of digital publishing against their own desire for profit and expression.This sense of mischief and slippage forms a big part of what self-publishing is. In contrast to traditional publishing—with its long lead times and physical real estate—self-publishing can’t help but appear fragile, wild and coarse. There is no other comparison possible.To survive in self-publishing is to survive outside the established book industry and to thrive within a new and far more uncertain market/space, one almost entirely without a mapped topology. Unlike the traditional publishing industry—very much a legacy, a “relatively stable” population group (Straw 373)—self-publishing cannot escape its otherness, not in the short term. Both its spatial coordinates and its pathways remain too fast-evolving in comparison to the referent of traditional publishing. In the short-to-medium term, I imagine it will remain at some cultural remove from traditional publishing, be it perceived as a threatening northern force or a speculative west.To see self-publishing in the present, I encourage scholars to step away from traditional publishing industry protocols and frameworks, to strive to see this new arena as the self-published authors themselves understand it (what Muggleton has referred to a “indigenous meaning” 13).Straw and Shank’s scene concept provides one possible conceptual framework for this shift in understanding as scene’s reliance on spatial considerations harbours an often underemphazised asset: it is a theory of orientation. At heart, it draws as much from de Certeau as Bourdieu and as such, the scene presented in this work is never complete or fixed. It is de Certeau’s city “shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces” (93). These scenes—be they musicians or authors—are only ever glimpsed and from a vantage point of close proximity. In short, it is one way out of the essentialisms that currently shroud self-published fiction as a craft, business and community of authors. The cultural space of self-publishing, to return Straw’s scene definition, is one that mirrors its own porous, online infrastructure, its own predominance in virtuality. Its pathways are coded together inside fast-moving media companies and these pathways are increasingly entwined within algorithmic processes of curation that promise meritocratization and disintermediation yet delivery systems that can be learned and manipulated.The agility to publish within these systems is the true skill-set required to self-publish fiction online. It traverses specific platforms and short-term eras. It is the core attribute of success in the scene. Everything else is secondary, including the content of the books produced. It is not the case that these books are of lesser literary quality or that their ever-growing abundance is threatening—this is the counter-argument so often presented by the traditional book industry—but more so that without entrepreneurial agility, the quality of the ebook goes undetermined as it sinks lower and lower into a distribution system that is so open it appears endless.ReferencesAmanda M. Lee. “Re: KU Page Reads and Rank.” Kboards: Writer’s Cafe. 1 Oct. 2007 <https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,232945.msg3245005.html#msg3245005>.Annie B [Annie Bellet]. “Re: KU Page Reads and Rank.” Kboards: Writer’s Cafe. 1 Oct. 2007 <https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,232945.msg3245068.html#msg3245068>.Anniejocoby [Annie Jocoby]. “Re: Tell Me Why You're WIDE or KU ONLY.” Kboards: Writer’s Cafe. 1 Oct. 2007 <https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,242514.msg3558176.html#msg3558176>.Baverstock, Alison, and Jackie Steinitz. “Why Are the Self-Publishers?” Learned Publishing 26 (2013): 211-223.Bennett, Andy, and Richard A. Peterson, eds. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.———, and Ian Rogers. Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge, 1984.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984.Haugland, Ann. “Opening the Gates: Print On-Demand Publishing as Cultural Production” Publishing Research Quarterly 22.3 (2006): 3-16.Howey, Hugh. “October 2016 Author Earnings Report: A Turning of the Tide.” Author Earnings. 12 Oct. 2016 <http://authorearnings.com/report/october-2016/>.Kboards. About Kboards.com. 2017. 4 Oct. 2017 <https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,242026.0.html>.KindleSpy. 2017. Chrome plug-in.Laquintano, Timothy. Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing. University of Iowa Press, 2016.Levey, Nick. “Post-Press Literature: Self-Published Authors in the Literary Field.” Post 45. 1 Oct. 2017 <http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/02/post-press-literature-self-published-authors-in-the-literary-field-3/>.McGregor, Jay. “Amazon Pays $450,000 a Year to This Self-Published Writer.” Forbes. 17 Apr. 2017 <http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2015/04/17/mark-dawson-made-750000-from-self-published-amazon-books/#bcce23a35e38>.McIlroy, Thad. “Startups within the U.S. Book Publishing Industry.” Publishing Research Quarterly 33 (2017): 1-9.Muggleton, David. Inside Subculture: The Post-Modern Meaning of Style. Berg, 2000.Orwell, George. Selected Essays. Penguin Books, 1960.Fowler, Dawn. ‘‘This Is the North – We Do What We Want’: The Red Riding Trilogy as ‘Yorkshire Noir.” Cops on the Box. University of Glamorgan, 2013.Rogers, Ian. “The Hobbyist Majority and the Mainstream Fringe: The Pathways of Independent Music Making in Brisbane, Australia.” Redefining Mainstream Popular Music, eds. Andy Bennett, Sarah Baker, and Jodie Taylor. Routlegde, 2013. 162-173.Shank, Barry. Dissonant Identities: The Rock’n’Roll Scene in Austin Texas. Wesleyan University Press, 1994.Straw, Will. “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music.” Cultural Studies 5.3 (1991): 368–88.Thomlinson, Adam, and Pierre C. Bélanger. “Authors’ Views of e-Book Self-Publishing: The Role of Symbolic Capital Risk.” Publishing Research Quarterly 31 (2015): 306-316.Thompson, John B. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Penguin, 2012.Weinberg, Dana Beth. “The Self-Publishing Debate: A Social Scientist Separates Fact from Fiction.” Digital Book World. 3 Oct. 2017 <http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/self-publishing-debate-part3/>.

Since the dawn of agriculture there has been a need to communicate in order to optimize production and yields. Extension and Knowledge Technology and Transfer (KTT) has seen a lot of changes over the past 100 years. None of these were as great as in the introduction of the Internet and computer technology. With this rapid change in technology, KTT workers and consultants have to adapt how information is getting to producers. Though majority of farms still prefer hard copies of publications and research, we are seeing an increase in the amount of material found online. We have also seen a shift away from demo days and on farm consultations, in order to use webinars, podcasts and social media. Farmers have a been labelled as 'slow to adapt', but this is not just a generational gap anymore. Herd size, producer personalities and delivery methods all effect how the producer wants to receive information. Though the industry is good at producing information, it is important to get it into the producers hands. Until the digital space becomes the norm for all producers there is a need to view the trends in KTT and combine traditional and new age communication methods in order to reach all farmers. As technology continues to change there will be a constant need to change how we are reaching producers while continuing with the KTT methods that have worked in the past.

Since the dawn of agriculture there has been a need to communicate in order to optimize production and yields. Extension and Knowledge Technology and Transfer (KTT) has seen a lot of changes over the past 100 years. None of these were as great as in the introduction of the Internet and computer technology. With this rapid change in technology, KTT workers and consultants have to adapt how information is getting to producers. Though majority of farms still prefer hard copies of publications and research, we are seeing an increase in the amount of material found online. We have also seen a shift away from demo days and on farm consultations, in order to use webinars, podcasts and social media. Farmers have a been labelled as 'slow to adapt', but this is not just a generational gap anymore. Herd size, producer personalities and delivery methods all effect how the producer wants to receive information. Though the industry is good at producing information, it is important to get it into the producers hands. Until the digital space becomes the norm for all producers there is a need to view the trends in KTT and combine traditional and new age communication methods in order to reach all farmers. As technology continues to change there will be a constant need to change how we are reaching producers while continuing with the KTT methods that have worked in the past.

We need a clear, unified, and consistent voice to effect the complete dismantling, the abolition, of the mechanisms of animal exploitation.And that will only come from what we say and do, no matter who we are.— Gary L. Francione, animal rights theoristThe history of hashtags is relatively short but littered with the remnants of corporate hashtags which may have seemed a good idea at the time within the confines of the boardroom. It is difficult to understand the rationale behind the use of hashtags as an effective communications tactic in 2019 by corporations when a quick stroll through their recent past leaves behind the much-derided #qantasluxury (Glance), #McDstories (Hill), and #myNYPD (Tran).While hashtags have an obvious purpose in bringing together like-minded publics and facilitating conversation (Kwye et al. 1), they have also regularly been the subject of “hashtag takeovers” by activists and other interested parties, and even by trolls, as the Ecological Society of Australia found in 2015 when their seemingly innocuous #ESA15 hashtag was taken over with pornographic images (news.com.au). Hashtag takeovers have also been used as a dubious marketing tactic, where smaller and less well-known brands tag their products with trending hashtags such as #iphone in order to boost their audience (Social Garden). Hashtags are increasingly used as a way for activists or other interested parties to disrupt a message. It is, I argue, predictable that any hashtag related to an even slightly controversial topic will be subject to some form of activist hashtag takeover, with varying degrees of success.That veganism and the dairy industry should attract such conflict is unsurprising given that the two are natural enemies, with vegans in particular seeming to anticipate and actively engage in the battle for the opposing hashtag.Using a comparative analysis of the #Veganuary and #Februdairy hashtags and how they have been used by both pro-vegan and pro-dairy social media users, this article illustrates that the enthusiastic and well-meaning social media efforts of farmers and dairy supporters have so far been unable to counteract those of well-organised and equally passionate vegan activists. This analysis compares tweets in the first week of the respective campaigns, concluding that organisations, industries and their representatives should be extremely wary of engaging said activists who are not only highly-skilled but are also highly-motivated. Grassroots, ideology-driven activism is a formidable opponent in any public space, let alone when it takes place on the outspoken and unstructured landscape of social media which is sometimes described as the “wild West” (Fitch 5) where anything goes and authenticity and plain-speaking is key (Macnamara 12).I Say Hashtag, You Say Bashtag#Februdairy was launched in 2018 to promote the benefits of dairy. The idea was first mooted on Twitter in 2018 by academic Dr Jude Capper, a livestock sustainability consultant, who called for “28 days, 28 positive dairy posts” (@Bovidiva; Howell). It was a response to the popular Veganuary campaign which aimed to “inspire people to try vegan for January and throughout the rest of the year”, a campaign which had gained significant traction both online and in the traditional media since its inception in 2014 (Veganuary). Hopes were high: “#Februdairy will be one month of dairy people posting, liking and retweeting examples of what we do and why we do it” (Yates). However, the #Februdairy hashtag has been effectively disrupted and has now entered the realm of a bashtag, a hashtag appropriated by activists for their own purpose (Austin and Jin 341).The Dairy Industry (Look Out the Vegans Are Coming)It would appear that the dairy industry is experiencing difficulties in public perception. While milk consumption is declining, sales of plant-based milks are increasing (Kaiserman) and a growing body of health research has questioned whether dairy products and milk in particular do in fact “do a body good” (Saccaro; Harvard Milk Study). In the 2019 review of Canada’s food guide, its first revision since 2007, for instance, the focus is now on eating plant-based foods with dairy’s former place significantly downgraded. Dairy products no longer have their own distinct section and are instead placed alongside other proteins including lentils (Pippus).Nevertheless, the industry has persevered with its traditional marketing and public relations activities, choosing to largely avoid addressing animal welfare concerns brought to light by activists. They have instead focused their message towards countering concerns about the health benefits of milk. In the US, the Milk Processing Education Program’s long-running celebrity-driven Got Milk campaign has been updated with Milk Life, a health focused campaign, featuring images of children and young people living an active lifestyle and taking part in activities such as skateboarding, running, and playing basketball (Milk Life). Interestingly, and somewhat inexplicably, Milk Life’s home page features the prominent headline, “How Milk Can Bring You Closer to Your Loved Ones”.It is somewhat reflective of the current trend towards veganism that tennis aces Serena and Venus Williams, both former Got Milk ambassadors, are now proponents for the plant-based lifestyle, with Venus crediting her newly-adopted vegan diet as instrumental in her recovery from an auto-immune disease (Mango).The dairy industry’s health focus continues in Australia, as well as the use of the word love, with former AFL footballer Shane Crawford—the face of the 2017 campaign Milk Loves You Back, from Lion Dairy and Drinks—focusing on reminding Australians of the reputed nutritional benefits of milk (Dawson).Dairy Australia meanwhile launched their Legendairy campaign with a somewhat different focus, promoting and lauding Australia’s dairy families, and with a message that stated, in a nod to the current issues, that “Australia’s dairy farmers and farming communities are proud, resilient and innovative” (Dairy Australia). This campaign could be perceived as a morale-boosting exercise, featuring a nation-wide search to find Australia’s most legendairy farming community (Dairy Australia). That this was also an attempt to humanise the industry seems obvious, drawing on established goodwill felt towards farmers (University of Cambridge). Again, however, this strategy did not address activists’ messages of suffering animals, factory farms, and newborn calves being isolated from their grieving mothers, and it can be argued that consumers are being forced to make the choice between who (or what) they care about more: animals or the people making their livelihoods from them.Large-scale campaigns like Legendairy which use traditional channels are of course still vitally important in shaping public opinion, with statistics from 2016 showing 85.1% of Australians continue to watch free-to-air television (Roy Morgan, “1 in 7”). However, a focus and, arguably, an over-reliance on traditional platforms means vegans and animal activists are often unchallenged when spreading their message via social media. Indeed, when we consider the breakdown in age groups inherent in these statistics, with 18.8% of 14-24 year-olds not watching any commercial television at all, an increase from 7% in 2008 (Roy Morgan, “1 in 7”), it is a brave and arguably short-sighted organisation or industry that relies primarily on traditional channels to spread their message in 2019. That these large-scale campaigns do little to address the issues raised by vegans concerning animal welfare leaves these claims largely unanswered and momentum to grow.This growth in momentum is fuelled by activist groups such as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) who are well-known in this space, with 5,494,545 Facebook followers, 1.06 million Twitter followers, 973,000 Instagram followers, and 453,729 You Tube subscribers (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). They are also active on Pinterest, a visual-based platform suited to the kinds of images and memes particularly detrimental to the dairy industry. Although widely derided, PETA’s reach is large. A graphic video posted to Facebook on February 13 2019 and showing a suffering cow, captioned “your cheese is not worth this” was shared 1,244 times, and had 4.6 million views in just over 24 hours (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). With 95% of 12-24 year olds in Australia now using social networking sites (Statista), it is little wonder veganism is rapidly growing within this demographic (Bradbury), with The Guardian labelling the rise of veganism unstoppable (Hancox).Activist organisations are joined by prominent and charismatic vegan activists such as James Aspey (182,000 Facebook followers) and Earthling Ed (205,000 Facebook followers) in distributing information and images that are influential and often highly graphic or disturbing. Meanwhile Instagram influencers and You Tube lifestyle vloggers such as Ellen Fisher and FreeLee share information promoting vegan food and the vegan lifestyle (with 650,320 and 785,903 subscribers respectively). YouTube video Dairy Is Scary has over 5 million views (Janus) and What the Health, a follow-up documentary to Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, promoting veganism, is now available on Netflix, which itself has 9.8 million Australian subscribers (Roy Morgan, “Netflix”). BOSH’s plant-based vegan cookbook was the fastest selling cookbook of 2018 (Chiorando).Additionally, the considerable influence of celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, Beyonce, Alicia Silverstone, Zac Efron, and Jessica Chastain, to name just a few, speaking publicly about their vegan lifestyle, encourages veganism to become mainstream and increases its widespread acceptance.However not all the dairy industry’s ills can be blamed on vegans. Rising costs, cheap imports, and other pressures (Lockhart, Donaghy and Gow) have all placed pressure on the industry. Nonetheless, in the battle for hearts and minds on social media, the vegans are leading the way.Qualitative research interviewing new vegans found converting to veganism was relatively easy, yet some respondents reported having to consult multiple resources and required additional support and education on how to be vegan (McDonald 17).Enter VeganuaryUsing a month, week or day to promote an idea or campaign, is a common public relations and marketing strategy, particularly in health communications. Dry July and Ocsober both promote alcohol abstinence, Frocktober raises funds for ovarian cancer, and Movember is an annual campaign raising awareness and funds for men’s health (Parnell). Vegans Matthew Glover and Jane Land were discussing the success of Movember when they raised the idea of creating a vegan version. Their initiative, Veganuary, urging people to try vegan for the month of January, launched in 2014 and since then 500,000 people have taken the Veganuary pledge (Veganuary).The Veganuary website is the largest of its kind on the internet. With vegan recipes, expert advice and information, it provides all the answers to Why go vegan, but it is the support offered to answer How to go vegan that truly sets Veganuary apart. (Veganuary)That Veganuary participants would use social media to discuss and share their experiences was a foregone conclusion. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are all utilised by participants, with the official Veganuary pages currently followed/liked by 159,000 Instagram followers, receiving 242,038 Facebook likes, and 45,600 Twitter followers (Veganuary). Both the Twitter and Instagram sites make effective use of hashtags to spread their reach, not only using #Veganuary but also other relevant hashtags such as #TryVegan, #VeganRecipes, and the more common #Vegan, #Farm, and #SaveAnimals.Februdairy Follows Veganuary, But Only on the CalendarCalling on farmers and dairy producers to create counter content and their own hashtag may have seemed like an idea that would achieve an overall positive response.Agricultural news sites and bloggers spread the word and even the BBC reported on the industry’s “fight back” against Veganuary (BBC). However the hashtag was quickly overwhelmed with anti-dairy activists mobilising online. Vegans issued a call to arms across social media. The Vegans in Australia Facebook group featured a number of posts urging its 58,949 members to “thunderclap” the Februdairy hashtag while the Project Calf anti-dairy campaign declared that Februdairy offered an “easy” way to spread their information (Sandhu).Februdairy farmers and dairy supporters were encouraged to tell their stories, sharing positive photographs and videos, and they did. However this content was limited. In this tweet (fig. 1) the issue of a lack of diverse content was succinctly addressed by an anti-Februdairy activist.Fig. 1: Content challenges. (#Februdairy, 2 Feb. 2019)MethodUtilising Twitter’s advanced search capability, I was able to search for #Veganuary tweets from 1 to 7 January 2019 and #Februdairy tweets from 1 to 7 February 2019. I analysed the top tweets provided by Twitter in terms of content, assessed whether the tweet was pro or anti Veganuary and Februdairy, and also categorised its content in terms of subject matter.Tweets were analysed to assess whether they were on message and aligned with the values of their associated hashtag. Veganuary tweets were considered to be on message if they promoted veganism or possessed an anti-dairy, anti-meat, or pro-animal sentiment. Februdairy tweets were assessed as on message if they promoted the consumption of dairy products, expressed sympathy or empathy towards the dairy industry, or possessed an anti-vegan sentiment. Tweets were also evaluated according to their clarity, emotional impact and coherence. The overall effectiveness of the hashtag was then evaluated based on the above criteria as well as whether they had been hijacked.Results and FindingsOverwhelmingly, the 213 #Veganuary tweets were on message. That is they were pro-Veganuary, supportive of veganism, and positive. The topics were varied and included humorous memes, environmental facts, information about the health benefits of veganism, as well as a strong focus on animals. The number of non-graphic tweets (12) concerning animals was double that of tweets featuring graphic or shocking imagery (6). Predominantly the tweets were focused on food and the sharing of recipes, with 44% of all pro #Veganuary tweets featuring recipes or images of food. Interestingly, a number of well-known corporations tweeted to promote their vegan food products, including Tesco, Aldi, Iceland, and M&S. The diversity of veganism is reflected in the tweets. Organisations used the hashtag to promote their products, including beauty and shoe products, social media influencers promoted their vegan podcasts and blogs, and, interestingly, the Ethiopian Embassy of the United Kingdom tweeted their support.There were 23 (11%) anti-Veganuary tweets. Of these, one was from Dr. Jude Capper, the founder of Februdairy. The others expressed support for farming and farmers, and a number were photographs of meat products, including sausages and fry-ups. One Australian journalist tweeted in favour of meat, stating it was yummy murder. These tweets could be described as entertaining and may perhaps serve as a means of preaching to the converted, but their ability to influence and persuade is negligible.Twitter’s search tool provided access to 141 top #Februdairy tweets. Of these 82 (52%) were a hijack of the hashtag and overtly anti-Februdairy. Vegan activists used the #Februdairy hashtag to their advantage with most of their tweets (33%) featuring non-graphic images of animals. They also tweeted about other subject matters, including environmental concerns, vegan food and products, and health issues related to dairy consumption.As noted by the activists (see fig. 1 above), most of the pro-Februdairy tweets were images of milk or dairy products (41%). Images of farms and farmers were the next most used (26%), followed by images of cows (17%) (see fig. 2). Fig. 2: An activist makes their anti-Februdairy point with a clear, engaging image and effective use of hashtags. (#Februdairy, 6 Feb. 2019)The juxtaposition between many of the tweets was also often glaring, with one contrasting message following another (see fig. 3). Fig. 3: An example of contrasting #Februdairy tweets with an image used by the activists to good effect, making their point known. (#Februdairy, 2 Feb. 2019)Storytelling is a powerful tool in public relations and marketing efforts. Yet, to be effective, high-quality content is required. That many of the Februdairy proponents had limited social media training was evident; images were blurred, film quality was poor, or they failed to make their meaning clear (see fig. 4). Fig. 4: A blurred photograph, reflective of some of the low-quality content provided by Februdairy supporters. (#Februdairy, 3 Feb. 2019)This image was tweeted in support of Februdairy. However the image and phrasing could also be used to argue against Februdairy. We can surmise that the tweeter was suggesting the cow was well looked after and seemingly content, but overall the message is as unclear as the image.While some pro-Februdairy supporters recognised the need for relevant hashtags, often their images were of a low-quality and not particularly engaging, a requirement for social media success. This requirement seems to be better understood by anti-Februdairy activists who used high-quality images and memes to create interest and gain the audience’s attention (see figs. 5 and 6). Fig. 5: An uninspiring image used to promote Februdairy. (#Februdairy, 6 Feb. 2019) Fig. 6: Anti-Februdairy activists made good use of memes, recognising the need for diverse content. (#Februdairy, 3 Feb. 2019)DiscussionWhat the #Februdairy case makes clear, then, is that in continuing its focus on traditional media, the dairy industry has left the battle online to largely untrained, non-social media savvy supporters.From a purely public relations perspective, one of the first things we ask our students to do in issues and crisis communication is to assess the risk. “What can hurt your organisation?” we ask. “What potential issues are on the horizon and what can you do to prevent them?” This is PR101 and it is difficult to understand why environmental scanning and resulting action has not been on the radar of the dairy industry long before now. It seems they have not fully anticipated or have significantly underestimated the emerging issue that public perception, animal cruelty, health concerns, and, ultimately, veganism has had on their industry and this is to their detriment. In Australia in 2015–16 the dairy industry was responsible for 8 per cent (A$4.3 billion) of the gross value of agricultural production and 7 per cent (A$3 billion) of agricultural export income (Department of Agriculture and Water Resources). When such large figures are involved and with so much at stake, it is hard to rationalise the decision not to engage in a more proactive online strategy, seeking to engage their publics, including, whether they like it or not, activists.Instead there are current attempts to address these issues with a legislative approach, lobbying for the introduction of ag-gag laws (Potter), and the limitation of terms such as milk and cheese (Worthington). However, these measures are undertaken while there is little attempt to engage with activists or to effectively counter their claims with a widespread authentic public relations campaign, and reflects a failure to understand the nature of the current online environment, momentum, and mood.That is not to say that the dairy industry is not operating in the online environment, but it does not appear to be a priority, and this is reflected in their low engagement and numbers of followers. For instance, Dairy Australia, the industry’s national service body, has a following of only 8,281 on Facebook, 6,981 on Twitter, and, crucially, they are not on Instagram. Their Twitter posts do not include hashtags and unsurprisingly they have little engagement on this platform with most tweets attracting no more than two likes. Surprisingly they have 21,013 subscribers on YouTube which featured professional and well-presented videos. This demonstrates some understanding of the importance of effective storytelling but not, as yet, trans-media storytelling.ConclusionSocial media activism is becoming more important and recognised as a legitimate voice in the public sphere. Many organisations, perhaps in recognition of this as well as a growing focus on responsible corporate behaviour, particularly in the treatment of animals, have adjusted their behaviour. From Unilever abandoning animal testing practices to ensure Dove products are certified cruelty free (Nussbaum), to Domino’s introducing vegan options, companies who are aware of emerging trends and values are changing the way they do business and are reaping the benefits of engaging with, and catering to, vegans. Domino’s sold out of vegan cheese within the first week and vegans were asked to phone ahead to their local store, so great was the demand. From their website:We knew the response was going to be big after the demand we saw for the product on social media but we had no idea it was going to be this big. (Domino’s Newsroom)As a public relations professional, I am baffled by the dairy industry’s failure to adopt a crisis-based strategy rather than largely rely on the traditional one-way communication that has served them well in the previous (golden?) pre-social media age. However, as a vegan, persuaded by the unravelling of the happy cow argument, I cannot help but hope this realisation continues to elude them.References@bovidiva. “Let’s Make #Februdairy Happen This Year. 28 Days, 28 Positive #dairy Posts. From Cute Calves and #cheese on Crumpets, to Belligerent Bulls and Juicy #beef #burgers – Who’s In?” Twitter post. 15 Jan. 2018. 1 Feb. 2019 <https://twitter.com/bovidiva/status/952910641840447488?lang=en>.Austin, Lucinda L., and Yan Jin. Social Media and Crisis Communication. New York: Routledge, 2018.Bradbury, Tod. “Data Shows Major Rise in Veganism among Young People.” Plant Based News 12 Oct. 2018. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.plantbasednews.org>.BBC. “Februdairy: The Dairy Industry Fights Back against Veganuary.” BBC.com 8 Feb. 2018. 1 Feb. 2019 <https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-42990941>.Campaign Brief. “Shane Crawford Stars in ‘Milk Loves You Back’ Work for Lion Dairy & Drinks via AJF Partnership.” Campaign Brief Australia 1 Jun. 2017. 12 Feb. 2019 <http://www.campaignbrief.com/2017/06/shane-crawford-stars-in-milk-l.html>.Chiorando, Maria. “BOSH!’s Vegan Cookbook Is Fastest Selling Cookery Title of 2018.” Plant Based News 26 April 2018. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.plantbasednews.org/post/bosh-s-vegan-cookbook-is-fastest-selling-cookery-title-of-2018>.Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret. Dir. Kip Anderson, and Keegan Kuhn. Appian Way, A.U.M. Films, First Spark Media, 2014.Dairy Australia. “About Legendairy Capital.” Legendairy.com.au, 2019. 12 Feb. 2019 <http://www.legendairy.com.au/dairy-talk/capital-2017/about-us>.Dawson, Abigail. “Lion Dairy & Drinks Launches Campaign to Make Milk Matter Again.” Mumbrella 1 Jun. 2017. 10 Feb 2019 <https://mumbrella.com.au/lion-dairy-drinks-launches-campaign-make-milk-matter-448581>.Department of Agriculture and Water Resources. “Dairy Industry.” Australian Government. 21 Sep. 2018. 20 Feb. 2019 <http://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/research-topics/surveys/dairy>.Domino’s Newsroom. “Meltdown! Domino’s Set to Run Out of Vegan Cheese!” Domino’s Australia 18 Jan. 2018. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://newsroom.dominos.com.au/home/2018/1/17/meltdown-dominos-set-to-run-out-of-vegan-cheese>.Fitch, Kate. “Making Friends in the Wild West: Singaporean Public Relations Practitioners’ Perceptions of Working in Social Media.” PRism 6.2 (2009). 10 Feb. 2019 <http://www.prismjournal.org/fileadmin/Praxis/Files/globalPR/FITCH.pdf>.Francione, Gary L. “Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach.” Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach 10 Feb. 2019. <https://www.abolitionistapproach.com/quotes/>.Glance, David. “#QantasLuxury: A Qantas Social Media Disaster in Pyjamas.” The Conversation 23 Nov. 2011. 10 Feb. 2019 <http://theconversation.com/qantasluxury-a-qantas-social-media-disaster-in-pyjamas-4421>.Hancox, Dan. “The Unstoppable Rise of Veganism: How a Fringe Movement Went Mainstream.” The Guardian 1 Apr. 2018. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/apr/01/vegans-are-coming-millennials-health-climate-change-animal-welfare>.“Harvard Milk Study: It Doesn’t Do a Body Good.” HuffPost Canada 25 Jul. 2013. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/07/05/harvard-milk-study_n_3550063.html>.Hill, Kashmir. “#McDStories: When a Hashtag Becomes a Bashtag.” Forbes.com 24 Jan. 2012. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/01/24/mcdstories-when-a-hashtag-becomes-a-bashtag/#1541ef39ed25>.Howell, Madeleine. “Goodbye Veganuary, Hello Februdairy: How the Dairy Industry Is Taking the Fight to Its Vegan Critics.” The Telegraph 9 Feb. 2018. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/features/goodbye-veganuary-hello-februdairy-dairy-industry-taking-fight/>.Janus, Erin. “DAIRY IS SCARY! The Industry Explained in 5 Minutes.” Video. 27 Dec. 2015. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcN7SGGoCNI&t=192s>.Kaiserman, Beth. “Dairy Industry Struggles in a Sea of Plant-Based Milks.” Forbes.com 31 Jan. 2019. 20 Feb. 2019 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/bethkaiserman/2019/01/31/dairy-industry-plant-based-milks/#7cde005d1c9e>.Kwye, Su Mon, et al. “On Recommending Hashtags in Twitter Networks.” Proceedings of the Social Informatics: 4th International Conference, SocInfo. 5-7 Dec. 2012. Lausanne: Research Collection School of Information Systems. 337-50. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2696&context=sis_research>.Lockhart, James, Danny Donaghy, and Hamish Gow. “Milk Price Cuts Reflect the Reality of Sweeping Changes in Global Dairy Market.” The Conversation 12 May 2016. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://theconversation.com/milk-price-cuts-reflect-the-reality-of-sweeping-changes-in-global-dairy-market-59251>.Macnamara, Jim. “‘Emergent’ Media and Public Communication: Understanding the Changing Mediascape.” Public Communication Review 1.2 (2010): 3–17.Mango, Alison. “This Drastic Diet Change Helped Venus Williams Fight Her Autoimmune Condition.” Health.com 12 Jan. 2017. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.health.com/nutrition/venus-williams-raw-vegan-diet>.McDonald, Barbara. “Once You Know Something, You Can’t Not Know It. An Empirical Look at Becoming Vegan.” Foodethics.univie.ac.at, 2000. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://foodethics.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/inst_ethik_wiss_dialog/McDonald__B._2000._Vegan_...__An_Empirical_Look_at_Becoming_Vegan..pdf>.Milk Life. “What Is Milk Life?” 20 Feb. 2019 <https://milklife.com/what-is-milk-life>.News.com.au. “Twitter Trolls Take over Conference Hashtag with Porn.” News.com.au 30 Nov. 2015. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://www.news.com.au/national/twitter-trolls-take-over-ecology-conference-hashtag-with-porn/news-story/06a76d7ab53ec181776bdb11d735e422>.Nussbaum, Rachel. “Tons of Your Favorite Drugstore Products Are Officially Cruelty-Free Now.” Glamour.com 9 Oct. 2018. 21 Feb. 2019 <https://www.glamour.com/story/dove-cruelty-free-peta>.Parnell, Kerry. “Charity Theme Months Have Taken over the Calendar.” Daily Telegraph.com 26 Sep. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/charity-theme-months-have-taken-over-the-calendar/news-story/1f444a360ee04b5ec01154ddf4763932>.People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “This Cow Was Suffering on Dairy Farm and the Owner Refused to Help Her.” Facebook post. 13 Feb. 2019. 15 Feb. 2019 <https://www.facebook.com/official.peta>.Pippus, Anna. “Progress! Canada’s New Draft Food Guide Favors Plant-Based Protein and Eliminates Dairy as a Food Group.” Huffington Post 7 Dec. 2017. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/progress-canadas-new-food-guide-will-favor-plant_us_5966eb4ce4b07b5e1d96ed5e>.Potter, Will. “Ag-Gag Laws: Corporate Attempts to Keep Consumers in the Dark.” Griffith Journal of Law and Human Dignity (2017): 1–32.Roy Morgan. “Netflix Set to Surge beyond 10 Million Users.” Roy Morgan 3 Aug. 2018. 20 Feb. 2019 <http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/7681-netflix-stan-foxtel-fetch-youtube-amazon-pay-tv-june-2018-201808020452>.———. “1 in 7 Australians Now Watch No Commercial TV, Nearly Half of All Broadcasting Reaches People 50+, and Those with SVOD Watch 30 Minutes Less a Day.” Roy Morgan 1 Feb. 2016. 10 Feb. 2019 <http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/6646-decline-and-change-commercial-television-viewing-audiences-december-2015-201601290251>.Saccaro, Matt. “Milk Does Not Do a Body Good, Says New Study.” Mic.com 29 Oct. 2014. 12 Feb. 2019 <https://mic.com/articles/102698/milk-does-not-do-a-body-good#.o7MuLnZgV>.Sandhu, Serina. “A Group of Vegan Activists Is Trying to Hijack the ‘Februdairy’ Month by Encouraging People to Protest at Dairy Farms.” inews.co.uk 5 Feb. 2019. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/vegan-activists-hijack-februdairy-protest-dairy-farms-farmers/>.Social Garden. “Hashtag Blunders That Hurt Your Social Media Marketing Efforts.” Socialgarden.com.au 30 May 2014. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://socialgarden.com.au/social-media-marketing/hashtag-blunders-that-hurt-your-social-media-marketing-efforts/>.Statista: The Statista Portal. Use of Social Networking Sites in Australia as of March 2017 by Age. 2019. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.statista.com/statistics/729928/australia-social-media-usage-by-age/>.Tran, Mark. “#myNYPD Twitter Callout Backfires for New York Police Department.” The Guardian 23 Apr. 2014. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/23/mynypd-twitter-call-out-new-york-police-backfires>.University of Cambridge. “Farming Loved But Misunderstood, Survey Shows.” Cam.uc.uk 23 Aug. 2012. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/farming-loved-but-misunderstood-survey-shows>.Veganuary. “About Veganuary.” 2019. 21 Feb. 2019 <https://veganuary.com/about/>.———. “Veganuary: Inspiring People to Try Vegan!” 2019. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://veganuary.com/>.What the Health. Dir. Kip Anderson, and Keegan Kuhn. A.U.M. Films, 2017.Worthington, Brett. “Federal Government Pushes to Stop Plant-Based Products Labelled as ‘Meat’ or ‘Milk’.” ABC News 11 Oct. 2018. 20 Feb. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-11/federal-government-wants-food-standards-reviewed/10360200>.Yates, Jack. “Farmers Plan to Make #Februdairy Month of Dairy Celebration.” Farmers Weekly 20 Jan. 2018. 10 Feb. 2019 <https://www.fwi.co.uk/business/farmers-plan-make-februdairy-month-dairy-celebration>.

Every act of art is able to reveal, balance and revive the relations between a territory and its inhabitants (François Davin, Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue)Introducing the Understory Art in Nature TrailIn February 2015, a colossal wildfire destroyed 98,300 hectares of farm and bushland surrounding the town of Northcliffe, located 365 km south of Perth, Western Australia (WA). As the largest fire in the recorded history of the southwest region (Southern Forest Arts, After the Burn 8), the disaster attracted national attention however the extraordinary contribution of local knowledge in saving a town considered by authorities to be “undefendable” (Kennedy) is yet to be widely appreciated. In accounting for a creative scene that survived the conflagration, this case study sees culture mobilised as a socioeconomic resource for conservation and the healing of community spirit.Northcliffe (population 850) sits on a coastal plain that hosts majestic old-growth forest and lush bushland. In 2006, Southern Forest Arts (SFA) dedicated a Southern Forest Sculpture Walk for creative professionals to develop artworks along a 1.2 km walk trail through pristine native forest. It was re-branded “Understory—Art in Nature” in 2009; then “Understory Art in Nature Trail” in 2015, the understory vegetation layer beneath the canopy being symbolic of Northcliffe’s deeply layered caché of memories, including “the awe, love, fear, and even the hatred that these trees have provoked among the settlers” (Davin in SFA Catalogue). In the words of the SFA Trailguide, “Every place (no matter how small) has ‘understories’—secrets, songs, dreams—that help us connect with the spirit of place.”In the view of forest arts ecologist Kumi Kato, “It is a sense of place that underlies the commitment to a place’s conservation by its community, broadly embracing those who identify with the place for various reasons, both geographical and conceptual” (149). In bioregional terms such communities form a terrain of consciousness (Berg and Dasmann 218), extending responsibility for conservation across cultures, time and space (Kato 150). A sustainable thematic of place must also include livelihood as the third party between culture and nature that establishes the relationship between them (Giblett 240). With these concepts in mind I gauge creative impact on forest as place, and, in turn, (altered) forest’s impact on people. My abstraction of physical place is inclusive of humankind moving in dialogic engagement with forest. A mapping of Understory’s creative activities sheds light on how artists express physical environments in situated creative practices, clusters, and networks. These, it is argued, constitute unique types of community operating within (and beyond) a foundational scene of inspiration and mystification that is metaphorically “rising from the ashes.” In transcending disconnectedness between humankind and landscape, Understory may be understood to both culturalise nature (as an aesthetic system), and naturalise culture (as an ecologically modelled system), to build on a trope introduced by Feld (199). Arguably when the bush is cultured in this way it attracts consumers who may otherwise disconnect from nature.The trail (henceforth Understory) broaches the histories of human relations with Northcliffe’s natural systems of place. Sub-groups of the Noongar nation have inhabited the southwest for an estimated 50,000 years and their association with the Northcliffe region extends back at least 6,000 years (SFA Catalogue; see also Crawford and Crawford). An indigenous sense of the spirit of forest is manifest in Understory sculpture, literature, and—for the purpose of this article—the compilation CD Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (henceforth Canopy, Figure 1).As a cultural and environmental construction of place, Canopy sustains the land with acts of seeing, listening to, and interpreting nature; of remembering indigenous people in the forest; and of recalling the hardships of the early settlers. I acknowledge SFA coordinator and Understory custodian Fiona Sinclair for authorising this investigation; Peter Hill for conservation conversations; Robyn Johnston for her Canopy CD sleeve notes; Della Rae Morrison for permissions; and David Pye for discussions. Figure 1. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (CD, 2006). Cover image by Raku Pitt, 2002. Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Forest Ecology, Emotion, and ActionEstablished in 1924, Northcliffe’s ill-founded Group Settlement Scheme resulted in frontier hardship and heartbreak, and deforestation of the southwest region for little economic return. An historic forest controversy (1992-2001) attracted media to Northcliffe when protesters attempting to disrupt logging chained themselves to tree trunks and suspended themselves from branches. The signing of the Western Australian Regional Forest Agreement in 1999 was followed, in 2001, by deregulation of the dairy industry and a sharp decline in area population.Moved by the gravity of this situation, Fiona Sinclair won her pitch to the Manjimup Council for a sound alternative industry for Northcliffe with projections of jobs: a forest where artists could work collectively and sustainably to reveal the beauty of natural dimensions. A 12-acre pocket of allocated Crown Land adjacent to the town was leased as an A-Class Reserve vested for Education and Recreation, for which SFA secured unified community ownership and grants. Conservation protocols stipulated that no biomass could be removed from the forest and that predominantly raw, natural materials were to be used (F. Sinclair and P. Hill, personal interview, 26 Sep. 2014). With forest as prescribed image (wider than the bounded chunk of earth), Sinclair invited the artists to consider the themes of spirituality, creativity, history, dichotomy, and sensory as a basis for work that was to be “fresh, intimate, and grounded in place.” Her brief encouraged artists to work with humanity and imagination to counteract residual community divisiveness and resentment. Sinclair describes this form of implicit environmentalism as an “around the back” approach that avoids lapsing into political commentary or judgement: “The trail is a love letter from those of us who live here to our visitors, to connect with grace” (F. Sinclair, telephone interview, 6 Apr. 2014). Renewing community connections to local place is essential if our lives and societies are to become more sustainable (Pedelty 128). To define Northcliffe’s new community phase, artists respected differing associations between people and forest. A structure on a karri tree by Indigenous artist Norma MacDonald presents an Aboriginal man standing tall and proud on a rock to become one with the tree and the forest: as it was for thousands of years before European settlement (MacDonald in SFA Catalogue). As Feld observes, “It is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability” (201).Adhering to the philosophy that nature should not be used or abused for the sake of art, the works resonate with the biorhythms of the forest, e.g. functional seats and shelters and a cascading retainer that directs rainwater back to the resident fauna. Some sculptures function as receivers for picking up wavelengths of ancient forest. Forest Folk lurk around the understory, while mysterious stone art represents a life-shaping force of planet history. To represent the reality of bushfire, Natalie Williamson’s sculpture wraps itself around a burnt-out stump. The work plays with scale as small native sundew flowers are enlarged and a subtle beauty, easily overlooked, becomes apparent (Figure 2). The sculptor hopes that “spiders will spin their webs about it, incorporating it into the landscape” (SFA Catalogue).Figure 2. Sundew. Sculpture by Natalie Williamson, 2006. Understory Art in Nature Trail, Northcliffe, WA. Image by the author, 2014.Memory is naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported (Feld 201). Topaesthesia (sense of place) denotes movement that connects our biography with our route. This is resonant for the experience of regional character, including the tactile, olfactory, gustatory, visual, and auditory qualities of a place (Ryan 307). By walking, we are in a dialogue with the environment; both literally and figuratively, we re-situate ourselves into our story (Schine 100). For example, during a summer exploration of the trail (5 Jan. 2014), I intuited a personal attachment based on my grandfather’s small bush home being razed by fire, and his struggle to support seven children.Understory’s survival depends on vigilant controlled (cool) burns around its perimeter (Figure 3), organised by volunteer Peter Hill. These burns also hone the forest. On 27 Sept. 2014, the charred vegetation spoke a spring language of opportunity for nature to reassert itself as seedpods burst and continue the cycle; while an autumn walk (17 Mar. 2016) yielded a fresh view of forest colour, patterning, light, shade, and sound.Figure 3. Understory Art in Nature Trail. Map Created by Fiona Sinclair for Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue (2006). Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Understory and the Melody of CanopyForest resilience is celebrated in five MP3 audio tours produced for visitors to dialogue with the trail in sensory contexts of music, poetry, sculptures and stories that name or interpret the setting. The trail starts in heathland and includes three creek crossings. A zone of acacias gives way to stands of the southwest signature trees karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor), jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata), and marri (Corymbia calophylla). Following a sheoak grove, a riverine environment re-enters heathland. Birds, insects, mammals, and reptiles reside around and between the sculptures, rendering the earth-embedded art a fusion of human and natural orders (concept after Relph 141). On Audio Tour 3, Songs for the Southern Forests, the musician-composers reflect on their regionally focused items, each having been birthed according to a personal musical concept (the manner in which an individual artist holds the totality of a composition in cultural context). Arguably the music in question, its composers, performers, audiences, and settings, all have a role to play in defining the processes and effects of forest arts ecology. Local musician Ann Rice billeted a cluster of musicians (mostly from Perth) at her Windy Harbour shack. The energy of the production experience was palpable as all participated in on-site forest workshops, and supported each other’s items as a musical collective (A. Rice, telephone interview, 2 Oct. 2014). Collaborating under producer Lee Buddle’s direction, they orchestrated rich timbres (tone colours) to evoke different musical atmospheres (Table 1). Composer/Performer Title of TrackInstrumentation1. Ann RiceMy Placevocals/guitars/accordion 2. David PyeCicadan Rhythmsangklung/violin/cello/woodblocks/temple blocks/clarinet/tapes 3. Mel RobinsonSheltervocal/cello/double bass 4. DjivaNgank Boodjakvocals/acoustic, electric and slide guitars/drums/percussion 5. Cathie TraversLamentaccordion/vocals/guitar/piano/violin/drums/programming 6. Brendon Humphries and Kevin SmithWhen the Wind First Blewvocals/guitars/dobro/drums/piano/percussion 7. Libby HammerThe Gladevocal/guitar/soprano sax/cello/double bass/drums 8. Pete and Dave JeavonsSanctuaryguitars/percussion/talking drum/cowbell/soprano sax 9. Tomás FordWhite Hazevocal/programming/guitar 10. David HyamsAwakening /Shaking the Tree /When the Light Comes guitar/mandolin/dobro/bodhran/rainstick/cello/accordion/flute 11. Bernard CarneyThe Destiny Waltzvocal/guitar/accordion/drums/recording of The Destiny Waltz 12. Joel BarkerSomething for Everyonevocal/guitars/percussion Table 1. Music Composed for Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.Source: CD sleeve and http://www.understory.com.au/art.php. Composing out of their own strengths, the musicians transformed the geographic region into a living myth. As Pedelty has observed of similar musicians, “their sounds resonate because they so profoundly reflect our living sense of place” (83-84). The remainder of this essay evidences the capacity of indigenous song, art music, electronica, folk, and jazz-blues to celebrate, historicise, or re-imagine place. Firstly, two items represent the phenomenological approach of site-specific sensitivity to acoustic, biological, and cultural presence/loss, including the materiality of forest as a living process.“Singing Up the Land”In Aboriginal Australia “there is no place that has not been imaginatively grasped through song, dance and design, no place where traditional owners cannot see the imprint of sacred creation” (Rose 18). Canopy’s part-Noongar language song thus repositions the ancient Murrum-Noongar people within their life-sustaining natural habitat and spiritual landscape.Noongar Yorga woman Della Rae Morrison of the Bibbulmun and Wilman nations co-founded The Western Australian Nuclear Free Alliance to campaign against the uranium mining industry threatening Ngank Boodjak (her country, “Mother Earth”) (D.R. Morrison, e-mail, 15 July 2014). In 2004, Morrison formed the duo Djiva (meaning seed power or life force) with Jessie Lloyd, a Murri woman of the Guugu Yimidhirr Nation from North Queensland. After discerning the fundamental qualities of the Understory site, Djiva created the song Ngank Boodjak: “This was inspired by walking the trail […] feeling the energy of the land and the beautiful trees and hearing the birds. When I find a spot that I love, I try to feel out the lay-lines, which feel like vortexes of energy coming out of the ground; it’s pretty amazing” (Morrison in SFA Canopy sleeve) Stanza 1 points to the possibilities of being more fully “in country”:Ssh!Ni dabarkarn kooliny, ngank boodja kookoorninyListen, walk slowly, beautiful Mother EarthThe inclusion of indigenous language powerfully implements an indigenous interpretation of forest: “My elders believe that when we leave this life from our physical bodies that our spirit is earthbound and is living in the rocks or the trees and if you listen carefully you might hear their voices and maybe you will get some answers to your questions” (Morrison in SFA Catalogue).Cicadan Rhythms, by composer David Pye, echoes forest as a lively “more-than-human” world. Pye took his cue from the ambient pulsing of male cicadas communicating in plenum (full assembly) by means of airborne sound. The species were sounding together in tempo with individual rhythm patterns that interlocked to create one fantastic rhythm (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Composer David Pye). The cicada chorus (the loudest known lovesong in the insect world) is the unique summer soundmark (term coined by Truax Handbook, Website) of the southern forests. Pye chased various cicadas through Understory until he was able to notate the rhythms of some individuals in a patch of low-lying scrub.To simulate cicada clicking, the composer set pointillist patterns for Indonesian anklung (joint bamboo tubes suspended within a frame to produce notes when the frame is shaken or tapped). Using instruments made of wood to enhance the rich forest imagery, Pye created all parts using sampled instrumental sounds placed against layers of pre-recorded ambient sounds (D. Pye, telephone interview, 3 Sept. 2014). He takes the listener through a “geographical linear representation” of the trail: “I walked around it with a stopwatch and noted how long it took to get through each section of the forest, and that became the musical timing of the various parts of the work” (Pye in SFA Canopy sleeve). That Understory is a place where reciprocity between nature and culture thrives is, likewise, evident in the remaining tracks.Musicalising Forest History and EnvironmentThree tracks distinguish Canopy as an integrative site for memory. Bernard Carney’s waltz honours the Group Settlers who battled insurmountable terrain without any idea of their destiny, men who, having migrated with a promise of owning their own dairy farms, had to clear trees bare-handedly and build furniture from kerosene tins and gelignite cases. Carney illuminates the culture of Saturday night dancing in the schoolroom to popular tunes like The Destiny Waltz (performed on the Titanic in 1912). His original song fades to strains of the Victor Military Band (1914), to “pay tribute to the era where the inspiration of the song came from” (Carney in SFA Canopy sleeve). Likewise Cathie Travers’s Lament is an evocation of remote settler history that creates a “feeling of being in another location, other timezone, almost like an endless loop” (Travers in SFA Canopy sleeve).An instrumental medley by David Hyams opens with Awakening: the morning sun streaming through tall trees, and the nostalgic sound of an accordion waltz. Shaking the Tree, an Irish jig, recalls humankind’s struggle with forest and the forces of nature. A final title, When the Light Comes, defers to the saying by conservationist John Muir that “The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes the heart of the people is always right” (quoted by Hyams in SFA Canopy sleeve). Local musician Joel Barker wrote Something for Everyone to personify the old-growth karri as a king with a crown, with “wisdom in his bones.”Kevin Smith’s father was born in Northcliffe in 1924. He and Brendon Humphries fantasise the untouchability of a maiden (pre-human) moment in a forest in their song, When the Wind First Blew. In Libby Hammer’s The Glade (a lover’s lament), instrumental timbres project their own affective languages. The jazz singer intended the accompanying double bass to speak resonantly of old-growth forest; the cello to express suppleness and renewal; a soprano saxophone to impersonate a bird; and the drums to imitate the insect community’s polyrhythmic undercurrent (after Hammer in SFA Canopy sleeve).A hybrid aural environment of synthetic and natural forest sounds contrasts collision with harmony in Sanctuary. The Jeavons Brothers sampled rustling wind on nearby Mt Chudalup to absorb into the track’s opening, and crafted a snare groove for the quirky eco-jazz/trip-hop by banging logs together, and banging rocks against logs. This imaginative use of percussive found objects enhanced their portrayal of forest as “a living, breathing entity.”In dealing with recent history in My Place, Ann Rice cameos a happy childhood growing up on a southwest farm, “damming creeks, climbing trees, breaking bones and skinning knees.” The rich string harmonies of Mel Robinson’s Shelter sculpt the shifting environment of a brewing storm, while White Haze by Tomás Ford describes a smoky controlled burn as “a kind of metaphor for the beautiful mystical healing nature of Northcliffe”: Someone’s burning off the scrubSomeone’s making sure it’s safeSomeone’s whiting out the fearSomeone’s letting me breathe clearAs Sinclair illuminates in a post-fire interview with Sharon Kennedy (Website):When your map, your personal map of life involves a place, and then you think that that place might be gone…” Fiona doesn't finish the sentence. “We all had to face the fact that our little place might disappear." Ultimately, only one house was lost. Pasture and fences, sheds and forest are gone. Yet, says Fiona, “We still have our town. As part of SFA’s ongoing commission, forest rhythm workshops explore different sound properties of potential materials for installing sound sculptures mimicking the surrounding flora and fauna. In 2015, SFA mounted After the Burn (a touring photographic exhibition) and Out of the Ashes (paintings and woodwork featuring ash, charcoal, and resin) (SFA, After the Burn 116). The forthcoming community project Rising From the Ashes will commemorate the fire and allow residents to connect and create as they heal and move forward—ten years on from the foundation of Understory.ConclusionThe Understory Art in Nature Trail stimulates curiosity. It clearly illustrates links between place-based social, economic and material conditions and creative practices and products within a forest that has both given shelter and “done people in.” The trail is an experimental field, a transformative locus in which dedicated physical space frees artists to culturalise forest through varied aesthetic modalities. Conversely, forest possesses agency for naturalising art as a symbol of place. Djiva’s song Ngank Boodjak “sings up the land” to revitalise the timelessness of prior occupation, while David Pye’s Cicadan Rhythms foregrounds the seasonal cycle of entomological music.In drawing out the richness and significance of place, the ecologically inspired album Canopy suggests that the community identity of a forested place may be informed by cultural, economic, geographical, and historical factors as well as endemic flora and fauna. Finally, the musical representation of place is not contingent upon blatant forms of environmentalism. The portrayals of Northcliffe respectfully associate Western Australian people and forests, yet as a place, the town has become an enduring icon for the plight of the Universal Old-growth Forest in all its natural glory, diverse human uses, and (real or perceived) abuses.ReferencesAustralian Broadcasting Commission. “Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.” Into the Music. Prod. Robyn Johnston. Radio National, 5 May 2007. 12 Aug. 2014 <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/intothemusic/canopy-songs-for-the-southern-forests/3396338>.———. “Composer David Pye.” Interview with Andrew Ford. The Music Show, Radio National, 12 Sep. 2009. 30 Jan. 2015 <http://canadapodcasts.ca/podcasts/MusicShowThe/1225021>.Berg, Peter, and Raymond Dasmann. “Reinhabiting California.” Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California. Ed. Peter Berg. San Francisco: Planet Drum, 1978. 217-20.Crawford, Patricia, and Ian Crawford. Contested Country: A History of the Northcliffe Area, Western Australia. Perth: UWA P, 2003.Feld, Steven. 2001. “Lift-Up-Over Sounding.” The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts. Ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 193-206.Giblett, Rod. People and Places of Nature and Culture. Bristol: Intellect, 2011.Kato, Kumi. “Addressing Global Responsibility for Conservation through Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Kodama Forest, a Forest of Tree Spirits.” The Environmentalist 28.2 (2008): 148-54. 15 Apr. 2014 <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-007-9051-6#page-1>.Kennedy, Sharon. “Local Knowledge Builds Vital Support Networks in Emergencies.” ABC South West WA, 10 Mar. 2015. 26 Mar. 2015 <http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2015/03/09/4193981.htm?site=southwestwa>.Morrison, Della Rae. E-mail. 15 July 2014.Pedelty, Mark. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2012.Pye, David. Telephone interview. 3 Sep. 2014.Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion, 1976.Rice, Ann. Telephone interview. 2 Oct. 2014.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Ryan, John C. Green Sense: The Aesthetics of Plants, Place and Language. Oxford: Trueheart Academic, 2012.Schine, Jennifer. “Movement, Memory and the Senses in Soundscape Studies.” Canadian Acoustics: Journal of the Canadian Acoustical Association 38.3 (2010): 100-01. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/2264>.Sinclair, Fiona. Telephone interview. 6 Apr. 2014.Sinclair, Fiona, and Peter Hill. Personal Interview. 26 Sep. 2014.Southern Forest Arts. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests. CD coordinated by Fiona Sinclair. Recorded and produced by Lee Buddle. Sleeve notes by Robyn Johnston. West Perth: Sound Mine Studios, 2006.———. Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue. Northcliffe, WA, 2006. Unpaginated booklet.———. Understory—Art in Nature. 2009. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://www.understory.com.au/>.———. Trailguide. Understory. Presented by Southern Forest Arts, n.d.———. After the Burn: Stories, Poems and Photos Shared by the Local Community in Response to the 2015 Northcliffe and Windy Harbour Bushfire. 2nd ed. Ed. Fiona Sinclair. Northcliffe, WA., 2016.Truax, Barry, ed. Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. 2nd ed. Cambridge Street Publishing, 1999. 10 Apr. 2016 <http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook/Soundmark.html>.

I. First Brexit, then Trump: Has the past year or so ushered in a “wave” (Weisberg), a “barrage” (Desmond-Harris) or a “deluge” (Sidahmed) of that notoriously noxious affect, hate? It certainly feels that way to those of us identified with progressive social and political causes—those of us troubled, not just by Trump’s recent electoral victory, but by the far-right forces to which that victory has given voice. And yet the questions still hanging over efforts to quantify emotional or affective states leaves the claim that there has been a clear spike in hate moot (Ngai 26; Massumi 136-7; Ahmed, Promise 3-8). So let’s try asking a different question. Has this same period seen a rise, across liberal media platforms, in the rhetorical work of “hate-attribution”? Here, at least, an answer seems in readier reach. For no one given to scrolling distractedly through liberal Anglophone media outlets, from The New York Times, to The Guardian, to Slate, will be unfamiliar with a species of journalism that, in reporting the appalling activities associated with what has become known as the “alt-right” (Main; Wallace-Wells; Gourarie), articulates those activities in the rubric of a calculable uptick in hate itself.Before the U.S. Presidential election, this fledgling journalistic genre was already testing its wings, its first shudderings felt everywhere from Univision anchor Jorge Ramos’s widely publicized documentary, Hate Rising (2016), which explores the rise of white supremacist movements across the South-West U.S, to an edition of Slate’s Trumpcast entitled “The Alt-Right and a Deluge of Hate,” which broached the torment-by-Twitter of left-wing journalist David French. In the wake of the election, and the appalling acts of harassment and intimidation it seemed to authorize, the genre gained further momentum—leading to the New Yorker’s “Hate Is on the Rise After Trump’s Election,” to The Guardian’s “Trump’s Election led to Barrage of Hate,” and to Vox’s “The Wave of Post-Election Hate Reportedly Sweeping the Nation, Explained.” And it still has traction today, judging not just by James King’s recent year-in-review column, “The Year in Hate: From Donald Trump to the Rise of the Alt-Right,” but by Salon’s “A Short History of Hate” which tracks the alt-right’s meteoric 2016 rise to prominence, and the New York Times’ recently launched hate-speech aggregator, “This Week in Hate.”As should already be clear from these brisk, thumbnail accounts of the texts in question, the phenomena alluded to by the titular term “hate” are not instances of hate per se, but rather instances of “hate-speech.” The word “hate,” in other words, is being deployed here not literally, to refer to an emotional state, but metonymically, as a shorthand for “hate-speech”—a by-now widely conventionalized and legally codified parlance originating with the U.N. Declaration to describe “violent or violence-inciting speech or acts that “aim or intend to inflict injury, or incite prejudice or hatred, against persons of groups” because of their ethnic, religious, sexual or social affiliation. And there is no doubt that, beyond the headlines, these articles do incredibly important work, drawing connections between, and drawing attention to, a host of harmful activities associated with the so-called “alt-right”—from a pair of mangled, pretzel-shaped swastikas graffiti-ed in a children’s playground, to acts of harassment, intimidation and violence against women, African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, and LGBTQ people, to Trump’s own racist, xenophobic and misogynistic tweets. Yet the fact that an emotion-term like hate is being mobilized across these texts as a metonym for the “alt-right” is no oratorical curio. Rather, it perpetuates a pervasive way of thinking about the relationship between the alt-right (a political phenomenon) and hate (an emotional phenomenon) that should give pause to those of us committed to mining that vein of cultural symptomatology now consigned, across the social sciences and critical humanities, to affect theory. Specifically, these headlines inscribe, in miniature, a kind of micro-assessment, a micro-geography and micro-theory of hate. First, they suggest that, even prior to its incarnation in specific, and dangerous, forms of speech or action, hate is in and of itself anathema, a phenomenon so unquestioningly dangerous that a putative “rise” or “spike” in its net presence provides ample pretext for a news headline. Second, they propose that hate may be localized to a particular social or political group—a group subsisting, unsurprisingly, on that peculiarly contested frontier between the ideological alt-right and the American Midwest. And third, they imply that hate is so indubitably the single most significant source of the xenophobic, racist and sexist activities they go on to describe that it may be casually used as these activities’ lexical proxy. What is crystallizing here, I suggest, is what scholars of rhetoric dub a rhetorical “constellation” (Campbell and Jamieson 332)—a constellation from which hate emerges as, a) inherently problematic, b) localizable to the “alt-right,” and, c) the primary engine of the various activities and expressions we associate with them. This constellation of conventions for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movement has coalesced into a “genre” we might dub the genre of “hate-attribution.” Yet while it’s far from clear that the genre is an effective one in a political landscape that’s fast becoming a political battleground, it hasn’t appeared by chance. Treating “hate,” then, less as a descriptive “grid of analysis” (Sedgwick 152), than as a rhetorical projectile, this essay opens by interrogating the “hate-attribution” genre’s logic and querying its efficacy. Having done so, it approaches the concept of “alternatives” by asking: how might calling time on the genre help us think differently about both hate itself and about the forces catalyzing, and catalyzed by, Trump’s presidential campaign? II.The rhetorical power of the genre of hate-attribution, of course, isn’t too difficult to pin down. An emotion so thoroughly discredited that its assignment is now in and of itself a term of abuse (see, for example, the O.E.D’s freshly-expanded definition of the noun “hater”), hate is an emotion the Judeo-Christian tradition deems not just responsible for but practically akin to murder (John 3:1). In part as a result of this tradition, hate has proven thoroughly resistant to efforts to elevate it from the status of an expression of a subject’s pestiferous inner life to the status of a polemical response to an object in the world. Indeed, while a great deal of the critical energy amassing under the rubric of “affect theory” has recently been put into recuperating the strategic or diagnostic value of emotions long scorned as irrelevant to oppositional struggle—from irritation and envy, to depression, anger and shame (Ngai; Cvetkovich; Gould; Love)—hate has notably not been among them. In fact, those rare scholarly accounts of affect that do address “hate,” notably Ahmed’s excellent work on right-wing extremist groups in the United Kingdom, display an understandable reluctance to rehabilitate it for progressive thought (Cultural Politics). It should come as no surprise, then, that the genre of “hate-attribution” has a rare rhetorical power. In identifying “hate” as the source of a particular position, gesture or speech-act, we effectively drain said position, gesture or speech-act of political agency or representational power—reducing it from an at-least-potentially polemical action in or response to the world, to the histrionic expression of a reprehensible personhood. Yet because hate’s near-taboo status holds across the ideological and political spectrum, what is less clear is why the genre of hate-attribution has achieved such cachet in the liberal media in particular. The answer, I would argue, lies in the fact that the work of hate-attribution dovetails all too neatly with liberal political theory’s longstanding tendency to laminate its social and civic ideals to affective ideals like “love,” “sympathy,” “compassion,” and, when in a less demonstrative humor, “tolerance”. As Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions has recently shown, this tradition has an impressive philosophical pedigree, running from Aristotle’s philia (16), John Locke’s “toleration” and David Hume’s “sympathy” (69-75), to the twentieth century’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its promotion of “tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups.” And while the labour of what Lauren Berlant calls “liberal sentimentality” (“Poor Eliza”, 636) has never quite died away, it does seem to have found new strength with the emergence of the “intimate public sphere” (Berlant, Queen)—from its recent popular apotheosis in the Clinton campaign’s notorious “Love Trumps Hate” (a slogan in which “love,” unfortunately, came to look a lot like resigned technocratic quietism in the face of ongoing economic and environmental crisis [Zizek]), to its revival as a philosophical project among progressive scholars, many of them under the sway of the so-called “affective turn” (Nussbaum; Hardt; Sandoval; hooks). No surprise, then, that liberalism’s struggle to yoke itself to “love” should have as its eerie double a struggle to locate among its ideological and political enemies an increasingly reified “hate”. And while the examples of this project we’ve touched on so far have hailed from popular media, this set of protocols for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movements is not unique to media circles. It’s there in political discourse, as in ex-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s announcement, on MSNBC, that “Americans will unite against [Trump’s] hatred.” And it’s there, too, in academic media studies, from FLOW journal’s November 2016 call for papers inviting respondents to comment, among other things, on “the violence and hatred epitomized by Trump and his supporters,” to the SCMS conference’s invitation to members to participate in a pop-up panel entitled “Responding to Hate, Disenfranchisement and the Loss of the Commons.” Yet while the labor of hate-attribution to which many progressive forces have become attached carries an indisputable rhetorical force, it also has some profound rhetorical flaws. The very same stigma, after all, that makes “hate” such a powerful explanatory grenade to throw also makes it an incredibly tough one to land. As Ahmed’s analysis of the online rhetoric of white supremacist organizations should remind us (Cultural Politics), most groups structured around inciting and promoting violence against women and minorities identify, perversely, not as hate groups, but as movements propelled by the love of race and nation. And while left-wing pundits pronounce “hate” the signature emotion of a racist, misogynist Trump-voting right, supporters of Trump ascribe it, just as routinely, to the so-called “liberal elite,” a group whose mythical avatars—from the so-called “Social Justice Warrior” or “SJW,” to the supercilious Washington politico—are said to brand “ordinary [white, male] Americans” indiscriminately as racist, misogynistic, homophobic buffoons. Thus, for example, The Washington Post’s uncanny, far-right journalistic alter-ego, The Washington Times, dubs the SPLC a “liberal hate group”; the Wikipedia mirror-site, Conservapedia, recasts liberal objections to gun violence as “liberal hate speech” driven by an “irrational aversion to weapons”; while one blood-curdling sub-genre of reportage on Steve Bannon’s crypto-fascist soapbox, Breitbart News, is devoted to denouncing what it calls “ ‘anti-White Racism.’” It’s easy enough, of course, to defend the hate-attribution genre’s liberal incarnations while dismissing its right-wing variants as cynical, opportunistic shams, as Ahmed does (Cultural Politics)—thereby re-establishing the wellspring of hate where we are most comfortable locating it: among our political others. Yet to do so seems, in some sense, to perpetuate a familiar volley of hate-attribution. And to the extent that, as many media scholars have shown (Philips; Reed; Tett; Turow), our digital, networked political landscape is in danger of being reduced to a silo-ed discursive battleground, the ritual exchange of terminological grenades that everyone seems eager to propel across ideological lines, but that no one, understandably, seems willing to pick up, seems counter-productive to say the least.Even beyond the genre’s ultimate ineffectiveness, what should strike anyone used to reflecting on affect is how little justice it does to the ubiquity and intricacy of “hate” as an affective phenomenon. Hate is not and cannot be the exclusive property or preserve of one side of the political spectrum. One doesn’t have to stretch one’s critical faculties too far to see the extent to which the genre of hate-attribution participates in the emotional ballistics it condemns or seeks to redress. While trafficking in a relatively simple hate-paradigm (as a subjective emotional state that may be isolated to a particular person or group), the genre itself incarnates a more complex, socially dynamic model of hate in which the emotion operates through logics of projection perhaps best outlined by Freud. In the “hate-attribution” genre, that is, hate—like those equally abjected categories “sentimentality,” “worldliness” or “knowingness” broached by Sedgwick in her bravura analyses of “scapegoating attribution” (150-158)—finds its clearest expression in and through the labor of its own adscription. And it should come as no surprise that an emotion so widely devalued, where it is not openly prohibited, might also find expression in less overt form.Yet to say as much is by no means to discredit the genre. As legal scholar Jeremy Waldron has recently pointed out, there’s no particular reason why “the passions and emotions that lie behind a particular speech act” (34)—even up to and including hate—should devalue the speech acts they rouse. On the contrary, to pin the despicable and damaging activities of the so-called “alt right” on “hate” is, if anything, to do an injustice to a rich and complex emotion that can be as generative as it can be destructive. As Freud suggests in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” for example, hate may be the very seed of love, since the forms of “social feeling” (121) celebrated under the liberal rubric of “tolerance,” “love,” and “compassion,” are grounded in “the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification” (121; italics mine). Indeed, Freud projects this same argument across a larger, historical canvas in Civilization and its Discontents, which contends that it is in our very struggle to combat our “aggressive instincts” that human communities have developed “methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love” (31). For Freud, that is, the practice of love is a function of ongoing efforts to see hate harnessed, commuted and transformed. III.What might it mean, then, to call time on this round of hate-attribution? What sort of “alternatives” might emerge when we abandon the assumption that political engagement entails a “struggle over who has the right to declare themselves as acting out of love” (Ahmed, Cultural Politics 131), and thus, by that same token, a struggle over the exact location and source of hate? One boon, I suggest, is the license it gives those of us on the progressive left to simply own our own hate. There’s little doubt that reframing the dangerous and destructive forms of speech fomented by Trump’s campaign, not as eruptions of hate, or even as “hate-speech,” but as speech we hate would be more consistent with what once seemed affect theory’s first commandment: to take our own affective temperature before launching headlong into critical analysis. After all, when Lauren Berlant (“Trump”) takes a stab at economist Paul Krugman’s cautions against “the Danger of Political Emotions” with the timely reminder that “all the messages are emotional,” the “messages” she’s pointing to aren’t just those of our political others, they’re ours; and the “emotions” she’s pointing to aren’t just the evacuated, insouciant versions of love championed by the Clinton campaign, they’re of the messier, or as Ngai might put it, “uglier” (2) variety—from shame, depression and anger, to, yes, I want to insist, hate.By way of jump-starting this program of hate-avowal, then, let me just say it: this essay was animated, in part, by a certain kind of hate. The social critic in me hates the breathtaking simplification of the complex social, economic and emotional forces animating Trump voters that seem to actuate some liberal commentary; the psychologist in me hates the self-mystification palpable in the left’s insistence on projecting and thus disowning its own (often very well justified) aggressions; and the human being in me, hating the kind of toxic speech to which Trump’s campaign has given rise, wishes to be able to openly declare that hatred. Among its other effects, hate is characterized by hypervigilance for lapses or failings in an object it deems problematic, a hypervigilance that—sometimes—animates analysis (Zeki and Romoya). In this sense, “hate” seems entitled to a comfortable place in the ranks of what Nick Salvato has recently dubbed criticism’s creative “obstructions”—phenomena that, while “routinely identified as detriments” to critical inquiry, may also “form the basis for … critical thinking” (1).Yet while one boon associated with this disclosure might be a welcome intellectual honesty, a more significant boon, I’d argue, is what getting this disclosure out of the way might leave room for. Opting out of the game of hurling “hate” back and forth across a super-charged political arena, that is, we might devote our column inches and Facebook posts to the less sensational but more productive task of systematically challenging the specious claims, and documenting the damaging effects, of a species of utterance (Butler; Matsuda; Waldron) we’ve grown used to simply descrying as pure, distilled “hate”. And we also might do something else. Relieved of the confident conviction that we can track “Trumpism” to a spontaneous outbreak of a single, localizable emotion, we might be able to offer a fuller account of the economic, social, political and affective forces that energize it. Certainly, hate plays a part here—although the process by which, as Isabelle Stengers puts it, affect “make[s] present, vivid and mattering … a worldly world” (371) demands that we scrutinize that hate as a syndrome, rather than simply moralize it as a sin, addressing its mainsprings in a moment marked by the nerve-fraying and life-fraying effects of what has become known across the social sciences and critical humanities as conditions of social and economic “precarity” (Muehlebach; Neil and Rossiter; Stewart).But perhaps hate’s not the only emotion tucked away under the hood. Here’s something affect theory knows today: affect moves not, as more traditional theorists of political emotion have it, “unambiguously and predictably from one’s cognitive processing,” but in ways that are messy, muddled and indirect (Gould 24). That form of speech is speech we hate. But it may not be “hate speech.” That crime is a crime we hate. But it may not be a “hate-crime.” One of the critical tactics we might crib from Berlant’s work in Cruel Optimism is that of decoding and decrypting, in even the most hateful acts, an instance of what Berlant, herself optimistically, calls “optimism.” For Berlant, after all, optimism is very often cruel, attaching itself, as it seems to have done in 2016, to scenes, objects and people that, while ultimately destined to “imped[e] the aim that brought [it to them] initially,” nevertheless came to seem, to a good portion of the electorate, the only available exponent of that classic good-life genre, “the change that’s gonna come” (“Trump” 1-2) at a moment when the Democratic party’s primary campaign promise was more of the free-market same. And in a recent commentary on Trump’s rise in The New Inquiry (“Trump”), Berlant exemplified the kind of critical code-breaking this hypothesis might galvanize, deciphering a twisted, self-mutilating optimism in even the most troublesome acts, claims or positions. Here’s one translation: “Anti-P.C. means: I feel unfree.” And here’s another: “people react negatively, reactively and literally to Black Lives Matter, reeling off the other ‘lives’ that matter.” Berlant’s transcription? “They feel that they don’t matter, and they’re not wrong.”ReferencesAhmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.———. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge, 2004.Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2010.———. Politics. Trans. Ernest Barker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.———. “Trump, or Political Emotions.” The New Inquiry 5 Aug. 2016. <http://thenewinquiry.com/features/trump-or-political-emotions/>.———. “Poor Eliza.” American Literature 70.3 (1998): 635-668.———. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Durham, NC: Duke UP: 1998.Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York and London: Routledge, 1997.Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. “Introduction to Form and Genre.” Methods of Rhetorical Criticism: A Twentieth Century Perspective. Eds. Bernard Brock, Robert L. Scott, and James W. Chesebro. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. 331-242.Conservapedia. “Liberal Hate Speech.” <http://www.conservapedia.com/Liberal_hate_speech>.Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.Desmond-Harris, Jenna. “The Wave of Post-Election Hate Reportedly Sweeping the Nation, Explained.” Vox 17 Nov. 2016. <http://www.vox.com/2016/11/17/13639138/trump-hate-crimes-attacks-racism- xenophobia-islamophobia-schools>.Freud, Sigmund. “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVIII: 1920-1922. Trans James Strachey. London: Vintage, 2001.———. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. 1930. <http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/FreudS-CIVILIZATION-AND-ITS-DISCONTENTS-text-final.pdf>.Gould, Deborah. “Affect and Protest.” Political Emotions. Eds. Janet Staiger, Anne Cvetkovich, Ann Reynolds. New York: Routledge, 2010.Gourarie, Chava. “How the Alt-Right Checkmated the Media.” Columbia Journalism Review 30 Aug. 2016. <http://www.cjr.org/analysis/alt_right_media_clinton_trump.php>.Hardt, Michael. “For Love or Money.” Cultural Anthropology 26. 4 (2011): 676-82.hooks, bell. All about Love: New Visions. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Horowitz, David. “Anti-White Racism: The Hate That Dares Not Speak Its Name.” Breitbart News 26 Apr. 2016. <http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/04/26/anti-white-racism-hate-dares-not-speak-name-2/>.Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. London: Thomas and Joseph Allman, 1817.KCRW. “The Rise of Hate and the Right Wing.” <http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/press-play->.King, James. “This Year in Hate.” Vocativ 12 Dec. 2016. <http://www.vocativ.com/383234/hate-crime-donald-trump-alt-right-2016/>.Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration. London: Huddersfield, 1796.Main, Thomas J. “What’s the Alt-Right?” Los Angeles Times 25 Aug. 2016. <http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-main-alt-right-trump-20160825-snap-story.html>.Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.Matsuda, Mari. Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. Westview Press 1993.Muehlebach, Andrea. “On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year in Sociocultural Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 115. 2 (2013): 297-311.Neilson, Brett, and Ned Rossiter. “From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks.” Fibreculture 5 (2005). <http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-022-from-precarity-to-precariousness-and-back-again-labour-life-and-unstable-networks/1>.Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.Nussbaum, Martha. Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.Okeowo, Alexis. “Hate on the Rise after Trump’s Election.” New Yorker 17 Nov. 2016. <http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hate-on-the-rise-after-trumps-election>.Phillips, Angela. “Social Media Is Changing the Face of Politics—and It’s Not Good News.” The Conversation 9 Feb. 2016. <https://theconversation.com/social-media-is-changing-the-face-of-politics-and-its-not-goodnews-54266>.Reed, T.V. Digitized Lives: Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era. New York: Routledge, 2014.Salvato, Nick. Obstructions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis; Minnesota University Press, 2001. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.Sidahmed, Mazin. “Trump's Election Led to 'Barrage of Hate', Report Finds.” The Guardian 29 Nov. 2016. <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/29/trump-related-hate-crimes-report-southern-poverty-law-center>.Stengers, Isabelle. “Wondering about Materialism.” The Speculative Turn: Continental Philosophy and Realism. Eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. Melbourne: re.press, 2001. 368-380. Stewart, Kathleen. “Precarity’s Forms.” Cultural Anthropology 27.3 (2012): 518-525. Tett, Gillian. The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016.Turow, Joseph. The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.Waldron, Jeremy. The Harm in Hate Speech. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wallace-Wells, Benjamin, “Is the Alt-Right for Real?” New Yorker 5 May 2016. <http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/is-the-alt-right-for-real>.Washington Times. “Editorial: The FBI Dumps a ‘Hate Group’.” 28 Mar. 2014. <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/28/editorial-the-fbi-dumps-a-hate- group/>.Weisberg, Jacob. “The Alt-Right and a Deluge of Hate.” Slate 1 Nov. 2016. <http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/trumpcast/2016/11/how_the_alt_right_harassed_david_french_on_twitter_and_at_home.html>.Zeki, S., and J.P. Romaya. “Neural Correlates of Hate.” PLoS ONE 1.3 (2008). <http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003556>.Zizek, Slavoj. “Love as a Political Category.” Paper presented to the 6th Subversive Festival, 16 May 2013. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b44IhiCuNw4>.

Introduction Documentary film has grown significantly in the past decade, with high profile films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Supersize Me, and An Inconvenient Truth garnering increased attention both at the box office and in the news media. In addition, the rising prominence of web-based media has provided new opportunities for documentary to create social impact. Films are now typically released with websites, Facebook pages, twitter feeds, and web videos to increase both reach and impact. This combination of technology and broader audience appeal has given rise to a current landscape in which documentary films are imbedded within coordinated multi-media campaigns. New media have not only opened up new avenues for communicating with audiences, they have also created new opportunities for data collection and analysis of film impacts. A recent report by McKinsey and Company highlighted this potential, introducing and discussing the implications of increasing consumer information being recorded on the Internet as well as through networked sensors in the physical world. As they found: "Big data—large pools of data that can be captured, communicated, aggregated, stored, and analyzed—is now part of every sector and function of the global economy" (Manyika et al. iv). This data can be mined to learn a great deal about both individual and cultural response to documentary films and the issues they represent. Although film has a rich history in humanities research, this new set of tools enables an empirical approach grounded in the social sciences. However, several researchers across disciplines have noted that limited investigation has been conducted in this area. Although there has always been an emphasis on social impact in film and many filmmakers and scholars have made legitimate (and possibly illegitimate) claims of impact, few have attempted to empirically justify these claims. Over fifteen years ago, noted film scholar Brian Winston commented that "the underlying assumption of most social documentaries—that they shall act as agents of reform and change—is almost never demonstrated" (236). A decade later, Political Scientist David Whiteman repeated this sentiment, arguing that, "despite widespread speculation about the impact of documentaries, the topic has received relatively little systematic attention" ("Evolving"). And earlier this year, the introduction to a special issue of Mass Communication and Society on documentary film stated, "documentary film, despite its growing influence and many impacts, has mostly been overlooked by social scientists studying the media and communication" (Nisbet and Aufderheide 451). Film has been studied extensively as entertainment, as narrative, and as cultural event, but the study of film as an agent of social change is still in its infancy. This paper introduces a systematic approach to measuring the social impact of documentary film aiming to: (1) discuss the context of documentary film and its potential impact; and (2) argue for a social science approach, discussing key issues about conducting such research. Changes in Documentary Practice Documentary film has been used as a tool for promoting social change throughout its history. John Grierson, who coined the term "documentary" in 1926, believed it could be used to influence the ideas and actions of people in ways once reserved for church and school. He presented his thoughts on this emerging genre in his 1932 essay, First Principles of Documentary, saying, "We believe that the cinema's capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself, can be exploited in a new and vital art form" (97). Richard Barsam further specified the definition of documentary, distinguishing it from non-fiction film, such that all documentaries are non-fiction films but not all non-fiction films are documentaries. He distinguishes documentary from other forms of non-fiction film (i.e. travel films, educational films, newsreels) by its purpose; it is a film with an opinion and a specific message that aims to persuade or influence the audience. And Bill Nichols writes that the definition of documentary may even expand beyond the film itself, defining it as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" (12). Documentary film has undergone many significant changes since its inception, from the heavily staged romanticism movement of the 1920s to the propagandist tradition of governments using film to persuade individuals to support national agendas to the introduction of cinéma vérité in the 1960s and historical documentary in the 1980s (cf. Barnouw). However, the recent upsurge in popularity of documentary media, combined with technological advances of internet and computers have opened up a whole new set of opportunities for film to serve as both art and agent for social change. One such opportunity is in the creation of film-based social action campaigns. Over the past decade, filmmakers have taken a more active role in promoting social change by coordinating film releases with action campaigns. Companies such as Participant Media (An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., etc.) now create "specific social action campaigns for each film and documentary designed to give a voice to issues that resonate in the films" (Participant Media). In addition, a new sector of "social media" consultants are now offering services, including "consultation, strategic planning for alternative distribution, website and social media development, and complete campaign management services to filmmakers to ensure the content of nonfiction media truly meets the intention for change" (Working Films). The emergence of new forms of media and technology are changing our conceptions of both documentary film and social action. Technologies such as podcasts, video blogs, internet radio, social media and network applications, and collaborative web editing "both unsettle and extend concepts and assumptions at the heart of 'documentary' as a practice and as an idea" (Ellsworth). In the past decade, we have seen new forms of documentary creation, distribution, marketing, and engagement. Likewise, film campaigns are utilizing a broad array of strategies to engage audience members, including "action kits, screening programs, educational curriculums and classes, house parties, seminars, panels" that often turn into "ongoing 'legacy' programs that are updated and revised to continue beyond the film's domestic and international theatrical, DVD and television windows" (Participant Media). This move towards multi-media documentary film is becoming not only commonplace, but expected as a part of filmmaking. NYU film professor and documentary film pioneer George Stoney recently noted, "50 percent of the documentary filmmaker's job is making the movie, and 50 percent is figuring out what its impact can be and how it can move audiences to action" (qtd. in Nisbet, "Gasland"). In his book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins, coined the term "transmedia storytelling", which he later defined as "a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience" ("Transmedia"). When applied to documentary film, it is the elements of the "issue" raised by the film that get dispersed across these channels, coordinating, not just an entertainment experience, but a social action campaign. Dimensions of Evaluation It is not unreasonable to assume that such film campaigns, just like any policy or program, have the possibility to influence viewers' knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Measuring this impact has become increasingly important, as funders of documentary and issue-based films want look to understand the "return on investment" of films in terms of social impact so that they can compare them with other projects, including non-media, direct service projects. Although we "feel" like films make a difference to the individuals who also see them in the broader cultures in which they are embedded, measurement and empirical analysis of this impact are vitally important for both providing feedback to filmmakers and funders as well as informing future efforts attempting to leverage film for social change. This type of systematic assessment, or program evaluation, is often discussed in terms of two primary goals—formative (or process) and summative (or impact) evaluation (cf. Muraskin; Trochim and Donnelly). Formative evaluation studies program materials and activities to strengthen a program, and summative evaluation examines program outcomes. In terms of documentary film, these two goals can be described as follows: Formative Evaluation: Informing the Process As programs (broadly defined as an intentional set of activities with the aim of having some specific impact), the people who interact with them, and the cultures they are situated in are constantly changing, program development and evaluation is an ongoing learning cycle. Film campaigns, which are an intentional set of activities with the aim of impacting individual viewers and broader cultures, fit squarely within this purview. Without formulating hypotheses about the relationships between program activities and goals and then collecting and analyzing data during implementation to test them, it is difficult to learn ways to improve programs (or continue doing what works best in the most efficient manner). Attention to this process enables those involved to learn more about, not only what works, but how and why it works and even gain insights about how program outcomes may be affected by changes to resource availability, potential audiences, or infrastructure. Filmmakers are constantly learning and honing their craft and realizing the impact of their practice can help the artistic process. Often faced with tight budgets and timelines, they are forced to confront tradeoffs all the time, in the writing, production and post-production process. Understanding where they are having impact can improve their decision-making, which can help both the individual project and the overall field. Summative Evaluation: Quantifying Impacts Evaluation is used in many different fields to determine whether programs are achieving their intended goals and objectives. It became popular in the 1960s as a way of understanding the impact of the Great Society programs and has continued to grow since that time (Madaus and Stufflebeam). A recent White House memo stated that "rigorous, independent program evaluations can be a key resource in determining whether government programs are achieving their intended outcomes as well as possible and at the lowest possible cost" and the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) launched an initiative to increase the practice of "impact evaluations, or evaluations aimed at determining the causal effects of programs" (Orszag 1). Documentary films, like government programs, generally target a national audience, aim to serve a social purpose, and often do not provide a return on their investment. Participant Media, the most visible and arguably most successful documentary production company in the film industry, made recent headlines for its difficulty in making a profit during its seven-year history (Cieply). Owner and founder Jeff Skoll reported investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the company and CEO James Berk added that the company sometimes measures success, not by profit, but by "whether Mr. Skoll could have exerted more impact simply by spending his money philanthropically" (Cieply). Because of this, documentary projects often rely on grant funding, and are starting to approach funders beyond traditional arts and media sources. "Filmmakers are finding new fiscal and non-fiscal partners, in constituencies that would not traditionally be considered—or consider themselves—media funders or partners" (BRITDOC 6). And funders increasingly expect tangible data about their return on investment. Says Luis Ubiñas, president of Ford Foundation, which recently launched the Just Films Initiative: In these times of global economic uncertainty, with increasing demand for limited philanthropic dollars, assessing our effectiveness is more important than ever. Today, staying on the frontlines of social change means gauging, with thoughtfulness and rigor, the immediate and distant outcomes of our funding. Establishing the need for evaluation is not enough—attention to methodology is also critical. Valid research methodology is a critical component of understanding around the role entertainment can play in impacting social and environmental issues. The following issues are vital to measuring impact. Defining the Project Though this may seem like an obvious step, it is essential to determine the nature of the project so one can create research questions and hypotheses based on a complete understanding of the "treatment". One organization that provides a great example of the integration of documentary film imbedded into a larger campaign or movement is Invisible Children. Founded in 2005, Invisible Children is both a media-based organization as well as an economic development NGO with the goal of raising awareness and meeting the needs of child soldiers and other youth suffering as a result of the ongoing war in northern Uganda. Although Invisible Children began as a documentary film, it has grown into a large non-profit organization with an operating budget of over $8 million and a staff of over a hundred employees and interns throughout the year as well as volunteers in all 50 states and several countries. Invisible Children programming includes films, events, fundraising campaigns, contests, social media platforms, blogs, videos, two national "tours" per year, merchandise, and even a 650-person three-day youth summit in August 2011 called The Fourth Estate. Individually, each of these components might lead to specific outcomes; collectively, they might lead to others. In order to properly assess impacts of the film "project", it is important to take all of these components into consideration and think about who they may impact and how. This informs the research questions, hypotheses, and methods used in evaluation. Film campaigns may even include partnerships with existing social movements and non-profit organizations targeting social change. The American University Center for Social Media concluded in a case study of three issue-based documentary film campaigns: Digital technologies do not replace, but are closely entwined with, longstanding on-the-ground activities of stakeholders and citizens working for social change. Projects like these forge new tools, pipelines, and circuits of circulation in a multiplatform media environment. They help to create sustainable network infrastructures for participatory public media that extend from local communities to transnational circuits and from grassroots communities to policy makers. (Abrash) Expanding the Focus of Impact beyond the Individual A recent focus has shifted the dialogue on film impact. Whiteman ("Theaters") argues that traditional metrics of film "success" tend to focus on studio economic indicators that are far more relevant to large budget films. Current efforts focused on box office receipts and audience size, the author claims, are really measures of successful film marketing or promotion, missing the mark when it comes to understanding social impact. He instead stresses the importance of developing a more comprehensive model. His "coalition model" broadens the range and types of impact of film beyond traditional metrics to include the entire filmmaking process, from production to distribution. Whiteman (“Theaters”) argues that a narrow focus on the size of the audience for a film, its box office receipts, and viewers' attitudes does not incorporate the potential reach of a documentary film. Impacts within the coalition model include both individual and policy levels. Individual impacts (with an emphasis on activist groups) include educating members, mobilizing for action, and raising group status; policy includes altering both agenda for and the substance of policy deliberations. The Fledgling Fund (Barrett and Leddy) expanded on this concept and identified five distinct impacts of documentary film campaigns. These potential impacts expand from individual viewers to groups, movements, and eventually to what they call the "ultimate goal" of social change. Each is introduced briefly below. Quality Film. The film itself can be presented as a quality film or media project, creating enjoyment or evoking emotion in the part of audiences. "By this we mean a film that has a compelling narrative that draws viewers in and can engage them in the issue and illustrate complex problems in ways that statistics cannot" (Barrett and Leddy, 6). Public Awareness. Film can increase public awareness by bringing light to issues and stories that may have otherwise been unknown or not often thought about. This is the level of impact that has received the most attention, as films are often discussed in terms of their "educational" value. "A project's ability to raise awareness around a particular issue, since awareness is a critical building block for both individual change and broader social change" (Barrett and Leddy, 6). Public Engagement. Impact, however, need not stop at simply raising public awareness. Engagement "indicates a shift from simply being aware of an issue to acting on this awareness. Were a film and its outreach campaign able to provide an answer to the question 'What can I do?' and more importantly mobilize that individual to act?" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). This is where an associated film campaign becomes increasingly important, as transmedia outlets such as Facebook, websites, blogs, etc. can build off the interest and awareness developed through watching a film and provide outlets for viewers channel their constructive efforts. Social Movement. In addition to impacts on individuals, films can also serve to mobilize groups focused on a particular problem. The filmmaker can create a campaign around the film to promote its goals and/or work with existing groups focused on a particular issue, so that the film can be used as a tool for mobilization and collaboration. "Moving beyond measures of impact as they relate to individual awareness and engagement, we look at the project's impact as it relates to the broader social movement … if a project can strengthen the work of key advocacy organizations that have strong commitment to the issues raised in the film" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). Social Change. The final level of impact and "ultimate goal" of an issue-based film is long-term and systemic social change. "While we understand that realizing social change is often a long and complex process, we do believe it is possible and that for some projects and issues there are key indicators of success" (Barrett and Leddy, 7). This can take the form of policy or legislative change, passed through film-based lobbying efforts, or shifts in public dialogue and behavior. Legislative change typically takes place beyond the social movement stage, when there is enough support to pressure legislators to change or create policy. Film-inspired activism has been seen in issues ranging from environmental causes such as agriculture (Food Inc.) and toxic products (Blue Vinyl) to social causes such as foreign conflict (Invisible Children) and education (Waiting for Superman). Documentary films can also have a strong influence as media agenda-setters, as films provide dramatic "news pegs" for journalists seeking to either sustain or generation new coverage of an issue (Nisbet "Introduction" 5), such as the media coverage of climate change in conjunction with An Inconvenient Truth. Barrett and Leddy, however, note that not all films target all five impacts and that different films may lead to different impacts. "In some cases we could look to key legislative or policy changes that were driven by, or at least supported by the project... In other cases, we can point to shifts in public dialogue and how issues are framed and discussed" (7). It is possible that specific film and/or campaign characteristics may lead to different impacts; this is a nascent area for research and one with great promise for both practical and theoretical utility. Innovations in Tools and Methods Finally, the selection of tools is a vital component for assessing impact and the new media landscape is enabling innovations in the methods and strategies for program evaluation. Whereas the traditional domain of film impact measurement included box office statistics, focus groups, and exit surveys, innovations in data collection and analysis have expanded the reach of what questions we can ask and how we are able to answer them. For example, press coverage can assist in understanding and measuring the increase in awareness about an issue post-release. Looking directly at web-traffic changes "enables the creation of an information-seeking curve that can define the parameters of a teachable moment" (Hart and Leiserowitz 360). Audience reception can be measured, not only via interviews and focus groups, but also through content and sentiment analysis of web content and online analytics. "Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision making, minimize risks, and unearth valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden" (Manyika et al. 5). These new tools are significantly changing evaluation, expanding what we can learn about the social impacts of film through triangulation of self-report data with measurement of actual behavior in virtual environments. Conclusion The changing media landscape both allows and impels evaluation of film impacts on individual viewers and the broader culture in which they are imbedded. Although such analysis may have previously been limited to box office numbers, critics' reviews, and theater exit surveys, the rise of new media provides both the ability to connect filmmakers, activists, and viewers in new ways and the data in which to study the process. This capability, combined with significant growth in the documentary landscape, suggests a great potential for documentary film to contribute to some of our most pressing social and environmental needs. A social scientific approach, that combines empirical analysis with theory applied from basic science, ensures that impact can be measured and leveraged in a way that is useful for both filmmakers as well as funders. In the end, this attention to impact ensures a continued thriving marketplace for issue-based documentary films in our social landscape. References Abrash, Barbara. "Social Issue Documentary: The Evolution of Public Engagement." American University Center for Social Media 21 Apr. 2010. 26 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/›. Aufderheide, Patricia. "The Changing Documentary Marketplace." Cineaste 30.3 (2005): 24-28. Barnouw, Eric. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Barrett, Diana and Sheila Leddy. "Assessing Creative Media's Social Impact." The Fledgling Fund, Dec. 2008. 15 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.thefledglingfund.org/media/research.html›. Barsam, Richard M. Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1992. BRITDOC Foundation. The End of the Line: A Social Impact Evaluation. London: Channel 4, 2011. 12 Oct. 2011 ‹http://britdoc.org/news_details/the_social_impact_of_the_end_of_the_line/›. Cieply, Michael. "Uneven Growth for Film Studio with a Message." New York Times 5 Jun. 2011: B1. Ellsworth, Elizabeth. "Emerging Media and Documentary Practice." The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs. Aug. 2008. 22 Sep. 2011. ‹http://www.gpia.info/node/911›. Grierson, John. "First Principles of Documentary (1932)." Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary. Eds. Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. 97-102. Hart, Philip Solomon and Anthony Leiserowitz. "Finding the Teachable Moment: An Analysis of Information-Seeking Behavior on Global Warming Related Websites during the Release of The Day After Tomorrow." Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 3.3 (2009): 355-66. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. ———. "Transmedia Storytelling 101." Confessions of an Aca-Fan. The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. 22 Mar. 2007. 10 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html›. Madaus, George, and Daniel Stufflebeam. "Program Evaluation: A Historical Overview." Evaluation in Education and Human Services 49.1 (2002): 3-18. Manyika, James, Michael Chui, Jacques Bughin, Brad Brown, Richard Dobbs, Charles Roxburgh, and Angela Hung Byers. Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity. McKinsey Global Institute. May 2011 ‹http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/big_data/›. Muraskin, Lana. Understanding Evaluation: The Way to Better Prevention Programs. Washington: U.S. Department of Education, 1993. 8 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www2.ed.gov/PDFDocs/handbook.pdf›. Nichols, Bill. "Foreword." Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Eds. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997. 11-13. Nisbet, Matthew. "Gasland and Dirty Business: Documentary Films Shape Debate on Energy Policy." Big Think, 9 May 2011. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://bigthink.com/ideas/38345›. ———. "Introduction: Understanding the Social Impact of a Documentary Film." Documentaries on a Mission: How Nonprofits Are Making Movies for Public Engagement. Ed. Karen Hirsch, Center for Social Media. Mar. 2007. 10 Sep. 2011 ‹http://aladinrc.wrlc.org/bitstream/1961/4634/1/docs_on_a_mission.pdf›. Nisbet, Matthew, and Patricia Aufderheide. "Documentary Film: Towards a Research Agenda on Forms, Functions, and Impacts." Mass Communication and Society 12.4 (2011): 450-56. Orszag, Peter. Increased Emphasis on Program Evaluation. Washington: Office of Management and Budget. 7 Oct. 2009. 10 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-01.pdf›. Participant Media. "Our Mission." 2011. 2 Apr. 2011 ‹http://www.participantmedia.com/company/about_us.php.›. Plantinga, Carl. Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Trochim, William, and James Donnelly. Research Methods Knowledge Base. 3rd ed. Mason: Atomic Dogs, 2007. Ubiñas, Luis. "President's Message." 2009 Annual Report. Ford Foundation, Sep. 2010. 10 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.fordfoundation.org/about-us/2009-annual-report/presidents-message›. Vladica, Florin, and Charles Davis. "Business Innovation and New Media Practices in Documentary Film Production and Distribution: Conceptual Framework and Review of Evidence." The Media as a Driver of the Information Society. Eds. Ed Albarran, Paulo Faustino, and R. Santos. Lisbon, Portugal: Media XXI / Formal, 2009. 299-319. Whiteman, David. "Out of the Theaters and into the Streets: A Coalition Model of the Political Impact of Documentary Film and Video." Political Communication 21.1 (2004): 51-69. ———. "The Evolving Impact of Documentary Film: Sacrifice and the Rise of Issue-Centered Outreach." Post Script 22 Jun. 2007. 10 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.allbusiness.com/media-telecommunications/movies-sound-recording/5517496-1.html›. Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute, 1995. Working Films. "Nonprofits: Working Films." Foundation Source Access 31 May 2011. 5 Oct. 2011 ‹http://access.foundationsource.com/nonprofit/working-films/›.