Journal articles on the topic 'University of Sheffield. Centre for Research on User Studies'

Background For systematic reviews to be rigorous, deliverable and useful, they need a well-defined review question. Scoping for a review also requires the specification of clear inclusion criteria and planned synthesis methods. Guidance is lacking on how to develop these, especially in the context of undertaking rapid and responsive systematic reviews to inform health services and health policy. Objective This report describes and discusses the experiences of review scoping of three commissioned research centres that conducted evidence syntheses to inform health and social care organisation, delivery and policy in the UK, between 2017 and 2020. Data sources Sources included researcher recollection, project meeting minutes, e-mail correspondence with stakeholders and scoping searches, from allocation of a review topic through to review protocol agreement. Methods We produced eight descriptive case studies of selected reviews from the three teams. From case studies, we identified key issues that shape the processes of scoping and question formulation for evidence synthesis. The issues were then discussed and lessons drawn. Findings Across the eight diverse case studies, we identified 14 recurrent issues that were important in shaping the scoping processes and formulating a review’s questions. There were ‘consultative issues’ that related to securing input from review commissioners, policy customers, experts, patients and other stakeholders. These included managing and deciding priorities, reconciling different priorities/perspectives, achieving buy-in and engagement, educating the end-user about synthesis processes and products, and managing stakeholder expectations. There were ‘interface issues’ that related to the interaction between the review team and potential review users. These included identifying the niche/gap and optimising value, assuring and balancing rigour/reliability/relevance, and assuring the transferability/applicability of study evidence to specific policy/service user contexts. There were also ‘technical issues’ that were associated with the methods and conduct of the review. These were choosing the method(s) of synthesis, balancing fixed and fluid review questions/components/definitions, taking stock of what research already exists, mapping versus scoping versus reviewing, scoping/relevance as a continuous process and not just an initial stage, and calibrating general compared with specific and broad compared with deep coverage of topics. Limitations As a retrospective joint reflection by review teams on their experiences of scoping processes, this report is not based on prospectively collected research data. In addition, our evaluations were not externally validated by, for example, policy and service evidence users or patients and the public. Conclusions We have summarised our reflections on scoping from this programme of reviews as 14 common issues and 28 practical ‘lessons learned’. Effective scoping of rapid, responsive reviews extends beyond information exchange and technical procedures for specifying a ‘gap’ in the evidence. These considerations work alongside social processes, in particular the building of relationships and shared understanding between reviewers, research commissioners and potential review users that may be reflective of consultancy, negotiation and co-production models of research and information use. Funding This report has been based on work commissioned by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Services and Delivery Research (HSDR) programme as three university-based evidence synthesis centres to inform the organisation, delivery and commissioning of health and social care; at the University of Exeter (NIHR 16/47/22), the University of Sheffield (NIHR 16/47/17) and the University of York (NIHR 16/47/11). This report was commissioned by the NIHR HSDR programme as a review project (NIHR132708) within the NIHR HSDR programme. This project was funded by the NIHR HSDR programme and will be published in full in Health Services and Delivery Research; Vol. 9, No. 15. See the NIHR Journals Library website for further project information.

This paper describes the results of three sewer sediment studies, carried out in Dundee, financed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Water Research centre (WRc). The work was carried out by the University of Abertay Dundee (Wastewater Technology Centre) as part of a collaborative research project undertaken with the University of Newcastle and the University of Sheffield. In Dundee, through collaboration with the sewerage system operator (Tayside Regional Council Water Services Department), three field sites have been established in interceptor and trunk sewer sites, since 1992, to monitor, as closely as possible, sediment and other pollutant erosion, their transport and the effects of first flushes. The physical and biochemical nature of the material being transported near the bed of real sewers has been measured. The importance of this mode of transport, in terms of mass transported and pollutant potential, is demonstrated based on data collected from the Dundee system sites. Comparisons are made between measured transport rates at the bed, at sites with and without deposited beds, with results obtained by applying empirical relationships developed to predict near bed transport in laboratory studies. A modified relationship is proposed which best fits the Dundee system data.

In the south-west German village of Hayingen, the playwright-director Martin Schleker presents large open-air productions of politically sensitive yet entertaining plays to mass audiences on an annual basis. This article explores the element of risk in Schleker's work: his use of purely amateur performers; his job-creation schemes for young people; and his left-wing and often anti-Catholic stance on issues such as racism and nuclear arms before often deeply conservative, culturally Catholic audiences. Schleker's work is situated in the wider context of the state-funded, civic theatres in Germany, and of the tradition of open-air ‘Naturtheater’ which is particularly strong in the Swabian region. Some assumptions surrounding such binary divides as amateur-professional and high art-entertainment are also explored. Data for this article was collected in the Hayingen ‘Naturtheater’ during a period of ethnographic research supported by the Leverhulme Trust. Having completed her doctorate at Sheffield University, Alison Phipps has been working as a lecturer in the Department of German – and in particular in the Centre for Intercultural Germanistics – at Glasgow University since October 1995. She has published in the areas of her research interests, which include contemporary German theatre and performance research, Ethnographic approaches to language education, and popular German culture and intercultural studies.

This paper reports on strategic developments to enhance student learner autonomy skills through the use of enquiry-based learning (EBL) in the design of higher education programmes. The UK's Sheffield Hallam University is a recognized Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) in the field of developing learner autonomy. Central to the university's learning, teaching and assessment strategy is the conviction that students must become autonomous learners to acquire the skills and knowledge needed for employment, research and continuing professional development. In this context it is imperative that students are increasingly able to manage their own learning, formulate their own lines of enquiry and develop flexible approaches to their studies – the essence of acquiring learner autonomy. It is also important that they can work across discipline boundaries, often in teams, tackling problems that are essentially multidisciplinary. The central theme of this paper is the strategic use of EBL in areas that involve students working together in small groups.

BackgroundUK NHS organisations are required to consult patients and the public about proposals for major changes to services. The evidence base for current UK guidance is unclear.ObjectivesTo assess what is known about effective patient and public engagement in reconfiguration processes and to identify implications for further research.DesignRapid evidence synthesis.SettingHealth services affected by reconfiguration proposals in the UK (particularly the English) NHS and similar health systems.ParticipantsMembers of the public and their representatives, patients and patient groups.InterventionsAny intervention to encourage patients and the public and their representatives to be involved in discussions about proposals for major service change.Main outcome measuresAny measure of ‘successful’ engagement as reported by health service decision-makers, patients and public representatives. We were also interested in the outcome of controversial reconfiguration proposals.Data sourcesWe carried out separate searches for systematic reviews, primary research studies and grey literature. Database searches were limited to material published in English from 2000 to March 2014.Review methodsFinal decisions on study inclusion were made by two reviewers independently. We used EPPI-Reviewer 4 (Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre, University of London, London, UK) to record decisions and for data extraction and quality assessment. We carried out a narrative synthesis using multiple frameworks (including pre-specified research questions and current guidance). In synthesising the case studies, we selected a number of ‘exemplars’ based on quality of reporting and some evaluation of the process of engagement.ResultsEight systematic reviews, seven empirical research studies and 24 case studies (six exemplars) were included. Methods of engagement varied in nature and intensity, and generally involved a mixed methods approach. There was no evidence on the isolated impact of any particular engagement method or collection of methods. In general, engagement was most likely to be successful when the process started at an early stage, offered opportunities for genuine interaction and was led and supported by clinicians involved in delivering the relevant services. The impact of engagement was variably measured and demonstrated. Impact was more frequently defined in terms of process measures than success or failure of reconfiguration. Little was reported on the potential negative impact of service user engagement.ConclusionsPatients and the public could be engaged through a wide variety of methods. In selecting which methods to employ locally, decision-makers should take into account the nature of the local population and of the proposed service changes. Problems often arose because decision-makers paid insufficient attention to issues considered important by the public. NHS England guidance could be a helpful practical framework for future engagement activity.Future workClearly reported evaluations of interventions are needed including those that test the sustainability of methods of engagement and their impact over time. The NHS England guidance on planning and delivering service change may provide a foundation for the design of future research.FundingCommissioned by the National Institute for Health Research Health Service and Delivery Research (HSDR) programme from the University of York HSDR Evidence Synthesis Centre (project no. 13/05/11).

Abstract. Since 1975, flood estimation in Ireland has generally followed methods as outlined in the Flood Studies Report (Natural Environment Research Council, 1975). An update of this for conditions in the Republic of Ireland commenced in 2005 and included research in Urban Catchment Flood Analysis. To inform this work, a scoping study of issues relating to flooding caused by urban runoff was undertaken by a team from the Centre for Water Resources Research at University College Dublin and some of the findings are described in this paper. It focussed on quantitative and qualitative research methods (self-completion questionnaires and Focus Groups) to review the methods of flood estimation for urbanised catchments currently in use in Ireland. It assessed the nature of deficiencies associated with urban-runoff control and identified achievable and realistic objectives for further research. A questionnaire was developed around a number of key themes pertaining to flooding caused by urban runoff and circulated to 291 stakeholders in target sectors that ranged from Engineering Consultancies to Academic Institutions. A total of 100 questionnaires were returned giving a 34% response rate. The study found; (i) a proliferation of methods are used in practice resulting in significant differences between the estimates; (ii) some methods are sometimes being used for inappropriate spatial scales; (iii) there is a lack of clear guidance on the use of the methods and/or associated software packages; (iv) there is little appreciation of the uncertainties associated with the methods and (v) there are significant deficiencies in some of the basic information available. A list of recommendations was produced, to guide the commissioning of future research to improve the methods available to designers.

Today’s consumers are very connected and knowledgeable and have very high expectations of businesses in terms of corporate social and environmental responsibilities. Yet, researchers have demonstrated the existence of a behaviour gap between consumers’ intention and their action. While they expect brands to be more responsible and are willing to pay more from the ones that ‘do good’, that willingness to purchase more ethical products fails to translate to a concrete purchase in reality. This behaviour gap is a real challenge to ethical fashion brands, a challenge that must be addressed in order to support the growth of the market and ensure that sustainability truly becomes the fashion industry framework. This chapter supports to a certain extent the arguments of the Professors Kate Fletcher (University of Arts London) and Lynda Grose (California College of Arts) in favour of creating longer-lasting garments through the design for sustainability approach. Their work has, among other things, put the user back to the centre of discussions and his relationship with clothing and how this relationship should affect systemic change in the industry. The purpose of this chapter is to bring the consumer behavioural paradox to light and to share through a case study one way ethical fashion brands could bridge consumers’ expectations and thus empower them in their choice to live more sustainably.

Abstract Background Mobile health technologies are innovative solutions for delivering instructions to patients preparing for their colonoscopy appointments. Aims To systematically review the literature of the effect of smartphone-based technologies supporting colonoscopy appointment preparation on patient outcomes. Methods With the assistance of a librarian, one author searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL and CENTRAL for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that evaluated the effect of smartphone-based technologies for colonoscopy preparation on bowel cleanliness and user satisfaction. Two independent reviewers extracted data on patient and intervention characteristics and study outcomes, and appraised study quality using the Cochrane Risk-of-Bias tool. Summary statistics were generated using random effects models for the trials that used either the Boston Bowel Preparation Scale (BPPS) or the Ottawa Bowel Preparation Scale (OBPS). Statistical heterogeneity was assessed using I2. Results Ten RCTs met our inclusion criteria. Smartphone-based interventions included apps, SMS text messages, video clips, camera apps, and social media apps. Most studies showed smartphone-based interventions were associated with better quality bowel cleanliness scores and higher user satisfaction compared to usual care. Standardized mean differences for the BBPS and OBPS differed between the intervention and control groups [SMD 0.57, 95%CI 0.18, 0.95] and [SMD -0.39, 95%CI -0.59, -0.19], respectively. Statistically significant statistical heterogeneity was found for the meta-analyses for the trials employing the BBPS (I2=80%, p=0.03) but not for the trials using the OBPS (I2=45%, p=0.16). All RCTs were at high risk of bias from non-blinded participants, and most studies were at high or unclear risk of bias due to lack of allocation concealment. Funnel plots to evaluate publication bias were not generated as there were too few studies with sufficient data to analyze. Conclusions This systematic review found that smartphone-based technology users had better bowel cleanliness quality scores and higher satisfaction with the method of delivering instructions compared to patients given usual care. Given that all RCTs were at high risk of bias, high-quality RCTs that blind participants and conceal study group allocation are needed. Funding Agencies CIHRDepartment of Medicine, McGill University and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre

Purpose. Reports on findings of work concerning the use of the JISC information environment by students, considering how information environments are related to the working environments of their users. Design/methodology/approach. CERLIM at Manchester Metropolitan University, partnered by CSALT (the Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technologies) at Lancaster University, has brought to bear perspectives from both information management and educational research. During 2003 to 2004 the scope of the evaluation was broadened to include all of the JISC development activity in the information environment area and has been extended to the further education sector: this is known as EDNER+. Findings. The use of quality attributes approaches can provide clues as to what it is about a service which is creating dissatisfaction among the users. Research limitations/implications. Coupled with other findings about “satisficing” behaviours, the findings are suggestive of some of the key areas which need to be given attention. They also support a finding from this and other work in EDNER/EDNER+, namely that to students internet search engines in general and Google in particular represent a benchmark of “good”. Practical implications. Given that use of bibliographic services is uniformly low among undergraduate students, and that the use of OPACs is variable, IE service developers will have to work very hard to produce services which gain acceptance among this group of users. Since IE includes further education students among its target user groups, it will be critical to address the full range of attributes against the needs of this group, as well as the higher education group, in future service design. Originality/value. Using a wide range of methodologies the team has explored the outcomes of a large number of projects funded by the JISC, as well as examining the architecture and rollout of the information environment itself.

Most Finnish university students, just like the other new global elites (Kramsch,2013), use English without problems. Some students, however, struggle withEnglish to the extent that their studies suffer. One could say that they have adeeply “wounded” English self (Karlsson, 2013). My context of research andpractice is the Autonomous Learning Modules (ALMS) at Helsinki UniversityLanguage Centre. In my work as a language counsellor and practitioner-researcher,pedagogical concerns are always primary, and there is a need to appreciatediversity yet notice every student’s unique experiences. The broadbackground of my recent work is English as part of the identity of young academicFinns. In particular, I have been interested in how students with a“wounded” English self can develop new identity positions, and in how a languagecounsellor can help them in this process. In this paper, my focus is on thesubtle practical interconnections between learner autonomy, learner diversity,and learner identity as they emerge in a diary written by a student of Englishwith dyslexia and language (classroom) anxiety. A narrative case study of Mariiaillustrates how the counsellor’s appreciation and her own recognition of thecomplex ecological realities (Casanave, 2012) surrounding and interacting withher learning encourage and empower her. Mariia uses her freedom to controlher own learning (Huang & Benson, 2013) and makes choices from the manylifewide experiential learning opportunities in her life (Karlsson & Kjisik, 2011).Reflective writing in the learning diary helps her to construct a realistic vision ofherself as a learner and user of English, and she leaves the identity position ofa failure in the classroom and claims a new, more successful one (Norton, 2014).

Background Our research arises from anticipated increases in demand for psychological trauma services in the UK, with particular reference to armed forces veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Commissioning and service provider activity to improve veterans’ health is evolving. Objectives To explore what UK services exist and establish potentially effective models of care and effective treatments for armed forces veterans with PTSD. Design A four-stage rapid evidence synthesis comprising information gathering on UK service provision; an evidence review on models of care; a metareview on treatment effectiveness; and a synthesis highlighting research priorities. Setting For the evidence reviews, any setting that was relevant to the UK health and social care system. Participants UK armed forces veterans with PTSD following repeated exposure to traumatic events. Interventions Any model of care or treatment. Main outcome measures Any relevant outcome. Data sources Information about current UK practice. Searches of databases [including MEDLINE, PsycINFO and PILOTS (Published International Literature on Traumatic Stress)], guidelines and relevant websites, up to November 2016. Review methods We screened titles and abstracts using EPPI-Reviewer 4 (EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, UK) and EndNote X7 [Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters), Philadelphia, PA, USA]. Decisions to include papers were made by two reviewers independently. We conducted a narrative synthesis of research literature on models of care and on treatments, guided by information from UK practice. In our evidence reviews, we assessed (when appropriate) the quality of included studies using established criteria. To help interpret our findings, we consulted recently published public and patient involvement data, a veteran service user and experts with academic, military and commissioning backgrounds. Results We gathered information about current UK practice. Sixty-one studies were included in the rapid evidence review on models of care and seven systematic reviews in the rapid metareview of treatments. The quality of evidence in both evidence reviews was limited. Promising models of care from more robust studies (three randomised controlled trials and one qualitative study) were collaborative arrangements and community outreach for improving intervention access and uptake; integrated mental health services and behavioural intervention on increased smoking abstinence; and peer support as an acceptable complement to PTSD treatment. A poor fit was noted between the research literature and UK service provision. Promising treatments were psychosocial interventions (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, cognitive processing therapy, trauma-focused and exposure-based intervention) and pharmacotherapy (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, antipsychotics) for improving PTSD and mental health symptoms. Limitations The literature pool was larger than anticipated. Evidence for potentially effective models of care and potentially effective treatments is limited in quality and quantity. Although we aimed for a comprehensive evidence synthesis, pragmatic decisions in searching, screening and inclusion of studies may mean that relevant studies were overlooked. Conclusions There is tentative support for the effectiveness of some models of care and certain treatments currently delivered in UK practice. Our findings are timely for commissioners and service providers when developing present activity in veterans’ health care. Future work We report potential implications for future health-care practice, including early intervention for veterans transitioning from military life, improving general practitioners’ knowledge about services, implementing needs-based service design and tackling wider-system challenges. Regarding potential areas of future research, we have identified the need for more-robust (and longer) evaluative studies in the UK setting. Funding The National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme.

BackgroundWhile early outcomes of paediatric cardiac surgery have improved, less attention has been given to later outcomes including post-discharge mortality and emergency readmissions.ObjectivesOur objectives were to use a mixed-methods approach to build an evidenced-based guideline for postdischarge management of infants undergoing interventions for congenital heart disease (CHD).MethodsSystematic reviews of the literature – databases used: MEDLINE (1980 to 1 February 2013), EMBASE (1980 to 1 February 2013), Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL; 1981 to 1 February 2013), The Cochrane Library (1999 to 1 February 2013), Web of Knowledge (1980 to 1 February 2013) and PsycINFO (1980 to 1 February 2013). Analysis of audit data from the National Congenital Heart Disease Audit and Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network databases pertaining to records of infants undergoing interventions for CHD between 1 January 2005 and 31 December 2010. Qualitative analyses of online discussion posted by 73 parents, interviews with 10 helpline staff based at user groups, interviews with 20 families whose infant either died after discharge or was readmitted urgently to intensive care, and interviews with 25 professionals from tertiary care and 13 professionals from primary and secondary care. Iterative multidisciplinary review and discussion of evidence incorporating the views of parents on suggestions for improvement.ResultsDespite a wide search strategy, the studies identified for inclusion in reviews related only to patients with complex CHD, for whom adverse outcome was linked to non-white ethnicity, lower socioeconomic status, comorbidity, age, complexity and feeding difficulties. There was evidence to suggest that home monitoring programmes (HMPs) are beneficial. Of 7976 included infants, 333 (4.2%) died postoperatively, leaving 7634 infants, of whom 246 (3.2%) experienced outcome 1 (postdischarge death) and 514 (6.7%) experienced outcome 2 (postdischarge death plus emergency intensive care readmissions). Multiple logistic regression models for risk of outcomes 1 and 2 had areas under the receiver operator curve of 0.78 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.75 to 0.82] and 0.78 (95% CI 0.75 to 0.80), respectively. Six patient groups were identified using classification and regression tree analysis to stratify by outcome 2 (range 3–24%), which were defined in terms of neurodevelopmental conditions, high-risk cardiac diagnosis (hypoplastic left heart, single ventricle or pulmonary atresia), congenital anomalies and length of stay (LOS) > 1 month. Deficiencies and national variability were noted for predischarge training and information, the process of discharge to non-specialist services including documentation, paediatric cardiology follow-up including HMP, psychosocial support post discharge and the processes for accessing help when an infant becomes unwell.ConclusionsNational standardisation may improve discharge documents, training and guidance on ‘what is normal’ and ‘signs and symptoms to look for’, including how to respond. Infants with high-risk cardiac diagnoses, neurodevelopmental conditions or LOS > 1 month may benefit from discharge via their local hospital. HMP is suggested for infants with hypoplastic left heart, single ventricle or pulmonary atresia. Discussion of postdischarge deaths for infant CHD should occur at a network-based multidisciplinary meeting. Audit is required of outcomes for this stage of the patient journey.Future workFurther research may determine the optimal protocol for HMPs, evaluate the use of traffic light tools for monitoring infants post discharge and develop the analytical steps and processes required for audit of postdischarge metrics.Study registrationThis study is registered as PROSPERO CRD42013003483 and CRD42013003484.FundingThe National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme. The National Congenital Heart Diseases Audit (NCHDA) and Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network (PICANet) are funded by the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme, administered by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP). PICAnet is also funded by Welsh Health Specialised Services Committee; NHS Lothian/National Service Division NHS Scotland, the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, National Office of Clinical Audit Ireland, and HCA International. The study was supported by the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust and University College London. Sonya Crowe was supported by the Health Foundation, an independent charity working to continuously improve the quality of health care in the UK.

Abstract Background Observational studies have demonstrated associations between maternal gestational vitamin D status and offspring bone health. We have recently shown, in a randomised controlled trial, that pregnancy vitamin D supplementation leads to improved offspring bone mass at birth amongst winter deliveries (when background 25(OH)-vitamin D levels are lowest). In the present analysis, we aimed to evaluate whether the beneficial effect of pregnancy vitamin D supplementation on neonatal bone mass is sustained into early childhood, with bone indices assessed at age 4 years in a subset of participants of the MAVIDOS trial. Methods Pregnant women were randomised in Southampton, Oxford and Sheffield, in a double-blind design, to 1000 IU/day cholecalciferol or matched placebo from 14 weeks’ gestation to birth. At 4 years of age (Southampton participants only, n = 723 births), offspring assessments included anthropometry, whole-body dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) [Hologic Horizon, yielding whole body less head (WBLH) bone mineral content (BMC), bone mineral density (BMD), bone area (BA) and lean mass (LM)], and a maternal questionnaire. Linear regression was used to estimate the mean difference (represented by β) in outcomes between the two randomisation arms, adjusted for sex and age at DXA. Further models were additionally adjusted for gestational age, maternal BMI, and child’s sedentary time. All outcomes were standardised to a standard deviation scale, for ease of comparison. Full ethics and MHRA approvals were granted. Results 564 children attended the 4-year visit; 452 had a useable DXA with minimal movement artefact. Maternal pregnancy vitamin D supplementation led to greater offspring indices of bone mass compared with placebo, irrespective of season. For example, WBLH BMD at age 4 years was greater in the offspring of supplemented mothers [β = 0.18 SD (95%CI: 0.00, 0.35), p = 0.047]; there was also evidence of greater LM in the intervention group [β = 0.15 SD (95%CI: -0.02, 0.31), p = 0.081]. In fully adjusted models associations were consistent for lumbar spine indices and for BA and BMC. In keeping with the offspring findings, maternal vitamin D supplementation led to significantly higher maternal plasma 25(OH)D concentrations in late pregnancy (34 weeks’ gestation): placebo group (median(IQR)): 42.4 nmol/l (23.3, 56.4); vitamin D group: 67.4 nmol/l (56.2, 80.3); p < 0.001. Conclusion This is the first ever demonstration in a large placebo-controlled, double-blind randomised controlled trial that maternal pregnancy vitamin D supplementation leads to improved bone and lean mass in children. Our findings suggest that maternal cholecalciferol supplementation may have lasting benefits for offspring musculoskeletal health and thus represent an important public health message. This work was supported by grants from Versus Arthritis 17702, Medical Research Council (MRC #405050259; #U105960371), Bupa Foundation, NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), University of Southampton, and NIHR Oxford BRC, University of Oxford. EC was supported by the Wellcome Trust (#201268/Z/16/Z). Disclosures E.M. Curtis None. R.J. Moon None. S. D'Angelo None. S.R. Crozier None. N.J. Bishop None. S. Gopal- Kothandapani None. S. Kennedy None. A.T. Papageorghiou None. R. Fraser None. S.V. Gandhi None. I. Schoenmakers None. A. Prentice None. H.M. Inskip None. K.M. Godfrey None. K. Javaid None. R. Eastell None. C. Cooper None. N.C. Harvey None.

Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum on olnud teerajajaid digihumanitaaria valdkonnas juba 1990. aastatest, alates arvutikultuuri laiemast levikust. Väärtuslike andmekogude haldamisel on olnud missiooniks nende kättesaadavaks tegemine avalikkusele. Kultuuripärand avati laiemale kasutajale kahes suunas: sisupõhised otsitavad andmebaasid ning suhtepõhised andmekeskkonnad. Siinse artikli eesmärgiks on näidata arvutusliku kirjandusteaduse tänapäevaseid võimalusi ja nendega seotud kirjanduslike keeleressursside loomist koostöös korpuslingvistidega. Artiklis analüüsin kultuuripärandi sisukeskkondade ja andmekoguside kasutusvõimalusi masinloetava keeleressursina. Esimeste selliste katsetena on valminud kirjavahetuse ja kriitika märgendatud keelekorpused päringusüsteemis KORP. Käesolev uurimus toob on 20. sajandi alguse mõjukriitika probleemi näitel välja kirjanduslike keelekorpuste potentsiaali kultuuripärandi uurimisel. Estonia can soon expect an explosive growth in digital heritage and text resources due to the current project of mass digitisation of national cultural heritage (printed books, archival documents, photos, art, audiovisual, and ethnographic artifacts) (2019–2023). This will give new opportunities for different fields of digital humanities and make digitised heritage accessible to everyone in the form of open data. The project will focus on the usage of the heritage, on the needs of education, e-learning, and the creative industry, including digital creative arts. The aim of this article is to examine some research possibilities that opened up for literary history due to the digitisation of literary works and archival sources and to put them in the general context of digital humanities. Although the field of digital humanities is broad, the meaning of DH is often reduced to methods of computational language-centered analyses, mainly based on using different tools and software languages (R, Stylo, Phyton, Gephy, Top Modelling etc.). While the corpus-based research is already a professional standard in linguistics, literary scholars are still more used to working with traditional methods. This article introduces two digital literary history projects belonging to the field of digital humanities and analyses them as language resources for creating texts corpora, and introduces some results of the case study of Estonian criticism from the Young Estonia movement up to the 1920s, carried out using the literary texts corpora in the corpus query system KORP (https://korp.keeleressursid.ee) by the Centre of Estonian Language Resources. During the past twenty years, I have mainly focussed on developing large-scale implementation projects for digital representation of Estonian literary history. The objective of these experimental projects has been to develop principally new non-linear models of Estonian literary history for the digital environment. These activities were based on my research of the intertextual relations between authors, literary works, and critical texts using traditional methods. The first content-based literary history project “ERNI. Estonian Literary History in Texts 1924–1925” (www2.kirmus.ee/erni) was based on a hypertextual network of literary source texts and reviews. We re-conceptualised literary history as a non-linear narrative and a gallery with many entrances. The task of the project was also to ensure its usability in education: a significant number of study materials has been added in cooperation with schoolteachers. In 2004, we initiated our long-term and still running project “Kreutzwald’s Century: the Estonian Cultural History Web” (http://kreutzwald.kirmus.ee) at the Estonian Literary Museum. The objective of this project was to make literary sources of the period accessible as the dynamic, interactive information environment. This was a hybrid project which synthesised the classical study of Estonian literary history, the needs of the digital media user, and the expanding digital resources from different memory institutions; its underlying idea was to link together all the works of fiction of an author, as well as their biography, manuscripts, and photos and to make them visible for the user on five interactive time axes. The project uses a specially created platform. Today, this platform is extensively used by schoolteachers: in 2020 (Jan.–Dec.) it had about 8, 986.555 million clicks and during seven years (2013 Dec.–2020 Dec.) it has collected 64, 627.380 million clicks. To find out how we can fit such content-based models of literary heritage into the context of Digital Humanities we need to compare the previous modelling practices with our current experimental project in the corpus query system KORP. Our interdisciplinary project “Literary Studies Meet Corpus Linguistics” (2017–2020) concentrated on studying literary history sources with linguistic methods. As the result of the project two literary text corpora were created: “Epistolary text corpus of Estonian writers Johannes Semper and Johannes Vares-Barbarus” and “Corpus of the Estonian literary criticism, Noor-Eesti and the 1920s”. Both of them were pilot projects in the field, started with converting the digitalised archival and printed sources into machine-readable format before text and data mining for corpus creation. Query system KORP allows us to organise the language data by all the categories used in the corpus, for example, to learn who and in what context mentioned the name of the French writer André Gide. The second currently running project is the morphologically annotated corpus of literary criticism. This corpus contains texts of literary reviews and criticism in different genres, drawn from the projects ERNI and “Kreutzwald’s Century”. The first results in studying the dynamics of literary values can already be seen. A query in KORP about the word ‘mõju’ (‘influence’) revealed that the manifesto “More of European culture!”of the group Young Estonia, voiced in 1905, was during the independent Estonian Republic replaced by the valuing of a specific national character. Corpus query showed a change in the meaning of the word: in the criticism contemporary to Young Estonia, the word ‘mõju’ was only associated with the historical pressure from Russian and German cultures. The foundation for modern comparative linguistics at the University of Tartu was laid in the 1920s by the professorship in Estonian literature.

At one point in Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the archdeacon, Claude Frollo, looked up from a book on his table to the edifice of the gothic cathedral, visible from his canon’s cell in the cloister of Notre Dame: “Alas!” he said, “this will kill that” (146). Frollo’s lament, that the book would destroy the edifice, captures the medieval cleric’s anxiety about the way in which Gutenberg’s print technology would become the new universal means for recording and communicating humanity’s ideas and artistic expression, replacing the grand monuments of architecture, human engineering, and craftsmanship. For Hugo, architecture was “the great handwriting of humankind” (149). The cathedral as the material outcome of human technology was being replaced by the first great machine—the printing press. At this point in the third millennium, some people undoubtedly have similar anxieties to Frollo: is it now the book’s turn to be destroyed by yet another great machine? The inclusion of “post print” in our title is not intended to sound the death knell of the book. Rather, we contend that despite the enduring value of print, digital publishing is “present and active” and is changing the way in which research, particularly in the humanities, is being undertaken. Our approach has three related parts. First, we consider how digital technologies are changing the way in which content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a global, distributed network. This section argues that the transition from print to electronic or digital publishing means both losses and gains, particularly with respect to shifts in our approaches to textuality, information, and innovative publishing. Second, we discuss the Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) project, with which we are involved. This case study of a digitising initiative opens out the transformative possibilities and challenges of digital publishing and e-scholarship for research communities. Third, we reflect on technology’s capacity to bring about major changes in the light of the theoretical and practical issues that have arisen from our discussion. I. Digitising in a “post-print age” We are living in an era that is commonly referred to as “the late age of print” (see Kho) or the “post-print age” (see Gunkel). According to Aarseth, we have reached a point whereby nearly all of our public and personal media have become more or less digital (37). As Kho notes, web newspapers are not only becoming increasingly more popular, but they are also making rather than losing money, and paper-based newspapers are finding it difficult to recruit new readers from the younger generations (37). Not only can such online-only publications update format, content, and structure more economically than print-based publications, but their wide distribution network, speed, and flexibility attract advertising revenue. Hype and hyperbole aside, publishers are not so much discarding their legacy of print, but recognising the folly of not embracing innovative technologies that can add value by presenting information in ways that satisfy users’ needs for content to-go or for edutainment. As Kho notes: “no longer able to satisfy customer demand by producing print-only products, or even by enabling online access to semi-static content, established publishers are embracing new models for publishing, web-style” (42). Advocates of online publishing contend that the major benefits of online publishing over print technology are that it is faster, more economical, and more interactive. However, as Hovav and Gray caution, “e-publishing also involves risks, hidden costs, and trade-offs” (79). The specific focus for these authors is e-journal publishing and they contend that while cost reduction is in editing, production and distribution, if the journal is not open access, then costs relating to storage and bandwith will be transferred to the user. If we put economics aside for the moment, the transition from print to electronic text (e-text), especially with electronic literary works, brings additional considerations, particularly in their ability to make available different reading strategies to print, such as “animation, rollovers, screen design, navigation strategies, and so on” (Hayles 38). Transition from print to e-text In his book, Writing Space, David Bolter follows Victor Hugo’s lead, but does not ask if print technology will be destroyed. Rather, he argues that “the idea and ideal of the book will change: print will no longer define the organization and presentation of knowledge, as it has for the past five centuries” (2). As Hayles noted above, one significant indicator of this change, which is a consequence of the shift from analogue to digital, is the addition of graphical, audio, visual, sonic, and kinetic elements to the written word. A significant consequence of this transition is the reinvention of the book in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by space and time. Rather, it is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors, and texts. The Web 2.0 platform has enabled more experimentation with blending of digital technology and traditional writing, particularly in the use of blogs, which have spawned blogwriting and the wikinovel. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce and Community … and Why We Should Worry is a wikinovel or blog book that was produced over a series of weeks with contributions from other bloggers (see: http://www.sivacracy.net/). Penguin Books, in collaboration with a media company, “Six Stories to Start,” have developed six stories—“We Tell Stories,” which involve different forms of interactivity from users through blog entries, Twitter text messages, an interactive google map, and other features. For example, the story titled “Fairy Tales” allows users to customise the story using their own choice of names for characters and descriptions of character traits. Each story is loosely based on a classic story and links take users to synopses of these original stories and their authors and to online purchase of the texts through the Penguin Books sales website. These examples of digital stories are a small part of the digital environment, which exploits computer and online technologies’ capacity to be interactive and immersive. As Janet Murray notes, the interactive qualities of digital environments are characterised by their procedural and participatory abilities, while their immersive qualities are characterised by their spatial and encyclopedic dimensions (71–89). These immersive and interactive qualities highlight different ways of reading texts, which entail different embodied and cognitive functions from those that reading print texts requires. As Hayles argues: the advent of electronic textuality presents us with an unparalleled opportunity to reformulate fundamental ideas about texts and, in the process, to see print as well as electronic texts with fresh eyes (89–90). The transition to e-text also highlights how digitality is changing all aspects of everyday life both inside and outside the academy. Online teaching and e-research Another aspect of the commercial arm of publishing that is impacting on academe and other organisations is the digitising and indexing of print content for niche distribution. Kho offers the example of the Mark Logic Corporation, which uses its XML content platform to repurpose content, create new content, and distribute this content through multiple portals. As the promotional website video for Mark Logic explains, academics can use this service to customise their own textbooks for students by including only articles and book chapters that are relevant to their subject. These are then organised, bound, and distributed by Mark Logic for sale to students at a cost that is generally cheaper than most textbooks. A further example of how print and digital materials can form an integrated, customised source for teachers and students is eFictions (Trimmer, Jennings, & Patterson). eFictions was one of the first print and online short story anthologies that teachers of literature could customise to their own needs. Produced as both a print text collection and a website, eFictions offers popular short stories in English by well-known traditional and contemporary writers from the US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and Europe, with summaries, notes on literary features, author biographies, and, in one instance, a YouTube movie of the story. In using the eFictions website, teachers can build a customised anthology of traditional and innovative stories to suit their teaching preferences. These examples provide useful indicators of how content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a distributed network. However, the question remains as to how to measure their impact and outcomes within teaching and learning communities. As Harley suggests in her study on the use and users of digital resources in the humanities and social sciences, several factors warrant attention, such as personal teaching style, philosophy, and specific disciplinary requirements. However, in terms of understanding the benefits of digital resources for teaching and learning, Harley notes that few providers in her sample had developed any plans to evaluate use and users in a systematic way. In addition to the problems raised in Harley’s study, another relates to how researchers can be supported to take full advantage of digital technologies for e-research. The transformation brought about by information and communication technologies extends and broadens the impact of research, by making its outputs more discoverable and usable by other researchers, and its benefits more available to industry, governments, and the wider community. Traditional repositories of knowledge and information, such as libraries, are juggling the space demands of books and computer hardware alongside increasing reader demand for anywhere, anytime, anyplace access to information. Researchers’ expectations about online access to journals, eprints, bibliographic data, and the views of others through wikis, blogs, and associated social and information networking sites such as YouTube compete with the traditional expectations of the institutions that fund libraries for paper-based archives and book repositories. While university libraries are finding it increasingly difficult to purchase all hardcover books relevant to numerous and varied disciplines, a significant proportion of their budgets goes towards digital repositories (e.g., STORS), indexes, and other resources, such as full-text electronic specialised and multidisciplinary journal databases (e.g., Project Muse and Proquest); electronic serials; e-books; and specialised information sources through fast (online) document delivery services. An area that is becoming increasingly significant for those working in the humanities is the digitising of historical and cultural texts. II. Bringing back the dead: The CLDR project The CLDR project is led by researchers and librarians at the Queensland University of Technology, in collaboration with Deakin University, University of Sydney, and members of the AustLit team at The University of Queensland. The CLDR project is a “Research Community” of the electronic bibliographic database AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource, which is working towards the goal of providing a complete bibliographic record of the nation’s literature. AustLit offers users with a single entry point to enhanced scholarly resources on Australian writers, their works, and other aspects of Australian literary culture and activities. AustLit and its Research Communities are supported by grants from the Australian Research Council and financial and in-kind contributions from a consortium of Australian universities, and by other external funding sources such as the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Like other more extensive digitisation projects, such as Project Gutenberg and the Rosetta Project, the CLDR project aims to provide a centralised access point for digital surrogates of early published works of Australian children’s literature, with access pathways to existing resources. The first stage of the CLDR project is to provide access to digitised, full-text, out-of-copyright Australian children’s literature from European settlement to 1945, with selected digitised critical works relevant to the field. Texts comprise a range of genres, including poetry, drama, and narrative for young readers and picture books, songs, and rhymes for infants. Currently, a selection of 75 e-texts and digital scans of original texts from Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive have been linked to the Children’s Literature Research Community. By the end of 2009, the CLDR will have digitised approximately 1000 literary texts and a significant number of critical works. Stage II and subsequent development will involve digitisation of selected texts from 1945 onwards. A precursor to the CLDR project has been undertaken by Deakin University in collaboration with the State Library of Victoria, whereby a digital bibliographic index comprising Victorian School Readers has been completed with plans for full-text digital surrogates of a selection of these texts. These texts provide valuable insights into citizenship, identity, and values formation from the 1930s onwards. At the time of writing, the CLDR is at an early stage of development. An extensive survey of out-of-copyright texts has been completed and the digitisation of these resources is about to commence. The project plans to make rich content searchable, allowing scholars from children’s literature studies and education to benefit from the many advantages of online scholarship. What digital publishing and associated digital archives, electronic texts, hypermedia, and so forth foreground is the fact that writers, readers, publishers, programmers, designers, critics, booksellers, teachers, and copyright laws operate within a context that is highly mediated by technology. In his article on large-scale digitisation projects carried out by Cornell and University of Michigan with the Making of America collection of 19th-century American serials and monographs, Hirtle notes that when special collections’ materials are available via the Web, with appropriate metadata and software, then they can “increase use of the material, contribute to new forms of research, and attract new users to the material” (44). Furthermore, Hirtle contends that despite the poor ergonomics associated with most electronic displays and e-book readers, “people will, when given the opportunity, consult an electronic text over the print original” (46). If this preference is universally accurate, especially for researchers and students, then it follows that not only will the preference for electronic surrogates of original material increase, but preference for other kinds of electronic texts will also increase. It is with this preference for electronic resources in mind that we approached the field of children’s literature in Australia and asked questions about how future generations of researchers would prefer to work. If electronic texts become the reference of choice for primary as well as secondary sources, then it seems sensible to assume that researchers would prefer to sit at the end of the keyboard than to travel considerable distances at considerable cost to access paper-based print texts in distant libraries and archives. We considered the best means for providing access to digitised primary and secondary, full text material, and digital pathways to existing online resources, particularly an extensive indexing and bibliographic database. Prior to the commencement of the CLDR project, AustLit had already indexed an extensive number of children’s literature. Challenges and dilemmas The CLDR project, even in its early stages of development, has encountered a number of challenges and dilemmas that centre on access, copyright, economic capital, and practical aspects of digitisation, and sustainability. These issues have relevance for digital publishing and e-research. A decision is yet to be made as to whether the digital texts in CLDR will be available on open or closed/tolled access. The preference is for open access. As Hayles argues, copyright is more than a legal basis for intellectual property, as it also entails ideas about authorship, creativity, and the work as an “immaterial mental construct” that goes “beyond the paper, binding, or ink” (144). Seeking copyright permission is therefore only part of the issue. Determining how the item will be accessed is a further matter, particularly as future technologies may impact upon how a digital item is used. In the case of e-journals, the issue of copyright payment structures are evolving towards a collective licensing system, pay-per-view, and other combinations of print and electronic subscription (see Hovav and Gray). For research purposes, digitisation of items for CLDR is not simply a scan and deliver process. Rather it is one that needs to ensure that the best quality is provided and that the item is both accessible and usable by researchers, and sustainable for future researchers. Sustainability is an important consideration and provides a challenge for institutions that host projects such as CLDR. Therefore, items need to be scanned to a high quality and this requires an expensive scanner and personnel costs. Files need to be in a variety of formats for preservation purposes and so that they may be manipulated to be useable in different technologies (for example, Archival Tiff, Tiff, Jpeg, PDF, HTML). Hovav and Gray warn that when technology becomes obsolete, then content becomes unreadable unless backward integration is maintained. The CLDR items will be annotatable given AustLit’s NeAt funded project: Aus-e-Lit. The Aus-e-Lit project will extend and enhance the existing AustLit web portal with data integration and search services, empirical reporting services, collaborative annotation services, and compound object authoring, editing, and publishing services. For users to be able to get the most out of a digital item, it needs to be searchable, either through double keying or OCR (optimal character recognition). The value of CLDR’s contribution The value of the CLDR project lies in its goal to provide a comprehensive, searchable body of texts (fictional and critical) to researchers across the humanities and social sciences. Other projects seem to be intent on putting up as many items as possible to be considered as a first resort for online texts. CLDR is more specific and is not interested in simply generating a presence on the Web. Rather, it is research driven both in its design and implementation, and in its focussed outcomes of assisting academics and students primarily in their e-research endeavours. To this end, we have concentrated on the following: an extensive survey of appropriate texts; best models for file location, distribution, and use; and high standards of digitising protocols. These issues that relate to data storage, digitisation, collections, management, and end-users of data are aligned with the “Development of an Australian Research Data Strategy” outlined in An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework (2006). CLDR is not designed to simply replicate resources, as it has a distinct focus, audience, and research potential. In addition, it looks at resources that may be forgotten or are no longer available in reproduction by current publishing companies. Thus, the aim of CLDR is to preserve both the time and a period of Australian history and literary culture. It will also provide users with an accessible repository of rare and early texts written for children. III. Future directions It is now commonplace to recognize that the Web’s role as information provider has changed over the past decade. New forms of “collective intelligence” or “distributed cognition” (Oblinger and Lombardi) are emerging within and outside formal research communities. Technology’s capacity to initiate major cultural, social, educational, economic, political and commercial shifts has conditioned us to expect the “next big thing.” We have learnt to adapt swiftly to the many challenges that online technologies have presented, and we have reaped the benefits. As the examples in this discussion have highlighted, the changes in online publishing and digitisation have provided many material, network, pedagogical, and research possibilities: we teach online units providing students with access to e-journals, e-books, and customized archives of digitised materials; we communicate via various online technologies; we attend virtual conferences; and we participate in e-research through a global, digital network. In other words, technology is deeply engrained in our everyday lives. In returning to Frollo’s concern that the book would destroy architecture, Umberto Eco offers a placatory note: “in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else” (n. pag.). Eco’s point has relevance to our discussion of digital publishing. The transition from print to digital necessitates a profound change that impacts on the ways we read, write, and research. As we have illustrated with our case study of the CLDR project, the move to creating digitised texts of print literature needs to be considered within a dynamic network of multiple causalities, emergent technological processes, and complex negotiations through which digital texts are created, stored, disseminated, and used. Technological changes in just the past five years have, in many ways, created an expectation in the minds of people that the future is no longer some distant time from the present. Rather, as our title suggests, the future is both present and active. References Aarseth, Espen. “How we became Postdigital: From Cyberstudies to Game Studies.” Critical Cyber-culture Studies. Ed. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari. New York: New York UP, 2006. 37–46. An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework: Final Report of the e-Research Coordinating Committee. Commonwealth of Australia, 2006. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991. Eco, Umberto. “The Future of the Book.” 1994. 3 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Gunkel, David. J. “What's the Matter with Books?” Configurations 11.3 (2003): 277–303. Harley, Diane. “Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Research and Occasional Papers Series. Berkeley: University of California. Centre for Studies in Higher Education. 12 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Hirtle, Peter B. “The Impact of Digitization on Special Collections in Libraries.” Libraries & Culture 37.1 (2002): 42–52. Hovav, Anat and Paul Gray. “Managing Academic E-journals.” Communications of the ACM 47.4 (2004): 79–82. Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris). Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth editions, 1993. Kho, Nancy D. “The Medium Gets the Message: Post-Print Publishing Models.” EContent 30.6 (2007): 42–48. Oblinger, Diana and Marilyn Lombardi. “Common Knowledge: Openness in Higher Education.” Opening up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education Through Open Technology, Open Content and Open Knowledge. Ed. Toru Liyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 389–400. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Trimmer, Joseph F., Wade Jennings, and Annette Patterson. eFictions. New York: Harcourt, 2001.

Introduction The construction of meaning is specifically denoted by texts that are created and published by the mass media. To highlight how that meaning is constructed, we might take a communication research approach which then enables us to understand how mass media texts impact society. To undertake such an approach it is useful to reflect on two methods outlined by Adoni and Mane who suggest there are two communication research methodologies. “The first focuses on the social construction of reality as an important aspect of the relationship between culture and society. The second approach concentrates on the social construction of reality as one type of media effect.” (Adoni and Mane 323). Relying on Adoni and Mane’s second communication research approach and combining this with the practice of remix, we can begin to understand how practitioners construct a reality from the mass audience perspective and not the mass media’s construction. This aligns with the approach taken by the ABC Pool remix practitioners in that they are informed by the mass media’s construction of meaning, yet oppose their understanding of the text as the basis for their altered construction of meaning. The oppositional reading of the media text also aligns with Hall’s encoding/decoding theory, specifically the oppositional reading where audiences resist the dominant or preferred reading of the text (Long & Wall). If we align Deuze’s (Media Work) thinking to mass media that suggests we live in media as opposed to with media, the effects of the construction of reality have a major impact on how we construct our own lives. Until recently, that media and consequent meaning has been constructed by the mass media and broadcast into our living rooms, headphones, billboards and other public spaces where media resides. The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and the affordances these information and communication technologies provide for the audience to talk back in new and innovative ways has challenged that traditional model of meaning construction. Now, instead of the mass media designing and disseminating meaning through our media consumption channels, the audience also has an opportunity to participate in this consumption and production process (Bruns; Jenkins; Shirky). “Remix means to take cultural artifacts and combine and manipulate them into new kinds of creative blends,” according to (Knobel & Lankshear 22) where Lessig argues that digital remix is writing on a mass cultural practice scale (Remix). Remix within this paper is considered a practice that takes the affordances of the technology and couples that with the creative ability of the artists to create socially constructed meanings through new and inventive methods. In considering socially constructed meaning, it is useful to reflect on media dependency theory, which suggests the amount of subjective reality depends on direct experience with various phenomena and the exposure to the media in relation to those phenomena (Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur). “According to the media dependency hypothesis, the degree of media contribution to the individual's construction of subjective reality is a function of one's direct experience with various phenomena and consequent dependence on the media for information about these phenomena” (Adoni and Mane 324). Remix requires a parent piece of media (the original meaning) to create a remixed child (the re-constructed meaning). There is a clear dependency relationship between the parent and child pieces of media in this arrangement, which realistically shapes how the child will be created. If this material is published in a non-institutional environment, the artist is more or less free to demonstrate what ever meaning they wish to express. However when this practice emerges from within an institutional environment, this raises concerns of the media production, namely is the media institution challenging the original meaning they placed on certain texts and are they endorsing the new socially constructed meaning provided by remix artists? Constructing new forms of meaning and challenging the preferred meaning of institutionally generated texts intrinsically connects remix to the act of online activism. Activism can be defined as “people and organisations that work to promote social or political changes” for the benefit of society (Jones 1). Scholars have noted the significance of online technologies to aid in the mobilisation of mass groups of individuals in protest. In light of the recent Arab Spring uprisings, González-Bailón et al. note “the number of events connecting social media with social unrest has multiplied, not only in the context of authoritarian regimes exemplified by the recent wave of upsurges across the Arab world but also in western liberal democracies, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis and changes to welfare policies” (para 1). Although the majority of work that is remixed on ABC Pool is not related to an authoritarian regime, it is representative of the frustrations many citizens have towards the inequality of distribution of wealth and power to a few privileged individuals. Remix as an online activism activity also explicitly demonstrates Hall’s oppositional reading of encoded texts. This paper will use media dependency theory as a lens to investigate how remix occurs outside of the institution to challenge the meanings created by authorities within the institutional setting, while challenging the mass media approach towards social discourse construction. To do this, the paper will focus on the case study of one remix artist, Main$treaM, who was an active participant within the institutional online community, ABC Pool. ABC Pool was a user created content space that ceased to operate during May 2013 from within the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The Pool project enabled users to publish their audio, video, photography and writing on a platform that was developed and resourced by the ABC. ABC Pool was open to everyone and was governed by the same editorial policies that regulated all media and activities across the ABC in relation to the ABC Charter (ABC Act 1983). ABC Pool also operated under a Creative Commons licensing regime which enabled media to flow across platforms, for example the Internet, radio and television, while providing attribution to the original author (generally under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license). Main$treaM was one active user that engaged in remix to pursue his creative direction but to also challenge the meanings of texts that had been created by the mass media. Max Prophet$ equals Ca$h for Comments Main$treaM had been active in Pool for several months when he began publishing his remixed works. His approach towards media and its production is especially important as his technique involved challenging the societal discourse that is accepted from traditional forms of media production and reappropriating them to reflect how an audience would reconstruct them, from their Deuzian lived in experience. Main$treaM can also be classified as an oppositional reader of text in regards to how he decodes the meaning within the message (Hall). His online activist approach is obvious in his self-described profile. Main$treaM’s profile on ABC Pool says: Making animations, music & loads of max prophet$ However, his profile on Discogs (Discogs is one of the largest online music databases, where users can contribute music information and data while locating collectables within the global marketplace) reveals the artist’s creative and political perspectives: Main$treaM started off wanting to piss people off. He loathed the studio recording industry professionals & Sound Production Mass Media Culture in general. How could it be that a TV Camera can record what you say in the street, then edit it into something YOU DID NOT SAY but take a little news sample off the TV & bam: "WE WILL SUE YOU" These days it makes me sick that hard breaks & media cut ups are trendy. Not sick enough to actually stop. Main$treaM’s approach is one that challenges the stereotypical rhetoric tropes of the mass media and is concerned with choosing a remix style that aligns with the media dependency theory. That is, he draws on the one perspective which is garnered by the traditional media figureheads and applies his lived in experience with those same societal discourses to provide a significantly different meaning (Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur). The tool he uses to operationalise this is the art of remix by taking multiple cultural artefacts to create new creative blends (Knobel & Lankshear). John Laws is a radio celebrity who has dominated the Australian media landscape for decades with his at times controversial ‘shock jock’ talk back radio program. He is right wing in his political alignment and has at times been the centre of controversial programming efforts that has riled Australian audiences, which also involved input from Australian media authorities. His political alignment coupled with his disregard for audience sensitivities makes Laws an ideal character for an activist remix artist such as Main$treaM to target. Main$treaM had taken comments that Laws had made, placed them out of context and remixed them to deliberately misrepresent Laws’s opinion. One track in particular, Max Prophet$, is a reaction to the controversial Cash for Comments scandal (Johnson). In this case, John Laws was accused of receiving remuneration from Toyota to endorse their products on his radio program without acknowledging this activity as advertising. Main$treaM, through one of his ABC Pool contributions Max Prophet$, selected various comments that Laws had made during his radio broadcasts, and remixed them in a format that had John Laws say he was indeed receiving large amounts of money from Toyota. His remix, in the tradition of Pauline Pantsdown, took Laws’s comments and connected them to say “That really is a terrific vehicle that Hilux Workmate, great name too isn’t it”, highlighting a clear endorsement of the Toyota product by the radio presenter. However, Main$treaM did not stop at proving his point with this one remix contribution. He also provided in addition to the Max Prophet$ contribution, many other controversial social commentary works, including Cock Cheek parts One and Two, Prickseye Picture of You and I, and Ca$h for Comment$. Each contribution focussed on a particular character trait that Laws had become known for, such as inviting input from his listeners and then hanging up on them when they provided commentary that was contrary to his opinion. “Did I call you or did you call me” was Main$treaM’s method of whimsically suggesting that Laws is a rude, right wing conservative. The public opinion within Australia of John Laws is split between support from the conservatives and disdain from the liberals. Main$treaM was attempting to provide a voice from within the liberal perspective that illuminates the public opinion of Laws. The public opinion of Laws is one cultural discourse that is difficult to define, and almost impossible to publish to the broader public. Remix, as Lessig suggests, provides the most suitable genre of mass cultural practice to interrogate both perspectives of someone as controversial as Laws, where ABC Pool provides the most suitable platform to publish remixed societal perspectives on contemporary controversial issues. However, as outlined earlier, ABC Pool is contained within the same regulatory framework as any other publication space of the ABC. Essentially by publishing this controversial work on an ABC platform is blurring the boundaries between the ABC providing a place to publish the material and the ABC endorsing the material. ABC Pool operated under a reactive mode of moderation which suggests that content can be published without any form of moderation but if it were flagged as inappropriate by another user or audience member it had to be investigated by the ABC Pool team. Main$treaM’s contemporary material contained confronting concepts, language and techniques and was flagged as inappropriate by an anonymous Pool user during 2011. In this instance, it becomes clear that remix within an institutional setting is a complicated activity to facilitate. By providing a Creative Commons licensing regime, the ABC Pool project is endorsing remix as an institutional activity, and given the ethos of ABC Pool to experiment with new and innovative ways of engaging the audience, remix is crucial to its operation. However given the complaints of the other users that Main$treaM’s material was inappropriate, the problem arose of how to manage contentious remix activity. Aligning with Jenkins’s convergent cultures and Bruns’s produsage theories which incorporates the audience into the production process, the ABC Pool project was required to promote remix as a suitable activity for its users. Remix as an online activist activity in turn attracted the societal dissent approach from remix artists, providing a problem of adhering to the rules and regulations of the ABC more broadly. In the immediacy of the complaint, a large proportion of Main$treaM’s material was temporarily unpublished from ABC Pool until the team could provide a suitable solution on how to solve the tensions. The Legal Consultation Process In an instance such as this, an ABC employee is required to consult the editorial policy people to seek their advice on the most appropriate approach on the problematic material. The ABC Editorial Policies representatives referenced the material in the then Section 9 of the Editorial Policies, which relates to user-generated content. After the consultation process, they could see no breach of the guidelines; however, given the obscene constitution of the material, they suggested the Pool team refer the material to ABC Legal, a process in the ABC known as ‘referring up’. ABC Legal had a team of media lawyers interrogate the material from a criminal law perspective. It is worth noting, in both departments, Legal and Editorial Policies, there was support for Main$treaM’s creative expression (Fieldnotes, 2011). However, both parties were approaching the material and acting in a risk management capacity to protect the integrity of the ABC brand. After receiving the approval of the editorial policy people, the ABC Pool team had to seek the advice from ABC Legal. After two weeks of investigation, ABC Legal returned the following recommendations for the Pool team: Ultimately, risk management is the deciding factor to determine if the material should be published or not, supported by a solid defense should the case go to court.There are three areas to be considered with Main$treaM’s content:CopyrightDefamatoryObscenityIn regards to copyright, it is OK to publish in this case because the works are covered by parody or satire as the pieces have a focussed angle, or subject (John Laws).Defamation is more complicated. Firstly, we have to establish if the usual person could identify the defamed person. If yes, we need to establish what imputations there are, i.e. homophobic tendencies, pedophilia, etc. For each imputation, we need to establish if there is a defense. Typical defenses are honest opinion, expressed as one’s view, or truth. Honest Opinion needs to have a base to relate it to and not just a rant – i.e. John Laws was caught in the Cash for Comments scandal but there is no evidence to suggest he is a pedophile (unless the artists knows a truth – which becomes complicated again).Obscenity comes under classification, and since Pool does not have a rating system in place, we cannot offer this as a way to avoid publishing. A standard example of this relates to a younger audience member having the same access to an obscene piece of content (as guided by Pool’s Guidelines Section 4.1 a and b).These rules are premised by how do I read it/hear it. This is how a jury of citizens will approach the same piece of content. Risk management is also present when we ask how will John Laws hear about it, and what will the community think about it.(Fieldnotes, 2011) The suggestions the legal team returned are significant in highlighting the position of a media institution that facilitates remix. What is relevant here is a public service media organisation is a specific type of media organisation that is responsible for facilitating increased citizenry through its activities (Cunningham). Martin builds on the work of Jacka and Hartley to highlight how the ABC should be encouraging ‘DIY citizenry’. She says the combination of the core Reithian values of educate, inform and entertain can be combined with new media technologies that enable a “semiotic self determination model” to construct a “national semiosis model” (Hartley 161). However, there is a clear misalignment between the values of the PSM and the remix artist. What was required was the presence of a cultural intermediary to assist in calibrating those values and engaging in a negotiation phase between the two stakeholders. A cultural intermediary is a human or non-human actor that is located between the production and consumption of cultural artifacts and aids in facilitating the negotiation space between different expertise disciplines. In this case, it was the role of the community manager to attempt to connect the two approaches and enable remix practice to continue under the auspices of the ABC. The ABC had shifted its approach towards some of the Main$treaM material, but given its regulatory framework was unable to facilitate all of his contributions. Unfortunately in this case, Main$treaM did not align with the requirements of the ABC, left the Pool community and did not continue his practice of remix within the ABC any further. Conclusion Remixed texts that are published on PSM platforms demonstrate high levels of dependency on existing mass media texts, aligning them with the approach of the media dependency theory (Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur). Remixed texts are also cultural products of artists that live in media and not with media, as noted by Deuze (Media Industries, Work and Life) and are the result of mass cultural practice that manipulates the meaning of multiple cultural artefacts (Lessig). Remix as a form of online activism is also representative of Hall’s oppositional reading of texts which enable the practitioner to deepen their involvement within the social construction of reality (Adoni & Mane). Convergence cultures represent the audience’s ever-increasing desire to participate in the production of media and not merely consume it (Jenkins). The theoretical alignment of remix with these theories suggests remixed texts have a deeper and richer cultural representation than that of its institutionally produced parent text. However, collaboratively produced cultural artefacts via remix are problematised by the digital divide debate, specifically through the access of tools and knowledge for this practice. Lin terms this problem as ‘techno-elite’ where only certain individuals have access and knowledge and tools to engage in these types of cultural activities facilitated by PSM. Further, Carpentier challenges this type of participation by asking if we have access and can interact, are we really participating in a democratising activity, given the promises of online activism? Given that PSM is pursuing the concept of the audience as user, which positions the audience as a producer of content across online environments, facilitating the practice of remix should align with its core values to inform, educate and entertain (Martin). However as we have seen with the Main$treaM case, this is problematic when attempting to align the focus of a remix artist with that of PSM. In these instances the work of the cultural intermediary as the disciplinary expertise negotiator becomes critical to increase the societal representation within the production and consumption of cultural artefacts produced through the activity of remix. A public service broadcaster that is supportive of both institutionally produced texts, along with socially informed text production through remix, will be a rigorous media organisation that supports a better informed citizenry, or as Hartley suggests a self determined national semiosis model. References Adoni, Hanna, and Sherrill Mane. "Media and the Social Construction of Reality: Toward and Integration of Theory and Research." Communication Research 11.3 (1984): 323-40. Ball-Rokeach, Sandra, and DeFluer, Melvin. "A Dependency Model of Mass Media Effects." Communication Research 3 (1976): 3-21. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Carpentier, Nico. "The Concept of Participation. If They Have Access and Interact, Do They Really Participate?" Communication Management Quarterly 21 (2011): 13-36. Cunningham, Stuart. Hidden Innovation: Policy, Industry and the Creative Sector. Creative Economy and Innovation Culture. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2013. Deuze, Mark. Media Work. London: Polity Press, 2007. Deuze, Mark. "Media Industries, Work and Life." European Journal of Communication 24 (2009): 467. Enli, Gunn Sara. "Redefining Public Service Broadcasting." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14.1 (2008): 105 - 20. González-Bailón, Sandra, et al. "The Dynamics of Protest Recruitment through an Online Network." Scientific Reports 1.197 (2011). Hall, Stuart. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Council of Europe Colloquy on "Training In The Critical Reading of Television Language". 1973. Hartley, John. "Communicative Democracy in a Redactional Society: The Future of Journalism Studies." Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 1.1 (2001): 39-48. Jacka, Liz. "'Good Democracy': The Role of Public Service Broadcasting." The Centre for Culture and History (2001). 2 Feb. 2013 < http://www.cmchnyu.org/pdfs/jacka.pdf >. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture - Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Johnson, Rob. Cash for Comment: The Seduction of Journo Culture. Media.Culture Series. Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000. Jones, Christopher. "Activism or Slacktivism? The Role of Social Media in Effecting Social Change." Research Paper. School of Engineering and Applied Science: University of Virginia, 2013. Knobel, Michele, and Colin Lankshear. "Remix: The Art and Craft of Endless Hybridization." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52.1 (2008): 22-33. Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin, 2008. Lin, Yu-Wei. "The Emergence of the Techno-Elite Audience and Free/Open Source Content: A Case Study on Bbc Backstage." Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 9.2 (2012): 597-613. Long, Paul, and Tim Wall. "Investigating Audiences: What Do People Do with Media?" Media Studies: Texts, Production and Context. Eds. P. Long et al. Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited, 2009. 240-72. Martin, Fiona. "Beyond Public Service Broadcasting? ABC Online and the User/Citizen." Southern Review: Communication, Politics and Culture 35.1 (2002): 42-62. Rosen, Jay. "The People Formerly Known as the Audience." Pressthink: Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine (2006). 2 Feb. 2013 < http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/apr/25/bbc.broadcasting >. Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations. New York: Allen Lane, 2008.

IntroductionSupermarkets are functionally challenging environments for people with vision impairments. A supermarket is likely to house an average of 45,000 products in a median floor-space of 4,529 square meters and many visually impaired people are unable to shop without assistance, which greatly impedes personal independence (Nicholson et al.). The task of selecting goods in a supermarket is an “activity that is expressive of agency, identity and creativity” (Sutherland) from which many vision-impaired persons are excluded. In response to this, a number of proof of concept (demonstrating feasibility) and prototype assistive technologies are being developed which aim to use smart phones as potential sensorial aides for vision impaired persons. In this paper, I discuss two such prototypic technologies, Shop Talk and BlindShopping. I engage with this issue’s list theme by suggesting that, on the one hand, list making is a uniquely human activity that demonstrates our need for order, reliance on memory, reveals our idiosyncrasies, and provides insights into our private lives (Keaggy 12). On the other hand, lists feature in the creation of spatial inventories that represent physical environments (Perec 3-4, 9-10). The use of lists in the architecture of assistive technologies for shopping illuminates the interaction between these two modalities of list use where items contained in a list are not only textual but also cartographic elements that link the material and immaterial in space and time (Haber 63). I argue that despite the emancipatory potential of assistive shopping technologies, their efficacy in practical situations is highly dependent on the extent to which they can integrate a number of lists to produce representations of space that are meaningful for vision impaired users. I suggest that the extent to which these prototypes may translate to becoming commercially viable, widely adopted technologies is heavily reliant upon commercial and institutional infrastructures, data sources, and regulation. Thus, their design, manufacture and adoption-potential are shaped by the extent to which certain data inventories are accessible and made interoperable. To overcome such constraints, it is important to better understand the “spatial syntax” associated with the shopping task for a vision impaired person; that is, the connected ordering of real and virtual spatial elements that result in a supermarket as a knowable space within which an assisted “spatial practice” of shopping can occur (Kellerman 148, Lefebvre 16).In what follows, I use the concept of lists to discuss the production of supermarket-space in relation to the enabling and disabling potentials of assistive technologies. First, I discuss mobile digital technologies relative to disability and impairment and describe how the shopping task produces a disabling spatial practice. Second, I present a case study showing how assistive technologies function in aiding vision impaired users in completing the task of supermarket shopping. Third, I discuss various factors that may inhibit the liberating potential of technology assisted shopping by vision-impaired people. Addressing Shopping as a Disabling Spatial Practice Consider how a shopping list might inform one’s experience of supermarket space. The way shopping lists are written demonstrate the variability in the logic that governs list writing. As Bill Keaggy demonstrates in his found shopping list Web project and subsequent book, Milk, Eggs, Vodka, a shopping list may be written on a variety of materials, be arranged in a number of orientations, and the writer may use differing textual attributes, such as size or underlining to show emphasis. The writer may use longhand, abbreviate, write neatly, scribble, and use an array of alternate spelling and naming conventions. For example, items may be listed based on knowledge of the location of products, they may be arranged on a list as a result of an inventory of a pantry or fridge, or they may be copied in the order they appear in a recipe. Whilst shopping, some may follow strictly the order of their list, crossing back and forth between aisles. Some may work through their list item-by-item, perhaps forward scanning to achieve greater economies of time and space. As a person shops, their memory may be stimulated by visual cues reminding them of products they need that may not be included on their list. For the vision impaired, this task is near impossible to complete without the assistance of a relative, friend, agency volunteer, or store employee. Such forms of assistance are often unsatisfactory, as delays may be caused due to the unavailability of an assistant, or the assistant having limited literacy, knowledge, or patience to adequately meet the shopper’s needs. Home delivery services, though readily available, impede personal independence (Nicholson et al.). Katie Ellis and Mike Kent argue that “an impairment becomes a disability due to the impact of prevailing ableist social structures” (3). It can be said, then, that supermarkets function as a disability producing space for the vision impaired shopper. For the vision impaired, a supermarket is a “hegemonic modern visual infrastructure” where, for example, merchandisers may reposition items regularly to induce customers to explore areas of the shop that they wouldn’t usually, a move which adds to the difficulty faced by those customers with impaired vision who work on the assumption that items remain as they usually are (Schillmeier 161).In addressing this issue, much emphasis has been placed on the potential of mobile communications technologies in affording vision impaired users greater mobility and flexibility (Jolley 27). However, as Gerard Goggin argues, the adoption of mobile communication technologies has not necessarily “gone hand in hand with new personal and collective possibilities” given the limited access to standard features, even if the device is text-to-speech enabled (98). Issues with Digital Rights Management (DRM) limit the way a device accesses and reproduces information, and confusion over whether audio rights are needed to convert text-to-speech, impede the accessibility of mobile communications technologies for vision impaired users (Ellis and Kent 136). Accessibility and functionality issues like these arise out of the needs, desires, and expectations of the visually impaired as a user group being considered as an afterthought as opposed to a significant factor in the early phases of design and prototyping (Goggin 89). Thus, the development of assistive technologies for the vision impaired has been left to third parties who must adopt their solutions to fit within certain technical parameters. It is valuable to consider what is involved in the task of shopping in order to appreciate the considerations that must be made in the design of shopping intended assistive technologies. Shopping generally consists of five sub-tasks: travelling to the store; finding items in-store; paying for and bagging items at the register; exiting the store and getting home; and, the often overlooked task of putting items away once at home. In this process supermarkets exhibit a “trichotomous spatial ontology” consisting of locomotor space that a shopper moves around the store, haptic space in the immediate vicinity of the shopper, and search space where individual products are located (Nicholson et al.). In completing these tasks, a shopper will constantly be moving through and switching between all three of these spaces. In the next section I examine how assistive technologies function in producing supermarkets as both enabling and disabling spaces for the vision impaired. Assistive Technologies for Vision Impaired ShoppersJason Farman (43) and Adriana de Douza e Silva both argue that in many ways spaces have always acted as information interfaces where data of all types can reside. Global Positioning System (GPS), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and Quick Response (QR) codes all allow for practically every spatial encounter to be an encounter with information. Site-specific and location-aware technologies address the desire for meaningful representations of space for use in everyday situations by the vision impaired. Further, the possibility of an “always-on” connection to spatial information via a mobile phone with WiFi or 3G connections transforms spatial experience by “enfolding remote [and latent] contexts inside the present context” (de Souza e Silva). A range of GPS navigation systems adapted for vision-impaired users are currently on the market. Typically, these systems convert GPS information into text-to-speech instructions and are either standalone devices, such as the Trekker Breeze, or they use the compass, accelerometer, and 3G or WiFi functions found on most smart phones, such as Loadstone. Whilst both these products are adequate in guiding a vision-impaired user from their home to a supermarket, there are significant differences in their interfaces and data architectures. Trekker Breeze is a standalone hardware device that produces talking menus, maps, and GPS information. While its navigation functionality relies on a worldwide radio-navigation system that uses a constellation of 24 satellites to triangulate one’s position (May and LaPierre 263-64), its map and text-to-speech functionality relies on data on a DVD provided with the unit. Loadstone is an open source software system for Nokia devices that has been developed within the vision-impaired community. Loadstone is built on GNU General Public License (GPL) software and is developed from private and user based funding; this overcomes the issue of Trekker Breeze’s reliance on trading policies and pricing models of the few global vendors of satellite navigation data. Both products have significant shortcomings if viewed in the broader context of the five sub-tasks involved in shopping described above. Trekker Breeze and Loadstone require that additional devices be connected to it. In the case of Trekker Breeze it is a tactile keypad, and with Loadstone it is an aftermarket screen reader. To function optimally, Trekker Breeze requires that routes be pre-recorded and, according to a review conducted by the American Foundation for the Blind, it requires a 30-minute warm up time to properly orient itself. Both Trekker Breeze and Loadstone allow users to create and share Points of Interest (POI) databases showing the location of various places along a given route. Non-standard or duplicated user generated content in POI databases may, however, have a negative effect on usability (Ellis and Kent 2). Furthermore, GPS-based navigation systems are accurate to approximately ten metres, which means that users must rely on their own mobility skills when they are required to change direction or stop for traffic. This issue with GPS accuracy is more pronounced when a vision-impaired user is approaching a supermarket where they are likely to encounter environmental hazards with greater frequency and both pedestrian and vehicular traffic in greater density. Here the relations between space defined and spaces poorly defined or undefined by the GPS device interact to produce the supermarket surrounds as a disabling space (Galloway). Prototype Systems for Supermarket Navigation and Product SelectionIn the discussion to follow, I look at two prototype systems using QR codes and RFID that are designed to be used in-store by vision-impaired shoppers. Shop Talk is a proof of concept system developed by researchers at Utah State University that uses synthetic verbal route directions to assist vision impaired shoppers with supermarket navigation, product search, and selection (Nicholson et al.). Its hardware consists of a portable computational unit, a numeric keypad, a wireless barcode scanner and base station, headphones for the user to receive the synthetic speech instructions, a USB hub to connect all the components, and a backpack to carry them (with the exception of the barcode scanner) which has been slightly modified with a plastic stabiliser to assist in correct positioning. Shop Talk represents the supermarket environment using two data structures. The first is comprised of two elements: a topological map of locomotor space that allows for directional labels of “left,” “right,” and “forward,” to be added to the supermarket floor plan; and, for navigation of haptic space, the supermarket inventory management system, which is used to create verbal descriptions of product information. The second data structure is a Barcode Connectivity Matrix (BCM), which associates each shelf barcode with several pieces of information such as aisle, aisle side, section, shelf, position, Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode, product description, and price. Nicholson et al. suggest that one of their “most immediate objectives for future work is to migrate the system to a more conventional mobile platform” such as a smart phone (see Mobile Shopping). The Personalisable Interactions with Resources on AMI-Enabled Mobile Dynamic Environments (PRIAmIDE) research group at the University of Deusto is also approaching Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) by exploring the smart phone’s sensing, communication, computing, and storage potential. As part of their work, the prototype system, BlindShopping, was developed to address the issue of assisted shopping using entirely off-the-shelf technology with minimal environmental adjustments to navigate the store and search, browse and select products (López-de-Ipiña et al. 34). Blind Shopping’s architecture is based on three components. Firstly, a navigation system provides the user with synthetic verbal instructions to users via headphones connected to the smart phone device being used in order to guide them around the store. This requires a RFID reader to be attached to the tip of the user’s white cane and road-marking-like RFID tag lines to be distributed throughout the aisles. A smartphone application processes the RFID data that is received by the smart phone via Bluetooth generating the verbal navigation commands as a result. Products are recognised by pointing a QR code reader enabled smart phone at an embossed code located on a shelf. The system is managed by a Rich Internet Application (RIA) interface, which operates by Web browser, and is used to register the RFID tags situated in the aisles and the QR codes located on shelves (López-de-Ipiña and 37-38). A typical use-scenario for Blind Shopping involves a user activating the system by tracing an “L” on the screen or issuing the “Location” voice command, which activates the supermarket navigation system which then asks the user to either touch an RFID floor marking with their cane or scan a QR code on a nearby shelf to orient the system. The application then asks the user to dictate the product or category of product that they wish to locate. The smart phone maintains a continuous Bluetooth connection with the RFID reader to keep track of user location at all times. By drawing a “P” or issuing the “Product” voice command, a user can switch the device into product recognition mode where the smart phone camera is pointed at an embossed QR code on a shelf to retrieve information about a product such as manufacturer, name, weight, and price, via synthetic speech (López-de-Ipiña et al. 38-39). Despite both systems aiming to operate with as little environmental adjustment as possible, as well as minimise the extent to which a supermarket would need to allocate infrastructural, administrative, and human resources to implementing assistive technologies for vision impaired shoppers, there will undoubtedly be significant establishment and maintenance costs associated with the adoption of production versions of systems resembling either prototype described in this paper. As both systems rely on data obtained from a server by invoking Web services, supermarkets would need to provide in-store WiFi. Further, both systems’ dependence on store inventory data would mean that commercial versions of either of these systems are likely to be supermarket specific or exclusive given that there will be policies in place that forbid access to inventory systems, which contain pricing information to third parties. Secondly, an assumption in the design of both prototypes is that the shopping task ends with the user arriving at home; this overlooks the important task of being able to recognise products in order to put them away or to use at a later time.The BCM and QR product recognition components of both respective prototypic systems associates information to products in order to assist users in the product search and selection sub-tasks. However, information such as use-by dates, discount offers, country of manufacture, country of manufacturer’s origin, nutritional information, and the labelling of products as Halal, Kosher, containing alcohol, nuts, gluten, lactose, phenylalanine, and so on, create further challenges in how different data sources are managed within the devices’ software architecture. The reliance of both systems on existing smartphone technology is also problematic. Changes in the production and uptake of mobile communication devices, and the software that they operate on, occurs rapidly. Once the fit-out of a retail space with the necessary instrumentation in order to accommodate a particular system has occurred, this system is unlikely to be able to cater to the requirement for frequent upgrades, as built environments are less flexible in the upgrading of their technological infrastructure (Kellerman 148). This sets up a scenario where the supermarket may persist as a disabling space due to a gap between the functional capacities of applications designed for mobile communication devices and the environments in which they are to be used. Lists and Disabling Spatial PracticeThe development and provision of access to assistive technologies and the data they rely upon is a commercial issue (Ellis and Kent 7). The use of assistive technologies in supermarket-spaces that rely on the inter-functional coordination of multiple inventories may have the unintended effect of excluding people with disabilities from access to legitimate content (Ellis and Kent 7). With de Certeau, we can ask of supermarket-space “What spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space?" (96).In designing assistive technologies, such as those discussed in this paper, developers must strive to achieve integration across multiple data inventories. Software architectures must be optimised to overcome issues relating to intellectual property, cross platform access, standardisation, fidelity, potential duplication, and mass-storage. This need for “cross sectioning,” however, “merely adds to the muddle” (Lefebvre 8). This is a predicament that only intensifies as space and objects in space become increasingly “representable” (Galloway), and as the impetus for the project of spatial politics for the vision impaired moves beyond representation to centre on access and meaning-making.ConclusionSupermarkets act as sites of hegemony, resistance, difference, and transformation, where the vision impaired and their allies resist the “repressive socialization of impaired bodies” through their own social movements relating to environmental accessibility and the technology assisted spatial practice of shopping (Gleeson 129). It is undeniable that the prototype technologies described in this paper, and those like it, indeed do have a great deal of emancipatory potential. However, it should be understood that these devices produce representations of supermarket-space as a simulation within a framework that attempts to mimic the real, and these representations are pre-determined by the industrial, technological, and regulatory forces that govern their production (Lefebvre 8). Thus, the potential of assistive technologies is dependent upon a range of constraints relating to data accessibility, and the interaction of various kinds of lists across the geographic area that surrounds the supermarket, locomotor, haptic, and search spaces of the supermarket, the home-space, and the internal spaces of a shopper’s imaginary. These interactions are important in contributing to the reproduction of disability in supermarkets through the use of assistive shopping technologies. The ways by which people make and read shopping lists complicate the relations between supermarket-space as location data and product inventories versus that which is intuited and experienced by a shopper (Sutherland). Not only should we be creating inventories of supermarket locomotor, haptic, and search spaces, the attention of developers working in this area of assistive technologies should look beyond the challenges of spatial representation and move towards a focus on issues of interoperability and expanded access of spatial inventory databases and data within and beyond supermarket-space.ReferencesDe Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Print.De Souza e Silva, A. “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies As Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces.” Space and Culture 9.3 (2006): 261-78.Ellis, Katie, and Mike Kent. Disability and New Media. New York: Routledge, 2011.Farman, Jason. Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York: Routledge, 2012.Galloway, Alexander. “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” Theory, Culture and Society 28 (2011): 85-102.Gleeson, Brendan. Geographies of Disability. London: Routledge, 1999.Goggin, Gerard. Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 2006.Haber, Alex. “Mapping the Void in Perec’s Species of Spaces.” Tattered Fragments of the Map. Ed. Adam Katz and Brian Rosa. S.l.: Thelimitsoffun.org, 2009.Jolley, William M. When the Tide Comes in: Towards Accessible Telecommunications for People with Disabilities in Australia. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 2003.Keaggy, Bill. Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found. Cincinnati, Ohio: HOW Books, 2007.Kellerman, Aharon. Personal Mobilities. London: Routledge, 2006.Kleege, Georgia. “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account.” The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd edition. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 2006. 391-98.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991.López-de-Ipiña, Diego, Tania Lorido, and Unai López. “Indoor Navigation and Product Recognition for Blind People Assisted Shopping.” Ambient Assisted Living. Ed. J. Bravo, R. Hervás, and V. Villarreal. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2011. 25-32. May, Michael, and Charles LaPierre. “Accessible Global Position System (GPS) and Related Orientation Technologies.” Assistive Technology for Visually Impaired and Blind People. Ed. Marion A. Hersh, and Michael A. Johnson. London: Springer-Verlag, 2008. 261-88. Nicholson, John, Vladimir Kulyukin, and Daniel Coster. “Shoptalk: Independent Blind Shopping Through Verbal Route Directions and Barcode Scans.” The Open Rehabilitation Journal 2.1 (2009): 11-23.Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Trans. and Ed. John Sturrock. London: Penguin Books, 1997.Schillmeier, Michael W. J. Rethinking Disability: Bodies, Senses, and Things. New York: Routledge, 2010.Sutherland, I. “Mobile Media and the Socio-Technical Protocols of the Supermarket.” Australian Journal of Communication. 36.1 (2009): 73-84.

IntroductionBushfires have taken numerous lives and destroyed communities throughout Australia over many years. Catastrophic fire weather alerts have occurred during the Australian summer of 2012–13, and long-term forecasts predict increased bushfire events throughout several areas of Australia. This article highlights how organisational and individual responses to bushfire in Australia often entail creative responses—either improvised responses at the time of bushfire emergencies or innovative (organisational, strategic, or technological) changes which help protect the community from, or mitigate against, future bushfire catastrophes. These improvised or innovative responses include emergency communications systems, practices, and devices. This article reports on findings from a research project funded by the Australian Research Council titled Using Community Engagement and Enhanced Visual Information to Promote FireWatch Satellite Communications as a Support for Collaborative Decision-making. FireWatch is a Web-based public information product based on near real time satellite data produced by the West Australian (WA) Government entity, Landgate. The project researches ways in which remote and regional publics can be engaged and mobilised through the development of a more user-friendly FireWatch site to make fire information accessible and usable, allowing a community-focused response to risk.The significance of the research project is evident both in how it addresses the important and life-threatening challenge of bushfires; and also in how Australia’s increasingly hot, dry, long summers are adding to historically-established risks. This innovative project uses an iterative, participatory design process incorporating action-research practices. This will ensure that the new Firewatch interface is redesigned, tested, observed, and reflected upon multiple times—and will incorporate the collective creativity of users, designers, and researchers.The qualitative findings reported on in this article are based on 19 interviews with community members in the town of Kununurra in the remote Kimberley region of WA. The findings are positioned within a reconceptualised framework in which creativity is viewed as an essential component of successful emergency responses. This includes, we argue, two critical aspects of creativity: improvisation during a catastrophic event; and ongoing innovation to improve future responses to catastrophes—including communication practices and technologies. This shifts the discourse within the literature in relation to the effective management and community responses to the changing phenomenon of fire catastrophes. Findings from the first round of interviews, and results of enquiries into previous bushfires in Australia, are used to highlight how these elements of creativity often entail a collective creativity on the part of emergency responders or the community in general. An additional focus is on the importance of the critical use of communication during a bushfire event.ImprovisationThe notion of "improvisation" is often associated with artistic performance. Nonetheless, improvisation is also integral to making effectual responses during natural catastrophes. “Extreme events present unforeseen conditions and problems, requiring a need for adaptation, creativity, and improvisation while demanding efficient and rapid delivery of services under extreme conditions” (Harrald 257).Catastrophes present us with unexpected scenarios and require rapid, on the spot problem solving and “even if you plan for a bushfire it is not going to go to plan. When the wind changes direction there has to be a new plan” (Jeff. Personal Interview. 2012). Jazz musicians or improvisational actors “work to build their knowledge across a range of fields, and this knowledge provides the elements for each improvisational outcome” (Kendra and Wachendorf 2). Similarly, emergency responders’ knowledge and preparation can be drawn “upon in the ambiguous and dynamic conditions of a disaster where not every need has been anticipated or accounted for” (Kendra and Wachtendorf 2). Individuals and community organisations not associated with emergency services also improvise in a creative and intuitive manner in the way they respond to catastrophes (Webb and Chevreau). For example, during the 9/11 terrorism catastrophe in the USA an assorted group of boat owners rapidly self-organised to evacuate Lower Manhattan. On their return trips, they carried emergency personnel and supplies to the area (Kendra and Wachendorf 5). An interviewee in our study also recalls bush fire incidents where creative problem solving and intuitive decision-making are called for. “It’s like in a fire, you have to be thinking fast. You need to be semi self-sufficient until help arrives. But without doing anything stupid and creating a worse situation” (Kelly. Personal Interview. 2012). Kelly then describes the rapid community response she witnessed during a recent fire on the outskirts of Kununurra, WA.Everyone had to be accounted for, moving cars, getting the tractors out, protecting the bores because you need the water. It happens really fast and it is a matter of rustling everyone up with the machinery. (2012)In this sense, the strength of communities in responding to catastrophes or disasters “results largely from the abilities of [both] individuals and organisations to adapt and improvise under conditions of uncertainty” (Webb and Chevreau 67). These improvised responses frequently involve a collective creativity—where groups of neighbours or emergency workers act in response to the unforseen, often in a unified and self-organising manner. InnovationCatastrophes also stimulate change and innovation for the future. Disasters create a new environment that must be explored, assessed, and comprehended. Disasters change the physical and social landscape, and thereby require a period of exploration, learning, and the development of new approaches. (Kendra and Wachtendorf 6)These new approaches can include organisational change, new response strategies, and technologies and communication improvements. Celebrated inventor Benjamin Franklin, for instance, facilitated the formation of the first Volunteer Fire department in the 1850s as a response to previous urban fire catastrophes in the USA (Mumford 258). This organisational innovation continues to play an instrumental part in modern fire fighting practices. Indeed, people living in rural and remote areas of Australia are heavily reliant on volunteer groups, due to the sparse population and vast distances that need to be covered.As with most inventions and innovations, new endeavours aimed at improving responses to catastrophes do not occur in a vacuum. They “are not just accidents, nor the inscrutable products of sporadic genius, but have abundant and clear causes in prior scientific and technological development” (Gifillian 61). Likewise, the development of our user-friendly and publically available FireWatch site relies on the accumulation of preceding inventions and innovations. This includes the many years spent developing the existing FireWatch site, a site dense in information of significant value to scientists, foresters, land managers, and fire experts.CommunicationsOften overlooked in discussions regarding emergency communications is the microgeographical exchanges that occur in response to the threat of natural disasters. This is where neighbours fill the critical period before emergency service responders can appear on site. In this situation, it is often local knowledge that underpins improvised grassroots communication networks that inform and organise the neighbourhood. During a recent bushfire on peri-rural blocks on the outskirts of Kununurra, neighbours went into action before emergency services volunteers could respond.We phoned around and someone would phone and call in. Instead of 000 being rung ten times, make sure that one person rang it in. 40 channel [CB Radio] was handy – two-way communication, four wheelers – knocking on doors making sure everyone is out of the house, just in case. (Jane. Personal Interview. 2012) Similarly, individuals and community groups have been able to inform and assist each other on a larger scale via social network technologies (SNTs). This creative application of SNTs began after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 when individuals created wikis in order to find missing persons (Palen and Lui). Twitter has experienced considerable growth and was used freely during the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Australia. Studies of tweeting activity during these fires indicate that “tweets made during Black Saturday are laden with actionable factual information which contrasts with earlier claims that tweets are of no value made of mere random personal notes” (Sinnappan et al. n.p.).Traditionally, official alerts and warnings have been provided to the public via television and radio. However, several inquiries into the recent bushfires within Australia show concern “with the way in which fire agencies deliver information to community members during a bushfire...[and in order to] improve community safety from bushfire, systems need to be implemented that enable community members to communicate information to fire agencies, making use of local knowledge” (Elsworth et al. 8).Technological and social developments over the last decade mean the public no longer relies on a single source of official information (Sorensen and Sorensen). Therefore, SNTs such as Twitter and Facebook are being used by the media and emergency authorities to make information available to the public. These SNTs are dynamic, in that there can be a two-way flow of information between the public and emergency organisations. Nonetheless, there has been limited use of SNTs by emergency agencies to source information posted by in situ residents, in order to help in decision-making (Freeman). Organisational use of multiple communication channels and platforms to inform citizens about bushfire emergencies ensures a greater degree of coverage—in case of communication systems breakdowns or difficulties—as in the telephone alert system breakdown in Kelmscott-Roleystone, WA or a recent fire in Warrnambool, Victoria which took out the regional telephone exchange making telephone calls, mobiles, landlines, and the Internet non-operational (Johnson). The new FireWatch site will provide an additional information option for rural and remote Australians who, often rely on visual sightings and on word-of-mouth to be informed about fires in their region. “The neighbour came over and said - there is a fire, we’d better get our act together because it is going to hit us. No sooner than I turned around, I thought shit, here it comes” (Richard. Personal Interview. 2012). The FireWatch ProjectThe FireWatch project involves the redevelopment of an existing FireWatch website to extend the usability of the product from experts to ordinary users in order to facilitate community-based decision-making and action both before and during bushfire emergencies. To this purpose, the project has been broken down to two distinct, yet interdependent, strands. The community strand involves collaboration within a community (in this case the Kununurra community) in order to carry out a community-centred approach to further development of the site. The design strand involves the development of an intuitive and accessible Web presentation of complex information in clear, unambiguous ways to inform action in stressful circumstances. At this stage, a first round of 19 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders has been conducted in Kununurra to determine fire-related information-seeking behaviours, attitudes to mediated information services in the region, as well as user feedback on a prototype website developed in the design strand of the project. Stakeholders included emergency services personnel (payed and volunteer), shire representatives, tourism operators, small business operators (including tourism operators), a forest manager, a mango farmer, an Indigenous ranger team manager as well as general community members. Interviewees reported dissatisfaction with current information systems. They gave positive feedback about the website prototype. “It’s very much, very easy to follow” (David. Personal Interview. 2012). “It looks so much better than [the old site]. You couldn’t get in that close on [the other site]. It is fantastic” (Lance. Personal Interview. 2012). They also added thought-provoking contributions to the design of the website (to be discussed later).Residents of Kununurra who were interviewed for this research project found bushfire warning communications unsatisfactory, especially during a recent fire on the outskirts of town. People who called 000 had difficulties passing the information on, having to explain exactly where Kununurra was and the location of fires to operators not familiar with the area. When asked how the Kununurra community gets their fire information a Shire representative explained: That is not very good at the moment. The only other way we can think about it is perhaps more updates on things like Facebook, perhaps on a website, but with this current fire there really wasn’t a lot of information and a lot of people didn’t know what was going on. We [the shire] knew because we were talking to the [fire] brigades and to FESA [Fire and Emergency Services Authority] but most residents didn’t have any idea and it looks pretty bad. (Ginny. Personal Interview. 2012) All being well, the new user-friendly FireWatch site will add another platform through which fire information messages are transmitted. Community members will be offered continuously streamed bushfire location information, which is independent of any emergency services communication systems. In particular, rural and remote areas of Australia will have fire information at the ready.The participatory methodology used in the design of the new FireWatch website makes use of collaborative creativity, whereby users’ vision of the website and context are incorporated. This iterative process “creates an equal evolving participatory process between user and designer towards sharing values and knowledge and creating new domains of collective creativity” (Park 2012). The rich and sometimes contradictory suggestions made by interviewees in this project often reflected individual visions of the tasks and information required, and individual preferences regarding the delivery of this information. “I have been thinking about how could this really work for me? I can give you feedback on what has happened in the past but how could it work for me in the future?” (Keith. Personal Interview. 2012). Keith and other community members interviewed in Kununurra indicated a variety of extra functions on the site not expected by the product designers. Some of these unexpected functions were common to most interviewees such as the great importance placed on the inclusion of a satellite view option on the site map (example shown in Figure 1). Jeremy, a member of an Indigenous ranger unit in the Kununurra area, was very keen to incorporate the satellite view options on the site. He explained that some of the older rangers:can’t use GPSs and don’t know time zones or what zones to put in, so they’ll use a satellite-style view. We’ll have Google Earth up on one [screen], and also our [own] imagery up on another [screen] and go that way. Be scrolling in and see – we’ve got a huge fire scar for 2011 around here; another guy will be on another computer zoning in and say, I think it is here. It’s quite simplistic but it works. (Personal Interview. 2012) In the case above, where rangers are already switching between computer screens to incorporate a satellite view into their planning, the importance of a satellite view layer on the FireWatch website makes user context an essential part of the design process. Incorporating many layers on one screen, as recommended by participants also ensures a more elegant solution to an existing problem.Figure 1: Satellite view in the Kununurra area showing features such as gorges, rivers, escarpments and dry riverbedsThis research project will involve further consultation with participants (both online and offline) regarding bushfire safety communications in their region, as well as the further design of the site. The website will be available over multiple devices (for example desktops, smart phones, and hand held tablet devices) and will be launched late this year. Further work will also be carried out to determine if social media is appropriate for this community of users in order to build awareness and share information regarding the site.Conclusion Community members improvise and self-organise when communicating fire information and organising help for each other. This can happen at a microgeographical (neighbourhood) level or on a wider level via social networking sites. Organisations also develop innovative communication systems or devices as a response to the threat of bushfires. Communication innovations, such as the use of Twitter and Facebook by fire emergency services, have been appropriated and fine-tuned by these organisations. Other innovations such as the user-friendly Firewatch site rely on previous technological developments in satellite-delivered imagery—as well as community input regarding the design and use of the site.Our early research into community members’ fire-related information-seeking behaviours and attitudes to mediated information services in the region of Kununurra has found unexpectedly creative responses, which range from collective creativity on the part of emergency responders or the community in general during events to creative use of existing information and communication networks. We intend to utilise this creativity in re-purposing FireWatch alongside the creative work of the designers in the project.Although it is commonplace to think of graphic design and new technology as incorporating creativity, it is rarely acknowledged how frequently these innovations harness everyday perspectives from non-professionals. In the case of the FireWatch developments, the creativity of designers and technologists has been informed by the creative responses of members of the public who are best placed to understand the challenges posed by restricted information flows on the ground in times of crisis. In these situations, people respond not only with new ideas for the future but with innovative responses in the present as they communicate with each other to deal with the challenge of a fast-moving and unpredictable situation. Such improvisation, honed through close awareness of the contours and parameters of both community and communication, are one of the ways through which people help keep themselves and each other safe in the face of dramatic developments.ReferencesElsworth, G., and K. Stevens, J. Gilbert, H. Goodman, A Rhodes. "Evaluating the Community Safety Approach to Bushfires in Australia: Towards an Assessment of What Works and How." Biennial Conference of the Eupopean Evaluation Society, Lisbon, Oct. 2008. Freeman, Mark. "Fire, Wind and Water: Social Networks in Natural Disasters." Journal of Cases on Information Technology (JCIT) 13.2 (2011): 69–79.Gilfillan, S. Colum. The Sociology of Invention. Chicago: Follett Publishing, 1935.Harrald, John R. "Agility and Discipline: Critical Success Factors for Disaster Response." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604.1 (2006): 256–72.Johnson, Peter. "Australia Unprepared for Bushfire”. Australian Broadcasting Corporation 17 Dec. 2012. 3 Jan. 2013 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2012/12/17/3654075.htm›.Keelty, Mick J. "A Shared Responsibility: the Report of the Perth Hills Bushfires February 2011". Department of Premier and Cabinet, Government of Western Australia, Perth.Kendra, James, and Tricia Wachtendorf. "Improvisation, Creativity, and the Art of Emergency Management." NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Understanding and Responding to Terrorism: A Multi-Dimensional Approach. Washington, DC, 8-9 Sep. 2006.———. "Creativity in Emergency Response after the World Trade Centre Attack". Amud Conference of the International Emergency Management Society. University of Delaware. 14-17 May 2002. Mumford, Michael D. "Social Innovation: Ten Cases from Benjamin Franklin." Creativity Research Journal 14.2 (2002): 253–66.Palen, Leysia, and Sophia.B. Liu. "Citizen Communications in Crisis: Anticipating a Future of ICT-Supported Public Participation." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. San Jose, 28 Apr. - 3 May 2007.Park, Ji Yong. "Design Process Excludes Users: The Co-Creation Activities between User and Designer." Digital Creativity 23.1 (2012): 79–92. Sinnappan, Suku, Cathy Farrell, and Elizabeth Stewart. "Priceless Tweets! A Study on Twitter Messages Posted During Crisis: Black Saturday." Proceedings of 21st Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS 2010). Brisbane, Australia, 1-3 Dec 2010.Sorensen, John H., and Barbara Vogt Sorensen. "Community Processes: Warning and Evacuation." Handbook of Disaster Research. Eds. Havidán Rodríguez, Enrico Louis Quarantelli, and Russell Rowe Dynes. New York: Springer, 2007. 183–99.Webb, Gary R., and Francois-Regis Chevreau. "Planning to Improvise: The Importance of Creativity and Flexibility in Crisis Response." International Journal of Emergency Management 3.1 (2006): 66–72.

In this paper we explore the rise of anti-gambling apps in the context of the massive expansion of gambling in new spheres of life (online and offline) and an acceleration in strategies of anticipatory and individualised management of harm caused by gambling. These apps, and the techniques and forms of labour they demand, are examples of and a mechanism through which a mode of governance premised on ‘self-care’ and ‘self-control’ is articulated and put into practice. To support this argument, we explore two government initiatives in the Australian context. Quit Pokies, a mobile app project between the Moreland City Council, North East Primary Care Partnership and the Victorian Local Governance Association, is an example of an emerging service paradigm of ‘self-care’ that uses online and mobile platforms with geo-location to deliver real time health and support interventions. A similar mobile app, Gambling Terminator, was launched by the NSW government in late 2012. Both apps work on the premise that interrupting a gaming session through a trigger, described by Quit Pokies’ creator as a “tap on the shoulder” provides gamblers the opportunity to take a reflexive stance and cut short their gambling practice in the course of play. We critically examine these apps as self-disciplining techniques of contemporary neo-liberalism directed towards anticipating and reducing the personal harm and social risk associated with gambling. We analyse the material and discursive elements, and new forms of user labour, through which this consumable media is framed and assembled. We argue that understanding the role of these apps, and mobile media more generally, in generating new techniques and technologies of the self, is important for identifying emerging modes of governance and their implications at a time when gambling is going through an immense period of cultural normalisation in online and offline environments. The Australian context is particularly germane for the way gambling permeates everyday spaces of sociality and leisure, and the potential of gambling interventions to interrupt and re-configure these spaces and institute a new kind of subject-state relation. Gambling in Australia Though a global phenomenon, the growth and expansion of gambling manifests distinctly in Australia because of its long cultural and historical attachment to games of chance. Australians are among the biggest betters and losers in the world (Ziolkowski), mainly on Electronic Gaming Machines (EGM) or pokies. As of 2013, according to The World Count of Gaming Machine (Ziolkowski), there were 198,150 EGMs in the country, of which 197,274 were slot machines, with the rest being electronic table games of roulette, blackjack and poker. There are 118 persons per machine in Australia. New South Wales is the jurisdiction with most EGMs (95,799), followed by Queensland (46,680) and Victoria (28,758) (Ziolkowski). Gambling is significant in Australian cultural history and average Australian households spend at least some money on different forms of gambling, from pokies to scratch cards, every year (Worthington et al.). In 1985, long-time gambling researcher Geoffrey Caldwell stated thatAustralians seem to take a pride in the belief that we are a nation of gamblers. Thus we do not appear to be ashamed of our gambling instincts, habits and practices. Gambling is regarded by most Australians as a normal, everyday practice in contrast to the view that gambling is a sinful activity which weakens the moral fibre of the individual and the community. (Caldwell 18) The omnipresence of gambling opportunities in most Australian states has been further facilitated by the availability of online and mobile gambling and gambling-like spaces. Social casino apps, for instance, are widely popular in Australia. The slots social casino app Slotomania was the most downloaded product in the iTunes store in 2012 (Metherell). In response to the high rate of different forms of gambling in Australia, a range of disparate interest groups have identified the expansion of gambling as a concerning trend. Health researchers have pointed out that online gamblers have a higher risk of experiencing problems with gambling (at 30%) compared to 15% in offline bettors (Hastings). The incidence of gambling problems is also disproportionately high in specific vulnerable demographics, including university students (Cervini), young adults prone to substance abuse problems (Hayatbakhsh et al.), migrants (Tanasornnarong et al.; Scull & Woolcock; Ohtsuka & Ohtsuka), pensioners (Hing & Breen), female players (Lee), Aboriginal communities (Young et al.; McMillen & Donnelly) and individuals experiencing homelessness (Holsworth et al.). While there is general recognition of the personal and public health impacts of gambling in Australia, there is a contradiction in the approach to gambling at a governance level. On one hand, its expansion is promoted and even encouraged by the federal and state governments, as gambling is an enormous source of revenue, as evidenced, for example, by the construction of the new Crown casino in Barangaroo in Sydney (Markham & Young). Campaigns trying to limit the use of poker machines, which are associated with concerns over problem gambling and addiction, are deemed by the gambling lobby as un-Australian. Paradoxically, efforts to restrict gambling or control gambling winnings have also been described as un-Australian, such as in the Australian Taxation Office’s campaign against MONA’s founder, David Walsh, whose immense art collection was acquired with the funds from a gambling scheme (Global Mail). On the other hand, people experiencing problems with gambling are often categorised as addicts and the ultimate blame (and responsibility) is attributed to the individual. In Australia, attitudes towards people who are arguably addicted to gambling are different than those towards individuals afflicted by alcohol or drug abuse (Jean). While “Australians tend to be sympathetic towards people with alcohol and other drug addictions who seek help,” unless it is seen as one of the more socially acceptable forms of occasional, controlled gambling (such as sports betting, gambling on the Melbourne Cup or celebrating ANZAC Day with Two-Up), gambling is framed as an individual “problem” and “moral failing” (Jean). The expansion of gambling is the backdrop to another development in health care and public health discourse, which have for some time now been devoted to the ideal of what Lupton has called the “digitally engaged patient” (Lupton). Technologies are central to the delivery of this model of health service provision that puts the patient at the centre of, and responsible for, their own health and medical care. Lupton has pointed out how this discourse, while appearing new, is in fact the latest version of the 1970s emphasis on the ‘patient as consumer’, an idea given an extra injection by the massive development and availability of digital and interactive web-based and mobile platforms, many of these directed towards the provision of health and health-related information and services. What this means for patients is that, rather than relying solely on professional medical expertise and care, the patient is encouraged to take on some of this medical/health work to conduct practices of ‘self-care’ (Lupton). The Discourse of ‘Self-Management’ and ‘Self-Care’ The model of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-management’ by ‘empowering’ digital technology has now become a dominant discourse within health and medicine, and is increasingly deployed across a range of related sectors such as welfare services. In recent research conducted on homelessness and mobile media, for example, government department staff involved in the reform of welfare services referred to ‘self-management’ as the new service paradigm that underpins their digital reform strategy. Echoing ideas and language similar to the “digitally engaged patient”, customers of Centrelink, Medicare and other ‘human services’ are being encouraged (through planned strategic initiatives aimed at shifting targeted customer groups online) to transact with government services digitally and manage their own personal profiles and health information. One departmental staff member described this in terms of an “opportunity cost”, the savings in time otherwise spent standing in long queues in service centres (Humphry). Rather than view these examples as isolated incidents taking place within or across sectors or disciplines, these are better understood as features of an emerging ‘discursive formation’ , a term Foucault used to describe the way in which particular institutions and/or the state establish a regime of truth, or an accepted social reality and which gives definition to a new historical episteme and subject: in this case that of the self-disciplined and “digitally engaged medical/health patient”. As Foucault explained, once this subject has become fully integrated into and across the social field, it is no longer easy to excavate, since it lies below the surface of articulation and is held together through everyday actions, habits and institutional routines and techniques that appear to be universal, necessary and/normal. The way in which this citizen subject becomes a universal model and norm, however, is not a straightforward or linear story and since we are in the midst of its rise, is not a story with a foretold conclusion. Nevertheless, across a range of different fields of governance: medicine; health and welfare, we can see signs of this emerging figure of the self-caring “digitally engaged patient” constituted from a range of different techniques and practices of self-governance. In Australia, this figure is at the centre of a concerted strategy of service digitisation involving a number of cross sector initiatives such as Australia’s National EHealth Strategy (2008), the National Digital Economy Strategy (2011) and the Australian Public Service Mobile Roadmap (2013). This figure of the self-caring “digitally engaged” patient, aligns well and is entirely compatible with neo-liberal formulations of the individual and the reduced role of the state as a provider of welfare and care. Berry refers to Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as outlined in his lectures to the College de France as a “particular form of post-welfare state politics in which the state essentially outsources the responsibility of the ‘well-being' of the population” (65). In the case of gambling, the neoliberal defined state enables the wedding of two seemingly contradictory stances: promoting gambling as a major source of revenue and capitalisation on the one hand, and identifying and treating gambling addiction as an individual pursuit and potential risk on the other. Risk avoidance strategies are focused on particular groups of people who are targeted for self-treatment to avoid the harm of gambling addiction, which is similarly framed as individual rather than socially and systematically produced. What unites and makes possible this alignment of neoliberalism and the new “digitally engaged subject/patient” is first and foremost, the construction of a subject in a chronic state of ill health. This figure is positioned as terminal from the start. They are ‘sick’, a ‘patient’, an ‘addict’: in need of immediate and continuous treatment. Secondly, this neoliberal patient/addict is enabled (we could even go so far as to say ‘empowered’) by digital technology, especially smartphones and the apps available through these devices in the form of a myriad of applications for intervening and treating ones afflictions. These apps range fromself-tracking programs such as mood regulators through to social media interventions. Anti-Pokie Apps and the Neoliberal Gambler We now turn to two examples which illustrate this alignment between neoliberalism and the new “digitally engaged subject/patient” in relation to gambling. Anti-gambling apps function to both replace or ‘take the place’ of institutions and individuals actively involved in the treatment of problem gambling and re-engineer this service through the logics of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-management’. Here, we depart somewhat from Foucault’s model of disciplinary power summed up in the institution (with the prison exemplifying this disciplinary logic) and move towards Deleuze’s understanding of power as exerted by the State not through enclosures but through diffuse and rhizomatic information flows and technologies (Deleuze). At the same time, we retain Foucault’s attention to the role and agency of the user in this power-dynamic, identifiable in the technics of self-regulation and in his ideas on governmentality. We now turn to analyse these apps more closely, and explore the way in which these articulate and perform these disciplinary logics. The app Quit Pokies was a joint venture of the North East Primary Care Partnership, the Victorian Local Governance Association and the Moreland City Council, launched in early 2014. The idea of the rational, self-reflexive and agentic user is evident in the description of the app by app developer Susan Rennie who described it this way: What they need is for someone to tap them on the shoulder and tell them to get out of there… I thought the phone could be that tap on the shoulder. The “tap on the shoulder” feature uses geolocation and works by emitting a sound alert when the user enters a gaming venue. It also provides information about each user’s losses at that venue. This “tap on the shoulder” is both an alert and a reprimand from past gambling sessions. Through the Responsible Gambling Fund, the NSW government also launched an anti-pokie app in 2013, Gambling Terminator, including a similar feature. The app runs on Apple and Android smartphone platforms, and when a person is inside a gambling venue in New South Wales it: sends reminder messages that interrupt gaming-machine play and gives you a chance to re-think your choices. It also provides instant access to live phone and online counselling services which operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (Google Play Store) Yet an approach that tries to prevent harm by anticipating the harm that will come from gambling at the point of entering a venue, also eliminates the chance of potential negotiations and encounters a user might have during a visit to the pub and how this experience will unfold. It reduces the “tap on the shoulder”, which may involve a far wider set of interactions and affects, to a software operation and it frames the pub or the club (which under some conditions functions as hubs for socialization and community building) as dangerous places that should be avoided. This has the potential to lead to further stigmatisation of gamblers, their isolation and their exclusion from everyday spaces. Moreland Mayor, Councillor Tapinos captures the implicit framing of self-care as a private act in his explanation of the app as a method for problem gamblers to avoid being stigmatised by, for example, publicly attending group meetings. Yet, curiously, the app has the potential to create a new kind of public stigmatisation through potentially drawing other peoples’ attention to users’ gambling play (as the alarm is triggered) generating embarrassment and humiliation at being “caught out” in an act framed as aberrant and literally, “alarming”. Both Quit Pokies and Gambling Terminator require their users to perform ‘acts’ of physical and affective labour aimed at behaviour change and developing the skills of self-control. After downloading Quit Pokies on the iPhone and launching the app, the user is presented an initial request: “Before you set up this app. please write a list of the pokies venues that you regularly use because the app will ask you to identify these venues so it can send you alerts if you spend time in these locations. It will also use your set up location to identify other venues you might use so we recommend that you set up the App in the location where you spend most time. Congratulation on choosing Quit Pokies.”Self-performed processes include installation, setting up, updating the app software, programming in gambling venues to be detected by the smartphone’s inbuilt GPS, monitoring and responding to the program’s alerts and engaging in alternate “legitimate” forms of leisure such as going to the movies or the library, having coffee with a friend or browsing Facebook. These self-performed labours can be understood as ‘technologies of the self’, a term used by Foucault to describe the way in which social members are obliged to regulate and police their ‘selves’ through a range of different techniques. While Foucault traces the origins of ‘technologies of the self’ to the Greco-Roman texts with their emphasis on “care of oneself” as one of the duties of citizenry, he notes the shift to “self-knowledge” under Christianity around the 8th century, where it became bound up in ideals of self-renunciation and truth. Quit Pokies and Gambling Terminator may signal a recuperation of the ideal of self-care, over confession and disclosure. These apps institute a set of bodily activities and obligations directed to the user’s health and wellbeing, aided through activities of self-examination such as charting your recovery through a Recovery Diary and implementing a number of suggested “Strategies for Change” such as “writing a list” and “learning about ways to manage your money better”. Writing is central to the acts of self-examination. As Jeremy Prangnell, gambling counsellor from Mission Australia for Wollongong and Shellharbour regions explained the app is “like an electronic diary, which is a really common tool for people who are trying to change their behaviour” (Thompson). The labours required by users are also implicated in the functionality and performance of the platform itself suggesting the way in which ‘technologies of the self’ simultaneously function as a form of platform work: user labour that supports and sustains the operation of digital systems and is central to the performance and continuation of digital capitalism in general (Humphry, Demanding Media). In addition to the acts of labour performed on the self and platform, bodies are themselves potentially mobilised (and put into new circuits of consumption and production), as a result of triggers to nudge users away from gambling venues, towards a range of other cultural practices in alternative social spaces considered to be more legitimate.Conclusion Whether or not these technological interventions are effective or successful is yet to be tested. Indeed, the lack of recent activity in the community forums and preponderance of issues reported on installation and use suggests otherwise, pointing to a need for more empirical research into these developments. Regardless, what we’ve tried to identify is the way in which apps such as these embody a new kind of subject-state relation that emphasises self-control of gambling harm and hastens the divestment of institutional and social responsibility at a time when gambling is going through an immense period of expansion in many respects backed by and sanctioned by the state. Patterns of smartphone take up in the mainstream population and the rise of the so called ‘mobile only population’ (ACMA) provide support for this new subject and service paradigm and are often cited as the rationale for digital service reform (APSMR). Media convergence feeds into these dynamics: service delivery becomes the new frontier for the merging of previously separate media distribution systems (Dwyer). Letters, customer service centres, face-to-face meetings and web sites, are combined and in some instances replaced, with online and mobile media platforms, accessible from multiple and mobile devices. These changes are not, however, simply the migration of services to a digital medium with little effective change to the service itself. Health and medical services are re-invented through their technological re-assemblage, bringing into play new meanings, practices and negotiations among the state, industry and neoliberal subjects (in the case of problem gambling apps, a new subjectivity, the ‘neoliberal addict’). These new assemblages are as much about bringing forth a new kind of subject and mode of governance, as they are a solution to problem gambling. This figure of the self-treating “gambler addict” can be seen to be a template for, and prototype of, a more generalised and universalised self-governing citizen: one that no longer needs or makes demands on the state but who can help themselves and manage their own harm. Paradoxically, there is the potential for new risks and harms to the very same users that accompanies this shift: their outright exclusion as a result of deprivation from basic and assumed digital access and literacy, the further stigmatisation of gamblers, the elimination of opportunities for proximal support and their exclusion from everyday spaces. References Albarrán-Torres, César. “Gambling-Machines and the Automation of Desire.” Platform: Journal of Media and Communication 5.1 (2013). Australian Communications and Media Authority. “Australians Cut the Cord.” Research Snapshots. Sydney: ACMA (2013) Berry, David. Critical Theory and the Digital. Broadway, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014 Berry, David. Stunlaw: A Critical Review of Politics, Arts and Technology. 2012. ‹http://stunlaw.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/code-foucault-and-neoliberal.html›. Caldwell, G. “Some Historical and Sociological Characteristics of Australian Gambling.” Gambling in Australia. Eds. G. Caldwell, B. Haig, M. Dickerson, and L. Sylan. Sydney: Croom Helm Australia, 1985. 18-27. Cervini, E. “High Stakes for Gambling Students.” The Age 8 Nov. 2013. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/high-stakes-for-gambling-students-20131108-2x5cl.html›. Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October (1992): 3-7. Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” Eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988 Hastings, E. “Online Gamblers More at Risk of Addiction.” Herald Sun 13 Oct. 2013. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/online-gamblers-more-at-risk-of-addiction/story-fni0fiyv-1226739184629#!›.Hayatbakhsh, Mohammad R., et al. "Young Adults' Gambling and Its Association with Mental Health and Substance Use Problems." Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 36.2 (2012): 160-166. Hing, Nerilee, and Helen Breen. "A Profile of Gaming Machine Players in Clubs in Sydney, Australia." Journal of Gambling Studies 18.2 (2002): 185-205. Holdsworth, Louise, Margaret Tiyce, and Nerilee Hing. "Exploring the Relationship between Problem Gambling and Homelessness: Becoming and Being Homeless." Gambling Research 23.2 (2012): 39. Humphry, Justine. “Demanding Media: Platform Work and the Shaping of Work and Play.” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture, 10.2 (2013): 1-13. Humphry, Justine. “Homeless and Connected: Mobile Phones and the Internet in the Lives of Homeless Australians.” Australian Communications Consumer Action Network. Sep. 2014. ‹https://www.accan.org.au/grants/completed-grants/619-homeless-and-connected›.Lee, Timothy Jeonglyeol. "Distinctive Features of the Australian Gambling Industry and Problems Faced by Australian Women Gamblers." Tourism Analysis 14.6 (2009): 867-876. Lupton, D. “The Digitally Engaged Patient: Self-Monitoring and Self-Care in the Digital Health Era.” Social Theory & Health 11.3 (2013): 256-70. Markham, Francis, and Martin Young. “Packer’s Barangaroo Casino and the Inevitability of Pokies.” The Conversation 9 July 2013. ‹http://theconversation.com/packers-barangaroo-casino-and-the-inevitability-of-pokies-15892›. Markham, Francis, and Martin Young. “Who Wins from ‘Big Gambling’ in Australia?” The Conversation 6 Mar. 2014. ‹http://theconversation.com/who-wins-from-big-gambling-in-australia-22930›.McMillen, Jan, and Katie Donnelly. "Gambling in Australian Indigenous Communities: The State of Play." The Australian Journal of Social Issues 43.3 (2008): 397. Ohtsuka, Keis, and Thai Ohtsuka. “Vietnamese Australian Gamblers’ Views on Luck and Winning: Universal versus Culture-Specific Schemas.” Asian Journal of Gambling Issues and Public Health 1.1 (2010): 34-46. Scull, Sue, Geoffrey Woolcock. “Problem Gambling in Non-English Speaking Background Communities in Queensland, Australia: A Qualitative Exploration.” International Gambling Studies 5.1 (2005): 29-44. Tanasornnarong, Nattaporn, Alun Jackson, and Shane Thomas. “Gambling among Young Thai People in Melbourne, Australia: An Exploratory Study.” International Gambling Studies 4.2 (2004): 189-203. Thompson, Angela, “Live Gambling Odds Tipped for the Chop.” Illawarra Mercury 22 May 2013: 6. Metherell, Mark. “Virtual Pokie App a Hit - But ‘Not Gambling.’” Sydney Morning Herald 13 Jan. 2013. ‹http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/smartphone-apps/virtual-pokie-app-a-hit--but-not-gambling-20130112-2cmev.html#ixzz2QVlsCJs1›. Worthington, Andrew, et al. "Gambling Participation in Australia: Findings from the National Household Expenditure Survey." Review of Economics of the Household 5.2 (2007): 209-221. Young, Martin, et al. "The Changing Landscape of Indigenous Gambling in Northern Australia: Current Knowledge and Future Directions." International Gambling Studies 7.3 (2007): 327-343. Ziolkowski, S. “The World Count of Gaming Machines 2013.” Gaming Technologies Association, 2014. ‹http://www.gamingta.com/pdf/World_Count_2014.pdf›.

Machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods. Mark Weiser on ubiquitous computing (21st Century Computer 104) In 2007, a forum entitled HCI 2020: Human Values in a Digital Age sought to address the questions: What will our world be like in 2020? Digital technologies will continue to proliferate, enabling ever more ways of changing how we live. But will such developments improve the quality of life, empower us, and make us feel safer, happier and more connected? Or will living with technology make it more tiresome, frustrating, angst-ridden, and security-driven? What will it mean to be human when everything we do is supported or augmented by technology? (Harper et al. 10) The forum came as a response to, what many call, post-PC technological developments; developments that seek to engulf our lives in digital technologies which in their various forms are meant to support and augment our everyday lives. One of these developments has been the project of ubiquitous computing along with its kin project, tangible computing. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) made its appearance in the late 1980s in the labs of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) as the “third wave” in computing, following those of the mainframe and personal computing (Weiser, Open House 2). Mark Weiser, who coined the term, along with his collaborators at Xerox PARC, envisioned a “new technological paradigm” which would leave behind the traditional one-to-one relationship between human and computer, and spread computation “ubiquitously, but invisibly, throughout the environment” (Weiser, Gold and Brown 693). Since then, the field has grown and now counts several peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and academic and industrial research centres around the world, which have set out to study the new “post-PC computing” under names such as Pervasive Computing, Ambient Intelligence, Tangible Computing, The Internet of Things, etc. Instead of providing a comprehensive account of all the different ubicomp incarnations, this paper seeks to focus on the early projects and writings of some of ubicomp’s most prominent figures and tease out, as a way of critique, the origins of some of its romantic promises. From the outset, ubiquitous computing was heavily informed by a human-centred approach that sought to shift the focus from the personal computer back to its users. On the grounds that the PC has dominated the technological landscape at the expense of its human counterparts, ubiquitous computing promised a different human-machine interaction, with “machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs” (104, my italics) placing the two in opposite and antagonistic terrains. The problem comes about in the form of interaction between people and machines … So when the two have to meet, which side should dominate? In the past, it has been the machine that dominates. In the future, it should be the human. (Norman 140) Within these early ubicomp discourses, the computer came to embody a technological menace, the machine that threatened the liberal humanist value of being free and in control. For example, in 1999 in a book that was characterized as “the bible of ‘post-PC’ thinking” by Business Week, Donald Norman exclaimed: we have let ourselves to be trapped. … I don’t want to be controlled by a technology. I just want to get on with my life, … So down with PC’s; down with computers. All they do is complicate our lives. (72) And we read on the website of MIT’s first ubicomp project Oxygen: For over forty years, computation has centered about machines, not people. We have catered to expensive computers, pampering them in air-conditioned rooms or carrying them around with us. Purporting to serve us, they have actually forced us to serve them. Ubiquitous computing then, in its early incarnations, was presented as the solution; the human-centred, somewhat natural approach, which would shift the emphasis away from the machine and bring control back to its legitimate owner, the liberal autonomous human subject, becoming the facilitator of our apparently threatened humanness. Its promise? An early promise of regressive augmentation, I would say, since it promised to augment our lives, not by changing them, but by returning us to a past, better world that the alienating PC has supposedly displaced, enabling us to “have more time to be more fully human” (Weiser and Brown). And it sought to achieve this through the key characteristic of invisibility, which was based on the paradox that while more and more computers will permeate our lives, they will effectively disappear. Ubicomp’s Early Romantic Promises The question of how we can make computers disappear has been addressed in computer research in various ways. One of the earliest and most prominent of these is the approach, which focuses on the physicality of the world seeking to build tangible interfaces. One of the main advocates of this approach is MIT’s Tangible Media Group, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishii. The group has been working on their vision, which they call “Tangible Bits,” for almost two decades now, and in 2009 they were awarded the “Lasting Impact Award” at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) for their metaDesk platform, presented in 1997 (fig.1), which explores the coupling of everyday physical objects with digital information (Ullmer and Ishii). Also, in 2004 in a special paper titled “Bottles: A Transparent Interface as a Tribute to Mark Weiser”, Ishii presented once again an early project he and his group developed in 1999, and for which they were personally commented by Weiser himself. According to Ishii, bottles (fig. 2)—a system which comprises three glass bottles “filled with music” each representing a different musical instrument, placed on a Plexiglas “stage” and controlled by their physical manipulation (moving, opening or closing them)—no less, “illustrates Mark Weiser’s vision of the transparent (or invisible) interface that weaves itself into the fabric of everyday life” (1299). Figure 1: metaDesk platform (MIT Tangible Media Group) Figure 2: musicBottles (MIT Tangible Media Group) Tangible computing was based on the premise that we inhabit two worlds: the physical world and cyberspace, or as Ishii and Ullmer put it, the world of atoms and the world of bits claiming that there is gap between these two worlds that left us “torn between these parallel but disjoint spaces” (1). This agreed with Weiser’s argument that cyberspace, and specifically the computer, has taken centre stage leaving the real world—the real people, the real interactions—in the background and neglected. Tangible computing then sought to address this problem by "bridging the gaps between both cyberspace and the physical environment" (1). As Ishii and Ullmer wrote in 1997: The aim of our research is to show concrete ways to move beyond the current dominant model of GUI [Graphic User Interface] bound to computers with a flat rectangular display, windows, a mouse, and a keyboard. To make computing truly ubiquitous and invisible, we seek to establish a new type of HCI that we call "Tangible User Interfaces" (TUIs). TUIs will augment the real physical world by coupling digital information to everyday physical objects and environments. (2) “Our intention is to take advantage of natural physical affordances to achieve a heightened legibility and seamlessness of interaction between people and information” (2). In his earlier work computer scientist Paul Dourish turned to phenomenology and the concept of embodiment in order to develop an understanding of interaction as embodied. This was prior to his recent work with cultural anthropologist Bell where they examined the motivating mythology of ubiquitous computing along with the messiness of its lived experience (Dourish and Bell). Dourish, in this earlier work observed that one of the common critical features early tangible and ubiquitous computing shared is that “they both attempt to exploit our natural familiarity with the everyday environment and our highly developed spatial and physical skills to specialize and control how computation can be used in concert with naturalistic activities” (Context-Aware Computing 232). They then sought to exploit this familiarity in order to build natural computational interfaces that fit seamlessly within our everyday, real world (Where the Action Is 17). This idea of an existing set of natural tactile skills appears to come hand-in-hand with a nostalgic, romantic view of an innocent, simple, and long gone world that the early projects of tangible and ubiquitous computing sought to revive; a world where the personal computer not only did not fit, an innocent world in fact displaced by the personal computer. In 1997, Ishii and Ullmer wrote about their decision to start their investigations about the “future of HCI” in the museum of the Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments at Harvard University in their efforts to get inspired by “the aesthetics and rich affordances of these historical scientific instruments” concerned that, “alas, much of this richness has been lost to the rapid flood of digital technologies” (1). Elsewhere Ishii explained that the origin of his idea to design a bottle interface began with the concept of a “weather forecast bottle;” an idea he intended to develop as a present for his mother. “Upon opening the weather bottle, she would be greeted by the sound of singing birds if the next day’s weather was forecasted to be clear” (1300). Here, we are introduced to a nice elderly lady who has opened thousands of bottles while cooking for her family in her kitchen. This senior lady; who is made to embody the symbolic alignment between woman, the domestic and nature (see Soper, Rose, Plumwood); “has never clicked a mouse, typed a URL, nor booted a computer in her life” (Ishii 1300). Instead, “my mother simply wanted to know the following day’s weather forecast. Why should this be so complicated?” (1300, my italics). Weiser also mobilised nostalgic sentiments in order to paint a picture of what it would be to live with ubiquitous computing. So, for example, when seeking a metaphor for ubiquitous computing, he proposed “childhood – playful, a building of foundations, constant learning, a bit mysterious and quickly forgotten by adults” (Not a Desktop 8). He viewed the ubicomp home as the ideal retreat to a state of childhood; playfully reaching out to the unknown, while being securely protected and safely “at home” (Open House). These early ideas of a direct experience of the world through our bodily senses along with the romantic view of a past, simple, and better world that the computer threatened and that future technological developments promised, could point towards what Leo Marx has described as America’s “pastoral ideal”, a force that, according to Marx, is ingrained in the American view of life. Balancing between primitivism and civilisation, nature and culture, the pastoral ideal “is an embodiment of what Lovejoy calls ‘semi-primitivism’; it is located in a middle ground somewhere ‘between’, yet in a transcendent relation to, the opposing forces of civilisation and nature” (Marx 23). It appears that the early advocates of tangible and ubiquitous computing sought to strike a similar balance to the American pastoral ideal; a precarious position that managed to reconcile the disfavour and fear of Europe’s “satanic mills” with an admiration for the technological power of the Industrial Revolution, the admiration for technological development with the bucolic ideal of an unspoiled and pure nature. But how was such a balance to be achieved? How could the ideal middle state be achieved balancing the opposing forces of technological development and the dream of the return to a serene pastoral existence? According to Leo Marx, for the European colonisers, the New World was to provide the answer to this exact question (101). The American landscape was to become the terrain where old and new, nature and technology harmonically meet to form a libertarian utopia. Technology was seen as “‘naturally arising’ from the landscape as another natural ‘means of happiness’ decreed by the Creator in his design of the continent. So, far from conceding that there might be anything alien or ‘artificial’ about mechanization, technology was seen as inherent in ‘nature’; both geographic and human” (160). Since then, according to Marx, the idea of the “return” to a new Golden Age has been engrained in the American culture and it appears that it informs ubiquitous computing’s own early visions. The idea of a “naturally arising” technology which would facilitate our return to the once lost garden of security and nostalgia appears to have become a common theme within ubiquitous computing discourses making appearances across time and borders. So, for example, while in 1991 Weiser envisioned that ubiquitous technologies will make “using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods” (21st Century Computer 11), twelve years later Marzano writing about Philip’s vision of Ambient Intelligence promised that “the living space of the future could look more like that of the past than that of today” (9). While the pastoral defined nature in terms of the geographical landscape, early ubiquitous computing appeared to define nature in terms of the objects, tools and technologies that surround us and our interactions with them. While pastoral America defined itself in contradistinction to the European industrial sites and the dirty, smoky and alienating cityscapes, within those early ubiquitous computing discourses the role of the alienating force was assigned to the personal computer. And whereas the personal computer with its “grey box” was early on rejected as the modern embodiment of the European satanic mills, computation was welcomed as a “naturally arising” technological solution which would infuse the objects which, “through the ages, … are most relevant to human life—chairs, tables and beds, for instance, … the objects we can’t do without” (Marzano 9). Or else, it would infuse the—newly constructed—natural landscape fulfilling the promise that when the “world of bits” and the “world of atoms” are finally bridged, the balance will be restored. But how did these two worlds come into existence? How did bits and atoms come to occupy different and separate ontological spheres? Far from being obvious or commonsensical, the idea of the separation between bits and atoms has a history that grounds it to specific times and places, and consequently makes those early ubiquitous and tangible computing discourses part of a bigger story that, as documented (Hayles) and argued (Agre), started some time ago. The view that we inhabit the two worlds of atoms and bits (Ishii and Ullmer) was endorsed by both early ubiquitous and tangible computing, it was based on the idea of the separation of computation from its material instantiation, presenting the former as a free floating entity able to infuse our world. As we saw earlier, tangible computing took the idea of this separation as an unquestionable fact, which then served as the basis for its research goals. As we read in the home page of the Tangible Media Group’s website: Where the sea of bits meets the land of atoms, we are now facing the challenge of reconciling our dual citizenship in the physical and digital worlds. "Tangible Bits" is our vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI): we seek a seamless coupling of bits and atoms by giving physical form to digital information and computation (my italics). The idea that digital information does not have to have a physical form, but is given one in order to achieve a coupling of the two worlds, not only reinforces the view of digital information as an immaterial entity, but also places it in a privileged position against the material world. Under this light, those early ideas of augmentation or of “awakening” the physical world (Ishii and Ullmer 3) appear to be based on the idea of a passive material world that can be brought to life and become worthy and meaningful through computation, making ubiquitous computing part of a bigger and more familiar story. Restaging the dominant Cartesian dualism between the “ensouled” subject and the “soulless” material object, the latter is rendered passive, manipulable, and void of agency and, just like Ishii’s old bottles, it is performed as a mute, docile “empty vessel” ready to carry out any of its creator’s wishes; hold perfumes and beverages, play music, or tell the weather. At the same time, computation was presented as the force that could breathe life to a mundane and passive world; a free floating, somewhat natural, immaterial entity, like oxygen (hence the name of MIT’s first ubicomp project), like the air we breathe that could travel unobstructed through any medium, our everyday objects and our environment. But it is interesting to see that in those early ubicomp discourses computation’s power did not extend too far. While computation appeared to be foregrounded as a powerful, almost magic, entity able to give life and soul to a soulless material world, at the same time it was presented as controlled and muted. The computational power that would fill our lives, according to Weiser’s ubiquitous computing, would be invisible, it wouldn’t “intrude on our consciousness” (Weiser Not a Desktop 7), it would leave no traces and bring no radical changes. If anything, it would enable us to re-establish our humanness and return us to our past, natural state promising not to change us, or our lives, by introducing something new and unfamiliar, but to enable us to “remain serene and in control” (Weiser and Brown). In other words, ubiquitous computing, as this early story goes, would not be alienating, complex, obtrusive, or even noticeable, for that matter, and so, at the end of this paper, we come full circle to ubicomp’s early goals of invisibility with its underpinnings of the precarious pastoral ideal. This short paper focused on some of ubicomp’s early stories and projects and specifically on its promise to return us to a past and implicitly better world that the PC has arguably displaced. By reading these early promises of, what I call, regressive augmentation through Marx’s work on the “pastoral ideal,” this paper sought to tease out, in order to unsettle, the origins of some of ubicomp’s romantic promises. References Agre, P. E. Computation and Human Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Dourish, P. “Seeking a Foundation for Context-Aware Computing.” Human–Computer Interaction 16.2-4 (2001): 229-241. ———. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Dourish, P. and Genevieve Bell. Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011.Grimes, A., and R. Harper. “Celebratory Technology: New Directions for Food Research in HCI.” In CHI’08, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 2008. 467-476. Harper, R., T. Rodden, Y. Rogers, and A. Sellen (eds.). Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020. Microsoft Research, 2008. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/Cambridge/projects/hci2020/downloads/BeingHuman_A3.pdf›. Hayles, K. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Ishii, H. “Bottles: A Transparent Interface as a Tribute to Mark Weiser.” IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems 87.6 (2004): 1299-1311. Ishii, H., and B. Ullmer. “Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms.” In CHI ’97, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 1997. 234-241. Marx, L. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 35th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Marzano, S. “Cultural Issues in Ambient Intelligence”. In E. Aarts and S. Marzano (eds.), The New Everyday: Views on Ambient Intelligence. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2003. Norman, D. The Invisible Computer: Why Good Oroducts Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Plumwood, V. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London, New York: Routledge, 1993. Rose, G. Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Polity, 1993. Soper, K. “Naturalised Woman and Feminized Nature.” In L. Coupe (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2000. Ullmer, B., and H. Ishii. “The metaDESK: Models and Prototypes for Tangible User Interfaces.” In UIST '97, Proceedings of the 10th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. New York: ACM, 1997. 223-232. Weiser, M. “The Computer for the 21st Century." Scientific American 265.3 (1991): 94-104. ———. “The Open House.” ITP Review 2.0, 1996. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://makingfurnitureinteractive.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/wholehouse.pdf›. ———. “The World Is Not a Desktop." Interactions 1.1 (1994): 7-8. Weiser, M., and J.S. Brown. “The Coming Age of Calm Technology.” 1996. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.johnseelybrown.com/calmtech.pdf›. Weiser, M., R. Gold, and J.S. Brown. “The Origins of Ubiquitous Computing at PARC in the Late 80s.” Pervasive Computing 38 (1999): 693-696.

‘We are faced today with an entire system of communication technology which is the perfect medium to host and transfer the very programs designed to destroy the functionality of the system.’ (IBM Researcher: Sarah Gordon, 1995) Despite renewed interest in open source code, the openness of the information space is nothing new in terms of the free flow of information. The transitive and nonlinear configuration of data flow has ceaselessly facilitated the sharing of code. The openness of the info-space encourages a free distribution model, which has become central to numerous developments through the abundant supply of freeware, shareware and source code. Key moments in open source history include the release in 1998 of Netscape’s Communicator source code, a clear attempt to stimulate browser development. More recently in February 2004 the ‘partial leaking’ of Microsoft Windows 2000 and NT 4.0 source code demonstrated the often-hostile disposition of open culture and the potential threat it poses to existing corporate business models. However, the leading exponents of the open source ethic predate these events by more than a decade. As an extension of the hacker, the virus writer has managed, since the 1980s, to bend the shape of info-space beyond recognition. By freely spreading viruses, worms and hacker programs across the globe, virus writers have provided researchers with a remarkable set of digital footprints to follow. The virus has, as IBM researcher Sarah Gordon points out, exposed the info-space as a ‘perfect medium’ rife for malicious viral infection. This paper argues that viral technologies can hold info-space hostage to the uncertain undercurrents of information itself. As such, despite mercantile efforts to capture the spirit of openness, the info-space finds itself frequently in a state far-from-equilibrium. It is open to often-unmanageable viral fluctuations, which produce levels of spontaneity, uncertainty and emergent order. So while corporations look to capture the perpetual, flexible and friction-free income streams from centralised information flows, viral code acts as an anarchic, acentred Deleuzian rhizome. It thrives on the openness of info-space, producing a paradoxical counterpoint to a corporatised information society and its attempt to steer the info-machine. The Virus in the Open System Fred Cohen’s 1984 doctoral thesis on the computer virus locates three key features of openness that makes viral propagation possible (see Louw and Duffy, 1992 pp. 13-14) and predicts a condition common to everyday user experience of info-space. Firstly, the virus flourishes because of the computer’s capacity for information sharing_; transitive flows of code between nodes via discs, connected media, network links, user input and software use. In the process of information transfer the ‘witting and unwitting’ cooperation of users and computers is a necessary determinant of viral infection. Secondly, information flow must be _interpreted._ Before execution computers interpret incoming information as a series of instructions (strings of bits). However, before execution, there is no fundamental distinction between information received, and as such, information has no _meaning until it has been executed. Thus, the interpretation of information does not differentiate between a program and a virus. Thirdly, the alterability or manipulability of the information process allows the virus to modify information. For example, advanced polymorphic viruses avoid detection by using non-significant, or redundant code, to randomly encrypt and decrypt themselves. Cohen concludes that the only defence available to combat viral spread is the ‘limited transitivity of information flow’. However, a reduction in flow is contrary to the needs of the system and leads ultimately to the unacceptable limitation of sharing (Cohen, 1991). As Cohen states ‘To be perfectly secure against viral attacks, a system must protect against incoming information flow, while to be secure against leakage of information a system must protect against outgoing information flow. In order for systems to allow sharing, there must be some information flow. It is therefore the major conclusion of this paper that the goals of sharing in a general purpose multilevel security system may be in such direct opposition to the goals of viral security as to make their reconciliation and coexistence impossible.’ Cohen’s research does not simply end with the eradication of the virus via the limitation of openness, but instead leads to a contentious idea concerning the benevolent properties of viral computing and the potential legitimacy of ‘friendly contagion’. Cohen looks beyond the malevolent enemy of the open network to a benevolent solution. The viral ecosystem is an alternative to Turing-von Neumann capability. Key to this system is a benevolent virus,_ which epitomise the ethic of open culture. Drawing upon a biological analogy, benevolent viral computing _reproduces in order to accomplish its goals; the computing environment evolving_ rather than being ‘designed every step of the way’ (see Zetter, 2000). The _viral ecosystem_ demonstrates how the spread of viruses can purposely _evolve through the computational space using the shared processing power of all host machines. Information enters the host machine via infection and a translator program alerts the user. The benevolent virus_ passes through the host machine with any additional modifications made by the _infected_ _user. The End of Empirical Virus Research? Cohen claims that his research into ‘friendly contagion’ has been thwarted by network administrators and policy makers (See Levy, 1992 in Spiller, 2002) whose ‘apparent fear reaction’ to early experiments resulted in trying to solve technical problems with policy solutions. However, following a significant increase in malicious viral attacks, with estimated costs to the IT industry of $13 billion in 2001 (Pipkin, 2003 p. 41), research into legitimate viruses has not surprisingly shifted from the centre to the fringes of the computer science community (see Dibbell, 1995)._ _Current reputable and subsequently funded research tends to focus on efforts by the anti-virus community to develop computer hygiene. Nevertheless, malevolent or benevolent viral technology provides researchers with a valuable recourse. The virus draws analysis towards specific questions concerning the nature of information and the culture of openness. What follows is a delineation of a range of approaches, which endeavour to provide some answers. Virus as a Cultural Metaphor Sean Cubitt (in Dovey, 1996 pp. 31-58) positions the virus as a contradictory cultural element, lodged between the effective management of info-space and the potential for spontaneous transformation. However, distinct from Cohen’s aspectual analogy, Cubitt’s often-frivolous viral metaphor overflows with political meaning. He replaces the concept of information with a space of representation, which elevates the virus from empirical experience to a linguistic construct of reality. The invasive and contagious properties of the biological parasite are metaphorically transferred to viral technology; the computer virus is thus imbued with an alien otherness. Cubitt’s cultural discourse typically reflects humanist fears of being subjected to increasing levels of technological autonomy. The openness of info-space is determined by a managed society aiming to ‘provide the grounds for mutation’ (p. 46) necessary for profitable production. Yet the virus, as a possible consequence of that desire, becomes a potential opposition to ‘ideological formations’. Like Cohen, Cubitt concludes that the virus will always exist if the paths of sharing remain open to information flow. ‘Somehow’, Cubitt argues, ‘the net must be managed in such a way as to be both open and closed. Therefore, openness is obligatory and although, from the point of view of the administrator, it is a recipe for ‘anarchy, for chaos, for breakdown, for abjection’, the ‘closure’ of the network, despite eradicating the virus, ‘means that no benefits can accrue’ (p.55). Virus as a Bodily Extension From a virus writing perspective it is, arguably, the potential for free movement in the openness of info-space that that motivates the spread of viruses. As one writer infamously stated it is ‘the idea of making a program that would travel on its own, and go to places its creator could never go’ that inspires the spreading of viruses (see Gordon, 1993). In a defiant stand against the physical limitations of bodily movement from Eastern Europe to the US, the Bulgarian virus writer, the Dark Avenger, contended that ‘the American government can stop me from going to the US, but they can’t stop my virus’. This McLuhanesque conception of the virus, as a bodily extension (see McLuhan, 1964), is picked up on by Baudrillard in Cool Memories_ _(1990). He considers the computer virus as an ‘ultra-modern form of communication which does not distinguish, according to McLuhan, between the information itself and its carrier.’ To Baudrillard the prosperous proliferation of the virus is the result of its ability to be both the medium and the message. As such the virus is a pure form of information. The Virus as Information Like Cohen, Claude Shannon looks to the biological analogy, but argues that we have the potential to learn more about information transmission in artificial and natural systems by looking at difference rather than resemblance (see Campbell, 1982). One of the key aspects of this approach is the concept of redundancy. The theory of information argues that the patterns produced by the transmission of information are likely to travel in an entropic mode, from the unmixed to the mixed – from information to noise. Shannon’s concept of redundancy ensures that noise is diminished in a system of communication. Redundancy encodes information so that the receiver can successfully decode the message, holding back the entropic tide. Shannon considers the transmission of messages in the brain as highly redundant since it manages to obtain ‘overall reliability using unreliable components’ (in Campbell, 1982 p. 191). While computing uses redundancy to encode messages, compared to transmissions of biological information, it is fairly primitive. Unlike the brain, Turing-von-Neumann computation is inflexible and literal minded. In the brain information transmission relies not only on deterministic external input, but also self-directed spontaneity and uncertain electro-chemical pulses. Nevertheless, while Shannon’s binary code is constrained to a finite set of syntactic rules, it can produce an infinite number of possibilities. Indeed, the virus makes good use of redundancy to ensure its successful propagation. The polymorphic virus is not simply a chaotic, delinquent noise, but a decidedly redundant form of communication, which uses non-significant code to randomly flip itself over to avoid detection. Viral code thrives on the infinite potential of algorithmic computing; the open, flexible and undecidable grammar of the algorithm allows the virus to spread, infect and evolve. The polymorphic virus can encrypt and decrypt itself so as to avoid anti-viral scanners checking for known viral signatures from the phylum of code known to anti-virus researchers. As such, it is a raw form of Artificial Intelligence, relying on redundant inflexible_ _code programmed to act randomly, ignore or even forget information. Towards a Concept of Rhizomatic Viral Computation Using the concept of the rhizome Deleuze and Guattari (1987 p. 79) challenge the relation between noise and pattern established in information theory. They suggest that redundancy is not merely a ‘limitative condition’, but is key to the transmission of the message itself. Measuring up the efficiency of a highly redundant viral transmission against the ‘splendour’ of the short-term memory of a rhizomatic message, it is possible to draw some conclusions from their intervention. On the surface, the entropic tendency appears to be towards the mixed and the running down of the system’s energy. However, entropy is not the answer since information is not energy; it cannot be conserved, it can be created and destroyed. By definition information is something new, something that adds to existing information (see Campbell, 1982 p. 231), yet efficient information transmission creates invariance in a variant environment. In this sense, the pseudo-randomness of viral code, which pre-programs elements of uncertainty and free action into its propagation, challenges the efforts to make information centralised, structured and ordered. It does this by placing redundant noise within its message pattern. The virus readily ruptures the patterned symmetry of info-space and in terms of information produces something new. Viral transmission is pure information as its objective is to replicate itself throughout info-space; it mutates the space as well as itself. In a rhizomatic mode the anarchic virus is without a central agency; it is a profound rejection of all Generals and power centres. Viral infection, like the rhizomatic network, is made up of ‘finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbour to any other’. Viral spread flows along non-pre-existent ‘channels of communication’ (1987 p. 17). Furthermore, while efforts are made to striate the virus using anti-viral techniques, there is growing evidence that viral information not only wants to be free, but is free to do as it likes. About the Author Tony Sampson is a Senior Lecturer and Course Tutor in Multimedia & Digital Culture, School of Cultural and Innovation Studies at the University of East London, UK Email: t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk Citation reference for this article MLA Style Sampson, Tony. "A Virus in Info-Space" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/07_Sampson.php>. APA Style Sampson, T. (2004, Jul1). A Virus in Info-Space. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/07_Sampson.php>

As the name suggests, the humanities is largely a study of the human condition, in which history sits as a discipline concerned with the past. Environmental history is a new field that brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to consider the changing relationships between humans and the environment over time. Critiques of anthropocentrism that place humans at the centre of the universe or make assessments through an exclusive human perspective provide a challenge to scholars to rethink our traditional biases against the nonhuman world. The movement towards nonhumanism or posthumanism, however, does not seem to have had much of an impression on history as a discipline. What would a nonhumanist history look like if we re-centred the historical narrative around pigs? There are histories of pigs as food (see for example, The Cambridge History of Food which has a chapter on “Hogs”). There are food histories that feature pork in terms of its relationship to multiethnic identity (such as Donna Gabaccia’s We Are What We Eat) and examples made of pigs to promote ethical eating (Singer). Pigs are central to arguments about dietary rules and what motivates them (Soler; Dolander). Ancient pig DNA has also been employed in studies on human migration and colonisation (Larson et al.; Durham University). Pigs are also widely used in a range of products that would surprise many of us. In 2008, Christien Meindertsma spent three years researching the products made from a single pig. Among some of the more unexpected results were: ammunition, medicine, photographic paper, heart valves, brakes, chewing gum, porcelain, cosmetics, cigarettes, hair conditioner and even bio diesel. Likewise, Fergus Henderson, who coined the term ‘nose to tail eating’, uses a pig on the front cover of the book of that name to suggest the extraordinary and numerous potential of pigs’ bodies. However, my intention here is not to pursue a discussion of how parts of their bodies are used, rather to consider a reorientation of the historical narrative to place pigs at the centre of stories of our co-evolution, in order to see what their history might say about humans and our relationships with them. This is underpinned by recognition of the inter-relationality of humans and animals. The relationships between wild boar and pigs with humans has been long and diverse. In a book exploring 10,000 years of interaction, Anton Ervynck and Peter Rowley-Conwy argue that pigs have been central to complex cultural developments in human societies and they played an important role in human migration patterns. The book is firmly grounded within the disciplines of zoology, anthropology and archaeology and contributes to an understanding of the complex and changing relationship humans have historically shared with wild boar and domestic pigs. Naturalist Lyall Watson also explores human/pig relationships in The Whole Hog. The insights these approaches offer for the discipline of history are valuable (although overlooked) but, more importantly, such scholarship also challenges a humanist perspective that credits humans exclusively with historical change and suggests, moreover, that we did it alone. Pigs occupy a special place in this history because of their likeness to humans, revealed in their use in transplant technology, as well as because of the iconic and paradoxical status they occupy in our lives. As Ervynck and Rowley-Conwy explain, “On the one hand, they are praised for their fecundity, their intelligence, and their ability to eat almost anything, but on the other hand, they are unfairly derided for their apparent slovenliness, unclean ways, and gluttonous behaviour” (1). Scientist Niamh O’Connell was struck by the human parallels in the complex social structures which rule the lives of pigs and people when she began a research project on pig behaviour at the Agricultural Research Institute at Hillsborough in County Down (Cassidy). According to O’Connell, pigs adopt different philosophies and lifestyle strategies to get the most out of their life. “What is interesting from a human perspective is that low-ranking animals tend to adopt one of two strategies,” she says. “You have got the animals who accept their station in life and then you have got the other ones that are continually trying to climb, and as a consequence, their life is very stressed” (qtd. in Cassidy). The closeness of pigs to humans is the justification for their use in numerous experiments. In the so-called ‘pig test’, code named ‘Priscilla’, for instance, over 700 pigs dressed in military uniforms were used to study the effects of nuclear testing at the Nevada (USA) test site in the 1950s. In When Species Meet, Donna Haraway draws attention to the ambiguities and contradictions promoted by the divide between animals and humans, and between nature and culture. There is an ethical and critical dimension to this critique of human exceptionalism—the view that “humanity alone is not [connected to the] spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies” (11). There is also that danger that any examination of our interdependencies may just satisfy a humanist preoccupation with self-reflection and self-reproduction. Given that pigs cannot speak, will they just become the raw material to reproduce the world in human’s own image? As Haraway explains: “Productionism is about man the tool-maker and -user, whose highest technical production is himself […] Blinded by the sun, in thrall to the father, reproduced in the sacred image of the same, his rewards is that he is self-born, an auto telic copy. That is the mythos of enlightenment and transcendence” (67). Jared Diamond acknowledges the mutualistic relationship between pigs and humans in Guns, Germs and Steel and the complex co-evolutionary path between humans and domesticated animals but his account is human-centric. Human’s relationships with pigs helped to shape human history and power relations and they spread across the world with human expansion. But questioning their utility as food and their enslavement to this cause was not part of the account. Pigs have no voice in the histories we write of them and so they can appear as passive objects in their own pasts. Traces of their pasts are available in humanity’s use of them in, for example, the sties built for them and the cooking implements used to prepare meals from them. Relics include bones and viruses, DNA sequences and land use patterns. Historians are used to dealing with subjects that cannot speak back, but they have usually left ample evidence of what they have said. In the process of writing, historians attempt to perform the miracle, as Curthoys and Docker have suggested, of restoration; bringing the people and places that existed in the past back to life (7). Writing about pigs should also attempt to bring the animal to life, to understand not just their past but also our own culture. In putting forward the idea of an alternative history that starts with pigs, I am aware of both the limits to such a proposal, and that most people’s only contact with pigs is through the meat they buy at the supermarket. Calls for a ban on intensive pig farming (RSPCA, ABC, AACT) might indeed have shocked people who imagine their dinner comes from the type of family farm featured in the movie Babe. Baby pigs in factory farms would have been killed a long time before the film’s sheep dog show (usually at 3 to 4 months of age). In fact, because baby pigs do grow so fast, 48 different pigs were used to film the role of the central character in Babe. While Babe himself may not have been aware of the relationship pigs generally have to humans, the other animals were very cognisant of their function. People eat pigs, even if they change the name of the form it takes in order to do so:Cat: You know, I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m not sure if you realize how much the other animals are laughing at you for this sheep dog business. Babe: Why would they do that? Cat: Well, they say that you’ve forgotten that you’re a pig. Isn't that silly? Babe: What do you mean? Cat: You know, why pigs are here. Babe: Why are any of us here? Cat: Well, the cow’s here to be milked, the dogs are here to help the Boss's husband with the sheep, and I’m here to be beautiful and affectionate to the boss. Babe: Yes? Cat: [sighs softly] The fact is that pigs don’t have a purpose, just like ducks don’t have a purpose. Babe: [confused] Uh, I—I don’t, uh ... Cat: Alright, for your own sake, I’ll be blunt. Why do the Bosses keep ducks? To eat them. So why do the Bosses keep a pig? The fact is that animals don’t seem to have a purpose really do have a purpose. The Bosses have to eat. It’s probably the most noble purpose of all, when you come to think about it. Babe: They eat pigs? Cat: Pork, they call it—or bacon. They only call them pigs when they’re alive (Noonan). Babe’s transformation into a working pig to round up the sheep makes him more useful. Ferdinand the duck tried to do the same thing by crowing but was replaced by an alarm clock. This is a common theme in children’s stories, recalling Charlotte’s campaign to praise Wilbur the pig in order to persuade the farmer to let him live in E. B. White’s much loved children’s novel, Charlotte’s Web. Wilbur is “some pig”, “terrific”, “radiant” and “humble”. In 1948, four years before Charlotte’s Web, White had published an essay “Death of a Pig”, in which he fails to save a sick pig that he had bought in order to fatten up and butcher. Babe tried to present an alternative reality from a pig’s perspective, but the little pig was only spared because he was more useful alive than dead. We could all ask the question why are any of us here, but humans do not have to contemplate being eaten to justify their existence. The reputation pigs have for being filthy animals encourages distaste. In another movie, Pulp Fiction, Vincent opts for flavour, but Jules’ denial of pig’s personalities condemns them to insignificance:Vincent: Want some bacon? Jules: No man, I don’t eat pork. Vincent: Are you Jewish? Jules: Nah, I ain’t Jewish, I just don’t dig on swine, that’s all. Vincent: Why not? Jules: Pigs are filthy animals. I don’t eat filthy animals. Vincent: Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood. Jules: Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’d never know ’cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I ain’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got sense enough to disregard its own feces [sic]. Vincent: How about a dog? Dogs eats its own feces. Jules: I don’t eat dog either. Vincent: Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal? Jules: I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way. Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true? Jules: Well we’d have to be talkin’ about one charming motherfuckin’ pig. I mean he’d have to be ten times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’? In the 1960s television show Green Acres, Arnold was an exceptional pig who was allowed to do whatever he wanted. He was talented enough to write his own name and play the piano and his attempts at painting earned him the nickname “Porky Picasso”. These talents reflected values that are appreciated, and so he was. The term “pig” is, however, chiefly used a term of abuse, however, embodying traits we abhor—gluttony, obstinence, squealing, foraging, rooting, wallowing. Making a pig of yourself is rarely honoured. Making a pig of the humanities, however, could be a different story. As a historian I love to forage, although I use white gloves rather than a snout. I have rubbed my face and body on tree trunks in the service of forestry history and when the temperature rises I also enjoy wallowing, rolling from side to side rather than drawing a conclusion. More than this, however, pigs provide a valid means of understanding key historical transitions that define modern society. Significant themes in modern history—production, religion, the body, science, power, the national state, colonialism, gender, consumption, migration, memory—can all be understood through a history of our relationships with pigs. Pigs play an important role in everyday life, but their relationship to the economic, social, political and cultural matters discussed in general history texts—industrialisation, the growth of nation states, colonialism, feminism and so on—are generally ignored. However “natural” this place of pigs may seem, culture and tradition profoundly shape their history and their own contribution to those forces has been largely absent in history. What, then, would the contours of such a history that considered the intermeshing of humans and pigs look like? The intermeshing of pigs in early human history Agricultural economies based on domestic animals began independently in different parts of the world, facilitating increases in population and migration. Evidence for long-term genetic continuity between modern and ancient Chinese domestic pigs has been established by DNA sequences. Larson et al. have made an argument for five additional independent domestications of indigenous wild boar populations: in India, South East Asia and Taiwan, which they use to develop a picture of both pig evolution and the development and spread of early farmers in the Far East. Domestication itself involves transformation into something useful to animals. In the process, humans became transformed. The importance of the Fertile Crescent in human history has been well established. The area is attributed as the site for a series of developments that have defined human history—urbanisation, writing, empires, and civilisation. Those developments have been supported by innovations in food production and animal husbandry. Pig, goats, sheep and cows were all domesticated very early in the Fertile Crescent and remain four of the world’s most important domesticated mammals (Diamond 141). Another study of ancient pig DNA has concluded that the earliest domesticated pigs in Europe, believed to be descended from European wild boar, were introduced from the Middle East. The research, by archaeologists at Durham University, sheds new light on the colonisation of Europe by early farmers, who brought their animals with them. Keith Dobney explains:Many archaeologists believe that farming spread through the diffusion of ideas and cultural exchange, not with the direct migration of people. However, the discovery and analysis of ancient Middle Eastern pig remains across Europe reveals that although cultural exchange did happen, Europe was definitely colonised by Middle Eastern farmers. A combination of rising population and possible climate change in the ‘fertile crescent’, which put pressure on land and resources, made them look for new places to settle, plant their crops and breed their animals and so they rapidly spread west into Europe (ctd in ScienceDaily). Middle Eastern farmers colonised Europe with pigs and in the process transformed human history. Identity as a porcine theme Religious restrictions on the consumption of pigs come from the same area. Such restrictions exist in Jewish dietary laws (Kashrut) and in Muslim dietary laws (Halal). The basis of dietary laws has been the subject of much scholarship (Soler). Economic and health and hygiene factors have been used to explain the development of dietary laws historically. The significance of dietary laws, however, and the importance attached to them can be related to other purposes in defining and expressing religious and cultural identity. Dietary laws and their observance may have been an important factor in sustaining Jewish identity despite the dispersal of Jews in foreign lands since biblical times. In those situations, where a person eats in the home of someone who does not keep kosher, the lack of knowledge about your host’s ingredients and the food preparation techniques make it very difficult to keep kosher. Dietary laws require a certain amount of discipline and self-control, and the ability to make distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, pure and defiled, the sacred and the profane, in everyday life, thus elevating eating into a religious act. Alternatively, people who eat anything are often subject to moral judgments that may also lead to social stigmatisation and discrimination. One of the most powerful and persuasive discourses influencing current thinking about health and bodies is the construction of an ‘obesity epidemic’, critiqued by a range of authors (see for example, Wright & Harwood). As omnivores who appear indiscriminate when it comes to food, pigs provide an image of uncontrolled eating, made visible by the body as a “virtual confessor”, to use Elizabeth Grosz’s term. In Fat Pig, a production by the Sydney Theatre Company in 2006, women are reduced to being either fat pigs or shrieking shallow women. Fatuosity, a blog by PhD student Jackie Wykes drawing on her research on fat and sexual subjectivity, provides a review of the play to describe the misogyny involved: “It leaves no options for women—you can either be a lovely person but a fat pig who will end up alone; or you can be a shrill bitch but beautiful, and end up with an equally obnoxious and shallow male counterpart”. The elision of the divide between women and pigs enacted by such imagery also creates openings for new modes of analysis and new practices of intervention that further challenge humanist histories. Such interventions need to make visible other power relations embedded in assumptions about identity politics. Following the lead of feminists and postcolonial theorists who have challenged the binary oppositions central to western ideology and hierarchical power relations, critical animal theorists have also called into question the essentialist and dualist assumptions underpinning our views of animals (Best). A pig history of the humanities might restore the central role that pigs have played in human history and evolution, beyond their exploitation as food. Humans have constructed their story of the nature of pigs to suit themselves in terms that are specieist, racist, patriarchal and colonialist, and failed to grasp the connections between the oppression of humans and other animals. The past and the ways it is constructed through history reflect and shape contemporary conditions. In this sense, the past has a powerful impact on the present, and the way this is re-told, therefore, also needs to be situated, historicised and problematicised. The examination of history and society from the standpoint of (nonhuman) animals offers new insights on our relationships in the past, but it might also provide an alternative history that restores their agency and contributes to a different kind of future. As the editor of Critical Animals Studies, Steve Best describes it: “This approach, as I define it, considers the interaction between human and nonhuman animals—past, present, and future—and the need for profound changes in the way humans define themselves and relate to other sentient species and to the natural world as a whole.” References ABC. “Changes to Pig Farming Proposed.” ABC News Online 22 May 2010. 10 Aug. 2010 http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/22/2906519.htm Against Animal Cruelty Tasmania. “Australia’s Intensive Pig Industry: The Intensive Pig Industry in Australia Has Much to Hide.” 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.aact.org.au/pig_industry.htm Babe. Dir. Chris Noonan. Universal Pictures, 1995. Best, Steven. “The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: Putting Theory into Action and Animal Liberation into Higher Education.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 7.1 (2009): 9-53. Cassidy, Martin. “How Close are Pushy Pigs to Humans?”. BBC News Online 2005. 10 Sep. 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/4482674.stmCurthoys, A., and Docker, J. “Time Eternity, Truth, and Death: History as Allegory.” Humanities Research 1 (1999) 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.anu.edu.au/hrc/publications/hr/hr_1_1999.phpDiamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Dolader, Miguel-Àngel Motis. “Mediterranean Jewish Diet and Traditions in the Middle Ages”. Food: A Culinary History. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. Trans. Clarissa Botsford, Arthus Golhammer, Charles Lambert, Frances M. López-Morillas and Sylvia Stevens. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 224-44. Durham University. “Chinese Pigs ‘Direct Descendants’ of First Domesticated Breeds.” ScienceDaily 20 Apr. 2010. 29 Aug. 2010 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100419150947.htm Gabaccia, Donna R. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Haraway, D. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2005. 63-124. Haraway, D. When Species Meet: Posthumanities. 3rd ed. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Henderson, Fergus. Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Kiple, Kenneth F., Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas. Cambridge History of Food. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Larson, G., Ranran Liu, Xingbo Zhao, Jing Yuan, Dorian Fuller, Loukas Barton, Keith Dobney, Qipeng Fan, Zhiliang Gu, Xiao-Hui Liu, Yunbing Luo, Peng Lv, Leif Andersson, and Ning Li. “Patterns of East Asian Pig Domestication, Migration, and Turnover Revealed by Modern and Ancient DNA.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, United States 19 Apr. 2010. 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0912264107/DCSupplemental Meindertsma, Christien. “PIG 05049. Kunsthal in Rotterdam.” 2008. 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.christienmeindertsma.com/index.php?/books/pig-05049Naess, A. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement.” Inquiry 16 (1973): 95-100. Needman, T. Fat Pig. Sydney Theatre Company. Oct. 2006. Noonan, Chris [director]. “Babe (1995) Memorable Quotes”. 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112431/quotes Plumwood, V. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Pulp Fiction. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Miramax, 1994. RSPCA Tasmania. “RSPCA Calls for Ban on Intensive Pig Farming.” 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.rspcatas.org.au/press-centre/rspca-calls-for-a-ban-on-intensive-pig-farming ScienceDaily. “Ancient Pig DNA Study Sheds New Light on Colonization of Europe by Early Farmers” 4 Sep. 2007. 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070903204822.htm Singer, Peter. “Down on the Family Farm ... or What Happened to Your Dinner When it was Still an Animal.” Animal Liberation 2nd ed. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990. 95-158. Soler, Jean. “Biblical Reasons: The Dietary Rules of the Ancient Hebrews.” Food: A Culinary History. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. Trans. Clarissa Botsford, Arthus Golhammer, Charles Lambert, Frances M. López-Morillas and Sylvia Stevens. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 46-54. Watson, Lyall. The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs. London: Profile, 2004. White, E. B. Essays of E. B. White. London: HarperCollins, 1979. White, E. B. Charlotte’s Web. London: HarperCollins, 2004. Wright, J., and V. Harwood. Eds. Biopolitics and the ‘Obesity Epidemic’. New York: Routledge, 2009. Wykes, J. Fatuosity 2010. 29 Aug. 2010 http://www.fatuosity.net

Images 1-6: Photographs by Rachelle Viader Knowles (2012)This article discusses the cross-cultural, augmented artwork Parallel Worlds, Intersecting Moments (2012) by Rachelle Viader Knowles and Judy Anderson, that premiered at the First Nations University of Canada Gallery in Regina, on 2 March 2012, as part of a group exhibition entitled Critical Faculties. The work consists of two elements: wall pieces with black and white Quick Response (QR) codes created using traditional beading and framed within red Stroud cloth; and a series of videos, accessible via scanning the beaded QR codes. The videos feature Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people from Saskatchewan, Canada telling stories about their own personal experiences with new technologies. A QR code is a matrix barcode made up of black square modules on a white square in a grid pattern that is optically machine-readable. Performance artist and scholar Rebecca Caines was invited by the artists to participate in the work as a subject in one of the videos. She attended the opening and observed how audiences improvised and interacted with the work. Caines then went on to initiate this collaborative writing project. Like the artwork it analyzes, this writing documents a series of curated experiences and conversations. This article includes excerpts of artist statements, descriptions of artists’s process and audience observation, and new sections of collaborative critical writing, woven together to explore the different augmented elements of the artwork and the results of this augmentation. These conversations and responses explore the cross-cultural processes that led to the work’s creation, and describe the results of the technological and social disruptions and slippages that occurred in the development phase and in the gallery as observers and artists improvised with the augmentation technology, and with each other. The article includes detail on the augmented art practices of storytelling, augmented reality (AR), and traditional beading, that collided and mutated during this project, exploring the tension and opportunity inherent in the human impulse to augment. Storytelling through Augmented Art Practices: The Creation of the WorkJUDY ANDERSON: I am a Plains Cree artist from the Gordon’s First Nation, which is located in Saskatchewan, Canada. As a Professor of Indian Fine Arts at the First Nations University of Canada, I research and continue to learn about traditional art making using traditional materials creating primarily beaded pieces such as medicine bags and drum sticks. Of particular interest to me, however, is how such traditional practices manifest in contemporary Aboriginal art. In this regard I have been greatly influenced by my colleague and friend, artist Ruth Cuthand, and specifically her Trading series, which reframed my thinking about beadwork (Art Placement), and later by the work of artists like Nadia Myer, and KC Adams (Myer; KC Adams). Cuthand’s incredibly successful series taught me that beadwork does not only beautify and “augment” our world, but it has the power to bring to the forefront important issues regarding Aboriginal people. As a result, I began to work on my own ideas on how to create beadworks that spoke to both traditional and contemporary thoughts.RACHELLE VIADER KNOWLES: At the time we started developing this project, we were both working in leadership roles in our respective Departments; Judy as Coordinator of Indian Fine Arts at First Nations University, and myself as Head of Visual Arts at the University of Regina. We began discussing ways that we could create more interconnection between our faculty members and students. At the centre of both our practices was a dialogic method of back and forth negotiation and compromise. JA: Rachelle had the idea that we should bead QR codes and make videos for the upcoming First Nations and University of Regina joint faculty exhibition. Over the 2011 Christmas holiday we visited each other’s homes, beaded together, and found out about each other’s lives by telling stories of the things we’ve experienced. I felt it was very important that our QR codes were not beaded in the exact same manner; Rachelle built up hers through a series of straight lines, whereas mine was beaded with a circle around the square QR code, which reflected the importance of the circle in my Cree belief system. It was important for me to show that even though we, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, have similar experiences, we often have a different approach or way of thinking about similar things. I also suggested we frame the black and white beaded QR codes with bright red Stroud cloth, a heavy wool cloth originating in the UK that has been used in North America as trade cloth since the 1680s, and has become a significant part of First Nations fabric traditions.Since we were approaching this piece as a cross-cultural one, I chose the number seven for the amount of stories we would create because it is a sacred number in my own Plains Cree spiritual teachings. As such, we brought together seven pairs of people, including ourselves. The participants were drawn from family and friends from reserves and communities around Saskatchewan, including the city of Regina, as well as colleagues and students from the two university campuses. There were a number of different age ranges and socioeconomic backgrounds represented. We came together to tell stories about our experiences with technology, a common cross-cultural experience that seemed appropriate to the work.RVK: As the process of making the beadworks unfolded however, what became apparent to me was the sheer amount of hours it takes to create a piece of “augmentation” through beading, and the deeply social nature of the activity. We also worked together on the videos for the AR part of the artwork. Each participant in the videos was asked to write a short text about some aspect of their relationship to technology and communications. We took the short stories, arranged them into pairs, and used them to write short scripts. We then invited each pair to perform the scripts together on camera in my studio. The stories were really broad ranging. My own was a reflection of the profound discomfort of finding a blog where a man I was dating was publishing the story of our relationship as it unfolded. Other stories covered the loss of no longer being able to play the computer games from teenage years, first encounters with new technologies and social networks, secret admirers, and crank calls to emergency services. The storytelling and dialogue between us as we shared our practices became an important, but unseen layer of this “dialogical” work (Kester).REBECCA CAINES: I came along to Rachelle’s studio at the university to be a participant in a video for the piece. My co-performer was a young woman called Nova Lee. We laughed and chatted and talked and sat knee-to-knee together to film our stories about technology, both of us focusing on different types of Internet relationships. We were asked to read one line of our story at a time, interweaving together our poem of experience. Afterwards I asked her where her name was from. She told me it was from a song. She found the song on YouTube on Rachelle’s computer in the studio and played it for us. Here is a sample of the lyrics: I told my daddy I'd found a girlWho meant the world to meAnd tomorrow I'd ask the Indian chiefFor the hand of Nova LeeDad's trembling lips spoke softlyAs he told me of my life twangs then he said I could never takeThis maiden for my wifeSon, the white man and Indians were fighting when you were bornAnd a brave called Yellow Sun scalped my little boySo I stole you to get even for what he'd doneThough you're a full-blooded Indian, son I love you as much as my own little fellow that's deadAnd, son, Nova Lee is your sisterAnd that's why I've always saidSon, don't go near the IndiansPlease stay awaySon, don't go near the IndiansPlease do what I say— Rex Allen. “Don’t Go Near the Indians.” 1962. Judy explained to Rachelle and I that this was a common history of displacement in Canada, people taken away, falling in love with their relatives without knowing, perhaps sensing a connection, always longing for a home (Campbell). I thought, “What a weight for this young woman to bear, this name, this history.” Other participants also learnt about each other this way through the sharing of stories. Many had come to Canada from other places, each with different cultural and colonial resonances. Through these moments of working together, new understandings formed that deeply affected the participants. In this way, layers of storytelling form the heart of this work.JA: Storytelling holds an incredibly special place in Aboriginal people’s lives; through them we learned the laws, rules, and regulations that governed our behaviour as individuals, within our family, our communities, and our nations. These stories included histories (personal and communal), sacred teachings, the way the world used to be, creation stories, medicine stories, stories regarding the seasons and animals, and stories that defined our relationship with the environment, etc. The stories we asked for not only showed that we as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people have the same experiences, but also work in the way that a traditional story would. For example, Rachelle’s story taught a good lesson about how it is important to learn about the individual you are dating—had she not, her whole life could have been laid out to any who may have come across that man’s blog. My story spoke to the need to look up and observe what is around you instead of being engrossed in your own little world, because you don’t know who could be lifting your information. They all showed a common interest in sharing information, and laughing at mistakes and life lessons.Augmented Storytelling and Augmented RealityRC: This work relies on the augmented reality (AR) qualities of the QR code. Pavlik and Bridges suggest AR, even through relatively limited tools like a QR code, can have a significant impact on storytelling practices: “AR enriches an individual’s experience with the real world … Stories are put in a local context and act as a supplement to a citizen’s direct experience with the world” (Pavlik and Bridges 21). Their research shows that AR technologies like QR codes brings the story to life in a three dimensional and interactive form that allows the user a level of participation impossible in traditional, analogue media. They emphasize the different viewing possible in AR storytelling as: The new media storytelling model is nonlinear. The storyteller conceptualizes the audience member not as a consumer of the story engaged in a third-person narrative, but rather as a participant engaged in a first-person narrative. The storyteller invites the participant to explore the story in a variety of ways, perhaps beginning in the middle, moving across time, or space, or by topic. (Pavlik and Bridges 22) In their case studies, Pavlik and Bridges show AR has the “potential to become a viable storytelling format with a diverse range of options that engage citizens through sight, sound, or haptic experiences… to produce participatory, immersive, and community-based stories” (Pavlik and Bridges 39). The personal stories in this artwork were remediated a number of different ways. They were written down, then separated into one-line fragments, interwoven with our partners, and re-read again and again for the camera, before being edited and processed. Marked by the artists clearly as ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘non Aboriginal’ and placed alongside works featuring traditional beading, these stories were marked and re-inscribed by complex and fragmented histories of indigenous and non-indigenous relations in Canada. This history was emphasized as the QR codes were also physically located in the First Nations University of Canada, a unique indigenous space.To view this artwork in its entirety, therefore, two camera-enabled and internet-capable mobile devices were required to be used simultaneously. Due to the way they were accessed and played back through augmented reality technologies, stories in the gallery were experienced in nonlinear fashions, started part way through, left before completion, or not in sync with the partner they were designed to work with. The audience experimented with the video content, stopping and starting it to produce new combinations of words and images. This experience was also affected by chance as the video files online were on a cycle, after a set period of time, the scan would suddenly produce a new story. These augmented stories were recreated and reshaped by participants in dialogue with the space, and with each other. Augmented Stories and Improvised CommunitiesRC: In her 1997 study of the reception of new media art in galleries, Beryl Graham surveys the types of audience interaction common to new media art practices like AR art. She “reveals patterns of use of interactive artworks including the relation of use-time to gender, aspects of intimidation, and social interaction.” In particular, she observes “a high frequency of collective use of artworks, even when the artworks are designed to be used by one person” (Graham 2). What Graham describes as “collective” and “social,” I see as a type of improvisation engaging with difference, differences between audience members, and differences between human participants and the alien nature of sophisticated, interactive technologies. Improvisation “embodies real-time creative decision-making, risk-taking, and collaboration” (Heble). In the improvisatory act, participants participate in active listening in order to work with different voices, experiences, and practices, but share a common focus in the creative endeavour. Notions such as “the unexpected” or “the mistake” are constantly reconfigured into productive material. However, as leading improvisation studies scholar Ajay Heble suggests, “improvisation must be considered not simply as a musical or creative form, but as a complex social phenomenon that mediates transcultural inter-artistic exchanges that produce new conceptions of identity, community, history, and the body” (Heble). I watched at the opening as audience members in Parallel Worlds, Intersecting Moments paired up, successfully or unsuccessfully attempted to scan the code and download the video, and physically wrapped themselves around their partner (often a stranger) in order to hear the quiet audio in the loud gallery. The audience began to help each other through the process, to improvise together. The QR code was not always a familiar or comfortable object. The audience often had to install a QR code reader application onto their own device first, and then proceed to try to get the reader to work. Underfunded university Wi-Fi connections dropped, Apple ID logins failed, devices stalled. There were sudden loud cries when somebody successfully scanned their half of the work, and then rushes and scrambles as small groups of people attempted to sync their videos to start at the same time. The louder the gallery got, the closer the pairs had to stand to each other to hear the video through the device’s tiny speakers. Many people looked over someone else’s shoulder without their knowledge. Sometimes people were too close for comfort and behavior was negotiated and adapted. Sometimes, the pairs gave up trying; sometimes they borrowed each other’s devices, sometimes their phone or tablet was incompatible. Difference created new improvisations, or introduced sudden stops or diversions in the activities taking place. The theme of the work was strengthened every time an improvised negotiation took place, every time the technology faltered or succeeded, every time a digital or physical interaction was attempted. Through the combination of augmented bead practices used in an innovative way, and augmented technology with new audiences, new types of improvisatory responses could take place.Initially I found it difficult to not simplify and stereotype the processes taking place, to read it as a metaphor of the differing access to resources and training in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities, a clear example of the ways technology-use marks wealth and status. As I moved through the space, caught up in dialogic, improvisatory encounters, cross-cultural experiences broke down, but did not completely erase, these initial markers of difference. Instead, layers of interaction and information began to be placed over the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal identities in the gallery. My own assumptions were placed under pressure as I interacted with the artists and the other participants in the space. My identity as a relative newcomer to Saskatchewan was slowly augmented by the stories and experiences I shared and heard, and the audience members shifted back and forth between being experts in the aspects of the stories and technologies that were familiar, and asking for help to translate and activate the stories and processes that were alien.Augmented Art PracticesJA: There is an old saying, “if it doesn’t move, bead it.” I think that this desire to augment with the decorative is handed down through traditional thoughts and beliefs regarding clothing. Once nomadic we did not accumulate many goods, as a result, the goods we did keep were beautified though artistic practices including quilling and eventually beadwork (painting too). And our clothing was thought of as spiritual because it did the important act of protecting us from the elements, therefore it was thought of as sacred. To beautify the clothing was to honour your spirit while at the same time it honoured the animal that had given its life to protect you (Berlo and Phillips). I think that this belief naturally grew to include any item, after all, there is nothing like an object or piece of clothing that is beaded well—no one can resist it. There is, however, a belief that humans should not try to mimic perfection, which is reserved for the Creator and in many cases a beader will deliberately put a bead out of place.RC: When new media produces unexpected results, or as Rachelle says, when pixels “go out of place”, it can be seen as a sign that humans are (deliberately or accidently) failing to use the digital technology in the way it was intended. In Parallel Worlds, Intersecting Moments the theme of cross cultural encounters and technological communication was only enhanced by these moments of displacement and slippage and the improvisatory responses that took place. The artists could not predict the degree of slippage that would occur, but from their catalogue texts and the conversations above, it is clear that collective negotiation was a desired outcome. By creating a QR code based artwork that utilized augmented art practices to create new types of storytelling, the artists allowed augmented identities to develop, slip, falter, and be reconfigured. Through the dialogic art practices of traditional beading and participatory video work, Anderson and Knowles began to build new modes of communication and knowledge sharing. I believe there could be productive relationships to be further explored between what Judy calls the First Nations “desire to bead” whilst acknowledging human fallibility; and the ways Rachelle aims to technologically-augment conversation and storytelling through contemporary AR and video practices despite, or perhaps because of the possibility of risk and disruptions when bodies and code interact. What kind of trust and reciprocity becomes possible across cultural divides when this can be acknowledged as a common human quality? How could beads and/or pixels being “out of place” expose fault lines and opportunities in these kinds of cross-cultural knowledge transfer? As Judy suggested in our conversations, such work requires active engagement from the audience in the process that does not always occur. “In those instances, does the piece fail or people fail the piece? I'm not sure.” In crossing back and forth between these different types of augmentation impulses, and by creating improvisatory, dialogic encounters in the gallery, these artists began the tentative, complex, and vital process of cultural exchange, and invited participants and audience to take this step with them and to work “across traditional and contemporary modes of production” to “use the language and process of art to speak, listen, teach and learn” (Knowles and Anderson).ReferencesAdams, K.C. “Cyborg Hybrid \'cy·borg 'hi·brid\ n.” KC Adams, n.d. 16 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.kcadams.net/art/arttotal.html›. Allen, Rex. “Don't Go Near the Indians.” Rex Allen Sings and Tells Tales of the Golden West. Mercury, 1962. LP and CD.Anderson, Judy, and Rachelle Viader Knowles. Parallel Worlds, Intersecting Moments. First Nations University of Canada Gallery; Slate Gallery, Regina, Saskatchewan, 2012. Art Placement. “Ruth Cuthand”. Artists. Art Placement, n.d. 16 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.artplacement.com/gallery/artists.php›.Berlo, Janet Catherine, and Ruth B. Phillips. Native North American Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Campbell, Maria. Stories of the Road Allowance People. Penticton, B.C.: Theytus Books, 1995. Critical Faculties. Regina: University of Regina and First Nations University of Canada, 2012. Graham, Beryl C.E. “A Study of Audience Relationships with Interactive Computer-Based Visual Artworks in Gallery Settings, through Observation, Art Practice, and Curation”. Dissertation. University of Sunderland, 1997. Heble, Ajay. “About ICASP.” Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice. University of Guelph; Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada, n.d. 16 Nov. 2011 ‹http://www.improvcommunity.ca/›.Kester, Grant. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Knowles, Rachelle Viader. Rachelle Viader Knowles, n.d. 16 Nov. 2013 ‹http://uregina.ca/rvk›.Myre, Nadia. Nadia Myre. 16 Nov. 2013 ‹http://nadiamyre.com/NadiaMyre/home.html›. Pavlik, John G., and Frank Bridges. “The Emergence of Augmented Reality (AR) as a Storytelling Medium in Journalism.” Journalism & Communication Monographs 15.4 (2013): 4-59.

IntroductionThe common origin of the adjective “corporeal” and the noun “corpse” in the Latin root corpus points to the value of mortuary practices for investigating how the human body is objectified. In post-mortem rituals, the body—formerly the manipulator of objects—becomes itself the object that is manipulated. Thus, these funerary rituals provide a type of double reflexivity, where the object and subject of manipulation can be used to reciprocally illuminate one another. To this extent, any consideration of corporeality can only benefit from a discussion of how the body is objectified through mortuary practices. This paper offers just such a discussion with respect to a selection of two contrasting mortuary practices, in the context of the prehistoric past and the Classical Era respectively. At the most general level, we are motivated by the same intellectual impulse that has stimulated expositions on corporeality, materiality, and incarnation in areas like phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 77–234), Marxism (Adorno 112–119), gender studies (Grosz vii–xvi), history (Laqueur 193–244), and theology (Henry 33–53). That is to say, our goal is to show that the body, far from being a transparent frame through which we encounter the world, is in fact a locus where historical, social, cultural, and psychological forces intersect. On this view, “the body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes an infinitely malleable and highly unstable culturally constructed product” (Shilling 78). However, for all that the cited paradigms offer culturally situated appreciations of corporeality; our particular intellectual framework will be provided by cognitive science. Two reasons impel us towards this methodological choice.In the first instance, the study of ritual has, after several decades of stagnation, been rewarded—even revolutionised—by the application of insights from the new sciences of the mind (Whitehouse 1–12; McCauley and Lawson 1–37). Thus, there are good reasons to think that ritual treatments of the body will refract historical and social forces through empirically attested tendencies in human cognition. In the present connection, this means that knowledge of these tendencies will reward any attempt to theorise the objectification of the body in mortuary rituals.In the second instance, because beliefs concerning the afterlife can never be definitively judged to be true or false, they give free expression to tendencies in cognition that are otherwise constrained by the need to reflect external realities accurately. To this extent, they grant direct access to the intuitive ideas and biases that shape how we think about the world. Already, this idea has been exploited to good effect in areas like the cognitive anthropology of religion, which explores how counterfactual beings like ghosts, spirits, and gods conform to (and deviate from) pre-reflective cognitive patterns (Atran 83–112; Barrett and Keil 219–224; Barrett and Reed 252–255; Boyer 876–886). Necessarily, this implies that targeting post-mortem treatments of the body will offer unmediated access to some of the conceptual schemes that inform thinking about human corporeality.At a more detailed level, the specific methodology we propose to use will be provided by conceptual blending theory—a framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, and others to describe how structures from different areas of experience are creatively blended to form a new conceptual frame. In this system, a generic space provides the ground for coordinating two or more input spaces into a blended space that synthesises them into a single output. Here this would entail using natural or technological processes to structure mortuary practices in a way that satisfies various psychological needs.Take, for instance, W.B. Yeats’s famous claim that “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart” (“Easter 1916” in Yeats 57-8). Here, the poet exploits a generic space—that of everyday objects and the effort involved in manipulating them—to coordinate an organic input from that taxonomy (the heart) with an inorganic input (a stone) to create the blended idea that too energetic a pursuit of an abstract ideal turns a person into an unfeeling object (the heart-as-stone). Although this particular example corresponds to a familiar rhetorical figure (the metaphor), the value of conceptual blending theory is that it cuts across distinctions of genre, media, language, and discourse level to provide a versatile framework for expressing how one area of human experience is related to another.As indicated, we will exploit this versatility to investigate two ways of objectifying the body through the examination of two contrasting mortuary practices—cremation and inhumation—against different cultural horizons. The first of these is the conceptualisation of the body as an object of a technical process, where the post-mortem cremation of the corpse is analogically correlated with the metallurgical refining of ore into base metal. Our area of focus here will be Bronze Age cremation practices. The second conceptual scheme we will investigate focuses on treatments of the body as a vegetable object; here, the relevant analogy likens the inhumation of the corpse to the planting of a seed in the soil from which future growth will come. This discussion will centre on the Classical Era. Burning: The Body as Manufactured ObjectThe Early and Middle Bronze Age in Western Europe (2500-1200 BCE) represented a period of change in funerary practices relative to the preceding Neolithic, exemplified by a move away from the use of Megalithic monuments, a proliferation of grave goods, and an increase in the use of cremation (Barrett 38-9; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Brück, Material Metaphors 308; Waddell, Bronze Age 141-149). Moreover, the Western European Bronze Age is characterised by a shift away from communal burial towards single interment (Barrett 32; Bradley 158-168). Equally, the Bronze Age in Western Europe provides us with evidence of an increased use of cist and pit cremation burials concentrated in low-lying areas (Woodman 254; Waddell, Prehistoric 16; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Bettencourt 103). This greater preference for lower-lying location appears to reflect a distinctive change in comparison to the distribution patterns of the Neolithic burials; these are often located on prominent, visible aspects of a landscape (Cooney and Grogan 53-61). These new Bronze Age burial practices appear to reflect a distancing in relation to the territories of the “old ancestors” typified by Megalithic monuments (Bettencourt 101-103). Crucially, the Bronze Age archaeological record provides us with evidence that indicates that cremation was becoming the dominant form of deposition of human remains throughout Central and Western Europe (Sørensen and Rebay 59-60).The activities associated with Bronze Age cremations such as the burning of the body and the fragmentation of the remains have often been considered as corporeal equivalents (or expressions) of the activities involved in metal (bronze) production (Brück, Death 84-86; Sørensen and Rebay 60–1; Rebay-Salisbury, Cremations 66-67). There are unequivocal similarities between the practices of cremation and contemporary bronze production technologies—particularly as both processes involve the transformation of material through the application of fire at temperatures between 700 ºC to 1000 ºC (Musgrove 272-276; Walker et al. 132; de Becdelievre et al. 222-223).We assert that the technologies that define the European Bronze Age—those involved in alloying copper and tin to produce bronze—offered a new conceptual frame that enabled the body to be objectified in new ways. The fundamental idea explored here is that the displacement of inhumation by cremation in the European Bronze Age was motivated by a cognitive shift, where new smelting technologies provided novel conceptual metaphors for thinking about age-old problems concerning human mortality and post-mortem survival. The increased use of cremation in the European Bronze Age contrasts with the archaeological record of the Near Eastern—where, despite the earlier emergence of metallurgy (3300–3000 BCE), we do not see a notable proliferation in the use of cremation in this region. Thus, mortuary practices (i.e. cremation) provide us with an insight into how Western European Bronze Age cultures mediated the body through changes in technological objects and processes.In the terminology of conceptual blending, the generic space in question centres on the technical manipulation of the material world. The first input space is associated with the anxiety attending mortality—specifically, the cessation of personal identity and the extinction of interpersonal relationships. The second input space represents the technical knowledge associated with bronze production; in particular, the extraction of ore from source material and its mixing with other metals to form an alloy. The blended space coordinates these inputs to objectify the human body as an object that is ritually transformed into a new but more durable substance via the cremation process. In this contention we use the archaeological record to draw a conceptual parallel between the emergence of bronze production technology—centring on transition of naturally occurring material to a new subsistence (bronze)—and the transitional nature of the cremation process.In this theoretical framework, treating the body as a mixture of substances that can be reduced to its constituents and transformed through technologies of cremation enabled Western European Bronze Age society to intervene in the natural process of putrefaction and transform the organic matter into something more permanent. This transformative aspect of the cremation is seen in the evidence we have for secondary burial practices involving the curation and circulation of cremated bones of deceased members of a group (Brück, Death 87-93). This evidence allows us to assert that cremated human remains and objects were considered products of the same transformation into a more permanent state via burning, fragmentation, dispersal, and curation. Sofaer (62-69) states that the living body is regarded as a person, but as soon as the transition to death is made, the body becomes an object; this is an “ontological shift in the perception of the body that assumes a sudden change in its qualities” (62).Moreover, some authors have proposed that the exchange of fragmented human remains was central to mortuary practices and was central in establishing and maintaining social relations (Brück, Death 76-88). It is suggested that in the Early Bronze Age the perceptions of the human body mirrored the perceptions of objects associated with the arrival of the new bronze technology (Brück, Death 88-92). This idea is more pronounced if we consider the emergence of bronze technology as the beginning of a period of capital intensification of natural resources. Through this connection, the Bronze Age can be regarded as the point at which a particular natural resource—in this case, copper—went through myriad intensive manufacturing stages, which are still present today (intensive extraction, production/manufacturing, and distribution). Unlike stone tool production, bronze production had the addition of fire as the explicit method of transformation (Brück, Death 88-92). Thus, such views maintain that the transition achieved by cremation—i.e. reducing the human remains to objects or tokens that could be exchanged and curated relatively soon after the death of the individual—is equivalent to the framework of commodification connected with bronze production.A sample of cremated remains from Castlehyde in County Cork, Ireland, provides us with an example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in a Western European context (McCarthy). This is chosen because it is a typical example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in the context of Western Europe; also, one of the authors (MG) has first-hand experience in the analysis of its associated remains. The Castlehyde cremation burial consisted of a rectangular, stone-lined cist (McCarthy). The cist contained cremated, calcined human remains, with the fragments generally ranging from a greyish white to white in colour; this indicates that the bones were subject to a temperature range of 700-900ºC. The organic content of bone was destroyed during the cremation process, leaving only the inorganic matrix (brittle bone which is, often, described as metallic in consistency—e.g. Gejvall 470-475). There is evidence that remains may have been circulated in a manner akin to valuable metal objects. First of all, the absence of long bones indicates that there may have been a practice of removing salient remains as curatable records of ancestral ties. Secondly, remains show traces of metal staining from objects that are no longer extant, which suggests that graves were subject to secondary burial practices involving the removal of metal objects and/or human bone. To this extent, we can discern that human remains were being processed, curated, and circulated in a similar manner to metal objects.Thus, there are remarkable similarities between the treatment of the human body in cremation and bronze metal production technologies in the European Bronze Age. On the one hand, the parallel between smelting and cremation allowed death to be understood as a process of transformation in which the individual was removed from processes of organic decay. On the other hand, the circulation of the transformed remains conferred a type of post-mortem survival on the deceased. In this way, cremation practices may have enabled Bronze Age society to symbolically overcome the existential anxiety concerning the loss of personhood and the breaking of human relationships through death. In relation to the former point, the resurgence of cremation in nineteenth century Europe provides us with an example of how the disposal of a human body can be contextualised in relation to socio-technological advancements. The (re)emergence of cremation in this period reflects the post-Enlightenment shift from an understanding of the world through religious beliefs to the use of rational, scientific approaches to examine the natural world, including the human body (and death). The controlled use of fire in the cremation process, as well as the architecture of crematories, reflected the industrial context of the period (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 16).With respect to the circulation of cremated remains, Smith suggests that Early Medieval Christian relics of individual bones or bone fragments reflect a reconceptualised continuation of pre-Christian practices (beginning in Christian areas of the Roman Empire). In this context, it is claimed, firstly, that the curation of bone relics and the use of mobile bone relics of important, saintly individuals provided an embodied connection between the sacred sphere and the earthly world; and secondly, that the use of individual bones or fragments of bone made the Christian message something portable, which could be used to reinforce individual or collective adherence to Christianity (Smith 143-167). Using the example of the Christian bone relics, we can thus propose that the curation and circulation of Bronze Age cremated material may have served a role similar to tools for focusing religiously oriented cognition. Burying: The Body as a Vegetable ObjectGiven that the designation “the Classical Era” nominates the entirety of the Graeco-Roman world (including the Near East and North Africa) from about 800 BCE to 600 CE, there were obviously no mortuary practices common to all cultures. Nevertheless, in both classical Greece and Rome, we have examples of periods when either cremation or inhumation was the principal funerary custom (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21).For instance, the ancient Homeric texts inform us that the ancient Greeks believed that “the spirit of the departed was sentient and still in the world of the living as long as the flesh was in existence […] and would rather have the body devoured by purifying fire than by dogs or worms” (Mylonas 484). However, the primary sources and archaeological record indicate that cremation practices declined in Athens circa 400 BCE (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 20). With respect to the Roman Empire, scholarly opinion argues that inhumation was the dominant funerary rite in the eastern part of the Empire (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 17-21; Morris 52). Complementing this, the archaeological and historical record indicates that inhumation became the primary rite throughout the Roman Empire in the first century CE. Inhumation was considered to be an essential rite in the context of an emerging belief that a peaceful afterlife was reflected by a peaceful burial in which bodily integrity was maintained (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21; Morris 52; Toynbee 41). The question that this poses is how these beliefs were framed in the broader discourses of Classical culture.In this regard, our claim is that the growth in inhumation was driven (at least in part) by the spread of a conceptual scheme, implicit in Greek fertility myths that objectify the body as a seed. The conceptual logic here is that the post-mortem continuation of personal identity is (symbolically) achieved by objectifying the body as a vegetable object that will re-grow from its own physical remains. Although the dominant metaphor here is vegetable, there is no doubt that the motivating concern of this mythological fabulation is human mortality. As Jon Davies notes, “the myths of Hades, Persephone and Demeter, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of Adonis and Aphrodite, of Selene and Endymion, of Herakles and Dionysus, are myths of death and rebirth, of journeys into and out of the underworld, of transactions and transformations between gods and humans” (128). Thus, such myths reveal important patterns in how the post-mortem fate of the body was conceptualised.In the terminology of mental mapping, the generic space relevant to inhumation contains knowledge pertaining to folk biology—specifically, pre-theoretical ideas concerning regeneration, survival, and mortality. The first input space attaches to human mortality; it departs from the anxiety associated with the seeming cessation of personal identity and dissolution of kin relationships subsequent to death. The second input space is the subset of knowledge concerning vegetable life, and how the immersion of seeds in the soil produces a new generation of plants with the passage of time. The blended space combines the two input spaces by way of the funerary script, which involves depositing the body in the soil with a view to securing its eventual rebirth by analogy with the sprouting of a planted seed.As indicated, the most important illustration of this conceptual pattern can be found in the fertility myths of ancient Greece. The Homeric Hymns, in particular, provide a number of narratives that trace out correspondences between vegetation cycles, human mortality, and inhumation, which inform ritual practice (Frazer 223–404; Carney 355–65; Sowa 121–44). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, for instance, charts how Persephone is abducted by Hades, god of the dead, and taken to his underground kingdom. While searching for her missing daughter, Demeter, goddess of fertility, neglects the earth, causing widespread devastation. Matters are resolved when Zeus intervenes to restore Persephone to Demeter. However, having ingested part of Hades’s kingdom (a pomegranate seed), Persephone is obliged to spend half the year below ground with her captor and the other half above ground with her mother.The objectification of Persephone as both a seed and a corpse in this narrative is clearly signalled by her seasonal inhumation in Hades’ chthonic realm, which is at once both the soil and the grave. And, just as the planting of seeds in autumn ensures rebirth in spring, Persephone’s seasonal passage from the Kingdom of the Dead nominates the individual human life as just one season in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. A further signifying element is added by the ingestion of the pomegranate seed. This is evocative of her being inseminated by Hades; thus, the coordination of vegetation cycles with life and death is correlated with secondary transition—that from childhood to adulthood (Kerényi 119–183).In the examples given, we can see how the Homeric Hymn objectifies both the mortal and sexual destiny of the body in terms of thresholds derived from the vegetable world. Moreover, this mapping is not merely an intellectual exercise. Its emotional and social appeal is visible in the fact that the Eleusinian mysteries—which offered the ritual homologue to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter—persisted from the Mycenaean period to 396 CE, one of the longest recorded durations for any ritual (Ferguson 254–9; Cosmopoulos 1–24). In sum, then, classical myth provided a precedent for treating the body as a vegetable object—most often, a seed—that would, in turn, have driven the move towards inhumation as an important mortuary practice. The result is to create a ritual form that makes key aspects of human experience intelligible by connecting them with cyclical processes like the seasons of the year, the harvesting of crops, and the intergenerational oscillation between the roles of parent and child. Indeed, this pattern remains visible in the germination metaphors and burial practices of contemporary religions such as Christianity, which draw heavily on the symbolism associated with mystery cults like that at Eleusis (Nock 177–213).ConclusionWe acknowledge that our examples offer a limited reflection of the ethnographic and archaeological data, and that they need to be expanded to a much greater degree if they are to be more than merely suggestive. Nevertheless, suggestiveness has its value, too, and we submit that the speculations explored here may well offer a useful starting point for a larger survey. In particular, they showcase how a recurring existential anxiety concerning death—involving the fear of loss of personal identity and kinship relations—is addressed by different ways of objectifying the body. Given that the body is not reducible to the objects with which it is identified, these objectifications can never be entirely successful in negotiating the boundary between life and death. In the words of Jon Davies, “there is simply no let-up in the efforts by human beings to transcend this boundary, no matter how poignantly each failure seemed to reinforce it” (128). For this reason, we can expect that the record will be replete with conceptual and cognitive schemes that mediate the experience of death.At a more general level, it should also be clear that our understanding of human corporeality is rewarded by the study of mortuary practices. No less than having a body is coextensive with being human, so too is dying, with the consequence that investigating the intersection of both areas is likely to reveal insights into issues of universal cultural concern. For this reason, we advocate the study of mortuary practices as an evolving record of how various cultures understand human corporeality by way of external objects.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor W. Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. Trans. Rolf Tiedemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.Atran, Scott. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Barrett, John C. “The Living, the Dead and the Ancestors: Neolithic and Bronze Age Mortuary Practices.” The Archaeology of Context in the Neolithic and Bronze Age: Recent Trends. Eds. John. C. Barrett and Ian. A. Kinnes. 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IntroductionThey shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.Recited at many Anzac and Remembrance Day services, ‘The Ode’, an excerpt from a poem by Laurence Binyon, speaks of a timelessness within the inexorable march of time. When we memorialise those for whom time no longer matters, time stands still. Whether those who died in service of their country have finally “beaten time” or been forced to acknowledge that “their time on earth was up”, depends on your preference for clichés. Time and death are natural bedfellows. War memorials, be they physical or digital, declare a commitment to “remember them”. This article will compare and contrast the purpose of, and community response to, virtual and physical war memorials. It will examine whether virtual war memorials are a sign of the times – a natural response to the internet era. If, as Marshall McLuhan says, the medium is the message, what experiences do we gain and lose through online war memorials?Physical War MemorialsDuring and immediately after the First World War, physical war memorials were built in almost every city, town and village of the Allied countries involved in the war. They served many purposes. One of the roles of physical war memorials was to keep the impact of war at the centre of a town’s consciousness. In a regional centre like Bathurst, in New South Wales, the town appears to be built around the memorial – the court, council chambers, library, churches and pubs gather around the war memorials.Similarly, in small towns such as Bega, Picton and Kiama, war memorial arches form a gateway to the town centre. It is an architectural signal that you are entering a community that has known pain, death and immense loss. Time has passed, but the names of the men and women who served remain etched in stone: “lest we forget”.The names are listed in a democratic fashion: usually in alphabetical order without their rank. However, including all those who offered their service to “God, King and Country” (not just those who died) also had a more sinister and divisive effect. It reminded communities of those “eligibles” in their midst whom some regarded as “shirkers”, even if they were conscientious objectors or needed to stay and continue vital industries, like farming (Inglis & Phillips 186).Ken Inglis (97) estimated that every second Australian family was in mourning after the Great War. Jay Winter (Sites 2) goes further arguing that “almost every family” in the British Commonwealth was grieving, either for a relative; or for a friend, work colleague, neighbour or lover. Nations were traumatised. Physical war memorials provided a focal point for that universal grief. They signalled, through their prominence in the landscape or dominance of a hilltop, that it was acceptable to grieve. Mourners were encouraged to gather around the memorial in a public place, particularly on Anzac Day and Remembrance Day each year. Grief was seen, observed, respected.Such was the industrial carnage of the Western Front, that about one third of Australia and New Zealand’s fatal casualties were not brought home. Families lost a family member, body and soul, in the Great War. For those people who subscribed to a Victorian view of death, who needed a body to grieve over, the war memorial took on the role of a gravesite and became a place where people would place a sprig of wattle, poke a poppy into the crevice beside a name, or simply touch the letters etched or embossed in the stone (Winter, Experience 206). As Ken Inglis states: “the statue on its pedestal does stand for each dead man whose body, identified or missing, intact or dispersed, had not been returned” to his home town (11).Physical war memorials were also a place where women could forge new identities over time. Women accepted, or claimed their status as war widows, grieving mothers or bereft fiancés, while at the same time coming to terms with their loss. As Joy Damousi writes: “mourning of wartime loss involved a process of sustaining both a continuity with, and a detachment from, a lost soldier” (1). Thus, physical war memorials were transitional, liminal spaces.Jay Winter (Sites 85) believes that physical war memorials were places to both honour and mourn the dead, wounded, missing and shell-shocked. These dual functions of both esteeming and grieving those who served was reinforced at ceremonies, such as Anzac or Remembrance Day.As Joy Damousi (156) and Ken Inglis (457, 463) point out, war memorials in Australia are rarely sites of protest, either for war widows or veterans campaigning for a better pension, or peace activists who opposed militarism. When they are used in this way, it makes headlines in the news (Legge). They are seldom used to highlight the tragedy, inhumanity or futility of war. The exception to this, were the protests against the Vietnam War.The physical war memorials which mushroomed in Australian country towns and cities after the First World War captured and claimed those cataclysmic four years for the families and communities who were devastated by the war. They provided a place to both honour and mourn those who served, not just once, but for as long as the memorial remained. They were also a place of pilgrimage, particularly for families who did not have a grave to visit and a focal point for the annual rituals of remembrance.However, over the past 100 years, some unmaintained physical war memorials are beginning to look like untended graves. They have become obstacles rather than sentinels in the landscape. Laurence Aberhart’s haunting photographs show that memorials in places like Dorrigo in rural New South Wales “go largely unnoticed year-round, encroached on by street signage and suburbia” (Lakin 49). Have physical war memorials largely fulfilled their purpose and are they becoming obsolete? Perhaps they have been supplanted by the gathering space of the 21st century: the Internet.Digital War MemorialsThe centenary of the Great War heralded a mushrooming of virtual war memorials. Online First World War memorials focus on collecting and amassing information that commemorates individuals. They are able to include far more information than will fit on a physical war memorial. They encourage users to search the digitised records that are available on the site and create profiles of people who served. While they deal in records from the past, they are very much about the present: the user experience and their connection to their ancestors who served.The Imperial War Museum’s website Lives of the First World War asks users to “help us build the permanent digital memorial to all who contributed during the First World War”. This request deserves scrutiny. Firstly, “permanent” – is this possible in the digital age? When the head of Google, Vint Cerf, disclosed in 2015 that software programming wizards were still grappling with how to create digital formats that can be accessed in 10, 100 or a 1000 years’ time; and recommended that we print out our precious digital data and store it in hard copy or risk losing it forever; then it appears that online permanency is a mirage.Secondly, “all who contributed” – the website administrators informed me that “all” currently includes people who served with Canada and Britain but the intention is to include other Commonwealth nations. It seems that the former British Empire “owns” the First World War – non-allied, non-Commonwealth nations that contributed to the First World War will not be included. One hundred years on, have we really made peace with Germany and Turkey? The armistice has not yet spread to the digital war memorial. The Lives of the First world War website missed an opportunity to be leaders in online trans-national memorialisation.Discovering Anzacs, a website built by the National Archives of Australia and Archives New Zealand, is a little more subdued and honest, as visitors are invited to “enhance a profile dedicated to the wartime journey of someone who served”.Physical and online war memorials can work in tandem. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Victoria created a website that provides background information on the military service of the 159 members of the legal profession who are named on their Memorial board. This is an excellent example of a digital medium expanding on and reinvigorating a physical memorial.It is noteworthy that all of these online memorial websites commemorate those who served in the First World War, and sometimes the Boer or South African War. There is no space for remembering those who served or died in more recent wars like Afghanistan or Iraq. James Brown and others discuss how the cult of Anzac is overshadowing the service and sacrifices of the men and women who have been to more recent wars. The proximity of their service mitigates against its recognition – it is too close for comfortable, detached remembrance.Complementary But Not ExclusiveA comparison of their functions indicates that online memorials which focus on the First World War complement, but will never replace the role of physical war memorials. As discussed, physical war memorials were sites for grieving, pilgrimage and collectively honouring the men and women who served and died. Online websites which allow users to upload scanned documents and photographs; transcribe diary entries or letters; post tribute poems, songs or video clips; and provide links to other relevant records online are neither places of pilgrimage nor sites for grieving. They are about remembrance, not memory (Scates, “Finding” 221).Ken Inglis describes physical war memorials as “bearers of collective memory” (7). In a sense, online war memorials are keepers of individual, user-enhanced archival records. It can be argued that online memorials to the First World War tap into the desire for hero-worship, the boom in family history research and what Scates calls the “cult of remembrance” (“Finding” 218). They provide a way for individuals, often two or three generations removed, to discover, understand and document the wartime experiences of individuals in their family. By allowing descendants to situate their family story within the larger, historically significant narrative of the First World War, online memorials encourage people to feel that the suffering and untimely death of their forbear wasn’t in vain – that it contributed to something worthwhile and worth remembering. At a collective level, this contributes to the ANZAC myth and former Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s attempt to use it as a foundational myth for Australia’s nationhood.Kylie Veale (9) argues that cyberspace has encouraged improvements on traditional memorial practices because online memorials can be created in a more timely fashion, they are more affordable and they are accessible and enable the sharing of grief and bereavement on a global scale. As evidence of this, an enterprising group in the USA has developed an android app which provides a template for creating an online memorial. They compete with Memorialsonline.com. Veale’s arguments remind us that the Internet is a hyper-democratic space where interactions and sites that are collaborative or contemplative exist alongside trolling and prejudice. Veale also contends that memorial websites facilitate digital immortality, which helps keep the memory of the deceased alive. However, given the impermanence of much of the content on the Internet, this final attribute is a bold claim.It is interesting to compare the way individual soldiers are remembered prior to and after the arrival of the Internet. Now that it is possible to create a tribute website, or Facebook page in memory of someone who served, do families do this instead of creating large physical scrapbooks or photo albums? Or do they do both? Garry Roberts created a ‘mourning diary’ as a record of his journey of agonising grief for his eldest son who died in 1918. His diary consists of 27 scrapbooks, weighing 10 kilograms in total. Pat Jalland (318) suggests this helped Roberts to create some sort of order out of his emotional turmoil. Similarly, building websites or digital tribute pages can help friends and relatives through the grieving process. They can also contribute the service person’s story to official websites such as those managed by the Australian Defence Forces. Do grieving family members look up a website or tribute page they’ve created in the same way that they might open up a scrapbook and remind themselves of their loved one? Kylie Veale’s research into online memorials created for anyone who has died, not necessarily those killed by war, suggests online memorials are used in this way (5).Do grieving relatives take comfort from the number of likes, tags or comments on a memorial or tribute website, in the same way that they might feel supported by the number of people who attend a memorial service or send a condolence card? Do they archive the comments? Garry Roberts kept copies of the letters of sympathy and condolence that he received from friends and relatives after his son’s tragic death and added them to his 27 scrapbooks.Both onsite and online memorials can suffer from lack of maintenance and relevance. Memorial websites can become moribund like untended headstones in a graveyard. Once they have passed their use as a focal point of grief, a place to post tributes; they can languish, un-updated and un-commented on.Memorials and PilgrimageOne thing that online memorials will never be, however, are sites of pilgrimage or ritual. One does not need to set out on a journey to visit an online memorial. It is as far away as your portable electronic device. Online memorials cannot provide the closure or sense of identity and community that comes from visiting a memorial or gravesite.This was evident in December 2014 when people felt the need to visit the Lindt Café in Sydney’s Martin Place after the terrorist siege and lay flowers and tributes. While there were also Facebook tribute pages set up for these victims of violence, mourners still felt the need to visit the sites. A permanent memorial to the victims of the siege has now opened in Martin Place.Do people gather around a memorial website for the annual rituals which take place on Anzac or Remembrance Day, or the anniversaries of significant battles? In 2013, the Australian War Memorial (AWM) saw a spike in people logging onto the Memorial’s Remembrance Day web page just prior to 11am. They left the site immediately after the minute’s silence. The AWM web team think they were looking for a live broadcast of the Remembrance Day service in Canberra. When that wasn’t available online, they chose to stay on the site until after the minute’s silence. Perhaps this helped them to focus on the reason for Remembrance Day. Perhaps, as Internet speeds get faster, it will be possible to conduct your own virtual ceremony in real time with friends and family in cyberspace.However, I cannot imagine a time when visiting dignitaries from other countries will post virtual wreaths to virtual war memorials. Ken Inglis argues that the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the AWM has become the ritual centre of the Australian nation, “receiving obligatory wreaths from every visiting head of state” (459).Physical and Online Memorials to the War in AfghanistanThere are only eight physical war memorials to the Afghanistan conflict in Australia, even though this is the longest war Australia has been involved in to date (2001-2015). Does the lack of physical memorials to the war in Afghanistan mean that our communities no longer need them, and that people are memorialising online instead?One grieving father in far north Queensland certainly felt that an online memorial would never suffice. Gordon Chuck’s son, Private Benjamin Chuck, was killed in a Black Hawk helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2010 when he was only 27 years old. Spurred by his son’s premature death, Gordon Chuck rallied family, community and government support, in the tiny hinterland town of Yungaburra, west of Cairns in Queensland, to establish an Avenue of Honour. He knocked on the doors of local businesses, the Returned Servicemen’s League (RSL), the Australian Defence Forces and every level of government to raise $300,000. His intention was to create a timeless memorial of world standard and national significance. On 21 June 2013, the third anniversary of his son’s death, the Chief of the Defence Force and the Prime Minister formally opened the Avenue of Honour in front of “thousands” of people (Nancarrow).Diggers from Afghanistan who have visited the Yungaburra Avenue of Honour speak of the closure and sense of healing it gave them (Nancarrow). The Avenue, built on the shores of Lake Tinaroo, features parallel rows of Illawarra flame trees, whose red blossoms are in full bloom around Remembrance Day and symbolise the blood and fire of war and the cycle of life. It commemorates all the Australian soldiers who have died in the Afghanistan war.The Avenue of Honour, and the memorial in Martin Place clearly demonstrate that physical war memorials are not redundant. They are needed and cherished as sites of grief, hope and commemoration. The rituals conducted there gather gravitas from the solemnity that falls when a sea of people is silent and they provide healing through the comfort of reverent strangers.ConclusionEven though we live in an era when most of us are online every day of our lives, it is unlikely that virtual war memorials will ever supplant their physical forebears. When it comes to commemorating the First World War or contemporary conflicts and those who fought or died in them, physical and virtual war memorials can be complementary but they fulfil fundamentally different roles. Because of their medium as virtual memorials, they will never fulfil the human need for a place of remembrance in the real world.ReferencesBinyon, Laurence. “For the Fallen.” The Times. 21 Sep. 1914. 7 Oct. 2019 <https://www.army.gov.au/our-history/traditions/for-the-fallen>.Brown, James. Anzac’s Long Shadow. Sydney: Black Inc., 2014.Damousi, Joy. The Labour of Loss. Great Britain: Cambridge UP, 1999.Hunter, Kathryn. “States of Mind: Remembering the Australian-New Zealand Relationship.” Journal of the Australian War Memorial 36 (2002). 7 Oct. 2019 <https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/journal/j36/nzmemorial>.Inglis, Ken. Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1998.Inglis, Ken, and Jock Phillips. “War Memorials in Australia and New Zealand: A Comparative Survey.” Australian Historical Studies 24.96 (1991): 179-191.Jalland, Pat. Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840-1918. London: Oxford University Press, 2002.Knapton, Sarah. “Print Out Digital Photos or Risk Losing Them, Google Boss Warns.” Telegraph 13 Feb. 2015. 7 Oct. 2019 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11410506/Print-out-digital-photos-or-risk-losing-them-Google-boss-warns.html>.Lakin, Shaune. “Laurence Aberhart ANZAC.” Artlink 35.1 (2015): 48-51.Legge, James. “Vandals Deface Two London War Memorials with ‘Islam’ Graffiti”. Independent 27 May 2013. 7 Oct. 2019 <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/vandals-deface-two-london-war-memorials-with-islam-graffiti-8633386.html>.Luckins, Tanya. The Gates of Memory. Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books, 2004.McLuhan, Marshall. Understating Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Mentor, 1964.McPhedran, Ian. “Families of Dead Soldiers Angered after Defence Chief David Hurley Donates Memorial Plinth to Avenue of Honour.” Cairns Post 7 June 2014. 7 Oct. 2019 <http://www.cairnspost.com.au/news/cairns/families-of-dead-soldiers-angered-after-defence-chief-david-hurley-donates-memorial-plinth-to-avenue-of-honour/story-fnjpusyw-1226946540125>.McPhedran, Ian. “Backflip over Donation of Memorial Stone from Afghanistan to Avenue of Honour at Yungaburra.” Cairns Post 11 June 2014. 7 Oct. 2019 <http://www.cairnspost.com.au/news/cairns/backflip-over-donation-of-memorial-stone-from-afghanistan-to-avenue-of-honour-at-yungaburra/story-fnkxmm0j-1226950508126>.Ministry for Culture and Heritage. “Interpreting First World War Memorials.” Updated 4 Sep. 2014. <http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/interpreting-first-world-war-memorials>.Nancarrow, Kirsty. “Thousands Attend Opening of Avenue of Honour, a Memorial to Diggers Killed in Afghanistan”. ABC News 7 Nov. 2014. 2 Oct. 2014 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-22/avenue-of-honour-remembers-fallen-diggers/4773592>.Scates, Bruce. “Finding the Missing of Fromelles: When Soldiers Return.” Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War. Eds. Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010. 212-231.Scates, Bruce. “Soldiers’ Journeys: Returning to the Battlefields of the Great War.” Journal of the Australian War Memorial 40 (2007): n.p.Scott, Ernest. Australia during the War: The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918. Vol. XI. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1941.Stanley, Peter. “Ten Kilos of First World War Grief at the Melbourne Museum.” The Conversation 27 Aug. 2014. 10 Oct. 2019 <https://theconversation.com/ten-kilos-of-first-world-war-grief-at-the-melbourne-museum-30362>.Veale, Kylie. “Online Memorialisation: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape for Remembering the Dead.” Fibreculture Journal 3 (2004). 7 Oct. 2019 <http://three.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-014-online-memorialisation-the-web-as-a-collective-memorial-landscape-for-remembering-the-dead/>.Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. Cambrigde: Cambridge UP, 1995.———. The Experience of World War I. London: Macmillan, 1988.

Babies and toddlers are amassing huge followings on social media, achieving microcelebrity status, and raking in five figure sums. In East Asia, many of these lucrative “micro­-microcelebrities” rise to fame by inheriting exposure and proximate microcelebrification from their social media Influencer mothers. Through self-branding techniques, Influencer mothers’ portrayals of their young’ children’s lives “as lived” are the canvas on which (baby) products and services are marketed to readers as “advertorials”. In turning to investigate this budding phenomenon, I draw on ethnographic case studies in Singapore to outline the career trajectory of these young children (under 4yo) including their social media presence, branding strategies, and engagement with their followers. The chapter closes with a brief discussion on some ethical considerations of such young children’s labour in the social media age.Influencer MothersTheresa Senft first coined the term “microcelebrity” in her work Camgirls as a burgeoning online trend, wherein people attempt to gain popularity by employing digital media technologies, such as videos, blogs, and social media. She describes microcelebrities as “non-actors as performers” whose narratives take place “without overt manipulation”, and who are “more ‘real’ than television personalities with ‘perfect hair, perfect friends and perfect lives’” (Senft 16), foregrounding their active response to their communities in the ways that maintain open channels of feedback on social media to engage with their following.Influencers – a vernacular industry term albeit inspired by Katz & Lazarsfeld’s notion of “personal influence” that predates Internet culture – are one type of microcelebrity; they are everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles, engage with their following in “digital” and “physical” spaces, and monetize their following by integrating “advertorials” into their blog or social media posts and making physical appearances at events. A pastiche of “advertisement” and “editorial”, advertorials in the Influencer industry are highly personalized, opinion-laden promotions of products/services that Influencers personally experience and endorse for a fee. Influencers in Singapore often brand themselves as having “relatability”, or the ability to persuade their followers to identify with them (Abidin). They do so by make consciously visible the backstage (Goffman) of the usually “inaccessible”, “personal”, and “private” aspects of mundane, everyday life to curate personae that feel “authentic” to fans (Marwick 114), and more accessible than traditional celebrity (Senft 16).Historically, the Influencer industry in Singapore can be traced back to the early beginnings of the “blogshop” industry from the mid-2000s and the “commercial blogging” industry. Influencers are predominantly young women, and market products and services from diverse industries, although the most popular have been fashion, beauty, F&B, travel, and electronics. Most prominent Influencers are contracted to management agencies who broker deals in exchange for commission and assist in the production of their vlogs. Since then, the industry has grown, matured, and expanded so rapidly that Influencers developed emergent models of advertorials, with the earliest cohorts moving into different life stages and monetizing several other aspects of their personal lives such as the “micro-microcelebrity” of their young children. What this paper provides is an important analysis of the genesis and normative practices of micro-microcelebrity commerce in Singapore from its earliest years, and future research trajectories in this field.Micro-Microcelebrity and Proximate MicrocelebrificationI define micro-microcelebrities as the children of Influencers who have themselves become proximate microcelebrities, having derived exposure and fame from their prominent Influencer mothers, usually through a more prolific, deliberate, and commercial form of what Blum-Ross defines as “sharenting”: the act of parents sharing images and stores about their children in digital spaces such as social networking sites and blogs. Marwick (116-117), drawing from Rojek’s work on types of celebrity – distinguishes between two types of microcelebrity: “ascribed microcelebrity” where the online personality is made recognizable through the “production of celebrity media” such as paparazzi shots and user-produced online memes, or “achieved microcelebrity” where users engage in “self-presentation strateg[ies]”, such as fostering the illusion of intimacy with fans, maintaining a persona, and selective disclosure about oneself.Micro-microcelebrities lie somewhere between the two: In a process I term “proximate microcelebrification”, micro-microcelebrities themselves inherit celebrity through the preemptive and continuous exposure from their Influencer mothers, many beginning even during the pre-birth pregnancy stages in the form of ultrasound scans, as a form of “achieved microcelebrity”. Influencer mothers whose “presentational strategies” (cf. Marshall, “Promotion” 45) are successful enough (as will be addressed later) gain traction among followers, who in turn further popularize the micro-microcelebrity by setting up fan accounts, tribute sites, and gossip forums through which fame is heightened in a feedback loop as a model of “ascribed microcelebrity”.Here, however, I refrain from conceptualizing these young stars as “micro-Influencers” for unlike Influencers, these children do not yet curate their self-presentation to command the attention of followers, but instead are used, framed, and appropriated by their mothers for advertorials. In other words, Influencer mothers “curate [micro-microcelebrities’] identities into being” (Leaver, “Birth”). Following this, many aspects of their micro-microcelebrities become rapidly commodified and commercialized, with advertisers clamoring to endorse anything from maternity hospital stays to nappy cream.Although children of mommybloggers have the prospect to become micro-microcelebrities, both groups are conceptually distinct. Friedman (200-201) argues that among mommybloggers arose a tension between those who adopt “the raw authenticity of nonmonetized blogging”, documenting the “unglamorous minutiae” of their daily lives and a “more authentic view of motherhood” and those who use mommyblogs “primarily as a source of extra income rather than as a site for memoir”, focusing on “parent-centered products” (cf. Mom Bloggers Club).In contrast, micro-microcelebrities and their digital presence are deliberately commercial, framed and staged by Influencer mothers in order to maximize their advertorial potential, and are often postured to market even non-baby/parenting products such as fast food and vehicles (see later). Because of the overt commerce, it is unclear if micro-microcelebrity displays constitute “intimate surveillance”, an “almost always well-intentioned surveillance of young people by parents” (Leaver, “Born” 4). Furthermore, children are generally peripheral to mommybloggers whose own parenting narratives take precedence as a way to connect with fellow mothers, while micro-microcelebrities are the primary feature whose everyday lives and digital presence enrapture followers.MethodologyThe analysis presented is informed by my original fieldwork with 125 Influencers and related actors among whom I conducted a mixture of physical and digital personal interviews, participant observation, web archaeology, and archival research between December 2011 and October 2014. However, the material presented here is based on my digital participant observation of publicly accessible and intentionally-public digital presence of the first four highly successful micro-microcelebrities in Singapore: “Baby Dash” (b.2013) is the son of Influencer xiaxue, “#HeYurou” (b.2011) is the niece of Influencer bongqiuqiu, “#BabyElroyE” (b.2014) is the son of Influencer ohsofickle, and “@MereGoRound” (b.2015) is the daughter of Influencer bongqiuqiu.The microcelebrity/social media handles of these children take different forms, following the platform on which their parent/aunt has exposed them on the most. Baby Dash appears in all of xiaxue’s digital platforms under a variety of over 30 indexical, ironic, or humourous hashtags (Leaver, “Birth”) including “#pointylipped”, #pineappledash”, and “#面包脸” (trans. “bread face”); “#HeYurou” appears on bongqiuqiu’s Instagram and Twitter; “#BabyElroyE” appears on ohsofickle’s Instagram and blog, and is the central figure of his mother’s new YouTube channel; and “@MereGoRound” appears on all of bongqiuqiu’s digital platforms but also has her own Instagram account and dedicated YouTube channel. The images reproduced here are screenshot from Influencer mothers’ highly public social media: xiaxue, bongqiuqiu, and ohsofickle boast 593k, 277k, and 124k followers on Instagram and 263k, 41k, and 17k followers on Twitter respectively at the time of writing.Anticipation and Digital EstatesIn an exclusive front-pager (Figure 1) on the day of his induced birth, it was announced that Baby Dash had already received up to SGD25,000 worth of endorsement deals brokered by his Influencer mother, xiaxue. As the first micro-microcelebrity in his cohort (his mother was among the pioneer Influencers), Baby Dash’s Caesarean section was even filmed and posted on xiaxue’s YouTube channel in three parts (Figure 2). xiaxue had announced her pregnancy on her blog while in her second trimester, following which she consistently posted mirror selfies of her baby bump.Figure 1 & 2, screenshot April 2013 from ‹instagram.com/xiaxue›In her successful attempt at generating anticipation, the “bump” itself seemed to garner its own following on Twitter and Instagram, with many followers discussing how the Influencer dressed “it”, and how “it” was evolving over the weeks. One follower even compiled a collage of xiaxue’s “bump” chronologically and gifted it to the Influencer as an art image via Twitter on the day she delivered Baby Dash (Figure 3 & 4). Followers also frequently speculated and bantered about how her baby would look, and mused about how much they were going to adore him. Figure 3 & 4, screenshot March 2013 from ‹twitter.com/xiaxue› While Lupton (42) has conceptualized the sharing of images that precede birth as a “rite of passage”, Influencer mothers who publish sonograms deliberately do so in order to claim digital estates for their to-be micro-microcelebrities in the form of “reserved” social media handles, blog URLs, and unique hashtags for self-branding. For instance, at the 3-month mark of her pregnancy, Influencer bongqiuqiu debuted her baby’s dedicated hashtag, “#MereGoRound” in a birth announcement on her on Instagram account. Shortly after, she started an Instagram account, “@MereGoRound”, for her baby, who amassed over 5.5k followers prior to her birth. Figure 5 & 6, screenshot March 2015 from instagram.com/meregoround and instagram.com/bongqiuqiuThe debut picture features a heavily pregnant belly shot of bongqiuqiu (Figure 5), creating much anticipation for the arrival of a new micro-microcelebrity: in the six months leading up to her birth, various family, friends, and fans shared Instagram images of their gifts and welcome party for @MereGoRound, and followers shared congratulations and fan art on the dedicated Instagram hashtag. During this time, bongqiuqiu also frequently updated followers on her pregnancy progress, not without advertising her (presumably sponsored) gynecologist and hospital stay in her pregnancy diaries (Figure 6) – like Baby Dash, even as a foetus @MereGoRound was accumulating advertorials. Presently at six months old, @MereGoRound boasts almost 40k followers on Instagram on which embedded in the narrative of her growth are sponsored products and services from various advertisers.Non-Baby-Related AdvertorialsPrior to her pregnancy, Influencer bongqiuqiu hopped onto the micro-microcelebrity bandwagon in the wake of Baby Dash’s birth, by using her niece “#HeYurou” in her advertorials. Many Influencers attempt to naturalize their advertorials by composing their post as if recounting a family event. With reference to a child, parent, or partner, they may muse or quip about a product being used or an experience being shared in a bid to mask the distinction between their personal and commercial material. bongqiuqiu frequently posted personal, non-sponsored images engaging in daily mundane activities under the dedicated hashtag “#HeYurou”.However, this was occasionally interspersed with pictures of her niece holding on to various products including storybooks (Figure 8) and shopping bags (Figure 9). At first glance, this might have seemed like any mundane daily update the Influencer often posts. However, a close inspection reveals the caption bearing sponsor hashtags, tags, and campaign information. For instance, one Instagram post shows #HeYurou casually holding on to and staring at a burger in KFC wrapping (Figure 7), but when read in tandem with bongqiuqiu’s other KFC-related posts published over a span of a few months, it becomes clear that #HeYurou was in fact advertising for KFC. Figure 7, 8, 9, screenshot December 2014 from ‹instagram.com/bongqiuqiu›Elsewhere, Baby Dash was incorporated into xiaxue’s car sponsorship with over 20 large decals of one of his viral photos – dubbed “pineapple Dash” among followers – plastered all over her vehicle (Figure 10). Followers who spot the car in public are encouraged to photograph and upload the image using its dedicated hashtag, “#xiaxuecar” as part of the Influencer’s car sponsorship – an engagement scarcely related to her young child. Since then, xiaxue has speculated producing offshoots of “pineapple Dash” products including smartphone casings. Figure 10, screenshot December 2014 from ‹instagram.com/xiaxue›Follower EngagementSponsors regularly organize fan meet-and-greets headlined by micro-microcelebrities in order to attract potential customers. Photo opportunities and the chance to see Baby Dash “in the flesh” frequently front press and promotional material of marketing campaigns. Elsewhere on social media, several Baby Dash fan and tribute accounts have also emerged on Instagram, reposting images and related media of the micro-microcelebrity with overt adoration, no doubt encouraged by xiaxue, who began crowdsourcing captions for Baby Dash’s photos.Influencer ohsofickle postures #BabyElroyE’s follower engagement in a more subtle way. In her YouTube channel that debut in the month of her baby’s birth, ohsofickle produces video diaries of being a young, single, mother who is raising a child (Figure 11). In each episode, #BabyElroyE is the main feature whose daily activities are documented, and while there is some advertising embedded, ohsofickle’s approach on YouTube is much less overt than others as it features much more non-monetized personal content (Figure 12). Her blog serves as a backchannel to her vlogs, in which she recounts her struggles with motherhood and explicitly solicits the advice of mothers. However, owing to her young age (she became an Influencer at 17 and gave birth at 24), many of her followers are teenagers and young women who respond to her solicitations by gushing over #BabyElroyE’s images on Instagram. Figure 11 & 12, screenshot September 2015 from ‹instagram.com/ohsofickle›PrivacyAs noted by Holloway et al. (23), children like micro-microcelebrities will be among the first cohorts to inherit “digital profiles” of their “whole lifetime” as a “work in progress”, from parents who habitually underestimate or discount the privacy and long term effects of publicizing information about their children at the time of posting. This matters in a climate where social media platforms can amend privacy policies without user consent (23), and is even more pressing for micro-microcelebrities whose followers store, republish, and recirculate information in fan networks, resulting in digital footprints with persistence, replicability, scalability, searchability (boyd), and extended longevity in public circulation which can be attributed back to the children indefinitely (Leaver, “Ends”).Despite minimum age restrictions and recent concerns with “digital kidnapping” where users steal images of other young children to be re-posted as their own (Whigham), some social media platforms rarely police the proliferation of accounts set up by parents on behalf of their underage children prominently displaying their legal names and life histories, citing differing jurisdictions in various countries (Facebook; Instagram), while others claim to disable accounts if users report an “incorrect birth date” (cf. Google for YouTube). In Singapore, the Media Development Authority (MDA) which governs all print and digital media has no firm regulations for this but suggests that the age of consent is 16 judging by their recommendation to parents with children aged below 16 to subscribe to Internet filtering services (Media Development Authority, “Regulatory” 1). Moreover, current initiatives have been focused on how parents can impart digital literacy to their children (Media Development Authority, “Empowered”; Media Literacy Council) as opposed to educating parents about the digital footprints they may be unwittingly leaving about their children.The digital lives of micro-microcelebrities pose new layers of concern given their publicness and deliberate publicity, specifically hinged on making visible the usually inaccessible, private aspects of everyday life (Marshall, “Persona” 5).Scholars note that celebrities are individuals for whom speculation of their private lives takes precedence over their actual public role or career (Geraghty 100-101; Turner 8). However, the personae of Influencers and their young children are shaped by ambiguously blurring the boundaries of privacy and publicness in order to bait followers’ attention, such that privacy and publicness are defined by being broadcast, circulated, and publicized (Warner 414). In other words, the publicness of micro-microcelebrities is premised on the extent of the intentional publicity rather than simply being in the public domain (Marwick 223-231, emphasis mine).Among Influencers privacy concerns have aroused awareness but not action – Baby Dash’s Influencer mother admitted in a national radio interview that he has received a death threat via Instagram but feels that her child is unlikely to be actually attacked (Channel News Asia) – because privacy is a commodity that is manipulated and performed to advance their micro-microcelebrities’ careers. As pioneer micro-microcelebrities are all under 2-years-old at present, future research warrants investigating “child-centred definitions” (Third et al.) of the transition in which they come of age, grow an awareness of their digital presence, respond to their Influencer mothers’ actions, and potentially take over their accounts.Young LabourThe Ministry of Manpower (MOM) in Singapore, which regulates the employment of children and young persons, states that children under the age of 13 may not legally work in non-industrial or industrial settings (Ministry of Manpower). However, the same document later ambiguously states underaged children who do work can only do so under strict work limits (Ministry of Manpower). Elsewhere (Chan), it is noted that national labour statistics have thus far only focused on those above the age of 15, thus neglecting a true reflection of underaged labour in Singapore. This is despite the prominence of micro-microcelebrities who are put in front of (video) cameras to build social media content. Additionally, the work of micro-microcelebrities on digital platforms has not yet been formally recognized as labour, and is not regulated by any authority including Influencer management firms, clients, the MDA, and the MOM. Brief snippets from my ethnographic fieldwork with Influencer management agencies in Singapore similarly reveal that micro-microcelebrities’ labour engagements and control of their earnings are entirely at their parents’ discretion.As models and actors, micro-microcelebrities are one form of entertainment workers who if between the ages of 15 days and 18 years in the state of California are required to obtain an Entertainment Work Permit to be gainfully employed, adhering to strict work, schooling, and rest hour quotas (Department of Industrial Relations). Furthermore, the Californian Coogan Law affirms that earnings by these minors are their own property and not their parents’, although they are not old enough to legally control their finances and rely on the state to govern their earnings with a legal guardian (Screen Actors Guild). However, this similarly excludes underaged children and micro-microcelebrities engaged in creative digital ecologies. Future research should look into safeguards and instruments among young child entertainers, especially for micro-micrcocelebrities’ among whom commercial work and personal documentation is not always distinct, and are in fact deliberately intertwined in order to better engage with followers for relatabilityGrowing Up BrandedIn the wake of moral panics over excessive surveillance technologies, children’s safety on the Internet, and data retention concerns, micro-microcelebrities and their Influencer mothers stand out for their deliberately personal and overtly commercial approach towards self-documenting, self-presenting, and self-publicizing from the moment of conception. As these debut micro-microcelebrities grow older and inherit digital publics, personae, and careers, future research should focus on the transition of their ownership, engagement, and reactions to a branded childhood in which babies were postured for an initimate public.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “Communicative Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, & Technology. Forthcoming, Nov 2015.Aiello, Marianne. “Mommy Blog Banner Ads Get Results.” Healthcare Marketing Advisor 17 Nov. 2010. HealthLeaders Media. 16 Aug. 2015 ‹http://healthleadersmedia.com/content/MAR-259215/Mommy-Blog-Banner-Ads-Get-Results›.Azzarone, Stephanie. “When Consumers Report: Mommy Blogging Your Way to Success.” Playthings 18 Feb. 2009. 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The concept of transmedia storyworlds unfolding across complex serial narrative structures has become increasingly important to the study of modern media industries and audience communities. Yet, the precise connections between transmedia networks, serial structures, and narrative processes often remain underdeveloped. The dispersion of potential story elements across a diverse collection of media platforms and technologies prompts questions concerning the function of seriality in the absence of fixed instalments, the meaning of narrative when plot is largely a personal construction of each audience member, and the nature of storytelling in the absence of a unifying author, or when authorship itself takes on a serial character. This special issue opens a conversation on the intersection of these three concepts and their implications for a variety of disciplines, artistic practices, and philosophies. By re-thinking these concepts from fresh perspectives, the collection challenges scholars to consider how a wide range of academic, aesthetic, and social phenomena might be productively thought through using the overlapping lenses of transmedia, seriality, and narrativity. Thus, the collection gathers scholars from life-writing, sport, film studies, cultural anthropology, fine arts, media studies, and literature, all of whom find common ground at this fruitful crossroads. This breadth also challenges the narrow use of transmedia as a specialized term to describe current developments in corporate mass media products that seek to exploit the affordances of hybrid digital media environments. Many prominent scholars, including Marie-Laure Ryan and Henry Jenkins, acknowledge that a basic definition of transmedia as stories with extensions and reinterpretations in numerous media forms includes the oldest kinds of human expression, such as the ancient storyworlds of Arthurian legend and The Odyssey. Yet, what Jenkins terms “top-down” transmedia—that is, pre-planned and often corporate transmedia—has received a disproportionate share of scholarly attention, with modern franchises like The Matrix, the Marvel universe, and Lost serving as common exemplars (Flanagan, Livingstone, and McKenny; Hadas; Mittell; Scolari). Thus, many of the contributions to this issue push the boundaries of what has commonly been studied as transmedia as well as the limits of what may be considered a serial structure or even a story. For example, these papers imagine how an autobiography may also be a digital concept album unfolding in reverse, how participatory artistic performances may unfold in unpredictable instalments across physical and digital space, and how studying sports fandom as a long series of transmedia narrative elements encourages scholars to grapple with the unique structures assembled by audiences of non-fictional story worlds. Setting these experimental offerings into dialogue with entries that approach the study of transmedia in a more established manner provides the basis for building bridges between such recognized conversations in new media studies and potential collaborations with other disciplines and subfields of media studies.This issue builds upon papers collected from four years of the International Transmedia Serial Narration Seminar, which I co-organized with Dr. Claire Cornillon, Assistant Professor (Maîtresse de Conférences) of comparative literature at Université de Nîmes. The seminar held sessions in Paris, Le Havre, Rouen, Amsterdam, and Utrecht, with interdisciplinary speakers from the USA, Australia, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. As a transnational, interdisciplinary project intended to cross both theoretical and physical boundaries, the seminar aimed to foster exchange between academic conversations that can become isolated not only within disciplines, but also within national and linguistic borders. The seminar thus sought to enhance academic mobility between both people and ideas, and the digital, open-access publication of the collected papers alongside additional scholarly interlocutors serves to broaden the seminar’s goals of creating a border-crossing conversation. After two special issues primarily collecting the French language papers in TV/Series (2014) and Revue Française des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication (2017), this issue seeks to share the Transmedia Serial Narration project with a wider audience by publishing the remaining English-language papers, accompanied by several other contributions in dialogue with the seminar’s themes. It is our hope that this collection will invite a broad international audience to creatively question the meaning of transmedia, seriality, and narrativity both historically and in the modern, rapidly changing, global and digital media environment.Several articles in the issue illuminate existing debates and common case studies in transmedia scholarship by comparing theoretical models to the much more slippery reality of a media form in flux. Thus, Mélanie Bourdaa’s feature article, “From One Medium to the Next: How Comic Books Create Richer Storylines,” examines theories of narrative complexity and transmedia by scholars including Henry Jenkins, Derek Johnson, and Jason Mittell to then propose a new typology of extensions to accommodate the lived reality expressed by producers of transmedia. Because her interviews with artists and writers emphasize the co-constitutive nature of economic and narrative considerations in professionals’ decisions, Bourdaa’s typology can offer researchers a tool to clarify the marketing and narrative layers of transmedia extensions. As such, her classification system further illuminates what is particular about forms of corporate transmedia with a profit orientation, which may not be shared by non-profit, collective, and independently produced transmedia projects.Likewise, Radha O’Meara and Alex Bevan map existing scholarship on transmedia to point out the limitations of deriving theory only from certain forms of storytelling. In their article “Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations,” O’Meara and Bevan argue that scholars have preferred to focus on examples of transmedia with a strong central author-figure or that they may indeed help to rhetorically shore up the coherency of transmedia authorship through writing about transmedia creators as auteurs. Tying their critique to the established weaknesses of auteur theory associated with classic commentaries like Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” and Foucault’s “What is an Author?”, O’Meara and Bevan explain that this focus on transmedia creators as authority figures reinforces hierarchical, patriarchal understandings of the creative process and excludes from consideration all those unauthorized transmedia extensions through which audiences frequently engage and make meaning from transmedia networks. They also emphasize the importance of constructing academic theories of transmedia authorship that can accommodate collaborative forms of hybrid amateur and professional authorship, as well as tolerate the ambiguities of “authorless” storyworlds that lack clear narrative boundaries. O’Meara and Bevan argue that such theories will help to break down gendered power hierarchies in Hollywood, which have long allowed individual men to “claim credit for the stories and for all the work that many people do across various sectors and industries.”Dan Hassler-Forest likewise considers existing theory and a corporate case study in his examination of analogue echoes within a modern transmedia serial structure by mapping the storyworld of Twin Peaks (1990). His article, “‘Two Birds with One Stone’: Transmedia Serialisation in Twin Peaks,” demonstrates the push-and-pull between two contemporary TV production strategies: first, the use of transmedia elements that draw viewers away from the TV screen toward other platforms, and second, the deployment of strategies that draw viewers back to the TV by incentivizing broadcast-era appointment viewing. Twin Peaks offers a particularly interesting example of the manner in which these strategies intertwine partly because it already offered viewers an analogue transmedia experience in the 1990s by splitting story elements between TV episodes and books. Unlike O’Meara and Bevan, who elucidate the growing prominence of transmedia auteurs who lend rhetorical coherence to dispersed narrative elements, Hassler-Forest argues that this older analogue transmedia network capitalized upon the dilution of authorial authority, due to the distance between TV and book versions, to negotiate tensions between the producers’ competing visions. Hassler-Forest also notes that the addition of digital soundtrack albums further complicates the serial nature of the story by using the iTunes and TV distribution schedules to incentivize repeated sequential consumption of each element, thus drawing modern viewers to the TV screen, then the computer screen, and then back again.Two articles offer a concrete test of these theoretical perspectives by utilizing ethnographic participant-observation and interviewing to examine how audiences actually navigate diffuse, dispersed storyworlds. For example, Céline Masoni’s article, “From Seriality to Transmediality: A Socio-narrative Approach of a Skilful and Literate Audience,” documents fans’ highly strategic participatory practices. From her observations of and interviews with fans, Masoni theorizes the types of media literacy and social as well as technological competencies cultivated through transmedia fan practices. Olivier Servais and Sarah Sepulchre’s article similarly describes a long-term ethnography of fan transmedia activity, including interviews with fans and participant-observation of the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) Game of Thrones Ascent (2013). Servais and Sepulchre find that most people in their interviews are not “committed” fans, but rather casual readers and viewers who follow transmedia extensions sporadically. By focusing on this group, they widen the existing research which often focuses on or assumes a committed audience like the skilful and literate fans discussed by Masoni.Servais and Sepulchre’s results suggest that these viewers may be less likely to seek out all transmedia extensions but readily accept and adapt unexpected elements, such as the media appearances of actors, to add to their serial experiences of the storyworld. In a parallel research protocol observing the Game of Thrones Ascent MMORPG, Servais and Sepulchre report that the most highly-skilled players exhibit few behaviours associated with immersion in the storyworld, but the majority of less-skilled players use their gameplay choices to increase immersion by, for example, choosing a player name that evokes the narrative. As a result, Servais and Sepulchre shed light upon the activities of transmedia audiences who are not necessarily deeply committed to the entire transmedia network, and yet who nonetheless make deliberate choices to collect their preferred narrative elements and increase their own immersion.Two contributors elucidate forms of transmedia that upset the common emphasis on storyworlds with film or TV as the core property or “mothership” (Scott). In her article “Transmedia Storyworlds, Literary Theory, Games,” Joyce Goggin maps the history of intersections between experimental literature and ludology. As a result, she questions the continuing dichotomy between narratology and ludology in game studies to argue for a more broadly transmedia strategy, in which the same storyworld may be simultaneously narrative and ludic. Such a theory can incorporate a great deal of what might otherwise be unproblematically treated as literature, opening up the book to interrogation as an inherently transmedial medium.L.J. Maher similarly examines the serial narrative structures that may take shape in a transmedia storyworld centred on music rather than film or TV. In her article “You Got Spirit, Kid: Transmedial Life-Writing Across Time and Space,” Maher charts the music, graphic novels, and fan interactions that comprise the Coheed and Cambria band storyworld. In particular, Maher emphasizes the importance of autobiography for Coheed and Cambria, which bridges between fictional and non-fictional narrative elements. This interplay remains undertheorized within transmedia scholarship, although a few have begun to explicate the use of transmedia life-writing in an activist context (Cati and Piredda; Van Luyn and Klaebe; Riggs). As a result, Maher widens the scope of existing transmedia theory by more thoroughly connecting fictional and autobiographical elements in the same storyworld and considering how serial transmedia storytelling structures may differ when the core component is music.The final three articles take a more experimental approach that actively challenges the existing boundaries of transmedia scholarship. Catherine Lord’s article, “Serial Nuns: Michelle Williams Gamaker’s The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten as Serial and Trans-serial,” explores the unique storytelling structures of a cluster of independent films that traverse time, space, medium, and gender. Although not a traditional transmedia project, since the network includes a novel and film adaptations and extensions by different directors as well as real-world locations and histories, Lord challenges transmedia theorists to imagine storyworlds that include popular history, independent production, and spatial performances and practices. Lord argues that the main character’s trans identity provides an embodied and theoretical pivot within the storyworld, which invites audiences to accept a position of radical mobility where all fixed expectations about the separation between categories of flora and fauna, centre and periphery, the present and the past, as well as authorized and unauthorized extensions, dissolve.In his article “Non-Fiction Transmedia: Seriality and Forensics in Media Sport,” Markus Stauff extends the concept of serial transmedia storyworlds to sport, focusing on an audience-centred perspective. For the most part, transmedia has been theorized with fictional storyworlds as the prototypical examples. A growing number of scholars, including Arnau Gifreu-Castells and Siobhan O'Flynn, enrich our understanding of transmedia storytelling by exploring non-fiction examples, but these are commonly restricted to the documentary genre (Freeman; Gifreu-Castells, Misek, and Verbruggen; Karlsen; Kerrigan and Velikovsky). Very few scholars comment on the transmedia nature of sport coverage and fandom, and when they do so it is often within the framework of transmedia news coverage (Gambarato, Alzamora, and Tárcia; McClearen; Waysdorf). Stauff’s article thus provides a welcome addition to the existing scholarship in this field by theorizing how sport fans construct a user-centred serial transmedia storyworld by piecing together narrative elements across media sources, embodied experiences, and the serialized ritual of sport seasons. In doing so, he points toward ways in which non-fiction transmedia may significantly differ from fictional storyworlds, but he also enriches our understanding of an audience-centred perspective on the construction of transmedia serial narratives.In his artistic practice, Robert Lawrence may most profoundly stretch the existing parameters of transmedia theory. Lawrence’s article, “Locate, Combine, Contradict, Iterate: Serial Strategies for PostInternet Art,” details his decades-long interrogation of transmedia seriality through performative and participatory forms of art that bridge digital space, studio space, and public space. While theatre and fine arts have often been considered through the theoretical lens of intermediality (Bennett, Boenisch, Kattenbelt, Vandsoe), the nexus of transmedia, seriality, and narrative enables Lawrence to describe the complex, interconnected web of planned and unplanned extensions of his hybrid digital and physical installations, which often last for decades and incorporate a global scope. Lawrence thus takes the strategies of engagement that are perhaps more familiar to transmedia theorists from corporate viral marketing campaigns and turns them toward civic ends (Anyiwo, Bourdaa, Hardy, Hassler-Forest, Scolari, Sokolova, Stork). As such, Lawrence’s artistic practice challenges theorists of transmedia and intermedia to consider the kinds of social and political “interventions” that artists and citizens can stage through the networked possibilities of transmedia expression and how the impact of such projects can be amplified through serial repetition.Together, the whole collection opens new pathways for transmedia scholarship, more deeply explores how transmedia narration complicates understandings of seriality, and constructs an international, interdisciplinary dialogue that brings often isolated conversations into contact. In particular, this issue enriches the existing scholarship on independent, artistic, and non-fiction transmedia, while also proposing some important limitations, exceptions, and critiques to existing scholarship featuring corporate transmedia projects with a commercial, top-down structure and a strong auteur-like creator. These diverse case studies and perspectives enable us to understand more inclusively the structures and social functions of transmedia in the pre-digital age, to theorize more robustly how audiences experience transmedia in the current era of experimentation, and to imagine more broadly a complex future for transmedia seriality wherein professionals, artists, and amateurs all engage in an iterative, inclusive process of creative and civic storytelling, transcending artificial borders imposed by discipline, nationalism, capitalism, and medium.ReferencesAnyiwo, U. Melissa. "It’s Not Television, It’s Transmedia Storytelling: Marketing the ‘Real’World of True Blood." True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic. Ed. Brigid Cherry. New York: IB Tauris, 2012. 157-71.Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. Basingstoke: Macmillian, 1988. 142-48.Bennett, Jill. "Aesthetics of Intermediality." 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"2016 Rio Summer Olympics and the Transmedia Journalism of Planned Events." Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2018. 126-146.Gifreu-Castells, Arnau. "Mapping Trends in Interactive Non-fiction through the Lenses of Interactive Documentary." International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling. Berlin: Springer, 2014.Gifreu-Castells, Arnau, Richard Misek, and Erwin Verbruggen. "Transgressing the Non-fiction Transmedia Narrative." VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture 5.10 (2016): 1-3.Hadas, Leora. "Authorship and Authenticity in the Transmedia Brand: The Case of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD." Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 7.1 (2014).Hardy, Jonathan. "Mapping Commercial Intertextuality: HBO’s True Blood." Convergence 17.1 (2011): 7-17.Hassler-Forest, Dan. "Skimmers, Dippers, and Divers: Campfire’s Steve Coulson on Transmedia Marketing and Audience Participation." 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"Examining Documentary Transmedia Narratives through The Living History of Fort Scratchley Project." Convergence 22.3 (2016): 250-268.Van Luyn, Ariella, and Helen Klaebe. "Making Stories Matter: Using Participatory New Media Storytelling and Evaluation to Serve Marginalized and Regional Communities." Creative Communities: Regional Inclusion and the Arts. Intellect Press, 2015. 157-173.McClearen, Jennifer. "‘We Are All Fighters’: The Transmedia Marketing of Difference in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)." International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 18.Mittell, Jason. "Playing for Plot in the Lost and Portal Franchises." Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 6.1 (2012): 5-13.O'Flynn, Siobhan. "Documentary's Metamorphic Form: Webdoc, Interactive, Transmedia, Participatory and Beyond." Studies in Documentary Film 6.2 (2012): 141-157.Riggs, Nicholas A. "Leaving Cancerland: Following Bud at the End of Life." Storytelling, Self, Society 10.1 (2014): 78-92.Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today, 34.3 (2013): 361-388. <https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2325250>.Scolari, Carlos Alberto. "Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production." International Journal of Communication 3 (2009).Scott, Suzanne. “Who’s Steering the Mothership: The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia Storytelling.” The Participatory Cultures Handbook. Eds. Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Henderson. New York: Routledge, 2013. 43-53.Sokolova, Natalia. "Co-opting Transmedia Consumers: User Content as Entertainment or ‘Free Labour’? The Cases of STALKER. and Metro 2033." Europe-Asia Studies 64.8 (2012): 1565-1583.Stork, Matthias. "The Cultural Economics of Performance Space: Negotiating Fan, Labor, and Marketing Practice in Glee's Transmedia Geography." Transformative Works & Cultures 15 (2014).Waysdorf, Abby. "My Football Fandoms, Performance, and Place." Transformative Works & Cultures 18 (2015).Vandsoe, Anette. "Listening to the World. Sound, Media and Intermediality in Contemporary Sound Art." SoundEffects – An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience 1.1 (2011): 67-81.

Connecting I’ve moved house on the weekend, closer to the centre of an Australian capital city. I had recently signed up for broadband, with a major Australian Internet company (my first contact, cf. Turner). Now I am the proud owner of a larger modem than I have ever owned: a white cable modem. I gaze out into our new street: two thick black cables cosseted in silver wire. I am relieved. My new home is located in one of those streets, double-cabled by Telstra and Optus in the data-rush of the mid-1990s. Otherwise, I’d be moth-balling the cable modem, and the thrill of my data percolating down coaxial cable. And it would be off to the computer supermarket to buy an ASDL modem, then to pick a provider, to squeeze some twenty-first century connectivity out of old copper (the phone network our grandparents and great-grandparents built). If I still lived in the country, or the outskirts of the city, or anywhere else more than four kilometres from the phone exchange, and somewhere that cable pay TV will never reach, it would be a dish for me — satellite. Our digital lives are premised upon infrastructure, the networks through which we shape what we do, fashion the meanings of our customs and practices, and exchange signs with others. Infrastructure is not simply the material or the technical (Lamberton), but it is the dense, fibrous knotting together of social visions, cultural resources, individual desires, and connections. No more can one easily discern between ‘society’ and ‘technology’, ‘carriage’ and ‘content’, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, or ‘infrastructure’ and ‘applications’ (or ‘services’ or ‘content’). To understand telecommunications in action, or the vectors of fibre, we need to consider the long and heterogeneous list of links among different human and non-human actors — the long networks, to take Bruno Latour’s evocative concept, that confect our broadband networks (Latour). The co-ordinates of our infrastructure still build on a century-long history of telecommunications networks, on the nineteenth-century centrality of telegraphy preceding this, and on the histories of the public and private so inscribed. Yet we are in the midst of a long, slow dismantling of the posts-telegraph-telephone (PTT) model of the monopoly carrier for each nation that dominated the twentieth century, with its deep colonial foundations. Instead our New World Information and Communication Order is not the decolonising UNESCO vision of the late 1970s and early 1980s (MacBride, Maitland). Rather it is the neoliberal, free trade, market access model, its symbol the 1984 US judicial decision to require the break-up of AT&T and the UK legislation in the same year that underpinned the Thatcherite twin move to privatize British Telecom and introduce telecommunications competition. Between 1984 and 1999, 110 telecommunications companies were privatized, and the ‘acquisition of privatized PTOs [public telecommunications operators] by European and American operators does follow colonial lines’ (Winseck 396; see also Mody, Bauer & Straubhaar). The competitive market has now been uneasily installed as the paradigm for convergent communications networks, not least with the World Trade Organisation’s 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services and Annex on Telecommunications. As the citizen is recast as consumer and customer (Goggin, ‘Citizens and Beyond’), we rethink our cultural and political axioms as well as the axes that orient our understandings in this area. Information might travel close to the speed of light, and we might fantasise about optical fibre to the home (or pillow), but our terrain, our band where the struggle lies today, is narrower than we wish. Begging for broadband, it seems, is a long way from warchalking for WiFi. Policy Circuits The dreary everyday business of getting connected plugs the individual netizen into a tangled mess of policy circuits, as much as tricky network negotiations. Broadband in mid-2003 in Australia is a curious chimera, welded together from a patchwork of technologies, old and newer communications industries, emerging economies and patterns of use. Broadband conjures up grander visions, however, of communication and cultural cornucopia. Broadband is high-speed, high-bandwidth, ‘always-on’, networked communications. People can send and receive video, engage in multimedia exchanges of all sorts, make the most of online education, realise the vision of home-based work and trading, have access to telemedicine, and entertainment. Broadband really entered the lexicon with the mass takeup of the Internet in the early to mid-1990s, and with the debates about something called the ‘information superhighway’. The rise of the Internet, the deregulation of telecommunications, and the involuted convergence of communications and media technologies saw broadband positioned at the centre of policy debates nearly a decade ago. In 1993-1994, Australia had its Broadband Services Expert Group (BSEG), established by the then Labor government. The BSEG was charged with inquiring into ‘issues relating to the delivery of broadband services to homes, schools and businesses’. Stung by criticisms of elite composition (a narrow membership, with only one woman among its twelve members, and no consumer or citizen group representation), the BSEG was prompted into wider public discussion and consultation (Goggin & Newell). The then Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE), since transmogrified into the Communications Research Unit of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), conducted its large-scale Communications Futures Project (BTCE and Luck). The BSEG Final report posed the question starkly: As a society we have choices to make. If we ignore the opportunities we run the risk of being left behind as other countries introduce new services and make themselves more competitive: we will become consumers of other countries’ content, culture and technologies rather than our own. Or we could adopt new technologies at any cost…This report puts forward a different approach, one based on developing a new, user-oriented strategy for communications. The emphasis will be on communication among people... (BSEG v) The BSEG proposed a ‘National Strategy for New Communications Networks’ based on three aspects: education and community access, industry development, and the role of government (BSEG x). Ironically, while the nation, or at least its policy elites, pondered the weighty question of broadband, Australia’s two largest telcos were doing it. The commercial decision of Telstra/Foxtel and Optus Vision, and their various television partners, was to nail their colours (black) to the mast, or rather telegraph pole, and to lay cable in the major capital cities. In fact, they duplicated the infrastructure in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne, then deciding it would not be profitable to cable up even regional centres, let alone small country towns or settlements. As Terry Flew and Christina Spurgeon observe: This wasteful duplication contrasted with many other parts of the country that would never have access to this infrastructure, or to the social and economic benefits that it was perceived to deliver. (Flew & Spurgeon 72) The implications of this decision for Australia’s telecommunications and television were profound, but there was little, if any, public input into this. Then Minister Michael Lee was very proud of his anti-siphoning list of programs, such as national sporting events, that would remain on free-to-air television rather than screen on pay, but was unwilling, or unable, to develop policy on broadband and pay TV cable infrastructure (on the ironies of Australia’s television history, see Given’s masterly account). During this period also, it may be remembered, Australia’s Internet was being passed into private hands, with the tendering out of AARNET (see Spurgeon for discussion). No such national strategy on broadband really emerged in the intervening years, nor has the market provided integrated, accessible broadband services. In 1997, landmark telecommunications legislation was enacted that provided a comprehensive framework for competition in telecommunications, as well as consolidating and extending consumer protection, universal service, customer service standards, and other reforms (CLC). Carrier and reseller competition had commenced in 1991, and the 1997 legislation gave it further impetus. Effective competition is now well established in long distance telephone markets, and in mobiles. Rivalrous competition exists in the market for local-call services, though viable alternatives to Telstra’s dominance are still few (Fels). Broadband too is an area where there is symbolic rivalry rather than effective competition. This is most visible in advertised ADSL offerings in large cities, yet most of the infrastructure for these services is comprised by Telstra’s copper, fixed-line network. Facilities-based duopoly competition exists principally where Telstra/Foxtel and Optus cable networks have been laid, though there are quite a number of ventures underway by regional telcos, power companies, and, most substantial perhaps, the ACT government’s TransACT broadband network. Policymakers and industry have been greatly concerned about what they see as slow takeup of broadband, compared to other countries, and by barriers to broadband competition and access to ‘bottleneck’ facilities (such as Telstra or Optus’s networks) by potential competitors. The government has alternated between trying to talk up broadband benefits and rates of take up and recognising the real difficulties Australia faces as a large country with a relative small and dispersed population. In March 2003, Minister Alston directed the ACCC to implement new monitoring and reporting arrangements on competition in the broadband industry. A key site for discussion of these matters has been the competition policy institution, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and its various inquiries, reports, and considerations (consult ACCC’s telecommunications homepage at http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm). Another key site has been the Productivity Commission (http://www.pc.gov.au), while a third is the National Office on the Information Economy (NOIE - http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/access/access/broadband1.htm). Others have questioned whether even the most perfectly competitive market in broadband will actually provide access to citizens and consumers. A great deal of work on this issue has been undertaken by DCITA, NOIE, the regulators, and industry bodies, not to mention consumer and public interest groups. Since 1997, there have been a number of governmental inquiries undertaken or in progress concerning the takeup of broadband and networked new media (for example, a House of Representatives Wireless Broadband Inquiry), as well as important inquiries into the still most strategically important of Australia’s companies in this area, Telstra. Much of this effort on an ersatz broadband policy has been piecemeal and fragmented. There are fundamental difficulties with the large size of the Australian continent and its harsh terrain, the small size of the Australian market, the number of providers, and the dominant position effectively still held by Telstra, as well as Singtel Optus (Optus’s previous overseas investors included Cable & Wireless and Bell South), and the larger telecommunications and Internet companies (such as Ozemail). Many consumers living in metropolitan Australia still face real difficulties in realising the slogan ‘bandwidth for all’, but the situation in parts of rural Australia is far worse. Satellite ‘broadband’ solutions are available, through Telstra Countrywide or other providers, but these offer limited two-way interactivity. Data can be received at reasonable speeds (though at far lower data rates than how ‘broadband’ used to be defined), but can only be sent at far slower rates (Goggin, Rural Communities Online). The cultural implications of these digital constraints may well be considerable. Computer gamers, for instance, are frustrated by slow return paths. In this light, the final report of the January 2003 Broadband Advisory Group (BAG) is very timely. The BAG report opens with a broadband rhapsody: Broadband communications technologies can deliver substantial economic and social benefits to Australia…As well as producing productivity gains in traditional and new industries, advanced connectivity can enrich community life, particularly in rural and regional areas. It provides the basis for integration of remote communities into national economic, cultural and social life. (BAG 1, 7) Its prescriptions include: Australia will be a world leader in the availability and effective use of broadband...and to capture the economic and social benefits of broadband connectivity...Broadband should be available to all Australians at fair and reasonable prices…Market arrangements should be pro-competitive and encourage investment...The Government should adopt a National Broadband Strategy (BAG 1) And, like its predecessor nine years earlier, the BAG report does make reference to a national broadband strategy aiming to maximise “choice in work and recreation activities available to all Australians independent of location, background, age or interests” (17). However, the idea of a national broadband strategy is not something the BAG really comes to grips with. The final report is keen on encouraging broadband adoption, but not explicit on how barriers to broadband can be addressed. Perhaps this is not surprising given that the membership of the BAG, dominated by representatives of large corporations and senior bureaucrats was even less representative than its BSEG predecessor. Some months after the BAG report, the Federal government did declare a broadband strategy. It did so, intriguingly enough, under the rubric of its response to the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry report (Estens), the second inquiry responsible for reassuring citizens nervous about the full-privatisation of Telstra (the first inquiry being Besley). The government’s grand $142.8 million National Broadband Strategy focusses on the ‘broadband needs of regional Australians, in partnership with all levels of government’ (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’). Among other things, the government claims that the Strategy will result in “improved outcomes in terms of services and prices for regional broadband access; [and] the development of national broadband infrastructure assets.” (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’) At the same time, the government announced an overall response to the Estens Inquiry, with specific safeguards for Telstra’s role in regional communications — a preliminary to the full Telstra sale (Alston, ‘Future Proofing’). Less publicised was the government’s further initiative in indigenous telecommunications, complementing its Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities (DCITA). Indigenous people, it can be argued, were never really contemplated as citizens with the ken of the universal service policy taken to underpin the twentieth-century government monopoly PTT project. In Australia during the deregulatory and re-regulatory 1990s, there was a great reluctance on the part of Labor and Coalition Federal governments, Telstra and other industry participants, even to research issues of access to and use of telecommunications by indigenous communicators. Telstra, and to a lesser extent Optus (who had purchased AUSSAT as part of their licence arrangements), shrouded the issue of indigenous communications in mystery that policymakers were very reluctant to uncover, let alone systematically address. Then regulator, the Australian Telecommunications Authority (AUSTEL), had raised grave concerns about indigenous telecommunications access in its 1991 Rural Communications inquiry. However, there was no government consideration of, nor research upon, these issues until Alston commissioned a study in 2001 — the basis for the TAPRIC strategy (DCITA). The elision of indigenous telecommunications from mainstream industry and government policy is all the more puzzling, if one considers the extraordinarily varied and significant experiments by indigenous Australians in telecommunications and Internet (not least in the early work of the Tanami community, made famous in media and cultural studies by the writings of anthropologist Eric Michaels). While the government’s mid-2003 moves on a ‘National Broadband Strategy’ attend to some details of the broadband predicament, they fall well short of an integrated framework that grasps the shortcomings of the neoliberal communications model. The funding offered is a token amount. The view from the seat of government is a glance from the rear-view mirror: taking a snapshot of rural communications in the years 2000-2002 and projecting this tableau into a safety-net ‘future proofing’ for the inevitable turning away of a fully-privately-owned Telstra from its previously universal, ‘carrier of last resort’ responsibilities. In this aetiolated, residualist policy gaze, citizens remain constructed as consumers in a very narrow sense in this incremental, quietist version of state securing of market arrangements. What is missing is any more expansive notion of citizens, their varied needs, expectations, uses, and cultural imaginings of ‘always on’ broadband networks. Hybrid Networks “Most people on earth will eventually have access to networks that are all switched, interactive, and broadband”, wrote Frances Cairncross in 1998. ‘Eventually’ is a very appropriate word to describe the parlous state of broadband technology implementation. Broadband is in a slow state of evolution and invention. The story of broadband so far underscores the predicament for Australian access to bandwidth, when we lack any comprehensive, integrated, effective, and fair policy in communications and information technology. We have only begun to experiment with broadband technologies and understand their evolving uses, cultural forms, and the sense in which they rework us as subjects. Our communications networks are not superhighways, to invoke an enduring artefact from an older technology. Nor any longer are they a single ‘public’ switched telecommunications network, like those presided over by the post-telegraph-telephone monopolies of old. Like roads themselves, or the nascent postal system of the sixteenth century, broadband is a patchwork quilt. The ‘fibre’ of our communications networks is hybrid. To be sure, powerful corporations dominate, like the Tassis or Taxis who served as postmasters to the Habsburg emperors (Briggs & Burke 25). Activating broadband today provides a perspective on the path dependency of technology history, and how we can open up new threads of a communications fabric. Our options for transforming our multitudinous networked lives emerge as much from everyday tactics and strategies as they do from grander schemes and unifying policies. We may care to reflect on the waning potential for nation-building technology, in the wake of globalisation. We no longer gather our imagined community around a Community Telephone Plan as it was called in 1960 (Barr, Moyal, and PMG). Yet we do require national and international strategies to get and stay connected (Barr), ideas and funding that concretely address the wider dimensions of access and use. We do need to debate the respective roles of Telstra, the state, community initiatives, and industry competition in fair telecommunications futures. Networks have global reach and require global and national integration. Here vision, co-ordination, and resources are urgently required for our commonweal and moral fibre. To feel the width of the band we desire, we need to plug into and activate the policy circuits. Thanks to Grayson Cooke, Patrick Lichty, Ned Rossiter, John Pace, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. Works Cited Alston, Richard. ‘ “Future Proofing” Regional Communications.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115485,00.php> —. ‘A National Broadband Strategy.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115486,00.php>. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Broadband Services Report March 2003. Canberra: ACCC, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm>. —. Emerging Market Structures in the Communications Sector. Canberra: ACCC, 2003. 15 July 2003 <http://www.accc.gov.au/pubs/publications/utilities/telecommu... ...nications/Emerg_mar_struc.doc>. Barr, Trevor. new media.com: The Changing Face of Australia’s Media and Telecommunications. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Besley, Tim (Telecommunications Service Inquiry). Connecting Australia: Telecommunications Service Inquiry. Canberra: Department of Information, Communications and the Arts, 2000. 17 July 2003 <http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/final_report.php>. Briggs, Asa, and Burke, Peter. A Social History of the Internet: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Broadband Advisory Group. Australia’s Broadband Connectivity: The Broadband Advisory Group’s Report to Government. Melbourne: National Office on the Information Economy, 2003. 15 July 2003 <http://www.noie.gov.au/publications/NOIE/BAG/report/index.htm>. Broadband Services Expert Group. Networking Australia’s Future: Final Report. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service (AGPS), 1994. Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE). Communications Futures Final Project. Canberra: AGPS, 1994. Cairncross, Frances. The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives. London: Orion Business Books, 1997. Communications Law Centre (CLC). Australian Telecommunications Regulation: The Communications Law Centre Guide. 2nd edition. Sydney: Communications Law Centre, University of NSW, 2001. Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA). Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities: Report on the Strategic Study for Improving Telecommunications in Remote Indigenous Communities. Canberra: DCITA, 2002. Estens, D. Connecting Regional Australia: The Report of the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry. Canberra: DCITA, 2002. <http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/rti-report.php>, accessed 17 July 2003. Fels, Alan. ‘Competition in Telecommunications’, speech to Australian Telecommunications Users Group 19th Annual Conference. 6 March, 2003, Sydney. <http://www.accc.gov.au/speeches/2003/Fels_ATUG_6March03.doc>, accessed 15 July 2003. Flew, Terry, and Spurgeon, Christina. ‘Television After Broadcasting’. In The Australian TV Book. Ed. Graeme Turner and Stuart Cunningham. Allen & Unwin, Sydney. 69-85. 2000. Given, Jock. Turning Off the Television. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Goggin, Gerard. ‘Citizens and Beyond: Universal service in the Twilight of the Nation-State.’ In All Connected?: Universal Service in Telecommunications, ed. Bruce Langtry. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1998. 49-77 —. Rural Communities Online: Networking to link Consumers to Providers. Melbourne: Telstra Consumer Consultative Council, 2003. Goggin, Gerard, and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (HoR). Connecting Australia!: Wireless Broadband. Report of Inquiry into Wireless Broadband Technologies. Canberra: Parliament House, 2002. <http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/cita/Wbt/report.htm>, accessed 17 July 2003. Lamberton, Don. ‘A Telecommunications Infrastructure is Not an Information Infrastructure’. Prometheus: Journal of Issues in Technological Change, Innovation, Information Economics, Communication and Science Policy 14 (1996): 31-38. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Luck, David. ‘Revisiting the Future: Assessing the 1994 BTCE communications futures project.’ Media International Australia 96 (2000): 109-119. MacBride, Sean (Chair of International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems). Many Voices, One World: Towards a New More Just and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order. Paris: Kegan Page, London. UNESCO, 1980. Maitland Commission (Independent Commission on Worldwide Telecommunications Development). The Missing Link. Geneva: International Telecommunications Union, 1985. Michaels, Eric. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Mody, Bella, Bauer, Johannes M., and Straubhaar, Joseph D., eds. Telecommunications Politics: Ownership and Control of the Information Highway in Developing Countries. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995. Moyal, Ann. Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1984. Post-Master General’s Department (PMG). Community Telephone Plan for Australia. Melbourne: PMG, 1960. Productivity Commission (PC). Telecommunications Competition Regulation: Inquiry Report. Report No. 16. Melbourne: Productivity Commission, 2001. <http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/telecommunications/finalreport/>, accessed 17 July 2003. Spurgeon, Christina. ‘National Culture, Communications and the Information Economy.’ Media International Australia 87 (1998): 23-34. Turner, Graeme. ‘First Contact: coming to terms with the cable guy.’ UTS Review 3 (1997): 109-21. Winseck, Dwayne. ‘Wired Cities and Transnational Communications: New Forms of Governance for Telecommunications and the New Media’. In The Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, ed. Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone. London: Sage, 2002. 393-409. World Trade Organisation. General Agreement on Trade in Services: Annex on Telecommunications. Geneva: World Trade Organisation, 1994. 17 July 2003 <http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/12-tel_e.htm>. —. Fourth protocol to the General Agreement on Trade in Services. Geneva: World Trade Organisation. 17 July 2003 <http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/4prote_e.htm>. Links http://www.accc.gov.au/pubs/publications/utilities/telecommunications/Emerg_mar_struc.doc http://www.accc.gov.au/speeches/2003/Fels_ATUG_6March03.doc http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/cita/Wbt/report.htm http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115485,00.html http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115486,00.html http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/access/access/broadband1.htm http://www.noie.gov.au/publications/NOIE/BAG/report/index.htm http://www.pc.gov.au http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/telecommunications/finalreport/ http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/final_report.html http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/rti-report.html http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/12-tel_e.htm http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/4prote_e.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... 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In Australian universities, many courses provide lecture notes as a standard learning resource; however, captions and transcripts of these lectures are not usually provided unless requested by a student through dedicated disability support officers (Worthington). As a result, to date their use has been limited. However, while the requirement for—and benefits of—captioned online lectures for students with disabilities is widely recognised, these captions or transcripts might also represent further opportunity for a personalised approach to learning for the mainstream student population (Podszebka et al.; Griffin). This article reports findings of research assessing the usefulness of captioned recorded lectures as a mainstream learning tool to determine their usefulness in enhancing inclusivity and learning outcomes for the disabled, international, and broader student population.Literature ReviewCaptions have been found to be of benefit for a number of different groups considered at-risk. These include people who are D/deaf or hard of hearing, those with other learning difficulties, and those from a non-English speaking background (NESB).For students who are D/deaf or hard of hearing, captions play a vital role in providing access to otherwise inaccessible audio content. Captions have been found to be superior to sign language interpreters, note takers, and lip reading (Stinson et al.; Maiorana-Basas and Pagliaro; Marschark et al.).The use of captions for students with a range of cognitive disabilities has also been shown to help with student comprehension of video-based instruction in a higher education context (Evmenova; Evmenova and Behrmann). This includes students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (Knight et al.; Reagon et al.) and students with dyslexia (Alty et al.; Beacham and Alty). While, anecdotally, captions are also seen as of benefit for students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Kent et al.), studies have proved inconclusive (Lewis and Brown).The third group of at-risk students identified as benefiting from captioning recorded lecture content are those from a NESB. The use of captions has been shown to increase vocabulary learning (Montero Perez, Peters, Clarebout, and Desmet; Montero Perez, Van Den Noortgate, and Desmet) and to assist with comprehension of presenters with accents or rapid speech (Borgaonkar, 2013).In addition to these three main groups of at-risk students, captions have also been demonstrated to increase the learning outcomes for older students (Pachman and Ke, 2012; Schmidt and Haydu, 1992). Captions also have demonstrable benefits for the broader student cohort beyond these at-risk groups (Podszebka et al.; Griffin). For example, a recent study found that the broader student population utilised lecture captions and transcripts in order to focus, retain information, and overcome poor audio quality (Linder). However, the same study revealed that students were largely unaware about the availability of captions and transcripts, nor how to access them.MethodologyIn 2016 students in the Curtin University unit Web Communications (an introductory unit for the Internet Communications major) and its complementary first year unit, Internet and Everyday Life, along with a second year unit, Web Media, were provided with access to closed captions for their online recorded lectures. The latter unit was added to the study serendipitously when its lectures were required to be captioned through a request from the Curtin Disability Office during the study period. Recordings and captions were created using the existing captioning system available through Curtin’s lecture recording platform—Echo360. As well as providing a written caption of what is being said during the lectures, this system also offers a sophisticated search functionality, as well as access to a total transcript of the lecture. The students were provided access to an online training module, developed specifically for this study, to explain the use of this system.Enrolled Curtin students, both on-campus and online, Open Universities Australia (OUA) students studying through Curtin online, teaching staff, and disability officers were then invited to participate in a survey and interviews. The study sought to gain insights into students’ use of both recorded lectures and captioned video at the time of the survey, and their anticipated future usage of these services (see Kent et al.).A total of 50 students—of 539 enrolled across the different instances of the three units—completed the survey. In addition, five follow-up interviews with students, teaching staff, and disability support staff were conducted once the surveys had been completed. Staff interviewed included tutors and unit coordinators who taught and supervised units in which the lecture captions were provided. The interviews assessed the awareness, use, and perceived validity of the captions system in the context of both learning and teaching.ResultsA number of different questions were asked regarding students’ demographics, their engagement with online unit materials, including recorded lectures, their awareness of Echo360’s lecture captions, as well as its additional features, their perceived value of online captions for their studies, and the future significance of captions in a university context.Of the 50 participants in the survey, only six identified themselves as a person with a disability—almost 90 per cent did not identify as disabled. Additionally, 45 of the 50 participants identified English as their primary language. Only one student identified as a person with both a disability and coming from a NESB.Engagement with Online Unit Materials and Recorded LecturesThe survey results provide insight into the ways in which participants interact with the Echo360 lecture system. Over 90 per cent of students had accessed the recorded lectures via the Echo360 system. While this might not seem notable at first, given such materials are essential elements of the units surveyed, the level of repeated engagement seen in these results is important because it indicates the extent to which students are revising the same material multiple times—a practice that captions are designed to facilitate and assist. For instance, one lecture was recorded per week for each unit surveyed, and most respondents (70 per cent) were viewing these lectures at least once or twice a week, while 10 per cent were viewing the lectures multiple times a week. Over half of the students surveyed reported viewing the same lecture more than once. Out these participants, 19 (or 73 per cent) had viewed a lecture twice and 23 per cent had viewed it three times or more. This illustrates that frequent revision is taking place, as students watch the same lecture repeatedly to absorb and clarify its contents. This frequency of repeated engagement with recorded unit materials—lectures in particular—indicates that students were making online engagement and revision a key element of their learning process.Awareness of the Echo360 Lecture Captions and Additional FeaturesHowever, while students were highly engaged with both the online learning material and the recorded lectures, there was less awareness of the availability of the captioning system—only 34 per cent of students indicated they were aware of having access to captions. The survey also asked students whether or not they had used additional features of the Echo360 captioning system such as the search function and downloadable lecture transcripts. Survey results confirm that these features were being used; however, responses indicated that only a minority of students using the captions system used these features, with 28 per cent using the search function and 33 per cent making use of the transcripts. These results can be seen as an indication that additional features were useful for revision, albeit for the minority of students who used them. A Curtin disability advisor noted in their interview that:transcripts are particularly useful in addition to captions as they allow the user to quickly skim the material rather than sit through a whole lecture. Transcripts also allow translation into other languages, highlighting text and other features that make the content more accessible.Teaching staff were positive about these features and suggested that providing transcripts saved time for tutors who are often approached to provide these to individual students:I typically receive requests for lecture transcripts at the commencement of each study period. In SP3 [during this study] I did not receive any requests.I feel that lecture transcripts would be particularly useful as this is the most common request I receive from students, especially those with disabilities.I think transcripts and keyword searching would likely be useful to many students who access lectures through recordings (or who access recordings even after attending the lecture in person).However, the one student who was interviewed preferred the keyword search feature, although they expressed interest in transcripts as well:I used the captions keyword search. I think I would like to use the lecture transcript as well but I did not use that in this unit.In summary, while not all students made use of Echo360’s additional features for captions, those who did access them did so frequently, indicating that these are potentially useful learning tools.Value of CaptionsOf the students who were aware of the captions, 63 per cent found them useful for engaging with the lecture material. According to one of the students:[captions] made a big difference to me in terms on understanding and retaining what was said in the lectures. I am not sure that many students would realise this unless they actually used the captions…I found it much easier to follow what was being said in the recorded lectures and I also found that they helped stay focussed and not become distracted from the lecture.It is notable that the improvements described above do not involve assistance with hearing or language issues, but the extent to which captions improve a more general learning experience. This participant identified themselves as a native English speaker with no disabilities, yet the captions still made a “big difference” in their ability to follow, understand, focus on, and retain information drawn from the lectures.However, while over 60 per cent of students who used the captions reported they found them useful, it was difficult to get more detailed feedback on precisely how and why. Only 52.6 per cent reported actually using them when accessing the lectures, and a relatively small number reported taking advantage of the search and transcripts features available through the Echo360 system. Exactly how they were being used and what role they play in student learning is therefore an area to pursue in future research, as it will assist in breaking down the benefits of captions for all learners.Teaching staff also reported the difficulty in assessing the full value of captions—one teacher interviewed explained that the impact of captions was hard to monitor quantitatively during regular teaching:it is difficult enough to track who listens to lectures at all, let alone who might be using the captions, or have found these helpful. I would like to think that not only those with hearing impairments, but also ESL students and even people who find listening to and taking in the recording difficult for other reasons, might have benefitted.Some teaching staff, however, did note positive feedback from students:one student has given me positive feedback via comments on the [discussion board].one has reported that it helps with retention and with times when speech is soft or garbled. I suspect it helps mediate my accent and pitch!While 60 per cent claiming captions were useful is a solid majority, it is notable that some participants skipped this question. As discussed above, survey answers indicate that this was because these 37 students did not think they had access to captions in their units.Future SignificanceOverall, these results indicate that while captions can provide a benefit to students’ engagement with online lecture learning material, there is a need for more direct and ongoing information sharing to ensure both students and teaching staff are fully aware of captions and how to use them. Technical issues—such as the time delay in captions being uploaded—potentially dissuade students from using this facility, so improving the speed and reliability of this tool could increase the number of learners keen to use it. All staff interviewed agreed that implementing captions for all lectures would be beneficial for everyone:any technology that can assist in making lectures more accessible is useful, particularly in OUA [online] courses.it would be a good example of Universal Design as it would make the lecture content more accessible for students with disabilities as well as students with other equity needs.YES—it benefits all students. I personally find that I understand and my attention is held more by captioned content.it certainly makes my role easier as it allows effective access to recorded lectures. Captioning allows full access as every word is accessible as opposed to note taking which is not verbatim.DiscussionThe results of this research indicate that captions—and their additional features—available through the Echo360 captions system are an aid to student learning. However, there are significant challenges to be addressed to make students aware of these features and their potential benefits.This study has shown that in a cohort of primarily English speaking students without disabilities, over 60 per cent found captions a useful addition to recorded lectures. This suggests that the implementation of captions for all recorded lectures would have widespread benefits for all learners, not only those with hearing or language difficulties. However, at present, only “eligible” students who approach the disability office would be considered for this service, usually students who are D/deaf or hard of hearing. Yet it can be argued that these benefits—and challenges—could also extend to other groups that are might traditionally have been seen to benefit from the use of captions such as students with other disabilities or those from a NESB.However, again, a lack of awareness of the training module meant that this potential cohort did not benefit from this trial. In this study, none of the students who identified as having a disability or coming from a NESB indicated that they had access to the training module. Further, five of the six students with disabilities reported that they did not have access to the captions system and, similarly, only two of the five NESB students. Despite these low numbers, all the students who were part of these two groups and who did access the captions system did find it useful.It can therefore be seen that the main challenge for teaching staff is to ensure all students are aware of captions and can access them easily. One option for reducing the need for training or further instructions might be having captions always ON by default. This means students could incorporate them into their study experience without having to take direct action or, equally, could simply choose to switch them off.There are also a few potential teething issues with implementing captions universally that need to be noted, as staff expressed some concerns regarding how this might alter the teaching and learning experience. For example:because the captioning is once-off, it means I can’t re-record the lectures where there was a failure in technology as the new versions would not be captioned.a bit cautious about the transcript as there may be problems with students copying that content and also with not viewing the lectures thinking the transcripts are sufficient.Despite these concerns, the survey results and interviews support the previous findings showing that lecture captions have the potential to benefit all learners, enhancing each student’s existing capabilities. As one staff member put it:in the main I just feel [captions are] important for accessibility and equity in general. Why should people have to request captions? Recorded lecture content should be available to all students, in whatever way they find it most easy (or possible) to engage.Follow-up from students at the end of the study further supported this. As one student noted in an email at the start of 2017:hi all, in one of my units last semester we were lucky enough to have captions on the recorded lectures. They were immensely helpful for a number of reasons. I really hope they might become available to us in this unit.ConclusionsWhen this project set out to investigate the ways diverse groups of students could utilise captioned lectures if they were offered it as a mainstream learning tool rather than a feature only disabled students could request, existing research suggested that many accommodations designed to assist students with disabilities actually benefit the entire cohort. The results of the survey confirmed this was also the case for captioning.However, currently, lecture captions are typically utilised in Australian higher education settings—including Curtin—only as an assistive technology for students with disabilities, particularly students who are D/deaf or hard of hearing. In these circumstances, the student must undertake a lengthy process months in advance to ensure timely access to essential captioned material. Mainstreaming the provision of captions and transcripts for online lectures would greatly increase the accessibility of online learning—removing these barriers allows education providers to harness the broad potential of captioning technology. Indeed, ensuring that captions were available “by default” would benefit the educational outcomes and self-determination of the wide range of students who could benefit from this technology.Lecture captioning and transcription is increasingly cost-effective, given technological developments in speech-to-text or automatic speech recognition software, and the increasing re-use of content across different iterations of a unit in online higher education courses. At the same time, international trends in online education—not least the rapidly evolving interpretations of international legislation—provide new incentives for educational providers to begin addressing accessibility shortcomings by incorporating captions and transcripts into the basic materials of a course.Finally, an understanding of the diverse benefits of lecture captions and transcripts needs to be shared widely amongst higher education providers, researchers, teaching staff, and students to ensure the potential of this technology is accessed and used effectively. Understanding who can benefit from captions, and how they benefit, is a necessary step in encouraging greater use of such technology, and thereby enhancing students’ learning opportunities.AcknowledgementsThis research was funded by the Curtin University Teaching Excellence Development Fund. Natalie Latter and Kai-ti Kao provided vital research assistance. 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Introduction Almost all industries in Australia today have adopted digital media in some way. However, uses in large scale activities such as mining may seem to be different from others. This article looks at mining practices with a media studies approach, and concludes that, just as many other industries, mining and media have converged. Many Australian mine sites are adopting new media for communication and control to manage communication, explore for ore bodies, simulate forces, automate drilling, keep records, and make transport and command robotic. Beyond sharing similar digital devices for communication and computation, new media in mining employ characteristic digital media operations, such as numerical operation, automation and managed variability. This article examines the implications of finding that some of the most material practices have become mediated by new media. Mining has become increasingly mediated through new media technologies similar to GPS, visualisation, game remote operation, similar to those adopted in consumer home and mobile digital media. The growing and diversified adoption of digital media championed by companies like Rio Tinto aims not only ‘improve’ mining, but to change it. Through remediating practices of digital mining, new media have become integral powerful tools in prospective, real time and analytical environments. This paper draws on two well-known case studies of mines in the Pilbara and Western NSW. These have been documented in press releases and media reports as representing changes in media and mining. First, the West Angelas mines in the Pilbara is an open cut iron ore mine introducing automation and remote operation. This mine is located in the remote Pilbara, and is notable for being operated remotely from a control centre 2000km away, near Perth Airport, WA. A growing fleet of Komatsu 930E haul trucks, which can drive autonomously, traverses the site. Fitted with radars, lasers and GPS, these enormous vehicles navigate through the open pit mine with no direct human control. Introducing these innovations to mine sites become more viable after iron ore mining became increasingly profitable in the mid-2000s. A boom in steel building in China drove unprecedented demand. This growing income coincided with a change in public rhetoric from companies like Rio Tinto. They pointed towards substantial investments in research, infrastructure, and accelerated introduction of new media technologies into mining practices. Rio Tinto trademarked the term ‘Mine of the future’ (US Federal News Service 1), and publicised their ambitious project for renewal of mining practice, including digital media. More recently, prices have been more volatile. The second case study site is a copper and gold underground mine at Northparkes in Western NSW. Northparkes uses substantial sensing and control, as well as hybrid autonomous and remote operated vehicles. The use of digital media begins with prospecting, and through to logistics of transportation. Engineers place explosives in optimal positions using computer modelling of the underground rock formations. They make heavy use of software to coordinate layer-by-layer use of explosives in this advanced ‘box cut’ mine. After explosives disrupt the rock layer a kilometre underground, another specialised vehicle collects and carries the ore to the surface. The Sandvik loader-hauler-dumper (LHD) can be driven conventionally by a driver, but it can also travel autonomously in and out of the mine without a direct operator. Once it reaches a collection point, where the broken up ore has accumulated, a user of the surface can change the media mode to telepresence. The human operator then takes control using something like a games controller and multiple screens. The remote operator controls the LHD to fill the scoop with ore. The fully-loaded LHD backs up, and returns autonomously using laser senses to follow a trail to the next drop off point. The LHD has become a powerful mediator, reconfiguring technical, material and social practices throughout the mine. The Meanings of Mining and Media Are Converging Until recently, mining and media typically operated ontologically separately. The media, such as newspapers and television, often tell stories about mining, following regular narrative scripts. There are controversies and conflicts, narratives of ecological crises, and the economics of national benefit. There are heroic and tragic stories such as the Beaconsfield mine collapse (Clark). There are new industry policies (Middelbeek), which are politically fraught because of the lobbying power of miners. Almost completely separately, workers in mines were consumers of media, from news to entertainment. These media practices, while important in their own right, tell nothing of the approaching changes in many other sectors of work and everyday life. It is somewhat unusual for a media studies scholar to study mine sites. Mine sites are most commonly studied by Engineering (Bellamy & Pravica), Business and labour and cultural histories (McDonald, Mayes & Pini). Until recently, media scholarship on mining has related to media institutions, such as newspapers, broadcasters and websites, and their audiences. As digital media have proliferated, the phenomena that can be considered as media phenomena has changed. This article, pointing to the growing roles of media technologies, observes the growing importance that media, in these terms, have in the rapidly changing domain of mining. Another meaning for ‘media’ studies, from cybernetics, is that a medium is any technology that translates perception, makes interpretations, and performs expressions. This meaning is more abstract, operating with a broader definition of media — not only those institutionalised as newspapers or radio stations. It is well known that computer-based media have become ubiquitous in culture. This is true in particular within the mining company’s higher ranks. Rio Tinto’s ambitious 2010 ‘Mine of the Future’ (Fisher & Schnittger, 2) program was premised on an awareness that engineers, middle managers and senior staff were already highly computer literate. It is worth remembering that such competency was relatively uncommon until the late 1980s. The meanings of digital media have been shifting for many years, as computers become experienced more as everyday personal artefacts, and less as remote information systems. Their value has always been held with some ambivalence. Zuboff’s (387-414) picture of loss, intimidation and resistance to new information technologies in the 1980s seems to have dissipated by 2011. More than simply being accepted begrudgingly, the PC platform (and variants) has become a ubiquitous platform, a lingua franca for information workers. It became an intimate companion for many professions, and in many homes. It was an inexpensive, versatile and generalised convergent medium for communication and control. And yet, writers such as Gregg observe, the flexibility of networked digital work imposes upon many workers ‘unlimited work’. The office boundaries of the office wall break down, for better or worse. Emails, utility and other work-related behaviours increasingly encroach onto domestic and public space and time. Its very attractiveness to users has tied them to these artefacts. The trail that leads the media studies discipline down the digital mine shaft has been cleared by recent work in media archaeology (Parikka), platform studies (Middelbeek; Montfort & Bogost; Maher) and new media (Manovich). Each of these redefined Media Studies practices addresses the need to diversify the field’s attention and methods. It must look at more specific, less conventional and more complex media formations. Mobile media and games (both computer-based) have turned out to be quite different from traditional media (Hjorth; Goggin). Kirschenbaum’s literary study of hard drives and digital fiction moves from materiality to aesthetics. In my study of digital mining, I present a reconfigured media studies, after the authors, that reveals heterogeneous media configurations, deserving new attention to materiality. This article also draws from the actor network theory approach and terminology (Latour). The uses of media / control / communications in the mining industry are very complex, and remain under constant development. Media such as robotics, computer modelling, remote operation and so on are bound together into complex practices. Each mine site is different — geologically, politically, and economically. Mines are subject to local and remote disasters. Mine tunnels and global prices can collapse, rendering active sites uneconomical overnight. Many technologies are still under development — including Northparkes and West Angelas. Both these sites are notable for their significant use of autonomous vehicles and remote operated vehicles. There is no doubt that the digital technologies modulate all manner of the mining processes: from rocks and mechanical devices to human actors. Each of these actors present different forms of collusion and opposition. Within a mining operation, the budgets for computerised and even robotic systems are relatively modest for their expected return. Deep in a mine, we can still see media convergence at work. Convergence refers to processes whereby previously diverse practices in media have taken on similar devices and techniques. While high-end PCs in mining, running simulators; control data systems; visualisation; telepresence, and so on may be high performance, ruggedised devices, they still share a common platform to the desktop PC. Conceptual resources developed in Media Ecology, New Media Studies, and the Digital Humanities can now inform readings of mining practices, even if their applications differ dramatically in size, reliability and cost. It is not entirely surprising that some observations by new media theorists about entertainment and media applications can also relate to features of mining technologies. Manovich argues that numerical representation is a distinctive feature of new media. Numbers have always already been key to mining engineering. However, computers visualise numerical fields in simulations that extend out of the minds of the calculators, and into visual and even haptic spaces. Specialists in geology, explosives, mechanical apparatuses, and so on, can use plaftorms that are common to everyday media. As the significance of numbers is extended by computers in the field, more and more diverse sources of data provide apparently consistent and seamless images of multiple fields of knowledge. Another feature that Manovich identifies in new media is the capacity for automation of media operations. Automation of many processes in mechanical domains clearly occurred long before industrial technologies were ported into new media. The difference with new media in mine sites is that robotic systems must vary their performance according to feedback from their extra-system environments. For our purposes, the haul trucks in WA are software-controlled devices that already qualify as robots. They sense, interpret and act in the world based on their surroundings. They evaluate multiple factors, including the sensors, GPS signals, operator instructions and so on. They can repeat the path, by sensing the differences, day after day, even if the weather changes, the track wears away or the instructions from base change. Automation compensates for differences within complex and changing environments. Automation of an open-pit mine haulage system… provides more consistent and efficient operation of mining equipment, it removes workers from potential danger, it reduces fuel consumption significantly reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and it can help optimize vehicle repairs and equipment replacement because of more-predictable and better-controlled maintenance. (Parreire and Meech 1-13) Material components in physical mines tend to become modular and variable, as their physical shape lines up with the logic of another of Manovich’s new media themes, variability. Automatic systems also make obsolete human drivers, who previously handled those environmental variations, for better or for worse, through the dangerous, dull and dirty spaces of the mine. Drivers’ capacity to control repeat trips is no longer needed. The Komatsu driverless truck, introduced to the WA iron ore mines from 2008, proved itself to be almost as quick as human drivers at many tasks. But the driverless trucks have deeper advantages: they can run 23 hours each day with no shift breaks; they drive more cautiously and wear the equipment less than human drivers. There is no need to put up workers and their families up in town. The benefit most often mentioned is safety: even the worst accident won’t produce injuries to drivers. The other advantage less mentioned is that autonomous trucks don’t strike. Meanwhile, managers of human labour also need to adopt certain strategies of modulation to support the needs and expectations of their workers. Mobile phones, televisions and radio are popular modes of connecting workers to their loved ones, particularly in the remote and harsh West Angelas site. One solution — regular fly-in-fly out shifts — tends also to be alienating for workers and locals (Cheshire; Storey; Tonts). As with any operations, the cost of maintaining a safe and comfortable environment for workers requires trade-offs. Companies face risks from mobile phones, leaking computer networks, and espionage that expose the site to security risks. Because of such risks, miners tend be subject to disciplinary regimes. It is common to test alcohol and drug levels. There was some resistance from workers, who refused to change to saliva testing from urine testing (Latimer). Contesting these machines places the medium, in a different sense, at the centre of regulation of the workers’ bodies. In Northparkes, the solution of hybrid autonomous and remote operation is also a solution for modulating labour. It is safer and more comfortable, while also being more efficient, as one experienced driver can control three trucks at a time. This more complex mode of mediation is necessary because underground mines are more complex in geology, and working environments to suit full autonomy. These variations provide different relationships between operators and machines. The operator uses a games controller, and watches four video views from the cabin to make the vehicle fill the bucket with ore (Northparkes Mines, 9). Again, media have become a pivotal element in the mining assemblage. This combines the safety and comfort of autonomous operation (helping to retain staff) with the required use of human sensorimotor dexterity. Mine systems deserve attention from media studies because sites are combining large scale physical complexity with increasingly sophisticated computing. The conventional pictures of mining and media rarely address the specificity of subjective and artefactual encounters in and around mine sites. Any research on mining communication is typically within the instrumental frames of engineering (Duff et al.). Some of the developments in mechanical systems have contributed to efficiency and safety of many mines: larger trucks, more rock crushers, and so on. However, the single most powerful influence on mining has been adopting digital media to control, integrate and mining systems. Rio Tinto’s transformative agenda document is outlined in its high profile ‘Mine of the Future’ agenda (US Federal News Service). The media to which I refer are not only those in popular culture, but also those with digital control and communications systems used internally within mines and supply chains. The global mining industry began adopting digital communication automation (somewhat) systematically only in the 1980s. Mining companies hesitated to adopt digital media because the fundamentals of mining are so risky and bound to standard procedures. Large scale material operations, extracting and processing minerals from under the ground: hardly to be an appropriate space for delicate digital electronics. Mining is also exposed to volatile economic conditions, so investing in anything major can be unattractive. High technology perhaps contradicts an industry ethos of risk-taking and masculinity. Digital media became domesticated, and familiar to a new generation of formally educated engineers for whom databases and algorithms (Manovich) were second nature. Digital systems become simultaneously controllers of objects, and mediators of meanings and relationships. They control movements, and express communications. Computers slide from using meanings to invoking direct actions over objects in the world. Even on an everyday scale, computer operations often control physical processes. Anti-lock Braking Systems regulate a vehicle’s braking pressure to avoid the danger when wheels lock-up. Or another example, is the ATM, which involves both symbolic interactions, and also exchange of physical objects. These operations are examples of the ‘asignifying semiotic’ (Guattari), in which meanings and non-meanings interact. There is no operation essential distinction between media- and non-media digital operations. Which are symbolic, attached or non-consequential is not clear. This trend towards using computation for both meanings and actions has accelerated since 2000. Mines of the Future Beyond a relatively standard set of office and communications software, many fields, including mining, have adopted specialised packages for their domains. In 3D design, it is AutoCAD. In hard sciences, it is custom modelling. In audiovisual production, it may be Apple and Adobe products. Some platforms define their subjectivity, professional identity and practices around these platforms. This platform orientation is apparent in areas of mining, so that applications such as the Gemcom, Rockware, Geological Database and Resource Estimation Modelling from Micromine; geology/mine design software from Runge, Minemap; and mine production data management software from Corvus. However, software is only a small proportion of overall costs in the industry. Agents in mining demand solutions to peculiar problems and requirements. They are bound by their enormous scale; physical risks of environments, explosive and moving elements; need to negotiate constant change, as mining literally takes the ground from under itself; the need to incorporate geological patterns; and the importance of logistics. When digital media are the solution, there can be what is perceived as rapid gains, including greater capacities for surveillance and control. Digital media do not provide more force. Instead, they modulate the direction, speed and timing of activities. It is not a complete solution, because too many uncontrolled elements are at play. Instead, there are moment and situations when the degree of control refigures the work that can be done. Conclusions In this article I have proposed a new conception of media change, by reading digital innovations in mining practices themselves as media changes. This involved developing an initial reading of the operations of mining as digital media. With this approach, the array of media components extends far beyond the conventional ‘mass media’ of newspapers and television. It offers a more molecular media environment which is increasingly heterogeneous. It sometimes involves materiality on a huge scale, and is sometimes apparently virtual. The mining media event can be a semiotic, a signal, a material entity and so on. It can be a command to a human. It can be a measurement of location, a rock formation, a pressure or an explosion. The mining media event, as discussed above, is subject to Manovich’s principles of media, being numerical, variable and automated. In the mining media event, these principles move from the aesthetic to the instrumental and physical domains of the mine site. The role of new media operates at many levels — from the bottom of the mine site to the cruising altitude of the fly-in-fly out aeroplanes — has motivated significant changes in the Australian industry. When digital media and robotics come into play, they do not so much introduce change, but reintroduce similarity. This inversion of media is less about meaning, and more about local mastery. Media modulation extends the kinds of influence that can be exerted by the actors in control. In these situations, the degrees of control, and of resistance, are yet to be seen. Acknowledgments Thanks to Mining IQ for a researcher's pass at Mining Automation and Communication Conference, Perth in August 2012. References Bellamy, D., and L. 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Game of Thrones (GoT) has become the most popular way of referring to a universe that was previously known under the title A Song of Ice and Fire by fans of fantasy novels. Indeed, thanks to its huge success, the TV series is now the most common entry into what is today a complex narrative constellation. Game of Thrones began as a series of five novels written by George R. R. Martin (first published in 1996). It was adapted as a TV series by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss for HBO in 2011, as a comic book series (2011—2014), several video games (Blood of Dragons, 2007; A Game of Thrones: Genesis, 2011; Game of Thrones, 2012; Game of Thrones Ascent, 2013; Game of Thrones, 2014), as well as several prequel novellas, a card game (A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, 2002), and a strategy board game (2003), not to mention the promotional transmedia developed by Campfire to bring the novels’ fans to the TV series. Thus, the GoT ensemble does indeed look like a form of transmedia, at least at first sight.Game of Thrones’ UniverseGenerally, definitions of transmedia assemble three elements. First, transmedia occurs when the content is developed on several media, “with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. … Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa” (Jenkins 97-98). The second component is the narrative world. The authors of Transmédia Dans Tous Ses États notice that transmedia stories “are in some cases reduced to a plain link between two contents on two media, with no overall vision” (Collective 4). They consider these ensembles weak. For Gambarato, the main point of transmedia is “the worldbuilding experience, unfolding content and generating the possibilities for the story to evolve with new and pertinent content,” what Jenkins called “worldmaking” (116). The third ingredient is the audience. As the narrative extends itself over several platforms, consumers’ participation is essential. “To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels” (Jenkins 21).The GoT constellation does not precisely match this definition. In the canonical example examined by Jenkins, The Matrix, the whole was designed from the beginning of the project. That was not the case for GoT, as the transmedia development clearly happened once the TV series had become a success. Not every entry in this ensemble unfolds new aspects of the world, as the TV series is an adaptation of the novels (until the sixth season when it overtook the books). Not every component is self-contained, as the novels and TV series are at the narrative system’s centre. This narrative ensemble more closely matches the notion of “modèle satellitaire” conceived by Saint-Gelais, where one element is the first chronologically and hierarchically. However, this statement does not devalue the GoT constellation, as the canonical definition is rarely actualized (Sepulchre “La Constellation Transmédiatique,” Philipps, Gambarato “Transmedia”), and as transmedia around TV series are generally developed after the first season, once the audience is stabilized. What is most noticeable about GoT is the fact that the TV series has probably replaced the novels as the centre of the ensemble.Under the influence of Jenkins, research on transmedia has often come to be related to fan studies. In this work, he describes very active and connected users. Research in game studies also shows that gamers are creative and form communities (Berry 155-207). However, the majority of these studies focused on hardcore fans or hardcore gamers (Bourdaa; Chen; Davis; Jenkins; Peyron; Stein). Usual users are less studied, especially for such transmedia practices.Main Question and MethodologyDue to its configuration, and the wide spectrum of users’ different levels of involvement, the GoT constellation offers an occasion to confront two audiences and their practices. GoT transmedia clearly targets both fiction lovers and gamers. The success of the franchise has led to heavy consumption of transmedia elements, even by fans who had never approached transmedia before, and may allow us to move beyond the classical analysis. That’s why, in that preliminary research, by comparing TV series viewers in general with a quite specific part of them, ordinary gamers of the videogame GOT Ascent, we aim to evaluate transmedia use in the GOT community. The results on viewers are part of a broader research project on TV series and transmedia. The originality of this study focuses on ordinary viewers, not fans. The goal is to understand if they are familiar with transmedia, if they develop transmedia practices, and why. The paper is based on 52 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2012 (11) and 2013 (41). Consumers of fictional extensions of TV series and fans of TV series were selected. The respondents are around twenty years old, university students, white, mostly female (42 women, 10 men), and are not representative outside the case study. Therefore, the purpose of this first empirical sample was simply to access ordinary GOT viewers’ behaviours, and to elaborate an initial landscape of their use of different media in the same world.After that, we focused our analysis on one specific community, a subset of the GOT’s universe’s users, that is, players of the GoT Ascent videogame (we use “gamers” as synonym for “players” and “users”). Through this online participative observation, we try to analyse the players’ attitudes, and evaluate the nature of their involvement from a user perspective (Servais). Focusing on one specific medium in the GOT constellation should allow us to further flesh out the general panorama on transmedia, by exploring involvement in one particular device more deeply. Our purpose in that is to identify whether the players are transmedia users, and so GoT fans, or if they are firstly players. During a three month in-game ethnography, in June-August 2013, we played Aren Gorn, affiliated to House Tyrell, level 91, and member of “The Winter is Dark and Full of Terrors” Alliance (2500 members). Following an in-game ethnography (Boellstorff 123-134), we explored gamers’ playing attitudes inside the interface.The Users, TV Series, and TransmediaThe respondents usually do not know what transmedia is, even if a lot of them (36) practice it. Those who are completely unaware that a narrative world can be spread over several media are rare. Only ten of them engage in fan practices (cosplay, a kind of costuming community, fan-fiction, and fan-vidding, that is fans who write fiction or make remix videos set in the world they love), which tends to show that transmedia does not only concern fans.Most of the ordinary viewers are readers, as 23 of them cite books (True Blood, Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Les Piliers de la Terre), one reads a recipe book (Plus Belle la Vie), and seven consume comics (The Walking Dead, Supernatural). They do not distinguish between novelisation (the novel adapted from a TV series) and the original book. Other media are also consumed, however a lot less: animation series, special episodes on the Internet, music, movies, websites (blogs, fictional websites), factual websites (about the story, the production, actors), fan-fiction, and cosplay.Transmedia does not seem to be a strong experience. Céline and Ioana respectively read the novels adapted from Plus Belle la Vie and Gossip Girl, but don’t like them. “It is written like a script … There’s no description, only the dialogues between characters” (Ioana). Lora watched some webisodes of Cougar Town but didn’t find them funny. Aurélie has followed the Twitter of Sookie Stackouse (True Blood) and Guilleaume D. sometimes consumes humoristic content on 9gag, but irregularly. “It’s not my thing” (Aurélie). The participants are even more critical of movies, especially the sequels of Sex and the City.That does not mean the respondents always reject transmedia components. First, they enjoy elements that are not supposed to belong to the world. These may be fan productions or contents they personally inject into the universe. Several have done research on the story’s topic: Alizée investigated mental disorders to understand United States of Tara; Guilleaume G. wandered around on Google Earth to explore Albuquerque (Breaking Bad); for Guilleaume D., Hugh Laurie’s music album is part of the character of Gregory House; Julie adores Peter Pan and, for her, Once Upon A Time, Finding Neverland, and Hook are part of the same universe. Four people particularly enjoy when the fictional characters’ couples are duplicated by real relationships between actors (which may explain all the excitement surrounding Kit Harrington and Rose Leslie’s real-life love story, paralleling their characters’ romance on GOT). If there is a transmedia production, it seems that there is also a kind of “transmedia reception,” as viewers connect heteroclite elements to build a coherent world of their own. Some respondents even develop a creative link to the world: writing fan-fiction, poetry, or building scale models (but that is not this paper’s topic, see Sepulchre “Les Constellations Narratives”, “Editorial”).A second element they appreciate is the GOT TV series. Approximately half of the respondents cite GoT (29/52). They are not fundamentally different from the other viewers except that more of them have fan practices (9 vs. 1), and a few more develop transmedia consumption (76% against 61%). To the very extent that there is consensus over the poor quality of the novels (in general), A Song of Ice and Fire seems to have seduced every respondent. Loic usually hates reading; his relatives have pointed out to him that he has read more with GoT than in his entire lifetime. Marie D. finds the novels so good that she stopped watching the TV series. Marine insists she generally reads fan-fiction because she hates the novelisations, but the GoT books are the only good ones. The novels apparently allow a deeper immersion into the world and that is the manifest benefit of consuming them. Guilleaume G. appreciates the more detailed descriptions. Céline, Florentin, Ioana, and Marine like to access the characters’ thoughts. Julie thinks she feels the emotions more deeply when she reads. Sometimes, the novels can change their opinions on a character. Emilie finds Sansa despicable in the TV series, but the books led her to understand her sensibility.Videogames & TransmediaThe vast majority of transmedia support from the GoT universe primarily targets “world lovers,” that is, users involved in media uses because they love the fantasy of the universe. However, only video games allow a personalized incarnation as a hero over a long term of time, and thus a customized active appropriation. This is in fact undoubtedly why the GoT universe’s transmedia galaxy has also been deployed in video games. GOT Ascent is a strategy game edited by Disruptor Beam, an American company specialising in TV games. Released in February 2013, the franchise attracted up to 9,000,000 players in 2014, but only 295,107 monthly active users. This significant difference between the accumulated number of players and those actually active (around 3 %) may well testify that those investing in this game are probably not a community of gamers.Combining role playing and strategy game, GoT Ascent is designed in a logic that deeply integrates the elements, not only from the TV series, but also from books and other transmedia extensions. In GoT Ascent, gamers play a small house affiliated to one of the main clans of Westeros. During the immersive game experience, the player participates in all the GoT stories from an insider’s point of view. The game follows the various GoT books, resulting in an extension whenever a new volume is published. The player interacts with others by PVE (Player versus Environment) or PVP (Player versus Player) alliances with a common chat and the possibility of sending goods to other members. With a fair general score (4,1 on 10), the game is evaluated weakly by the players (JeuxOnLine). Hence a large majority of them are probably not looking for that kind of experience.If we focus on the top players in GoT Ascent, likely representing those most invested, it is interesting to examine the names they choose. Indeed, that choice often reveals the player’s intention, either to refer to a gamer logic or the universe of GoT. During our research, we clearly distinguished two types of names, self-referential ones or those referring to the player’s general pseudonym. In concrete terms, the name is a declination of a pseudonym of more general avatars, or else refers to other video game worlds than GoT. In GoT Ascent, the second category of names, those very clearly anchored in the world of Martin, are clearly dominant.Is it possible to correlate the name chosen and the type of player? Can we affirm that people who choose a name not related to the GoT universe are players and that the others are GoT fans? Probably not obviously, but the consistency of a character’s name with the universe is, in the GoT case, very important for an immersive experience. The books’ author has carefully crafted his surnames and, in the game, assuming a name is therefore very clearly a symbolically important act in the desire to roleplay in that universe. Choosing one that is totally out of sync with the game world clearly means you are not there to immerse yourself in the spirit of GoT, but to play. In short, the first category is representative of the gamers, but the players are not restricted to those naming their avatar out of the world’s spirit.This intuition is confirmed by a review of the names related to the rank of the players. When we studied high-level players, we realized that most of them use humorous names, which are totally out of the mood of the GoT universe. Thus, in 2013, the first ranked player in terms of power was called Flatulence, a French term that is part of a humorous semantics. Yet this type of denomination is not limited to the first of the list. Out the top ten players, only two used plausible GoT names. However, as soon as one leaves the game’s elite’s sphere, the plausible names are quickly in the majority. There is a sharp opposition between the vast majority of players, who obviously try to match the world, and pure gamers.We found the same logic for the names of the Alliances, the virtual communities of players varying from a few to hundreds. Three Alliances have achieved the #1 rank in the game in the game’s first two years: Hear Me Roar (February 2013), Fire and Blood (January 2014), and Kong's Landing (September 2014). Two of those Alliances are of a more humoristic bent. However, an investigation into the 400 alliances demonstrates that fewer than 5 % have a clear humoristic signification. We might estimate that in GoT Ascent the large majority of players increase their immersive experience by choosing a GoT role play related Alliance name. We can conclude that they are mainly GoT fans playing the game, and that they seek to lend the world coherence. The high-level players are an exception. Inside GOT Ascent, the dominant culture remains connected to the GoT world.ConclusionA transmedia story is defined by its networked configuration, “worldmaking,” and users’ involvement. The GoT constellation is clearly a weak ensemble (Sepulchre, 2012). However, it has indeed developed on several platforms. Furthermore, the relationship between the novels and the TV series is quite unprecedented. Indeed, both elements are considered as qualitative, and the TV series has become the main entry for many fans. Thus, both of them acquire an equal authority.The GoT transmedia storyworld also unfolds a fictional world and depends on users’ activities, but in a peculiar way. If the viewers and gamers are analysed from fan or game studies perspectives, they appear to be weak users. Indeed, they do not seek new components; they are mainly readers and do not enjoy the transmedia experience; the players are not regular ones; and they are much less creative and humorous than high-level gamers.These weak practices have, however, one function: to prolong the pleasure of the fictional world, which is the third characteristic of transmedia. The players experiment with GoT Ascent by incarnating characters inserted into Alliances whose names may exist in the original world. This appears to be a clear attempt to become immersed in the universe. The ordinary viewers appreciate the deeper experience the novels allow. When they feed the world with unexpected elements, it is also to improve the world.Thus, transmedia appropriation by users is a reality, motivated by a taste for the universe, even if it is a weak consumption in comparison with the demanding, creative, and sometimes iconoclastic practices gamers and fans usually develop. It is obvious, in both fields, that they are new TV series fans (they quote mainly recent shows) and beginners in the world of games. For a significant part of them, GoT was probably their first time developing transmedia practices.However, GoT Ascent is not well evaluated by gamers and many of them do not repeat the experience (as the monthly number of gamers shows). Likewise, the ordinary viewers neglect the official transmedia components as too marketing oriented. The GoT novels are the exception proving the rule. They demonstrate that users are quite selective: they are not satisfied with weak elements. The question that this paper cannot answer is: was GoT a first experience? Will they persevere in the future? Yet, in this preliminary research, we have seen that studying ordinary users’ weak involvement (series viewers or gamers) is an interesting path in elaborating a theory of transmedia user’s activities, which takes the public’s diversity into account.ReferencesBerry, Vincent. L’Expérience Virtuelle: Jouer, Vivre, Apprendre Dans un Jeu Video. Rennes: UP Rennes, 2012.Boellstorff, Tom. “A Typology of Ethnographic Scales for Virtual Worlds.” Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual. Ed. William Sim Bainbridge. London: Springer, 2009.Bourdaa, Mélanie. “Taking a Break from All Your Worries: Battlestar Galactica et Les Nouvelles Pratiques Télévisuelles des Fans.” Questions de Communication 22 (2012) 2014. <http://journals.openedition.org/questionsdecommunication/6917>.Chen, Mark. Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of An Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.Collective. Le Transmédia Dans Tous Ses États: Les Cahiers de Veille de la Fondation Télécom. Paris: Fondation Télécom, 2012. 29 Dec. 2017 <https://www.fondation-mines-telecom.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2012-cahier-veille-transmedia.pdf\>.Davis, C.H. “Audience Value and Transmedia Products.” Media Innovations. Eds. T. Storsul and A. Krumsvik. Gothenburg: Nordicom, 2013. 179-190.Gambarato, Renira. “How to Analyze Transmedia Narratives?” Conference New Media: Changing Media Landscapes. Saint Petersburg, 2012. 2017 <http://prezi.com/fovz0jrlfsn0/how-to-analyze-transmedia-narratives>.Gambarato, Renira. “Transmedia Storytelling.” Serious Science, 2016. 2017 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thZnd_K8Vfs>.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. Updated ed. New York: New York UP, 2006.JeuxOnLine. “Game of Thrones Ascent.” 2013. <http://www.jeuxonline.info/jeu/Game_of_Thrones_Ascent>.Peyron, David. Culture Geek. Limoges: FYP Editions, 2013.Philipps, Andrea. A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2012.Saint-Gelais, Richard. Fictions Transfuges. La Transfictionnalité et Ses Enjeux. Paris: Seuil, 2011.Sepulchre, S. Le Transmédia Dans Tous Ses États: Les Cahiers de Veille de la Fondation Télécom. Paris: Fondation Télécom, 2012. 29 Dec. 2017 <https://www.fondation-mines-telecom.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2012-cahier-veille-transmedia.pdf>.———. “La Constellation Transmédiatique de Breaking Bad: Analyse de la Complémentarité Trouvée entre la Télévision et Internet.” ESSACHESS-Journal for Communication 4.1 (2011). 29 Dec. 2017 <http://www.essachess.com/index.php/jcs/article/view/111>. ———. “Les Constellations Narratives: Que Font les Téléspectateurs des Adaptations Multimédiatiques des Séries Télévisées?” TV/Series 3 (2013). 29 Dec. 2017 <http://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/729>. ———. “Editorial.” Inter Pares: Revue Électronique de Jeunes Chercheurs en Sciences Humains et Sociales 6 (2016). 29 Dec. 2017 <https://epic.univ-lyon2.fr/medias/fichier/inter-pares-6-maquette-v8web_1510576660265-pdf>.Servais, Olivier. “Funerals in the “World of Warcraft”: Religion, Polemic, and Styles of Play in a Videogame Universe.” Social Compass 62.3 (2015): 362-378.Stein, Louisa Ellen, and Kristina Busse. Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC series. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014.

Since the eruption of the global justice movement at 1999’s Battle of Seattle, much has been made about the impact of the Internet on progressive activism. Of particular interest have been the ways in which activists have used the Internet as a communication medium, as a forum for information dissemination and as a tool for organizing (Deibert, Kahn & Kellner; Meikle; Smith). Applications like Websites, email and Internet Relay Chat have largely facilitated the new movement as a global phenomenon (Bennett; van Aelst & Walgrave). Cyberactivism – political activism on the Internet – is a new mode of contentious action, and new practices such as virtual sit-ins, online petitions and email campaigns have enhanced the repertoire of contention (McCaughey & Ayers). But what effects have activists had on the Internet? How have they shaped the Internet to fit both their technical needs and movement goals? Geeks and Global Justice The global justice movement (GJM) has broadened to include a new brand of activism, one that moves beyond simply using technology toward particular ends to include the modification and transformation of technology itself. Tech activism combines the free software ethos derived from geek culture with concerns for social justice on a planetary scale. Tech activists are the computer programmers who write, develop and deploy software for the online projects of activist groups. They also develop and maintain activist Websites and provide technical support, largely on a volunteer basis. The novelty of tech activism moves beyond the political alliance of social justice activists and computer geeks, however. Rather, it lies in the way tech activists incorporate the democratic goals of the GJM into the very technology used to pursue those goals. That is to say, tech activists recode software intended for use by activists in a way that anticipates the progressive social change they pursue. In this way, tech activists produce both an alternative version of the technology that is accessible, participatory, and non-hierarchical, and an alternate vision of society based on those same ideals. Detailed histories of the Internet reveal it to be a social construction contingent upon social factors (Abbate; Ceruzzi). Conceptualizing it this way, we can better understand how the goals and values of the global justice movement are inflected in the Internet’s ongoing “invention” (Abbate). The tension between capitalist logic and democratic impulses that characterizes the Internet suggests that it is an unfinished and flexible technology (Feenberg & Bakardjieva). Thus it is not surprising that as corporate interests continue to settle the virtual frontier, the Internet emerges as the locus of a new struggle. Like the Internet itself, this struggle is multilayered. It is at once a contest between private and public interests manifested at the “content” layer of the Internet, composed of applications such as the World Wide Web, and also at the Internet’s underlying infrastructure, the “logical” layer comprising the data transport and transmission protocols (Lessig). Commercial interests are poised to dominate the Web, pushing democratic and public uses to the margins of cyberspace; further, corporate influence threatens to further close and commodify access to the Internet (Meikle). Politicizing Technology But if the Internet is a social construction that turns upon human agency in its ongoing development, opportunities for contestation and change exist. The chance to challenge power imbalances entrenched in contemporary industrial society, where technical action is an exercise of power, arises in the technical sphere. Technology, therefore, is recast as a political project. It is not a reified “thing” but rather and ambivalent process, one pregnant with both liberating and oppressive possibilities (Feenberg, “Critical Theory”). The current strain of tech activism embodied in the global justice movement exploits this ambivalence, returning to the radicalism of the Free Software Movement. The FSM in turn has roots in 1960s digital counterculture, with its foundational belief that information should be free (Stallman). While today the wider tech community has drifted from these radical origins, the enduring legacy of the FSM is twofold. It is at once the redefinition of technology as a political project subject to democratic intervention, and the promotion of an alternative social model based on decentralization, volunteerism, cooperation and self-empowerment. The disarticulation of software from the logic of capitalism thus appears as an example of democratic rationalization: the creation and use of technology that undermines the existing social hierarchy (Feenberg, “Questioning”). Tech activists in the global justice movement have reclaimed computer technology development as a political frontier for contentious action. It was at 1999’s Battle of Seattle that activists first realized the potential and power of the Internet for their burgeoning movement. Since then, tech activists have been central to the global justice movement, facilitating the novel combination of interactive digital technology and social justice activism. From hosting hacklabs and sending reclaimed computers to developing countries, to setting up transient media centres amidst political actions and natural disasters, tech activists have clearly embraced the politics of technology. One prominent example of tech activism in the GJM is the Independent Media Centre (IMC), a Web-based network of radical media making collectives that went live for the Seattle protest. Tech activists are responsible for the technical implementation and continued maintenance of IMC, which was founded to give voice to activists protesting the ill effects of global capitalism. Today it is widely recognized as the media arm of the GJM. Indymedia and Free Software The choice of free software for the global site, indymedia.org, was deliberate, and suggests a philosophical inheritance from the free software movement. It also shows with clarity the project’s political objectives. At present, all the software on the global network, which includes more than 130 “nodes”, is by charter free software. Throughout Indymedia’s six-year history, free software has enabled the IMC tech collective to develop applications “that encourage cooperation, solidarity, an equal field of participation” among volunteers (Henshaw-Plath. “Proposal”). Critically, free software met technical requirements while promoting social objectives: “It’s clear that the technology we use and process by which it’s constructed and articulated [are] deeply political. We are creating the technical systems that prefigure the change we want to see in society” (Henshaw-Plath, “IMC-Tech”). Clearly, tech activists understand coding as technical process with social implications. They make an explicit attempt to imbue software with ideals that mirror their social justice objectives, never losing sight of the social purpose of the software, nor of the user-technology relation. In the case of the continual hacking of Active, the original open publishing software, “the geeks of IMC-Tech were keenly aware that each technological design or set of features creates a particular publishing structure and, as a result, empowers users…in an equally particular way” (Hill 2). This is an example of user agency at the level of technical design; by including a wider array of values and needs in their software, tech activists are helping to democratize Internet technology. Tech activists thus display insight into the power asymmetries inherent in capitalist socio-technical systems, like the Internet, as well as the knowledge that such asymmetries are both socially constructed and reflective of inequality in the broader social context. Wild Wild Wikis: The Latest Frontier Activists in the global justice movement, supported by geeks who share their social conscience, created Indymedia to communicate their social objectives, including economic and environmental justice, participatory democracy and racial and gender equality. But internal communication among Indymedia activists was also important. Initially, the IMC Tech Collective communicated by email lists and Internet Relay Chat (IRC). They subsequently adopted wiki technology in an effort to create a sustainable system for documenting its project. As one member of the Docs Tech Working Group observed: “Getting a functioning and used wiki is really vital for the network…Email lists just aren’t cutting it for the level of organizing and information exchange and growth we need to help facilitate” (Windmueller). The purpose of the Global Indymedia Documentation Project is to gather collective knowledge about IMC’s history, its current projects and its short and long-term goals. Such documentation is vital to the success of Indymedia; not only does it provide a public record, it creates a fluidity that facilitates participation at varying levels. “The Indymedia Documentation Project looks like a normal Web site… except that it encourages contribution and editing of pages, questions, answers, comments and updates” (Indymedia). Wiki software has been popular in the business community as a “conversational knowledge management solution” that fosters an efficient and collaborative work process (Gonzalez-Reinhart, 5). A wiki is a series of linked, dynamic Web pages that can be created, edited and deleted by a logged-on user, with no coding skills necessary. All changes are documented, so the wiki’s history is preserved and accessible for viewing. Because of its accessible, collective and participatory design, Kahn and Kellner call the wiki “the next wave in the emerging democratic Internet” (196). By 2002, IMC techs adopted and hacked up TWiki, a free software wiki clone aimed at the corporate intranet world, assembling a number of separately running wikis in one Website, docs.indymedia.org. While mailing lists facilitate information exchange, and IRC enables real time discussion, neither application provides a collaborative space for Indymedia volunteers to work asynchronously on common projects. The wiki, however, facilitates information flow, which allows distributed teams to work together seamlessly and productively, and eliminates the one-Webmaster syndrome of outdated content. Further, the wiki has proven useful as a forum for discussing technical issues regarding the smooth running of the network, while its ability to store policy documents, research papers, proposals and meeting logs create an invaluable store of cumulative knowledge. A successful wiki has political implications beyond the virtual sphere, offering alternative ways of social organization offline. “The recognition of this might lead some people to take the organization of work in a wiki as a model that could succeed in the real world as well (Ebersbach & Glaser)” The “wiki way” (Cunningham) of self-organization and collaboration to produce high quality work without capitalist incentives reveals other ways to value technology, ways not currently embraced by the dominant social order as it is underwritten by corporate capitalism. As social software, wikis create prospects for democratic communication and collaboration online, making it an important new application for activist work. Conclusion The Internet remains an unfinished and contested technology. Because it is socially constructed, users can intervene in its development and shape its future direction(s). Tech activists in the global justice movement bridge the divide between geek and activist communities, developing and maintaining the digital infrastructure that supports progressive activism on a planetary scale. Through their free software work, tech activists develop Internet technology that reflects their technical needs and social objectives, deliberately opposing the commercial encroachment of cyberspace. In the case of Indymedia, tech activists redeployed wiki software to facilitate movement goals – by creating a public and democratic space for online collaboration, and by challenging inherent power inequities reflected in the broader society. By addressing such imbalances at the level of technical design, they have created an alternative version of Internet technology as well as an alternate vision of society. References Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Bennett, W.L. “Communicating Global Activism: Strengths and Vulnerabilities of Networked Politics.” Eds. W. van de Donk, B.D. Loader, P.G. Nixon and D. Rucht. Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens, and Social Movements. London and New York: Routledge (2004): 123-146. Ceruzzi, Paul. A History of Modern Computing. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Cunningham, Ward. “Why Wiki Works.” Cunningham and Cunningham Website, n.d. 25 Nov. 2005 http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks>. Deibert, Ronald J. “International Plug n’ Play? Citizen Activism, the Internet and Global Public Policy.” International Studies Perspectives 1 (2000): 255-272. Feenberg, Andrew. Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ———. Questioning Technology. London and New York: Routledge. 1999. ———, and Maria Bakardjieva. “Consumers or Citizens? The Online Community Debate.” Eds. Andrew Feenberg and Darrin Barney. Community in the Digital Age: Philosophy and Practice. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield (2004): 1-28. Ebersbach, Anja, and Markus Glaser. “Towards Emancipatory Use of a Medium: The Wiki.” International Journal of Information Ethics 2 (2004): 1-9. GNU. “Overview of the GNU System.” GNU Website, n.d. 22 Nov. 2005 http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.html>. Gonzalez-Reinhart, Jennifer. “Wiki and the Wiki Way: Beyond a Knowledge Management System.” 2005. 5 Dec. 2005 http://www.uhisrc.com/FTB/Wiki/wiki_way_brief%5B1%5D-Jennifer%2005.pdf>. Henshaw-Plath, Evan. “Proposal to Reform www.indy by Highlighting Local IMCs.” 2002. 29 Apr. 2003 http://internal.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=538>. Henshaw-Plath, Evan. “IMC-Tech Summary for November 16th 2001.” 2001. 28 Nov. 2005 http://archives.lists.indymedia.org/imc-summaries/2001-November/000028.html>. Hill, Benjamin Mako. “Software, Politics and Indymedia.” 2003. 25 Nov. 2005 http://mako.cc/writing/mute-indymedia_software.html>. Indymedia. “Welcome Guest.” Indymedia Website, n.d. 2 Dec. 2005 http://docs.indymedia.org/viewauth/TWiki/WelcomeGuest>. Kahn, Richard V., and Douglas Kellner. “Virtually Democratic: Online Communities and Internet Activism.” Eds. Andrew Feenberg and Darrin Barney. Community in the Digital Age: Philosophy and Practice. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield (2004): 183-200. Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books. 1999. McCaughey, Martha and Michael D. Ayers. Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. 2003. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. New York: Routledge. 1999. Smith, Jackie. “Cyber Subversion in the Information Economy.” Dissent Spring 2001: 48-52. Stallman, Richard. “The GNU Project.” GNU Website. 1999. 22 Nov. 2005 http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html>. Van Aelst, Peter and Stefaan Walgrave. “New Media, New Movements? The Role of the Internet in Shaping the ‘Anti-Globalization’ Movement.” Eds. W. van de Donk, B.D. Loader, P.G. Nixon and D. Rucht, Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens, and Social Movements. London and New York: Routledge (2004): 123-146. Windmueller, John. Comment posted to Indymedia Documentation Project wiki. 15 Nov. 2005 http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Sysadmin/ImcDocsReplaceWikiEngine>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Milberry, Kate. "Reconstructing the Internet: How Social Justice Activists Contest Technical Design in Cyberspace." M/C Journal 9.1 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/10-milberry.php>. APA Style Milberry, K. (Mar. 2006) "Reconstructing the Internet: How Social Justice Activists Contest Technical Design in Cyberspace," M/C Journal, 9(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/10-milberry.php>.

From an interview with “Mr A”, executive producer and co-creator of the Getaway in Stockholm (GiS) films: Mr A: Yeah, when I tell my girlfriend, ‘You should watch this, it’s good, it’s a classic, it’s an old movie’ and she thinks it’s, like, the worst. And when I actually look at it and it is the worst, it is just a car chase … [Laughs] But you have to look a lot harder, to how it is filmed, you have to learn … Because, you can’t watch car racing for instance, because they are lousy at filming; you get no sensation of speed. If you watch the World Rally Championship it looks like they go two miles an hour. The hardest thing [of the whole thing] is capturing the speed … I want to engage with the notion of “speed” in terms of the necessary affects of automobility, but first I will give some brief background information on the Getaway in Stockholm series of films. Most of the information on the films is derived from the interview with Mr A carried out over dinner in Stockholm, October 2004. Contact was made via e-mail and I organised with the editors of Autosalon Magazine for an edited transcription to be published as an incentive to participate in the interview. Mr A’s “Tarantino-style” name is necessary because the films he makes with Mr X (co-creator) and a small unnamed group of others involve filming highly illegal acts: one or two cars racing through the streets of Stockholm evading police at sustained speeds well over 200 km/h. Due to a quirk in Swedish traffic law, unless they are caught within a certain time frame of committing driving offences or they actually admit to the driving offences, then they cannot be charged. The Swedish police are so keen to capture these renegade film makers that when they appeared on Efterlyst (pron: ef-de-list; the equivalent of “Sweden’s Most Wanted”) instead of the normal toll-free 1-800 number that viewers could phone to give tips, the number on the screen was the direct line to the chief of Stockholm’s traffic unit. The original GiS film (2000) was made as a dare. Mr A and some friends had just watched Claude Lelouch’s 1976 film C’était un Rendez-vous. Rumour has it that Lelouch had a ten-minute film cartridge and had seen how a gyro stabilised camera worked on a recent film. He decided to make use of it with his Ferrari. He mounted the camera to the bonnet and raced through the streets of Paris. In typical Parisian style at the end of the short nine minute film the driver parks and jumps from the Ferrari to embrace a waiting woman for their “rendezvous”. Shortly after watching the film someone said to Mr A, “you don’t do that sort of thing in Stockholm”. Mr A and Mr X set out to prove him wrong. Nearly all the equipment used in the filming of the first GiS film was either borrowed or stolen. The Porsche used in the film (like all the cars in the films) was lent to them. The film equipment consisted of, in Mr A’s words, a “big ass” television broadcast camera and a smaller “lipstick” camera stolen from the set of the world’s first “interactive” reality TV show called The Bar. (The Bar followed a group of people who all lived together in an apartment and also worked together in a bar. The bar was a “real” bar and served actual customers.) The first film was made for fun, but after Mr A and his associates received several requests for copies they decided to ramp up production to commercial levels. Mr A has a “real job” working in advertising; making the GiS films once a year is his main job with his advertising job being on a self-employed, casual basis. As a production team it is a good example of amateurs becoming semi-professionals within the culture industries. The GiS production team distributes one film per year under the guise of being a “documentary” which allows them to escape the wrath of Swedish authorities due to further legal quirks. Although they still sell DVDs from their Website, the main source of income comes from the sale of the worldwide distribution rights to British “powersports” specialist media company Duke Video. Duke also sells a digitally remastered DVD version of Rendezvous on their Website. As well as these legitimate distribution methods, copies of all six GiS films and Rendezvous are available on the internet through various peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Mr A says there isn’t much he can do about online file sharing besides asking people to support the franchise if they like the films by buying the DVDs. There are a number of groups making films for car enthusiast using similar guerilla film production methods. However, most of the films are one-offs or do not involve cars driven at such radical speeds. An exception was another Swedish film maker who called himself “Ghostrider” and who produced similar films using a motorbike. Police apprehended a man who they alleged is “Ghostrider” in mid-2004 within the requisite timeframe of an offence that had been allegedly committed. The GiS films alongside these others exist within the automotive cultural industry. The automotive cultural industry is a term I am using to describe the overlap between the automotive industry and the cultural industries of popular culture. The films tap in to a niche market of car enthusiasts. There are many different types of car enthusiasts, everything from petite-bourgeois vintage-car restorers to moral panic-inducing street racers. Obviously the GiS films are targeted more towards the street racing end of the spectrum, which is not surprising because Sweden has a very developed underground street racing scene. A good example is the Stockholm-based “Birka Cup”: a quasi-professional multi-round underground street-racing tournament with 60,000 SEK (approx. AUD$11,000) prize money. The rules and rankings for the tournament are found on the tournament Website. To give some indication of what goes on at these events a short teaser video clip for the 2003 Birka Cup DVD is also available for download from the Website. The GiS films have an element of the exotic European-Other about them, not only because of the street-racing pedigree exemplified by the Birka Cup and similar underground social institutions (such as another event for “import” street racers called the “Stockholm Open”), but because they capture an excess within European car culture normally associated with exotic supercars or the extravagant speeds of cars driven on German autobahns or Italian autostradas. For example, the phrase “European Styling” is often used in Australia to sell European designed “inner-city” cars, such as the GM Holden Barina, a.k.a. the Vauxhall Corsa or the Opel Corsa. Cars from other regional manufacturing zones often do not receive such a specific regional identification; for example, cars built in Asian countries are described as “fully imported” rather than “Asian styling”. Tom O’Dell has noted that dominant conception of automobility in Sweden is different to that of the US. That is, “automobility” needs to be qualified with a national or local context and I assume that other national contexts in Europe would equally be just as different. However, in non-European, mainly post-colonial contexts, such as Australia, the term “European” is an affectation signaling something special. On a different axis, “excess” is directly expressed in the way the police are “captured” in the GiS films. Throughout the GiS series there is a strongly antagonist relation to the police. The initial pre-commercial version of the first GiS film had NWA’s “Fuck the Police” playing over the opening credits. Subsequent commercially-released versions of the film had to change the opening title music due to copyright infringement issues. The “bonus footage” material of subsequent DVDs in the series represents the police as impotent and foolish. Mr A describes it as a kind of “prank” played on police. His rationale is that they live out the fantasy that “everyone” wishes they could do to the police when they are pulled over for speeding and the like; as he puts it, “flipping the bird and driving off”. The police are rendered foolish and captured on film, which is an inversion of the normative traffic-cop-versus-traffic-infringer power relation. Mr A specifies the excess of European modernity to something specific to automobility, which is the near-universal condition of urbanity in most developed nations. The antagonism between the GiS drivers and the police is figured as a duel. The speed of the car(s) obviously exceeds what is socially and legally acceptable and therefore places the drivers in direct conflict with police. The speed captured on film is in part a product of this tension and gives speed a qualitative cultural dimension beyond a simple notion from rectilinear physics of speed as a rate of motion. The qualitative dimension of speed as been noted by Peter Wollen: Speed is not simply thrilling in itself, once sufficiently accelerated, but also enables us to enter exposed and unfamiliar situations, far removed from the zones of safety and normality – to travel into space, for instance, beyond the frontiers of the known. (106) Knowledge is subsumed by the dialect of road safety: “safety” versus “speed”. Knowledge takes on many forms and it is here that speed gains its complexity. In the high-school physics of rectilinear motion speed refers to a rate. Mr A discusses speed as a sensation (“thrill” in the language of Wollen) in the quote at the beginning of the essay. If the body develops sensations from affects and percepts (Deleuze and Guattari 179-83), then what are the affects and percepts that are developed by the body into the sensation of speed? The catchphrase for the GiS films is “Reality Beats Fiction By Far!” The “reality” at stake here is not only the actuality of cars traveling at high speeds within urban spaces, which in the vernacular of automotive popular culture is more “real” than Hollywood representations, but the “reality” of automobilised bodies engaging with and “getting away” from the police. Important here is that the police serve as the symbolic representatives of the governmental institutions and authorities that regulate and discipline populations to be automobilised road users. The police are principally symbolic because one’s road-user body is policed, to a large degree, by one’s self; that is, by the perceptual apparatus that enables us to judge traffic’s rates of movement and gestures of negotiation that are indoctrinated into habit. We do this unthinkingly as part of everyday life. What I want to suggest is that the GiS films tap into the part of our respective bodily perceptual and affective configurations that allow us to exist as road users. To explain this I need to go on a brief detour through “traffic” and its relation to “speed”. Speed serves a functional role within automobilised societies. Contrary to the dominant line from the road safety industry, the “speed limit” we encounter everyday on the road is not so much a limit, but a guide for the self-organisation of traffic. To think the “speed limit” as a limit allows authorities to imagine a particular movement-based threshold of perception and action that bestows upon drivers the ability to negotiate the various everyday hazard-events that constitute the road environment. This is a negative way to look at traffic and is typical of the (post)modernist preoccupation with incorporating contingency (“the accident”) into behavioural protocol and technical design (Lyotard 65-8). It is not surprising that the road safety industry is an exemplary institution of what Gilles Deleuze called the “control society”. The business of the road safety industry is the perpetual modulation of road user populations in a paradoxical attempt to both capture (forecast and study) the social mechanics of the accident-event while postponing its actualisation. Another way to look at traffic is to understand it as a self-organising system. Ilya Prigogine and Robert Herman modeled vehicle traffic as two flows – collective and individual – as a function of the concentration and speed of vehicles. At a certain tipping point the concentration of traffic is such that individual mobility is subsumed by the collective. Speed plays an important role both in the abstract sense of a legislated “speed limit” and as the emergent consistency of mobile road users distributed in traffic. That is, automotive traffic does not move at a constant speed, but nominally moves at a consistent speed. The rate and rhythms of traffic have a consistency that we all must become familiar with to successfully negotiate the everyday system of automobility. For example, someone simply walking becomes a “pedestrian” in the duration of automobilised time-space. Pedestrians must embody a similar sense of the rate of traffic as that perceived by drivers in the cars that constitute traffic. The pedestrian uses this sense of speed when negotiating traffic so as to cross the road, while the driver uses it to maintain a safe distance from the car in front and so on. The shared sense of speed demands an affective complicity of road-user bodies to allow them to seamlessly incorporate themselves into the larger body of traffic on a number of different registers. When road users do not comply with this shared sense of speed that underpins traffic they are met with horn blasts, rude figure gestures, abuse, violence and so on. The affects of traffic are accelerated in the body and developed by the body into the sensations and emotions of “road rage”. Road users must performatively incorporate the necessary dispositions for participating with other road users in traffic otherwise they disrupt the affective script (“habits”) for the production of traffic. When I screened the first GiS film in a seminar in Sweden the room was filled with the sound of horrified gasps. Afterwards someone suggested to me that they (the Swedes) were more shocked than I (an Australian) about the film. Why? Is it because I am a “hoon”? We had all watched the same images heard the same sounds, yet, the “speeds” were not equal. They had experienced the streets in the film as a part of traffic. Their bodies knew just how slow the car was meant to be going. The film captured and transmitted the affects of a different automobilised body. Audiences follow the driver “getting away” from those universally entrusted (at least on a symbolic level) with the governance of traffic – the police – while, for a short period, becoming a new body that gets away from the “practiced perception” (Massumi 189) of habits that normatively enable the production of traffic. What is captured in the film – the event of the getaway – has the potential to develop in the body of the spectator as the sensation of “speed” and trigger a getaway of the body. Acknowledgement I would like to acknowledge the generous funding from the Centre for Cultural Research and the College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences, University of Western Sydney, in awarding me the 2004 CCR CAESS Postgraduate International Scholarship, and the support from my colleagues at the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden where I carried out this research as a doctoral exchange student. References Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on Control Societies”. Negotiations. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchill and Hugh Tomlinson. London: Verso, 1994. Getaway in Stockholm series. 21 Oct. 2005 http://www.getawayinstockholm.com>. Lyotard, Jean François. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1991. Massumi, Brian. “Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation”. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Eds. Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson. Durham, London: Duke UP, 2002. O’Dell, Tom. “Raggare and the Panic of Mobility: Modernity and Everyday Life in Sweden.” Car Culture. Ed. Daniel Miller. Oxford: Berg, 2001. 105-32. Prigogine, Ilya, and Robert Herman. “A Two-Fluid Approach to Town Traffic.” Science 204 (1979): 148-51. Wollen, Peter. “Speed and the Cinema.” New Left Review 16 (2002): 105–14. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Fuller, Glen. "The Getaway." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/07-fuller.php>. APA Style Fuller, G. (Dec. 2005) "The Getaway," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/07-fuller.php>.

IntroductionOver three days in November 2017, 400 people gathered for a conference at the Sam’s Town Hotel and Gambling Hall in Las Vegas, Nevada. The majority of attendees were fiction authors but the conference program looked like no ordinary writer’s festival; there were no in-conversation interviews with celebrity authors, no panels on the politics of the book industry and no books launched or promoted. Instead, this was a gathering called 20Books2017, a self-publishing conference about the business of fiction ebooks and there was expertise in the room.Among those attending, 50 reportedly earned over $100,000 US per annum, with four said to be earning in excess of $1,000,000 US year. Yet none of these authors are household names. Their work is not adapted to film or television. Their books cannot be found on the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores. For the most part, these authors go unrepresented by the publishing industry and literary agencies, and further to which, only a fraction have ever actively pursued traditional publishing. Instead, they write for and sell into a commercial fiction market dominated by a single retailer and publisher: online retailer Amazon.While the online ebook market can be dynamic and lucrative, it can also be chaotic. Unlike the traditional publishing industry—an industry almost stoically adherent to various gatekeeping processes: an influential agent-class, formalized education pathways, geographic demarcations of curatorial power (see Thompson)—the nascent ebook market is unmapped and still somewhat ungoverned. As will be discussed below, even the markets directly engineered by Amazon are subject to rapid change and upheaval. It can be a space with shifting boundaries and thus, for many in the traditional industry both Amazon and self-publishing come to represent a type of encroaching northern dread.In the eyes of the traditional industry, digital self-publishing certainly conforms to the barbarous north of European literary metaphor: Orwell’s ‘real ugliness of industrialism’ (94) governed by the abject lawlessness of David Peace’s Yorkshire noir (Fowler). But for adherents within the day-to-day of self-publishing, this unruly space also provides the frontiers and gold-rushes of American West mythology.What remains uncertain is the future of both the traditional and the self-publishing sectors and the degree to which they will eventually merge, overlap and/or co-exist. So-called ‘hybrid-authors’ (those self-publishing and involved in traditional publication) are becoming increasingly common—especially in genre fiction—but the disruption brought about by self-publishing and ebooks appears far from complete.To the contrary, the Amazon-led ebook iteration of this market is relatively new. While self-publishing and independent publishing have long histories as modes of production, Amazon launched both its Kindle e-reader device and its marketplace Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) a little over a decade ago. In the years subsequent, the integration of KDP within the Amazon retail environment dramatically altered the digital self-publishing landscape, effectively paving the way for competing platforms (Kobo, Nook, iBooks, GooglePlay) and today’s vibrant—and, at times, crassly commercial—self-published fiction communities.As a result, the self-publishing market has experienced rapid growth: self-publishers now collectively hold the largest share of fiction sales within Amazon’s ebook categories, as much as 35% of the total market (Howey). Contrary to popular belief they do not reside entirely at the bottom of Amazon’s expansive catalogue either: at the time of writing, 11 of Amazon’s Top 50 Bestsellers were self-published and the median estimated monthly revenue generated by these ‘indie’ books was $43,000 USD / month (per author) on the American site alone (KindleSpy).This international publishing market now proffers authors running the gamut of commercial uptake, from millionaire successes like romance writer H.M. Ward and thriller author Mark Dawson, through to the 19% of self-published authors who listed their annual royalty income as $0 per annum (Weinberg). Their overall market share remains small—as little as 1.8% of trade publishing in the US as a whole (McIlroy 4)—but the high end of this lucrative slice is particularly dynamic: science fiction author Michael Anderle (and 20Books2017 keynote) is on-track to become a seven-figure author in his second year of publishing (based on Amazon sales ranking data), thriller author Mark Dawson has sold over 300,000 copies of his self-published Milton series in 3 years (McGregor), and a slew of similar authors have recently attained New York Times and US Today bestseller status.To date, there is not a broad range of scholarship investigating the operational logics of self-published fiction. Timothy Laquintano’s recent Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing (2016) is a notable exception, drawing self-publishing into historical debates surrounding intellectual property, the future of the book and digital abundance. The more empirical portions of Mass Authorship—taken from activity between 2011 to 2015—directly informs this research and his chapter on Amazon (Chapter 4) could be read as a more macro companion to my findings below; taken together and compared they illustrate just how fast-moving the market is. Nick Levey’s work on ‘post-press’ literature and its inherent risks (and discourses of cultural capitol) also informs my thesis here.In addition to which, there is scholarship centred on publishing more generally that also touches on self-published writers as a category of practitioner (see Baverstock and Steinitz, Haughland, Thomlinson and Bélanger). Most of this later work focuses almost entirely on the finished product, usually situating self-publishing as directly oppositional to traditional publishing, and thus subordinating it.In this paper, I hope to outline how the self-publishers I’ve observed have enacted various tactical approaches that specifically strive to tame their chaotic marketplace, and to indicate—through one case study (Amazon exclusivity)—a site of production and resistance where they have occasionally succeeded. Their approach is one that values information sharing and an open-source approach to book-selling and writing craft, ideologies drawn more from the tech / start-up world than commercial book industry described by Thompson (10). It is a space deeply informed by the virtual nature of its major platforms and as such, I argue its relation to the world of traditional publishing—and its representation within the traditional book industry—are tenuous, despite the central role of authorship and books.Making the Virtual Self-Publishing SceneWithin the study of popular music, the use of Barry Shank and Will Straw’s ‘scene’ concept has been an essential tool for uncovering and mapping independent/DIY creative practice. The term scene, defined by Straw as cultural space, is primarily interested in how cultural phenomena articulates or announces itself. A step beyond community, scene theorists are less concerned with examining an evolving history of practice (deemed essentialist) than they are concerned with focusing on the “making and remaking of alliances” as the crucial process whereby communal culture is formed, expressed and distributed (370).A scene’s spatial dimension—often categorized as local, translocal or virtual (see Bennett and Peterson)—demands attention be paid to hybridization, as a diversity of actors approach the same terrain from differing vantage points, with distinct motivations. As a research tool, scene can map action as the material existence of ideology. Thus, its particular usefulness is its ability to draw findings from diverse communities of practice.Drawing methodologies and approaches from Bourdieu’s field theory—a particularly resonant lens for examining cultural work—and de Certeau’s philosophies of space and circumstantial moves (“failed and successful attempts at redirection within a given terrain,” 375), scene focuses on articulation, the process whereby individual and communal activity becomes an observable or relatable or recordable phenomena.Within my previous work (see Bennett and Rogers, Rogers), I’ve used scene to map a variety of independent music-making practices and can see clear resemblances between independent music-making and the growing assemblage of writers within ebook self-publishing. The democratizing impulses espoused by self-publishers (the removal of gatekeepers as married to visions of a fiction/labour meritocracy) marry up quite neatly with the heady mix of separatism and entrepreneurialism inherent in Australian underground music.Self-publishers are typically older and typically more upfront about profit, but the communal interaction—the trade and gifting of support, resources and information—looks decidedly similar. Instead, the self-publishers appear different in one key regard: their scene-making is virtual in ways that far outstrip empirical examples drawn from popular music. 20Books2017 is only one of two conferences for this community thus far and represents one of the few occasions in which the community has met in any sort of organized way offline. For the most part, and in the day-to-day, self-publishing is a virtual scene.At present, the virtual space of self-published fiction is centralized around two digital platforms. Firstly, there is the online message board, of which two specific online destinations are key: the first is Kboards, a PHP-coded forum “devoted to all things Kindle” (Kboards) but including a huge author sub-board of self-published writers. The archive of this board amounts to almost two million posts spanning back to 2009. The second message board site is a collection of Facebook groups, of which the 10,000-strong membership of 20BooksTo50K is the most dominant; it is the originating home of 20Books2017.The other platform constituting the virtual scene of self-publishing is that of podcasting. While there are a number of high-profile static websites and blogs related to self-publishing (and an emerging community of vloggers), these pale in breadth and interaction when compared to podcasts such as The Creative Penn, The Self-Publishing Podcast, The Sell More Books Show, Rocking Self-Publishing (now defunct but archived) and The Self-Publishing Formula podcast. Statistical information on the distribution of these podcasts is unavailable but the circulation and online discussion of their content and the interrelation between the different shows and their hosts and guests all point to their currency within the scene.In short, if one is to learn about the business and craft production modes of self-publishing, one tends to discover and interact with one of these two platforms. The consensus best practice espoused on these boards and podcasts is the data set in which the remainder of this paper draws findings. I have spent the last two years embedded in these communities but for the purposes of this paper I will be drawing data exclusively from the public-facing Kboards, namely because it is the oldest, most established site, but also because all of the issues and discussion presented within this data have been cross-referenced across the different podcasts and boards. In fact, for a long period Kboards was so central to the scene that itself was often the topic of conversation elsewhere.Sticking in the Algorithm: The Best Practice of Fiction Self-PublishingSelf-publishing is a virtual scene because its “constellation of divergent interests and forces” (Shank, Preface, x) occur almost entirely online. This is not just a case of discussion, collaboration and discovery occurring online—as with the virtual layer of local and translocal music scenes—rather, the self-publishing community produces into the online space, almost exclusively. Its venues and distribution pathways are online and while its production mechanisms (writing) are still physical, there is an almost instantaneous and continuous interface with the online. These writers type and, increasingly dictate, their work into the virtual cloud, have it edited there (via in-text annotation) and from there the work is often designed, formatted, published, sold, marketed, reviewed and discussed online.In addition to which, a significant portion of these writers produce collaborative works, co-writing novels and co-editing them via cooperative apps. Teams of beta-readers (often fans) work on manuscripts pre-launch. Covers, blurbs, log lines, ad copy and novel openings are tested and reconfigured via crowd-sourced opinion. Seen here, the writing of the self-publishing scene is often explicitly commercial. But more to the fact, it never denies its direct co-relation with the mandates of online publishing. It is not traditional writing (it moves beyond authorship) and viewing these writers as emerging or unpublished or indeed, using the existing vernacular of literary writing practices, often fails to capture what it is they do.As the self-publishers write for the online space, Amazon forms a huge part of their thinking and working. The site sits at the heart of the practices under consideration here. Many of the authors drawn into this research are ‘wide’ in their online retail distribution, meaning they have books placed with Amazon’s online retail competitors. Yet the decision to go ‘wide’ or stay exclusive to Amazon — and the volume of discussion around this choice — is illustrative of how dominant the company remains in the scene. In fact, the example of Amazon exclusivity provides a valuable case-study.For self-publishers, Amazon exclusivity brings two stated and tangible benefits. The first relates to revenue diversification within Amazon, with exclusivity delivering an additional revenue stream in the form of Kindle Unlimited royalties. Kindle Unlimited (KU) is a subscription service for ebooks. Consumers pay a flat monthly fee ($13.99 AUD) for unlimited access to over a million Kindle titles. For a 300-page book, a full read-through of a novel under KU pays roughly the same royalty to authors as the sale of a $2.99 ebook, but only to Amazon-exclusive authors. If an exclusive book is particularly well suited to the KU audience, this can present authors with a very serious return.The second benefit of Amazon exclusivity is access to internal site merchandising; namely ‘Free Days’ where the book is given away (and can chart on the various ‘Top 100 Free’ leaderboards) and ‘Countdown Deals’ where a decreasing discount is staggered across a period (thus creating a type of scarcity).These two perks can prove particularly lucrative to individual authors. On Kboards, user Annie Jocoby (also writing as Rachel Sinclair) details her experiences with exclusivity:I have a legal thriller series that is all-in with KU [Kindle Unlimited], and I can honestly say that KU has been fantastic for visibility for that particular series. I put the books into KU in the first part of August, and I watched my rankings rise like crazy after I did that. They've stuck, too. If I weren't in KU, I doubt that they would still be sticking as well as they have. (anniejocoby)This is fairly typical of the positive responses to exclusivity, yet it incorporates a number of the more opaque benefits entangled with going exclusive to Amazon.First, there is ‘visibility.’ In self-publishing terms, ‘visibility’ refers almost exclusively to chart positions within Amazon. The myriad of charts — and how they function — is beyond the scope of this paper but they absolutely indicate — often dictate — the discoverability of a book online. These charts are the ‘front windows’ of Amazon, to use an analogy to brick-and-mortar bookstores. Books that chart well are actively being bought by customers and they are very often those benefiting from Amazon’s powerful recommendation algorithm, something that expands beyond the site into the company’s expansive customer email list. This brings us to the second point Jocoby mentions, the ‘sticking’ within the charts.There is a widely held belief that once a good book (read: free of errors, broadly entertaining, on genre) finds its way into the Amazon recommendation algorithm, it can remain there for long periods of time leading to a building success as sales beget sales, further boosting the book’s chart performance and reviews. There is also the belief among some authors that Kindle Unlimited books are actively favoured by this algorithm. The high-selling Amanda M. Lee noted a direct correlation:Rank is affected when people borrow your book [under KU]. Page reads don't play into it all. (Amanda M. Lee)Within the same thread, USA Today bestseller Annie Bellet elaborated:We tested this a bunch when KU 2.0 hit. A page read does zip for rank. A borrow, even with no pages read, is what prompts the rank change. Borrows are weighted exactly like sales from what we could tell, it doesn't matter if nobody opens the book ever. All borrows now are ghost borrows, of course, since we can't see them anymore, so it might look like pages are coming in and your rank is changing, but what is probably happening is someone borrowed your book around the same time, causing the rank jump. (Annie B)Whether this advantage is built into the algorithm in a (likely) attempt to favour exclusive authors, or by nature of KU books presenting at a lower price point, is unknown but there is anecdotal evidence that once a KU book gains traction, it can ‘stick’ within the charts for longer periods of time compared to non-exclusive titles.At the entrepreneurial end of the fiction self-publishing scene, Amazon is positioned at the very centre. To go wide—to follow vectors through the scene adjacent to Amazon — is to go around the commercial centre and its profits. Yet no one in this community remains unaffected by the strategic position of this site and the market it has either created or captured. Amazon’s institutional practices can be adopted by competitors (Kobo Plus is a version of KU) and the multitude of tactics authors use to promote their work all, in one shape or another, lead back to ‘circumstantial moves’ learned from Amazon or services that are aimed at promoting work sold there. Further to which, the sense of instability and risk engendered by such a dominant market player is felt everywhere.Some Closing Ideas on the Ideology of Self-PublishingSelf-publishing fiction remains tactical in the de Certeau sense of the term. It is responsive and ever-shifting, with a touch of communal complicity and what he calls la perruque (‘the wig’), a shorthand for resistance that presents itself as submission (25). The entrepreneurialism of self-published fiction trades off this sense of the tactical.Within the scene, Amazon bestseller charts aren’t as much markers of prestige as systems to be hacked. The choice between ‘wide’ and exclusive is only ever short-term; it is carefully scrutinised and the trade-offs and opportunities are monitored week-to-week and debated constantly online. Over time, the self-publishing scene has become expert at decoding Amazon’s monolithic Terms of Service, ever eager to find both advantage and risk as they attempt to lever the affordances of digital publishing against their own desire for profit and expression.This sense of mischief and slippage forms a big part of what self-publishing is. In contrast to traditional publishing—with its long lead times and physical real estate—self-publishing can’t help but appear fragile, wild and coarse. There is no other comparison possible.To survive in self-publishing is to survive outside the established book industry and to thrive within a new and far more uncertain market/space, one almost entirely without a mapped topology. Unlike the traditional publishing industry—very much a legacy, a “relatively stable” population group (Straw 373)—self-publishing cannot escape its otherness, not in the short term. Both its spatial coordinates and its pathways remain too fast-evolving in comparison to the referent of traditional publishing. In the short-to-medium term, I imagine it will remain at some cultural remove from traditional publishing, be it perceived as a threatening northern force or a speculative west.To see self-publishing in the present, I encourage scholars to step away from traditional publishing industry protocols and frameworks, to strive to see this new arena as the self-published authors themselves understand it (what Muggleton has referred to a “indigenous meaning” 13).Straw and Shank’s scene concept provides one possible conceptual framework for this shift in understanding as scene’s reliance on spatial considerations harbours an often underemphazised asset: it is a theory of orientation. At heart, it draws as much from de Certeau as Bourdieu and as such, the scene presented in this work is never complete or fixed. It is de Certeau’s city “shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces” (93). These scenes—be they musicians or authors—are only ever glimpsed and from a vantage point of close proximity. In short, it is one way out of the essentialisms that currently shroud self-published fiction as a craft, business and community of authors. The cultural space of self-publishing, to return Straw’s scene definition, is one that mirrors its own porous, online infrastructure, its own predominance in virtuality. Its pathways are coded together inside fast-moving media companies and these pathways are increasingly entwined within algorithmic processes of curation that promise meritocratization and disintermediation yet delivery systems that can be learned and manipulated.The agility to publish within these systems is the true skill-set required to self-publish fiction online. It traverses specific platforms and short-term eras. It is the core attribute of success in the scene. Everything else is secondary, including the content of the books produced. It is not the case that these books are of lesser literary quality or that their ever-growing abundance is threatening—this is the counter-argument so often presented by the traditional book industry—but more so that without entrepreneurial agility, the quality of the ebook goes undetermined as it sinks lower and lower into a distribution system that is so open it appears endless.ReferencesAmanda M. 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Re-Framing Participation in the Architecture Studio Recently, within design literature, significant attention has been given to collaboration across different disciplines (see for instance, Nicolini et al.; Carlile), as well as consideration of the breakdown of traditional disciplinarity and the corresponding involvement of users in co-generation (Sanders and Stappers, “Co-Creation” 11–12) through the development and deployment of structured methods and toolkits (Sanders et al., “Framework”; Sanders and Stappers, “Probes”). Relatively less attention has been paid to the workings of the “communities of practice” (Wenger) operating within the disciplinary domain of architecture. The discourse around concept design in architecture has tended to emphasise individualist approaches driven by personal philosophies, inspirations, imitation of a more experienced designer, and emphasis on latent talent or genius (for instance, Moneo). This can be problematic because without a shared language and methods there are limited opportunities for making meaning to facilitate participation between collaborators in architectural studio settings. It is worth asking then: are there things that “Architecture” might learn from “Design” about the deployment of structured methods, and might this interdisciplinary exchange promote participatory practices in studio-based cultures? We address this question by connecting and building on two important concepts relevant to design methods, meta-design as described in the open design literature (De Mul 36–37), and design frames as described by Schön and formalised by Dorst (‘Core’; Frame; see also Weedon). Through this combination, we propose a theory of participation by making shared meaning in architectural design. We animate our theoretical contribution through a design toolkit we have developed, refined, and applied over several years in typologically focused architectural design studios in Australian university contexts. One important contribution, we argue, is to the area of design theory-building, by taking two previously unrelated concepts from the design methods literature. We draw them together using an example from our own design practices to articulate a new term and concept for making shared meaning in design. The other contribution made is to the translation of this concept into the context of studio-based architectural practice, a setting that has traditionally struggled to accept structured methods. The existence of other form-metaphor design tools available for architecture and the theoretical basis of their development and connection to design literature more broadly has not always been clearly articulated (see for example Di Mari and Yoo; Lewis et al.). The rationale for giving an account of the construction and deployment of our own toolkit is to illustrate its theoretical contribution while providing the basis for future field testing and translation (including by other researchers), noting the established trajectory of this kind of work in the design literature (see, for example, Hoolohan and Browne; Visser et al.; Vaajakallio and Mattelmäki; Sanders and Stappers, “Co-Creation” and ”Probes”). In line with this issue’s thematic and epistemological agenda, we adopt what Cross identifies as “designerly ways of knowing” (223), and is at least partly a reflection on a practice in which we engage with our own disciplines and research interests to propose and deploy design thinking as a kind of critical “reflection-in-action” (Robertson and Simonsen 2). Meta-Framing: Combining Meta-Design and Framing Meta-design is a term used in open design literature to describe approaches aimed toward orchestration of a project in such a way that people are afforded the agency to become effective co-designers, regardless of their pre-existing skills or design-specific knowledge (De Mul 36). According to a meta-design approach, design is conceived of as a shared project of mutual learning instead of an individualistic expression of singular genius. Through the establishment of shared protocols and formats, what Ehn (1) calls “infrastructuring”, individuals with even very limited design experience are provided scaffolds that enable them to participate in a design project. One important way in which meta-design helps “create a pathway through a design space” is through the careful selection and adoption of shared guiding metaphors that provide common meanings between co-designers (De Mul 36). The usefulness of metaphors is also recognised in the context of design frames, the second concept on which we build our theory. Conceptualised as “cognitive shortcuts” for making “sense of complex situations” (Haase and Laursen 21), design frames were first conceived of by Schön (132) as a rational approach to design, one guided by “epistemological norms”. Frames have subsequently been further developed within the design methods literature and are defined as a system of counterfactual design decision-making that uses metaphors to provide a rationale for negotiating ill-structured problems. According to Dorst, frames involve: the creation of a (novel) standpoint from which a problematic situation can be tackled … . Although frames are often paraphrased by a simple metaphor, they are in fact very complex sets of statements that include the specific perception of a problem situation, the (implicit) adoption of certain concepts to describe the situation, a ‘working principle’ that underpins a solution and the key thesis: IF we look at the problem situation from this viewpoint, and adopt the working principle associated with that position, THEN we will create the value we are striving for. (525) Despite Schön choosing to illustrate his original conception of framing through the example of a student’s architectural design project, there has been limited subsequent consideration of framing in architectural studio contexts—an exception being Eissa in 2019. This may be because formalised design methods have tended to be treated with suspicion within architectural culture. For instance, Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language is one such “highly systemised design process” (Dawes and Ostwald 10) that despite its potential to guide participatory design has had an “uneven reception” (Bhatt 716) within architecture itself. One way architecture as a disciplinary domain and as a profession has attempted to engage with design method is through typology, which is one of the few persistent and recurring notions in architectural discourse (Bandini; Grover et al.). As a system of classification, typology categorises “forms and functions as simply and unequivocally as possible” (Oechslin 37). In addition to being used as a classification system, typology has also been positioned as “a process as much as an object”, one with the potential for an “active role in the process of design” (Lathouri 25). Type and typology have been conceptualised as a particular way of projecting architecture’s “disciplinary agency” (Jacoby 936), and this goes some way to explaining their enduring value. A potentially valid criticism of framing is that it can tend toward “design fixation”, when a pre-existing assumption “inadvertently restricts the designers’ imagination” (Crilly). Similarly, typology-as-method—as opposed to a classification tool—has been criticised for being relatively “inflexible” or “reductive” (Shane 2011) and responsible for perpetuating “conservative, static norms” (Jacoby 932) if applied in a rote and non-reflexive way. We deal with these concerns in the discussion of the deployment of our Typekit below. We are drawing here on our experience teaching in the first two years of undergraduate architecture degrees in Australian university settings. As well as being equipped with a diversity of educational, social, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds, students typically have divergent competencies in the domain-specific skills of their discipline and a limited vocabulary for making shared meaning in relation to an architectural proposal. The challenge for studio-based collaborative work in such a context is developing shared understandings and a common language for working on a design project to enable a variety of different design solutions. The brief for a typical studio project will specify a common site, context, and program. Examples we have used include a bathhouse, fire station, archive, civic centre, and lifesaving club. There will then be multiple design solutions proposed by each studio participant. Significantly we are talking about relatively well-structured problems here, typically a specific building program for a specified site and user group. These are quite unlike the open-ended aims of “problem frames” described in the design thinking literature “to handle ill-defined, open-ended, and ambiguous problems that other problem-solving methodologies fail to handle” (Haase and Laursen 21). However, even for well-structured problems, there is still a multitude of possible solutions possible, generated by students working on a particular project brief. This openness reduces the possibility of making shared meaning and thus hinders participation in architectural design. Designing the Typekit The Typekit was developed heuristically out of our experiences teaching together over several years. As part of our own reflective practice, we realised that we had begun to develop a shared language for describing projects including that of students, our own, precedents and canonical works. Often these took the form of a simple formal or functional metaphor such as “the building is a wall”; “the building is an upturned coracle”; or “the building is a cloud”. While these cognitive shortcuts proved useful for our communication there remained the possibility for this language to become esoteric and exclusionary. On the other hand, we recognised the potential for this approach to be shared beyond our immediate “interpretive community” (Fish 485) of two, and we therefore began to develop a meta-design toolkit. Fig. 1: Hybrid page from the Typekit We began by developing a visual catalogue of formal and functional metaphors already present within the panoply of constructed contemporary architectural projects assembled by surveying the popular design media for relevant source material. Fig. 2: Classification of contemporary architectural built work using Typekit metaphors We then used simple line drawings to generate abstract representations of the observed building metaphors adopting isometry to maintain a level of objectivity and a neutral viewing position (Scolari). The drawings themselves were both revelatory and didactic and by applying what Cross calls “designerly ways of knowing” (Cross 223) the toolkit emerged as both design artefact and output of design research. We recognised two fundamentally different kinds of framing metaphors in the set of architectural projects we surveyed, rule-derived and model-derived—terms we are adapting from Choay’s description of “instaurational texts” (8). Rule-derived types describe building forms that navigate the development of a design from a generic to a specific form (Baker 70–71) through a series of discrete “logical operators” (Choay 134). They tend to follow a logic of “begin with x … perform some operation A … perform some operation B … end up with y”. Examples of such operations include add, subtract, scale-translate-rotate, distort and array. Model-derived framing metaphors are different in the way they aim toward an outcome that is an adapted version of an ideal initial form. This involves selecting an existing type and refining it until it suits the required program, site, and context. Examples of the model-derived metaphors we have used include the hedgehog, caterpillar, mountain, cloud, island, and snake as well as architectural Ur-types like the barn, courtyard, tent, treehouse, jetty, and ziggurat. The framing types we included in the Typekit are a combination of rule-derived and model-derived as well as useful hybrids that combined examples from different categories. This classification provides a construct for framing a studio experience while acknowledging that there are other ways of classifying formal types. Fig. 3: Development of isometric drawings of metaphor-frames After we developed a variety of these line drawings, we carried out a synthesis and classification exercise using a version of the KJ method. Like framing, KJ is a technique of abduction developed for dealing objectively with qualitative data without a priori categorisation (Scupin; Kawakita). It has also become an established and widely practiced method within design research (see, for instance, Hanington and Martin 104–5). Themes were developed from the images, and we aimed at balancing a parsimony of typological categories with a saturation of types, that is to capture all observed types/metaphors and to put them in as few buckets as possible. Fig. 4: Synthesis exercise of Typekit metaphors using the KJ method (top); classification detail (bottom) Deploying the Typekit We have successfully deployed the Typekit in architectural design studios at two universities since we started developing it in 2018. As a general process participants adopt a certain metaphor as the starting point of their design. Doing so provides a frame that prefigures other decisions as they move through a concept design process. Once a guiding metaphor is selected, it structures other decision-making by providing a counterfactual logic (Byrne 30). For instance, if a building-as-ramp is chosen as the typology to be deployed this guides a rationale as to where and how it is placed on the site. People should be able to walk on it; it should sit resolutely on the ground and not be floating above it; it should be made of a massive material with windows and doors appearing to be carved out of it; it can have a green occupiable roof; quiet and private spaces should be located at the top away from street noise; active spaces such as a community hall and entry foyer should be located at the bottom of the ramp … and so on. The adoption of the frame of “building-as-ramp” by its very nature is a crucial and critical move in the design process. It is a decision made early in the process that prefigures both “what” and “how” types of questions as the project develops. In the end, the result seems logical even inevitable but there are many other types that could have potentially been explored and these would have posed different kinds of questions and resulted in different kinds of answers during the process. The selection of a guiding metaphor also allows students to engage with historical and contemporary precedents to offer further insights into the development—as well as refinement—of their own projects within that classification. Even given the well-structured nature of the architectural project, precedents provide useful reference points from which to build domain-specific knowledge and benchmarks to measure the differences in approaches still afforded within each typological classification. We believe that our particular meta-framing approach addresses concerns about design fixation and balances mutual learning with opportunities for individual investigation. We position framing less about finding innovative solutions to wicked problems to become more about finding ways for a group of people to reason together through a design problem process by developing and using shared metaphors. Thus our invocation of framing is aligned to what Haase and Laursen term “solution frames” meaning they have an “operational” meaning-making agenda and provide opportunities for developing shared understanding between individuals engaged in a given problem domain (Haase and Laursen 20). By providing a variety of opportunities within an overarching “frame of frames” there are opportunities for parallel design investigation to be undertaken by individual designers. Meta-framing affords opportunities for shared meaning-making and a constructive discourse between different project outcomes. This occurs whether adopting the same type to enable questions including “How is my building-as-snake different from your building-as-snake?”, “Which is the most snake-like?”, or different types (“In what ways is my building-as-ramp different to your building-as-stair?”) By employing everyday visual metaphors, opportunities for “mutual learning between mutual participants” (Robertson and Simonsen 2) are enhanced without the need for substantial domain-specific architectural knowledge at a project’s outset. We argue that the promise of the toolkit and our meta-framing approach more generally is that it actually multiples rather than forecloses opportunities while retaining a shared understanding and language for reasoning through a project domain. This effectively responds to concerns that typology-as-method is a conservative or reductive approach to architectural design. It is important to clarify the role of our toolkit and its relationship to our theory-building agenda. On the basis of the findings accounted for here we do claim to draw specific conclusions about the efficacy of our toolkit. We simply did not collect experimental data relevant to that task. We can, however, use the example of our toolkit to animate, flesh out, and operationalise a model for collaboration in architectural design that may be useful for teaching and practicing architecture in collaborative, team-based contexts. The contribution of this account, therefore, is theoretical. That is, the adaptation of concepts from design literature modified and translated into a new domain to serve new purposes. The Promise of Meta-Framing through Typology Through our work, we have outlined the benefits of adopting formalised design methods in architecture as a way of supporting participation, including using toolkits for scaffolding architectural concept design. Meta-framing has shown itself to be a useful approach to enable participation in architectural design in a number of ways. It provides coherence of an idea and architectural concept. It assists decision-making in any given scenario because a designer can decide which out of a set of choices makes more sense within the “frame” adopted for the project. The question becomes then not “what do I like?” or “what do I want?” but “what makes sense within the project frame?” Finally and perhaps most importantly it brings a common understanding of a project that allows for communication across a team working on the same problem, supporting a variety of different approaches and problem-solving logics a voice. By combining methodologies and toolkits from the design methods literature with architecture’s domain-specific typological classifications we believe we have developed an effective and adaptive model for scaffolding participation and making shared meaning in architecture studio contexts. References Baker, Geoffrey H. Design Strategies in Architecture: An Approach to the Analysis of Form. 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The Alt Right Are Not Alright Academic explorations complicating both the Internet and whiteness have often focussed on the rise of the “alt-right” to examine the co-option of digital technologies to extend white supremacy (Daniels, “Cyber Racism”; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise”; Nagle). The term “alt-right” refers to media organisations, personalities, and sarcastic Internet users who promote the “alternative right”, understood as extremely conservative, political views online. The alt-right, in all of their online variations and inter-grouping, are infamous for supporting white supremacy online, “characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes. Alt-righters eschew ‘establishment’ conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethnonationalism as a fundamental value” (Southern Poverty Law Center). Theoretical studies of the alt-right have largely focussed on its growing presence across social media and websites such as Twitter, Reddit, and notoriously “chan” sites 4chan and 8chan, through the political discussions referred to as “threads” on the site (Nagle; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise”; Hawley). As well, the ability of online users to surpass national boundaries and spread global white supremacy through the Internet has also been studied (Back et al.). The alt-right have found a home on the Internet, using its features to cunningly recruit members and to establish a growing community that mainstream politically extreme views (Daniels, “Cyber Racism”; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise; Munn). This body of knowledge shows that academics have been able to produce critically relevant literature regarding the alt-right despite the online anonymity of the majority of its members. For example, Conway et al., in their analysis of the history and social media patterns of the alt-right, follow the unique nature of the Christchurch Massacre, encompassing the use and development of message boards, fringe websites, and social media sites to champion white supremacy online. Positioning my research in this literature, I am interested in contributing further knowledge regarding the alt-right, white supremacy, and the Internet by exploring the sinister conducting of Zoom-bombing anti-racist events. Here, I will investigate how white supremacy through the Internet can lead to violence, abuse, and fear that “transcends the virtual world to damage real, live humans beings” via Zoom-bombing, an act that is situated in a larger co-option of the Internet by the alt-right and white supremacists, but has been under theorised as a hate crime (Daniels; “Cyber Racism” 7). Shitposting I want to preface this chapter by acknowledging that while I understand the Internet, through my own external investigations of race, power and the Internet, as a series of entities that produce racial violence both online and offline, I am aware of the use of the Internet to frame, discuss, and share anti-racist activism. Here we can turn to the work of philosopher Michel de Certeau who conceived the idea of a “tactic” as a way to construct a space of agency in opposition to institutional power. This becomes a way that marginalised groups, such as racialised peoples, can utilise the Internet as a tactical material to assert themselves and their non-compliance with the state. Particularly, shitposting, a tactic often associated with the alt-right, has also been co-opted by those who fight for social justice and rally against oppression both online and offline. As Roderick Graham explores, the Internet, and for this exploration, shitposting, can be used to proliferate deviant and racist material but also as a “deviant” byway of oppositional and anti-racist material. Despite this, a lot can be said about the invisible yet present claims and support of whiteness through Internet and digital technologies, as well as the activity of users channelled through these screens, such as the alt-right and their digital tactics. As Vikki Fraser remarks, “the internet assumes whiteness as the norm – whiteness is made visible through what is left unsaid, through the assumption that white need not be said” (120). It is through the lens of white privilege and claims to white supremacy that online irony, by way of shitposting, is co-opted and understood as an inherently alt-right tool, through the deviance it entails. Their sinister co-option of shitposting bolsters audacious claims as to who has the right to exist, in their support of white identity, but also hides behind a veil of mischief that can hide their more insidious intention and political ideologies. The alt-right have used “shitposting”, an online style of posting and interacting with other users, to create a form of online communication for a translocal identity of white nationalist members. Sean McEwan defines shitposting as “a form of Internet interaction predicated upon thwarting established norms of discourse in favour of seemingly anarchic, poor quality contributions” (19). Far from being random, however, I argue that shitposting functions as a discourse that is employed by online communities to discuss, proliferate, and introduce white supremacist ideals among their communities as well as into the mainstream. In the course of this article, I will introduce racist Zoom-bombing as a tactic situated in shitposting which can be used as a means of white supremacist discourse and an attempt to block anti-racist efforts. By this line, the function of discourse as one “to preserve or to reproduce discourse (within) a closed community” is calculatingly met through shitposting, Zoom-bombing, and more overt forms of white supremacy online (Foucault 225-226). Using memes, dehumanisation, and sarcasm, online white supremacists have created a means of both organising and mainstreaming white supremacy through humour that allows insidious themes to be mocked and then spread online. Foucault writes that “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and danger, to cope with chance events, to evade ponderous, awesome materiality” (216). As Philippe-Joseph Salazar recontextualises to online white supremacists, “the first procedure of control is to define what is prohibited, in essence, to set aside that which cannot be spoken about, and thus to produce strategies to counter it” (137). By this line, the alt-right reorganises these procedures and allocates a checked speech that will allow their ideas to proliferate in like-minded and growing communities. As a result, online white supremacists becoming a “community of discourse” advantages them in two ways: first, ironic language permits the mainstreaming of hate that allows sinister content to enter the public as the severity of their intentions is doubted due to the sarcastic language employed. Second, shitposting is employed as an entry gate to more serious and dangerous participation with white supremacist action, engagement, and ideologies. It is important to note that white privilege is embodied in these discursive practices as despite this exploitation of emerging technologies to further white supremacy, there are approaches that theorise the alt-right as “crazed product(s) of an isolated, extremist milieu with no links to the mainstream” (Moses 201). In this way, it is useful to consider shitposting as an informal approach that mirrors legitimised white sovereignties and authorised white supremacy. The result is that white supremacist online users succeed in “not only in assembling a community of actors and a collective of authors, on the dual territory of digital communication and grass-roots activism”, but also shape an effective fellowship of discourse that audiences react well to online, encouraging its reception and mainstreaming (Salazar 142). Continuing, as McBain writes, “someone who would not dream of donning a white cap and attending a Ku Klux Klan meeting might find themselves laughing along to a video by the alt-right satirist RamZPaul”. This idea is echoed in a leaked stylistic guide by white supremacist website and message board the Daily Stormer that highlights irony as a cultivated mechanism used to draw new audiences to the far right, step by step (Wilson). As showcased in the screen capture below of the stylistic guide, “the reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor and is slowly awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points” (Feinburg). The result of this style of writing is used “to immerse recruits in an online movement culture built on memes, racial panic and the worst of Internet culture” (Wilson). Figure 1: A screenshot of the Daily Stormer’s playbook, expanding on the stylistic decisions of alt-right writers. Racist Zoom-Bombing In the timely text “Racist Zoombombing”, Lisa Nakamura et al. write the following: Zoombombing is more than just trolling; though it belongs to a broad category of online behavior meant to produce a negative reaction, it has an intimate connection with online conspiracy theorists and white supremacy … . Zoombombing should not be lumped into the larger category of trolling, both because the word “trolling” has become so broad it is nearly meaningless at times, and because zoombombing is designed to cause intimate harm and terrorize its target in distinct ways. (30) Notwithstanding the seriousness of Zoom-bombing, and to not minimise its insidiousness by understanding it as a form of shitposting, my article seeks to reiterate the seriousness of shitposting, which, in the age of COVID-19, Zoom-bombing has become an example of. I seek to purport the insidiousness of the tactical strategies of the alt-right online in a larger context of white violence online. Therefore, I am proposing a more critical look at the tactical use of the Internet by the alt-right, in theorising shitposting and Zoom-bombing as means of hate crimes wherein they impose upon anti-racist activism and organising. Newlands et al., receiving only limited exposure pre-pandemic, write that “Zoom has become a household name and an essential component for parties (Matyszczyk, 2020), weddings (Pajer, 2020), school and work” (1). However, through this came the strategic use of co-opting the application by the alt-right to digitise terror and ensure a “growing framework of memetic warfare” (Nakamura et al. 31). Kruglanski et al. label this co-opting of online tools to champion white supremacy operations via Zoom-bombing an example of shitposting: Not yet protesting the lockdown orders in front of statehouses, far-right extremists infiltrated Zoom calls and shared their screens, projecting violent and graphic imagery such as swastikas and pornography into the homes of unsuspecting attendees and making it impossible for schools to rely on Zoom for home-based lessons. Such actions, known as “Zoombombing,” were eventually curtailed by Zoom features requiring hosts to admit people into Zoom meetings as a default setting with an option to opt-out. (128) By this, we can draw on existing literature that has theorised white supremacists as innovation opportunists regarding their co-option of the Internet, as supported through Jessie Daniels’s work, “during the shift of the white supremacist movement from print to digital online users exploited emerging technologies to further their ideological goals” (“Algorithmic Rise” 63). Selfe and Selfe write in their description of the computer interface as a “political and ideological boundary land” that may serve larger cultural systems of domination in much the same way that geopolitical borders do (418). Considering these theorisations of white supremacists utilising tools that appear neutral for racialised aims and the political possibilities of whiteness online, we can consider racist Zoom-bombing as an assertion of a battle that seeks to disrupt racial justice online but also assert white supremacy as its own legitimate cause. My first encounter of local Zoom-bombing was during the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) Seminar titled “Intersecting Crises” by Western Sydney University. The event sought to explore the concatenation of deeply inextricable ecological, political, economic, racial, and social crises. An academic involved in the facilitation of the event, Alana Lentin, live tweeted during the Zoom-bombing of the event: Figure 2: Academic Alana Lentin on Twitter live tweeting the Zoom-bombing of the Intersecting Crises event. Upon reflecting on this instance, I wondered, could efforts have been organised to prevent white supremacy? In considering who may or may not be responsible for halting racist shit-posting, we can problematise the work of R David Lankes, who writes that “Zoom-bombing is when inadequate security on the part of the person organizing a video conference allows uninvited users to join and disrupt a meeting. It can be anything from a prankster logging on, yelling, and logging off to uninvited users” (217). However, this beckons two areas to consider in theorising racist Zoom-bombing as a means of isolated trolling. First, this approach to Zoom-bombing minimises the sinister intentions of Zoom-bombing when referring to people as pranksters. Albeit withholding the “mimic trickery and mischief that were already present in spaces such as real-life classrooms and town halls” it may be more useful to consider theorising Zoom-bombing as often racialised harassment and a counter aggression to anti-racist initiatives (Nakamura et al. 30). Due to the live nature of most Zoom meetings, it is increasingly difficult to halt the threat of the alt-right from Zoom-bombing meetings. In “A First Look at Zoom-bombings” a range of preventative strategies are encouraged for Zoom organisers including “unique meeting links for each participant, although we acknowledge that this has usability implications and might not always be feasible” (Ling et al. 1). The alt-right exploit gaps, akin to co-opting the mainstreaming of trolling and shitposting, to put forward their agenda on white supremacy and assert their presence when not welcome. Therefore, utilising the pandemic to instil new forms of terror, it can be said that Zoom-bombing becomes a new means to shitpost, where the alt-right “exploits Zoom’s uniquely liminal space, a space of intimacy generated by users via the relationship between the digital screen and what it can depict, the device’s audio tools and how they can transmit and receive sound, the software that we can see, and the software that we can’t” (Nakamura et al. 29). Second, this definition of Zoom-bombing begs the question, is this a fair assessment to write that reiterates the blame of organisers? Rather, we can consider other gaps that have resulted in the misuse of Zoom co-opted by the alt-right: “two conditions have paved the way for Zoom-bombing: a resurgent fascist movement that has found its legs and best megaphone on the Internet and an often-unwitting public who have been suddenly required to spend many hours a day on this platform” (Nakamura et al. 29). In this way, it is interesting to note that recommendations to halt Zoom-bombing revolve around the energy, resources, and attention of the organisers to practically address possible threats, rather than the onus being placed on those who maintain these systems and those who Zoom-bomb. As Jessie Daniels states, “we should hold the platform accountable for this type of damage that it's facilitated. It's the platform's fault and it shouldn't be left to individual users who are making Zoom millions, if not billions, of dollars right now” (Ruf 8). Brian Friedberg, Gabrielle Lim, and Joan Donovan explore the organised efforts by the alt-right to impose on Zoom events and disturb schedules: “coordinated raids of Zoom meetings have become a social activity traversing the networked terrain of multiple platforms and web spaces. Raiders coordinate by sharing links to Zoom meetings targets and other operational and logistical details regarding the execution of an attack” (14). By encouraging a mass coordination of racist Zoom-bombing, in turn, social justice organisers are made to feel overwhelmed and that their efforts will be counteracted inevitably by a large and organised group, albeit appearing prankster-like. Aligning with the idea that “Zoombombing conceals and contains the terror and psychological harm that targets of active harassment face because it doesn’t leave a trace unless an alert user records the meeting”, it is useful to consider to what extent racist Zoom-bombing becomes a new weapon of the alt-right to entertain and affirm current members, and engage and influence new members (Nakamura et al. 34). I propose that we consider Zoom-bombing through shitposting, which is within “the location of matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)” to challenge the role of interface design and Internet infrastructure in enabling racial violence online (Costanza-Chock). Conclusion As Nakamura et al. have argued, Zoom-bombing is indeed “part of the lineage or ecosystem of trollish behavior”, yet these new forms of alt-right shitposting “[need] to be critiqued and understood as more than simply trolling because this term emerged during an earlier, less media-rich and interpersonally live Internet” (32). I recommend theorising the alt-right in a way that highlights the larger structures of white power, privilege, and supremacy that maintain their online and offline legacies beyond Zoom, “to view white supremacy not as a static ideology or condition, but to instead focus on its geographic and temporal contingency” that allows acts of hate crime by individuals on politicised bodies (Inwood and Bonds 722). This corresponds with Claire Renzetti’s argument that “criminologists theorise that committing a hate crime is a means of accomplishing a particular type of power, hegemonic masculinity, which is described as white, Christian, able-bodied and heterosexual” – an approach that can be applied to theorisations of the alt-right and online violence (136). This violent white masculinity occupies a hegemonic hold in the formation, reproduction, and extension of white supremacy that is then shared, affirmed, and idolised through a racialised Internet (Donaldson et al.). Therefore, I recommend that we situate Zoom-bombing as a means of shitposting, by reiterating the severity of shitposting with the same intentions and sinister goals of hate crimes and racial violence. References Back, Les, et al. “Racism on the Internet: Mapping Neo-Fascist Subcultures in Cyber-Space.” Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture. Eds. Jeffrey Kaplan and Tore Bjørgo. Northeastern UP, 1993. 73-101. Bonds, Anne, and Joshua Inwood. “Beyond White Privilege: Geographies of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism.” Progress in Human Geography 40 (2015): 715-733. Conway, Maura, et al. “Right-Wing Extremists’ Persistent Online Presence: History and Contemporary Trends.” The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague. Policy Brief, 2019. Costanza-Chock, Sasha. “Design Justice and User Interface Design, 2020.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Association for Computing Machinery, 2020. Daniels, Jessie. “The Algorithmic Rise of the ‘Alt-Right.’” Contexts 17 (2018): 60-65. ———. “Race and Racism in Internet Studies: A Review and Critique.” New Media & Society 15 (2013): 695-719. ———. Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights. Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. First ed. U of California P, 1980. Donaldson, Mike. “What Is Hegemonic Masculinity?” Theory and Society 22 (1993): 643-657. Feinburg, Ashley. “This Is The Daily Stormer’s Playbook.” Huffington Post 13 Dec. 2017. <http://www.huffpost.com/entry/daily-stormer-nazi-style-guide_n_5a2ece19e4b0ce3b344492f2>. Foucault, Michel. “The Discourse on Language.” The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Ed. A.M. Sheridan Smith. Pantheon, 1971. 215-237. Fraser, Vicki. “Online Bodies and Sexual Subjectivities: In Whose Image?” The Racial Politics of Bodies, Nations and Knowledges. Eds. Barbara Baird and Damien W. Riggs. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 116-132. Friedberg, Brian, Gabrielle Lim, and Joan Donovan. “Space Invaders: The Networked Terrain of Zoom Bombing.” Harvard Shorenstein Center, 2020. Graham, Roderick. “Race, Social Media and Deviance.” The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance. Eds. Thomas J. Holt and Adam M. Bossler, 2019. 67-90. Hawley, George. Making Sense of the Alt-Right. Columbia UP, 2017. Henry, Matthew G., and Lawrence D. Berg. “Geographers Performing Nationalism and Hetero-Masculinity.” Gender, Place & Culture 13 (2006): 629-645. Kruglanski, Arie W., et al. “Terrorism in Time of the Pandemic: Exploiting Mayhem.” Global Security: Health, Science and Policy 5 (2020): 121-132. Lankes, R. David. Forged in War: How a Century of War Created Today's Information Society. Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Ling, Chen, et al. “A First Look at Zoombombing, 2021.” Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Oakland, 2021. McBain, Sophie. “The Alt-Right, and How the Paranoia of White Identity Politics Fuelled Trump’s Rise.” New Statesman 27 Nov. 2017. <http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/11/alt-right-and-how-paranoia-white-identity-politics-fuelled-trump-s-rise>. McEwan, Sean. “Nation of Shitposters: Ironic Engagement with the Facebook Posts of Shannon Noll as Reconfiguration of an Australian National Identity.” Journal of Media and Communication 8 (2017): 19-39. Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction.” Settler Colonial Studies 2 (2012): 2-22. Moses, A Dirk. “‘White Genocide’ and the Ethics of Public Analysis.” Journal of Genocide Research 21 (2019): 1-13. Munn, Luke. “Algorithmic Hate: Brenton Tarrant and the Dark Social Web.” VoxPol, 3 Apr. 2019. <http://www.voxpol.eu/algorithmic-hate-brenton-tarrant-and-the-dark-social-web>. Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Zero Books, 2017. Nakamura, Lisa, et al. Racist Zoom-Bombing. Routledge, 2021. Newlands, Gemma, et al. “Innovation under Pressure: Implications for Data Privacy during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Big Data & Society July-December (2020): 1-14. Perry, Barbara, and Ryan Scrivens. “White Pride Worldwide: Constructing Global Identities Online.” The Globalisation of Hate: Internationalising Hate Crime. Eds. Jennifer Schweppe and Mark Austin Walters. Oxford UP, 2016. 65-78. Renzetti, Claire. Feminist Criminology. Routledge, 2013. Ruf, Jessica. “‘Spirit-Murdering' Comes to Zoom: Racist Attacks Plague Online Learning.” Issues in Higher Education 37 (2020): 8. Salazar, Philippe-Joseph. “The Alt-Right as a Community of Discourse.” Javnost – The Public 25 (2018): 135-143. Selfe, Cyntia L., and Richard J. Selfe, Jr. “The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones.” College Composition and Communication 45 (1994): 480-504. Southern Poverty Law Center. “Alt-Right.” <http://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right>. Wilson, Jason. “Do the Christchurch Shootings Expose the Murderous Nature of ‘Ironic’ Online Fascism?” The Guardian, 16 Mar. 2019. <http://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2019/mar/15/do-the-christchurch-shootings-expose-the-murderous-nature-of-ironic-online-fascism>.

As the use of social networks becomes increasingly commonplace, scholars have observed that associated requirements arise relating to how one’s digital self is practised, worked on, and disseminated (Cover; Miller; Papacharissi). Since the earliest forms of online interaction, scholars have tracked the importance of the question of “realness” in identity and social groupings (Burkhalter; Donath; O’Brien). More recently, as people become more connected, connect-able and subject to peer (as well as corporate and government surveillance) (van Zoonen), digital media cultures have increasingly demanded the performance of authenticity as part of the work of belonging online (Banet-Weiser; Keller). Drawing on Banet-Weiser’s and Keller’s work in particular, “authenticity” is defined here as the quality of being considered consistently “true to oneself” in a way which is socially legitimated. I suggest, online, that this demand for authenticity is manifested through two poles of authenticity: authentic individuality and authentic belonging. In this paper, I discuss the interplay between authentic individuality and authentic belonging in (postfeminist) digital cultures, by using the case study of a set of meme blogs narrating youthful femininity on blogging social network Tumblr. This meme set, based on Tumblr blog “WhatShouldWeCallMe” (WSWCM), sets out a self-representative affective account of quotidian feminine experiences. In a set of six blogs of this meme set, including the “founder”, I consider the production of authenticities where the simultaneous importance of connection and imitative differentiation is foregrounded, tracking the way authenticity is practised in the founder and follower meme blogs. I contend that the WSWCM founder claims authentic individuality, producing itself through claims to originality, and pre-existing “best girlfriendship”. I then suggest that the follower meme blogs foreground authentic digital belonging, by exhibiting certain affective cultural literacies that demonstrate insider status in this intimate digital feminine public (Berlant). I surmise these strategies are used to manage the demands of tension between proving one’s true and individual self and the need to be recognised as belonging through commonality. The Authentic Self Brand and the Authentic Insider I suggest that one expression of authentic individuality can be found in the increasingly prevalent practice of self-branding in digital cultures on social network sites (Banet-Weiser). In what Banet-Weiser calls “the authentic self-brand”, one sets up a simultaneous relationship to oneself, and a relationship between oneself and one’s audience. This double relationship is one of “innovation, production, and consumption [of the self], charged with ideally producing a unique, ‘authentic’ self” (73) for others. The self-social relationship offered by the authentic self-brand dovetails with what scholars identify as a postfeminist media landscape in the West (Gill; McRobbie; Negra). Postfeminist narratives promote highly commercial paradigms of self-surveillance, self-regulation and self-improvement, particularly for young women (Gill, McRobbie), whereby one’s body, social practices and relationships are evaluated as part of the marketability of one’s self-brand (Banet-Weiser, Winch). In this marketised recasting of social relationships, one must treat oneself as a product to be invested in, and remain vigilantly aware of how one is perceived by an audience of potential “buyers”. Notably, postfeminism relies on the idea of a deep, inhering individuality to justify the injunction to marketise oneself (Gill). Following this logic, gendered practices which may improve one’s feminine “self-brand” such as attention to beauty practices and body shape, must be cast as for “oneself” and part of one’s “true desires”. This occurs in a landscape where it is widely presumed that feminism has done its work, and women are now “free” to perform femininity however they wish (Gill). In postfeminist digital cultures, proving one’s acts are done for one’s true self, not for others becomes crucial in demonstrating one’s feminine authenticity (Dobson, Individuality; Performative), even as one is aware of the social value of one’s profile or digital brand (Banet-Weiser, Ringrose and Barajas). Drawing on this body of work, I suggest that authentic individuality, performed through imperviousness to social influence, is the way in which these contradictions of the postfeminist self-brand are justified. At the same time, digital cultures can also be argued to offer “remix” spaces (Lessig) where the borrowing, imitation and adaptation of existing cultural artefacts demonstrates personally felt connections to wider social meanings. One common manifestation of this is the Internet “meme”, a unit of culture which relies on imitative adaptation and differentiation in its circulation (Shifman), which I discuss further in this article. Shifman illustrates the meme as a mode of interpretive connection with the example of YouTube meme “Leave Britney Alone”, which began with the founder meme video by actor Chris Crocker making an emotional plea that society leave singer Britney Spears in peace. Memes signal dominant social understandings of the original cultural unit: Shifman notes that with the “Leave Britney Alone” meme, the follower memes tended to mock Crocker’s perceived effeminacy, sexuality and excessiveness in their re-enactments of Crocker’s founder video. Authenticity in these forms of digital production might be argued to signify more about desires for legitimate or authentic belonging within digital publics as insiders, rather than proving a fundamental individuality. WhatShouldWeCallMe and Tumblr Remix Culture Tumblr is a relatively under-researched but rapidly growing blogging social network, documented at the end of 2014 as the social platform with the most growth in user numbers (Lunden). Tumblr is known as a promising hub of burgeoning visual youth cultures (Third and Hart), possibly due to its norms of anonymity and significant pop culture content of posts. Images are a dominant form of communication on the site, and most content on Tumblr is public. Notably, 70% of Tumblr traffic occurs internally through the repurposing and reblogging of posts in the “dashboard” area (the equivalent being the “newsfeed’ for Facebook), rather than from external sources (Walker). Tumblr users are able to follow each other, and like and reblog each other’s posts. However, direct comments on posts are not an available feature, unlike most “first wave” (Miller and Fink) blogging sites; if a user wishes to comment on a post, they can only do so when reblogging the post, which is then featured on their own blog. According to Tumblr founder David Karp, this feature discourages overly negative comments and flame wars because “if you’re going to be a jerk, you’re looking like a jerk in your own space” (Walker). These structures set up Tumblr as an ideal site for the production of memes as part of its remix culture, whilst still adhering to certain connective features of other social networks. To provide some context, the founder WSWCM blog boasted 50,000 new Tumblr followers in the month following its creation in 2012, with independent traffic reports logging the number of page views as one to two million per day (Casserly). Each post on the founder WSWCM is on average liked and reblogged by hundreds of other Tumblr users, but its significance, which I consider here, lies in the way that it has been taken up in a prolific variety of follower meme blogs. Interestingly, unlike “Leave Britney Alone”, the form of imitative differentiation here is keyed at speaking at a more self-representative level, rather than making a comment on or satirising the founder, suggesting a level of personal connection. Like “Leave Britney Alone”, the WSWCM meme set can be understood as a founder-based meme (Shifman), with one originating, successful meme text which then inspires many follower memes, which are usually less successful. The follower memes I consider here adapt the GIF-reaction format which is used to narrate everyday experiences of youthful femininity. Blog posts are produced by matching a GIF image to situations such as “when my boyfriend forgets to DVR the Voice” or “when I hear my frenemy got dumped by her boyfriend”. GIFs are moving photo files excerpting about three seconds of movement from popular culture ranging from film, television and YouTube videos. It must be stressed that the term “follower” does not necessarily connote a lack of originality. The imitation of the follower blogs is strategic: a deliberate, slight differentiation, which operates to set them apart, but still locates them within a youthful feminine public. The emergence of the WSWCM follower blogs is a dynamic one which, I suggest, has catalysed the founder to intensify its claims to legitimacy through authentic originality even as its funny and creative followers throw its uniqueness into question. The Founder Meme Blog: Best Friendship as Authenticity Practice One key way that the WSWCM founder makes claims to authenticity is through a “best girlfriendship”, which is also explicitly articulated as the driving force for the maintenance of the blog, rather than Tumblr followers or outside audiences. Whilst ads are hosted on the founder blog, it is explained that these are almost ancillary—“to pay the bills” of purchasing material to create the GIFs, pay for the site design, web-hosting fees, and other costs. The almost romantic figure of the female “best friend” features significantly, fitting with Winch’s claim that the female best friend becomes a new “soul mate”, beyond one’s (heterosexual) partner in postfeminist girlfriend culture. In this way, we see how certain social relationships become recognisable as authentic. The founder bloggers state in their FAQs: We are two best friends who met in college and now live on opposite coasts (of the United States). We used to send each other funny .gifs as a way of staying in touch, and decided to start a tumblr that both of us could check during the day. We thought we were just posting inside jokes, but are thrilled that other people find them as funny as we do. We never really intended for anyone else to see it. Whilst now, with potentially hundreds of thousands of followers, it is difficult to maintain that the blog is maintained solely as a means of keeping in contact, this long distance girlfriendship can be drawn on to establish the authenticity and social capital for the blog. The best friend is a productive space through which one can express one’s true, individual desires, free of others’ wishes and outside constraints. Many moments expressed in the original blog centre on (very funny) moments that are only shared with the best friend where one can really be “oneself”, such as “when my best friend and I stay in” (for a night in), or “when my best friend and I are DGAF in public” (“don’t give a fuck”). In the blog, the very exclusivity of the female best friend compared to other ambivalent relations with “other girls” and “guys”, can also be understood as a mechanism for carving out a space of feminine individuality. I suggest that this best girlfriendship should be understood as a permutation of the authentic self-brand, practised to achieve a form of authentic individuality. In Winch’s conception, postfeminist girlfriendship is about strategy rather than solidarity; girlfriendship becomes an “investment in the individual” as it is “essential in enabling feminine normativity” (2). This may be reflected in the way best friendship is mobilised as a brand for WSWCM. At its inception, WSWCM only used the “Minimalist” theme for its layout, a free theme offered by Tumblr, which is still visible in the formats of some of the meme blogs. Fig. 1A: “Screenshot of Minimalist Theme in follower blog.” Twodumbgirls.tumblr.com, 16 Feb. 2015.Fig. 1B: “Screenshot of Minimalist Theme in follower blog.” Whatshouldwecollegeme.tumblr.com, 16 Feb. 2015. However, in early 2014 the bloggers changed to a different header to distinguish their site. I suggest this can be understood as a response to establish originality and authenticity through a best friendship brand, in opposition to the other meme blogs, which had also adopted the founder theme. The WSWCM header features cartoonish depictions of the two bloggers, one in New York with the silhouette of skyscrapers behind her, and one on a beach with an open laptop, the blog visible on her screen. Fig. 2: “WhatShouldWeCallMe Header.” Whatshouldwecallme.tumblr.com, 17 Feb. 2015. This header clearly alludes to the fact that the bloggers are separated, in different places, but links them by depicting them as virtually identical. Somewhat similar to “Bratz” dolls, they are both represented with oversized heads, tiny bodies, long hair, and large eyes, with the only differences being that one is blonde with pale skin and blue eyes, the other brunette with tanned skin and green eyes. I suggest that what is striking about this cartoonish image is the way it fits into a commercial genre of representation of “girlfriends”. Further, whilst girlfriends are often positioned as differing, their differences are often positioned as complementary, to strengthen a united co-brand (Winch). The differences here are noticeably nominal, skin-deep—the slight variation in hair, eye and skin colour hint at “‘tantalising differences within a normative paradigm” (Winch 46). I am not suggesting here that the best friendship of the bloggers is artificial or purely commercial, but rather, that this production of digital best friendship coincides with strategies to achieve authentic individuality recognisable in postfeminist digital cultures. The best friend is thus crucial to the performance of authenticity in the original blog. It is important to note, however, that these practices exceed postfeminist self-branding in certain ways. Given that WSWCM has indeed inspired follower memes keyed in a self-representative register, this suggests possibilities of broader connection and a sense of intimacy through recognisability of shared femininity. From one form of insider practice—the WSWCM best girlfriendship—to another, other Tumblr bloggers through follower meme texts have also signalled their insider status, as young women able to narrate forms of feminine experience held out as representative and legitimate. The Follower Meme Blogs: Connective Differentiation In contrast to the founder’s production of authenticity through claims to originality, and through a relationship, which is held out as distinct from the desires to gain Internet followers, authenticity is practised differently in the follower memes. Authentic individuality is decentred; rather, the follower blogs appear to foreground the importance of authentic belonging. This becomes clear in the followers’ imitation of the founder in their positioning as similar, but slightly different. For example, in the blog WhatShouldBetchesCallMe, the blogging subject still narrates quotidian feminine trials and tribulations, but is much more knowingly confident and sassy; in WhatShouldWeCollegeMe, the blog focuses more on the experience of being at university than the founder meme. Shifman foregrounds the process of repackaging and imitation in the adaptation of memes; I suggest that what also must be considered in this meme set is connective differentiation, which repositions this repackaging as simultaneously a form of distancing and connection. Here, the connective differentiation of the follower blogs is a way of citing one’s knowledge and understanding of youthful feminine experience. By creating a self-representative, knowingly derivative but different follower blog in this meme set, this subsequent variation demonstrates one’s legitimate belonging in the feminine public sphere of WSWCM readership. I suggest Berlant’s conceptualisation of intimate publics is useful here in explaining how slight variations on an original theme play out in a culture in which authenticity is held up as essential. Berlant argues that women’s culture in the West, centrally shaped by relations to commodities, creates expectations of both normativity and commonality whereby the market claims to offer texts and objects which are true to women’s “particular core interests and desires” (5). This provides a “generic-but-unique” femininity (6) through which women can expect to be recognisable in this public. Arguably, what the memes opt into—through being recognised as derivative—is a form of recognition in an intimate feminine public. Thus, the follower memes adhere to these rules of recognisability in order to be seen. Recognition as belonging in this intimate public through social knowledge becomes more useful for the follower memes, which cannot rely on the status of originality of the founder meme. What this practice of discerning, connective differentiation may signal is a configuration of authenticity which manages the tension in demands of digital culture— signalling one’s individuality yet demonstrating one’s social embeddedness. As O’Brien (1998) notes in relation to early online social interaction, if one wants to be recognised and recognisable, one must draw on established social, cultural codes. Notably, many of the situations which are put forward in blog posts of the follower memes are not necessarily easily distinguishable in genre or content from the blog posts of the founder memes. Though the founder meme text places particular emphasis on best friendship, other forms of youthful, feminine (middle class) experience are recycled and re-adapted for circulation. Many of the situations which are put forward in the meme set, while creatively assembled, are ultimately generic so that they can be circulated on Tumblr to connect with others. Consequently, posts abound about social rituals of excessive drinking, struggling through university, and inadequacies in flirting technique. However, I note that these generic posts are still specific at the same time, requiring a highly discerning ability to capture and narrativise affective moments from diverse, miscellaneous pop culture material. The well-chosen GIF articulating one’s despondency as a single girl demonstrates a level of cultural and affective awareness of the semiotic intelligibility of the GIF, and the recognisable trials and tribulations of youthful feminine experience. Fig. 3: “When I’m depressed and have too much to drink.” 2ndhand-embarrassment.tumblr.com, 11 Feb. 2015. Thus, showing one’s specific knowledge of shared experience demonstrates an affective authenticity of connection and belonging. This authenticity works to prove one’s digital authority to micro-broadcast one’s life in a youthful feminine public, through showing one’s knowledge of the recognisable pitfalls, idiosyncrasies and experiences of being a young woman. I emphasise that it is this situated knowingness that comes through in the meme set in general, particularly in the follower memes. Given the generic nature of the content of posts across the meme set, the importance of “true” emotion is decentred—rather, what is vital is knowing which affective situations have the capacity to connect and be recognisable. Whilst the revelation of inner emotional truths have otherwise been considered key in the practice of authenticity in celebrity culture (Biressi and Nunn; Hesmondalgh and Baker), I propose that in the context in which this meme set is situated, this is not necessarily the most useful form of social currency. In these remix digital cultures, I suggest the interpretive premise of the digital audience is not that these products of remix literally speak to one’s experiences. Rather, remix cultures provide a means of demonstrating insider knowledge, which connects other insiders—a form of authentic belonging. Conclusion This paper has traced differing practices of feminine authenticity visible in the intersection of social network and remix cultures on Tumblr by examining the WSWCM meme set. I have suggested that the founder meme employs particular strategies of maintaining authentic individuality, such as resorting to the performance of an exclusive, “original” best girlfriendship brand. In contrast, the follower memes perform cultural and affective knowingness of youthful femininity, to assert their digital insider status—and right to belong. This meme set presents some productive questions through which to think through authenticity in digital cultures. Could striving for authentic belonging constitute one strategy of responding to a media-saturated culture, where authentic individuality is constantly elevated yet (perhaps) harder to achieve? These blogs demonstrate how the significance and practice of authenticity transforms in managing different configurations of social desires to belong, or be recognised as individual and original in (postfeminist) digital cultures. References Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Authentic TM. New York, NY: New York UP, 2012. Beer, David, and Roger Burrows. “Popular Culture, Digital Archives and the New Social Life of Data.” Theory, Culture & Society 30.4 (2013): 47–71. Berlant, Lauren Gail. The Female Complaint. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Burkhalter, Byron. "Reading Race Online: Discovering Racial Identity in Usenet Discussions." Communities in Cyberspace. Eds. Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock. London: Routledge, 1999. 59–74. 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Introduction It has frequently been noted that ICTs and social networking applications have blurred the once-clear boundary between work, leisure and entertainment, just as they have collapsed the distinction between public and private space. While each individual has a sense of what “home” means, both in terms of personal experience and more conceptually, the following three examples of online interaction (based on participants’ interest, or involvement, in activities traditionally associated with the home: pet care, craft and cooking) suggest that the utilisation of online communication technologies can lead to refined and extended definitions of what “home” is. These examples show how online communication can assist in meeting the basic human needs for love, companionship, shelter and food – needs traditionally supplied by the home environment. They also provide individuals with a considerably expanded range of opportunities for personal expression and emotional connection, as well as creative and commercial production, than that provided by the purely physical (and, no doubt, sometimes isolated and isolating) domestic environment. In this way, these case studies demonstrate the interplay and melding of physical and virtual “home” as domestic practices leach from the most private spaces of the physical home into the public space of the Internet (for discussion, see Gorman-Murray, Moss, and Rose). At the same time, online interaction can assert an influence on activity within the physical space of the home, through the sharing of advice about, and modeling of, domestic practices and processes. A Dog’s (Virtual) Life The first case study primarily explores the role of online communities in the formation and expression of affective values and personal identity – as traditionally happens in the domestic environment. Garber described the 1990s as “the decade of the dog” (20), citing a spate of “new anthropomorphic” (22) dog books, Internet “dog chat” sites, remakes of popular classics such as Lassie Come Home, dog friendly urban amenities, and the meteoric rise of services for pampered pets (28-9). Loving pets has become a lifestyle and culture, witnessed and commodified in Pet Superstores as well as in dog collectables and antiques boutiques, and in publications like The Bark (“the New Yorker of Dog Magazines”) and Clean Run, the international agility magazine, Website, online book store and information gateway for agility products and services. Available online resources for dog lovers have similarly increased rapidly during the decade since Garber’s book was published, with the virtual world now catering for serious hobby trainers, exhibitors and professionals as well as the home-based pet lover. At a recent survey, Yahoo Groups – a personal communication portal that facilitates social networking, in this case enabling users to set up electronic mailing lists and Internet forums – boasted just over 9,600 groups servicing dog fanciers and enthusiasts. The list Dogtalk is now an announcement only mailing list, but was a vigorous discussion forum until mid-2006. Members of Dogtalk were Australian-based “clicker-trainers”, serious hobbyist dog trainers, many of whom operated micro-businesses providing dog training or other pet-related services. They shared an online community, but could also engage in “flesh-meets” at seminars, conferences and competitive dog sport meets. An author of this paper (Rutherford) joined this group two years ago because of her interest in clicker training. Clicker training is based on an application of animal learning theory, particularly psychologist E. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning, so called because of the trademark use of a distinctive “click” sound to mark a desired behaviour that is then rewarded. Clicker trainers tend to dismiss anthropomorphic pack theory that positions the human animal as fundamentally opposed to non-human animals and, thus, foster a partnership (rather than a dominator) mode of social and learning relationships. Partnership and nurturance are common themes within the clicker community (as well as in more traditional “home” locations); as is recognising and valuing the specific otherness of other species. Typically, members regard their pets as affective equals or near-equals to the human animals that are recognised members of their kinship networks. A significant function of the episodic biographical narratives and responses posted to this list was thus to affirm and legitimate this intra-specific kinship as part of normative social relationship – a perspective that is not usually validated in the general population. One of the more interesting nexus that evolved within Dogtalk links the narrativisation of the pet in the domestic sphere with the pictorial genre of the family album. Emergent technologies, such as digital cameras together with Web-based image manipulation software and hosting (as provided by portals like Photobucket and Flickr ) democratise high quality image creation and facilitate the sharing of these images. Increasingly, the Dogtalk list linked to images uploaded to free online galleries, discussed digital image composition and aesthetics, and shared technical information about cameras and online image distribution. Much of this cultural production and circulation was concerned with digitally inscribing particular relationships with individual animals into cultural memory: a form of family group biography (for a discussion of the family photograph as a display of extended domestic space, see Rose). The other major non-training thread of the community involves the sharing and witnessing of the trauma suffered due to the illness and loss of pets. While mourning for human family members is supported in the off-line world – with social infrastructure, such as compassionate leave and/or bereavement counselling, part of professional entitlements – public mourning for pets is not similarly supported. Yet, both cultural studies (in its emphasis on cultural memory) and trauma theory have highlighted the importance of social witnessing, whereby traumatic memories must be narratively integrated into memory and legitimised by the presence of a witness in order to loosen their debilitating hold (Felman and Laub 57). Postings on the progress of a beloved animal’s illness or other misfortune and death were thus witnessed and affirmed by other Dogtalk list members – the sick or deceased pet becoming, in the process, a feature of community memory, not simply an individual loss. In terms of such biographical narratives, memory and history are not identical: “Any memories capable of being formed, retained or articulated by an individual are always a function of socially constituted forms, narratives and relations … Memory is always subject to active social manipulation and revision” (Halbwachs qtd. in Crewe 75). In this way, emergent technologies and social software provide sites, akin to that of physical homes, for family members to process individual memories into cultural memory. Dogzonline, the Australian Gateway site for purebred dog enthusiasts, has a forum entitled “Rainbow Bridge” devoted to textual and pictorial memorialisation of deceased pet dogs. Dogster hosts the For the Love of Dogs Weblog, in which images and tributes can be posted, and also provides links to other dog oriented Weblogs and Websites. An interesting combination of both therapeutic narrative and the commodification of affect is found in Lightning Strike Pet Loss Support which, while a memorial and support site, also provides links to the emerging profession of pet bereavement counselling and to suppliers of monuments and tributary urns for home or other use. loobylu and Narratives of Everyday Life The second case study focuses on online interactions between craft enthusiasts who are committed to the production of distinctive objects to decorate and provide comfort in the home, often using traditional methods. In the case of some popular craft Weblogs, online conversations about craft are interspersed with, or become secondary to, the narration of details of family life, the exploration of important life events or the recording of personal histories. As in the previous examples, the offering of advice and encouragement, and expressions of empathy and support, often characterise these interactions. The loobylu Weblog was launched in 2001 by illustrator and domestic crafts enthusiast Claire Robertson. Robertson is a toy maker and illustrator based in Melbourne, Australia, whose clients have included prominent publishing houses, magazines and the New York Public Library (Robertson “Recent Client List” online). She has achieved a measure of public recognition: her loobylu Weblog has won awards and been favourably commented upon in the Australian press (see Robertson “Press for loobylu” online). In 2005, an article in The Age placed Robertson in the context of a contemporary “craft revolution”, reporting her view that this “revolution” is in “reaction to mass consumerism” (Atkinson online). The hand-made craft objects featured in Robertson’s Weblogs certainly do suggest engagement with labour-intensive pursuits and the construction of unique objects that reject processes of mass production and consumption. In this context, loobylu is a vehicle for the display and promotion of Robertson’s work as an illustrator and as a craft practitioner. While skills-based, it also, however, promotes a family-centred lifestyle; it advocates the construction by hand of objects designed to enhance the appearance of the family home and the comfort of its inhabitants. Its specific subject matter extends to related aspects of home and family as, in addition to instructions, ideas and patterns for craft, the Weblog features information on commercially available products for home and family, recipes, child rearing advice and links to 27 other craft and other sites (including Nigella Lawson’s, discussed below). The primary member of its target community is clearly the traditional homemaker – the mother – as well as those who may aspire to this role. Robertson does not have the “celebrity” status of Lawson and Jamie Oliver (discussed below), nor has she achieved their market saturation. Indeed, Robertson’s online presence suggests a modest level of engagement that is placed firmly behind other commitments: in February 2007, she announced an indefinite suspension of her blog postings so that she could spend more time with her family (Robertson loobylu 17 February 2007). Yet, like Lawson and Oliver, Robertson has exploited forms of domestic competence traditionally associated with women and the home, and the non-traditional medium of the Internet has been central to her endeavours. The content of the loobylu blog is, unsurprisingly, embedded in, or an accessory to, a unifying running commentary on Robertson’s domestic life as a parent. Miles, who has described Weblogs as “distributed documentaries of the everyday” (66) sums this up neatly: “the weblogs’ governing discursive quality is the manner in which it is embodied within the life world of its author” (67). Landmark family events are narrated on loobylu and some attract deluges of responses: the 19 June 2006 posting announcing the birth of Robertson’s daughter Lily, for example, drew 478 responses; five days later, one describing the difficult circumstances of her birth drew 232 comments. All of these comments are pithy, with many being simple empathetic expressions or brief autobiographically based commentaries on these events. Robertson’s news of her temporary retirement from her blog elicited 176 comments that both supported her decision and also expressed a sense of loss. Frequent exclamation marks attest visually to the emotional intensity of the responses. By narrating aspects of major life events to which the target audience can relate, the postings represent a form of affective mass production and consumption: they are triggers for a collective outpouring of largely homogeneous emotional reaction (joy, in the case of Lily’s birth). As collections of texts, they can be read as auto/biographic records, arranged thematically, that operate at both the individual and the community levels. Readers of the family narratives and the affirming responses to them engage in a form of mass affirmation and consumerism of domestic experience that is easy, immediate, attractive and free of charge. These personal discourses blend fluidly with those of a commercial nature. Some three weeks after loobylu announced the birth of her daughter, Robertson shared on her Weblog news of her mastitis, Lily’s first smile and the family’s favourite television programs at the time, information that many of us would consider to be quite private details of family life. Three days later, she posted a photograph of a sleeping baby with a caption that skilfully (and negatively) links it to her daughter: “Firstly – I should mention that this is not a photo of Lily”. The accompanying text points out that it is a photo of a baby with the “Zaky Infant Sleeping Pillow” and provides a link to the online pregnancystore.com, from which it can be purchased. A quotation from the manufacturer describing the merits of the pillow follows. Robertson then makes a light-hearted comment on her experiences of baby-induced sleep-deprivation, and the possible consequences of possessing the pillow. Comments from readers also similarly alternate between the personal (sharing of experiences) to the commercial (comments on the product itself). One offshoot of loobylu suggests that the original community grew to an extent that it could support specialised groups within its boundaries. A Month of Softies began in November 2004, describing itself as “a group craft project which takes place every month” and an activity that “might give you a sense of community and kinship with other similar minded crafty types across the Internet and around the world” (Robertson A Month of Softies online). Robertson gave each month a particular theme, and readers were invited to upload a photograph of a craft object they had made that fitted the theme, with a caption. These were then included in the site’s gallery, in the order in which they were received. Added to the majority of captions was also a link to the site (often a business) of the creator of the object; another linking of the personal and the commercial in the home-based “cottage industry” sense. From July 2005, A Month of Softies operated through a Flickr site. Participants continued to submit photos of their craft objects (with captions), but also had access to a group photograph pool and public discussion board. This extension simulates (albeit in an entirely visual way) the often home-based physical meetings of craft enthusiasts that in contemporary Australia take the form of knitting, quilting, weaving or other groups. Chatting with, and about, Celebrity Chefs The previous studies have shown how the Internet has broken down many barriers between what could be understood as the separate spheres of emotional (that is, home-based private) and commercial (public) life. The online environment similarly enables the formation and development of fan communities by facilitating communication between those fans and, sometimes, between fans and the objects of their admiration. The term “fan” is used here in the broadest sense, referring to “a person with enduring involvement with some subject or object, often a celebrity, a sport, TV show, etc.” (Thorne and Bruner 52) rather than focusing on the more obsessive and, indeed, more “fanatical” aspects of such involvement, behaviour which is, increasingly understood as a subculture of more variously constituted fandoms (Jenson 9-29). Our specific interest in fandom in relation to this discussion is how, while marketers and consumer behaviourists study online fan communities for clues on how to more successfully market consumer goods and services to these groups (see, for example, Kozinets, “I Want to Believe” 470-5; “Utopian Enterprise” 67-88; Algesheimer et al. 19-34), fans regularly subvert the efforts of those urging consumer consumption to utilise even the most profit-driven Websites for non-commercial home-based and personal activities. While it is obvious that celebrities use the media to promote themselves, a number of contemporary celebrity chefs employ the media to construct and market widely recognisable personas based on their own, often domestically based, life stories. As examples, Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson’s printed books and mass periodical articles, television series and other performances across a range of media continuously draw on, elaborate upon, and ultimately construct their own lives as the major theme of these works. In this, these – as many other – celebrity chefs draw upon this revelation of their private lives to lend authenticity to their cooking, to the point where their work (whether cookbook, television show, advertisement or live chat room session with their fans) could be described as “memoir-illustrated-with-recipes” (Brien and Williamson). This generic tendency influences these celebrities’ communities, to the point where a number of Websites devoted to marketing celebrity chefs as product brands also enable their fans to share their own life stories with large readerships. Oliver and Lawson’s official Websites confirm the privileging of autobiographical and biographical information, but vary in tone and approach. Each is, for instance, deliberately gendered (see Hollows’ articles for a rich exploration of gender, Oliver and Lawson). Oliver’s hip, boyish, friendly, almost frantic site includes the what are purported-to-be self-revelatory “Diary” and “About me” sections, a selection of captioned photographs of the chef, his family, friends, co-workers and sponsors, and his Weblog as well as footage streamed “live from Jamie’s phone”. This self-revelation – which includes significant details about Oliver’s childhood and his domestic life with his “lovely girls, Jools [wife Juliette Norton], Poppy and Daisy” – completely blurs the line between private life and the “Jamie Oliver” brand. While such revelation has been normalised in contemporary culture, this practice stands in great contrast to that of renowned chefs and food writers such as Elizabeth David, Julia Child, James Beard and Margaret Fulton, whose work across various media has largely concentrated on food, cooking and writing about cooking. The difference here is because Oliver’s (supposedly private) life is the brand, used to sell “Jamie Oliver restaurant owner and chef”, “Jamie Oliver cookbook author and TV star”, “Jamie Oliver advertising spokesperson for Sainsbury’s supermarket” (from which he earns an estimated £1.2 million annually) (Meller online) and “Jamie Oliver social activist” (made MBE in 2003 after his first Fifteen restaurant initiative, Oliver was named “Most inspiring political figure” in the 2006 Channel 4 Political Awards for his intervention into the provision of nutritious British school lunches) (see biographies by Hildred and Ewbank, and Smith). Lawson’s site has a more refined, feminine appearance and layout and is more mature in presentation and tone, featuring updates on her (private and public) “News” and forthcoming public appearances, a glamorous selection of photographs of herself from the past 20 years, and a series of print and audio interviews. Although Lawson’s children have featured in some of her television programs and her personal misfortunes are well known and regularly commented upon by both herself and journalists (her mother, sister and husband died of cancer) discussions of these tragedies, and other widely known aspects of her private life such as her second marriage to advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, is not as overt as on Oliver’s site, and the user must delve to find it. The use of Lawson’s personal memoir, as sales tool, is thus both present and controlled. This is in keeping with Lawson’s professional experience prior to becoming the “domestic goddess” (Lawson 2000) as an Oxford graduated journalist on the Spectator and deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times. Both Lawson’s and Oliver’s Websites offer readers various ways to interact with them “personally”. Visitors to Oliver’s site can ask him questions and can access a frequently asked question area, while Lawson holds (once monthly, now irregularly) a question and answer forum. In contrast to this information about, and access to, Oliver and Lawson’s lives, neither of their Websites includes many recipes or other food and cooking focussed information – although there is detailed information profiling their significant number of bestselling cookbooks (Oliver has published 8 cookbooks since 1998, Lawson 5 since 1999), DVDs and videos of their television series and one-off programs, and their name branded product lines of domestic kitchenware (Oliver and Lawson) and foodstuffs (Oliver). Instruction on how to purchase these items is also featured. Both these sites, like Robertson’s, provide various online discussion fora, allowing members to comment upon these chefs’ lives and work, and also to connect with each other through posted texts and images. Oliver’s discussion forum section notes “this is the place for you all to chat to each other, exchange recipe ideas and maybe even help each other out with any problems you might have in the kitchen area”. Lawson’s front page listing states: “You will also find a moderated discussion forum, called Your Page, where our registered members can swap ideas and interact with each other”. The community participants around these celebrity chefs can be, as is the case with loobylu, divided into two groups. The first is “foodie (in Robertson’s case, craft) fans” who appear to largely engage with these Websites to gain, and to share, food, cooking and craft-related information. Such fans on Oliver and Lawson’s discussion lists most frequently discuss these chefs’ television programs and books and the recipes presented therein. They test recipes at home and discuss the results achieved, any problems encountered and possible changes. They also post queries and share information about other recipes, ingredients, utensils, techniques, menus and a wide range of food and cookery-related matters. The second group consists of “celebrity fans” who are attracted to the chefs (as to Robertson as craft maker) as personalities. These fans seek and share biographical information about Oliver and Lawson, their activities and their families. These two areas of fan interest (food/cooking/craft and the personal) are not necessarily or always separated, and individuals can be active members of both types of fandoms. Less foodie-orientated users, however (like users of Dogtalk and loobylu), also frequently post their own auto/biographical narratives to these lists. These narratives, albeit often fragmented, may begin with recipes and cooking queries or issues, but veer off into personal stories that possess only minimal or no relationship to culinary matters. These members also return to the boards to discuss their own revealed life stories with others who have commented on these narratives. Although research into this aspect is in its early stages, it appears that the amount of public personal revelation either encouraged, or allowed, is in direct proportion to the “open” friendliness of these sites. More thus are located in Oliver’s and less in Lawson’s, and – as a kind of “control” in this case study, but not otherwise discussed – none in that of Australian chef Neil Perry, whose coolly sophisticated Website perfectly complements Perry’s professional persona as the epitome of the refined, sophisticated and, importantly in this case, unapproachable, high-end restaurant chef. Moreover, non-cuisine related postings are made despite clear directions to the contrary – Lawson’s site stating: “We ask that postings are restricted to topics relating to food, cooking, the kitchen and, of course, Nigella!” and Oliver making the plea, noted above, for participants to keep their discussions “in the kitchen area”. Of course, all such contemporary celebrity chefs are supported by teams of media specialists who selectively construct the lives that these celebrities share with the public and the postings about others’ lives that are allowed to remain on their discussion lists. The intersection of the findings reported above with the earlier case studies suggests, however, that even these most commercially-oriented sites can provide a fruitful data regarding their function as home-like spaces where domestic practices and processes can be refined, and emotional relationships formed and fostered. In Summary As convergence results in what Turow and Kavanaugh call “the wired homestead”, our case studies show that physically home-based domestic interests and practices – what could be called “home truths” – are also contributing to a refiguration of the private/public interplay of domestic activities through online dialogue. In the case of Dogtalk, domestic space is reconstituted through virtual spaces to include new definitions of family and memory. In the case of loobylu, the virtual interaction facilitates a development of craft-based domestic practices within the physical space of the home, thus transforming domestic routines. Jamie Oliver’s and Nigella Lawson’s sites facilitate development of both skills and gendered identities by means of a bi-directional nexus between domestic practices, sites of home labour/identity production and public media spaces. As participants modify and redefine these online communities to best suit their own needs and desires, even if this is contrary to the stated purposes for which the community was instituted, online communities can be seen to be domesticated, but, equally, these modifications demonstrate that the activities and relationships that have traditionally defined the home are not limited to the physical space of the house. While virtual communities are “passage points for collections of common beliefs and practices that united people who were physically separated” (Stone qtd in Jones 19), these interactions can lead to shared beliefs, for example, through advice about pet-keeping, craft and cooking, that can significantly modify practices and routines in the physical home. Acknowledgments An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Association of Internet Researchers’ International Conference, Brisbane, 27-30 September 2006. 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IntroductionThe tagline for the 2008 Game On exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne invites visitors to “play your way through the history of videogames.” The Melbourne hosting follows on from exhibitions that have included the Barbican (London), the Royal Museum (Edinburgh) and the Science Museum (London). The Game On exhibition presents an exemplary instance of how digital games and digital games culture are recovered, organised and presented. The Science Museum exhibition offered visitors a walkthrough from the earliest to the latest consoles and games (Pong to Wii Sports) with opportunities for game play framed by curatorial plaques. This article will explore some of the themes and narratives embodied within the exhibition that see digital games technologies enrolled within a media teleology that emphasises technological advancement and upgrade. Narratives of Technological Upgrade The Game On exhibition employed a “social contextualisation” approach, connecting digital gaming developments with historical events and phenomena such as the 1969 moon landing and the Spice Girls. Whilst including thematic strands such as games and violence and games in education, the exhibition’s chronological ordering highlighted technological advancement. In doing so, the exhibition captured a broader tension around celebrating past technological advancement in gaming, whilst at the same time emphasising the quaint shortfalls and looking to future possibilities. That technological advancements stand out, particularly as a means of organising a narrative of digital gaming, resonates with Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Withford and Greig de Peuter’s analysis of digital gaming as a “perpetual innovation economy.” For Kline et al., corporations “devote a growing share of their resources to the continual alteration and upgrading of their products” (66). Technological upgrade and advancement were described by the Game On curator as an engaging aspect of the exhibition: When we had a BBC news presenter come in, she was talking about ‘here we have the PDP 1 and here I have the Nintendo DS’. She was just sort of comparing and contrasting. I know certainly that journalists were very keen on: ‘yeah, but how much processing power does the PDP 1 have?’, ‘what does it compare to today?’ – and it is very hard to compare. How do you compare Space War on the PDP 1 with something that runs on your mobile phone? They are very different systems. (Lee)This account of journalistic interest in technological progression and the curator’s subsequent interpretation raise a significant tension around understanding digital gaming. The concern with situating past gaming technologies and comparing capacities and capabilities, emphasises both the fascination with advancement and technological progress in the field and how the impressiveness of this advancement depends on remembering what has come before. Questions of remembering, recovering and forgetting are clear in the histories that console manufacturers offer when they describe past innovation and pioneering developments. For example, the company history provided by Nintendo on its website is exclusively a history of games technologies with no reference to the proceeding business of playing-card games from the late nineteenth century. Its website-published history only starts with the 1985 release of the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System), “an instant hit [that] over the course of the next two years, it almost single-handedly revitalized the video game industry” (Nintendo, ‘History’), and thereby overlooks the earlier 1983 less successful Famicom system. Past technologies are selectively remembered and recovered as part of the foundations for future success. This is a tension, that can be unpacked in a number of ways, across current industry transformations and strategies that potentially erase the past whilst simultaneously seeking to recover it as part of an evidence-base for future development. The following discussion develops an analysis of how digital gaming history is recovered and constructed.Industry Wind Change and Granny on the WiiThere is “unease, almost embarrassment”, James Newman suggests, “about the videogames industry within certain quarters of the industry itself” (6). Newman goes on to suggest:Various euphemisms have passed into common parlance, all seemingly motivated by a desire to avoid the use of the word ‘game’ and perhaps even ‘computer’, thereby adding a veneer of respectability, distancing the products and experiences from the childish pursuits of game, play and toys, and downplaying the technology connection with its unwanted resonances of nerds in bedrooms hunched over ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s and the amateurism of hobbyist production. (6-7) The attempted move away from the resonances of “nerds in bedrooms” has been a strategic decision for Nintendo especially. This is illustrated by the naming of consoles: ‘family’ in Famicom, ‘entertainment’ in NES and, more recently, the renaming of the Wii from ‘Revolution’. The seventh generation Nintendo Wii console, released in November and December 2006, may be been seen as industry leading in efforts to broaden gaming demographics. In describing the console for instance, Satoru Iwata, the President of Nintendo, stated, “we want to appeal to mothers who don't want consoles in their living rooms, and to the elderly and to young women. It’s a challenge, like trying to sell cosmetics to men” (Edge Online). This position illustrates a digital games industry strategy to expand marketing to demographic groups previously marginalised.A few examples from the marketing and advertising campaigns for the Nintendo Wii help to illustrate this strategy. The marketing associated with the Wii can be seen as part of a longer lineage of Nintendo marketing with Kline et al. suggesting, “it was under Nintendo’s hegemony that the video game industry began to see the systematic development of a high-intensity marketing apparatus, involving massive media budgets, ingenious event marketing, ground breaking advertising and spin off merchandising” (118). The “First Experiences” show on the Wii website mocks-up domestic settings as the backdrop to the Wii playing experience to present an ideal, potential Wii-play scenario. These advertisements can be seen to position the player within an imagined home and game-play environment and speak for the Wii. As Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar suggest, “technology does not speak for itself but has to be spoken for” (32). As part of their concern with addressing, “the particular regime of truth which surrounds, upholds, impales and represents technology” (32), Grint and Woolgar “analyse the way certain technologies gain specific attributes” (33). Across advertisements for the Wii there are a range of domestic environments and groups playing. Of these, the power to bring the family together and facilitate ease of game-play for the novice is most noticeable. David Morley’s comment that, “‘hi-tech’ discourse is often carefully framed and domesticated by a rather nostalgic vision of ‘family values’” (438) is borne out here.A television advertisement aired on Nickelodeon illustrates the extent to which the Wii was at the forefront in motioning forward a strategy of industry and gaming inclusiveness around the family: “the 60-second spot shows a dad mistaking the Wii Remote for his television remote control. Dad becomes immersed in the game and soon the whole family joins in” (Nintendo World Report). From confused fathers to family bonding, the Wii is presented as the easy-to-use and accessible device that brings the family together. The father confusing the Wii remote with a television remote control is an important gesture to foreground the accessibility of the Wii remotes compared to previous “joypads”, and emphasize the Wii as an accessible device with no bedroom, technical wizardry required. Within the emerging industry inclusivity agenda, the ‘over technological’ past of digital gaming is something to move away from. The forms of ‘geek’ or ‘hardcore’ that epitomise previous dominant representations of gaming have seemingly stood in the way of the industry reaching its full market potential. This industry wind change is captured in the comments of a number of current industry professionals.For Matthew Jeffrey, head of European Recruitment for Electronic Arts (EA), speaking at the London Games Week Career Fair, the shift in the accessibility and inclusivity of digital gaming is closely bound up with Nintendo’s efforts and these have impacted upon EA’s strategy: There is going to be a huge swathe of new things and the great thing in the industry, as you are all easy to identify, is that Nindento DS and the Wii have revolutionised the way we look at the way things are going on.Jeffrey goes on to add, “hopefully some of you have seen that your eighty year old grandparent is quite happy to play a game”, pointing to the figure of the grandparent as a game-player to emphasise the inclusivity shift within gaming.Similarly, at Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2007, the CEO of Ubisoft Yves Guillemot in his “The New Generation of Gaming: Facing the Challenges of a Changing Market” speech outlined the development of a family friendly portfolio to please a new, non-gamer population that would include the recruitment of subject experts for “non-game” titles. This instance of the accessibility and inclusivity strategy being advocated is notable for it being part of a keynote speech at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, an event associated with the Edinburgh festival that is both an important industry gathering and receives mainstream press coverage. The approaches taken by the other leading console manufacturers Sony and Microsoft, illustrate that whilst this is by no means a total shift, there is nevertheless an industry-wide engagement. The ‘World of Playstation: family and friends’ for example suggests that, “with PlayStation, games have never been more family-friendly” and that “you can even team up as a family to challenge your overseas relatives to a round of online quizzing over the PLAYSTATION Network” (Playstation).What follows from these accounts and transformations is a consideration of where the “geeky” past resides in the future of gaming as inclusive and accessible. Where do these developments leave digital gaming’s “subcultural past” (“subcultural” as it now becomes even within the games industry), as the industry forges on into mainstream culture? Past digital games technologies are clearly important in indicating technological progression and advancement, but what of the bedroom culture of gaming? How does “geek game culture” fit within a maturing future for the industry?Bedroom Programmers and Subcultural Memories There is a tension between business strategy directed towards making gaming accessible and thereby fostering new markets, and the games those in industry would design for people like themselves. This is not to deny the willingness or commitment of games developers to work on a variety of games, but instead to highlight transformation and tension. In their research into games development, Dovey and Kennedy suggest that, the “generation, now nearing middle-age and finding themselves in the driving seat of cultures of new media, have to reconcile a subcultural history and a dominant present” (145). Pierre Bourdieu’s account of symbolic capital is influential in tracing this shift, and Dovey and Kennedy note Bourdieu’s comment around, “the subjective image of the occupational project and the objective function of the occupation” (145). This shift is highly significant for ways of understanding maturation and inclusivity strategies within digital gaming.Bourdieu’s account of the “conservative functions attached” to an occupation for Dovey and Kennedy: Precisely describes the tensions between designers’ sense of themselves as ‘outsiders’ and rebels (‘the subjective image of the occupational project’) on the one hand and their position within a very tight production machine (‘the objective function of the occupation’) on the other. (145) I would suggest the “production machine”, that is to say the broader corporate management structures by which games development companies are increasingly operated, has a growing role in understandings of the industry. This approach was implicit in Iwata’s comments on selling cosmetics to men and broadening demographics, and Jeffrey’s comments pointing to how EA’s outlook would be influenced by the accessibility and inclusivity strategy championed by Nintendo. It may be suggested that as the occupational project of gaming is negotiated and shifts towards an emphasis on accessibility and inclusivity, the subjective image must be similarly reoriented. That previous industry models are being replaced, is highlighted in this excerpt from a Managing Director of a ‘leisure software’ company in the Staying ahead report on the creative industries by the Work Foundation:The first game that came from us was literally two schoolchildren making a game in their bedroom … the game hadn’t been funded, but made for fun … As those days are gone, the biggest challenges nowadays for game developers are finding funding that doesn’t impinge on creativity, and holding onto IP [intellectual property], which is so important if you want a business that is going to have any value. (27)This account suggests a hugely important transition from bedroom production, the days that ‘are gone’, towards Intellectual Property-aware production. The creative industries context for these comments should not be overlooked and is insightful for further recognising the shifts and negotiations taking place in digital gaming, notably, around the maturation of the games industry. The creative industries context is made explicit in creative industries reports such as Staying ahead and in the comments of Shaun Woodward (former Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport) in a keynote speech at the 2006 British Video Games Academy Awards, in which he referred to the games industry as “one of our most important creative industries”. The forms of collaboration between, for instance, The Independent Games Developers Association (TIGA) and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (see Gamasutra), further indicate the creative industries context to the maturation of the UK games industry.The creative industries context also presents the anchor through which tensions between a subcultural history and professional future and the complex forms of recovery can be more fully engaged with. The Game On curator’s indication that making comparisons between different games technologies systems was a delicate balance insightfully provides cautions to any attempt to mark out a strict departure from the ‘subcultural’ to the ‘professional’. Clearly put, the accessibility and inclusivity strategy that shifts away from geek culture and technical wizardry remains in conversation with geek elements as the foundation for the future. As technologies are recovered within a lineage of technological development and upgrade, the geek bedroom culture of gaming is almost mythologized to offer the industry history creative credentials and future potential. Recovering and Combining: Technologies and Memories for a Professional Future Emphasised thus far has been a shift from the days gone by of bedroom programming towards an inclusive and accessible professional and mature future. This is a teleological shift in the sense that the latest technological developments can be located within a past replete with innovation and pioneering spirit. In relation to the Wii for example, a Nintendo employee states:Nintendo is a company where you are praised for doing something different from everyone else. In this company, when an individual wants to do something different, everyone else lends their support to help them overcome any hurdles. I think this is how we made the challenge of Wii a possibility. (Nintendo)Nintendo’s history, alluded to here and implicit throughout the interviews with Nintendo staff from which this comment is taken, and previous and existing ‘culture’ of experimentation is offered here as the catalyst and enabler of the Wii. A further example may be offered in relation to Nintendo’s competitor Sony.A hugely significant transformation in digital gaming, further to the accessibility and inclusivity agenda, is the ability of players to develop their own games using games engines. For Phil Harrison (Sony), gaming technology is creating a, “‘virtual community’ of collaborative digital production, marking a return to the ‘golden age of video game development, which was at home, on your own with a couple of friends, designing a game yourself’” (Kline et al., 204). Bedroom gaming that in the earlier comments was regarded as days gone by for professionals, takes on a new significance as a form of user-engagement. The previous model of bedroom production, now outmoded compared to industry production, is relocated as available for users and recovered as the ‘golden age of gaming’. It is recovered as a model for users to aspire to. The significance of this for business strategy is made clear by Kline et al. who suggest that, “thousands of bright bulbs have essentially become Sony’s junior development community” (204). An obsolete model of past production is recovered and deployed within a future vision of the games industry that sees users participating and extending forms of games engagement and consumption. Similarly, the potential of ‘bedroom’ production and its recovery in relation to growth areas such as games for mobile phones, is carefully framed by Intellectual Property Rights (Edwards and Coulton). In this respect, forms of bedroom production are carefully situated in terms of industry strategies.The “Scarce Talent Seminars” as part of the London Games Week 2008 “Skills Week” further illustrate this continual recovery of ‘past’, or more accurately alternative, forms of production in line with narratives of professionalisation and industry innovation. The seminars were stated as offering advice on bridging the gap between the “bedroom programmer” and the “professional developer”. The discourse of ‘talent’ framed this seminar, and the bedroom programmer is held up as being (not having) raw talent with creative energies and love and commitment for gaming that can be shaped for the future of the industry. This discourse of bedroom programmers as talent emphasises the industry as an enabler of individual talent through access to professional development and technological resources. This then sits alongside the recovery of historical narratives in which bedroom gaming culture is celebrated for its pioneering spirit, but is ultimately recovered in terms of current achievements and future possibilities. “Skills Week” and guidance for those wanting to work in the industry connects with the recovery of past technologies and ways of making games visible amongst the potential industry workers of the future – students. The professional future of the industry is intertwined with graduates with professional qualifications. Those qualifications need not be, and sometimes preferably should not be, in ‘gaming’ courses. What is important is the love of games and this may be seen through the appreciation of gaming’s history. During research conducted with games design students in higher education courses in the UK, many students professed a love of games dating back to the Spectrum console in the 1980s. There was legitimacy and evidence of professing long-seated interests in consoles. At the same time as acknowledging the significant, embryonic power these consoles had in stimulating their interests, many students engaged in learning games design skills with the latest software packages. Similarly, they engaged in bedroom design activities themselves, as in the days gone by, but mainly as training and to develop skills useful to securing employment within a professional development studio. Broadly, students could be said to be recovering both technologies and ways of working that are then enrolled within their development as professional workers of the future. The professional future of the gaming industry is presented as part of a teleological trajectory that mirrors the technological progression of the industry’s upgrade culture. The days of bedroom programming are cast as periods of incubation and experimentation, and part of the journey that has brought gaming to where it is now. Bedroom programming is incorporated into the evidence-base of creative industries policy reports. Other accounts of bedroom programming, independent production and attempts to explore alternative publishing avenues do not feature as readily.In the 2000 Scratchware Manifesto for example, the authors declare, “the machinery of gaming has run amok”, and say, “Basta! Enough!” (Scratchware). The Scratchware Manifesto puts forward Scratchware as a response: “a computer game, created by a microteam, with pro-quality art, game design, programming and sound to be sold at paperback prices” (Scratchware). The manifesto goes on to say, “we need Scratchware because there is more than one way to develop good computer games” (Scratchware, 2000). Using a term readily associated with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the Scratchware Manifesto called for a revolution in gaming and stated, “we will strive for […] originality over the tried and tested” (Scratchware). These are the experiences and accounts of the games industry that seem to fall well outside of the technological and upgrade focused agenda of professional games development.The recovery and framing of past technologies and industry practices, in ways supportive to current models of technological upgrade and advancement, legitimises these models and marginalizes others. A eulogized and potentially mythical past is recovered to point to cultures of innovation and creative vibrancy and to emphasize current and future technological prowess. We must therefore be cautious of the instrumental dangers of recovery in which ‘bright bulbs’ are enrolled and alternative forms of production marginalised.As digital gaming establishes a secure footing with increased markets, the growing pains of the industry can be celebrated and recovered as part of the ongoing narratives of the industry. Recovery is vital to make sense of both the past and future. Within digital gaming, the PDP-1 and the bedroom geek both exist in the past, present and future as part of an industry strategy and trajectory that seeks to move away from them but also relies on them. They are the legitimacy, the evidence and the potential for affirming industry models. The extent to which other narratives can be told and technologies and memories recovered as alternative forms of evidence and potential is a question I, and hopefully others, will leave open.ReferencesDovey, John, and Helen W. Kennedy. Game Cultures. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006.Edge-Online. "Iwata: Wii Is 'Like Selling Make-Up to Men.'" Edge-Online 19 Sep. 2006. 29 Sep. 2006 ‹http://www.edge-online.com/news/iwata-wii-like-selling-make-up-men›.Edwards, Reuben, and Paul Coulton. "Providing the Skills Required for Innovative Mobile Game Development Using Industry/Academic Partnerships." Italics e journal 5.3 (2006). ‹http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/italics/vol5iss3/edwardscoulton.pdf›.Gamasutra. "TIGA Pushing for Continued UK Industry Government Support." Gamasutra Industry News 3 July 2007. 8 July 2007 ‹http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=14504›Grint, Keith, and Steve Woolgar. The Machine at Work. London: Blackwell, 1997.Jeffrey, Matthew. Transcribed Speech. 24 October 2007.Kline, Stephen, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig De Peuter. Digital Play. London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.Lee, Gaetan. Personal Interview. 27 July 2007.Morley, David. "What’s ‘Home’ Got to Do with It? Contradictory Dynamics in the Domestication of Technology and the Dislocation of Domesticity." European Journal of Cultural Studies 6.4 (2003): 435-458.Newman, James. Videogames. London: Routledge, 2004.Nintendo. "Company History." Nintendo. 2007. 3 Nov. 2008 ‹http://www.nintendo.com/corp/history.jsp›.Nintendo. "Wii Remote." Nintendo. 2006. 29 Sep. 2008 ‹http://wiiportal.nintendo-europe.com/97.html›.Nintendo World Report. "Nintendo’s Marketing Blitz: Wii Play for All!" Nintendo World Report 13 Nov. 2006. 29 Sep. 2008 ‹http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/newsArt.cfm?artid=12383›.Playstation. "World of Playstation: Family and Friends." Sony Playstation. 3 Nov. 2008 ‹http://uk.playstation.com/home/news/articles/detail/item103208/World-of-PlayStation:-Family-&-Friends/›.Scratchware. "The Scratchware Manifesto." 2000. 14 June 2006 ‹http://www.the-underdogs.info/scratch.php›.Work Foundation. Staying Ahead: The Economic Performance of the UK’s Creative Industries. London: Department of Culture, Media and Sport, 2007.

Do we eat what we are, or are we what we eat? Do we eat or are we eaten? In less cryptic terms, in eating, do we confirm our identities, or are our identities reforged, and refracted by what and how we eat? In posing these questions, I want to shift the terms of current debates about identity. I want to signal that the study of identity may take on new insights when we look at how we are or want to be in terms of what, how, and with whom we eat. If the analysis of identity has by and large been conducted through the optic of sex, it may well be that in western societies we are witnessing a shift away from sex as the sovereign signifier, or to put it more finely, the question of what we are is a constantly morphing one that mixes up bodies, appetites, classes, genders and ethnicities. It must be said that the question of identity and subjectivity has been so well trodden in the last several decades that the possibility of any virgin territory is slim. Bombarded by critiques of identity politics, any cultural critic still interested in why and how individuals fabricate themselves must either cringe before accusations of sociological do-gooding (and defend the importance of the categories of race, class, sex, gender and so forth), or face the endless clichés that seemingly support the investigation of identity. The momentum of my investigation is carried by a weak wager, by which I mean that the areas and examples I study cannot be overdetermined by a sole axis of investigation. My point of departure is basic: what if we were to think identities in another dimension, through the optic of eating and its associated qualities: hunger, greed, shame, disgust, pleasure, etc? While the connections suggested by eating are diverse and illuminating, interrogating identity through this angle brings its own load of assumptions and preconceptions. One of the more onerous aspects of 'writing about food' is the weight of previous studies. The field of food is a well traversed one, staked out by influential authors concerned with proper anthropological, historical and sociological questions. They are by and large attracted to food for its role in securing social categories and classifications. They have left a legacy of truisms, such as Lévi-Strauss's oft-stated maxim that food is good to think with1, or Brillat-Savarin's aphorism, 'tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are' (13). In turn, scientific idioms meet up with the buzzing clichés that hover about food. These can be primarily grouped around the notion that food is fundamental, that we all eat, and so on. Indeed, buffeted by the winds of postmodernism that have permeated public debates, it seems that there is a popular acceptance of the fact that identities are henceforth difficult, fragmented, temporary, unhinged by massive changes to modes of employment and the economy, re-formations of family, and the changes in the gender and sexual order. Living with and through these changes on a daily basis, it is no wonder that food and eating has been popularly reclaimed as a 'fundamental' issue, as the last bastion of authenticity in our lives. To put it another way, and in the terms that guide me, eating is seen as immediate -- it is something we all have to do; and it is a powerful mode of mediation, of joining us with others. What, how, and where we eat has emerged as a site of considerable social concern: from the fact that most do not eat en famille, that we increasingly eat out and through drive-in fast food outlets (in the US, 50% of the food budget is spent on eating outside the home), to the worries about genetically altered food and horror food -- mad cows, sick chickens, square tomatoes. Eating performs different connections and disconnections. Increasingly the attention to what we eat is seen as immediately connecting us, our bodies, to large social questions. At a broad level, this can be as diffuse as the winds that some argue spread genetically modified seed stock from one region to another. Or it can be as individually focussed as the knowledge that others are starving as we eat. This connection has long haunted children told 'to eat up everything on your plate because little children are starving in Africa', and in more evolved terms has served as a staple of forms of vegetarianism and other ethical forms of eating. From the pictures of starving children staring from magazine pages, the spectre of hunger is now broadcast by the Internet, exemplified in the Hunger Site where 'users are met by a map of the world and every 3.6 seconds, a country flashes black signifying a death due to hunger'. Here eating is the subject of a double articulation: the recognition of hunger is presumed to be a fundamental capacity of individuals, and our feelings are then galvanised into painless action: each time a user clicks on the 'hunger' button one of the sponsors donates a cup and a half of food. As the site explains, 'our sponsors pay for the donations as a form of advertising and public relations'. Here, the logic is that hunger is visceral, that it is a basic human feeling, which is to say that it is understood as immediate, and that it connects us in a basic way to other humans. That advertising companies know that it can also be a profitable form of meditation, transforming 'humans' into consumers is but one example of how eating connects us in complex ways to other people, to products, to new formulations of identity, and in this case altruism (the site has been called 'the altruistic mouse')2. Eating continually interweaves individual needs, desires and aspirations within global economies of identities. Of course the interlocking of the global and the local has been the subject of much debate over the last decade. For instance, in his recent book on globalisation, John Tomlinson uses 'global food and local identity' as a site through which to problematise these terms. It is clear that changes in food processing and transportation technologies have altered our sense of connection to the near and the far away, allowing us to routinely find in our supermarkets and eat products that previously would have been the food stuff of the élite. These institutional and technological changes rework the connections individuals have to their local, to the regions and nations in which they live. As Tomlinson argues, 'globalisation, from its early impact, does clearly undermine a close material relationship between the provenance of food and locality' (123). As he further states, the effects have been good (availability and variety), and bad (disrupting 'the subtle connection between climate, season, locality and cultural practice'). In terms of what we can now eat, Tomlinson points out that 'the very cultural stereotypes that identify food with, say, national culture become weakened' (124). Defusing the whiff of moralism that accompanies so much writing about food, Tomlinson argues that these changes to how we eat are not 'typically experienced as simply cultural loss or estrangement but as a complex and ambiguous blend: of familiarity and difference, expansion of cultural horizons and increased perceptions of vulnerability, access to the "world out there" accompanied by penetration of our own private worlds, new opportunities and new risks' (128). For the sake of my own argument his attention to the increased sense of vulnerability is particularly important. To put it more strongly, I'd argue that eating is of interest for the ways in which it can be a mundane exposition of the visceral nature of our connectedness, or distance from each other, from ourselves, and our social environment: it throws into relief the heartfelt, the painful, playful or pleasurable articulations of identity. To put it more clearly, I want to use eating and its associations in order to think about how the most ordinary of activities can be used to help us reflect on how we are connected to others, and to large and small social issues. This is again to attend to the immediacy of eating, and the ways in which that immediacy is communicated, mediated and can be put to use in thinking about culture. The adjective 'visceral' comes to mind: 'of the viscera', the inner organs. Could something as ordinary as eating contain the seeds of an extraordinary reflection, a visceral reaction to who and what we are becoming? In mining eating and its qualities might we glimpse gut reactions to the histories and present of the cultures within which we live? As Emily Jenkins writes in her account of 'adventures in physical culture', what if we were to go 'into things tongue first. To see how they taste' (5). In this sense, I want to plunder the visceral, gut levels revealed by that most boring and fascinating of topics: food and eating. In turn, I want to think about what bodies are and do when they eat. To take up the terms with which I started, eating both confirms what and who we are, to ourselves and to others, and can reveal new ways of thinking about those relations. To take the most basic of facts: food goes in, and then broken down it comes out of the body, and every time this happens our bodies are affected. While in the usual course of things we may not dwell upon this process, that basic ingestion allows us to think of our bodies as complex assemblages connected to a wide range of other assemblages. In eating, the diverse nature of where and how different parts of ourselves attach to different aspects of the social becomes clear, just as it scrambles preconceptions about alimentary identities. Of course, we eat according to social rules, in fact we ingest them. 'Feed the man meat', the ads proclaim following the line of masculinity inwards; while others draw a line outwards from biology and femininity into 'Eat lean beef'. The body that eats has been theorised in ways that seek to draw out the sociological equations about who we are in terms of class and gender. But rather than taking the body as known, as already and always ordered in advance by what and how it eats, we can turn such hypotheses on their head. In the act of ingestion, strict divisions get blurred. The most basic fact of eating reveals some of the strangeness of the body's workings. Consequently it becomes harder to capture the body within categories, to order stable identities. This then forcefully reminds us that we still do not know what a body is capable of, to take up a refrain that has a long heritage (from Spinoza to Deleuze to feminist investigations of the body). As Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd argue in terms of this idea, 'each body exists in relations of interdependence with other bodies and these relations form a "world" in which individuals of all kinds exchange their constitutive parts -- leading to the enrichment of some and the demise of others (e.g. eating involves the destruction of one body at the same time as it involves the enhancement of the other)' (101). I am particularly interested in how individuals replay equations between eating and identity. But that phrase sounds impossibly abstracted from the minute instances I have in mind. From the lofty heights, I follow the injunction to 'look down, look way down', to lead, as it were, with the stomach. In this vein, I begin to note petty details, like the fact of recently discovering breakfast. From a diet of coffee (now with a milk called 'Life') and cigarettes, I dutifully munch on fortified cereal that provides large amounts of folate should I be pregnant (and as I eat it I wonder am I, should I be?3). Spurred on by articles sprinkled with dire warnings about what happens to women in Western societies, I search out soy, linseed and other ingredients that will help me mimic the high phytoestrogen diet of Japanese women. Eating cereal, I am told, will stave off depression, especially with the addition of bananas. Washed down with yoghurt 'enhanced' with acidophilius and bifidus to give me 'friendly' bacteria that will fight against nasty heliobacter pylori, I am assured that I will even lose weight by eating breakfast. It's all a bit much first thing in the morning when the promise of a long life seems like a threat. The myriad of printed promises of the intricate world of alimentary programming serve as an interesting counterpoint to the straightforward statements on cigarette packages. 'Smoking kills' versus the weak promises that eating so much of such and such a cereal 'is a good source of soy phytoestrogenes (isolfavones) that are believed to be very beneficial'. Apart from the unpronounceable ingredients (do you really want to eat something that you can't say?), the terms of the contract between me and the cereal makers is thin: that such and such is 'believed to be beneficial'? While what in fact they may benefit is nebulous, it gets scarier when they specify that 'a diet rich in folate may reduce the risk of birth defects such as spina bifida'. The conditional tense wavers as I ponder the way spina bifida is produced as a real possibility. There is of course a long history to the web of nutritional messages that now surrounds us. In her potted teleology of food messages, Sue Thompson, a consultant dietitian, writes that in the 1960s, the slogan was 'you are what you eat'. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, the idea was that food was bad for you. In her words, 'it became a time of "Don't eat" and "bad foods". Now, happily, 'we are moving into a time of appreciating the health benefits of food' (Promotional release by the Dairy Farmers, 1997). As the new battle ground for extended enhanced life, eating takes on fortified meaning. Awed by the enthusiasm, I am also somewhat shocked by the intimacy of detail. I can handle descriptions of sex, but the idea of discussing the ways in which you 'are reducing the bacterial toxins produced from small bowel overgrowth' (Thompson), is just too much. Gut level intimacy indeed. However, eating is intimate. But strangely enough except for the effusive health gurus, and the gossip about the eating habits of celebrities, normally in terms of not-eating, we tend not to publicly air the fact that we all operate as 'mouth machines' (to take Noëlle Châtelet's term). To be blunt about it, 'to eat, is to connect ... the mouth and the anus' (Châtelet 34). We would, with good reason, rather not think about this; it is an area of conversation reserved for our intimates. For instance, in relationships the moment of broaching the subject of one's gut may mark the beginning of the end. So let us stay for the moment at the level of the mouth machine, and the ways it brings together the physical fact of what goes in, and the symbolic production of what comes out: meanings, statements, ideas. To sanitise it further, I want to think of the mouth machine as a metonym4 for the operations of a term that has been central to cultural studies: 'articulation'. Stuart Hall's now classic definition states that 'articulation refers to the complex set of historical practices by which we struggle to produce identity or structural unity out of, on top of, complexity, difference, contradiction' (qtd. in Grossberg, "History" 64). While the term has tended to be used rather indiscriminately -- theorists wildly 'articulate' this or that -- its precise terms are useful. Basically it refers to how individuals relate themselves to their social contexts and histories. While we are all in some sense the repositories of past practices, through our actions we 'articulate', bridge and connect ourselves to practices and contexts in ways that are new to us. In other terms, we continually shuttle between practices and meanings that are already constituted and 'the real conditions' in which we find ourselves. As Lawrence Grossberg argues, this offers 'a nonessentialist theory of agency ... a fragmented, decentered human agent, an agent who is both "subject-ed" by power and capable of acting against power' ("History" 65). Elsewhere Grossberg elaborates on the term, arguing that 'articulation is the production of identity on top of difference, of unities out of fragments, of structures across practices' (We Gotta Get Out 54). We are then 'articulated' subjects, the product of being integrated into past practices and structures, but we are also always 'articulating' subjects: through our enactment of practices we reforge new meanings, new identities for ourselves. This then reveals a view of the subject as a fluctuating entity, neither totally voluntaristic, nor overdetermined. In more down to earth terms, just because we are informed by practices not of our own making, 'that doesn't mean we swallow our lessons without protest' (Jenkins 5). The mouth machine takes in but it also spits out. In these actions the individual is constantly connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting. Grossberg joins the theory of articulation to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of rhizomes. In real and theoretical terms, a rhizome is a wonderful entity: it is a type of plant, such as a potato plant or an orchid, that instead of having tap roots spreads its shoots outwards, where new roots can sprout off old. Used as a figure to map out social relations, the rhizome allows us to think about other types of connection. Beyond the arboreal, tap root logic of, say, the family tree which ties me in lineage to my forefathers, the rhizome allows me to spread laterally and horizontally: as Deleuze puts it, the rhizome is antigenealogical, 'it always has multiple entryways' compelling us to think of how we are connected diversely, to obvious and sometimes not so obvious entities (35). For Grossberg the appeal of joining a theory of articulation with one inspired by rhizomes is that it combines the 'vertical complexity' of culture and context, with the 'wild realism' of the horizontal possibilities that connect us outward. To use another metaphor dear to Deleuze and Guattari, this is to think about the spread of rhizomatic roots, the 'lines of flight' that break open seemingly closed structures, including those we call ourselves: 'lines of flight disarticulate, open up the assemblage to its exterior, cutting across and dismantling unity, identity, centers and hierarchies' (qtd. in Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out 58). In this way, bodies can be seen as assemblages: bits of past and present practice, openings, attachments to parts of the social, closings and aversion to other parts. The tongue as it ventures out to taste something new may bring back fond memories, or it may cause us to recoil in disgust. As Jenkins writes, this produces a fascinating 'contradiction -- how the body is both a prison and a vehicle for adventure' (4). It highlights the fact that the 'body is not the same from day to day. Not even from minute to minute ... . Sometimes it seems like home, sometimes more like a cheap motel near Pittsburgh' (7). As we ingest we mutate, we expand and contract, we change, sometimes subtly, sometimes violently. The openings and closings of our bodies constantly rearranges our dealings with others, as Jenkins writes, the body's 'distortions, anxieties, ecstasies and discomforts all influence a person's interaction with the people who service it'. In more theoretical terms, this produces the body as 'an articulated plane whose organisation defines its own relations of power and sites of struggle', which 'points to the existence of another politics, a politics of feeling' (Grossberg, "History" 72). These theoretical considerations illuminate the interest and the complexity of bodies that eat. The mouth machine registers experiences, and then articulates them -- utters them. In eating, we may munch into whole chains of previously established connotations, just as we may disrupt them. For instance, an email arrives, leaving traces of its rhizomatic passage zapping from one part of the world to another, and then to me. Unsolicited, it sets out a statement from a Dr. Johannes Van Vugt in San Francisco who on October 11, 1999, National Coming Out Day in the US, began an ongoing 'Fast for Equal Rights for persons who are gay, lesbian and other sexual orientation minorities'. Yoking his fast with the teachings of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Dr. Van Vugt says he is fasting to 'call on you to choose love, not fear, and to do something about it'. The statement also reveals that he previously fasted 'to raise awareness and funds for African famine relief for which he received a Congressional commendation'. While personally I don't give much for his chances of getting a second commendation, this is an example of how the mouth machine closed still operates to articulate identities and politics to wildly diverging sites. While there is something of an arboreal logic to fasting for awareness of famine, the connection between not eating and anti-homophobic politics is decidedly rhizomatic. Whether or not it succeeds in its aim, and one of the tenets of a rhizomatic logic is that the points of connection cannot be guaranteed in advance, it does join the mouth with sex with the mouth with homophobic statements that it utters. There is then a sort of 'wild realism' at work here that endeavours to set up new assemblages of bodies, mouths and politics. From fasting to writing, what of the body that writes of the body that eats? In Grossberg's argument, the move to a rhizomatic field of analysis promises to return cultural theory to a consideration of 'the real'. He argues that such a theory must be 'concerned with particular configurations of practices, how they produce effects and how such effects are organized and deployed' (We Gotta Get Out 45). However, it is crucial to remember that these practices do not exist in a pure state in culture, divorced from their representations or those of the body that analyses them. The type of 'wild realism' that Grossberg calls for, as in Deleuze's 'new empiricism' is both a way of seeing the world, and offers it anew, illuminates otherly its structures and individuals' interaction with them. Following the line of the rhizome means that we must 'forcibly work both on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows', Guattari goes on to argue that 'there is no tripartition between a field of reality, the world, a field of representation, the book, and a field of subjectivity, the author. But an arrangement places in connection certain multiplicities taken from each of these orders' (qtd. in Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out 48). In terms of the possibilities offered by eating, these theoretical and conceptual arguments direct us to other ways of thinking about identity as both digestion and as indigestible. Bodies eat into culture. The mouth machine is central to the articulation of different orders, but so too is the tongue that sticks out, that draws in food, objects and people. Analysed along multiple alimentary lines of flight, in eating we constantly take in, chew up and spit out identities. Footnotes 1. As Barbara Santich has recently pointed out, Lévi-Strauss's point was made in relation to taboos on eating totem animals in traditional societies and wasn't a general comment on the connection between eating and thinking (4). 2. The sponsors of the Hunger Site include 0-0.com, a search engine, Proflowers.com, and an assortment of other examples of this new form of altruism (such as GreaterGood.com which advertises itself as a 'shop to benefit your favorite cause'), and 'World-Wide Recipes', which features a 'virtual restaurant'. 3. The pregnant body is of course one of the most policed entities in our culture, and pregnant friends report on the anxieties that are produced about what will go into the future child's body. 4. While Châtelet writes that thinking about the eating body 'throws her into full metaphor ... joining, for example the nutritional mouth and the lover's mouth' (8), I have tried to avoid the tug of metaphor. Of course, the seduction of metaphor is great, and there are copious examples of the metaphorisation of eating in regards to consumption, ingestion, reading and writing. However, as I've argued elsewhere (Probyn, Outside Belongings), I prefer to focus on the 'work' (or as Le Doeuff would say, 'le faire des images') that Deleuze and Guattari's terms accomplish as ways of modelling the social. This is a particularly crucial (if here underdeveloped) point in terms of my present project, where I seek to analyse the ways in which eating may reproduce an awareness of the visceral nature of social relations. That said, and as my valued colleague Melissa Hardie has often pointed out, my text is littered with metaphor. References Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste. Trans. Anne Drayton. Penguin, 1974. Châtelet, Noëlle. Le Corps a Corps Culinaire. Paris: Seuil, 1977. Deleuze, Gilles. "Rhizome versus Trees." The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. Gatens, Moira, and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Grossberg, Lawrence. "History, Politics and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies." Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.2 (1986): 61-77. ---. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York and London: Routledge,1992. Le Doeuff, Michèle. L'Étude et le Rouet. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Jenkins, Emily. Tongue First: Adventures in Physical Culture. London: Virago, 1999. Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belongings. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. ---. Sexing the Self. Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Santich, Barbara. "Research Notes." The Centre for the History of Food and Drink Newsletter. The University of Adelaide, September 1999. Thompson, Sue. Promotional pamphlet for the Dairy Farmers' Association. 1997. Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Oxford: Polity Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Elspeth Probyn. "The Indigestion of Identities." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php>. Chicago style: Elspeth Probyn, "The Indigestion of Identities," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Elspeth Probyn. (1999) The indigestion of identities. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php> ([your date of access]).