Journal articles on the topic 'Schema Coping Styles'

Background: According to Young's schema theory, Early Maladaptive Schemas (EMSs) arise due to the violation of core emotional needs during childhood. It seems likely that parents have difficulties in satisfying their children's emotional needs if they have high levels of EMSs themselves. Aims: This study investigated whether the extent of EMSs in parents is associated with the extent of EMSs in their offspring. Moreover, we tested for two putative mechanisms that account for this association: parental coping styles and parenting behaviour. Methods: Sixty dyads of parents (mother or father) and their adult children (N = 120), recruited from the general population, completed the Young Schema Questionnaire. The parents rated their schema coping styles and the children retrospectively rated the parenting of the participating parent. Results: As expected, parents' EMSs were significantly associated with EMSs in their offspring. This association was accounted for by the parental coping style Overcompensation and the adverse parenting that the child remembered. The parental coping style Avoidance did not account for the association. Conclusions: This study provides preliminary evidence for the notion that EMSs are passed on from one generation to the next via parental coping and parenting. Our findings thus support the assumption of schema theory that EMSs are connected to the family environment in terms of adverse parenting. If further confirmed, this has relevant implications for family-based interventions.

The Strong Black Woman (SBW) schema has been consistently linked to negative mental health outcomes among Black women. However, few have begun to explicate the mechanisms by which the endorsement of the SBW schema may influence mental health outcomes. Accordingly, the current study examined coping styles (social support, disengagement, spirituality, and problem-oriented/engagement) as mediators in the association between endorsement of the SBW schema and depressive symptoms in a sample of Black women. Data from 240 Black women ( Mage = 22.0, SD = 4.0 years) were collected assessing SBW schema endorsement, coping styles, and depressive symptoms. Parallel multiple mediation analysis was conducted using PROCESS Macro. Of the four coping styles examined, disengagement coping partially mediated the association between greater endorsement of the SBW schema and greater depressive symptoms. Study findings add depth to our understanding of the association between the SBW schema and mental health outcomes and lend themselves to research and clinical implications.

This study investigated whether the schema therapy constructs of schema coping and schema modes have val dity in adolescents. We examined the validity and reliability of the Schema Coping Inventory (SCI) and an 80-item version of the Schema Mode Inventory (SMI) in a mixed sample of adolescents. Confirmatory factor analyse showed that the first-order factor structures of the SCI and SMI were replicated, but that the hypothesized higher-order models of the SMI were not confirmed. Instead, we proposed an alternative higher-order model of Internalizing, Externalizing, Overachieving, and Healthy modes. In general, the SCI and SMI scales were able o distinguish the clinical sample from the community sample, and meaningful relationships were found between oping styles, schema modes, and behavior problems. In conclusion, our study supports the theorized relations ips between schema coping styles, schema modes, and behavior, problems in adolescents, and provides initial validation for the SCI and the, 80-item SMI in adolescent populations.

Purpose Young offenders are known to have more chaotic experiences in childhood than non-offenders, and this impacts on their attachments, coping styles and early maladaptive schemas (EMS). The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between these factors and drug use. Design/methodology/approach This study used self-report questionnaires on a sample of 105 incarcerated young offenders. Findings Attachment styles did not differentiate drug users from non-drug users. Drug users were found to be no more likely than non-drug users to use avoidant coping styles. However, they were more likely to have emotional coping styles. Drug users had more EMS, and overall, those with insecure attachments had more EMS. Individuals with emotional coping styles scored higher than those with rational coping styles on several EMS. Those with emotional coping styles scored lower on the emotional inhibition EMS than those with rational coping styles. Practical implications The evidence presented has implications for the understanding of drug use in young offenders by: providing support to the model proposed by Young et al. (2003) regarding how insecure attachments can contribute to EMS; providing support for Crittenden’s (2008) model of attachment whereby problematic behaviours such as drug use can be a strategy the individual uses to protect themselves at times of threat or discomfort; highlighting the need for an integrated model of substance use in offenders which incorporates early experiences, attachments and EMS; and highlighting why substance use may become a coping strategy in young offenders and how to engage them to meet their needs in pro-social ways. Originality/value The study contributes to the understanding of attachment, coping and drug use in a young offender population. It sets foundations in the authors’ understanding of patterns of EMS in young drug users and highlights the need for an integrated model of substance use which incorporates early experiences, attachments and EMS.

This research aimed at investigating the relationship between mediating role of emotional intelligence with early maladaptive schemas and copying style. Correlation method was adopted and all of the participants were among the students of Islamic Azad University-Islamshahr Branch. From the pool of 22300 students, 380 participants were chosen by stratified sampling method according to the Morgan Table. The questionnaire of Shering Emotional Intelligence, Yang’s schemas questionnaire (short form), Yang and Yang avoidance questionnaire and Yang Compensation questionnaire were administered and analyzed. The results gained from data analyses utilizing multiple regression statistical method and line analyses showed that this method had appropriate fitting with the available data. The findings revealed that emotional intelligence had a mediating role in relationship with early maladaptive schemas and students’ copying style. The early maladaptive schemas had a direct and significant impact on emotional intelligence. The researcher may come to this conclusion that the students who use early maladaptive schemas have less emotional intelligence. There was a positive relationship between early maladaptive schemas and students’ copying style. Furthermore, the early maladaptive schemas had a direct and significant impact on students’ copying style.

SynopsisWe used cluster analysis to delineate coping subtypes in a sample of 166 men with coronary heart disease who completed the Antwerp out-patient rehabilitation programme. These subtypes were identified on the basis of three well-defined superordinate traits that were selected from a comprehensive taxonomy: negative affectivity, social inhibition, and self-deception. Using Ward's minimum variance method and the cubic clustering criterion, we identified four coping subtypes; low-negative affectivity (N = 48), high-negative affectivity (N = 30), inhibited (N = 62), and repressive (N = 26) individuals. The accuracy of the resulting classification was demonstrated across parallel data sets and was further validated against external, health-related correlates that were not included in the clustering. The identified coping subtypes were significantly related to self-reports of subjective distress/perceived stress, ratings of Type A behaviour and anger-in, return to work, prevalence of chest-pain complaints, and use of minor tranquillizers and sleeping pills. The major findings of this study suggest that (a) male coronary patients represent a heterogeneous population with distinctly different coping subtypes, and that (b) a relatively small number of homogeneous subtypes can account for a substantial amount of variance in subjective well-being, coronary-prone behaviour, and return to work. These findings indicate that psychosomatic research should focus on how superordinate traits interact within individuals and corroborate the appropriateness of a class model to describe coping styles of male coronary patients. It is argued that discrepant findings across studies of Type-A behaviour and hostility may be related to the coping subtypes of the subject sample. Further attempts to cross-validate this classification scheme and to examine its health-related correlates are needed.

With the fast progress of information technology and the computer networks, it becomes very easy to reproduce and share the geospatial data due to its digital styles. Therefore, the usage of geospatial data suffers from various problems such as data authentication, ownership proffering, and illegal copying ,etc. These problems can represent the big challenge to future uses of the geospatial data. This paper introduces a new watermarking scheme to ensure the copyright protection of the digital vector map. The main idea of proposed scheme is based on transforming the digital map to frequently domain using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) in order to determine suitable areas to insert the watermark data. The digital map is separated into the isolated parts.Watermark data are embedded within the nominated magnitudes in each part when satisfied the definite criteria. The efficiency of proposed watermarking scheme is assessed within statistical measures based on two factors which are fidelity and robustness. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed watermarking scheme representing ideal trade off for disagreement issue between distortion amount and robustness. Also, the proposed scheme shows robust resistance for many kinds of attacks.

AbstractThe theory and principles of Metacognitive therapy (MCT) are described and data supporting its effects are summarized. MCT does not advocate challenging of negative automatic thoughts or traditional schemas. It proposes the existence of a universal maladaptive thinking style that causes disorder and focuses on helping patients regulate their cognition more adaptively. It aims to reduce worry and rumination and alter problematic patterns of attention and coping. In doing so it targets underlying metacognition that controls thinking and helps patients develop new ways of consciously experiencing inner events. Data from treatment studies suggest that individual MCT techniques and full treatment are highly effective. Further randomized trials are clearly warranted.

- P. she is a young woman that has always looked for of "demolish" her cognitive disfunctional scheme, that is: Drugs can help her to assuage her suffering, ther relational and emotional problems, her working and economic difficulties; but this cognitive disfunctional scheme is supported from husband's deviant behaviours (who is addict) and above all from a type of romantic disfunctional attachment. She is a vulnerabile person, who is'nt successful to face a lot of her stressful situations; she has adopted nearly always a disfunctional style of coping, the Avoidance. In fact, on the psychological sphere, the incapability to give a report with the others, to seek the proximity with the others or build a "distance", denotes an unbalance between the poles of the dependence and of the autonomy. The first contact with the heroin has been a reaction of adjustment that is finalized to assuage symptoms of depression as the suicide attempt, antecedent to the use of the heroin. Which is the anamnestic, diagnostic and therapeutic-rehabilitative way? Etiology and pathogenesis in according to the bio-psico- social model and the complex cognitive therapy.

About 15 years ago the City of Melbourne came up with a scheme that would transform completely the face and the fortunes of the city. At the time the city, like thousands of others around the globe, emptied at night as tens of thousands of commuters decamped in their cars for the suburbs. The Council's Postcode 3000 scheme, launched in 1992, outlined plans to entice residential development back into the city, through financial and technical incentives, technical advice, a review of technical requirements, research and statistical data, promotional events and publicity.It is hard now to believe -walking through the bustling streets lined with converted apartments and thriving businesses -that anyone was ever sceptical about the potential for city living Melbourne-style. The success of Postcode 3000 far exceeded even the most ambitious targets and the City of Melbourne became one of the fastest growing municipalities in the land.With its visionary new Council House 2 (CH2) building , the City of Melbourne is once again planning a lifestyle revolution. This time the subject is sustainability and the target is the construction industry. Using the CH2 office building as a living , breathing example, the Council intends to demonstrate the potential for sustainable technologies to transform the way we approach the design, construction and indeed entire philosophy of our built environment. Just as Postcode 3000 reinvented the city, the City of Melbourne wants to see the CH2 example copied , improved upon and enthusiastically taken up throughout Melbourne and far, far beyond.As before, there are a great many sceptics. The City's approach to this has been to patiently press ahead with construction of its best source of proof -CH2 itself -while actively and energetically encouraging lively debate -from the greatest enthusiasts to the harshest critics alike.

Distinctive features of ex situ plant populations (outside natural habitats) are manifested during the formation and development of groups of individuals mainly in the process of their introduction and acclimatization. The experience and practice of using terms for ex situ plant populations has been analyzed. Information about artificially created plant groups is generalized. The results of the analysis concerning the definition of the term "ex situ plant population" and its use in relation to introduced plants are presented. The list of definitions for the following terms are given: "initial population", "introductive population", "introductive coenotic population", "introduced population", "cultivated populations", "agro population", "cultural population", "hybrid population", "artificial population", "experimental population", "spontaneous population". It has been stated that modeling, forming and copying methods are used to form ex situ plant populations. It has been noted that ex situ plant populations can be formed and developed independently or artificially formed. The scheme of distribution of ex situ plant populations by the degree of genetic integrity, ability to reproduce, duration of existence, size and stage of development, place and style of formation of the initial population is proposed. It has been established that groups of genetically homogeneous individuals of artificial plant groups that freely cross each other and for a long time reproduce offsprings can be characterized as populations. Such populations are the result of purposeful human activity on the introduction and cultivation of plants, and are largely dependent on anthropic influence. The study of their structure and dynamics is a prerequisite for predicting and evaluating the success of introductions and preventing threats of spontaneous propagation and uncontrolled, unwanted naturalization of plants under new growth conditions.

Fatigue in persons with multiple sclerosis (PwMS) is severely disabling. However, the underlying mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Recent research suggests a link to early childhood adversities and psychological trait variables. In line with these studies, this paper took a psychodynamic perspective on MS-fatigue. It was hypothesized that fatigue could represent a manifestation of maladaptive coping with intense emotions. The schema therapeutic mode model served as a theoretical and empirically validated framework, linking psychodynamic theory and empirical research methods. The study was based on a data set of N = 571 PwMS that has also served as the basis for another publication. Data was collected online. The Schema Mode Inventory was used to quantify regulatory strategies to cope with emotionally stressful experiences. In addition, depressive symptoms (Beck's Depression Inventory - FastScreen), physical disability (Patient Determined Disease Steps), alexithymia (Toronto Alexithymia Scale-26), adverse childhood experiences (Childhood Trauma Questionnaire), and self-reported fatigue (Fatigue Scale for Motor and Cognitive Functions) were assessed. Latent profile analysis revealed three distinct groups of PwMS, based on their coping mode profiles: (1) PwMS with low maladaptive coping, (2) PwMS with avoidant/submissive coping styles, and (3) PwMS with avoidant/overcompensatory coping styles. Multivariate comparisons showed no significant difference in physical disability across the three groups. However, heightened levels of self-reported fatigue and depression symptoms occurred in PwMS with maladaptive coping styles. A path model uncovered that self-reported fatigue was robustly related to physical disability (β = 0.33) and detached/avoidant coping (Detached Protector; β = 0.34). There was no specific relation between any of the maladaptive coping modes and depression symptoms. Detached/avoidant coping was in turn predicted by childhood emotional abuse and neglect. The results indicate that childhood adversity and detached/avoidant coping styles may be associated with variability in MS-fatigue severity: PwMS that resort to detached/avoidant coping in response to negative emotions also tend to report heightened levels of fatigue, although they do not differ in their perceived disability from PwMS with low levels of fatigue and maladaptive coping. A link between MS-fatigue and the psychodynamic traumatic conversion model is discussed. The implications of these findings for therapeutic interventions require further study.

Coping styles such as overcompensation and avoidance are attempts that developed as survival mechanisms in difficult childhood environments. The objective of this study is to examine the psychometric properties of the Turkish version of the Young-Rygh Avoidance Inventory (YRAI). The sample (n = 1,555) randomly split into two groups to run principal component and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA). A parallel analysis was run to determine the factor number. CFA was carried out with maximum likelihood estimation robust method. Eight factors with 30 items were the final form of the Turkish YRAI. Cronbach alpha levels of each factor and inter-correlations with the Turkish Young Schema Questionnaire, Symptom Check List-90 revised, Beck Depression Inventory, and Beck Anxiety Inventory were calculated. Internal consistency analysis revealed acceptable coefficients. As to convergent validity, the correlational analysis showed statistically significant coefficients. Overall, the Turkish YRAI was found to have acceptable levels of reliability and validity.

AbstractThe relationship between early maladaptive schemas (EMSs) and psychopathology is thought to be mediated by the use of maladaptive compensatory coping and deficits in adaptive coping. One form of coping that might be affected by EMSs is an individual's style of humor, which can be adaptive or maladaptive. This study examined the relationships among EMS domains, styles of humor, and aggression. The EMS domain of Impaired Limits was most consistently related to aggression. Moreover, as predicted, an aggressive style of humor mediated the relationship between Impaired Limits and various aspects of aggression (i.e., verbal, physical, and hostility). In addition, self-defeating humor mediated the respective relationships between hostility and EMS domains of Impaired Limits, Disconnection, and Impaired Autonomy. Taken together, these results suggest that maladaptive humor styles may play an important role as one of the mechanisms by which early maladaptive schemas lead to later emotional and functional disturbance.

The article is devoted to the problems of studying the life style in psychology and the factors of its formation. The aim of the work is to establish the role of early maladaptive schemes as factors in the formation of certain aspects of student youth lifestyle. Early maladaptive schemes are considered according to J. Young's concept as models of reality perception which were formed in childhood under the influence of traumatic events and represent the perception and interpretation mechanisms of life experience. The empirical research was carried out on a student sample (21-27 years old) of both sexes; the total number of the studied people was 195. The method of early memories analysis and its quantitative assessment by the parameters of social interest, life position questionnaire, self-assessment of personality maturity, method of personality maturity diagnosis, world assumptions scale, diagnosing of interpersonal relationships style, differential emotions scale and J.Young’s early maladaptive schemas (EMS) questionnaire were used in the investigation. The results in six typical models lifestyles constructing were identified: "Avoidance of contact", "Superiority Complex", "Assertiveness", "Mimetism", "Maturity", "Interpersonal dependence". Specific and nonspecific mechanisms of EMS influence on lifestyles has been established. Nonspecific mechanism was revealed only for the "Interpersonal dependence" style. The styles "Avoidance of contact", "Mimetism", " Superiority Complex", "Assertiveness", "Maturity" revealed specific mechanisms, which consist in traumatic foundation presence formed by certain EMS for each style. "Avoidance of contact" is shaped like enhanced autonomy and intimacy avoidance. "Mimetism" is associated with overcoming the inferiority feelings by imitating worthy socially approved behavior. The "Superiority complex" is a protective "mask" associated with the conflict between the inferiority feeling and the Self-grandiosity. Life styles that are mature ("Maturity" and "Assertiveness") have traumatic basis, formed due to fixations in the early stages of personality development, and the ability to achieve mature aspects of personality occurs through various coping strategies.

Abstract The frontal lobe is responsible for high-order functioning, such as memory, attention, decision-making, and personality. Lesions in the frontal lobe may lead to different physical and psychological problems. The current study was conducted to examine the emotional, cognitive, and behavioural states and coping strategies of a patient with recurrent bilateral frontal lobe lesion. It also attempted to determine post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in a patient. This study described the case of an adult with recurrent bilateral frontal lobe tumour. It covered the clinical presentation, administration of Urdu translation of the Schema Mode Inventory (SMI) and Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale for DSM-5 (CAPS-5), and analysis of the case. The results of the study showed that the recurrent bilateral frontal lobe brain tumour patient engaged in child mode and had a dysfunctional coping style and a maladaptive punitive parent mode. Furthermore, the patient also had moderate PTSD symptoms. Continuous....

In March 2002, I was visiting the University of Southern California. One night, as sometimes happens on a vibrant campus, two interesting but very different public lectures were scheduled against one another. The first was by the co-chairman and co-founder of Adobe Systems Inc., Dr. John E. Warnock, talking about books. The second was a lecture by acclaimed video artist Bill Viola. The first event was clearly designed as a networking forum for faculty and entrepreneurs. The general student population was conspicuously absent. Warnock spoke of the future of Adobe, shared stories of his love of books, and in an embodiment of the democratising potential of Adobe software (and no doubt to the horror of archivists in the room) he invited the audience to handle extremely rare copies of early printed works from his personal library. In the lecture theatre where Viola was to speak the atmosphere was different. Students were everywhere; even at the price of ten dollars a head. Viola spoke of time and memory in the information age, of consciousness and existence, to an enraptured audience—and showed his latest work. The juxtaposition of these two events says something about our cultural moment, caught between a paradigm modelled on reverence toward the page, and a still emergent sense of medium, intensity and experimentation. But, the juxtaposition yields more. At one point in Warnock’s speech, in a demonstration of the ultra-high resolution possible in the next generation of Adobe products, he presented a scan of a manuscript, two pages, two columns per page, overflowing with detail. Fig. 1. Dr John E. Warnock at the Annenberg Symposium. Photo courtesy of http://www.annenberg.edu/symposia/annenberg/2002/photos.php Later, in Viola’s presentation, a fragment of a video work, Silent Mountain (2001) splits the screen in two columns, matching Warnock’s text: inside each a human figure struggles with intense emotion, and the challenges of bridging the relational gap. Fig. 2. Images from Bill Viola, Silent Mountain (2001). From Bill Viola, THE PASSIONS. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in Association with The National Gallery, London. Ed. John Walsh. p. 44. Both events are, of course, lectures. And although they are different in style and content, a ‘columnular’ scheme informs and underpins both, as a way of presenting and illustrating the lecture. Here, it is worth thinking about Pierre de la Ramée or Petrus (Peter) Ramus (1515-1572), the 16th century educational reformer who in the words of Frances Yates ‘abolished memory as a part of rhetoric’ (229). Ramus was famous for transforming rhetoric through the introduction of his method or dialectic. For Walter J. Ong, whose discussion of Ramism we are indebted to here, Ramus produced the paradigm of the textbook genre. But it is his method that is more noteworthy for us here, organised through definitions and divisions, the distribution of parts, ‘presented in dichotomized outlines or charts that showed exactly how the material was organised spatially in itself and in the mind’ (Ong, Orality 134-135). Fig. 3. Ramus inspired study of Medicine. Ong, Ramus 301. Ong discusses Ramus in more detail in his book Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. Elsewhere, Sutton, Benjamin, and I have tried to capture the sense of Ong’s argument, which goes something like the following. In Ramus, Ong traces the origins of our modern, diagrammatic understanding of argument and structure to the 16th century, and especially the work of Ramus. Ong’s interest in Ramus is not as a great philosopher, nor a great scholar—indeed Ong sees Ramus’s work as a triumph of mediocrity of sorts. Rather, his was a ‘reformation’ in method and pedagogy. The Ramist dialectic ‘represented a drive toward thinking not only of the universe but of thought itself in terms of spatial models apprehended by sight’ (Ong, Ramus 9). The world becomes thought of ‘as an assemblage of the sort of things which vision apprehends—objects or surfaces’. Ramus’s teachings and doctrines regarding ‘discoursing’ are distinctive for the way they draw on geometrical figures, diagrams or lecture outlines, and the organization of categories through dichotomies. This sets learning up on a visual paradigm of ‘study’ (Ong, Orality 8-9). Ramus introduces a new organization for discourse. Prior to Ramus, the rhetorical tradition maintained and privileged an auditory understanding of the production of content in speech. Central to this practice was deployment of the ‘seats’, ‘images’ and ‘common places’ (loci communes), stock arguments and structures that had accumulated through centuries of use (Ong, Orality 111). These common places were supported by a complex art of memory: techniques that nourished the practice of rhetoric. By contrast, Ramism sought to map the flow and structure of arguments in tables and diagrams. Localised memory, based on dividing and composing, became crucial (Yates 230). For Ramus, content was structured in a set of visible or sight-oriented relations on the page. Ramism transformed the conditions of visualisation. In our present age, where ‘content’ is supposedly ‘king’, an archaeology of content bears thinking about. In it, Ramism would have a prominent place. With Ramus, content could be mapped within a diagrammatic page-based understanding of meaning. A container understanding of content arises. ‘In the post-Gutenberg age where Ramism flourished, the term “content”, as applied to what is “in” literary productions, acquires a status which it had never known before’ (Ong, Ramus 313). ‘In lieu of merely telling the truth, books would now in common estimation “contain” the truth, like boxes’ (313). For Ramus, ‘analysis opened ideas like boxes’ (315). The Ramist move was, as Ong points out, about privileging the visual over the audible. Alongside the rise of the printing press and page-based approaches to the word, the Ramist revolution sought to re-work rhetoric according to a new scheme. Although spatial metaphors had always had a ‘place’ in the arts of memory—other systems were, however, phonetically based—the notion of place changed. Specific figures such as ‘scheme’, ‘plan’, and ‘table’, rose to prominence in the now-textualised imagination. ‘Structure’ became an abstract diagram on the page disconnected from the total performance of the rhetor. This brings us to another key aspect of the Ramist reformation: that alongside a spatialised organisation of thought Ramus re-works style as presentation and embellishment (Brummett 449). A kind of separation of conception and execution is introduced in relation to performance. In Ramus’ separation of reason and rhetoric, arrangement and memory are distinct from style and delivery (Brummett 464). While both dialectic and rhetoric are re-worked by Ramus in light of divisions and definitions (see Ong, Ramus Chs. XI-XII), and dialectic remains a ‘rhetorical instrument’ (Ramus 290), rhetoric becomes a unique site for simplification in the name of classroom practicality. Dialectic circumscribes the space of learning of rhetoric; invention and arrangement (positioning) occur in advance (289). Ong’s work on the technologisation of the word is strongly focused on identifying the impact of literacy on consciousness. What Ong’s work on Ramus shows is that alongside the so-called printing revolution the Ramist reformation enacts an equally if not more powerful transformation of pedagogic space. Any serious consideration of print must not only look at the technologisation of the word, and the shifting patterns of literacy produced alongside it, but also a particular tying together of pedagogy and method that Ong traces back to Ramus. If, as is canvassed in the call for papers of this issue of M/C Journal, ‘the transitions in print culture are uneven and incomplete at this point’, then could it be in part due to the way Ramism endures and is extended in electronic and hypermedia contexts? Powerpoint presentations, outlining tools (Heim 139-141), and the scourge of bullet points, are the most obvious evidence of greater institutionalization of Ramist knowledge architecture. Communication, and the teaching of communication, is now embedded in a Ramist logic of opening up content like a box. Theories of communication draw on so-called ‘models’ that draw on the representation of the communication process through boxes that divide and define. Perhaps in a less obvious way, ‘spatialized processes of thought and communication’ (Ong, Ramus 314) are essential to the logic of flowcharting and tracking new information structures, and even teaching hypertext (see the diagram in Nielsen 7): a link puts the popular notion that hypertext is close to the way we truly think into an interesting perspective. The notion that we are embedded in print culture is not in itself new, even if the forms of our continual reintegration into print culture can be surprising. In the experience of printing, of the act of pressing the ‘Print’ button, we find ourselves re-integrated into page space. A mini-preview of the page re-assures me of an actuality behind the actualizations on the screen, of ink on paper. As I write in my word processing software, the removal of writing from the ‘element of inscription’ (Heim 136) —the frictionless ‘immediacy’ of the flow of text (152) — is conditioned by a representation called the ‘Page Layout’, the dark borders around the page signalling a kind of structures abyss, a no-go zone, a place, beyond ‘Normal’, from which where there is no ‘Return’. At the same time, however, never before has the technological manipulation of the document been so complex, a part of a docuverse that exists in three dimensions. It is a world that is increasingly virtualised by photocopiers that ‘scan to file’ or ‘scan to email’ rather than good old ‘xeroxing’ style copying. Printing gives way to scanning. In a perverse extension of printing (but also residually film and photography), some video software has a function called ‘Print to Video’. That these super-functions of scanning to file or email are disabled on my department photocopier says something about budgets, but also the comfort with which academics inhabit Ramist space. As I stand here printing my lecture plan, the printer stands defiantly separate from the photocopier, resisting its colonizing convergence even though it is dwarfed in size. Meanwhile, the printer demurely dispenses pages, one at a time, face down, in a gesture of discretion or perhaps embarrassment. For in the focus on the pristine page there is a Puritanism surrounding printing: a morality of blemishes, smudges, and stains; of structure, format and order; and a failure to match that immaculate, perfect argument or totality. (Ong suggests that ‘the term “method” was appropriated from the Ramist coffers and used to form the term “methodists” to designate first enthusiastic preachers who made an issue of their adherence to “logic”’ (Ramus 304).) But perhaps this avoidance of multi-functionality is less of a Ludditism than an understanding that the technological assemblage of printing today exists peripherally to the ideality of the Ramist scheme. A change in technological means does not necessarily challenge the visile language that informs our very understanding of our respective ‘fields’, or the ideals of competency embodied in academic performance and expression, or the notions of content we adopt. This is why I would argue some consideration of Ramism and print culture is crucial. Any ‘true’ breaking out of print involves, as I suggest, a challenge to some fundamental principles of pedagogy and method, and the link between the two. And of course, the very prospect of breaking out of print raises the issue of its desirability at a time when these forms of academic performance are culturally valued. On the surface, academic culture has been a strange inheritor of the Ramist legacy, radically furthering its ambitions, but also it would seem strongly tempering it with an investment in orality, and other ideas of performance, that resist submission to the Ramist ideal. Ong is pessimistic here, however. Ramism was after all born as a pedagogic movement, central to the purveying ‘knowledge as a commodity’ (Ong, Ramus 306). Academic discourse remains an odd mixture of ‘dialogue in the give-and-take Socratic form’ and the scheduled lecture (151). The scholastic dispute is at best a ‘manifestation of concern with real dialogue’ (154). As Ong notes, the ideals of dialogue have been difficult to sustain, and the dominant practice leans towards ‘the visile pole with its typical ideals of “clarity”, “precision”, “distinctness”, and “explanation” itself—all best conceivable in terms of some analogy with vision and a spatial field’ (151). Assessing the importance and after-effects of the Ramist reformation today is difficult. Ong describes it an ‘elusive study’ (Ramus 296). Perhaps Viola’s video, with its figures struggling in a column-like organization of space, structured in a kind of dichotomy, can be read as a glimpse of our existence in or under a Ramist scheme (interestingly, from memory, these figures emote in silence, deprived of auditory expression). My own view is that while it is possible to explore learning environments in a range of ways, and thus move beyond the enclosed mode of study of Ramism, Ramism nevertheless comprises an important default architecture of pedagogy that also informs some higher level assumptions about assessment and knowledge of the field. Software training, based on a process of working through or mimicking a linked series of screenshots and commands is a direct inheritor of what Ong calls Ramism’s ‘corpuscular epistemology’, a ‘one to one correspondence between concept, word and referent’ (Ong, Orality 168). My lecture plan, providing an at a glance view of my presentation, is another. The default architecture of the Ramist scheme impacts on our organisation of knowledge, and the place of performance with in it. Perhaps this is another area where Ong’s fascinating account of secondary orality—that orality that comes into being with television and radio—becomes important (Orality 136). Not only does secondary orality enable group-mindedness and communal exchange, it also provides a way to resist the closure of print and the Ramist scheme, adapting knowledge to new environments and story frameworks. Ong’s work in Orality and Literacy could thus usefully be taken up to discuss Ramism. But this raises another issue, which has to do with the relationship between Ong’s two books. In Orality and Literacy, Ong is careful to trace distinctions between oral, chirographic, manuscript, and print culture. In Ramus this progression is not as prominent— partly because Ong is tracking Ramus’ numerous influences in detail —and we find a more clear-cut distinction between the visile and audile worlds. Yates seems to support this observation, suggesting contra Ong that it is not the connection between Ramus and print that is important, but between Ramus and manuscript culture (230). The interconnections but also lack of fit between the two books suggests a range of fascinating questions about the impact of Ramism across different media/technological contexts, beyond print, but also the status of visualisation in both rhetorical and print cultures. References Brummett, Barry. Reading Rhetorical Theory. Fort Worth: Harcourt, 2000. Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Maras, Steven, David Sutton, and with Marion Benjamin. “Multimedia Communication: An Interdisciplinary Approach.” Information Technology, Education and Society 2.1 (2001): 25-49. Nielsen, Jakob. Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond. Boston: AP Professional, 1995. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. —. Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. New York: Octagon, 1974. The Second Annual Walter H. Annenberg Symposium. 20 March 2002. http://www.annenberg.edu/symposia/annenberg/2002/photos.php> USC Annenberg Center of Communication and USC Annenberg School for Communication. 22 March 2005. Viola, Bill. Bill Viola: The Passions. Ed. John Walsh. London: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in Association with The National Gallery, 2003. Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Maras, Steven. "Reflections on Adobe Corporation, Bill Viola, and Peter Ramus while Printing Lecture Notes." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/05-maras.php>. APA Style Maras, S. (Jun. 2005) "Reflections on Adobe Corporation, Bill Viola, and Peter Ramus while Printing Lecture Notes," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/05-maras.php>.

‘Artists are replicants who have found the secret of their obsolescence.’ (Brian Massumi) The critical reception to British writer Iain Sinclair’s most recent novel Dining on Stones (or, the Middle Ground) frequently focused on the British writer’s predilection for intertextual quotation and allusion, and more specifically, on his proclivity for integrating material from his own backlist. A survey of Dining on Stones reveals the following textual duplication: an entire short story, “View from My Window”, which was published in 2003; excerpts from a 2002 collection of poetry and prose, White Goods; material from his 1999 collaboration with artist Rachel Lichtenstein, Rodinsky’s Room; a paragraph lifted from Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A to Z, also from 1999; and scenes from 1971’s The Kodak Mantra Diaries. Moreover, the name of the narrator, Andrew Norton, is copied from an earlier Sinclair work, Slow Chocolate Autopsy. Of the six aforementioned inter-texts, only Rodinsky’s Room has had wide commercial release. The remainder are small press publications, often limited edition, difficult to find and read, which leads to the charge that Sinclair is relying on the inaccessibility of earlier texts to obscure his acts of autoplagiarism in the mass market Dining on Stones. Whatever Sinclair’s motives, his textual methodology locates a point of departure for an interrogation of textual doubling within the context of late era capitalism. At first approximation, Dining on Stones appears to belong to a postmodern literature which treats a text’s confluence, or dissonance of innumerable signifiers and systems of signification as axiomatic and intra-textually draws attention to this circumstance. Thematically, the heteroglot narrative of Dining on Stones frequently returns to the duplication of textual material. The book’s primary narrator is haunted by doubles, not least because Andrew Norton periodically functions as a textual doppelganger for Sinclair. Norton’s biography constitutes a cut-up of episodes copied from Sinclair’s personal history and experience as it is presented in his non-fiction and quasi-autobiographical poetry and prose like Lights Out for the Territory and London Orbital. Like his creator, Norton is ontologically troubled by a fetch, or two, who may or may not be the products of his writer’s imagination. He claims that someone is ‘stealing my material. He impersonated me with a flair I couldn’t hope to equal, this thief. Trickster.’ (218) A ‘disturbing’ encounter with ‘Grays’, an uncannily familiar short story by another writer Marina Fountain, reveals a second textual poacher copying Norton’s work. She hadn’t written it without help, obviously. The tone was masculine, sure of itself, its pretensions; grammatically suspect, lexicologically challenged, topographically slapdash. A slash-and-burn stylist. But haunted: by missing fathers – Bram Stoker, S. Freud and Joseph Conrad. Clunky hints… about writing and stalking, literary bloodsucking, gender, disguise. … But it was the Conrad aspect that pricked me. Fountain had somehow got wind of my researched (incomplete, unpublished) essay on Conrad in Hackney. Her exaggerated prose, its shotgun sarcasm, jump-cuts, psychotic syntax, was an offensive parody of a manner of composition I’d left behind. (167) When ‘Grays’ is later reprinted in full in the novel (141-65), it is a renamed double of a previous Sinclair piece, ‘In Train for the Estuary’ (Sinclair, White Goods, 57-75). This doubling is replicated with another Sinclair story ‘View from My Window’ also being attributed to Fountain (313-341). Neither the style, nor the content of Sinclair’s previous works have been discarded: they have been reproduced and incorporated in Dining on Stones’ retrospective of Sinclair’s earlier work. Thus, Norton’s review of Fountain’s writing as ‘a manner of composition I’d left behind’ doubles as Sinclair’s self-conscious recognition of the text as an artefact produced from diverse inter-texts – including his own. In contrast to Sinclair’s dialogic doubling, Fountain’s double is of a monologic disposition. It is mechanical ‘echopraxis,’ a neologism coined in Dining on Stones which is defined as the ‘mindless repetition of another person’s moves and gestures.’ (192) Its mercenary dimension, enacted without regard for the integrity of the inter-text, is underscored with the epithet ‘slash-and-burn stylist.’ The monologic double possesses the text, drains it of its vitality. It entails necrosis, mortification. Fountain’s appropriation of Norton’s story is close to Fredric Jameson’s characterisation of pastiche which, he says, shuts down communication between texts (202). For Jameson, pastiche is the exemplary postmodern literary ‘style’. It is inert, static, a textual aporia. Jameson’s verdict is harsh: pastiche is cannibalism, text devouring text with an appetite that corresponds to the cupidity of consumer culture. Textual cannibalism vanquishes dialogism. It is the negation of the textual Other because cannibalism is only possible when the Other no longer exists. So how does Sinclair distinguish his doubling of his own text from Fountain’s monologic doubling as it is depicted in the novel’s narrative? A clue can be detected in one of the stories stolen by Fountain. ‘In Train for the Estuary’ is a re-writing of Dracula, and takes its cue from Karl Marx’s famous analogy between capitalism and vampirism: ‘capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ (342) Sinclair’s vampire doubles as an academic (or is it the other way round?) who obsessively and compulsively stalks her quarry/object of study, Joseph Conrad. First, she had learnt Polish. Then she tracked down the letters and initiated the slow, painstaking, much-revised process of translation. She travelled. Validated herself. Being alone in an unknown city, visiting libraries, enduring and enjoying bureaucratic obfuscation, sitting in bars, going to the cinema, allowed her to try on a new identity. She initiated correspondence with people she never met. She lied. She stole from Conrad. (Sinclair, White Goods, 58) The woman’s identity is leeched from the work of Conrad. Sinclair describes unethical activity in appropriating text: lying, stealing, sucking the blood from the corpus of Conrad. A compulsive need to maintain the ‘validation’ of this poached identity emerges, manifesting itself as addiction. The addict is an extreme embodiment of the (ir)rationality of consumption: consumed by the need to consume. The woman’s lust for text is commensurate with the twin desires—blood and real estate—of her precursor, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Sinclair’s narrative of addiction doubles as a meta-critique on the compulsive desire to reproduce text and image that characterizes postmodern textualities as well as the apparatuses that produce them. The textual doubling in Dining on Stones, which is published by the multinational Penguin, seems to enact a reterritorialisation of a deterritorialised minor literature. However, Sinclair’s allegorical rewriting of the vampire legend and its subsequent inclusion in the mainstream novel’s narrative, reveal that capitalism’s doubles are simulacra in the Aristotelian sense because they are copies for which there is no original. The ostensible ‘original’ is the product of different material conditions and thus cannot be duplicated by the machinery of capitalism. The capitalist reproduction of text produced within an alternative cultural economy is an uncanny double (with an infinite capacity to be doubled over and over again) whose existence, like that of Sinclair’s academic in White Goods, is parasitical. The capitalist simulacrum necessitates that the original be destroyed, or at the very least, theorised out of existence so that restrictions based on its own premise of individual property rights can be circumvented. Postmodernism’s attendant theory is an over-determined repetition of poststructuralist tenets such as the instability of texts, the polysemous signifier and the impossibility of self as empirical subject. Images and meaning are no longer anchored, and free to be reproduced. Paradoxically, this proliferation of signification has the effect of constricting the originary text, compressing it under the burden of competing meanings, so that it is almost undetectable. Writes Brian Massumi (doubling Jean Baudrillard), ‘postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.’ The postmodern project’s effacement of the centred subject and the self has as its consequence, according to Jameson, a ‘waning of affect’ which is superseded ‘by a peculiar kind of euphoria.’ (200) The euphoria to which Jameson refers is not that of the poststructuralist textasy. Instead, it is postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, a euphoria achieved from the fusion of contradictions. Postmodernism’s doubles are a utopian attempt to synthesize antinomy and unity in a simultaneity that assimilates the fragmentation of modernity and the modern subject, with the cohesion of the commodity and its closed system of cultural logic. As such, the postmodern double is a rejection of modernist engagements with technical reproducibility. Modernism’s literary assemblages are, in Victor Shlovsky’s words, the laying bare of the device, an exposition of the seams through techniques such as collage, bricolage and montage. These linguistic (and at times visual) conjunctures of disparate elements do not attempt to elide material and thematic disjuncture. As Walter Benjamin stresses, this type of textual methodology has the potential, through the disruption of spatial and temporal logic and the creation of anachrony, to rupture the linear representations and formations of order favoured by capitalist political economies (Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’). Postmodernism, which doubles (following Jameson’s formulation) as the cultural logic of late capitalism, reiterates that texts can be undone, and then reassembled, rearticulated anew, rendered useful to a commodity culture over and over again. Consequently, postmodernism’s copies are analogous, at the level of cultural production, to capitalism’s ceaseless appropriation of discourse, practice, and production. This is the alchemical project of capitalism. It strives to transform everything that it has doubled into the gold of the commodity. The inherent dangers of unrestrained reproduction are for Jameson exemplified in the treatment of Van Gogh’s Pair of Shoes (1885): If this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation—which has vanished into the past—is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end-product, and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production. (194) Jameson’s reading of Van Gogh’s shoes reminds us of the fate of Alberto Korda’s 1960 photograph of revolutionary Che Guevara. Appropriated by the media, inscribed on T-shirts, mugs, even door mats, Che’s portrait is an emblem of the degradation Jameson describes. Like Van Gogh’s painting, Korda’s photograph was once a ‘symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production,’ saturated with the potential and spirit of revolution. Over time, the iconic image has leaked meaning. The signifying chain that anchored it to its original significance is broken each time it is reproduced and decontextualised through the process of commodification, until Che’s image is unrecognisable, a mere ornament. Refuting Benjamin’s concerns in ‘The Work of Art in its Age of Technical Reproducibility’ postmodern theory argues that technologies enabling reproducibility have led to a democratisation of text and textual production, and by extension, have liberated the multitude from a hierarchy of value that privileges the singular. Mass reproduction and the accompanying pressure for texts to be accessible results in altered attitudes regarding the preservation of intellectual property rights and ‘fair use’. In an economy of signs where use-value has become synonymous with exchange-value, then the text which has no exchange value due to it being ‘freely’ available—‘free’ in its double sense, as something exempt from restriction, or cost—can be copied without economic or ethical restraint, without permission. The quotation marks can be scrapped. According to postmodern logic, the double is a transposition with a legitimacy equalling, even rivalling the original. Clearly, Jameson’s lament that postmodernism represents ‘the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction)’ cannot escape an association with elitism because technical reproducibility indubitably enables greater access. However, the utility of technologies of reproduction to the capitalist empire of structures and signs cannot be underestimated. It enables the ceaseless reproduction of ideologemes inscribed with the logic of capitalism; in other words, it enables capitalism to reproduce itself relentlessly. Postmodern cultural production is self-aware; it acknowledges its role as commodity and reproduces the ideology of the commodity form in its material form. In this manner, it functions as an ideologeme. Sinclair’s doubles cannot be understood according to the schema of postmodernism because he subverts postmodernism’s political and aesthetic symbiosis with capitalism. Moreover, the double in Sinclair travels beyond rehearsing a self-conscious hyphology (Barthes, 39). He defies postmodernism’s occultation of the author through his reiteration of the author’s authority over their own work. In contrast to the reductive manner postmodern texts duplicate other texts, Sinclair’s texts propose a typology of the double which advocates a dialogic duplication. Sinclair’s doubling refuses postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, and its synthesis of contradictions in the service of its unified material and aesthetic program: the commodification of literature. Consequently, Dining on Stones’ textual doubling is a critique of the epistemic shift to the monologic double which Jameson claims typifies a large portion of contemporary textual duplication. References Barthes, Roland. “Theory of the Text.” Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. ––– . “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility.” Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” The Jameson Reader. Eds. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Massumi, Brian. “Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari.” 12 May 2005. http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm>. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. Trans. by Ben Fowkes. Vintage Books edition. New York: Random House, 1976. Sinclair, Iain. Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A-Z. ––– . Dining on Stones. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004. ––– . Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta 1997. ––– . London Orbital. London: Granta, 2002. ––– . Rodinsky’s Room. London: Granta, 1998. ––– . View from My Window. Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2003. ––– . White Goods. Uppingham: Goldmark, 2002. Sinclair, Iain, and Dave McKean. Slow Chocolate Autopsy. London: Phoenix, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Seale, Kirsten. "Doubling: Capitalism and Textual Duplication." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/08-seale.php>. APA Style Seale, K. (Jul. 2005) "Doubling: Capitalism and Textual Duplication," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/08-seale.php>.

Rip, mix, share, and sue. Has ‘copy’ become a dirty word? The invitation to artists, activists, consumers and critics to engage in the debate surrounding the creative processes of ‘copy’ has been insightful, if not inciting sampling/reproduction/reflection itself: It clearly questions whether ‘copy’ deserves the negative connotations that it currently summonses. It has confronted the divide between the original and its replica, and questioned notions of authenticity and the essence of identity. It has found that ‘open source’ is an opportunity to capitalise on creativity, and that reuse is resplendently productive. Cultural expression and social exchange are seen to rest upon the acts of copying which are brought to our attention in this edition. As this issue illustrates, the word ‘copy’ has numerous interpretations, applications, and angles, yet an overriding wealth of debate currently outweighs all others; and that surrounds the tumultuous issue of ‘protecting’ copyright in the digital age. Since its conception in the 17th century, copyright law has faced an increasing challenge in achieving its original aims; namely, to strike a balance between creators’ and consumers’ rights in allowing concurrent attribution and access to works. Recent dramatic technological advancements affecting reproduction and distribution of copies, particularly pertaining to the Internet, have fundamentally changed and challenged the content environment. When copyright laws were first conceived, copying and distributing creative works was difficult. Now these activities are virtually free, and practically pervasive; in the digital age, the difficulty lies in their control. Yet because the primarily Western copyright regime relies on providing rights holders with the ability to control their works, copyright industries are working on strategies to garner greater control. Heading this list of strategies are technological content protection mechanisms, consumer education, and lawsuits against individual copyright infringers. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are being exploited and sabotaged simultaneously by entities within the Creative Industries, in an attempt to learn from and eliminate the free ‘competition’. Perceiving the mismatch of legal sanction and access to enabling technologies, critics revile the increasing restriction on consumers and creativity. The music industry, in particular, is experimenting with new business models to confine consumers’ rights to enjoy a growing bank of online music. Technical protection mechanisms, within the ambit of Digital Rights Management (DRM), are increasingly applied to enforce these licensing restrictions, providing ‘speed bumps’ for access to content (Digital Connections Council of the Committee for Economic Development 50). Given that these mechanisms can only temporarily allow a limited level of control over access to and usage of content, however, both IP and contract law are essential to the prevention and deterrence of infringement. While production and distribution corporations agitate about online ‘piracy’, an increasing population of consumers are unsympathetic, knowing that very little of the music industry revenue ends up in the pockets of artists, and knowing very little of the complex law surrounding copyright. Over the past few hundred years the content distribution business has become particularly wealthy, and it is primarily this link of the content chain from creator to consumer that is tending towards redundancy in the digital networked world: those who once resided in the middle of the content chain will no longer be required. When individuals and collectives create something they are proud of, they want the world to experience and talk about it, if not ‘rip, mix, mash, and share’ it. The need to create and communicate has always been part of human makeup. Infants learn rapidly during their first few years primarily by observing and emulating the behaviour of adults. But as children progress, and begin creating what they perceive to be their unique contribution, they naturally want to claim and display it as their own; hence the importance of attribution and moral rights to this debate. Clearly, society benefits in many ways from this drive to create, innovate, communicate, learn and share contributions. One need only cite Sir Isaac Newton, who is attributed as having said, ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Academics and scientists worldwide have long collaborated by sharing and building on one another’s work, a fact acknowledged by the Science Commons initiative (http://www.sciencecommons.org/) to provide open access to academic research and development. Such has been inspired by the vision of Lawrence Lessig, as espoused in The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. Appropriation of bits and pieces (‘samples’) of another’s work, along with appropriate attribution, has always been acceptable until recently. This legal tension is explored by authors Frederick Wasser, in his article ‘When Did They Copyright the World Without Us Noticing?’, and Francis Raven, in ‘Copyright and Public Goods: An Argument for Thin Copyright Protection’. Wasser explores the recent agitation against the legislated copyright extension in the United States to 95 years from publication (or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter) from an original 14, accompanied by the changing logic of copyright, which has further upset the balance between protection and fair use, between consumer and creator, and ultimately invests power in the intermediary. Raven argues for ‘thin’ copyright protection, having the intention to protect the incentive for producers to create while also defending the public’s right to a rich intellectual realm in the public domain. Current conflict surrounding music sampling illustrates that our evolution towards a regime of restrictive licensing of digital works, largely driven by copyright owners and content distributors, has made the use of bits and pieces of existing music difficult, if not impossible. In this issue’s feature article ‘Good Copy/Bad Copy’, Steve Collins examines the value of ‘copy’ where musical creativity and copyright law intersect. The recontextualisation and reshaping of music with regard to cover versions and sampling brings into relief the disparity in current legal and licensing provisions. When creativity is stifled by copyright, the original intention of the law is lost. Collins argues that creators are now subject to the control of an oppressive monopoly, which clearly should be addressed if innovative cultural expression is to thrive. The issue’s second article, ‘The Affect of Selection in Digital Sound Art’ by author and sound artist Owen Chapman, aka ‘Opositive’, explores the interplay and influence between the ‘raw and the remixed’, where subjective control over sound production is questioned. Transformation of sound hovers between an organic and intentional process, and creates affective influence: we are ultimately entreated to listen and learn, as sampling selection goes gestalt. Moving from the aural domain to the written, the significance of textual reuse and self-referentiality is introduced by Kirsten Seale in her academic exploration of reuse in the works of Iain Sinclair. Sinclair, in Dining on Stones (or, the Middle Ground), is seen to have subverted the postmodernist obscuration/denial of authorial control through the reintroduction of an assured self-sampling technique. Also in contemplating the written creative process, after significant exposure to the ever-more-evident proclivities of students to cut and paste from Websites, Dr. Gauti Sigthorsson asserts that plagiarism is merely symptomatic of the dominant sampling culture. Rather than looming as a crisis, Sigthorsson sees this increasing appropriation as a ‘teachable moment’, illustrating the delights of the open source process. Issues of identity and authenticity are explored in ‘Digital Doppelgängers’ by Lisa Bode, and ‘Slipping and Sliding: blind optimism, greed and the effect of fakes on our cultural understanding’ by art fraud and forensic expert Robyn Sloggett. In introducing the doppelgänger of Indo-European folklore and literature as the protagonist’s sinister double, Bode goes on to explore the digital manifestation: the image which challenges the integrity of the actor and his/her reflection, where original identity may be beyond the actor’s control. In copy’s final article ‘Slipping and Sliding’ by Sloggett, the determination of artistic authenticity is explored. Identity is seen to be predicated on authenticity: but does this necessarily hold? In reflecting on the notions of ‘copy’ explored in this issue, it is clear that civilisation has progressed by building on past successes and failures. A better, richer future can be possible if we continue to do exactly this. Instead, rights holders are striving to maintain control, using clumsy methods that effectively alter traditional user rights (or perceived rights) and practices. Imagine instead if all creative content were virtually free and easily accessible to all; where it would not longer be an infringement to make and share copies for non-commercial reasons. Is it possible to engineer an alternative incentive (to copyright) for creativity to flourish? This is, after all, the underlying goal behind copyright law. Copyright law provides a creator with a temporary monopoly over the sale and distribution of their work. Infringing copyright law is consequently depriving creators of this mechanism to make money, obtain notoriety and thus their very motivation to create. This goal to provide creative incentive is fundamentally important for society, intellectually and culturally, but alternative means to achieve it are worthy of exploration. A familiar alternative option to help generate creativity is to apply a special tax (levy) on all goods and services that enable viewing, listening, reading, publishing, copying, and downloading of digital content. The revenue pool this generates is then available for distribution amongst content creators, thereby creating a financial incentive. In over 40 countries, primarily European, partial variations of such a levy system are currently used to compensate copyright owners whilst allowing consumers a certain degree of free private copying. Professor William Fisher, Hale and Dorr Professor of Intellectual Property Law at Harvard University, and Director of the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, proposes as much in his book outlining a government-administered compensation scheme, encompassing free online access to music and movies: Promises to Keep: Technology, Law and the Future of Entertainment. As we are left to contemplate copyrights and ‘copywrongs’ (Vaidhyanathan), we may reflect that the ‘promotion of the progress of science and the useful arts’, as per Harper v. Row (471 U.S.), rests with the (some say draconian) directions determined by legislation. Measures contained in instruments such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), continue to diminish, if not desecrate, the public domain. Moreover, as the full impact of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States looms for the Australian audience, in the adoption of the extension of the copyright term to the criminalisation of IP infringement, we realise that the establishment of economically viable and legal alternatives to the adopted regime is paramount. (Moore) We are also left to lament the recent decision in MGM vs. Grokster, where the US Supreme Court has ruled unanimously against the file-sharing service providers Grokster and Streamcast Networks (developers of Morpheus), serving as an illustration of ongoing uncertainty surrounding P2P networks and technologies, and lack of certainty of any court decisions regarding such matters. In the future, as we log into Longhorn (http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn/), we will wonder where our right to enjoy began to disappear. Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (http://www.eff.org/) cry to ‘Defend Freedom in the Digital World’ gains increasing resonance. In presenting ‘copy’ to you, we invite you cut, paste, innovate, create, and be entertained, to share, and share alike, while you still can. References Digital Connections Council of the Committee for Economic Development (CED). Promoting Innovation and Economic Growth: The Special Problem of Digital Intellectual Property, 2004. http://www.ced.org/docs/report/report_dcc.pdf>. Fisher, William. Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment. Palo Alto CA: Stanford UP, 2004. Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random House, 2001. Moore, Christopher. “Creative Choices: Changes to Australian Copyright Law and the Future of the Public Domain.” Media International Australia 114 (2005): 71-82. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York UP, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Leisten, Susanna, and Rachel Cobcroft. "Copy." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Leisten, S., and R. Cobcroft. (Jul. 2005) "Copy," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/01-editorial.php>.

Plagiarism is wonderfully productive. It has spawned reams of policy documents, countless ‘model essay’ Web sites selling prefab or custom-written ‘examples’ of coursework, not to mention the database software used by universities to catch their clients and anyone else whose work presents a recurrence of a previously-seen paragraph, page or whole essay. That is not all. Plagiarism hearings at schools up and down the international educational hierarchy are a veritable job-creation scheme in themselves, now that every student’s first port of call when setting out on a research journey is Google, not the nearest library. Spare a thought for the futility of these endless exercises in the means of correct training: The accused sits in front of a presiding teacher (who sometimes is the accuser, sometimes not) with one or two other faculty who act as witnesses, jury or judges, depending on the system at hand. Of course, I can’t be specific about the hearings I’ve attended, but they tend to be dismally identical: The accusation is made, the consequences listed, the evidence presented and then the accused may offer explanations, mitigating circumstances, and other arguments in his/her defence. In these circumstances, the role of plagiarist is usually performed in the voice of one of three stock-characters: The unrepentant (‘OK, you caught me, so what? Do what you like.’), the complicit (‘This is so unfair! Everybody does it.’), and the ignorant (‘I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to!’). All of them are treated as sinners, but if plagiarism is a sin, what is the temptation? Those plagiarists meeting their fate at colleges and universities across the wired world, and all the others who are getting away with it, have been tempted to dip into texts that are freely or commercially accessible online, and to snatch snippets or whole chunks of those texts to present as their own. Why? The simplest answer is the desire to complete an assignment with the least effort. However, it won’t suffice to stop there and join the inquisitors. Lazy students existed long before Web pages and search engines were invented. There is something more happening here, and it has to do with the cultural transformation of the practice of writing. Student writers are faced with a wealth of material that is, if not authorless, then at least free of the ubiquitous authorial branding of conventional publishing. This is particularly true of scholarly material, often publicly funded, sponsored by grants, and made accessible on Web sites like M/C Journal. Alternatively, there exist various ‘open source’ writing projects taking place online, in weblogs (written by individuals or teams) and collectively produced ‘wikis‘. The Wikipedia is a good example of this kind of communitarian writing project. It’s an encyclopedia which the users can modify, regulated by the corrections and changes that other users make to the previous versions of an entry. It is a text constantly subjected to new updates, add-ons and hyperlinks. This variability is characteristic of all ‘new media objects’ (Manovich 36-40), and for writing it means that the draft-stage is never over – there are only successive versions. ‘But what about reliability, the authority of the sources?’ ask the scholarly-minded among us, myself included. Excepting peer-reviewed online journals, what guarantees do we have that the material our students are referencing or copy/pasting is worth the server-space it was stored on? For that, there is a tantalising answer; namely, another kind of authority which springs from the inherent inequality of Web links. We can illustrate this by the seemingly egalitarian practice of blogging. Anyone can start a weblog, and put their (and others’) work out into the online commons. Blogs contain not just text, but also images, audio, and music – they are highly flexible media platforms. Their content is free to see, hear, copy, even tinker with (or ‘version’), so long as the user links back to the original site. The link is the crucial reward, indicating that someone thinks this site worthy of attention. This is why blogs and other avenues of open source intellectual work are seemingly egalitarian. Linkage is the currency of all online content, and the organising principle of its hierarchy: The more links to a site, the greater its authority. Google does this for web pages in general, by cataloguing them and organising search query results by the number of links to the relevant websites. In a more specific way Technorati does the same thing for weblogs, measuring the ‘authority’ of a blog by how many others link to it. Finally, Blogshares.com takes the link-currency analogy all the way, operating a market for trading ‘shares’ in blogs. The valuation of each blog depends on the combined value of incoming links, which means that if I get linked by a particularly popular blog my stock goes up. In other words, there is a great deal of prestige or social capital to be gained by putting one’s work out into the online commons if – and this is a big if – it eventually gets noticed, cited, copied, distributed, engaged with, and linked. Linkage is currency because it represents a scarce resource, the attention of people. The low opportunity cost of starting a blog and the large number of bloggers make for a highly competitive environment, if a blogger’s objective is to get noticed. Jason Kottke has provided a concise illustration of this in a short article titled ‘Weblogs and Power Laws‘, which also contains a useful list of links (what else?) to further reading. Of course, counting citations has been a commonplace measure of a scholar’s authority for a long time, but when practiced on the Web in the form of linkage the old objection to citation-statistics is still pertinent: Just because someone gets cited does not mean the citations are favourable, and it doesn’t measure the quality of the scholarship. But it does measure the ability to gain and hold the attention of readers; the ‘stickiness’ (Gladwell 89-91) of a Web site, an author, or a piece of software is what counts. This is the media-situation in which students find themselves tempted. Plagiarism, far from being some sort of Internet-borne plague on the house of education, is a symptom of an emerging mode of reading and writing as usage – as participation in the creation of a social network of texts (e.g., blogrolls, comments-sections and social bookmarks sites like del.icio.us). Learners are easily baffled by linkage. They wander between Web sites, they browse, and sometimes they copy/paste material together. And sometimes they get caught. In other words, they need to be trained to take charge of their reading, processing and writing. The pedagogical challenge is to help students to participate in all of this. If our students can easily copy/paste out of the commons of the Web, and in a pinch buy an ‘example’ to pass off as their own, are not all summative essays and term papers now suspect? Furthermore, if this means the practice of basing a student’s mark on whatever product is handed in at the end of a course is now doomed to sink under the weight of endless plagiarism hearings, then that’s good news. At least it’s good news for those of us convinced that higher education is not about depositing information in the brains of our students, but rather to help them master the necessary information-skills; that is, to collect, assess, and utilise information on their own, and to integrate it into their practice. Learning to write is a lifelong process of finding one’s own voice, wrestling with the structural constraints of the sentence, the paragraph and the form. The way to spot a plagiarist is to notice the style, but style goes beyond words. It is the signature of independent thinking, of a successfully educated person who has passed beyond mere competence in a set of skills to creatively master them by means of apprenticeship, imitation and experimentation (Dreyfus 32-49). To put this in more concrete terms, encouraging continuous process over product is a feasible tactic to discourage plagiarism and the purchase of prefab essays online, because it forces the would-be plagiarist to reverse-engineer an outline, rough draft and other precursors to the final draft. When process matters, plagiarism becomes more trouble than it is worth. This tactic belongs to a larger strategy: What is at stake here is more than simply discouraging cheating; rather, there is now an opportunity to reassert the specific values of the humanities against the ubiquitous utilitarian reduction of higher education to mere knowledge-transfer, skills-training and the granting of credentials which may or may not provide an advantage in the job market. The now-pervasive temptation to plagiarise represents a chance for teachers to privilege process over product, and to teach the ethics of credit, attribution and linkage as immanent to that process. Wikis, blogs, and the mutual link-exchanges between online producers are now the facts of life for writers who interact, collaborate, and promote their work online. These practices afford new opportunities to think through the ethical principles of the online commons, not least what it means to give credit in social rather than monetary terms: Link and you shall be linked back to. References Dreyfus, Hubert. On the Internet. London: Routledge, 2001. Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2000. Kottke, Jason. “Weblogs and Power Laws.” Kottke.org. 15 Jun. 2005 http://www.kottke.org/03/02/weblogs-and-power-laws>. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Sigthorsson, Gauti. "Copy/Paste: The Joys of Plagiarism." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/04-sigthorsson.php>. APA Style Sigthorsson, G. (Jul. 2005) "Copy/Paste: The Joys of Plagiarism," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/04-sigthorsson.php>.

In a light-speed economy of communication, the only thing that moves faster than information is imagination. And in a time when, more than ever before, information is the currency of global politics, economics, conflict, and conquest what better way to critique and crinkle the global-social than to combine the two - information and imagination - into an hilarious mockery of, and a brief incursion into the vistas of the globalitarian order. This is precisely the reflexive and rhetorical pot-pourri that the group 'the Yes Men' (www.theyesmen.org) have formed. Beginning in 2000, the Yes Men describe themselves as a "network of impostors". Basically, the Yes Men (no they're not all men) fool organisations into believing they are representatives of the WTO (World Trade Organisation) and in-turn receive, and accept, invitations to speak (as WTO representatives) at conferences, meetings, seminars, and all manner and locale of corporate pow-wows. At these meetings, the Yes Men deliver their own very special brand of WTO public address. Let's walk through a hypothetical situation. Ashley is organising a conference for a multinational adult entertainment company, at which the management might discuss ways in which it could cut costs from its dildo manufacturing sector by moving production to Indonesia where labour is cheap and tax non-existent (for some), rubber is in abundance, and where the workers hands are slender enough so as to make even the "slimline-tickler" range appear gushingly large in annual report photographs. Ashley decides that a presentation from Supachai Panitchpakdi - head of the WTO body - on the virtues of unrestrained capitalism would be a great way to start the conference, and to build esprit de corps among participants - to summon some good vibrations, if you will. So Ashley jumps on the net. After the obligatory four hours of trying to close the myriad porn site pop-ups that plague internet users of the adult entertainment industry, Ashley comes across the WTO site - or at least what looks like the WTO site - and, via the email link, goes about inviting Supachai Panitchpakdi to speak at the conference. What Ashley doesn't realise is that the site is a mirror site of the actual WTO site. This is not, however, grounds for Ashley's termination because it is only after careful and timely scrutiny that you can tell the difference - and in a hypercapitalist economy who has got time to carefully scrutinize? You see, the Yes Men own the domain name www.gatt.org (GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]being the former, not so formalised and globally sanctioned incarnation of the WTO), so in the higgledy-piggeldy cross-referencing infosphere of the internet, and its economy of keywords, unsuspecting WTO fans often find themselves perusing the Yes Men site. The Yes Men are sirens in both senses of the word. They raise alarm to rampant corporatism; and they sing the tunes of corporatism to lure their victims – they signal and seduce. The Yes Men are pull marketers, as opposed to the push tactics of logo based activism, and this is what takes them beyond logoism and its focus on the brand bullies. During the few years the Yes Men have been operating their ingenious rhetorical realignment of the WTO, they have pulled off some of the most golden moments in tactical media’s short history. In May 2002, after accepting an email invitation from conference organisers, the Yes Men hit an accountancy conference in Sydney. In his keynote speech, yes man Andy Bichlbaum announced that as of that day the WTO had decided to "effect a cessation of all operations, to be accomplished over a period of four months, culminating in September". He announced that "the WTO will reintegrate as a new trade body whose charter will be to ensure that trade benefits the poor" (ref). The shocking news hit a surprisingly receptive audience and even sparked debate in the floor of the Canadian Parliament where questions were asked by MP John Duncan about "what impact this will have on our appeals on lumber, agriculture, and other ongoing trade disputes". The Certified Practicing Accountants (CPA) Australia reported that [t]he changes come in response to recent studies which indicate strongly that the current free trade rules and policies have increased poverty, pollution, and inequality, and have eroded democratic principles, with a disproportionatly large negative effect on the poorest countries (CPA: 2002) In another Yes Men assault, this time at a Finnish textiles conference, yes man Hank Hardy Unruh gave a speech (in stead of the then WTO head Mike Moore) arguing that the U.S. civil war (in which slavery became illegal) was a useless waste of time because the system of imported labour (slavery) has been supplanted now by a system of remote labour (sweatshops)- instead of bringing the "labour" to the dildos via ships from Africa, now we can take the dildos to the "labour", or more precisely, the idea of a dildo - or in biblical terms - take the mount'em to Mohammed, Mhemmet, or Ming. Unruh meandered through his speech to the usual complicit audience, happy to accept his bold assertions in the coma-like stride of a conference delegate, that is, until he ripped off his business suit (with help from an accomplice) to reveal a full-body golden leotard replete with a giant golden phallus which he proceeded to inflate with the aid of a small gas canister. He went on to describe to the audience that the suit, dubbed "the management leisure suit", was a new innovation in the remote labour control field. He informed the textiles delegates that located in the end of the phallus was a small video interface through which one could view workers in the Third World and administer, by remote control, electric shocks to those employees not working hard enough. Apparently after the speech only one objection was forwarded and that was from a woman who complained that the phallus device was not appropriate because not only men can oppress workers in the third world. It is from the complicity of their audiences that the Yes Men derive their most virulent critique. They point out that the "aim is to get people to think more seriously about the sort of bullshit they are prepared to swallow, if and when the information comes from a suitably respected authority. By appearing, for example, in the name of the WTO, one could even make out a case for justifying homicide, irrespective of the target audience's training and intellect" (Yes men) Unruh says. And this is the real statement that the Yes Men make, their real-life, real-time theatre hollows-out the signifer of the WTO and injects its own signified to highlight the predominant role of language - rhetoric - in the globalising of the ideas of neo-liberalism. In speaking shit and having people, nay, experts, swallow it comfortably, the Yes Men punctuate that globalisation is as much a movement of ideas across societies as it is a movement of things through societies. It is a movement of ideals - a movement of meanings. Organisations like the WTO propagate these meanings, and propagandise a situation where there is no alternative to initiatives like free trade and the top-down, repressive regime espoused buy neoliberal triumphalists. The Yes Men highlight that the seemingly immutable and inevitable charge of neoliberalism, is in fact simply the dominance of a single way of structuring social life - one dictated by the market. Through their unique brand of semiotic puppetry, the Yes Men show that the project of unelected treaty organisations like the WTO and their push toward the globalisation of neoliberalism is not inevitable, it is not a fait accompli, but rather, that their claims of an inexorable movement toward a neo-liberal capitalism are simply more rhetorical than real. By using the spin and speak of the WTO to suggest ideas like forcing the world's poor to recycle hamburgers to cure world hunger, the Yes Men demonstrate that the power of the WTO lies on the tip of their tongue, and their ability to convince people the world over of the unquestionable legitimacy of that tongue-tip teetering power. But it is that same power that has threatened the future of the Yes Men. In November 2001, the owners of the gatt.org website received a call from the host of its webpage, Verio. The WTO had contacted Verio and asked them to shut down the gatt.org site for copyright violations. But the Yes Men came up with their own response - they developed software that is freely available and which allows the user to mirror any site on the internet easily. Called "Reamweaver", the software allows the user to instantly "funhouse-mirror" anyone's website, copying the real-time "look and feel" but letting the user change any words, images, etc. that they choose. The thought of anyone being able to mimic any site on the internet is perhaps a little scary - especially in terms of e-commerce - imagine that "lizard-tongue belly button tickler" never arriving! Or thinking you had invited a bunch of swingers over to your house via a swingers website, only to find that you'd been duped by a rogue gang of fifteen tax accountants who had come to your house to give you a lecture on the issues associated with the inclusion of pro-forma information in preliminary announcements in East Europe 1955-1958. But seriously, I'm yet to critique the work of the Yes Men. Their brand of protest has come under fire most predictably from the WTO, and least surprisingly from their duped victims. But, really, in an era where the neo-liberal conservative right dominate the high-end operations of sociality, I am reticent to say a bad word about the Yes Men's light, creative, and refreshing style of dissent. I can hear the "free speech" cry coming from those who'd charge the Yes Men with denying their victims the right to freely express their ideas - and I suppose they are correct. But can supra-national institutions like the WTO and their ilk really complain about the Yes Men’s infringement on their rights to a fair communicative playing field when daily they ride rough-shod over the rights of people and the people-defined "rights" of all else with which we share this planet? This is a hazardous junction for the dissent of the Yes Men because it is a point at which personal actions collide head-on with social ethics. The Yes Men’s brand of dissent is a form of direct action, and like direct action, the emphasis is on putting physical bodies between the oppressor and the oppressed – in this case between the subaltern and the supra-national. The Yes Men put their bodies between and within bodies – they penetrate the veneer of the brand to crawl around inside and mess with the mind of the host company body. Messing with anybody’s body is going to be bothersome. But while corporations enjoy the “rights” of embodied citizens, they are spared from the consequences citizens must endure. Take Worldcom’s fraudulent accounting (the biggest in US history) for instance, surely such a monumental deception necessitates more than a USD500 million fine. When will “capital punishment” be introduced to apply to corporations? As in “killing off” the corporation and all its articles of association? Such inconsistencies in the citizenry praxis of corporations paint a pedestrian crossing at the junction where “body” activism meets the ethic (right?) of unequivocal free-speech for all – and when we factor-in crippling policies like structural adjustment, the ethically hazardous junction becomes shadowed by a glorious pedestrian overpass! Where logocentric activism literally concentrates on the apparel – the branded surface - the focus of groups like the Yes Men is on the body beneath – both corporate and corporeal. But are the tactics of the Yes Men enough? Does this step beyond logocentric focused activism wade into the territory of substantive change? Of course the answer is a resounding no. The Yes Men are culture jammers - and culture jamming exists in the realm of ephemera. It asks a question, for a fleeting moment in the grand scheme of struggle, and then fades away. Fetishising the tactics of the Yes Men risks steering dissent into a form of entertainment - much like the entertainmentised politics it opposes. What the Yes Men do is creative and skilful, but it does not express the depth of commitment displayed by those activists working tirelessly on myriad - less-glamorous - campaigns such as the free West Papua movement, and other broader issues of social activism like indigenous rights. If politics is entertainment, then the politics of the Yes Men celebrates the actor while ignoring the hard work of the production team. But having said that, I believe the Yes Men serve an important function in the complex mechanics of dissent. They are but one tactic - they cannot be expected to work with history, they exist in the moment, a transitory trance of reason. And provided the Yes Men continue to use their staged opportunities as platforms to suggest BETTER IDEAS, while also acknowledging the depth and complexity of the subject matter with which they deal, then their brand of protest is valid and effective. The Yes Men ride the cusp of a new style of contemporary social protest, and the more people who likewise use imagination to counter the globalitarian regime and its commodity logic, the better. Through intelligent satire and deft use of communication technologies, the Yes Men lay bare the internal illogic (in terms of human and ecological wellbeing) of the fetishistic charge to cut costs at all costs. Thank-Gatt for the Yes Men, the chastisers of the global eco-social pimps. Works Cited CPA. (2002). World Trade Organisation to Redefine Charter. http://theyesmen.org/tro/cpa.html Yes Men: http://theyesmen.org/ * And thanks to Phil Graham for the “capital punishment” idea. Links http://theyesmen.org/ http://theyesmen.org/tro/cpa.html http://www.gatt.org http://www.theyesmen.org/ Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Pace, John. "The Yes Men" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/05-yesmen.php>. APA Style Pace, J. (2003, Jun 19). The Yes Men. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/05-yesmen.php>

It is the same spectacle all over the Western world: whenever delegates gather to discuss the development and consequences of new media technologies, a handful of people among them will stand out from the crowd, and somehow seem not quite to fit in with the remaining assortment of techno-evangelists, Internet ethnographers, multimedia project leaders, and online culture critics. At some point in the proceedings, they'll get to the podium and hold a talk on their ideas for the future of copyright protection and intellectual property (IP) rights in the information age; when they are finished, the reactions of the audience typically range from mild "what was that all about?" amusement to sheer "they haven't got a clue" disbelief. Spare a thought for copyright lawyers; they're valiantly fighting a losing battle. Ever since the digitalisation and networking of our interpersonal and mass media made information transmission and duplication effortless and instantaneous, they've been trying to come up with ways to uphold and enforce concepts of copyright which are fundamentally linked to information as bound to physical objects (artifacts, books, CDs, etc.), as Barlow has demonstrated so clearly in "Selling Wine without Bottles". He writes that "copyright worked well because, Gutenberg notwithstanding, it was hard to make a book. ... Books had material surfaces to which one could attach copyright notices, publisher's marques, and price tags". If you could control the physical media which were used to transmit information (paper, books, audio and video tapes, as well as radio and TV sets, or access to cable systems), you could control who made copies when and where, and at what price. This only worked as long as the technology to make copies was similarly scarce, though: as soon as most people learnt to write, or as faxes and photocopiers became cheaper, the only real copyright protection books had was the effort that would have to be spent to copy them. With technology continuously advancing (perhaps even at accellerating pace), copyright is soon becoming a legal fiction that is losing its link to reality. Indeed, we are now at a point where we have the opportunity -- the necessity, even -- to shift the fictional paradigm, to replace the industrial-age fiction of protective individual copyright with an information-age fiction of widespread intellectual cooperation. As it becomes ever easier to bypass and ignore copyright rules, and as copyright thus becomes ever more illusionary, this new fiction will correspondingly come ever closer to being realised. To Protect and to ... Lose Today, the lawyers' (and their corporate employers') favourite weapon in their fight against electronic copyright piracy are increasingly elaborate protection mechanisms -- hidden electronic signatures to mark intellectual property, electronic keys to unlock copyrighted products only for legitimate users (and sometimes only for a fixed amount of time or after certain licence payments), encryption of sensitive information, or of entire products to prevent electronic duplication. While the encryption of information exchanges between individuals has been proven to be a useful deterrent against all but the most determined of hackers, it's interesting to note that practically no electronic copyright protection mechanism of mass market products has ever been seen to work. However good and elaborate the protection efforts, it seems that as long as there is a sufficient number of interested consumers unwilling to pay for legitimate access, copy protections will be cracked eventually: the rampant software piracy is the best example. On the other hand, where copy protections become too elaborate and cumbersome, they end up killing the product they are meant to protect: this is currently happening in the case of some of the pay-per-view or limited-plays protection schemes forced upon the U.S. market for Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs). The eventual failure of such mechanisms isn't a particularly recent observation, even. When broadcast radio was first introduced in Australia in 1923, it was proposed that programme content should be protected (and stations financed) by fixing radio receivers to a particular station's frequency -- by buying such a 'sealed set' receiver you would in effect subscribe to a station and acquire the right to receive the content it provided. Never known as uninventive, those Australians who this overprotectiveness didn't completely put off buying a receiver (radio was far from being a proven mass medium at the time, after all) did of course soon break the seal, and learnt to adjust the frequency to try out different stations -- or they built their own radios from scratch. The 'sealed set' scheme was abandoned after only nine months. Even with the development of copy protection schemes since the 1920s, a full (or at least sufficiently comprehensive) protection of intellectual property seems as unattainable a fiction as it was then. Protection and copying technology are never far apart in development anyway, but even more fundamentally, the protected products are eventually meant to be used, after all. No matter how elaborately protected a CD, a video, or a computer programme is, it will still have to be converted into sound waves, image information, or executable code, and at that level copying will still remain possible. In the absence of workable copy protection, however, copies will be made in large amounts -- even more so since information is now being spread and multiplied around the globe virtually at the speed of light. Against this tide of copies, any attempts to use legislation to at least force the payment of royalties from illegitimate users are also becoming increasingly futile. While there may be a few highly publicised court cases, the multitude of small transgressions will remain unanswered. This in turn undermines the equality before the law that is a basic human right: increasingly, the few that are punished will be able to argue that, if "everybody does it", to single them out is highly unfair. At the same time, corporate efforts to uphold the law may be counterproductive: as Barlow writes, "against the swift tide of custom, the Software Publishers' current practice of hanging a few visible scapegoats is so obviously capricious as to only further diminish respect for the law". Quite simply, their legal costs may not be justified by the results anymore. Abandoning Copyright Law If copyright has become a fiction, however -- one that is still, despite all evidence, posited as reality by the legal system --, and if the makeup of today's electronic media, particularly the Internet, allow that fiction to be widely ignored and circumvented in daily practice -- despite all corporate legal efforts --, how is this disparity between law and reality to be solved? Barlow offers a clear answer: "whenever there is such profound divergence between the law and social practice, it is not society that adapts". He goes on to state that it may well be that when the current system of intellectual property law has collapsed, as seems inevitable, that no new legal structure will arise in its place. But something will happen. After all, people do business. When a currency becomes meaningless, business is done in barter. When societies develop outside the law, they develop their own unwritten codes, practices, and ethical systems. While technology may undo law, technology offers methods for restoring creative rights. When William Gibson invented the term 'cyberspace', he described it as a "consensual hallucination" (67). As the removal of copyright to the realm of the fictional has been driven largely by the Internet and its 'freedom of information' ethics, perhaps it is apt to speak of a new approach to intellectual property (or, with Barlow, to 'creative rights') as one of consensual, collaborative use of such property. This approach is far from being fully realised yet, and must so for now remain fiction, too, but it is no mere utopian vision -- in various places, attempts are made to put into place consensual schemes of dealing with intellectual property. They also represent a move from IP hoarding to IP use. Raymond speaks of the schemes competing here as the 'cathedral' and the 'bazaar' system. In the cathedral system, knowledge is tightly controlled, and only the finished product, "carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation" (1), is ever released. This corresponds to traditional copyright approaches, where company secrets are hoarded and locked away (sometimes only in order to keep competitors from using them), and breaches punished severely. The bazaar system, on the other hand, includes the entire community of producers and users early on in the creative process, up to the point of removing the producer/user dichotomy altogether: "no quiet, reverent cathedral-building here -- rather, ... a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches ... out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles", as Raymond admits (1). The Linux 'Miracle' Raymond writes about one such bazaar-system project which provides impressive proof that the approach can work, however: the highly acclaimed Unix-based operating system Linux. Instigated and organised by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds, this enthusiast-driven, Internet-based development project has achieved more in less than a decade than what many corporate developers (Microsoft being the obvious example) can do in thrice that time, and with little financial incentive or institutional support at that. As Raymond describes, "the Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximise utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could achieve" (10). Thus, while there is no doubt that individual participants will eventually always also be driven by selfish reasons, there is collaboration towards the achievement of communal goals, and a consensus about what those goals are: "while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which bug-spotting and improvements get done by hundreds of people" (Raymond 10). It is obvious that such collaborative projects need a structure that allows for the immediate participation of a large community, and so in the same way that the Internet has been instrumental in dismantling traditional copyright systems, it is also a driving factor in making these new approaches possible: "Linux was the first project to make a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool. I don't think it's a coincidence that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993-1994 that saw the takeoff of the ISP industry and the explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet. Linus was the first person who learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet made possible" (Raymond 10). While some previous collaborative efforts exist (such as shareware schemes, which have existed ever since the advent of programmable home computers), their comparatively limited successes underline the importance of a suitable communication medium. The success of Linux has now begun to affect corporate structures, too: informational material for the Mozilla project, in fact, makes direct reference to the Linux experience. On the Net, Mozilla is as big as it gets -- instituted to continue development of Netscape Communicator-based Web browsers following Netscape's publication of the Communicator source code, it poses a serious threat to Microsoft's push (the legality of which is currently under investigation in the U.S.) to increase marketshare for its Internet Explorer browser. Much like Linux, Mozilla will be a collaborative effort: "we intend to delegate authority over the various modules to the people most qualified to make decisions about them. We intend to operate as a meritocracy: the more good code you contribute, the more responsibility you will be given. We believe that to be the only way to continue to remain relevant, and to do the greatest good for the greatest number" ("Who Is Mozilla.org?"), with the Netscape corporation only one among that number, and a contributor amongst many. Netscape itself intends to release browsers based on the Mozilla source code, with some individual proprietary additions and the benefits corporate structures allow (printed manuals, helplines, and the like), but -- so it seems -- it is giving up its unlimited hold over the course of development of the browser. Such actions afford an almost prophetic quality to Barlow's observation that "familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be the case that the best thing you can do to raise the demand for your product is to give it away". The use of examples from the computer world should not be seen to mean that the consensual, collaborative use of intellectual property suggested here is limited only to software -- it is, however, no surprise that a computer-based medium would first be put to use to support computer-based development projects. Producers and artists from other fields can profit from networking with their peers and clients just as much: artists can stay in touch with their audience and one another, working on collaborative projects such as the brilliant Djam Karet CD Collaborator (see Taylor's review in Gibraltar), professional interest groups can exchange information about the latest developments in their field as well as link with the users of their products to find out about their needs or problems, and the use of the Net as a medium of communication for academic researchers was one of its first applications, of course. In many such cases, consensual collaboration would even speed up the development process and help iron out remaining glitches, beating the efforts of traditional institutions with their severely guarded intellectual property rights. As Raymond sees it, for example, "no commercial developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem", and so "perhaps in the end the free-software culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software 'hoarding' is morally wrong ... , but simply because the commercial world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with free-software communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem" (10). Realising the Fiction There remains the problem that even the members of such development communities must make a living somehow -- a need to which their efforts in the community not only don't contribute, but the pursuit of which even limits the time available for the community efforts. The apparent impossibility of reconciling these two goals has made the consensual collaborative approach appear little more than a utopian fiction so far, individual successes like Linux or (potentially) Mozilla notwithstanding. However, there are ways of making money from the communal work even if due to the abolition of copyright laws mere royalty payments are impossible -- as the example of Netscape's relation to the Mozilla project shows, the added benefits that corporate support can bring will still seem worth paying for, for many users. Similarly, while music and artwork may be freely available on the Net, many music fans will still prefer to get the entire CD package from a store rather than having to burn the CD and print the booklet themselves. The changes to producer/user relations suggested here do have severe implications for corporate and legal structures, however, and that is the central reason why particularly the major corporate intellectual property holders (or, hoarders) and their armies of lawyers are engaged in such a fierce defensive battle. Needless to say, the changeover from the still-powerful fiction of enforcible intellectual property copyrights to the new vision of open, consensual collaboration that gives credit for individual contributions, but has no concept of an exclusive ownership of ideas, will not take place overnight. Intellectual property will continue to be guarded, trade secrets will keep being kept, for some time yet, but -- just as is the case with the established practice of patenting particular ideas just so competitors can't use them, but without ever putting them to use in one's own work -- eventually such efforts will prove to be self-defeating. Shutting one's creative talents off in a quiet cathedral will come to be seen as less productive than engaging in the creative cooperation occuring in the global bazaar, and solitary directives of central executives will be replaced by consensual decisions of the community of producers and users. As Raymond points out, "this is not to say that individual vision and brilliance will no longer matter; rather, ... the cutting edge ... will belong to people who start from individual vision and brilliance, then amplify it through the effective construction of voluntary communities of interest" (10). Such communal approaches may to some seem much like communism, but this, too, is a misconception. In fact, in this new system there is much more exchange, much more give and take going on than in the traditional process of an exchange of money for product between user and producer -- only the currency has changed. "This explains much of the collective 'volunteer' work which fills the archives, newsgroups, and databases of the Internet. Its denizens are not working for 'nothing,' as is widely believed. Rather they are getting paid in something besides money. It is an economy which consists almost entirely of information" (Barlow). And with the removal of the many barriers to the free flow of information and obstacles to scientific and artistic development that traditional copyright has created, the progress of human endeavour itself is likely to be sped up. In the end, then, it all comes down to what fictions we choose to believe or reject. In the light of recent developments, and considering the evidence that suggests the viability, even superiority of alternative approaches, it is becoming increasingly hard to believe that traditional copyright can, and much less, should be sustained. Other than the few major copyright holders, few stand to gain from upholding these rights. On the other hand, were we to lift copyright restrictions and use the ideas and information thus made available freely in a cooperative, consensual, and most of all productive way, we all might profit. As various projects have shown, that fiction is already in the process of being realised. References Barlow, John Perry. "Selling Wine without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net." 1993. 26 Jan. 1999 <www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/idea_economy_article.php>. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins, 1984. Raymond, Eric S. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." 1998. 26 Jan. 1999 <http://www.redhat.com/redhat/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar.php>. Taylor, Mike. "Djam Karet, Jeff Greinke, Tim Song Jones, Nick Peck, Kit Watkins." Gibraltar 5.12 (22 Apr. 1995). 10 Feb. 1999 <http://www.progrock.net/gibraltar/issues/Vol5.Iss12.htm>. "Who Is Mozilla.org?" Mozilla.org Website. 1998. 26 Jan. 1999 <http://www.mozilla.org/about.php>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "The Fiction of Copyright: Towards a Consensual Use of Intellectual Property." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "The Fiction of Copyright: Towards a Consensual Use of Intellectual Property," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 1 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (1999) The fiction of copyright: towards a consensual use of intellectual property. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php> ([your date of access]).

On May 18, 2003, the Australian Minister for Education, Brendon Nelson, appeared on the Channel Nine Sunday programme. The Yoda of political journalism, Laurie Oakes, attacked him personally and professionally. He disclosed to viewers that the Minister for Education, Science and Training had suffered a false start in his education, enrolling in one semester of an economics degree that was never completed. The following year, he commenced a medical qualification and went on to become a practicing doctor. He did not pay fees for any of his University courses. When reminded of these events, Dr Nelson became agitated, and revealed information not included in the public presentation of the budget of that year, including a ‘cap’ on HECS-funded places of five years for each student. He justified such a decision with the cliché that Australia’s taxpayers do not want “professional students completing degree after degree.” The Minister confirmed that the primary – and perhaps the only – task for university academics was to ‘train’ young people for the workforce. The fact that nearly 50% of students in some Australian Universities are over the age of twenty five has not entered his vision. He wanted young people to complete a rapid degree and enter the workforce, to commence paying taxes and the debt or loan required to fund a full fee-paying place. Now – nearly two years after this interview and with the Howard government blessed with a new mandate – it is time to ask how this administration will order education and value teaching and learning. The curbing of the time available to complete undergraduate courses during their last term in office makes plain the Australian Liberal Government’s stance on formal, publicly-funded lifelong learning. The notion that a student/worker can attain all required competencies, skills, attributes, motivations and ambitions from a single degree is an assumption of the new funding model. It is also significant to note that while attention is placed on the changing sources of income for universities, there have also been major shifts in the pattern of expenditure within universities, focusing on branding, marketing, recruitment, ‘regional’ campuses and off-shore courses. Similarly, the short-term funding goals of university research agendas encourage projects required by industry, rather than socially inflected concerns. There is little inevitable about teaching, research and education in Australia, except that the Federal Government will not create a fully-funded model for lifelong learning. The task for those of us involved in – and committed to – education in this environment is to probe the form and rationale for a (post) publicly funded University. This short paper for the ‘order’ issue of M/C explores learning and teaching within our current political and economic order. Particularly, I place attention on the synergies to such an order via phrases like the knowledge economy and the creative industries. To move beyond the empty promises of just-in-time learning, on-the-job training, graduate attributes and generic skills, we must reorder our assumptions and ask difficult questions of those who frame the context in which education takes place. For the term of your natural life Learning is a big business. Whether discussing the University of the Third Age, personal development courses, self help bestsellers or hard-edged vocational qualifications, definitions of learning – let alone education – are expanding. Concurrent with this growth, governments are reducing centralized funding and promoting alternative revenue streams. The diversity of student interests – or to use the language of the time, client’s learning goals – is transforming higher education into more than the provision of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. The expansion of the student body beyond the 18-25 age group and the desire to ‘service industry’ has reordered the form and purpose of formal education. The number of potential students has expanded extraordinarily. As Lee Bash realized Today, some estimates suggest that as many as 47 percent of all students enrolled in higher education are over 25 years old. In the future, as lifelong learning becomes more integrated into the fabric of our culture, the proportion of adult students is expected to increase. And while we may not yet realize it, the academy is already being transformed as a result. (35) Lifelong learning is the major phrase and trope that initiates and justifies these changes. Such expansive economic opportunities trigger the entrepreneurial directives within universities. If lifelong learning is taken seriously, then the goals, entry standards, curriculum, information management policies and assessments need to be challenged and changed. Attention must be placed on words and phrases like ‘access’ and ‘alternative entry.’ Even more consideration must be placed on ‘outcomes’ and ‘accountability.’ Lifelong learning is a catchphrase for a change in purpose and agenda. Courses are developed from a wide range of education providers so that citizens can function in, or at least survive, the agitation of the post-work world. Both neo-liberal and third way models of capitalism require the labeling and development of an aspirational class, a group who desires to move ‘above’ their current context. Such an ambiguous economic and social goal always involves more than the vocational education and training sector or universities, with the aim being to seamlessly slot education into a ‘lifestyle.’ The difficulties with this discourse are two-fold. Firstly, how effectively can these aspirational notions be applied and translated into a real family and a real workplace? Secondly, does this scheme increase the information divide between rich and poor? There are many characteristics of an effective lifelong learner including great personal motivation, self esteem, confidence and intellectual curiosity. In a double shifting, change-fatigued population, the enthusiasm for perpetual learning may be difficult to summon. With the casualization of the post-Fordist workplace, it is no surprise that policy makers and employers are placing the economic and personal responsibility for retraining on individual workers. Instead of funding a training scheme in the workplace, there has been a devolving of skill acquisition and personal development. Through the twentieth century, and particularly after 1945, education was the track to social mobility. The difficulty now – with degree inflation and the loss of stable, secure, long-term employment – is that new modes of exclusion and disempowerment are being perpetuated through the education system. Field recognized that “the new adult education has been embraced most enthusiastically by those who are already relatively well qualified.” (105) This is a significant realization. Motivation, meta-learning skills and curiosity are increasingly being rewarded when found in the already credentialed, empowered workforce. Those already in work undertake lifelong learning. Adult education operates well for members of the middle class who are doing well and wish to do better. If success is individualized, then failure is also cast on the self, not the social system or policy. The disempowered are blamed for their own conditions and ‘failures.’ The concern, through the internationalization of the workforce, technological change and privatization of national assets, is that failure in formal education results in social exclusion and immobility. Besides being forced into classrooms, there are few options for those who do not wish to learn, in a learning society. Those who ‘choose’ not be a part of the national project of individual improvement, increased market share, company competitiveness and international standards are not relevant to the economy. But there is a personal benefit – that may have long term political consequences – from being ‘outside’ society. Perhaps the best theorist of the excluded is not sourced from a University, but from the realm of fictional writing. Irvine Welsh, author of the landmark Trainspotting, has stated that What we really need is freedom from choice … People who are in work have no time for anything else but work. They have no mental space to accommodate anything else but work. Whereas people who are outside the system will always find ways of amusing themselves. Even if they are materially disadvantaged they’ll still find ways of coping, getting by and making their own entertainment. (145-6) A blurring of work and learning, and work and leisure, may seem to create a borderless education, a learning framework uninhibited by curriculum, assessment or power structures. But lifelong learning aims to place as many (national) citizens as possible in ‘the system,’ striving for success or at least a pay increase which will facilitate the purchase of more consumer goods. Through any discussion of work-place training and vocationalism, it is important to remember those who choose not to choose life, who choose something else, who will not follow orders. Everybody wants to work The great imponderable for complex economic systems is how to manage fluctuations in labour and the market. The unstable relationship between need and supply necessitates flexibility in staffing solutions, and short-term supplementary labour options. When productivity and profit are the primary variables through which to judge successful management, then the alignments of education and employment are viewed and skewed through specific ideological imperatives. The library profession is an obvious occupation that has confronted these contradictions. It is ironic that the occupation that orders knowledge is experiencing a volatile and disordered workplace. In the past, it had been assumed that librarians hold a degree while technicians do not, and that technicians would not be asked to perform – unsupervised – the same duties as librarians. Obviously, such distinctions are increasingly redundant. Training packages, structured through competency-based training principles, have ensured technicians and librarians share knowledge systems which are taught through incremental stages. Mary Carroll recognized the primary questions raised through this change. If it is now the case that these distinctions have disappeared do we need to continue to draw them between professional and para-professional education? Does this mean that all sectors of the education community are in fact learning/teaching the same skills but at different levels so that no unique set of skills exist? (122) With education reduced to skills, thereby discrediting generalist degrees, the needs of industry have corroded the professional standards and stature of librarians. Certainly, the abilities of library technicians are finally being valued, but it is too convenient that one of the few professions dominated by women has suffered a demeaning of knowledge into competency. Lifelong learning, in this context, has collapsed high level abilities in information management into bite sized chunks of ‘skills.’ The ideology of lifelong learning – which is rarely discussed – is that it serves to devalue prior abilities and knowledges into an ever-expanding imperative for ‘new’ skills and software competencies. For example, ponder the consequences of Hitendra Pillay and Robert Elliott’s words: The expectations inherent in new roles, confounded by uncertainty of the environment and the explosion of information technology, now challenge us to reconceptualise human cognition and develop education and training in a way that resonates with current knowledge and skills. (95) Neophilliacal urges jut from their prose. The stress on ‘new roles,’ and ‘uncertain environments,’ the ‘explosion of information technology,’ ‘challenges,’ ‘reconceptualisations,’ and ‘current knowledge’ all affirms the present, the contemporary, and the now. Knowledge and expertise that have taken years to develop, nurture and apply are not validated through this educational brief. The demands of family, work, leisure, lifestyle, class and sexuality stretch the skin taut over economic and social contradictions. To ease these paradoxes, lifelong learning should stress pedagogy rather than applications, and context rather than content. Put another way, instead of stressing the link between (gee wizz) technological change and (inevitable) workplace restructuring and redundancies, emphasis needs to be placed on the relationship between professional development and verifiable technological outcomes, rather than spruiks and promises. Short term vocationalism in educational policy speaks to the ordering of our public culture, requiring immediate profits and a tight dialogue between education and work. Furthering this logic, if education ‘creates’ employment, then it also ‘creates’ unemployment. Ironically, in an environment that focuses on the multiple identities and roles of citizens, students are reduced to one label – ‘future workers.’ Obviously education has always been marinated in the political directives of the day. The industrial revolution introduced a range of technical complexities to the workforce. Fordism necessitated that a worker complete a task with precision and speed, requiring a high tolerance of stress and boredom. Now, more skills are ‘assumed’ by employers at the time that workplaces are off-loading their training expectations to the post-compulsory education sector. Therefore ‘lifelong learning’ is a political mask to empower the already empowered and create a low-level skill base for low paid workers, with the promise of competency-based training. Such ideologies never need to be stated overtly. A celebration of ‘the new’ masks this task. Not surprisingly therefore, lifelong learning has a rich new life in ordering creative industries strategies and frameworks. Codifying the creative The last twenty years have witnessed an expanding jurisdiction and justification of the market. As part of Tony Blair’s third way, the creative industries and the knowledge economy became catchwords to demonstrate that cultural concerns are not only economically viable but a necessity in the digital, post-Fordist, information age. Concerns with intellectual property rights, copyright, patents, and ownership of creative productions predominate in such a discourse. Described by Charles Leadbeater as Living on Thin Air, this new economy is “driven by new actors of production and sources of competitive advantage – innovation, design, branding, know-how – which are at work on all industries.” (10) Such market imperatives offer both challenges and opportunity for educationalists and students. Lifelong learning is a necessary accoutrement to the creative industries project. Learning cities and communities are the foundations for design, music, architecture and journalism. In British policy, and increasingly in Queensland, attention is placed on industry-based research funding to address this changing environment. In 2000, Stuart Cunningham and others listed the eight trends that order education, teaching and learning in this new environment. The Changes to the Provision of Education Globalization The arrival of new information and communication technologies The development of a knowledge economy, shortening the time between the development of new ideas and their application. The formation of learning organizations User-pays education The distribution of knowledge through interactive communication technologies (ICT) Increasing demand for education and training Scarcity of an experienced and trained workforce Source: S. Cunningham, Y. Ryan, L. Stedman, S. Tapsall, K. Bagdon, T. Flew and P. Coaldrake. The Business of Borderless Education. Canberra: DETYA Evaluation and Investigations Program [EIP], 2000. This table reverberates with the current challenges confronting education. Mobilizing such changes requires the lubrication of lifelong learning tropes in university mission statements and the promotion of a learning culture, while also acknowledging the limited financial conditions in which the educational sector is placed. For university scholars facilitating the creative industries approach, education is “supplying high value-added inputs to other enterprises,” (Hartley and Cunningham 5) rather than having value or purpose beyond the immediately and applicably economic. The assumption behind this table is that the areas of expansion in the workforce are the creative and service industries. In fact, the creative industries are the new service sector. This new economy makes specific demands of education. Education in the ‘old economy’ and the ‘new economy’ Old Economy New Economy Four-year degree Forty-year degree Training as a cost Training as a source of competitive advantage Learner mobility Content mobility Distance education Distributed learning Correspondence materials with video Multimedia centre Fordist training – one size fits all Tailored programmes Geographically fixed institutions Brand named universities and celebrity professors Just-in-case Just-in-time Isolated learners Virtual learning communities Source: T. Flew. “Educational Media in Transition: Broadcasting, Digital Media and Lifelong Learning in the Knowledge Economy.” International Journal of Instructional Media 29.1 (2002): 20. There are myriad assumptions lurking in Flew’s fascinating table. The imperative is short courses on the web, servicing the needs of industry. He described the product of this system as a “learner-earner.” (50) This ‘forty year degree’ is based on lifelong learning ideologies. However Flew’s ideas are undermined by the current government higher education agenda, through the capping – through time – of courses. The effect on the ‘learner-earner’ in having to earn more to privately fund a continuance of learning – to ensure that they keep on earning – needs to be addressed. There will be consequences to the housing market, family structures and leisure time. The costs of education will impact on other sectors of the economy and private lives. Also, there is little attention to the groups who are outside this taken-for-granted commitment to learning. Flew noted that barriers to greater participation in education and training at all levels, which is a fundamental requirement of lifelong learning in the knowledge economy, arise in part out of the lack of provision of quality technology-mediated learning, and also from inequalities of access to ICTs, or the ‘digital divide.’ (51) In such a statement, there is a misreading of teaching and learning. Such confusion is fuelled by the untheorised gap between ‘student’ and ‘consumer.’ The notion that technology (which in this context too often means computer-mediated platforms) is a barrier to education does not explain why conventional distance education courses, utilizing paper, ink and postage, were also unable to welcome or encourage groups disengaged from formal learning. Flew and others do not confront the issue of motivation, or the reason why citizens choose to add or remove the label of ‘student’ from their bag of identity labels. The stress on technology as both a panacea and problem for lifelong learning may justify theories of convergence and the integration of financial, retail, community, health and education provision into a services sector, but does not explain why students desire to learn, beyond economic necessity and employer expectations. Based on these assumptions of expanding creative industries and lifelong learning, the shape of education is warping. An ageing population requires educational expenditure to be reallocated from primary and secondary schooling and towards post-compulsory learning and training. This cost will also be privatized. When coupled with immigration flows, technological changes and alterations to market and labour structures, lifelong learning presents a profound and personal cost. An instrument for economic and social progress has been individualized, customized and privatized. The consequence of the ageing population in many nations including Australia is that there will be fewer young people in schools or employment. Such a shift will have consequences for the workplace and the taxation system. Similarly, those young workers who remain will be far more entrepreneurial and less loyal to their employers. Public education is now publically-assisted education. Jane Jenson and Denis Saint-Martin realized the impact of this change. The 1980s ideological shift in economic and social policy thinking towards policies and programmes inspired by neo-liberalism provoked serious social strains, especially income polarization and persistent poverty. An increasing reliance on market forces and the family for generating life-chances, a discourse of ‘responsibility,’ an enthusiasm for off-loading to the voluntary sector and other altered visions of the welfare architecture inspired by neo-liberalism have prompted a reaction. There has been a wide-ranging conversation in the 1990s and the first years of the new century in policy communities in Europe as in Canada, among policy makers who fear the high political, social and economic costs of failing to tend to social cohesion. (78) There are dense social reorderings initiated by neo-liberalism and changing the notions of learning, teaching and education. There are yet to be tracked costs to citizenship. The legacy of the 1980s and 1990s is that all organizations must behave like businesses. In such an environment, there are problems establishing social cohesion, let alone social justice. To stress the product – and not the process – of education contradicts the point of lifelong learning. Compliance and complicity replace critique. (Post) learning The Cold War has ended. The great ideological battle between communism and Western liberal democracy is over. Most countries believe both in markets and in a necessary role for Government. There will be thunderous debates inside nations about the balance, but the struggle for world hegemony by political ideology is gone. What preoccupies decision-makers now is a different danger. It is extremism driven by fanaticism, personified either in terrorist groups or rogue states. Tony Blair (http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp) Tony Blair, summoning his best Francis Fukuyama impersonation, signaled the triumph of liberal democracy over other political and economic systems. His third way is unrecognizable from the Labour party ideals of Clement Attlee. Probably his policies need to be. Yet in his second term, he is not focused on probing the specificities of the market-orientation of education, health and social welfare. Instead, decision makers are preoccupied with a war on terror. Such a conflict seemingly justifies large defense budgets which must be at the expense of social programmes. There is no recognition by Prime Ministers Blair or Howard that ‘high-tech’ armory and warfare is generally impotent to the terrorist’s weaponry of cars, bodies and bombs. This obvious lesson is present for them to see. After the rapid and successful ‘shock and awe’ tactics of Iraq War II, terrorism was neither annihilated nor slowed by the Coalition’s victory. Instead, suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Indonesia and Israel snuck have through defenses, requiring little more than a car and explosives. More Americans have been killed since the war ended than during the conflict. Wars are useful when establishing a political order. They sort out good and evil, the just and the unjust. Education policy will never provide the ‘big win’ or the visible success of toppling Saddam Hussein’s statue. The victories of retraining, literacy, competency and knowledge can never succeed on this scale. As Blair offered, “these are new times. New threats need new measures.” (ht tp://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp) These new measures include – by default – a user pays education system. In such an environment, lifelong learning cannot succeed. It requires a dense financial commitment in the long term. A learning society requires a new sort of war, using ideas not bullets. References Bash, Lee. “What Serving Adult Learners Can Teach Us: The Entrepreneurial Response.” Change January/February 2003: 32-7. Blair, Tony. “Full Text of the Prime Minister’s Speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet.” November 12, 2002. http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp. Carroll, Mary. “The Well-Worn Path.” The Australian Library Journal May 2002: 117-22. Field, J. Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2000. Flew, Terry. “Educational Media in Transition: Broadcasting, Digital Media and Lifelong Learning in the Knowledge Economy.” International Journal of Instructional Media 29.1 (2002): 47-60. Hartley, John, and Cunningham, Stuart. “Creative Industries – from Blue Poles to Fat Pipes.” Department of Education, Science and Training, Commonwealth of Australia (2002). Jenson, Jane, and Saint-Martin, Denis. “New Routes to Social Cohesion? Citizenship and the Social Investment State.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 28.1 (2003): 77-99. Leadbeater, Charles. Living on Thin Air. London: Viking, 1999. Pillay, Hitendra, and Elliott, Robert. “Distributed Learning: Understanding the Emerging Workplace Knowledge.” Journal of Interactive Learning Research 13.1-2 (2002): 93-107. Welsh, Irvine, from Redhead, Steve. “Post-Punk Junk.” Repetitive Beat Generation. Glasgow: Rebel Inc, 2000: 138-50. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brabazon, Tara. "Freedom from Choice: Who Pays for Customer Service in the Knowledge Economy?." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/02-brabazon.php>. APA Style Brabazon, T. (Jan. 2005) "Freedom from Choice: Who Pays for Customer Service in the Knowledge Economy?," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/02-brabazon.php>.

IntroductionThe popularity of social networking sites (SNSs) bears witness to thriving movement protests worldwide. The development of new hardware technologies such as mobile devices and digital cameras, in particular, has fast enhanced visual communications among users that help document and broadcast contemporary social movements. Using social media with these technologies thus presents new opportunities for grassroots social movement organisations (SMOs) and activist groups to become narrators of their activist lives, and to promote solidarity and recognition for advancing varied civic and political agendas. With the case of a student activist group that led and organised a 10-day occupation protest in Hong Kong, this article examines the idea of new media-savvy SMOs as political curators that employ SNS platforms to (co-)create digital narratives at large-scale movement protests. Invoking the concepts of curation and choreography, it highlights how these processes can work together to encourage contentious engagement and collaboration in contemporary social movements.The New Media-Savvy SMO as Political CuratorWhereas traditional social movement studies stressed the importance of pre-existing social networks and organisational structures for collective action, developments in new information and communication technologies (ICTs) challenge the common theories of how people are drawn into and participate in social movements. In recent years, a spate of research has particularly emphasised the ability of individuals and small groups to self-organise on the Internet (e.g. Rheingold). Lately, observing the use of SNSs such as Facebook and Twitter in contemporary social movements, work in this area has focused on how SNSs enable movement diffusion through personal networks and individuals’ online activities even without either the aid or the oversight of an organisation (e.g. Shirky).However, horizontal activism self-organised by atomised new media users seems insufficient as an explanation of how many recent protest movements achieved their high tides. While the flourishing literature shows writers have correctly centred their study on the changing dynamics in control over information and the growing importance of individual users’ contributions, it fails to account for the crucial role that SMOs continue to play. In fact, recent studies consistently observe the continuing importance of SMOs in mobilising and coordinating collective actions in online environments (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl, Collective). Whereas new ICTs have provided activist groups with the instrument to deal with their contentious activities with less cueing and leadership from conventional institutionalised structures, SMOs have created their own new media resources. Nowadays, a significant percentage of protest participants have received their information from online platforms that are run by or affiliated with these organisations. The critical questions remain about the kinds of communication methods they utilise to activate and integrate independent activists’ networks and participation, especially in emerging social media environments.Unfortunately, existing research tends to overlook the discursive potentials and cultural dimensions in online activism while emphasising the cost-effectiveness and organisational function of new ICTs. In particular, social movement and new media scholars merely attended to the ways in which digital media enable widescale, relatively un-coordinated contributions to repositories of resources for networks of activists and interest groups, as SNS applications stress the importance of user participation, openness, and network effects in the processes of content production and sharing. However, the mere existence or even “surplus” (Shirky 27) of “second-order communal goods” (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl, “Reconceptualizing” 372)—a collection of resources created collectively but without a bounded community, through video-posting, tagging, and circulation practices engaged in by individuals—does not accidentally result in critical publics that come to take part in political activism. Rather, social movements are, above all, the space for manifesting ideas, choices, and a collective will, in which people produce their own history through their cultural creations and social struggles (Touraine). As such, the alteration of meaning, the struggle to define the situation, and the discursive practices carried out within a social movement are all major aspects of social movements and change (Melucci).Indeed, SMOs and marginalised communities worldwide have increasingly learnt the ability to become narrators of their activist and community lives, and to express solidarity and recognition afforded through technology adoption. The recent proliferation of social media applications and mobile digital technologies has allowed activist groups to create and distribute their own stories regarding concrete actions, ongoing campaigns, and thematic issues of protest movements on more multimedia platforms. In order to advance political ideas and collective action frames, they may bring together a variety of online content in such a way that the collated materials offer a commentary on a subject area by articulating and negotiating new media artefacts, while also inviting responses. Therefore, not only are the new media channels for activist communication comparatively inexpensive, but they also provide for a richer array of content and the possibility of greater control by SMOs over its (re-)creation, maintenance, and distribution for potential digital narrating. To understand how digital narrating takes place in contemporary protest movements with SNSs, we now turn to two analytic concepts—curation and choreography.Social Media Content Curation and Choreography Curation, as a new media practice, involves finding, categorising, and organising relevant online content on specific issues. For instance, museums and libraries may have curators to select and feature digital items for collection and display, improving the types of information accessible to a public audience. In protest movements, SMOs and political actors may also curate peer-produced content on SNS platforms so as to filter and amplify useful information for mobilising collective action. In fact, this process by SMOs and political actors is particularly important, as it helps sort and draw timely attention to these information sources, especially at times when users are faced with a large amount of noise created by millions of producers (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker). More importantly, not only does content curating entail the selection and preservation of online materials that may facilitate collective action, but it may also involve the (re-)presentation of selected content by telling stories not being told or by telling existing stories in a different way (Fotopoulou and Couldry). In contrast to professional collecting, it is a much more deliberate process, one which clearly articulates and puts forwards (opportunities for) new meanings or new understanding of a subject (Franks). For example, when new media content is re-posted or shared in its original form but in a new context, digital narrating occurs as it may result in a new or additional layer of meaning (Baym and Shah). Therefore, more than merely expending information resources available to activists, the power of curation can be understood primarily as discursive, as users may pick up particular versions of reality in interpreting social issues and protest movements (Bekkers, Moody, and Edwards).Moreover, nowadays, social media curating is not restricted to text but also includes image and video streaming, as the development of mobile devices and digital cameras has facilitated and enhanced instant communication and information retrieval almost regardless of location. The practice of content curating with SNSs may also involve the process of choreographing with various social media modules, such as posting a series of edited pictures under an overarching schema and organising user-generated photos into an album that suggests a particular theme. Rather than simply using a single visual item designed to tell a story, the idea of choreographing is thus concerned with how curated items are seen and experienced from the users’ perspectives as it “allows curators not just to expose elements of a story but to tell a structured tale with the traditional elements of beginning, middle and end” (Franks 288).In practice, the implementation of choreography can be envisioned to bring together the practice of content curating and that of enhancing and connecting contentious engagement at protest movements. For example, when SMOs make use of images and video to help frame an issue in a more advanced way by sharing a picture with a comment added on Facebook, they may at once, whether consciously or unconsciously, suggest possible endorsement to the selected content and/or the source—may it be that of an individual user or a formal organisation—while drawing attention to the image and circulating it beyond the original network for which it was posted (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker). As such, by posting pictures with captions and sharing user-generated photos that do not belong to the SMO but are produced by other users, curating and choreographing with social media content can create a temporary space for practicing mutual recognition and extending the relationship between the SMO and the larger public. Combined, they may therefore “entail the creation of norms and boundaries in particular user communities and their platforms” (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker 239).This article examines the ways in which a new media-savvy SMO employed SNS platforms to (co-)create digital narratives, with the case of the 2012 Anti-National Education Movement in Hong Kong. By highlighting how social media content curating and choreographing may work together to encourage engagement and collaboration at large-scale protests, we can better understand how emerging SNS-enabled affordances can be translated into concrete contentious activities, as well as the discursive aspects and cultural expressions of using new media platforms and digital technologies in contemporary protest movements.Digital Narrating for Grassroots Mobilisation Since 2010, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government has undertaken “national education” curriculum reform. However, the worry about mainland-Chinese style national education in schools brought people out to defend values that were held dear in Hong Kong. Scholarism, a new media-savvy SMO founded by about 20 secondary school students in May 2011, became the first pressure group formed against the “Moral and National Education” curriculum and became the leading activist group. On 30 August 2012, about 50 members and supporters of Scholarism started occupying the public area in front of the government’s headquarters, while three of its members went on a hunger strike. At the same time, Scholarism made active use of Facebook to undertake grassroots mobilisation, prompting both online activism and offline participation. On 7 September, over 120,000 people went to Occupy Headquarters. The next day, the Chief Executive, C. Y. Leung, succumbed to the pressure and declared that the curriculum would not be imposed in Hong Kong schools. In order to initiate a grassroots mobilisation, upon the beginning of Occupy Headquarters, Scholarism carried out the new media practice of telling the story of the student hunger strikers on Facebook to create a “moral shock” (Jasper 106) among the general public. On the first day of the occupation protest, 30 August, a poster on the hunger strike was released by Scholarism on its Facebook page. Instead of providing detailed information about the protest movement, this poster was characterised by the pictures of the three student hunger strikers. The headline message simply stated “We have started the hunger strike.” This poster was very popular among Facebook users; it accumulated more than 16,000 likes.By appealing to the hardships and sufferings of the three student hunger strikers, more photos were uploaded to narrate the course of the hunger strike and the occupation protest. In particular, pictures with captions added were posted on Facebook every couple of hours to report on the student hunger strikers’ latest situation. Although the mobilising power of these edited pictures did not come from their political ideology or rational argumentation, they sought to appeal to the “martyr-hood” of the student activists. Soon thereafter, as the social media updates of the student hunger strikers spread, feelings of shock and anger grew rapidly. Most of the comments that were posted under the updates and photos of the student hunger strikers on Scholarism’s Facebook page protested against the government’s brutality.In addition, as the movement grew, Scholarism extended the self-reporting activities on Facebook from members to non-members. For instance, it frequently (self-)reported on the amount of people joining the movement days and nights. This was especially so on 7 September, when Scholarism uploaded multiple photos and text messages to report on the physical movement of the 120,000 people. As a movement strategy, the display of images of protests and rallies on the Internet can help demonstrate the legitimacy, unity, numbers, and commitment of people supporting the movement goals (Carty and Onyett). Curating and choreographing with protest images on Facebook therefore facilitated the symbolic interactions and emotional exchanges among activists for maintaining movement solidarity and consolidating activist identity.To demonstrate the public support for its organisation and the movement, Scholarism extensively reported on its own, as well as other, protest activities and efforts on Facebook against the introduction of the “Moral and National Education” curriculum, creating unprecedented parallel public records of these events. In fact, throughout the entire movement protest, Scholarism took tight photo records of protest activities, systematically organised them into albums, and uploaded them onto Facebook every day between 30 August and 8 September.Content Co-Creation for Counter-Hegemonic ExpressionsFrom a (neo-)Gramscian perspective, counter-hegemony is often embedded and embodied in music, novels, drama, movies, and so on (Boggs). An example of counter-hegemony in the traditional media is a documentary that questions the government’s involvement in a war (Cohen). Therefore, popular culture in the media may help foster counter-hegemony on the terrain of civil society in preparation for political change (Pratt). For Chinese communities in East Asia, pop music, for example, had played a significant role in organising patriotic feelings in mass protest events, such as the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989 and the many subsequent protests in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere against the violence of the Beijing government (Chow 153). During the occupation protest, Facebook was turned into an open and flexible discursive space, in which cutting-edge counter-hegemonic narratives were produced, distributed, and expressed. Scholarism and many individual activists adopted the social media platform to (co-)create activists’ discourses and knowledge in order to challenge the dominant political and cultural codes (Melucci). An example is a poster created by Scholarism, posted on its Facebook page on 4 September. The title message of this poster is: “This is not the government headquarters. This is our CIVIC SQUARE. Come and occupy!” This message represents a discursive intervention that seeks to “illuminate the limits of normative discourses of knowledge and power” (Lane 138). It did so by replacing the original, official name and meaning of the government headquarters as well as its authority with the counter-hegemonic idea of “civic square,” a term developed and coined by Scholarism during the occupation protest to represent the public space in front of the headquarters.Moreover, the Facebook page of Scholarism was by no means the only source of content out of which counter-hegemonic knowledge and discourses were produced. Conversely, most of the new media artefacts observed on the Facebook page of Scholarism were originally created by and posted on, and therefore re-posted and shared from, the Facebook pages of other individual or group users. They are in forms of text, picture, video, and the like that sought to undermine the legitimacy of the Hong Kong government, ridicule the rationale of the “Moral and National Education” curriculum, and discredit figures in the opposition.An example is a cartoon made by an individual user and re-posted on the Facebook page of Scholarism on 2 September, the day before schools restarted in Hong Kong after the summer break. This cartoon features a schoolboy in his school uniform, who is going to school with a bunch of identical locks tied to his head. The title message is: “School begins, keep your brain safe.” This cartoon was created to ridicule the rationale of the introduction of the “Moral and National Education” by “making visible the underlying and hidden relations of power on which the smooth operation of government repression depends” (Lane 136).Another new media artefact re-posted on the Facebook page of Scholarism was originally created by a well-known Hong Kong cartoon painter of a major local newspaper. This cartoon sought to humanise the student activists and to condemn the brutality of the Hong Kong government. It paints an imagined situation in which a public conversation between the Secretary for Education, Hak-kim Eddie Ng, and the three students on the hunger strike takes place. In this cartoon, Ng is cast as the wholesaler of the “Moral and National Education” curriculum. Holding a bottle of liquid in his hand, he says to the students: “This is the tears of the chief executive from last night. Kids, should you all go home now?”Thus, counter-hegemonic expressions did not flow unidirectionally from Scholarism to the society at large. The special role of Scholarism was indeed to curate and choreograph new media artefacts by employing social media modules such as re-posting and sharing user-generated content. In so doing, it facilitated the mobilisation of the occupation protest and instant collaboration, as it connected scattered activities, turned them into a collective, and branded it with a common identity, conviction, and/or purpose.ConclusionThis article has briefly looked at the case of a new media-savvy SMO in Hong Kong as an example of how activist groups can become political curators at large-scale protest events. In particular, it highlights the concepts of curation and choreography in explaining how emerging SNS-enabled affordances can be translated into concrete contentious activities. This article argues that, rather than simply producing and disseminating content on SNS platforms, SMOs today have learnt to actively construct stories about protest movements with social media modules such as (re-)posting edited pictures and sharing user-generated photos in order to mobilise effective political interventions and sustain a vibrant participatory culture.ReferencesBaym, Geoffrey, and Chirag Shah. “Circulating Struggle: The On-Line Flow of Environmental Advocacy Clips from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.” Information Communication & Society 14.7 (2011): 1017–38. Bekkers, Victor, Rebecca Moody, and Arthur Edwards. “Micro-Mobilization, Social Media and Coping Strategies: Some Dutch Experiences.” Policy and Internet 3.4 (2011): 1–29. Bennett, W. Lance, Alexandra Segerberg, and Shawn Walker. “Organization in the Crowd: Peer Production in Large-Scale Networked Protests.” Information, Communication & Society 17.2 (2014): 232–60. Bimber, Bruce, Andrew J. 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