Academic literature on the topic 'Social network research ; Chat rooms ; Response Waiting Time'

As people spend increasing time interacting with others online, computer-mediated correspondence is rapidly becoming a common form of everyday communication. Computer-mediated communication ranges from text to voice to video, through a variety of technologies (e.g., e-mail, Web pages, listservs, chat). Real-time online 'conversation' occurs in group chat rooms and one-to-one instant messages, between people who may or may not know each other outside the cyber environment. Because of its emerging popularity, Internet chat has become a distinct form of discourse with characteristics unique to the medium. As people spend increasing time interacting with others online, computer-mediated correspondence is rapidly becoming a common form of everyday communication. Computer-mediated communication ranges from text to voice to video, through a variety of technologies (e.g., e-mail, Web pages, listservs, chat). Real-time online 'conversation' occurs in group chat rooms and one-to-one instant messages, between people who may or may not know each other outside the cyber environment. Because of its emerging popularity, Internet chat has become a distinct form of discourse with characteristics unique to the medium. The purpose of this study is to apply research findings investigating Internet communication between strangers to the online chats of 'familiars', people who already know each other. Although some people may become familiars through prolonged cyberspace encounters without face-to-face contact (Parks and Floyd; Walther), this study investigates only the chats of people who had an existing face-to-face relationship prior to chatting online. The genesis of this project came from our personal experience as friends who later became Internet chatters because of geographical distance. Because our communications often detailed professional matters, we would save our discussions as text files as an efficient method of record-keeping. We noticed at times, while sending instant messages, the need to make special accommodations to reconcile misunderstandings and effectively deal with interruptions. To get ourselves 'back on track' in those instances, we had to 'talk about the talk' (i.e., metacommunicate) in order to make sense of how seemingly straightforward communication had gone astray. Continued instant message sending resulted in more observations suggesting that our online chats were qualitatively different from our face-to-face conversations. In the following paragraphs, three examples from our transcripts are analysed and discussed in relation to findings from research in computer-mediated communication: (a) meaning negotiation through metacommunication and shared history; (b) disinhibition and reconstruction of self; and (c) rule establishment. Note that, in these examples, "DRCSC" and "Wickmansa" are the respective online screen names of the co-authors. Example One: Meaning Negotiation through Metacommunication and Shared History The first example illustrates difficulty understanding the essence of a sent message without cues typically available in face-to-face contact. It is important to note that the following exchanges were preceded by dialogue concerning a stressful situation where Wickmansa had responded "I can see why [there is a problem]". Beginning in line 35 below, DRCSC jokingly attempts to parallel Wickmansa's "I can see why" with "I can see why there is panic disorder". However, given the sober nature of the conversation up to that point, line 35's intended meaning is uncertain for Wickmansa (i.e., could be serious; could be sarcastic). The three lines subsequent to 35 represent deliberate attempts at meaning negotiation. February 4, 2000 The breakdown in communication between lines 35 and 36 required management and repair. To regain mutual understanding, we attempted to make sense of this misalignment in 37 and 38 and bring it back on track. Each line's query served two purposes: (a) to clarify the 'speaker's' previous statement; and (b) to request clarification about the other's meaning. Continuing the above dialogue, lines 39 through 48 below seem to work toward realignment through metacommunication. February 4, 2000 cont. It is noteworthy that in line 42, DRCSC strengthened the realignment by introducing a metaphor that invoked a shared deli counter experience (i.e., meaning negotiation through shared history). Wickmansa let DRCSC know that the reference was understood by building on the metaphor in line 44. In this way, shared history not only provided an efficient way to anchor meaning but also expedited realignment. Referencing shared history may be a distinct way familiars, unlike strangers, display social competence by demonstrating familiarity with both topic and person when negotiating meaning during Internet chat. The act of 'going meta' in lines 37-48 above seemed to renegotiate the initial misfires of 35 and 36, moving the conversation toward collaborative understanding. Moreover, it may be that part of the necessity for familiars to repair any perceived miscommunication is tied to consequences that do not exist for strangers over the Internet. Although strangers have the opportunity to reestablish 'anonymity' by creating a new screen name and/or persona (Kiesler, Siegal, and McGuire; Myers; Turkle), familiars are bound to the 'reality' of the Internet experience in later face-to-face contact. Consequently, familiars have a greater investment in the outcomes negotiated while chatting online. Example Two: Disinhibition and Reconstruction of Self As suggested by previous research, perceived anonymity between online strangers increases disinhibition and playfulness. This can lead to the formation of multiple 'selves' within a single individual that may bear little resemblance to the corporeal self (Balsamo; Turkle; Waskul, Douglass, and Edgely). Although it is impossible for familiars to realistically 'reinvent' who they are, we, as familiars, found ourselves enacting a version of anonymity by accentuating contextually favorable aspects of our personalities. This is to say that despite the seemingly restrictive nature of text-only media, chatting online provided a new forum to lightheartedly reveal, for example, humour. Thus, a witty and clever side that might not have been otherwise readily apparent was now 'viewable'. To illustrate, the following lines are extracted from a tangential discussion about the Internet service provider America Online. February 3, 2000 In response to Wickmansa's 178 above, DRCSC playfully interjected cleverness in line 179. Wickmansa's reply "LOL" in 180 could demonstrate his understanding of DRCSC's play on "-OL" words by embedding a similar intentionality within his response. However, without contextual cues normally available in face-to-face interaction, whether Wickmansa 'really' picked up on intentionality, competency, and playfulness -- or was merely using a common chat abbreviation -- was not certain to DRCSC. Note that "LOL" stands for 'laughing out loud' and is among the most common Internet chat expressions (Grossman). To better understand (i.e, negotiate meaning), DRCSC responded in line 181 by: (a) clarifying her previous position; and (b) indirectly requesting clarification from Wickmansa. In this way, regaining equilibrium paralleled the accommodations described in example one, despite different end goals. Continued cleverness may have been evidenced again in lines 182 and 183, albeit unintentionally, with a collaborative "poet, know it" follow-up, representative of the playful context which had been co-constructed. Example Three: Rule Establishment Internet chatters create and conform to norms and rules exclusive to the medium (Hayashibara; Postmes, Spears, and Lea; Rintel and Pittam), such as abbreviating common phrases, ignoring capitalisation, spelling phonetically, and using typed symbols to transform elements from the typist's behind-the-keyboard experience into the co-constructed 'cyber' reality. The chats below illustrate the co-creation of a rule as a way to efficiently convey an abrupt interruption in the external environment. April 10, 2000 April 11, 2000 The April 10 example began with metacommunication that suggested the need for a shorthand way to signify 'interruption -- do not send instant messages now'. This led to our creating a way to do so with the "/" symbol in lines 230-250. The rule's effectiveness was evidenced immediately by its usage in lines 251-253. Rule application again was seen on April 11 when DRCSC opened the chat with "/?" In effect, she parsimoniously asked 'Are you available for online chat?' with two key strokes. The "/" became a regular chat feature after it was established, exemplifying an idiosyncratic rule created by familiars for Internet chat. As familiars chatting online, we found ourselves using metacommunication and shared history to realign after a conversational breakdown, accentuating contextually favorable aspects of our personalities, and following global Internet chat norms while creating idiosyncratic rules to accommodate for missing sensory cues. Moreover, distinct from strangers, familiars may have a greater need to display social competence due to real-world consequences. Further research is recommended to investigate the generalisablility of our experience as familiars and to explore other characteristics unique to Internet chat. Moreover, it would be interesting to see if: (a) familiars' online chats are patterned with the same idiosyncratic features as their face-to-face and telephone interactions; or (b) the chat patterns of familiars who know each other in 'real life' contain significant differences from persons who know each other only through regular online encounters. References Balsamo, Ann. "The Virtual Body in Cyberspace." Research in Philosophy and Technology 13 (1993): 119. Baym, Nancy. "The Performance of Humor in Computer-Mediated Communication." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 1.2 (1995). 14 Aug. 2000 <http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol1/issue2/baym.php>. Grossman, Steve. "Chatter's Jargon Dictionary." 14 Aug. 2000 <http://www.stevegrossman.com/jargpge.htm#Dictionary>. Danet, Brenda, Lucia Ruedenberg-Wright, and Yehudit Rosenbaum-Tamari. "Hmmm ... Where's That Smoke Coming From: Writing, Play and Performance on Internet Relay Chat." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2.4 (1997). 14 Aug. 2000 <http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol2/issue4/danet.php>. Hayashibara, Kammie Nobue. "Adolescent Communication on the Internet: Investigation of a Teenage Chat Room." Masters Abstracts International 37.01 (1998): 0009. Holland, Norman M. "The Internet Regression." 14 Aug. 2000 <http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/rmy/holland.php>. Kiesler, Sara, Jane Siegal, and Timothy W. McGuire. "Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-Mediated Communication." American Psychologist 39 (1984): 1123-34. Myers, David. "'Anonymity Is Part of the Magic': Individual Manipulation of Computer-Mediated Communication Contexts." Qualitative Sociology 10.3 (1987): 251-66. Parks, Malcolm R., and Kory Floyd. "Making Friends in Cyberspace." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2.4 (1997). 14 Aug. 2000 <http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol2/issue4/index.php>. Postmes, Tom, Russell Spears, and Martin Lea. "The Formation of Group Norms in Computer-Mediated Communication." Human Communication Research 26 (in press). Rintel, E. Sean, and Jeffrey Pittam. "Strangers in a Strange Land: Interaction Management on Internet Relay Chat." Human Communication Research 23.4 (1997): 507-34. Spears, Russell, and Martin Lea. "Panacea or Panopticon? The Hidden Power in Computer-Mediated Communication." Communication Research 21.4 (1994): 427-59. Sproull, Lee, and Sara Kiesler. Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. Thomas, Jim. "Introduction: A Debate About the Ethics of Fair Practices for Collecting Social Science Data in Cyberspace." The Information Society 12.2 (1996): 107-17. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Walther, Joseph. "Computer-Mediated Communication: Impersonal, Interpersonal and Hyperpersonal Interaction." Communication Research 23.1 (1996): 3-43. Walther, Joseph, Jeffrey Anderson, and David Park. "Interpersonal Effects in Computer-Mediated Interaction." Communication Research 21.4 (1994): 460-87. Waskul, Dennis, Mark Douglass, and Charles Edgley. "Cybersex: Outercourse and the Enselfment of the Body." Symbolic Interaction 24.4 (in press). Witmer, Diane. "Practicing Safe Computing: Why People Engage in Risky Computer-Mediated Communication." Network and Netplay: Virtual Groups on the Internet. Ed. Fay Sudweeks, Margaret L. McLaughlin, and Sheizaf Rafaeli, Menlo Park, CA: AAAI/MIT P, 1998. 127-46. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Cynthia Campbell, Scott A. Wickman. "Familiars in a Strange Land: A Case Study of Friends Chatting Online." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/friends.php>. Chicago style: Cynthia Campbell, Scott A. Wickman, "Familiars in a Strange Land: A Case Study of Friends Chatting Online," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/friends.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Cynthia Campbell, Scott A. Wickman. (2000) Familiars in a strange land: a case study of friends chatting online. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/friends.php> ([your date of access]).

According to Taylor et al. (2001), dialogue can be defined "as a tool for effective and mutually rewarding interpersonal communication" (p. 267) and refers to “any negotiated exchange of ideas and opinions” (Kent & Taylor, 1998, p. 325), whereby all parties in a relationship strive to engage in an honest, open and ethically communicative give and take (Bortree & Seltzer, 2009). From a public relations perspective, dialogue is a necessary tool to build an effective relationship with the public (Kent & Taylor, 1998). Dialogical strategies therefore serve to build and maintain dynamic and lasting relationships with publics (Kent & Taylor, 1998). Field of application/theoretical foundation: Many studies investigating the dialogical strategies of organizations on the Internet refer in terms of their theoretical foundation to the preliminary work of Kent and Taylor (1998) and Taylor et al. (2001) (e. g. Bortree & Seltzer, 2009; Yang & Taylor, 2010). Kent and Taylor (1998) developed five dimensions, so-called “principles of dialogue” (Taylor et al., 2001, p. 269), which can be utilized by organizations in their strategically designed websites in order to engage in dialogical relationships Among these principles are: Ease of interface: This point refers to the usability of a site which is a prerequisite for online dialogue. If visitors do not have an easy time navigating a site and finding information, they will not have a positive experience at the website and may not use it again. Usefulness of information: This principle is relevant because it clarifies the reason for visiting a website. Visitors turn to a site when it provides them with information that is useful, trustworthy, and of lasting value. Conservation of visitors: The goal of websites should be to keep visitors on their own site and not to encourage them to visit other sites, e. g. through advertisements. Generation of return visits: A relationship can only be established by users who are encouraged to return and visit the website on a regular basis. Dialogic loop: Websites have to offer two-way communication (interactivity) in order to be fully dialogic. Other studies adapted the theoretical framework and modified it for application to different research objects such as social media platforms (Bortree & Seltzer, 2009; Yang & Taylor, 2010). For instance, the study by Bortree & Seltzer (2009) extended it by adding organization engagement as a new strategy, since organizations can also encourage dialogue via posts on their own sites (e. g. walls and discussion boards). Besides the dialogic strategies, their outcomes are often identified and coded as well. Example studies: Bortree & Seltzer (2009); Cho et al. (2014); Reber & Kim (2006); Taylor et al. (2001); Waters et al. (2009); Waters & Jamal (2011); Yang & Taylor (2010) Information on Bortree & Seltzer, 2009 Authors: Denise Sevick Bortree & Trent Seltzer, 2009 Research objective: “This study sought to determine to what degree advocacy organizations are utilizing dialogic strategies on their social networking profiles as well as the degree to which these strategies are related to actual dialogic outcomes” (p. 317). Objective of analysis: 50 Facebook profiles of environmental advocacy groups Timeframe of analysis: – Information about variables Variable name/definition: Dialogic strategies Level of analysis: Facebook page Values: - Links to organization homepage - Number of advertisements on a site - Use of applications - Ease of donations - Join now option - Offers of regular information through email - Profile sharing - Content sharing - Organization comments in dialogic spaces (i. e. wall and discussion boards) Scale of measurement: Nominal (Present/absent) Reliability: Intercoder reliability according to Scott’s Pi: .61 to .87 Codebook: – Variable name/definition: Outcomes of dialogic communication Level of analysis: Facebook page Values: - User posts (number of user posts on wall and discussion board) - Network activity (number of user posts in one week) - User responses to others (number of user posts in response to inquiries by the organization or others) - Organization response to users (number of organization posts in response to user inquiries) - Network extensiveness (total number of friends or fans) - Network growth (one week increase in number of friends or fans) Scale of measurement: Metric Reliability: Intercoder reliability according to Holsti: 90 % - 100 % Codebook: – Information onYang & Taylor, 2010 Authors: Aimei Yang & Maureen Taylor, 2010 Research questions: How do Chinese ENGOs’ websites incorporate features that facilitate interaction? How do Chinese ENGOs’ websites provide information to key stakeholders (members, volunteers, general public, and the media)? How do Chinese ENGOs’ websites incorporate relationship-building features? Object of analysis: 68 Chinese ENGO’s websites Timeframe of analysis: – Information about variable Level of analysis: Website features Values: - Ease of interaction (site map, major link to rest of site, search engine box) - Usefulness of information to members/volunteers (details of how to become affiliated, how to contribute money, links (email, telephone) to organization leaders, chat room/BBS/Blog, links to affiliate websites) - Usefulness of information to general public (tips of how to practice environmentally friendly activities in everyday life, tips of how to lead a healthy life, games and other entertainment function) - Usefulness of information to the media (press release room/search engine, FAQ section aimed at media, news published or aired about the organization, editorial stories written by organization staff, organization-in-action photos/stories, downloadable graphics/video/other material, organization fact sheets, organization logos for use in publication, clearly stated position on policy issues, organization perspective on current issues/trends, annual reports/financial) - Relationship-building (opportunity for user-response, opportunity to vote on issues, survey to voice opinion on issues, offers regular information through email, positing calendar of events) - Mission statement (statement of mission/organization value/goals from amoral authority perspective, statement of mission/organization value/goals from a grassroots perspective) Scale of measurement: Nominal (1 = absence; 2 = linked through at least three levels of hyperlinks from the front page; 3 = linked through at least two levels of hyperlinks from the front page; 4 = placed on the front page) Reliability: Intercoder reliability according to Scott’s Pi: .77 to 1.00 (M = .84) Codebook: – References Bortree, D. S., & Seltzer, T. (2009). Dialogic strategies and outcomes: An analysis of environmental advocacy groups’ Facebook profiles. Public Relations Review, 35(3), 317–319. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2009.05.002 Cho, M., Schweickart, T., & Haase, A. (2014). Public engagement with nonprofit organizations on Facebook. Public Relations Review, 40(3), 565–567. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2014.01.008 Kent, M. L., Taylor, M. (1998). Building dialogic relationships through the World Wide Web. Public Relations Review, 24(3), 321-334. Reber, B. H., & Kim, J. K. (2006). How activist groups use websites in media relations: Evaluating online press rooms. Journal of Public Relations Research, 18(4), 313–333. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532754xjprr1804_2 Taylor, M., Kent, M. L., & White, W. J. (2001). How activist organizations are using the Internet to build relationships. Public Relations Review, 27(3), 263–284. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0363-8111(01)00086-8 Waters, R. D., Burnett, E., Lamm, A., & Lucas, J. (2009). Engaging stakeholders through social networking: How nonprofit organizations are using Facebook. Public Relations Review, 35(2), 102–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2009.01.006 Waters, R. D., & Jamal, J. Y. (2011). Tweet, tweet, tweet: A content analysis of nonprofit organizations’ Twitter updates. Public Relations Review, 37(3), 321–324. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2011.03.002 Yang, A., & Taylor, M. (2010). Relationship-building by Chinese ENGOs’ websites: Education, not activation. Public Relations Review, 36(4), 342–351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2010.07.001

0. IntroductionIf we follow the line of much literature surrounding airports and urban mobility, the emphasis often falls on the fact that these spaces are designed to handle the mega-scale and super-human pace of mass transit. Airports have rightly been associated with velocity, as zones of rapid movement managed by enormous processing systems that guide bodies and things in transit (Pascoe; Pearman; Koolhaas; Gordon; Fuller & Harley). Yet this emphasis tends to ignore the spectrum of tempos and flows that are at play in airport terminals — from stillness to the much exalted hyper-rapidity of mobilized publics in the go-go world of commercial aviation.In this photo essay I'd like to pull a different thread and ask whether it's possible to think of aeromobility in terms of “uneven, differential mobility” (Bissell 280). What would it mean to consider waiting and stillness as forms of bodily engagement operating over a number of different scales and temporalities of movement and anticipation, without privileging speed over stillness? Instead of thinking mobility and stillness as diametrically opposed, can we instead conceive of them as occupying a number of different spatio-temporal registers in a dynamic range of mobility? The following is a provisional "visual ethnography" constructed from photographs of air terminal light boxes I have taken over the last five years (in Amsterdam, London, Chicago, Frankfurt, and Miami). Arranged into a "taxonomy of differentiality", each of these images comes from a slightly different angle, mode or directionality. Each view of these still images displayed in billboard-scale light-emitting devices suggests that there are multiple dimensions of visuality and bodily experience at play in these image-objects. The airport is characterized by an abundance of what appears to be empty space. This may be due to the sheer scale of mass transport, but it also arises from a system of active and non-active zones located throughout contemporary terminals. This photo series emphasises the "emptiness" of these overlooked left-over spaces that result from demands of circulation and construction.1. We Move the WorldTo many travellers, airport gate lounges and their surrounding facilities are loaded with a variety of contradictory associations and affects. Their open warehouse banality and hard industrial sterility tune our bodies to the vast technical and commercial systems that are imbricated through almost every aspect of contemporary everyday life.Here at the departure gate the traveller's body comes to a moment's rest. They are granted a short respite from the anxious routines of check in, body scans, security, information processing, passport scanning, itineraries, boarding procedures and wayfaring the terminal. The landside processing system deposits them at this penultimate point before final propulsion into the invisible airways that pipe them into their destination. We hear the broadcasting of boarding times, check-in times, name's of people that break them away from stillness, forcing people to move, to re-arrange themselves, or to hurry up. Along the way the passenger encounters a variety of techno-spatial experiences that sit at odds with the overriding discourse of velocity, speed and efficiency that lie at the centre of our social understanding of air travel. The airline's phantasmagorical projections of itself as guarantor and enabler of mass mobilities coincides uncomfortably with the passenger's own wish-fulfilment of escape and freedom.In this we can agree with the designer Bruce Mau when he suggests that these projection systems, comprised of "openings of every sort — in schedules, in urban space, on clothes, in events, on objects, in sightlines — are all inscribed with the logic of the market” (Mau 7). The advertising slogans and images everywhere communicate the dual concept that the aviation industry can deliver the world to us on time while simultaneously porting us to any part of the world still willing to accept Diners, VISA or American Express. At each point along the way these openings exhort us to stop, to wait in line, to sit still or to be patient. The weird geographies depicted by the light boxes appear like interpenetrating holes in space and time. These travel portals are strangely still, and only activated by the impending promise of movement.Be still and relax. Your destination is on its way. 2. Attentive AttentionAlongside the panoramic widescreen windows that frame the choreography of the tarmac and flight paths outside, appear luminous advertising light boxes. Snapped tightly to grid and locked into strategic sightlines and thoroughfares, these wall pieces are filled with a rotating menu of contemporary airport haiku and ersatz Swiss graphic design.Mechanically conditioned air pumped out of massive tubes creates the atmosphere for a very particular amalgam of daylight, tungsten, and fluorescent light waves. Low-oxygen-emitting indoor plants are no match for the diesel-powered plant rooms that maintain the constant flow of air to every nook and cranny of this massive processing machine. As Rem Koolhaas puts it, "air conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates buildings, air conditioning unites them" (Koolhaas). In Koolhaas's lingo, these are complex "junkspaces" unifying, colliding and coalescing a number of different circulatory systems, temporalities and mobilities.Gillian Fuller reminds us there is a lot of stopping and going and stopping in the global circulatory system typified by air-terminal-space.From the packing of clothes in fixed containers to strapping your belt – tight and low – stillness and all its requisite activities, technologies and behaviours are fundamental to the ‘flow’ architectures that organize the motion of the globalizing multitudes of today (Fuller, "Store" 63). It is precisely this functional stillness organised around the protocols of store and forward that typifies digital systems, the packet switching of network cultures and the junkspace of airports alike.In these zones of transparency where everything is on view, the illuminated windows so proudly brought to us by J C Decaux flash forward to some idealized moment in the future. In this anticipatory moment, the passenger's every fantasy of in-flight service is attended to. The ultimate in attentiveness (think dimmed lights, soft pillows and comfy blankets), this still image is captured from an improbable future suspended behind the plywood and steel seating available in the moment —more reminiscent of park benches in public parks than the silver-service imagined for the discerning traveller.3. We Know ChicagoSelf-motion is itself a demonstration against the earth-binding weight of gravity. If we climb or fly, our defiance is greater (Appleyard 180).The commercial universe of phones, cameras, computer network software, financial instruments, and an array of fancy new gadgets floating in the middle of semi-forgotten transit spaces constitutes a singular interconnected commercial organism. The immense singularity of these claims to knowledge and power loom solemnly before us asserting their rights in the Esperanto of "exclusive rollover minutes", "nationwide long distance", "no roaming charges" and insider local knowledge. The connective tissue that joins one part of the terminal to a commercial centre in downtown Chicago is peeled away, revealing techno-veins and tendrils reaching to the sky. It's a graphic view that offers none of the spectacular openness and flights of fancy associated with the transit lounges located on the departure piers and satellites. Along these circulatory ribbons we experience the still photography and the designer's arrangement of type to attract the eye and lure the body. The blobby diagonals of the telco's logo blend seamlessly with the skyscraper's ribbons of steel, structural exoskeleton and wireless telecommunication cloud.In this plastinated anatomy, the various layers of commercially available techno-space stretch out before the traveller. Here we have no access to the two-way vistas made possible by the gigantic transparent tube structures of the contemporary air terminal. Waiting within the less travelled zones of the circulatory system we find ourselves suspended within the animating system itself. In these arteries and capillaries the flow is spread out and comes close to a halt in the figure of the graphic logo. We know Chicago is connected to us.In the digital logic of packet switching and network effects, there is no reason to privilege the go over the stop, the moving over the waiting. These light box portals do not mirror our bodies, almost at a complete standstill now. Instead they echo the commercial product world that they seek to transfuse us into. What emerges is a new kind of relational aesthetics that speaks to the complex corporeal, temporal, and architectural dimensions of stillness and movement in transit zones: like "a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts” (Bourriaud 11). 4. Machine in the CaféIs there a possible line of investigation suggested by the fact that sound waves become visible on the fuselage of jet planes just before they break the sound barrier? Does this suggest that the various human senses are translatable one into the other at various intensities (McLuhan 180)?Here, the technological imaginary contrasts itself with the techno alfresco dining area enclosed safely behind plate glass. Inside the cafes and bars, the best businesses in the world roll out their biggest guns to demonstrate the power, speed and scale of their network coverage (Remmele). The glass windows and light boxes "have the power to arrest a crowd around a commodity, corralling them in chic bars overlooking the runway as they wait for their call, but also guiding them where to go next" (Fuller, "Welcome" 164). The big bulbous plane sits plump in its hangar — no sound barriers broken here. It reassures us that our vehicle is somewhere there in the network, resting at its STOP before its GO. Peeking through the glass wall and sharing a meal with us, this interpenetrative transparency simultaneously joins and separates two planar dimensions — machinic perfection on one hand, organic growth and death on the other (Rowe and Slutsky; Fuller, "Welcome").Bruce Mau is typical in suggesting that the commanding problem of the twentieth century was speed, represented by the infamous image of a US Navy Hornet fighter breaking the sound barrier in a puff of smoke and cloud. It has worked its way into every aspect of the design experience, manufacturing, computation and transport.But speed masks more than it reveals. The most pressing problem facing designers and citizens alike is growth — from the unsustainable logic of infinite growth in GDP to the relentless application of Moore's Law to the digital networks and devices that define contemporary society in the first world. The shift of emphasis from speed to growth as a time-based event with breaking points and moments of rupture has generated new possibilities. "Growth is nonlinear and unpredictable ... Few of us are ready to admit that growth is constantly shadowed by its constitutive opposite, that is equal partners with death” (Mau 497).If speed in part represents a flight from death (Virilio), growth invokes its biological necessity. In his classic study of the persistence of the pastoral imagination in technological America, The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx charted the urge to idealize rural environments at the advent of an urban industrialised America. The very idea of "the flight from the city" can be understood as a response to the onslaught of technological society and it's deathly shadow. Against the murderous capacity of technological society stood the pastoral ideal, "incorporated in a powerful metaphor of contradiction — a way of ordering meaning and value that clarifies our situation today" (Marx 4). 5. Windows at 35,000 FeetIf waiting and stillness are active forms of bodily engagement, we need to consider the different layers of motion and anticipation embedded in the apprehension of these luminous black-box windows. In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg notes that the Old Norse derivation of the word window “emphasizes the etymological root of the eye, open to the wind. The window aperture provides ventilation for the eye” (103).The virtual windows we are considering here evoke notions of view and shelter, open air and sealed protection, both separation from and connection to the outside. These windows to nowhere allow two distinct visual/spatial dimensions to interface, immediately making the visual field more complex and fragmented. Always simultaneously operating on at least two distinct fields, windows-within-windows provide a specialized mode of spatial and temporal navigation. As Gyorgy Kepes suggested in the 1940s, the transparency of windows "implies more than an optical characteristic; it implies a broader spatial order. Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations" (Kepes 77).The first windows in the world were openings in walls, without glass and designed to allow air and light to fill the architectural structure. Shutters were fitted to control air flow, moderate light and to enclose the space completely. It was not until the emergence of glass technologies (especially in Holland, home of plate glass for the display of commercial products) that shielding and protection also allowed for unhindered views (by way of transparent glass). This gives rise to the thesis that windows are part of a longstanding architectural/technological system that moderates the dual functions of transparency and separation. With windows, multi-dimensional planes and temporalities can exist in the same time and space — hence a singular point of experience is layered with many other dimensions. Transparency and luminosity "ceases to be that which is perfectly clear and becomes instead that which is clearly ambiguous" (Rowe and Slutsky 45). The light box air-portals necessitate a constant fluctuation and remediation that is at once multi-planar, transparent and "hard to read". They are informatic.From holes in the wall to power lunch at 35,000 feet, windows shape the manner in which light, information, sights, smells, temperature and so on are modulated in society. "By allowing the outside in and the inside out, [they] enable cosmos and construction to innocently, transparently, converge" (Fuller, "Welcome" 163). Laptop, phone, PDA and light box point to the differential mobilities within a matrix that traverses multiple modes of transparency and separation, rest and flight, stillness and speed.6. Can You Feel It?Increasingly the whole world has come to smell alike: gasoline, detergents, plumbing, and junk foods coalesce into the catholic smog of our age (Illich 47).In these forlorn corners of mobile consumption, the dynamic of circulation simultaneously slows and opens out. The surfaces of inscription implore us to see them at precisely the moment we feel unseen, unguided and off-camera. Can you see it, can you feel it, can you imagine the unimaginable, all available to us on demand? Expectation and anticipation give us something to look forward to, but we're not sure we want what's on offer.Air travel radicalizes the separation of the air traveller from ground at one instance and from the atmosphere at another. Air, light, temperature and smell are all screened out or technologically created by the terminal plant and infrastructure. The closer the traveller moves towards stillness, the greater the engagement with senses that may have been ignored by the primacy of the visual in so much of this circulatory space. Smell, hunger, tiredness, cold and hardness cannot be screened out.In this sense, the airplanes we board are terminal extensions, flying air-conditioned towers or groundscrapers jet-propelled into highways of the air. Floating above the horizon, immersed in a set of logistically ordained trajectories and pressurized bubbles, we look out the window and don't see much at all. Whatever we do see, it's probably on the screen in front of us which disconnects us from one space-time-velocity at the same time that it plugs us into another set of relations. As Koolhaas says, junkspace is "held together not by structure, but by skin, like a bubble" (Koolhaas). In these distended bubbles, the traveler momentarily occupies an uncommon transit space where stillness is privileged and velocity is minimized. The traveler's body itself is "engaged in and enacting a whole kaleidoscope of different everyday practices and forms" during the course of this less-harried navigation (Bissell 282).7. Elevator MusicsThe imaginary wheel of the kaleidoscope spins to reveal a waiting body-double occupying the projected territory of what appears to be a fashionable Miami. She's just beyond our reach, but beside her lies a portal to another dimension of the terminal's vascular system.Elevators and the networks of shafts and vents that house them, are to our buildings like veins and arteries to the body — conduits that permeate and structure the spaces of our lives while still remaining separate from the fixity of the happenings around them (Garfinkel 175). The terminal space contains a number of apparent cul-de-sacs and escape routes. Though there's no background music piped in here, another soundtrack can be heard. The Muzak corporation may douse the interior of the elevator with its own proprietary aural cologne, but at this juncture the soundscape is more "open". This functional shifting of sound from figure to ground encourages peripheral hearing, providing "an illusion of distended time", sonically separated from the continuous hum of "generators, ventilation systems and low-frequency electrical lighting" (Lanza 43).There is another dimension to this acoustic realm: “The mobile ecouteur contracts the flows of information that are supposed to keep bodies usefully and efficiently moving around ... and that turn them into functions of information flows — the speedy courier, the networking executive on a mobile phone, the scanning eyes of the consumer” (Munster 18).An elevator is a grave says an old inspector's maxim, and according to others, a mechanism to cross from one world to another. Even the quintessential near death experience with its movement down a long illuminated tunnel, Garfinkel reminds us, “is not unlike the sensation of movement we experience, or imagine, in a long swift elevator ride” (Garfinkel 191).8. States of SuspensionThe suspended figure on the screen occupies an impossible pose in an impossible space: half falling, half resting, an anti-angel for today's weary air traveller. But it's the same impossible space revealed by the airport and bundled up in the experience of flight. After all, the dimension this figures exists in — witness the amount of activity in his suspension — is almost like a black hole with the surrounding universe collapsing into it. The figure is crammed into the light box uncomfortably like passengers in the plane, and yet occupies a position that does not exist in the Cartesian universe.We return to the glossy language of advertising, its promise of the external world of places and products delivered to us by the image and the network of travel. (Remmele) Here we can go beyond Virilio's vanishing point, that radical reversibility where inside and outside coincide. Since everybody has already reached their destination, for Virilio it has become completely pointless to leave: "the inertia that undermines your corporeity also undermines the GLOBAL and the LOCAL; but also, just as much, the MOBILE and the IMMOBILE” (Virilio 123; emphasis in original).In this clinical corner of stainless steel, glass bricks and exit signs hangs an animated suspension that articulates the convergence of a multitude of differentials in one image. Fallen into the weirdest geometry in the world, it's as if the passenger exists in a non-place free of all traces. Flows and conglomerates follow one another, accumulating in the edges, awaiting their moment to be sent off on another trajectory, occupying so many spatio-temporal registers in a dynamic range of mobility.ReferencesAppleyard, Donald. "Motion, Sequence and the City." The Nature and Art of Motion. Ed. Gyorgy Kepes. New York: George Braziller, 1965. Adey, Peter. "If Mobility Is Everything Then It Is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobilities." Mobilities 1.1 (2006): 75–95. Bissell, David. “Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities.” Mobilities 2.2 (2007): 277-298.Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Paris: Les Presses du Reel, 2002. Classen, Constance. “The Deodorized City: Battling Urban Stench in the Nineteenth Century.” Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism. Ed. Mirko Zardini. Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, 2005. 292-322. Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006. Fuller, Gillian, and Ross Harley. Aviopolis: A Book about Airports. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005. Fuller, Gillian. "Welcome to Windows: Motion Aesthetics at the Airport." Ed. Mark Salter. Politics at the Airport. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2008. –––. "Store Forward: Architectures of a Future Tense". Ed. John Urry, Saolo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring. Air Time Spaces: Theory and Method in Aeromobilities Research. London: Routledge, 2008. 63-75.Garfinkel, Susan. “Elevator Stories: Vertical Imagination and the Spaces of Possibility.” Up Down Across: Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks. Ed. Alisa Goetz. London: Merrell, 2003. 173-196. Gordon, Alastair. Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure. New York: Metropolitan, 2004.Illich, Ivan. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of Stuff. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985. Kepes, Gyorgy. Language of Vision. New York: Dover Publications, 1995 (1944). Koolhass, Rem. "Junkspace." Content. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.btgjapan.org/catalysts/rem.html›.Lanza, Joseph. "The Sound of Cottage Cheese (Why Background Music Is the Real World Beat!)." Performing Arts Journal 13.3 (Sep. 1991): 42-53. McLuhan, Marshall. “Is It Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another.” McLuhan: Hot and Cool. Ed. Gerald Emanuel Stearn. Middlesex: Penguin, 1967. 172-182. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London: Oxford U P, 1964. Mau, Bruce. Life Style. Ed. Kyo Maclear with Bart Testa. London: Phaidon, 2000. Munster, Anna. Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics. New England: Dartmouth, 2006. Pascoe, David. Airspaces. London: Reaktion, 2001. Pearman, Hugh. Airports: A Century of Architecture. New York: Abrams, 2004. Remmele, Mathias. “An Invitation to Fly: Poster Art in the Service of Civilian Air Travel.” Airworld: Design and Architecture for Air Travel. Ed. Alexander von Vegesack and Jochen Eisenbrand. Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2004. 230-262. Rowe, Colin, and Robert Slutsky. Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal. Perspecta 8 (1963): 45-54. Virilio, Paul. City of Panic. Trans. Julie Rose. Oxford: Berg, 2005.

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

The elaborate cross-media spectacle, ‘Australian Idol,’ ostensibly lays bare the process of creating a pop star. Yet with so much made visible, much is rendered opaque. Specifically, ‘Idol’ is defined by the use of carefully-tuned strategies of publicity and promotion that create, shape and reshape a series of ‘authentic celebrities’ – pop stars whose emergence is sanctified through a seemingly open process of public ratification. Yet, Idol’s main actor is the music industry itself which uses contestants as vehicles for crafting intimate, long-term relationships with consumers. Through an analysis of the process through which various contestants in ‘Australian Idol’ are promoted and sold, it becomes clear that these populist icons are emblematic of an industry reinventing itself in a media environment that presents remarkable challenges and surprising opportunities. Curiously, the debates, strategies and motivations of the public relations industry have received little sustained attention in popular music studies. While much has been written about the contradictions between the rhetoric of rebellion and the complicated realities of corporate success (Frank; Negus), less has been written about the evolution of specific kinds of publicity and the strategies that shape their use in the music industry. This is surprising given the foundational role of public relations strategies within the culture industries generally and the music industry in particular. Specifically, what Turner et. al. define as ‘the promotional culture’ is central to the production and marketing of mainstream popular music. The ‘Idol’ phenomenon offers a rich opportunity to examine how the mainstream of the popular music industry uses distinct and novel marketing strategies in the face of declining sales of compact discs, an advertising environment that is extraordinarily crowded with all manner of competing messages, a steady rate of trade in digital song files and ever more effective competition from video games and DVDs. The ‘Idol’ phenomenon has proved to be a bundle of highly successful strategies for making money from popular music. Selling CDs seems to be almost ancillary to the phenomenon, acting as only one profit centre among many. Indeed, we can track the progress and deployment of specific strategies for shaping the creation of what has become a series of musical celebrities from the start of the first series of ‘Australian Idol’ through a continuous process of strategic publicity. The Attention Economy It has been somewhat hysterically estimated that the average resident of Sydney might be presented with around 3000 commercial messages a day (Lee). It is this kind of communication environment that makes account planners go weak in the knees in both paralysing anxiety and genuine excitement. Many have taken to paying people to go to bars, cafes and clubs to talk up the relative merits of a product to complete strangers in the guise of casual conversation. Similarly, commercial buskers have recently appeared on City Trains to proclaim the virtues of the wares they’ve been contracted to hawk. One can imagine ‘Cockles and Mussels’ has been updated as ‘MP3 Players and Really Cool Footwear.’ These phenomena are variously referred to as ‘viral,’ ‘tipping point,’ ‘word of mouth’ or ‘whisper’ marketing. (Gladwell; Godin; Henry; Lee; Rosen) Regardless of what you call it, the problem inspiring these promotional chats and arias is the same: advertisers can no longer count on getting and holding our attention. As Davenport and Beck, Brody and even Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon have noted, the more taxed public attention gets, the more valuable it becomes. By most industry accounts, the attention economy is an established reality. It represents a significant shift of emphasis away from traditional methods of reaching consumers, instead inspiring new thinking about how to create lasting, flexible and evolving relationships with target audiences. The attention economy is a complicated and often contradictory response to a media environment that appears less and less reliable and to consumers who behaviour is often poorly understood, even mysterious (Elliott and Jankel-Elliott). This challenging backdrop, however, is only the beginning for a seemingly beleaguered music industry. Wherever one looks, from the rise of the very real threat of global piracy to the expansion of the video game industry to mobile phones and hand held players to increasing amounts of money spent on DVDs and ring tones, selling CDs has become almost a sideline. The main event is the profitable use and reuse of the industry’s vast stores of intellectual property through all manner of media, most which didn’t exist ten years ago. Indeed, the ‘Idol’ phenomenon shows us how the music industry has been incorporating its jealously-guarded intellectual property and familiar modes of industrial self-presentation into existing media environments to build long-term relationships with consumers through television, radio, DVDs, CDs, the internet and mobile phones. Further, ‘Idol’s’ producers have supplemented more traditional models of communication by taking direct and explicit account of how and where audiences use a wide variety of media. The broad range of opportunities to participate in ‘Idol’ is central to its success. It demonstrates a willingness on the part of producers to accept the necessity of bending somewhat to the audience’s existing and evolving uses of the media. In short, they are simply not all that fussy about how participation actually happens so long as it does. Producers allow for many kinds of participation in order to constantly offer more specific and more active levels of involvement. ‘Idol’ has transformed consumer relationships within the music industry by coaxing into being ever more intimate, active and reciprocal relationships over the course of the contest by encouraging increasingly specific acts by consumers to complete a continual series of transactions. The Use and Reuse of Celebrity In many quarters, ‘Australian Idol’ has become a byword for bullshit. The competition seems rigged and the contestants are not seen as ‘real’ musicians in large part because their experience appears to be so transparent and so transparently commercial. As the mythology of the music industry has traditionally had it, deserving pop stars are established as celebrities through what is a more or less a linear progression. Early success is based on a carefully constructed sense of authentic cultural production. Credibility is established through a series of contestable affiliations to ostensibly organic music cultures, earned through artistic development and the hard slog of touring and practice (see Maxwell 118). The fraught possibilities of mainstream success continually beckon to ‘real’ musicians as they either ‘crossover’ or remain independent all the while trying to preserve some elusive measure of public honesty. As this mythology was implicitly unavailable to the producers of ‘Idol,’ a different kind of authenticity had to be constructed. Instead of a ‘battles of the bands’ (read: brands) contest, ‘Idol’ producers chose to present ‘unbranded’ aspirants (“Sydney Audition”). These hopefuls are presented as appealingly ambitious or merely optimistic individuals with varying degrees of talent. Those truly blessed, not only with talent but the drive to work it into saleable shape, would be carefully chosen from the multitude and offered an opportunity to make the most of their inherent yet unformed ability. Thus, their authenticity was assumed to be an implicit, inchoate presence, requiring the guiding hand of insiders to reach full flower. Through the facilitation of competition and direction provided in the form of knowledgeable music industry veterans who never tire of giving stern admonitions to indifferent performers who do not take full advantage of the opportunity presented to them, contestants are asked to prove themselves through an extended period of intense self-presentation and recreation. The lengthy televised, but tightly-edited auditions, complete with extensive commentary and the occasional gnashing of teeth on the part of the panel of experts and rejected contestants, demonstrate to us the earnest intent of those involved. Importantly, the authenticity of those proceeding through the contest is never firmly established, but has to be continually and strategically re-established. Each weighty choice of repertoire, wardrobe and performance style can only break them; each successful performance only raises the stakes. This tense maintenance of status as a deserving celebrity runs in tandem with the increasingly attentive and reciprocal relationship between the producers and the audience. The relationship begins with what has proved to be a compelling first act. Thousands of ‘ordinary’ Australians line up outside venues throughout the country, many sleeping in car parks and on footpaths, practising, singing and performing for the mobile camera crews. We are presented with their youthful vigour in all its varied guises. We cannot help but be convinced of the worth of those who survive such a process. The chosen few who are told with a flourish ‘You’re going to Sydney’ are then faced with what appears to be a daunting challenge, to establish themselves in short order as a performer with ‘the X factor’ (“Australian Idol” 14 July 2004). A fine voice and interesting look must be supplemented with those intangible qualities that result in wide public appeal. Yet these qualities are only made available to the public and the performer because of the contest itself. When the public is eventually asked to participate directly, it is to both produce and ratify exactly these ambiguous attributes. More than this, contestants need our help just to survive. Their celebrity is almost shockingly unstable, more fleeting than its surrounding rhetoric and context might suggest and under constant, expected threat. From round to round, favourites can easily become also rans–wild cards who limp out of one round, but storm through the next. The drama can only be heightened, securing our interest by requiring our input. As any advertiser can tell you, an effective campaign must end in action on our part. Through text message and phone voting as well as extensive ‘fan management’ through internet chat rooms and bulletin boards (see Stahl 228; http://au.messages.yahoo.com/australianidol/), our channelled ‘viral’ participation both shapes and completes the meanings of the contest. These active and often inventive relationships (http://au.australianidol.yahoo.com/fancentral/) allow the eventual ‘Idol’ to claim the credibility the means of their success otherwise renders suspect and these activities appear to consummate the relationship. However, the relationship continues well beyond the gala final. In a fascinating re-narration of the first series of ‘Australian Idol,’ Australian Idol: The Winner’s Story aired on the Friday following the final night of the contest. The story of the newly crowned Idol, Guy Sebastian, was presented in an hour long program that showed his home life, his life as a voice teacher in the Adelaide suburbs and his subsequent journey to stardom. The clips depicting his life prior to ‘Idol’ were of ambiguous vintage, cleverly silent on the exact date of production; somehow they were not quite in the past or the future, but floated in some eternal in-between. When his ‘Australian Idol’ experience was chronicled, after the second commercial break, we were allowed to see an intimate portrait of an anxious contestant transformed into ‘Your Australian Idol.’ There could be no doubt of the virtue of Sebastian’s struggles, nor of his well-earned victory. ‘New’ footage began with the sudden sensation reluctantly commenting on other contestants at the original Adelaide cattle call at the prompting of the mobile camera crew and ended with his teary-eyed mother exultant at the final decision as she stood in the front row at the Opera House. Further, not only is the entire run of the first series dramatically recounted in documentary format on the Australian Idol: Greatest Moments DVD, framed by Sebastian’s humble triumph, so are the stories of each member of the Final 12 and the paths they took through the contest. These reiterations serve to reinforce not only Sebastian’s status, but the status of the program itself. They confirm the benevolent success of the industry it so dutifully profiles. We are taken behind the curtain, allowed to see the machinery of stardom grind inevitably to a conclusion, knowing we will be allowed back again when the time is right. Whereas ‘Idol’ is routinely pilloried for its crass commercialism, it remains an unavoidable success. Viewers keep tuning in, advertisers still clamour to sponsor all aspects of the production and the CDs keep selling. Most importantly, the music industry has a showcase for its own operations. The structures of feeling it exists to produce take on a kind of subtle explicitness that ensures their perpetuation. Within an industry faced with threats perceived to be foundational, the creators of ‘Idol’ have produced an audacious and arrogant spectacle. They have made a profitable virtue out of an economic necessity. The expensive and unpredictable process of finding and nurturing new talent has not only been made more reliable, but ‘Idol’ has shown that it can actually turn a profit. The brand of celebrity produced by Idol possesses no mere sheen of populist approval, but embodies that more valuable commodity: popular attention, however reluctant or enthusiastic it may be. References “Australian Idol.” Ten Network, Sydney, 14 July 2004. “Australian Idol: The Winner’s Story.” Ten Network, Sydney, 21 November 2003. Australian Idol: Greatest Moments. Fremantle Media Operations, 2004. Brody, E.W. “The ‘Attention’ Economy.” Public Relations Quarterly 46.3 (2001): 18-21. Davenport, T., and J. Beck. “The Strategy and Structure of Firms in the Attention Economy.” Ivey Business Journal 66.4 (2002): 49–55. Elliott, R., and N. Jankel-Elliott. “Using Ethnography in Strategic Consumer Research.” Qualitative Market Research 6.4 (2003): 215-23. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002. Godin, Seth. Unleashing the Ideavirus. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Henry, Amy. “How Buzz Marketing Works for Teens.” Advertising and Marketing to Children April-June (2003): 3-10. Lee, Julian. “Stealth Marketers Ready to Railroad the Unsuspecting.” Sydney Morning Herald 24-5 July 2004: 3. Maxwell, Ian. “True to the Music: Authenticity, Articulation and Authorship in Sydney Hip-Hop Culture.” Social Semiotics 4.1-2 (1994): 117–37. Negus, Keith. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge, 1999. Negus, Keith. Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. London: Edward Arnold, 1992. Rosen, Emanuel. The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word of Mouth Marketing. London: Harper Collins, 2000. Stahl, Matthew. “A Moment like This: American Idol and Narratives of Meritocracy.” Bad Music: Music We Love to Hate. Eds. C. Washburne and M. Derno. New York: Routledge, 2004. 212–32. “Sydney Auditions: Conditions of Participation in the Australian Idol Audition.” Australian Idol Website 10 June 2004. http://au.australianidol.com.au>. Turner, G., F. Bonner, and P.D. Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Fairchild, Charles. "'Australian Idol' and the Attention Economy." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/09-fairchild.php>. APA Style Fairchild, C. (Nov. 2004) "'Australian Idol' and the Attention Economy," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/09-fairchild.php>.

Chat rooms are of enormous interest to social network researchers as they are one of the most interactive internet areas. To understand the behaviour of users in a chat room, there have been studies on the analysis of the Response Waiting Time (RWT) based on traditional approaches of aggregating the network contacts. However, real social networks are dynamic and properties such as RWT change over time. Unfortunately, the traditional approach focuses only on static network and neglecting the temporal variation in RWT which may have lead to misrepresentation of the true nature of RWT. In order to determine the true nature of RWT, we analyse and compare the RWT of three online chat room logs (Walford, IRC and T-REX) putting into consideration the dynamic nature of RWT. Our research shows that the distribution of the RWT exhibits multi-scaling behaviour, which signi cantly a ects the current views on the nature of RWT. This is a shift from simple power-law distribution to a more complex pattern. The previous study on users RWT between pairs of people claims that the RWT has a power-law distribution with an exponent of 1. However, our research shows that multi-scaling behaviour and the exponent has a wider range of values which depend on the environment and time of day. The di erent exponents observed on di erent time scales suggest that the time context or environment has a signi cant in uence on users RWT. Furthermore, using the chat characterise, we predicted the factors which could minimize response waiting time and improving the friendship connection during online chat sessions. We apply our ndings to design an algorithm for chat thread detection. Here, we proposed two variations of cluster algorithm. The rst algorithm involves the traditional approach while in the second one, the temporal variations in RWT was taken into consideration to capture the dynamic nature of a text stream. An advantage of our proposed method over the previous models is that previous models have involved highly computationally intensive methods and often lead to deterioration in the accuracy of the result whereas our proposed approach uses a simple and effective sequential thread detection method, which is less computationally intensive.